by Silva Payne

Created on: August 02, 2008   Last Updated: May 02, 2010

I have moved around many times since I was 14, so the word home has come to mean different things at different times.

I was born in the house we lived in, not in hospital like most babies are now. For the first 14 years of my life "home" was very much the safe secure place inside the garden fence that surrounded the property. More so, "home" was my bedroom, my refuge not only from my brother when he arrived 4 years later, but also from the world outside in general.

It was the place where my imagination had no constraints and there was no fear of being laughed at or teased by those whose imaginations had left them long ago. It was where I taught myself to sew and to read and write. Before I was born, my bedroom had been a makeshift greenhouse for my parents to grow tomatoes and pelargoniums, and on hot summer days the scent of both would creep out of the walls and woodwork and wait for me at bedtime. Years on, those smells have become "home" to me too.

When I was 14, my mother finally got her wish to live just once in a brand new house, and we moved a few miles closer to the town. This house was only "home" to me on paper. It was sterile compared to the small house we left behind; a building site for a garden and the only smell at bedtime was the sickly paint scent which never seemed to go completely. I grew up in that house, but I never grew into it, or it into me. When my parents announced 3 years later that they were moving to the other side of the country to a bungalow I'd never seen and it was my choice if I went with them or found my own home elsewhere, I was not sorry to leave it behind and tag along with my folks.

There followed several moves after that, which involved me staying in other people's homes although mostly with at least one room to call mine (or really that should be "ours" as I had a boyfriend in tow by then too). We stayed in bedsits, rented flats, went back to my parents occasionally, and then when I became pregnant we went back to my boyfriend's parents home, back across country.

I was always very conscious that I was in someone else's home and not my own. Using other people's front doors, having someone else pick up the mail before I got to it, feeling eyes watching me when I hung out washing or tried to move a piece of large furniture, all contributed to the feeling of temporary-ness. It became easier to move each time, because I was leaving less behind both emotionally and physically as I learned to travel lighter and lighter

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