About half a mile from Heathrow airport, in the thick of an urban wasteland of warehousing and carriageways and industrial units, there is, improbably, a crop field. There are field mice and foxes, thriving in the turned earth. Molehills. A two-dozen flock of goldfinches darting about the seedheads of thistles at the field edge. In the single large tree, a nest for a pair of sparrowhawks. For several years, I have stared out over this peculiar field, increasingly aware that what I am in fact looking for, beyond the fauna and Flora tubs, is home.
Home, for me, is a field in Yorkshire. Enclosed by its tumbled drystone walls, I would build fires, or sledge, or sit alone watching for movements in the grass. From the top of the field I scanned the horizon for distant towns, forests, and the ghostly green land that as a child I believed was a faraway continent; then, later, Riddlesden Golf Club. That field was the base from which I understood and felt the world, beneath my arse and through my fingertips. When I started to write, it was from there that I reached outwards.
Writing a fictional narrative is charged with the idea of home. You build the imagined physical structures of a house, a community, a landscape – and, more than that, you imagine your way inside what belonging means to a character. There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, which means something like a longing of the soul to come home to the place where your spirit lives. I’m pretty sure there is no Yorkshire term that expresses the same idea – it’s a little too lyrical for Yorkshire –but it is a word that I understand innately, and a yearning that is present in most of the characters I have ever created: home sometimes a tangible place, sometimes a psychological one.
It is this feeling, hiraeth, that I think I am experiencing when I gawp out at that Heathrow field. A borrowed impression of home. Yorkshire – as both an emotional pull and also, more and more, a physical one. My wife is also from a field in Yorkshire. (Different field, way beyond Riddlesden Golf Club.) We talk often about moving back. Doubts, however, quickly play on me at the prospect of it. The thought of being an imposter, an “off-comed”, wanting to implant myself in a community that never felt the need to move away.
Our children, mind you, seem up for it. In part because they were recently scared shitless by a visit to Buckingham Palace. They started climbing the railings and one of the Guardsmen – that most London of symbols – broke out of his living statue to scream at them and point his bayonet at their terrified skulls. If I was looking for a sign that it is time to go home, there it is.
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