The places I've lived

You know I said here that I've lived in 21 different homes? 

These were the places.

1. Our home when I was a baby, in North London.
2. We moved from there when I was still a baby, to Kingwell Avenue, still in North London.
3. When I was three we moved to Regency Close in the country market town of Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire.
4. We sold that house, and my mother had designed a new one and commissioned a builder, who didn't finish it by the time we had to move out of Regency Close. So we rented a house in Galloway Road in Bishops Stortford. I was six at the time. I learned to ride a bike in Galloway road — quiet, unmade surface. For a long while, every time I turned the corner I fell off. But I kept trying. There's a sermon in that.
5. The new build was still not ready when the lease expired, so the builder lent us his own house to live in. I have no idea where he went, I was only seven and didn't ask. The house was a big country place in a village, but I can't remember the name of it. The builder intrigued me. He had bad breath and looked, I thought, like a badger, or a pig.
6. Finally the new place was finished, and we moved into Elm House in the village of Much Hadham when I was eight. It had a quarter of an acre of garden, and there we had a big veggie patch and started to keep hens. We stayed there a while. It was named for the row of mature elms screening it from the road. They got Dutch elm disease and died — very sad.
7. When I was fourteen, we moved to Grooms Cottage, part of the rambling converted 13th century palace (plus outbuildings) of the Bishop of London. This was where Katherine de Valois took refuge with Owen Tudor, their marriage being strongly disapproved by her family. There we had an orchard, sheep, a wood, a stretch of river, a veggie garden in the medieval stable yard, a barn and other outbuildings; in all, five acres that went with the house. The summer I turned eighteen, I left home. My mother (initially with my father, later alone) moved house 6 times after that.
8. I went to live in Devon with some monks, and there my home was a caravan in a vegetable garden at the back of the Post Office. This was where, sitting in the silence and sunlight in their tiny chapel one morning, I read in their Rule of Life, "The priory should reflect the peace and order of heaven." That has been my rule of thumb for housekeeping ever since. Monastics have a Rule of Life, I have a rule of thumb; works well for me, there is room for both pathways. In Devon I learned to milk a cow from a Spanish priest who spoke no English. I observed that God looks after his own — Brother Jonathan wanted the Methodist chapel that stood on the access road to our farm. The  Methodist Circuit steward said "Over my dead body will that monk get our chapel." He died, and Jonathan got the chapel.
9. Then I moved on, to live with some nuns for a while. My home there was in the nurses' accommodation. There I learned nobody has to answer a phone. Sister Carmel said I looked more like a tramp than anyone else around the place. She meant "hobo" not "prostitute". It surprised me, but pleased me at the same time — it was probably also true of St Francis and Jesus.
10. After that, I moved to York university and lived in student accommodation for a year. I didn't move out in the holidays, just kept renting the room while I worked as a waitress or cleaner. I wanted to learn Old English, but the professor was such a tedious and boring lecturer he lost all his audience but six die-hards of which I was not one. Word had it that he got lost on the North York Moors taking a posse of students to see some archeological site. They found a policeman (Seriously? How?) who asked if he had a map. He did, but only of Britain in the Dark Ages.
11. While still an undergraduate at York, I became part of an interdenominational intentional Christian community, blessed beyond measure to have Ampleforth's Father Fabian Cowper as our chaplain. I wish you had known him. I did love that man. The light of Christ shone through him. Our little community set up home together in a Victorian house let to us by a gaggle of whisky priests in York. It took our menfolk a wild night of drinking to secure the tenancy. The house stood in St Martins Lane, overlooking the church yard; this was just off Micklegate within the city walls in York, a wonderful place to be. I lived there for about a year.
12. Then I got married to another community member. We bought a caravan and went to live by the track at the edge of a field of cabbages in a dairy farm out at Acaster Selby. We had a crazy dog called Mischief who used to leap through the cabbages like a kangaroo. We got our milk straight from the cow.
13. We lived there for a year, but then got the chance to rent the ground floor of the vicarage, built against the church wall of St Mary's Bishophill, just round the corner from St Martins Lane where the rest of the community was housed. Some of them later moved in upstairs. We staged a hilarious incident involving Victor Lewis Smith and a 1950s polka-dot nightie belonging to my mother, but perhaps that's an anecdote for another day. 
