The word “rent” has two very different meanings. The first, from the Old French rente or rendre, means to pay or receive regular payments in exchange for the use of land or property. The second, from the Old English “rendan”, means pulled asunder or in pieces: one’s face, hair or clothes torn in grief or rage.
Some readers will be renting happily, with good jobs, kind landlords and a sense of freedom and security. But for others – a growing number – the first meaning leads inexorably to the second. Renting can be a source of deep anxiety, the painful manifestation of an increasingly harsh capitalism, where greed is applauded and holders of land and property fatten themselves on the precarious labour of the disenfranchised.
Before I made myself a home in a shed, I was trapped in insecure renting and low-paid work. I felt alienated by books that failed to confront the preoccupying, draining effort of trying to stay housed.
One of the bleakest, most brilliant novels to explore how hand-to-mouth survival traps us in a cycle of despair, crushing all creativity, is Hunger by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. Published in 1890, the novel’s greatness lies in its compassion for its homeless and starving protagonist. He keeps trying to write even when he has to do it on a park bench, his head “buzzing” with hunger, after losing his job and being evicted from his apartment. He’s a human, not a fungible commodity, and retaining his humanity is almost more important to him than staying alive.
John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear is another shot of empathy for the dispossessed, especially the two essays Ten Dispatches about Endurance in Face of Walls and Ten Dispatches About Place. Poetic as ever, Berger examines what he calls “the poverty of the new capitalism”, showing how it rips up people’s connections with their homelands, forcing them into what he calls “The Nowhere”.
Danny Dorling’s book All That Is Solid is a must read for anyone wanting to try to grasp the structural inequalities that have caused the soaring rents and subsequent loss of freedom experienced by so many people of my generation. Its starting point is the belief that everyone has the right to be housed, and it meticulously deconstructs the corrupt and choking policies that have stripped away tenants’ rights, eroded social housing, and made home ownership a distant dream for so many to enrich a few.
My fellow Cornish author Lucy Wood’s collection of short stories, The Sing of the Shore, is one of the few books that tackles the problems of second-home ownership head-on. “Home Scar” follows a group of bored teenagers who decide to break into an empty holiday house, contrasting it with the rented cottages the children live in. “By-the-Wind Sailors” follows the Tulley family from caravan to winter-let to bed-and-breakfast and back to caravan, showing, like Hamsun did in Hunger, how such a precarious existence erodes self-esteem and becomes all-consuming.
For people who currently have no hope of getting on the property ladder, the graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire is the perfect antidote to the illusion of eventual ownership. Telling the story of the corner of a room and the events that have occurred there over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, it’s beautiful, funny, profound and ultimately reassuring.
• Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed by Catrina Davies is published by Riverrun (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
