In the garden there was a huge laburnum tree where caterpillars grew in the buds and dangled down on invisible threads in late spring. She liked bright plants. Pinks and yellows, for good energy, to ward off evil spirits. Lupins, azaleas, bleeding hearts. She dug up the pampas grass after I told her it was code for swingers. In the middle of the front lawn there was a monkey puzzle tree, its base beaded with grey stones, Japanese-style, after something she saw in a magazine. Other things: the crack-spangled patio, the planters polka-dotted with moss, the eternally unoccupied bird box. I’ve been back a handful of times. Birthdays. Christmases. Odd times off the slingshot of another failed love affair.

A WOMB OF ONE’S OWN

I lived in Stepney Green, Kentish Town, Streatham. I saved like Scrooge. I wrote for fourteen hours a day. I was in some kind of rocket mode, blazing a way, trying to escape an old atmosphere. I walked home down the worst of roads in a knitted hat, trying to look mad (un-rapeable), with my Yale key between my first two fingers. I had a contact – one, from a kindly teacher at school. I followed up on it. A trade magazine for a supermarket. It was a start. I ate a lot of sautéed vegetables. I had love affairs with men whose guitars were as badly strung as their sentences. Oh, to be fearless in terrible shoes again, oh so fearless and able to tolerate the cheapest of drinks and the cheapest of shoes. Outlet pleather and bad designs but all that time ahead, all that time, to wear terrible shoe after terrible shoe and wake up on another floorboarded, guitar-lined attic room with a leisurely hangover and all the hope in my heart. I’d leave before they woke, leaving a calligraphic note, and I’d go home and close my own door and feel joy when I saw the pictures I’d hung on my walls. The chairs I’d arranged. The carpets I’d chosen. The paint I’d painted. I started to feel what could be a kind of love of creating my own space. A love that could be nurturing and proud, as well as utterly romantic. A love that felt accessible and, if not quite democratic, then self-made. Empowering. All mine. To share with people I might have round, in varying contexts. I was romancing myself. I was also looking after myself. This was progress.

The first day of my first job, I texted my mother to tell her. She replied:

Good luck xxx

Good luck! Have you ever read a less motherly text? Good luck!