Home is, I suppose, just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house.

A place to feel safe.  – V. S. Naipaul

I grew up in a house in the tropics. It was a normal sort of house: a house made of bricks, with electricity and running water, and a driveway where my parents’ two cars were parked at night. The roof of the house was completely flat, like the lid of a box. The windows swung outward on hinges, and had thin metal arms with holes, like the holes along a belt, and you fitted a hole into a knob in the window-frame to keep the window in place. Over the windows was what we called ‘burglar proofing’: thick wires welded into a grid, the square gaps just big enough for me to slip my hand through. Everyone had burglar proofing: burglar proofing was standard. I knew, from the front pages of the newspapers, that people in Trinidad were often murdered – ‘chopped’ with cutlasses, or strangled, or beaten. I felt that these murders were unlikely to happen in our neighbourhood – still, the threat existed. It was why we had dogs; why everyone had dogs; it was why my father locked the doors every night at about ten o’clock – the back door, the patio door, and another internal door that separated the bedrooms from the rest of the house. I remember one occasion when a murderer, a man whose violent crimes were discussed in hushed voices by grown-ups around the neighbourhood, broke out of jail and was rumoured, thrillingly, to be ‘on the loose’. That evening, my father, feigning nonchalance, locked up early. During the night, I imagined I heard footsteps creeping around the house; I lay in my bed gazing at the shadows, afraid that a breeze would lift the curtain and reveal the face of the convict, his eyes white in the moonlight. I saw the silhouette of a man’s scraggly hair, arms reaching through the bars. Trembling, I crept to my parents’ room and got into their bed. The same windows, with the same burglar proofing and the same thin curtains, ran along two walls overlooking the back garden. There, nestled between the warm bodies of my mother and father, I felt safe.

That house had many problems. Thin brown crusts of termite trails grew like vines over the wooden window-frames. The roof leaked. The square linoleum tiles of the floor were warped from moisture, cracked at the edges. Everything metallic fell victim to rust. Mildew appeared on photographs sealed into albums, on the lace hems of curtains, on medical journals stuffed in drawers. Years later, I still remember my mother bent over a sink or on her hands and knees on the floor with the tin of Vim next to her, locked in a permanent battle against these dark forces. It was a battle she never won. It was the tropics, she said, hopelessly. The humidity. And the fact that it was impossible to keep things out. In every room, lizards clung to ceilings, or hid in the folds of curtains. Occasionally, a frog wandered in, backed itself into the dark corner under the linen cupboard and had to be chased out with a broom. Bread had to be stored in the microwave or the fridge to keep it from the birds; a sugar-bowl left unsealed would lead to rivers of ants flowing over the kitchen counters. Rain came in through the roof, or through the permanently open windows, or through the angled wooden slats below the windows. Daily, detritus was deposited around the house, like something washed in by a tide: leaves, twigs, flowers, branches, feathers, seeds, dust. For the eighteen years that I lived there with my family, my mother tried in vain to defend the borders of her home.

I didn’t mind the invasions so much, partly because I wasn’t the one doing the cleaning, but mostly because I didn’t perceive the brick walls as my borders. It was easy to stay out of the house all day, and to stay out of the way of my mother’s incessant sweeping and mopping: there was plenty to keep me and my siblings occupied in the garden. For a time, the garden fence functioned as the borders of my world, and it was a very pleasant world for a child of five or six. I was very happy there. Food-wise, there were guavas, mangoes, cherries and almonds. There were my siblings to play with, and sometimes neighbours; when there were no other children around, there were the dogs, and when the dogs were sleeping, there was still lots to do – tablemats could be woven out of leaves stripped from the little palm trees that bordered the carport; the almond tree’s roots spread all over the back garden, surfacing intermittently like crocodiles’ heads; banana leaves made tent-roofs for our camps. My mother didn’t mind the destruction we wrought out there – everything grew more or less uncontrollably anyway. She had long given up on her roses, which had promptly been devoured by ants; instead, a labourer came once a week and worked his way around the garden, bare-chested and sweating, with a cutlass. We held the dogs while he reversed up the short driveway, and then he threw the bush – branches, flowers, leaves, grass; living, crawling things dropping out from beneath these armfuls of greenery – into the back of his truck.

