I don’t speak or read any Japanese but I recently came across this Japanese term: mono no aware. There is no direct translation into English, but as far as I can understand, it means a sadness or sensitivity at the impermanent, transient nature of things or life.
As part of the publicity for the UK release of my novel Bitter Orange, I was asked to write a piece for The Guardian to go in their ‘Made in’ section. This short article is written each week by a different author about the place that influenced them the most when growing up.
Mine was about the freedom I had as a child to roam the countryside around Sydenham – the small Oxfordshire village where I was born and spent the first ten years of my life. My father renovated a cottage in that village, and then built a house next door which we moved into. For six months while the build was going on we lived in a static caravan onsite and I played amongst the house’s foundations and helped my dad stack bricks. We sold the house in 1977 when my parents divorced.
The article was published in The Guardian on 4th August and you can read it here.
A day or so after it was published online I looked at the comments under the article. The first one said, ‘Claire, we live in the house your family built. You’re welcome to come and visit any time’. And then I got a message on Twitter from a man called Mark, saying the same thing. Via a series of direct messages on Twitter we established that Mark’s parents had bought the house from my family, and many years later he bought it from his mother.
A couple of weeks ago me, my husband, and my eighty-year-old father went back to visit the house for the first time in forty-one years.
I was excited to be visiting, but also worried about feelings that I couldn’t quite pin down: a kind of sadness at all the time that had passed since we lived there, a nostalgia for my childhood, but also happiness to be able to go back. All those feelings were still there when we arrived, but Mark, his wife, Emily, his mother (who is Japanese*), and his children made us very welcome. We were shown around the house, looking at what was different (a much improved kitchen and family room), and what was the same (the open-tread stairs, the wrought-iron fire screens and door handles, and the bedrooms). Mark’s neighbour also invited us into the cottage next door, and I was shocked at how tiny the rooms were when I remembered them as being huge. My dad, also clearly moved, told us about the minor injuries he sustained while digging damp-proof courses, and an indoor bathroom.
But the nicest part of the visit for me was standing with Mark in his son’s bedroom, which had been Mark’s, and before that had been mine. We looked out through the high window at the back garden and I had a lovely moment of mono no aware at the thought that all three of us had been (or were) children in that room, looking out the window at the garden, and that at some point in the future another child, possibly still unborn, would gaze out through that window too.
*Apologies to Mark’s mother if my translation of mono no aware isn’t exactly correct.
What a wonderful experience to be able to go back and visit your childhood home. How serendipitous you were contacted and invited to do so.
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Oh! And lovely article for The Guardian, too 🙂
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Thanks Dale. It was such a wonderful experience to be able to go back.
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Great article but are you the baby on the building site? What a lack of health and safety – can you imagine that nowadays!
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I know! My uncle Nokey managed the building of the house, and this is him with my cousin, katie, I think. I hate to imagine him climbing that ladder carrying her!
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Ha! I bet she would too 😉
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What a wonder-full experience. 🙂
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It was!
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It’s so interesting to see the house when it was first built compared to how it looks now that it’s bedded in. And how great to be invited back to go back inside and have a look around. I’ve never been inside my first two childhood homes but I did go back to both villages and the same shift in dimensions that you mention seemed to have happened there. Streets were narrower and more steep than I remember them being!
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It is an odd feeling going back. Thanks for reading!
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SO moving, Claire. And now I have a phrase for what I so often feel! Loved this.
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Thanks so much, Dawn.
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A lovely piece about your childhood home, Claire. the article in The Guardian was interesting also. I often feel nostalgia for the house where I was born and the neighborhood I played in for my first nine years. I’ve forgotten many things but still remember the address for that house. I still keep in contact with two of my friends from the old neighborhood. My husband and I took our children back there once and visited with an elderly neighbor. Congratulations on your new book Claire. All the best. 🙂 — Suzanne
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I enjoyed reading about your childhood experiences, we only have one and should cherish it.
I have finished reading “Bitter Orange”, which I did enjoy and it left me in a quandary and reflective mood. I felt speechless with the injustice at the end and how Frances was so contended, regardless.
I also placed a review on Amazon.
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Glad the ending made you think! And thank you so much for the review – really appreciated.
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