There are places I remember

Four addresses and what I recall about them

We put our house on the market last week (!!! - more on this soon but, in short, although it feels like a massive, nerve-wracking wrench - especially as our house has literally never looked cleaner or tidier in preparation for viewings - my gut feeling is it’s the right thing) and it got me thinking about houses - and, more specifically, the houses I’ve lived in.

I added them all up. Thirteen addresses in total, plus two different houses in Ireland where I never properly lived, but where I spent lots of time as a child through to my late 20s. I don’t know if that’s high or low, numbers-wise.

Once I’d written them down, I felt some kind of need to recall and record something about each one. So that’s what this week’s piece is - some snippets and recollections of the first few places I lived.

In part, it’s inspired by an essay by Patrick Freyne called Real Estate, which appeared in the Summer 23 issue of The Dublin Review. If you’re short of time, you can read an extract here; however, I’d recommend listening to the whole thing here. It’s outrageously good writing.

I might continue this next week, I might not. I can’t decide if the topic is boring or fascinating - feel free to let me know in the comments, lol.

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12 Essex Drive, Washington, Tyne and Wear. I don’t really have any memories of the house I was born in. Well, not literally born in, but brought home to. A three-bedroomed 1960s semi on Garden Estate, Washington, Tyne and Wear. Reddish brown brickwork and a sloping drive down to the garage.

The Doddses live a couple of doors down; the Durkins around the corner; the Morrells across the road. Our joined-on neighbours are Billy and Rose and, strangely, I remember their house better than ours: busy carpets; the telephone table in the hallway; an opulent walnut drinks cabinet in the shape of a globe.

Family folklore fills in the gaps. The summer she turns seven, my older sister Clare is knocked over by a car and the broken bone punctures the skin. I’m only a baby when it happens, but the incident becomes vivid to me in its retelling. She spends weeks in hospital, eventually coming home in a thigh-high cast. I am three years old when we move.

12 Essex Drive as it is today

22 Glenburn Close, Washington, Tyne and Wear. A four-bed, detached house in a different, newer, part of Washington. My proper childhood home; the house I left to go to university. Sand-coloured bricks, a tidy lawn, a front door with a brass lion knocker: signs of going up in the world. One summer, we buy self-adhesive window strips to create lead diamonds on the front windows - it’s the 1990s; antique effects are all the rage.

Inside, there’s a honey-coloured kitchen with fussy spindles and fake wood grain and a long, stuttering tube light. A glass wall cupboard containing, in no particular order, a bone china teaset; two Lladró figurines; a Madonna-shaped bottle of holy water with a blue crown-shaped lid; a Chicago Bulls mug; the TV instruction manual. Our family always congregates in the kitchen to talk. It’s only when my husband, an outsider, comments on it that I realise it’s maybe a bit strange: “You never sit down. You always talk standing up in the kitchen.” I’d never noticed.

My friend Sarah lives three doors down, and we play elaborate, long-running games with our Barbies and Flower Fairies. Sarah is generally in charge of the games because she’s two years older than me, and also because she has more stuff: more Barbies; more Flower Fairies; a Right Said Fred CD; a karaoke machine; a purple resin keyring from Corfu with a pale starfish trapped inside. On light summer evenings, after the Neighbours closing credits at six o’clock, we meet and play with our dolls, or we might rollerblade up and down the path. We aren’t allowed to cross the road (Clare’s accident looms large), or go into the underpass at the end of the street (broken glass; offensive graffiti; dog shit).

Periodically, my parents think about relocating. On one occasion, a For Sale sign is actually erected on the front lawn. Dad has been made redundant; they think there’ll be more work opportunities back in London. On a reconnaissance trip, Mam visits a school in Camden Town. As the headmistress speaks, a grey cat appears on the back of her chair, staring at Mam with unblinking eyes. Its tail caresses the headmistress’s throat. We don’t end up moving. My parents stay in Glenburn Close for 20 years.

Me and James in the back garden at 22 Glenburn Close 1989-ish. Joyce-Next-Door is nebbing over the fence behind us.

St Mary’s College, Durham University. As an English undergraduate, I live in halls at St Mary’s - a neoclassical hall built in the 1950s, handsome in an understated kind of way - for a year. I’m devastated to have missed out on a place at Cambridge, and Durham feels like a poor runner-up. To manage my feelings, I tell myself I’m barely going away at all, - only eight miles down the A1 in fact - but, in reality, Durham feels like another planet.

My room is on the top floor, with sloping ceilings and an attic feel. The walls are yellow. A dormer window looks out over the college’s neat back lawn - no fairytale Cambridge turrets here. On the day I move in, my sister’s boyfriend says the corridor “smells like someone’s been sick after drinking white wine.” Lots of the other girls have strange half-names like Flo and Flick and Tori and they’re oh-so slightly built, bones like birds. There’s an unofficial female student uniform at Durham which includes pink pashminas, pearls and excessively backcombed hair.

My roommate is a quiet girl from the South West who’s spent her gap year abroad working as a Bible translator. Her shelf is stacked with Ghanaian trinkets and Enid Blyton books. She has a t-shirt which she says makes boys “fall in love” with her. We’re an odd match in many ways, but we get on well enough. In our second term, we choose to stick together for the rest of the year in our yellow attic room.

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44 St Giles Close, Durham. In my final year at uni, I move into a modern townhouse, the kind of place an estate agent would describe as “sympathetic to its surrounding area”. There are four of us upstairs and the landlord has turned the dining room into another bedroom. The walls are thin. One of my housemates is the Most Popular Lesbian On Campus and I write most of my dissertation to a soundtrack of her having empowered (and noisy) sex.

We are stereotypical students in that the kitchen is filthy and our neighbours hate us. One afternoon while Katy blasts Britney Spears’ Toxic on repeat, the lady next door - a woman in her late 60s - bangs on the front door to complain. As Katy flies down the stairs to answer it, she accidentally sets off a rape alarm hung up on a key rack. “What is that NOISE?” the neighbour shrieks. “It’s a rape alarm,” says Katy. “I’M GOING TO RAPE SOMEONE IN A MINUTE!” she yells. We’ve pushed her over the edge.

Watching Neighbours twice a day. Bottles of Blue Nun and Black Tower. Lots of Smiths and early Killers (and Britney, obviously). The day we move out is the only day in our entire tenancy that we clean the house. Every surface is tacky or thick with limescale and the stair carpet is coated in grey fluff. My mother is horrified. “I’ll be amazed if you get your deposit back,” she tells us.

Thanks for indulging me x

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I’m Laura McDonagh and I’m a second-generation Irish writer from the north-east of England.

My work explores memory, grief, social class, how place and identity intersect, being Irish in Britain, the 90s (💖) and more.

Subscribe to my Substack ‘Guess what? Me’ and I will love you forever IDEMT.xxx