As the years went on, my world expanded beyond our garden to what we called ‘the park’. The eight or ten houses in our immediate neighbourhood were arranged on quiet circular road, in the centre of which was a grassy patch of land, about an acre or so in size: a sort of cul-de-sac with a big round lawn in the middle. There was much running and sweating, the melting tarmac of the road sticking to the soles of our feet; there were roller skates that someone had been given for Christmas; there was a bicycle and many scraped knees. In this expanded territory, the variety of fruit increased to include plum, tamarind, five-finger, grapefruit and pomerac. I sat on patios and back steps, entertaining elderly ladies with my singing, and was given biscuits and juice. With these various visits and explorations to keep me busy, I stayed out my mother’s sight for most of the day; as I grew more confident, I strayed further afield, down as far as the WASA water station, or to the barracks where the mounted police kept their horses, or along the network of drains that ran behind the houses. But at the end of each day, at sunset, I always made sure to be near to our kitchen window so that when my mother called for me, I would be there to answer. Then, I often stayed outside for those final few minutes, sitting on the edge of the driveway watching the dusk fall as the dogs nosed around in the bushes. After the brilliant colours of sunset faded, there came a brief time – and it was always quiet during this time – when both light and dark existed at once, in changing proportions. The phenomenon seemed very mysterious to me as a child. Day after day I sat and watched it happen; sometimes, if I watched very closely, I thought I was able to pick the exact moment of equilibrium, the moment when light and dark were perfectly balanced. Usually, though, the moment slipped past me. Then, inside the house, lights would come on in one room, then another. Gradually, all around the neighbourhood, people switched on their TVs in readiness for the evening news. Under cover of darkness, frogs hopped out from the bush, cautiously approaching the dogs’ water bowl. From the kitchen came the sound of plates being laid on the table. When I finally went in to the brightly lit house, it was always with a faint sense of regret, a feeling that something had slipped through my grasp.

Within the walls of the house, the dramas of family life played out. My brother had his own room, us three girls had to share. We fought over the usual things children fight about: who would get a window-seat in the car on the way to school; who had broken someone’s hairbrush. When things were peaceful, people would be scattered around the house – someone stretched out on the sofa on the patio, reading; someone else by the bookshelf in the narrow corridor by the bedrooms, leafing through an encyclopaedia; someone else studying at their desk. The living room would have been the expected place for us to gather, but it had at one stage suffered from leaks; the television had been moved to my parents’ bedroom, a temporary measure which became permanent. My parents’ room, then, functioned as the centre of the household. People drifted in and out as they chose, but when we were all in the room together, the seating arrangement was always the same. My father had his armchair in the corner – a good spot, with breeze from the window on one side, and the bedside table with the telephone on the other, a sort of position of mission-control. My mother perched on the edge of the bed, usually trying to ignore the TV and read a book; my brother, who was the eldest, had the smaller armchair near the door. My sisters both claimed a spot on the bed, where they usually lay on their tummies, chins propped up by their hands; I, the youngest, would be cross-legged on the floor. The TV was usually on, but I don’t recall that we actually watched it that much. There was only one channel back then, and I feel like there must have been a double bill of Western movies every Saturday and Sunday – there’s no doubt that Trinidadian men were deeply impressed by Clint Eastwood.

