Where can we find home?

The last time I looked out over this view was at the beginning of the first lockdown.

I was feeling ill with symptoms that seemed to be covid and I did seriously wonder if I would ever get home again.

All my theatre projects for that year had been cancelled, of course, and so I also wondered if I’d ever work again…

A theatre company commissioned me to write and perform this piece online and it was the beginning of my recovery.

And now that I’m back, two long years later, looking out over this seascape again, what the piece is about seems to matter more than ever.

It briefly seemed at the time of the first lockdown as if the world might be changing and that we might learn something from the forced interruption of our self-destructive ways.

But we seem to have learnt nothing. The collective suicide machine seems to be working overtime.

The United Nations declares that everyone has the right to a decent standard of living in a safe home (Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights)

But now, as always, this is a right so many of us are denied in every country to the world. Including our own.

Denied this right through greed and hatred.

The war in Ukraine alone has done $30 billion worth of damage to residential homes.

In the face of all this, what does it mean to have a home?

What does it mean to be at home on this beautiful earth when through stupidity and short sighted greed we are all so ferociously destroying it?

What choices can we make?

How can we live?

1. Home.

Home…

How big the house was. How very old.

And me so very small.

Sixteen sixty six the house was built, my father said.

My mother never spoke of it, which was strange,

Because it was her family built the house

And owned the village that grew around

And all the land close by

Until they lost it all.

My brothers were much bigger so they were sent away to school

So there was my mum

And there was my dad

And there was me

In this great big tumbledown house

With the empty servants’ quarters and the derelict nursery wing

And the monkey puzzle and the enormous cedar tree

And the wind that howled about the house at night.

How I loved to be with my mum and her women friends

In the tiny room where she did her sewing

While I’d be playing with…

I forget what I played with

But I know that once I stole a doll from a girl in school

And locked myself in the downstairs lavatory.

My dad hammered at the door

And told me in a terrible voice

That I had to come out at once.

School was learning by heart the times tables

And the sevens and the eights were very hard

School was writing with a pencil and not being allowed to rub anything out

School was copying out copper plate letters

That looked so beautiful on the page

And so terrible where I’d copied them.

They were putting a play on once, I remember,

And you could be a gnome or a flower

And I wanted to be a flower because who’d want to be a gnome

And I didn’t understand why I was the only boy

We rehearsed in the yard outside the girl’s lavatories

Where only girls were allowed to go

And I liked it there.

Home was meat and two veg

Home was saying please and thank you

And eating with a knife and fork.

There was a very difficult way of eating peas

Which was important because we were gentlemen.

We never touched or hugged each other

And we never used the word “love”

I don’t know why

Perhaps because it wasn’t British

Or perhaps because it wasn’t manly.

In the big atlas in the library

So many countries in the world were coloured a funny kind of red

Because they were part of the Empire

And my dad said the British empire was the very best in the whole wide world.

When I was sent away to the place with the grey blankets

And the iron beds in rows

They taught me latin and ancient greek

But they didn’t teach me science

Because I was to be a man and govern the Empire.

I thought of my mum’s sewing room with her women friends

And the deep red hearth rug in front of the warm coal fire

And see it as a kind of paradise.

But by then the atlas had gone and the house had been sold

And my mother had died of bleeding in the brain

And there wasn’t a home any more.

It had gone.

2.

And when I got older and fell in love

I began to understand

That I had been trained to govern an empire

That was no longer there.

So I began again, the way you do,

I became a bus conductor

And then a student nurse

We lived in a commune, my lover and I,

Where we knew the personal was political

And that we were going to change the world.

And then we had a child

And the commune fell apart

Everyone left and it was gone.

And we began again, me and my lover,

We made a home

Where it didn’t matter how you ate your peas

And we hugged each other all the time

And said “I love you” every single day

Until cancer ate up my lover’s brain

And my daughters grew up and left home

And it was gone.

3.

So I stopped living as a man

And I began again, as you do.

I live now by the old harbour where the ships used to come

With timber, with jute, with fine Claret wine and with slaves.

Across the water is a memorial

For all the merchant seamen lost at sea

And all that has gone.

The ships are gone, the old harbour choked and useless with mud and silt

And its entrance blocked by the road to the shopping centre.

I was happy there, until the virus came.

And now I live in exile within sight and sound of the sea

The sea whose waters will one day rise and overwhelm my little house..

And now I know there is no home,

No place of safety and of refuge.

Perhaps there never really was

Perhaps there never will be such a thing again.

It will all again be gone.

My granddaughter runs around the garden and sometimes brings me presents of stones.

I pray for her survival.

But as for us, the grown-ups,

The ones who are now forbidden to touch,

We must go forward into the unknown world alone.