Where I Want To Be
All the houses I have lived in, part 2 (2001-2005)
116 Aldrens Lane, Lancaster (2001-2002)
In the second year of my undergraduate degree we moved out of halls, finding a narrow three storey terraced house to rent on the outskirts of Lancaster. It was on the opposite side of the river, requiring a long walk to the bus station and then a 25 minute bus journey to reach the university campus. I shared the house with D and R, all our third and fourth year friends from halls having graduated the previous summer and left Lancaster. We’d found the house by luck: I’d happened to come across a discarded photocopy of a poster advertising a house to rent for students on the floor of the printer room in the University Library. The landlord was surprised when we rang later that same day, because his son (the previous tenant) hadn’t even put the posters up yet. It felt like fate.
The house technically had four floors, if you counted the cellar - which we didn’t because it was permanently flooded by a foot or so of frigid river water. My room was on the top floor, with lime green walls and a slanted ceiling with a skylight window set in it. I found it strange to have a window that only showed the sky, with no view of the street below or the houses around us. Maybe this is the reason I have very few memories of the exterior of this house? A vague impression of a cramped concrete backyard where we kept the wheely bin, high brick walls on all sides and a flimsy wooden door onto the back alley. The house was bitterly cold in the winter, too big and too old to be adequately warmed by central heating, and sometimes all three of us would spend the night huddled in the double bed in D’s room.
We still went to the Sugarhouse most Thursday nights, keen to recapture some of the sense of being in community that living on a campus university had given us the year before. Nights out now ended with a slightly hair raising drunken walk home past Sainsbury’s and the small industrial estate, then over the bridge and into the maze of Victorian terraces on the far side. But we also had house parties, inviting course mates and our old corridor friends over to fill the house with music and laughter, and always by the end of the night someone locked in the bathroom sobbing.
For six months of this year I had a boyfriend who lived at home in North Wales. He was 26 to my 20, which looking back feels slightly icky but at the time made me feel cool and sophisticated. The male students I shared my lectures and seminars with still seemed like boys, childish in a way that I felt I’d left behind. My boyfriend would drive up to stay with me for the weekend, or I’d catch the train back to North Wales to visit my parents and spend the nights with him. He had a full-time job and a car and seemed very grown up and sophisticated. He broke up with me the week I came home for the three month summer vacation.
25 Bowerham Road, Lancaster (2002-2003)
We moved closer to the university campus in our final year, surprising our previous landlord who seemed sure that we’d stay on at Aldrens Lane. We moved in with T, who also studied history and who was repeating a year after having had glandular fever. This was the best house: on a direct bus route to campus and with a decent (non-student) pub nearby, as well as several corner shops. And no flooded cellar to give me anxiety dreams about the house floating away. The four of us quickly became a close knit team, and four felt a more secure number than three, steadier.
My room was on the ground floor this time, a living room or dining room converted into a student bedroom. It had wide bay windows looking out onto the steps up to the front door and the suggestion of a garden (a few slightly sorry for themselves plants in pots and a rampant green hedge). It was large and airy and painted a yellowy orange, reminding me in some ways of my bedroom at home in North Wales. So did the nights when I’d go to bed early, leaving the others watching a film or Buffy box set on VHS in living room and drift off to sleep with the murmur of low voices next door.
A couple of friends from our corridor in halls had moved back to Lancaster to do PGCEs. One was R’s boyfriend, who she’d got together with in Fresher’s Weeks of our first year so they were practically a married couple by this point: two years together and still going strong. Early in the New Year, T started going out with our other ex-corridor mate so some weeks it felt like there were 5 of us living in the house, occasionally competing to be first in the shower when we had early morning lectures that clashed.
There were more house parties and fancy dress nights out, coupled with long sunny afternoons sitting in a pub garden doing nothing very much. There was a sense of an impending end, our student days racing towards their close and a need to squeeze as much out of the time remaining to us as possible. Coupled with the increased pressure of our final year, revising for exams that suddenly felt like they mattered and grappling with a 10,000 word dissertation, the house sometimes felt like a tinderbox.
There was a dark time just before our final exams when I had gone home for the Easter holidays while the other three stayed in Lancaster. I returned three weeks later to inexplicable cold shoulders and pointed comments about how much toilet roll it was acceptable to use for a number one or a number two. Looking back, I’m sympathetic - we were all under a lot of stress and only 21 years old - but at the time it was devastating. Living in a house with my closest friends who were refusing to speak to me but wouldn’t tell me why felt like being plunged back into the worst parts of secondary school all over again.
162 Whitfield Terrace, Heaton, Newcastle (2003-2004)
I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, so I decided to put that decision off for another year and applied for an MA programme in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Two days after my parents had dropped me off at my new student flat in Heaton, Mum experienced a tonic-clonic seizure and was rushed to A&E. She stayed in hospital, undergoing tests, and I completed the induction week for my new degree before returning home by train to the news that she had been diagnosed with a benign brain tumour and would need to undergo surgery to remove it. I wanted to abandon the MA and move back to North Wales, but Mum was insistent that I stuck with it. So a strange, conflicted time of living in two places, 200 miles apart, began.
