‘People return to their childhood homes to revisit earlier versions of themselves’
Psychotherapist and author Julia Samuel
I recently took my best friend to see my childhood home in Kensington, west London. I lived there with my parents and four siblings from the age of one until I was 20; I have not been inside since I was 23, hen it was sold, 43 years ago. Yet it still appears in my dreams. It occupies a place inside me. I wanted to return to help me understand why it still held such power.
As we walked through nearby Holland Park, my body remembered before my mind did. A warmth spread through me. I thought of family picnics on the grass, ice-creams on hot afternoons, school sports days and sneaky cigarettes behind bushes as a teenager.
The closer we came to my street, the more I noticed what had survived. The backs of the Victorian houses facing the park looked almost unchanged. The trees were taller but familiar. As I turned the corner, my heartbeat quickened. Then I saw it.
A large white stucco Victorian house, even bigger than I remembered, as later owners have extended it. The two stone eagles that stood guard at the entrance, which I used to tap every time I ran up the steps, had disappeared. The little coal hole in the front wall was still there. My twin brother and I invented endless games through that opening. I could see us both there, age six, completely absorbed in a world of our own.
My friend and I stood on the opposite pavement, looking up at the house, when the family who live there now unlocked the front door and went inside. I felt an unexpected punch in my stomach. For a split second, I wanted to call after them, “I used to live here. Would you mind if I came in?”
I immediately changed my mind. I realised I did not want to go inside at all. I wanted to preserve the architecture of my memory. Every room held another version of me.
I looked up at the top-floor window on the left. That had been my bedroom. I could picture the desk I persuaded my mother to buy me, where I spent hours writing stories simply for the pleasure of disappearing into another world. I remembered the hall with its black and white tiled floor, the sweeping staircase covered in orange carpet. I recalled lying on the landing with my brother, on guard to see who entered and left. I could see my little legs trying to follow my sisters up the stairs, two steps at a time. My last significant memory is stepping down those stairs in my wedding dress, then standing in the hall beside my husband to welcome our guests.
If I walked through those rooms today, they would hold another family’s furniture, another family’s smells, another family’s life. Those memories would become mixed with someone else’s reality.
As I stood there, I felt two versions of myself share the same pavement. The woman I am today and the child who knew every creaking stair and every colour in every room of that house. As a psychotherapist, I’ve learned that people rarely return to their childhood homes because they miss the building. They return because they are revisiting earlier versions of themselves.
Children remember the emotional atmosphere of home as much as its architecture. Long before we have language, we absorb the rhythms of family life. We learn whether someone comes when we cry, whether conflict feels frightening or survivable, whether we belong and whether we matter. A stable home creates an inner sense of safety. An unpredictable one leaves us scanning for danger. Those early experiences become the template we carry into future relationships.
When parents die and families clear a childhood home, they do far more than sort possessions. Every object carries memory. Every room holds echoes of family life.
Another family belongs in my childhood home now, and I hope they fill it with a rich life of their own. I didn’t need to step inside because what mattered had never been contained by bricks and mortar. That house gave me my first experience of rootedness and belonging. Those foundations have steadied me through loss, change and uncertainty.
Our childhood homes shape our first understanding of safety, belonging, love and family. We leave them physically, but their emotional architecture stays with us for the rest of our lives.
‘Seeing my old home after a decade was a surprisingly gruelling emotional experience’
This is not the first time I have returned to my old house on Valley Road in Anfield, Liverpool. I moved out in 1971, aged 19, when I gained a place at Chelsea School of Art. When my mother was still alive, I would visit Liverpool once a month or so, and, although I had bought her a nice semi in the verdant south Liverpool suburb of Aigburth, I would regularly take friends who had come to visit to see our old house. I don’t know why I thought they’d be interested, but they didn’t get a choice.
It lies near the top of a street of modest terrace housing, built of yellow brick and distinguished from the most basic of working-class houses by its bay window. The last time I had visited was about a decade ago. At that time, every house in the street had been tastefully done up. Only my former house remained unimproved. Perhaps this was some commentary on how Liverpool viewed my legacy.
