This Must Be The Place

All the houses I have lived in, part 1 (1981-2001)

7 Buckingham Place, Brighton (1981-1983)

My deep dark secret is that I’m technically a southerner. I was born in Brighton, where both my parents had gone to university and then gone on to be secondary school English teachers. My first home was a whitewashed terrace house built in the 1840s on the hill behind the railway station. Making my way along the busy street via Google Maps last week, I discovered that the house now boasts a blue plaque, which sent me off down a pleasurable internet rabbit hole for a good hour to find out more about its previous famous resident.¹

I was 18 months old when we left Brighton, so I don’t have any memories of my first home. Except…maybe I do. I have a wispy, half-formed memory of lying down and looking across through cot bars to a window on my right, light filtering through a net curtain. When I described the room layout to my mum (door somewhere behind me, in the same wall that the cot lay against, a chest of drawers or bookshelf near the window) she told me that it matched my bedroom at Buckingham Place.

Clwyd Dale, St Asaph (1983-1984)

A square bungalow on the grounds of Ysgol Glan Clwyd, the Welsh language secondary school in St Asaph (second smallest city in the UK!). My parents rented it for 12 months when we first moved to North Wales, following a brief interlude in which we stayed with my maternal grandmother in Liverpool and my dad commuted to his new job in Rhyl. Dad and Nana did not get on, so I can only imagine this must have been a challenging time for all involved. The bungalow was demolished at some point in the early 2000s, but on Google Maps I can just make out the ghostly footprint of where it used to stand, just behind the sports field.

I don’t think I have any direct memories of this house, but I do have layers of indirect memories based on looking through photo albums with my parents and being told the stories behind each image. For a few of the photos, I have a memory of remembering them, if that makes sense - I can remember looking at them when I was young enough to remember the moment shown. Lying on the floor with my uncle, rolling a toy car back and forth between us. Sitting in front of the gas fire wrapped in a towel after a bath.

I can still remember St Asaph though, as a scattering of places along the main road through the village-sized city that spark memories. Holding the buggy handle as I walked beside Mum to the hardware shop at the bottom of the hill, which was an Aladdin’s cave of mysterious wonders. Balancing on the low stepped wall outside the bank, Mum clutching on to my hand. The playground by the river with its metal rocket-shaped climbing frame, roundabout and swings (always my favourite).

Mum and me, Clwyd Dale, summer 1984

Wynnstay Road area, Old Colwyn (1984-2000 and beyond)

I’m being slightly vague about the location of this house, because my dad still lives there. There being a semi-detached pebble dashed house built in the 1920s within sight of the sea. I feel very lucky to still be able to return to my childhood home in my mid-40s. Every visit is a journey through the layers of memories that fill every corner of every room, the collage of past versions of myself, my brother and our parents. It’s become increasingly bittersweet in the ten years since Mum died, as I watch the house as she knew it slowly decay and disappear, and Dad become increasingly frail and elderly.

This house remained home, even after I left it for a series of short-term tenancy agreements in Lancashire, Tyne & Wear, and County Durham. It still remains home in many ways, although for the last decade it has held that title jointly with the house my partner and I bought shortly before we got married and where we still live.

There are so many memories bound up in this house and its garden that it’s hard to pick out just a few to write about here. My earliest memories of it are tactile, fragmentary. The smooth dark wood of the bannisters and acorn-shaped newel post. The red painted steps by the back door. Helping Mum to stir cake batter in a heavy glass bowl. Curled up on the sofa with Dad to read a book. The view from my bedroom window, looking out over the garden to the back of the houses on the next road over.

Dad and me, Old Colwyn, winter 1984. Possibly my first experience of snow. The next time it snowed enough to make a snowman of this size I was 14.

I remember when the modestly sized garden of this suburban semi was a vast playground with distinct and different regions within it: the “hill” under the fire thorn tree where I would lie on a blanket in the shade to read, the crowded line of small apple trees that I learned to climb; graduating from. the smallest to the biggest as I grew; the red tiled patio with the scent of sweet peas; the honeysuckle at the bottom of the garden that I loved; The green plastic shell sandpit where my toddler brother spent hours building sandcastles and knocking them down.

I remember sitting at the top of the stairs in a summer twilight and sobbing as I waited for Mum and Dad to come back from a very rare night out, listening to our next door neighbour (who was babysitting me) as she chatted with a friend over our front garden wall. I remember sitting beside my brother and holding a blood soaked towel to his forehead after he tripped and gashed it open on the patio steps. I remember birthday parties crammed around the dining table with my friends: cheese and pineapple on sticks, wotsit crisps, ham sandwiches on white sliced bread and fairy cakes with hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top.

There are so many ways that this house has shaped me, and still does, and I fear the inevitable moment in the future when I’ll lose it.

Lonsdale College, Lancaster University (2000-2001)

I lived in halls for my first year of university, on a second floor corridor largely populated by third year students. I quickly bonded with the two other first year girls on my corridor (D and R) and predictably developed a crush on the lone first year boy. By Christmas however, all twelve of the people in our shared kitchen - aged between 18 and 22 - had become a gang. We went to the college bar together most nights, sometimes venturing out to other rival college’s bars on campus. Fylde was where all the sporty people went, while Grizedale residents tended towards the alternative. I was never sure what being in Lonsdale said about me.

We developed crushes on each other, a messy tangle of flirtations and one night stands and even proper relationships. We spent long nights in the Sugarhouse, the student nightclub in town, also known as the Shagger. It boasted permanently sticky floors from all the cheap lager spilled on them. I grew familiar with the moment at 2am when the lights came back on, and the almost magical enormous shadowy cavern - full of flashing lights, pounding bass beats that lodged somewhere near the base of my spine, and sweaty limbs that tangled with or brushed against my own - transformed into a slightly run down open space scattered with students in various levels of drunkenness and a sea of plastic pint glasses and fag ends.

I got a tattoo at the end of Freshers’ Week, a rite of passage to prove to myself that I had left home and was now an adult that I then spent the next six months trying to hide from Mum. The female bathroom on our floor was shared by about twenty of us and you always had to queue to use the showers, so sometimes I sneaked into the male bathroom instead, to shower in peace alongside the lone cockroach that lived on the windowsill. Somewhere in amongst all the boozing and watching VHS box sets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and seeing how long I could go without venturing to the laundrettes, I also studied history.

I don’t have many photos from my Lonsdale College year, largely I think because it was pre-smartphone era and I didn’t have a digital camera yet. I’ve been wondering whether the lack of photos also reflects how uncertain and uprooted I felt in that year. I was ready for change, ready to leave home and leave high school, ready to reinvent myself amongst people who hadn’t known since I was 5 or 11 (or since I was born in the case of my parents). But I also found the transition to university very challenging to navigate. Everything was new - people, places, what I did each day - and all my previous routines and safety nets were lost. Perhaps subconsciously I didn’t want to document it? Whatever the reason, 20+ plus years later it makes for an interesting contrast between how and what I remember of my first year and the later years of my undergraduate degree, for which I have many more photographs.

1. The blue plaque commemorates Richard Henry Nibbs (1819-1893), who lived at 7 Buckingham Place for the last 20 years of his life. Wikipedia tells me that he was a professional musician (playing the cello in the Theatre Royal orchestra) and self-taught artist. In 1840, he received a “substantial inheritance” which enabled him to become a full-time artist (lucky him!). He seems to have mainly painted ships and marine landscapes.