In any case, most of our family memories, I would guess, are rooted in this room. This was the room in which, when there were hurricanes, my mother made us picnics to have on the bed while the dogs hid under the kitchen table and the rain pelted down outside. This was the room that we all gathered in that day in July, many years ago, when the Trinidad Muslimeen tried to stage a coup d’état. (We were one less by then: my brother had already left.) We watched the rebel leader on the television, in his white robes and black skullcap, two armed men standing behind him, declaring that the government had been overthrown. My brother rang from the US. ‘You-all made news headlines, man!’ he said. ‘Trinidad is on CNN!’ We sat in our places (my sister now had the small armchair, and I had moved up to the bed) while my father told him not to worry, that it would all blow over. Each night, we gathered around the telephone as he was given the latest updates: someone had pointed a rifle in my sister’s face while she was buying tomatoes; another sister was trying to persuade my parents to let her donate blood; my father had been taken by the police to attend to the President, who had been shot in the leg. In between these phone calls, I suppose we would have gathered in my parents’ room anyway, but the television gave us an excuse: the broadcasting station, captured by the Muslimeen, played ‘Batman’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’ on repeat over the six days of the crisis. It gave us something to laugh at – what a jokey place Trinidad was! Trinidadians couldn’t even pull off a coup properly! – to hide our private anxieties. It was in this room, too, that we sat together and talked, that night when my brother came back for Christmas vacation after his first semester at Princeton, listening to him tell what it was like – his American room-mate, the quadrangles, the professors, the unlimited food in the dining halls (mounds and mounds of food, he said, and anything uneaten just thrown in the bin; we shivered at the thought of that), the laundromats, the squirrels, the midnight pizza deliveries. He was in wonderful form, dressed in new American clothes, but still himself, and he had left but he had returned, and I remember that there was much laughing and good cheer, and that we stayed up the whole night and only went to bed as it was getting light again.

Once my brother had gone, my sisters and I redistributed ourselves, and, at last, each of us had our own room. We gathered in our parents’ room less and less, usually drawn by some discussion of seemingly vast importance – Which universities should we apply to? How would the money be found? The first sister left, for university in Pennsylvania; not long after that, the next sister set off for Canada. For one more year, only I remained. It was a lonely final year. I rattled around the house on my own, studying, worrying about my grades and my university applications. Eventually, my letter came, arrangements were made. I got out the suitcases, packed my clothes and books. I was eager to leave, to set off and see the world as my siblings had done before me, but I made myself stop and look around at the empty house, and pay my respects to the moment that was passing. I am glad now that I did that. Eventually, I returned to my sorting and packing; not long after, I left too, as my brother and sisters had done before me.

I never saw that house again. By the time I returned to Trinidad, my parents had moved to a different part of Port of Spain. The new house was lovely – airy and gracious, with a swimming pool with violet thunbergia flowers growing up a trellis along one wall. I heard from friends that our old house had been bought and promptly demolished. I drove past to see. It looked like they had driven a bulldozer over it. The almond tree was gone. The mango tree at the back, which had been such a good tree, was gone; the guava tree: gone. Even the three small palm trees in front, whose leaves I used to weave into placemats and coasters, were gone. The place had been entirely flattened. It is still flattened. I know because I still look at it sometimes on Google Earth, late at night when I should be asleep.

*

After I finished at university, having nowhere in particular to go, but having a newly acquired European passport, I bought a one-way ticket to Italy. I filled a knapsack with as much as I could, and rolled my duvet into a tight bundle and wrapped it in a black garbage bag and string. The rest of my ‘stuff’ was packed into cardboard boxes and transported to a friend’s parents’ attic in New Hampshire, where it stayed for many years. First in Italy, and then in other European countries, as I moved from place to place carrying these bags, people asked where I was from. I took out the little laminated map of the world that I carried for this purpose, and pointed at the little dot. Every time, they peered at it and then drew back, gazing at me. ‘Tree-nee-dad!’ they exclaimed. They had heard the name over the years, they told me, but they had never encountered someone from this place. ‘But how did you arrive here?’ they asked. Sometimes I said that I was Irish – which was partially true, since this was the passport I carried – or even American; it didn’t much matter to me. But usually people would persist with their questions (Irish? But your colouring is so dark!) and the whole story would come out: the Irish mother, the Trinidadian father, and the look of amazement and marvel, to have met someone, presumably, so unusual, or from so far away. Then, once the location of my island had been established, they couldn’t understand why I spoke English, and so I had to go all the way back to Christopher Columbus in 1498 and the indigenous people who had lived on the islands – often, around now, espressos and plates of biscuits would be slid across the table towards me – then the various efforts at colonisation by different European powers, African slavery, sugar plantations, abolition of slavery, and then indentured labourers from India. A stunned silence would descend. But where, they persisted, still dissatisfied even after all this, where is home? It was a question that didn’t interest me much at the time. I was happy to be free, to be let loose in the world. ‘I can travel all over Europe with this passport!’ I wanted to tell people. ‘Look at all the places I can go!’ But this seemed impossible to communicate, so instead I shrugged and ate hurriedly, crumbs falling all about, while they stared, wide-eyed.