On this latest visit I assumed I would feel the warm nostalgia I usually experienced. I had no anticipation of the emotional hurricane that assaulted me when I stepped out of the taxi from Lime Street station and stood on the corner of Valley Road and Oakfield Road. I felt like someone who had been kidnapped, had a bag jammed over their head and dumped on some unfamiliar street corner in a rough part of town.
My gaze followed the curve of Oakfield Road to a building a few hundred metres away, an edifice of such vastness that it resembled a colossal warship anchored in the harbour of some small town. This is Anfield Stadium, the home of Liverpool FC. It had always been there but seemed to have increased in size exponentially since my last visit, grown fat on TV rights and shirt sales.
My old neighbourhood is unusual in that there are times when these streets are crammed with tens of thousands of people, but when the people have gone it feels as if this intermittent frenzy has caused it to lapse into exhaustion.
As I walked down Valley Road, I was hit by a range of unexpected emotions, the foremost of which was sadness. I felt a sense of familiarity but also of dislocation. Seeing my old house on an airless summer afternoon aged 74 brought back all sorts of memories of childhood: playing in the street, walking to school and visiting the shops. It all seemed such an impossibly vast time ago that it was hard to believe that I had been alive for so long.
When I was little, there was a dairy at the end of Valley Road that actually had cows in it. The building was still there, but it was housing now. When I returned from staring at it, there was a man sitting in a chair outside my old house drinking a can of beer. He said the house belonged to his sister and that she wouldn’t mind me looking around, but it didn’t look like it had changed much from my last visit, so I declined.
In my youth there were so many nearby shops – chandlers, greengrocers, delicatessens – and each was busy, but now 95% of shopfronts are shuttered. Strangely, the only place open was a smart-looking takeaway selling tacos and churros. The twin spectres of economic collapse and incompetent and corrupt redevelopment did for Anfield.
On the drive over, I’d asked my cabby how he thought the city had changed in the last few years. He told me that, for a long time, following Thatcher’s economic assault on the city, people were filled with despair, but they were starting, in a modest way, to regain hope.
To my mind, the grounds for this hope lie in initiatives such as the Homebaked Cooperative Bakery, which occupies a corner site a little farther along Oakfield Road from my former home. The building had been a bakery for more than 100 years, one that I remember visiting many times as a child, but it closed in 2010. After the Liverpool Biennial art festival used the site as a base, locals worked with the organisation to reopen the bakery in 2013. Now, it is thriving.
Perhaps this is where hope lies – not in grand schemes but in a little shop selling pies. Hopefully, other grassroots enterprises will follow and the streets of Anfield will again be teeming with people. I’m not sure if I will visit again. Seeing my childhood home after a decade was a surprisingly gruelling emotional experience. If I make it to 84, it’s hard to imagine what unsettling effect that will have.
How I’ve Tried to Change the World by Alexei Sayle (W&N, £16.99) is out now.
‘I was happy in that house. There were meals around a big old kitchen table, feasts that issued from an Aga’
Novelist Esther Freud
There were a lot of childhood homes. My sister and I counted them once: 16 in two years, but the longest and most defining was a converted laundry in East Sussex where I lived between the ages of eight and 14. The house was owned by an American, the father of three girls. The initial understanding was that my mother, my sister, Bella, and I were renting rooms from him, but it wasn’t long before I discovered my mother’s bed empty when I crept through to her in the middle of the night.
My stepfather, as I came to refer to him later, after we’d moved out, had recently divorced, and gained custody of his three young daughters – most unusual in those days. He had bought a derelict laundry on an old estate, which overlooked Ashdown Forest, in a village so small it was termed a hamlet, although there was a pub, a shop and a telephone box, from which we occasionally received calls from our father, pre-arranged by post.
The Old Laundry was the last building on the estate to be restored. There was also a coach house and several stable blocks, and the mansion with its Jacobean facade had been turned into flats. Our stepfather had renovated the house himself, adding an extension to the original square brick building. Inside, there was a chimney stack vast enough to heat the water that once washed the estate linen, and this was transformed into a fireplace big enough for us to sit inside on cushions.
