My father kept all his clothes in plastic bags. He travelled the world, and was never at home for many weeks before he had to go again. Even when, in the 1970s, he changed to working on the home market not overseas, he had a mill in Lancashire, his home base was in Hertfordshire, and he and my mother had a small cottage in Yorkshire for either of them to stay when their feet took them north. So his belongings were always packed and ready to go.
My mother made buying and selling houses her occupation — it was how she made money. We moved house when I was three, twice when I was seven, again when I was eight, and once when I was fourteen. I left home when I was eighteen and began my own house moves (my mother moved five more times during her lifetime).
First I lived with some monks in Devon, in a 12ft caravan. Then I lived in a shared room in the nurses' accommodation of a home for people with epilepsy and multiple disabilities run by nuns. Then I went to university and lived in hall for a year, moving from there into a tightly-packed shared house where we started a community. I moved from there to the ground floor of a disused rectory; it had a toilet but no bath or shower. After a while there (I was married by now, but still at university) we moved out into a 12ft caravan parked on the edge of a field of cabbages on a dairy farm. From there we moved into a barn on my parents' land. Then we moved to a small row house down in Hastings. It had two bedrooms, and we lived there from 1980 when our first child was born until 1984 when our twins (child 3 and 4) were born.
The next house, a three-bedroomed row house, we lived in for longer — fourteen years. Our youngest child was born there, and various people lived with us, ex-prisoners, a lodger, a boy who had attempted suicide when his home fell apart after his father died, all sorts.
We moved from there to a manse (US: parsonage) when I became a school chaplain. Problems at the school, that I shouldn't go into publicly, meant we moved from there after a year to another manse associated with a church pastorate where we lived for two years. During that time my whole life fell apart as difficulties originating in my husband's life meant I had to leave my work so we lost the house — this time we moved to a one-bedroomed apartment. None of our children had properly fledged at that point, so between us we occupied three one-bedroom apartments and a bed-sit, all within easy walking distance, and swapped homes (as individuals) quite often. During that time my husband left to be with someone else. A year later I married Bernard and moved to his little cottage on the edge of Flatropers Wood in the small village of Beckley, where he was able to offer me two drawers, half a cupboard, and a bed shared with him. He died after we'd been married 13 months, and I moved back to the one-bedroomed apartment in Hastings, along with Hebe who had been living with us at Beckley in yet another 12ft caravan. A year later my editor's marriage fell apart after a decade of difficult endeavour to glue it together. Some months after that, he and I married, but he worked in Oxford so I moved up to Aylesbury where he was based. During that time a succession of different people lived with us, some family members and some lodgers. We lived there for three years, but I missed my family atrociously and I was too unwell to work at that point, and left the church ministry. We moved back to Hastings and bought a house big enough to share with three of my daughters (they now own that house). We lived there with them for sixteen years. During that time I became chronically ill. When my husband was diagnosed with Parkinsons, seeing this could mean trouble for my daughters whose house we shared (female relatives are always the go-to for care provision), we moved out to live in the small rental house that was in effect my husband's pension.
That's a lot of house moves. In all of them, the success of space use was achieved by owning as little as possible — it makes the house bigger. The two steepest challenges were the time I spent living with Bernard with the two drawers and half-cupboard allocated to me (that made the 12ft caravan shared with my first husband and a dog look spacious), and the various permutations of incumbency we had in the one-bed apartment in Hastings after our life crash. Mostly my space there was a bed on the living room floor and I cannot remember where I kept my clothes.
I am so glad and grateful that I had a head start on all this by encountering Francis of Assisi when I was only fifteen. It meant there was no resentment, no adjustment of expectation, no disappointment or sense of being hard-done-by. The smallest, the lowliest and the least was what he went for in every circumstance of life. He stripped himself naked (literally) and walked away from his father's wealthy household to start again in an improvisation of poverty and hope fuelled entirely by faith and joy. He said he fell in love with Lady Poverty. That captivated my imagination as a teenager — and just as well, eh?
I have no idea what our future holds, but so far I have not managed to heal my health issues and I am growing old. Already our small house feels too big for me; the management of it makes me twitchy. But it is located in an undesirable neighbourhood, and is actually the cheapest kind of dwelling available bar moving hundreds of miles north; and I could not bear to part from my family; I love them.
Even so I know this is only a lily-pad my inner frog landed on for the present moment. So I work away patiently at decreasing my possessions (which are only clothes, stationery, natural meds, a sewing kit and a tool kit, and my altar and scant yard of books).
There is furniture here, and cooking utensils, crockery and cutlery, and things like pictures on the wall and a vacuum cleaner, a couple of rugs, some artefacts made by people I love. Several of our little sets of shelves and our stools/tables were made by Tony. These things made by people dear to me, I would find hard to walk away from. I'd search out homes where they would be treasured. But then I would walk away, because that's been the discipline of my life.
Like so many people in these uncertain times, I live in this kind of limbo, wondering what's coming next. As I'm sure you can feel, the whole air is sombre with an unsettled, and frankly somewhat ominous, vibe. I don't know what's coming, but something is. And at the very least, old age is not a game for sissies.
With all this in mind, and if these considerations are also the kind of thing that preoccupy your thoughts, I wanted to share with you this very interesting video by a woman who has moved again... and again... and again. Good food for thought.
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