“I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,” wrote Henry David Thoreau of his famous decision to live in a shed, in the woods, a few miles outside the town of Concord, Massachusetts. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” he went on; “I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”
Thoreau’s neighbours thought him selfish – but we’re still reading about Thoreau. Catrina Davies doesn’t presume she’ll still be read in a century and a half, but with Homesick, her memoir of life in a Cornish shed, she’s done something more memorable than the older people and holidaymakers who condemn her choices. There are other obvious differences: “Thoreau lived in a shed to make a statement,” she says, “while I was doing it because I seemed to have run out of other options.”
Davies’s options ran out because of the savagery of the UK’s current housing crisis. A box room in an overcrowded Bristol house cost her £400 a month – a sum almost impossible to raise given her irregular income teaching cello and writing music. She’d struggled through her teens and 20s with drug use and eating disorders, but in her 30s was trying to live a different sort of life – one more nourishing for herself and the planet. Davies knew she could have taken a steady, boring, poorly paid job, but doing so would have obliged her to give up many aspects of life that for her, made it worth living. “The opposite of slavery is freedom, not idleness,” she writes: “Freedom to work, and work hard, on things that matter to me. Freedom to be paid badly to do things well. Freedom to refuse to do bad things just because they pay well.” There’s something admirable in her refusal to accept the realities of the modern workplace, and willingness to live with the consequences.
When the indignities of sharing one kitchen and one bathroom with four unrelated adults and a child became overwhelming, Davies packed her van and moved into an old shed near Land’s End – a shed her father once used as his architect’s office before his business went under on Black Wednesday in 1992. The Davies family home was repossessed, her parents’ separation followed; she notes bleakly that with this crisis “my childhood ended”.
In the last 20 years, average house prices have grown about seven times faster than the average income of young people – lack of home ownership is now a fact of life for the young: “If food prices had risen as fast as house prices in the years since I came of age, a chicken would cost £51.” Cornwall’s depressed and seasonal economy offers an average full-time income of just £18,000 a year – about a quarter of the income you’d need to get a mortgage on an average house. In places the book reads as a lament for the economy of Cornwall, which voted for Brexit because something, anything, had to change.
Davies’ book lists the economic absurdities that seem to benefit only retirees and the rich: of landowners and their offshore advisers who pay minimal tax and minimum wage; of her sister’s family of five who, despite a reliable income, can only afford their own home by renting it out for three months each summer and moving into a tent; of the Tory policy of help to buy that used public funds to prop up the ailing housing market (much of which was nevertheless siphoned off into executive bonuses). She reminds us that Thatcher insisted wealth would trickle down: “We know now that markets do not regulate themselves, and it’s not wealth that trickles down, it’s greed.” The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the EU: between 2000 and 2015 homelessness rose by 40%. It’s estimated that one in every 200 people in Britain is homeless.
Davies writes wonderfully on the subject of work, observing that Thoreau “spent whole days doing literally nothing at all, and was very pleased with himself afterwards”. Despite this, she works hard – as a gardener, a builder’s labourer, a waitress, though her income is barely enough to keep her in her shed. One of Davies’s gardening clients buys shoes for her, and the winter coat she couldn’t afford. “The jobs we do and the amount of money we get paid to do them seems to have far more to do with our expectations, the foundations laid in childhood, than it does with our skills and talents,” she writes. “Boris Johnson gets paid a fortune for writing his column in the Daily Telegraph, even though there is plenty of hard evidence” that he “is not very good at journalism”.
Homesick is not a work of social science, neither is it a polemic; it’s a captivating memoir of personal struggle and recovery. It touches lightly on Thoreau’s Walden but goes its own way, taking as its canvas this precarious moment in our national story, when young people everywhere are seeing ladders pulled up, denied the securities and opportunities that their parents or even Thoreau took for granted. “I was taught that if I worked hard and lived an honest and generous life then I would be rewarded,” Davies writes. “This was misguided. I should have been taught to grab hold of that ladder and stamp on the hands of the people below me.”
• Gavin Francis’s Shapeshifters is published by Wellcome. Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed by Catrina Davies is published by Quercus on 11 July (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