It seemed at first that our ramshackle family would not be welcome on the Holly Hill estate: our van broke down on the cattle grid; our dog regularly escaped; and a feud developed with the man next door, a retired colonel, who had illegally – according to our stepfather – cut down an ancient tree that blocked his light. The rest of us ignored this quarrel, unwilling to risk our friendship with Margaret, the colonel’s wife, a big‑hearted woman who employed all five of us girls, rewarding us disproportionately for dusting and polishing, or ironing a shirt. Margaret became our ally and would drop round to sample our baking, watch our plays and listen to our recitals.
I was happy in that house. There were meals around a big old kitchen table, feasts that issued from an Aga, and occasionally my stepfather would make lasagne, commandeering every surface of the kitchen and allocating jobs. On Sundays he would make pancakes, and on winter evenings we would sit inside the fireplace while he played guitar and sang folk songs. I loved the rituals. I even loved the chores – I was in charge of feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs. And I loved the new baby, a boy, born when I was 10.
But there were dark days, too, when one or other of us, most often my stepfather, would lock themselves in the bathroom. When frustrations and jealousies would blacken the mood. Days when my sister would pull me aside and insist the whole setup was a charade: the singing and the pancakes. He didn’t love us or our mum. Charade or not, this house was where much of my character was formed, for better or for worse. The bookshelves, the conversation, the rituals and routines, the idea of family and what, at its best, it could be.
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I didn’t expect the suddenness with which the household broke apart. I arrived home one day to find a note: my mother had gone. My sister and I were to follow her to Cambridge, she explained, and we would not be going back.
My mother, I’m fairly certain, never returned to the house. My sister – absolutely not. But I did, decades later. Finding myself in Sussex, I drove over the cattle grid and into the estate. There were the familiar shrubs and lawns, the Gate House, the Coach House, the steep path that led up to the Old Laundry. I knocked on the door, full of dread – what if there wasn’t any answer? What if there was?
The new owners were happy to show me around. The house was smaller, tidier. How had this been the scene of so much joy and anguish? The Aga was still there and the fireplace, but my old downstairs bedroom had been turned into a dining room, and the trees that shaded it had fallen in the storm of 1987, allowing light to flood in. The colonel would be pleased, I thought. As I looked across the fence, I had a yearning to see Margaret, to tell her I still used the button box she had given me, to say how important she was.
I was quiet as I drove away. The Old Laundry, mythical receptacle of stories, was nothing but a shell. The real house, the one in which I had learned to read, fallen in love, experienced both triumph and despair, only existed now inside my head.
Esther Freud’s most recent novel is My Sister and Other Lovers (Bloomsbury).
‘At its best, a childhood home is a safe place in which solitude can be experienced without anxiety’
Writer Deborah Levy
I do not have to literally knock on the door of my childhood house to enter its domain. It is always inside me – “my first universe”, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard put it. Yes, in my mind’s eye, the door is ajar at this modest bungalow in Johannesburg, South Africa, 1966. It presents itself to me like a museum. Everything is in place. Nothing has changed since my last visit.
Of course, should I visit 11 Iris Road in the suburb of Norwood in real life, everything will have changed, but let’s press a foot into the dust of the past and see what it reveals.
Despite the force of the African sun and piercing stretch of blue sky above the tiles of its roof, the interior of the bungalow is dark and cool. Maybe the curtains are drawn in some of the rooms to keep it that way. I can smell floor polish as I glimpse myself, aged seven, with a crooked fringe trimmed by my mother and wearing a sleeveless summer dress, making my way towards the giant sack of oranges propped against the wall in the pantry.
Every day after school, I roll one of the oranges under the soles of my feet until it is soft and pulpy. I then make a hole in it with my thumb and suck out the juice, usually while sitting on the steps of the porch outside, reading a book or looking out at the tall uncut grass of the garden, where I am convinced I have dropped one of my Barbie’s pink plastic stilettos. The incredible thing about Barbie is how she never looks sad. In fact, Barbie is still smiling when my friend Leonie twists off her head and throws it at my beloved pogo stick in the hallway.
