As I get older, and particularly after having a child, I feel myself unexpectedly drawn back to the countryside I grew up in. I nose about, late at night, on the websites of estate agents specialising in the north-east, hopping down the coast from barn conversion to barn conversion, pausing sometimes to inspect the odd terraced house looking out to the grey North Sea.
I had thought that working in the city for 20 years would make any sense of being from a particular place fade. I had thought talk of belonging a bit naff. But the feeling only grows. The further away from the north I am, the more sure I am that grass should be coarse not lush, that hills should have heather and that any sea which doesn’t induce hypothermia isn’t worth its salt. I don’t plan to move. I have nothing to offer the countryside and couldn’t make any sort of living there. Nonetheless, given half a chance or a bank holiday weekend, I home like a pigeon.
I bundle up my stout son and my husband and drive them off to revisit my childhood. ‘It’s fun!’ I say, as the stinging sand whips up Embleton beach and smacks the toddler in the face. ‘What’s a sandwich without grit in it? Now, kick a limpet off that rock and feed it to a sea anemone. You don’t want to? Neither of you? Wimps.’
It’s simplest to see this as a longing for past not place, the sort of harking back to childhood that can seize a person in middle age, before a passion for genealogy sets in. But it’s not that.
I’m just programmed. Heft, as they say of sheep. As I step from the train at Alnmouth station, the taste of the air makes my heart lighter.
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