The MA was delivered week/week off: 5 days of lectures and seminars and workshops, 4 hours or so of teaching each day, followed by 9 days for reading and independent study, then 5 days of teaching and repeat. I lived in Heaton - student central - for 5 days and nights at a time, commuting into the city centre by bus or metro, then went home to North Wales for the 9 off days in the cycle, packing up my laptop and library books so I could work on my coursework essays alongside caring for Mum. During the on weeks, I lived in an upstairs Tyneside flat on a street of terrace=d houses in Heaton, student central. My flatmates were two other girls my age, both of whom were doing PGCEs. L was from Teesside and went home every weekend to stay with her fiancé. J was from Derry in Northern Ireland and told hair raising stories of military checkpoints and walking home from school past British soldiers armed with guns: the Good Friday Agreement had taken place only 5 years previously and in 2004 paramilitary groups on both the Loyalist and Nationalist sides were still in the process of decommissioning their weapons.
Mum had brain surgery in autumn 2003 and was discharged from hospital less than two weeks later. By spring 2004 she was mostly recovered, although she still became tired very quickly and needed a lot of rest. Most galling of all, in her eyes, she wasn’t legally allowed to drive because of the risk that she might have another seizure. Like the new leaves on the trees I watched from the window of the train, I slowly started to unfurl that spring. I began to make friends with some of my course mates, and eventually started to stay in Newcastle during the reading weeks. I started to learn my way around the city, discovering the delights of the Grainger Market and Eldon Square, visiting pets corner at Jesmond Dene or taking the metro to Tynemouth for fish and chips by the sea. I ventured out on nights out in the Bigg Market or on the Quayside with J and her friends, though I never made it to ‘The Boat’, the floating nightclub in an old car ferry (the Tuxedo Princess) moored under the Tyne Bridge and famous for its revolving dance floor which closed in 2007. I snogged a few unsuitable boys on shadowy dance floors and generally tried to remind myself how to feel 22 again.
34 Laburnum Avenue, Wallsend (2004-2005)
My MA was over and I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I decided to apply for Research Council funding to do a PhD and leave the decision in the lap of the gods: if I got the funding, I’d sign up for another 3-4 years of studenthood; if I didn’t, I’d return home to North Wales to regroup. I was successful so the North East would remain my home for a few more years. S, who was a couple of years ahead of me on the PhD programme had a room to rent in her house, so I moved east to Wallsend.
Another terraced house, but this one a ‘proper’ house rather than a Tyneside flat. My bedroom was downstairs, and had clearly started its life as a living room or dining room before the house become a student one. Its windows looked out onto the backyard, a narrow space occupied by wheely bins and hardy weeds persistently growing through the cracks in the concrete. I recognised some - dandelions, red valerian - and learned the names of others - rosebay willow herb, chickweed, speedwell. It was the first place I’d lived since leaving home that didn’t feel entirely like a student house, straddling the line between student digs and a real home - perhaps because S was a resident as well as the landlord, perhaps because she and my other housemates were older, in their mid 20s. B was from Turkey and studying for a PhD in a Science subject (I want to say engineering but the truth is that I’ve forgotten). N was from somewhere down south and taking a MA in social work. I was the youngest, finding my feet all over again after the most of the course mates I’d finally started to get to know the previous year had graduated and left the city.
The shower didn’t work, so we used one of those old fashioned shower head attachments that connected to the bath taps using flexible rubber hose. It made me think of my Nana’s house, as did sitting down in the bathtub to wash my hair. I discovered jap biscuits in the Co Op in Wallsend - buttercream sandwiched between two layers of nutty macaroon-like meringue - and bought myself a pack every time I did a grocery shop. I revelled in living closer to the coast - Tynemouth was only 15 minutes away on the Metro - and it soothed something inside me that was still reeling from the discovery of Mum’s serious illness and its aftermath to be able to go and walk by the sea whenever I wanted. Days when a storm was brewing were my favourites, when gusts of wind coated my skin in salt spray from the rising tide and the beach was empty except for me and the most determined dog walkers.
I made close friends with others who were starting a PhD in the same department as me that autumn. We were each allocated a desk and a computer in a high ceilinged office room in the turn of the twentieth century building that housed the department but had started life as the headquarters for Newcastle Breweries. From the windows I could look out directly onto the Haymarket, a constant dull roar of cars and buses passing, students streaming across the pedestrian crossing when the lights changed, and above it all the larger-than-life bronze angel on the war memorial, holding a sword in one hand and a victor’s wreath in the other. The building has been converted into luxury studio apartments now - I think I’ve found a photograph of the room that was once my office, now glossy and anonymous with a leather sofa and matching cushions on the bed, shiny laminate flooring and showroom furniture. But the view from the window is the same.
Love this, Ellen, especially the Newcastle sections - giving me lots of NE feelings. I think you describe those wilderness years so clearly, when you’re still working out who you are and what you do, and how the places you live in both help with that (in that you have the freedom to try different identities out) but also the transitory feeling of some of those houses make it hard to feel rooted and grounded. Looking forward to the next instalment.
My best friend lives in Heaton and I’m headed there next month to sample the new wine bar, tap room and vegan taco place…!