Diana Wichtel on her Devonport home: "It's made the journey from being a rumpty house in a rumpty street to being a house that's still fairly rumpty in a street increasingly full of gazillion-dollar do-ups and yoga pants."
Houses. Home. In the early 70s my mother and stepfather bought a tired villa that looked out past the old gasworks in Devonport to the harbour bridge. It wasn't my home – I'd fled by then – but it was home base. It cost $12,000. They sold it before property boomed but I think of Morrison Ave when talk turns to the destructive, endless escalation of house prices. My partner, inarticulate over market madness, accidentally made a new word: obsane. Obscene, meet insane. It's also obsurd.
Before Morrison Ave, nowhere had really seemed like home since we left Vancouver in 1964 to touch down in Auckland with what we could carry and without my father. We lived on our best behaviour with Nana, then in a creaky bach on Milford beach, where the roar of the waves, thigh-high kikuyu grass and the odd seagull dropping down the chimney gave the enterprise an air of shipwreck. After my stepfather moved in – another man from Vancouver, bizarrely – the five of us crammed into a one-bedroom-plus-sunporch rental in Takapuna. I moved out. Cue a blurred succession of hippie flats in the then-ungentrified precincts of Mt Eden, Ponsonby, Freemans Bay ...
I ended up in Devonport in the 70s, too. My ex and I lived in his family home, a modest 50s "elegant shed" in the manner of the Group, the starchitects of the time. Walls of glass, no insulation. You froze in the morning and fried in the afternoon, but with a certain spartan style. It was full of my mother-in-law's stuff. It never felt like mine.
Our current place, another Devonport villa, has been home for 40 years. We pulled out the carpet tiles and hospital-ward-green wallboard, barely noticed the wires dangling from the ceiling and the toilet that briefly perched in the middle of the hallway. We painted, plastered, brought up children, planted trees. Four cats, a dog and assorted goldfish have been buried with due ceremony in the yard. It's made the journey from being a rumpty house in a rumpty street to being a house that's still fairly rumpty in a street increasingly full of gazillion-dollar do-ups and yoga pants. Oh, well. We love it and it remains a place to land for two more generations.
Yet, when I dream about houses, it's always versions of the house in West 43rd Avenue, Vancouver, the first home I can remember, where our family was together. There was a secret door into the attic, a basement with all the necessities of life - a television – and a pink and grey kitchen with a breakfast nook. It felt like safety.
Years after the door had slammed on that life, I visited Vancouver with partner and kids. Chasing ghosts, I insisted we stop the cab on the way to the airport at 5am to take a picture of the house at West 43rd. If anyone saw me lurking in the dark like a madwoman, they probably considered calling the police. The photos came out blank.
In the 80s, in the London Review of Books, Salman Rushdie caught the nostalgia of leaving your country, of remembering an old house. He worked with a photo of his first home in India on the wall. It's not, as L.P. Hartley famously proclaimed, that the past is foreign country, he wrote. "It's my present that is foreign … the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time."
You hang on to what you can. In our living room, a world away from my first, alongside the television, the reproachful exercycle, battalions of books, are vestiges of West 43rd. The painting of a vase of roses and the brass mantle clock my father bought at auction; the crystal decanter and the glass into which he poured his one whiskey at night. They made it to Auckland not long after we did though my father never would. Sometimes those relics make me happy, sometimes desperately sad. Always they make the present feel less like a foreign country, more like home.
