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    Home: how I learnt not to run away
    Home: how I learnt not to run away
    Home: how I learnt not to run away
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Home: how I learnt not to run away

    By Diana Crampton

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    About this ebook

    Diana Crampton’s writing career has ranged over themes as varied as Chinese traditional medicine, tourism in Kenya and contemporary art. Among her many other writing assignments, she has published profiles of eminent Royal Academicians._x000D_
    In this remarkable book, ‘Home - how I learnt not to run away’, Diana recounts her early childhood and her subsequent travels and adventures, providing the reader with a highly readable combination of entertainment and thought-provoking life lessons.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Conrad Press
    Release dateOct 10, 2020
    ISBN9781839781162
    Home: how I learnt not to run away

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      Book preview

      Home - Diana Crampton

      Home

      How I learnt not to run away

      Diana Crampton

      Home

      Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2020

      Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com 
info@theconradpress.com

      ISBN 9781839781162

      Copyright © Diana Crampton, 2020

      The moral right of Diana Crampton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      All rights reserved.

      Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk

      The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

      To my sons and their father

      Introduction

      ‘Mme Salminen took a particular interest in people who exhibited signs of extreme emotion: it was her belief that violent passions, when efficiently channelled, can create the conditions for what she called ‘psychic breakthroughs’.

      Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome, Picador 1995

      Today, I am convinced that the notion of home is a total luxury. They say that the number of people on the move from the Middle East is of biblical proportions; they are fleeing war, but aiming to settle somewhere peaceful and safe. People are migrating around Africa like never before. Day after day, boatloads of people are found adrift in the Mediterranean.

      In 2014, Jonathan Dean reports, 50 million people were on the move, more than at any other time since World War II. Five years later and the numbers have swelled to 70 million (UNHCR statistics). On the shores of the Channel a refugee camp called The Jungle ‘houses’, in plastic shelters, thousands wishing to reach the UK to make a home. Periodically these are torn down and refugees moved on. Dinghies are frequently found trying to cross the Channel, one of the busiest ship thoroughfares in the world. Would the people feel as if they are home when they get to UK?

      I have been walking around thinking of this notion of home for several days now. Mainly I had written a memoir twenty years ago and wanted to get it published. The core of the memoir was my instability and mental health, loosely wrapped around notions of emigration, travel, tourism, wandering which I had studied for my Ph.D.

      Ultimately the memoir was too personal, perhaps written only for myself and difficult to put in terms that might be of use. My latter intention had been to show that one may have a serious mental illness and still survive. I survived what the health services have called suicide attempts, three of them, although only one was an actual conscious bid to imbibe enough pills to kill me. My father saved me. One of two times I have seen him cry.

      The fact remains that a major slant in the older memoir was travel. Here, today, I propose to express what home has meant to me through my life, investigating whether having a sense of home allays mental instability and hence giving us cause to stop and ponder how the world’s homeless will progress. How do people create a sense of home? Do they need it?

      Why should you read me? I am no celebrity, although I might be known by a small number of readers of the magazine I contribute to. My aim: to try and offer hope for those in the hopeless depths of depression and psychosis, or people who are near them, relatives, friends. My themes are those of relating the instability to either fight or flight and how these are intertwined in my personal history, hoping that readers will find resonances with their own travels or travails.

      On my worst days, my poor dear mother, trying hard to buoy me up, would say ‘one door closes, another door opens’. It’s a good philosophy to live by.

      Chapter One

      Suburbs

      I recall a snippet that the British on average move house once every seven years. On the other hand, the Triestini that I know, from the other half of my heritage, my Italian mother’s side, have all been in their abodes for a lifetime, several lifetimes. The average Briton moves house eight times in their lifetime, according to a statistic found on Google. So what I am going to do is now chart my homes, through my life, with my memories of those places.

      But, as a preamble, I was always fascinated by the fact that my parents slept in the Bois De Boulogne, having missed their train, on the way home to London from Trieste one time, when my mother was carrying me, pregnant. Whatever my mother had been feeling in trepidation, vulnerable, had, I surmised, communicated itself to me in my embryonic state, leaving me incapable of feeling at home for the duration. Forever really. A sort of nomad. But I have been sedentary for 20 years now.

      My mother had a hard birth. She was small, petite, dark-haired. She had commented to the midwife that finally the pains had lessened, which occasioned the midwife to press down on her and finally get me out.

      My first months were, I think, passed in the house of my grandparents. This was a three-bedroomed semi-detached built possibly in the forties, perhaps even thirties, with a bay window in the lounge, a large tree in the front garden and an adequate back garden, with two fruit trees. The rooms were of pleasing proportions, with a large bathroom upstairs, and a toilet under the stairs on the ground floor.

      Across the road were other similar houses, built slightly later. Out the back there were playing fields. I remember the stretch of green grass, even if I don’t recall anybody playing on it! My grandparents lived there for the following fifteen years, until my grandmother passed away. Down the road were some Nissen huts, used for the army during the war and which would eventually be replaced by more housing.

      Next door, I recall a jovial neighbour. Her name was Rusty, or was it a nickname, as she had the most gorgeous red hair? Opposite was a family with a couple of daughters, with whom I played. And down the road, a future colleague at school, in some houses built later.

      My paternal grandmother suffered a collapse of her spine and spent years in bed, tended by my grandfather. We would visit them each weekend. Before she had got so ill, my parents took advantage and left me with them Saturday nights. I was usually happy with this.

      My grandmother had been a school secretary and she had wished to have been a teacher, but her family circumstances had not permitted her further education. However, the teacherly instinct worked its way out by her teaching me mental arithmetic and giving me spelling tests. I really liked these activities, they were like games for me: Sunday mornings spent in bed for half an hour with a couple of little tests. My spelling has always been good and this must be attributed to those early ‘games’. Also my ex-husband tells me he is impressed by my mental arithmetic even now. These things were gifts to me from my grandmother, whom I called Nonna.

      The tending by my grandfather of my grandmother impressed my son, as he realised that the ethos of care seems to be strong in our family. Certainly, when my mother later broke her hip and ended up sleeping in the lounge, my father slept on the floor beside her, and even young Leo, about eleven years old at the time, spent one night on the floor beside her. The health visitor commented that we seemed to be caring a lot and compared us to the sort of care she found in Asian families.

      My grandma’s sister died young in the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, which swept across Europe. Her name was Naomi, but I don’t know where she was buried.

      My earliest recollections of my grandfather were of him chasing me around the garden pretending to be a monster: cheeks blown out and arms outstretched, myself running around giggling. He was a quiet man, the youngest of five siblings and devoted to my grandmother, who was armchair-bound for the years that I remembered her, until the collapse of her spine (and then bed-bound). My grandfather had been a clerk in a shipping office at the Colonial and Eagle wharves and it was the occasional treat for me to go up to work with him, a trip out to London. His father had been a Thames river policeman who got the George Cross for saving someone drowning in the river, but my father would laugh and just say my great-grandfather had fallen in drunk.

      Despite this disparaging cynicism, Dad had framed the certificate and the medal which my great-grandfather had earned, and these are now on the wall of my study in my current abode. The family had come from Deptford, which was a rough working class area, until it had become gentrified not so long back, my family having moved out decades earlier.

      I am not sure which side of the family was John Crampton, my grandpa’s dad, or granddad, I suppose. He and his brother were agricultural labourers who lived in Headcorn and who married two young sisters from Staplehurst, country folk.

      My father, around the time of my birth,

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