The lounge is where our mother keeps Auntie Molly’s record player, with its speakers made from wood. This sound system will travel with us from Johannesburg to the UK, when I am nine years old. I will inherit it as a teenager and play all my Bowie vinyl on it – but now I’m looking for Mum in the dark, cool bungalow. Yes, she is back from work. I can hear the ice rattling in her glass of brandy, and she has kicked off her shoes, patent leather burgundy kitten heels. My God. My mother is a secretary, and it occurs to my older self that she is like a character from Mad Men, a cross between Peggy and Joan. She tells me all about work. I don’t tell her anything about school. It is a relief not to be asked.
My bedroom is located at the back of the bungalow. It is a place of refuge and calm. I can lie in bed and glimpse the bright stars at night through its big windows. At its best, a childhood home is a safe place in which solitude can be experienced without anxiety. Solitude is different from loneliness. It is an invitation to have imaginative adventures, to daydream, to discover something we do not know, to pretend to be someone else for five minutes – perhaps someone braver and happier.
My childhood home represents the turbulent African part of my biography. Sometimes it feels like the child in this house is a ghost child who is not that keen to talk to my English adult self. Yet she haunts every book I have written.
The past is literally a foreign country in my case. I can see via Google Earth that the house is still there, but it has been redesigned to conceal its interior. When I was a child there was an iron gate that opened on to the front garden. Now that the garden is closed off to the street with a heavy door and a wall, I do not have a nostalgic longing to unlock its new mystery. If our first home holds “childhood motionless in its arms”, as Bachelard insists, it is also the place my brother and I had to solve the old mystery of where our mother had hidden the family supply of sweets. As it happens, I can tell you they are inside a yellow enamel cup, behind a bag of flour in the pantry.
Deborah Levy’s most recent work is My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein (Hamish Hamilton).
‘For my father, who was part of the first wave of south Asian immigration into the UK, property ownership served as a hedge against future precarity’
Novelist and artist Guy Gunaratne
Between the ages of three and nine, I lived with my parents, my brother and my half-sister in a small semi‑detached house on Crest Road, in a suburban part of Neasden, north-west London. The house had a pebbledash exterior, characterful bay windows and a narrow back garden, which, as I recall, extended farther than either of our neighbours’ gardens.
As I wander around the area today, not much has changed. There is still a newsagent at the end of the road and a bus stop from where my mother used to catch the no 16 to work. Farther along, a bookie has replaced the charity shop where my mother bought her silverware. There used to be a greengrocer in front of the bus stop. The grocer was a Cypriot man from whom my mother would buy cabbage, leeks and carrots. He wore a white coat and would offer a kindly slap to the cheek whenever I tagged along. The Ox & Gate pub, which the grocer might have patronised after closing time, still stands across the road, although the flash signage and live sports advertising indicate a change in owner.
My family moved around often when I was a child, but only ever within a five-mile radius. My mother still lives a few streets away. My father, working as a clerk in Paddington for most of his life, put me and my brother through school and tuition by purchasing modest properties around the area. He would redecorate the houses and sell them on over the years, which meant the family had to relocate every so often.
For my father, who was part of the first wave of south Asian immigration into the UK, property ownership was more than a social marker: it served as a hedge against future precarity. He used to tell stories of lodging in overcrowded rooms in the 1960s, shift‑sleeping in shared beds, and fretting over the labour market in the morning. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he had my brother and I help him redecorate these other homes, pasting wallpaper, laying down carpet and mowing the lawn. It was during these weekends that I came to realise that property ownership was never an end in itself but a means to afford a way of life. What mattered was not the high ceilings or the Edwardian bay windows, but whether we could afford the expense of keeping both salted fish and Indian okra in my mother’s kitchen cupboard.
I think this is why, as I stand in front of the house on Crest Road today, my memories aren’t so much shaped by its dimensions but by the extended sense of constant migration. I can, of course, locate certain memories in its rooms. I remember watching my brother leave for school from an upstairs window. I can recall the image of suitcases left on the landing when an aunt and uncle came to stay. There is my half-sister, the scent of her hairspray perfuming the hall as she skipped away for a night out. And another, in the narrow back garden, when, aged seven, I found a pigeon lying asleep near the farthest fence. There is an aspect of loss or transition to many of these memories.
I often wonder what my father would have made of my now choosing to live in cooperative housing in north London. I live alongside families and artists who both rent and part-own their homes. He would surely have raised an eyebrow at my rent. I also think he would have recognised the same instinct for community and shared shelter.
