Dialogue: Truly, there is no place like home

By JOE BENNETT

The Spanish have no word for home. They can say "at my house" but not "at home." When I taught English to Spaniards, I found it hard to make them understand the difference.

I explained that the best definition of home was the place where the toilet seat was at exactly the right height. But they looked at me warily.

Home is more than a house. Home is like a pair of jeans that time and body heat have tailored into a second skin. At the points where you bulge the jeans have faded.

When you take them off, they relinquish your shape slowly, like half a deflating corpse. They would fit no one else.

And the same is true of home.

Most people have two homes - the one they live in and the one they grew up in. You never shake that first home off. And it never forgets your departure.

As the spectacularly cheerful Philip Larkin wrote:

Home is so sad.

It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back.

Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so.

Last year I went back to the house I was reared in. On the mantelpiece stood the paltry collection of treasures - the pewter mug, the silver Russian coin and the two silver spirit measures - that I had known throughout my childhood.

I knew, without thinking, where the dinner plates were piled, the angle of the bend in the stairs, the precise pressure needed to close the bathroom door.

Such intimacy made the muscles of my neck clench.

It made me adolescent again, excited the same feelings that made me flee the place a quarter of a century ago.

It is, I suppose, the instinct that drives the fledgling to step off the branch and trust itself to the uncertain cushion of the air.

Between first and second homes lie the years of rented rooms.

These are the the years when we forge an identity with which we can live. Then one day, with awful suddenness, down comes a mortgage and up goes the drawbridge. It is neither good nor bad. It's as inevitable as a weasel digging a burrow.

I bought my first house at 30. At the time I thought I was making a rational decision. Now I see it as the work of instinct.

I can remember standing in the hall of that ramshackle house and thinking that for the first time in my life I could kick a hole in the wall and not have to explain the damage. It felt strangely like freedom.

Home looms large in my mind right now because I have just been away for a fortnight. I stayed in a hotel and ate fancy food of which I rapidly tired.

I no longer want rootlessness. To sink back into my home was like coming off stage and slumping in the dressing room.

I am comfortable in this house. Its parts have arranged themselves to suit me. I navigate about its rooms without collisions.

Things are where I have put them and no one moves them. My movements are registered here like animal tracks through the bush.

Where I don't go, stuff gathers. There is nothing I can do about it. Home tells the truth of me.

The potency of home appeals to advertisers, who must aim always at the basest instincts. Furnishers promise to turn our houses into homes. Magazines are devoted to the home. Competitions advertise the home of our dreams. They all lie.

Home is self and self is imperfect. Home has finger marks about the light switches, and in the cupboards lies the junk of dead dreams - the exercise machines, the books of self-improvement, the forgotten enthusiasms.

What makes a house a home is not the stencilled wallpaper or the macrame plant-holders or the Belgian blinds, but the passage of time. It moulds the occupant and the building into one, with the same smell.

It's the same process as makes my dogs curl under the desk as I write, wrapped in their own dens within mine.

I do not trust neat homes. In places where the furniture and rugs and vases are laid out as if for the magazine photographer I do not expect to hear rich or candid words.

The plug-in air freshener, the impeccable pastel shagpile, the rinsed and glittering kitchen disinfect the conversation, banish the thrill of meshing minds.

Home is more than a building. Home is an extension of the self, the occupant's unique and thoughtless signature on a scrap of land.

Most Spanish men live with their mothers until they find wives, but whether that has anything to do with why they have no word for home, I don't know.