Now Just Where Is It&;#063;

It's caught in a loop at the very bottom of South Leicestershire. I
don't know why I still live here. Or why I came back. It's the sort of
place that people seem to come back to.

I wasn't born here, my family moved here when I was three. They moved
down from Lancashire where I was born. My brother had a broad accent
and was forced to go to the secondary school for two weeks before the
Summer holidays. He had shorts and that accent. He learnt the hard way
to speak like the other boys. I suppose I had the accent too.

My parents liked the town when they visited. On the basis of wide roads
with trees they plumped for it and laid out our lives for us. No doubt
my father had spotted the cricket club and the great number of pubs. At
the time my sister was still alive. She had been born with spina
bifida, a very severe case. She spent most of her time in what my
mother terms a "hospital school" but came home in the holidays, so my
parents had to buy a bungalow for the wheelchair.

It is the first place I remember living although my memories are scant.
The smell of my brother's miniature steam engine that ran on methylated
spirit, the Magic Roundabout and some fleeting scenes involving my
sister. Not many though and she died soon after we moved here.

The first thing they did after she died was buy a house with stairs. I
remember the first time I saw the house. My cousin Dawn was staying
like she regularly did and my mother took us to see the house. We
didn't have the key but my mother found one of the downstairs sash
windows was open and we all climbed through. The house was enormous and
empty and felt ghostly to me.

That house was the place I watched the moon landing, I recall being
woken and going downstairs and looking at our black and white telly. It
was the place I got scared to death by listening to plays on the radio
and always imagined someone would climb through the bedroom window in
the night. It was the place my cousin Richard convinced me that if you
smeared wood with vaseline a saw wouldn't cut it.

And now I live in a house which is equidistant from those two, the
bungalow and the big house. Even though I have lived away I have
somehow been drawn back here. So has my brother who moved back with his
young family ten years ago.

I sometimes think I could move away and start again in a place where
nobody knows me. A place I imagine I would fit into. But I see the kids
with their mates and how they like their lives in this safe town and I
can't do it. Anyway it would take a year to clear out the loft.

Of course this diary is really nothing about the place I live. Andrew
will be disappointed. But a place is a collection of memories much more
than a mass of streets and buildings. The shop I go in for bread and a
paper is the shop I rode my bike to when I was eight to buy small boxes
of hard sweets in the shape of letters.

The kids go to the schools I went to. Some of the teachers are still
the same. The big park where I played is the place I took my own
children and where I still walk or cycle on sunny days even though they
are too grown up to go there with me for swings and the sandpit.

I have a history here. Sometimes it makes me feel dull and trapped.
Sometimes it is a comfort. I met my husband and was married here. Two
of my children were conceived and born here. My divorce papers came
through the letterbox in this very house. My father is buried in a
church cemetary a mile or so out of town.

I know this place, its moods and shapes. I know the people in it. It's
the place I work and drink and laugh and make love. And in ten years I
will be able to go any place I please. I reckon the kids will all be
settled then with places of their own. They could be anywhere and if I
am lucky I will be a writer in that tall house by the sea that I have
always dreamed about.