Last September, when my father died, my brother and I plotted a route for the procession that would take in some of the houses he had owned and redecorated. When we slowed down on Crest Road, the last stop before the cemetery, I noticed there were children’s bikes leant against the garden fence, the front door slightly ajar. I imagined other lives looking out at us from behind the net curtains. Somebody was home.
‘Everything was animated by our childhood dog, a black labrador retriever named Tarzan, who would pull us through the snow on an orange plastic sled’
Novelist Chloe Aridjis
Latin America has a long and eccentric tradition of appointing its writers to diplomatic posts abroad. Who better, it would seem, to represent your country than a cultural figure, especially if trade and serious geopolitics aren’t too much of a concern. And so it was that in the late 1970s, my father, a long-haired poet in his 30s, was appointed Mexican ambassador to the Netherlands, and our family relocated there. I was five years old when my parents, my sister and I left Switzerland (a previous posting) and moved into the ambassador’s residence in Wassenaar, where we lived for nearly three years. I hadn’t been back since the summer we left.
Not until this past April, that is, when I went to visit my childhood friend Victor in Amsterdam. I’d met him aged two in a sandpit in The Hague, and our families have remained friends. On my second day there, his parents, Ad and Ada, were driving me to the Mauritshuis museum when Ad asked whether I’d like to see my old home. We were passing through Wassenaar and had time for a quick detour. I remembered the street name but not the number. We searched for the house until we spotted the Mexican flag in the distance. I rang the buzzer, tried to explain who I was over the intercom. Moments later, a man appeared and introduced himself as the cook. I lived here as a child, I said somewhat timidly, and would love to revisit the grounds. He studied me and my friends and replied that the ambassadress was in a meeting and they couldn’t let anyone in without permission. He tried calling but her phone was switched off.
It was tantalising to be so close. I could almost feel a gloved hand keeping my curiosity in check. As we lingered outside, I gazed past the gold-tipped wrought‑iron gates, down the gravel driveway to a corner of the house. I recognised the tall brick chimney and shingled roof. It was by far the largest home I’ve lived in; much of it had remained a mystery. As a child, I had no sense that the space and its furnishings were all borrowed, that the Persian carpets and gilt bedframes had seen family after family come and go. My parents had hung some of their own masks and art on the walls to give character to the rooms. I remember an endless row of cupboards and two staircases, one with red carpeting and the other smaller and more secretive, connecting the kitchen to upstairs – that notion of front and back, the presentable and the hidden, now seems so foreign. On the third floor was the eerie attic, inhabited only by mice.
Looking back, the house belonged more to the adults. The garden belonged to me and my sister. It was the highlight of those years, the vagaries of Dutch weather permitting, and most of my memories are from there. There were groves of deciduous trees, a wood of ghostly birch, and a 350-year-old beech at the very end of the grounds. Everything was animated by our childhood dog, a black labrador retriever named Tarzan, who in winter would pull us through the snow on an orange plastic sled. In spring we’d invite our classmates over for Easter egg hunts amid the tulips and daffodils. I remember Hugo, the elderly gardener, always in his olive-green clothes and cap, and the mounds left by moles overnight. The fenced compost heap, the tennis court. After we returned to Mexico, we moved into a normal-sized house – my family home to this day – and I went back to being the daughter of a poet, which felt more natural. We were free to explore every space and inhabit every corner and create our own chaos without ever feeling that the house itself was hushing us.
That afternoon, after wandering through the Mauritshuis, Ad asked whether I had ever seen the Panorama Mesdag, a vast cylindrical painting from the late 19th century. We could drop by on our way back to Amsterdam. Half an hour later, we stood on the viewing platform as painted scenes from Scheveningen, a beach I’d often visited, wrapped around us. That familiar sea, its ships, dunes and village, all formed part of a great illusion of the past. Yet seeing my old house that day had felt like the greatest illusion of all. Those years. seemed so distant, and the impossibility of entering the house only strengthened the sense of remove. Part of me was relieved I hadn’t written over my memories, that the many details from that remarkable time would remain undisturbed, and I feel quite certain I may never return.