14. When I graduated, we had no money to pay rent. My mother said we could live in a barn that was part of the outbuildings of my parents' home. So we lived there for a summer, bought a gipsy vardo to renovate, added a couple of motherless kittens to our two dogs. I was expecting my first child and had a threatened miscarriage, so had to quit my job as a postman. My husband was working as a milkman. Our only vehicle was the milk delivery lorry. He got into trouble with his customers because the milk went off because he used to stop off his round to play the organ at the parish church on Sundays. Our life was a little bit dysfunctional. My father-in-law managed my husband into getting a job as a teacher down on the south coast at Seaford. So we sold the vardo and for a few months moved in with my husband's parents, but that doesn't count because it was their home, unlike the barn which was temporarily ours.
15. The week our first child was born we moved into our first owner-occupied home with a mortgage, a two-bedroomed end of terrace Victorian workers' cottage on the Battle Road in Hastings (at Hollington). Handily, it had a large brick-built shed attached, allowing us to keep goats and chickens (there was a long garden too, for fruit and veggies, and the next door neighbour was a hair salon, so they didn't use their garden and let us tether our goats there). On Sundays, one of our neighbours used to set out kitchen stools along their path so their grandchildren could watch the crazy Wilcocks with their animals.
16. Once we had four children, we decided we needed an extra bedroom. So all the high-schoolers from a Plain-dressing Hutterite community out at Robertsbridge came in their community lorry and helped us move half a mile up the hill to Oban Road. I wanted somewhere on the same side of the street as a school entrance in the same road, so that I could wave my eldest child off to school in the morning and watch for her coming home, without having to get her toddler sister and baby twin sisters dressed for outdoors to accompany her back and forth at the beginning and end of the day and every lunch time. We lived in that house for about fourteen years. My youngest child was born there, and it offered refuge to many broken people as well as being a place where ideas were born, books written, preachers were tutored, house groups met . . . I was a hospice chaplain while we lived there, we were involved in prison chaplaincy during those years, I became a Methodist minister and pastored a church from there.
17. Then changes in the Methodist Circuit prompted a change. We (me, my husband, our five children and two dogs) sold our house and moved to the minister's accommodation at a Methodist school, where I became the chaplain for one short and terrible year full of stürm und drang and upset. I, along with one of the governors, resigned my post to block some of what was going on.  
18. The church found me a new posting in north Kent, where we moved into the manse and I presumed we'd be there for years. Not so. An internal family bombshell I am not at liberty to share, because it involves other people's secrets, left me with no marriage, no family home, no job, no income, no pension and five children. 
19. I moved into what I could afford — a one-bedroomed apartment, which over the next few years became home to different combinations of me and my children as we shuttled about trying to make life work. My husband moved in and out and finally left. My children lived in another apartment we temporarily bought and a third one bought by their grandfather. This continued for a few years. The apartment was lovely — huge Edwardian windows, and came with a garage and hardstanding that I converted into a studio for my artist daughters and a pot-garden. Complete with compost heap. This home was in Combermere Road in St Leonards, and we called it Gezellig.
20. Then I got married again, to Bernard, and moved out to Beckley (near Rye) in East Sussex, in a quiet country lane on the edge of Flatropers Wood.  I was a pastor again by then, of two churches, with a planned increase to pastoring four more. My pastorate went from two churches to six the day after Bernard died of a short savage illness. I moved out, back to Gezellig, where I worked all hours to care for church congregations, preach, and manage in addition the oddly huge number of funerals that came my way because previous work had given me a specialism in that area of pastoral care.
21. Then I married Tony, my publisher of 20 years and dear friend, and we moved to Tindal Road in Aylesbury, to be near his work in Oxford. We called that house Hagia Sofia. To generate an income for myself there, we took in lodgers and I started writing full time. Down in Hastings (St Leonards) I sold Gezellig and we bought a house in Burry Road — Godsblessing House — big enough for us to have a room there when we were visiting, and for my three youngest daughters to live in. Nowadays, they share a house with Tony and me, and Buzzfloyd lives in Godsblessing House.
22. Then I kind of fell apart and came out of the Methodist ministry, worshipped with the Quakers a couple of years, needed to be quiet and by the sea and back with my family in Hastings. So we sold Hagia Sofia, and moved into the multiple occupancy rental house we had on the Bedgrove estate in Aylesbury while we searched for a suitable place down in Hastings. 
23. We eventually found the place where we now live, in Beaufort Road in St Leonards (Hastings). We kept the Bedgrove house a few years for Tony to live in during the working week, until he was able to transition to working from home and be in Hastings full time, at which point our Aylesbury connection came to an end. The other three then moved in to the Beaufort Road house.