Looking back on it, I believe I was really was quite happy, at that time, to simply wander the world with my backpack and garbage bag – yet I also believed that there would be an end to wandering. One day, I felt, I would settle down, have a home. Not in the sense of a country, I didn’t expect that, but at least a physical place, a place where I could come to rest, and finally put away my things, where I could draw some sort of boundary around me.

In the meanwhile, anyway, there was still my parents’ house, the new one with the pool and the violet thunbergia, which functioned very well as a place for my family to gather. Again, there was the hierarchy: my brother and his wife had the green bedroom with the en suite; my older sister got the pink room with built-in cupboards; the other sister got the ironing room; and I had the corner which we grandly referred to as ‘the library’, an alcove off the dining room, just big enough for a tiny sofa and bookshelves. The windows in this house were different to the old house: many of them had no glass panes at all, just wrought-iron burglar proofing fashioned into elegant curves, and hanging plants that gave a little privacy from the houses nearby. There was a large, high-ceilinged living area, and a patio that looked out at hills thickly covered with trees. It was an excellent house: we all got to know it well over the years. There were weddings, there were new children; there were gatherings on the patio in the evenings; there was much splashing and laughing in the pool. Our foreign visitors took photographs of ordinary things: birds, ants, trees, lizards, rain – and of us. We had never thought to photograph ourselves before. Some of these pictures were placed in silver frames and took up residence on bookshelves or side-tables, in that gracious house in Trinidad, and in other houses, in other countries, where my siblings and I were living. In this way, many years passed peacefully.

Gradually, though, we began hearing about things that had never before existed in Trinidad. Drugs: not the little street-corner marijuana sellers that there had always been, but white powder stuffed in plastic bags and hidden inside anything that was being transported out of the country. Large quantities of guns and ammunition were rumoured to be moving around. Whatever channel drugs used to take, I suppose, travelling from South America to North America, had been stamped out; a new channel had created itself, and this new route now passed through us. Now, when we visited Trinidad, we saw houses with twelve-foot-high fences and electric gates; people had private security systems, floodlit front yards. Our parents’ house, in comparison, had woefully weak defences; they refused to live in a fortress. One break-in followed another. Each time, we listened soberly to the details of the interactions, the list of objects that had been taken. We knew how break-ins often ended; we counted ourselves lucky. But people warned us that our ‘luck’ would not last, that our parents – elderly, alone – were a target. Reluctantly, they took to keeping the burglar-proofing doors locked all day; they rarely even sat out on their own patio or swam in the pool. Going downstairs to do a load of laundry involved unlocking and re-locking several doors, and walking around with a fistful of keys. Even so, we knew they were not safe. Once, when I visited with my own children, I stayed awake listening to the night-sounds outside, the incessant barking of dogs all around the neighbourhood, and further up the hill. It would be so easy for a criminal to come over the hill behind the house, as so many people had told me was common in this location, and to creep up to the wall and point a gun through the steel bars. All night, the dogs barked; all night, I watched those windows.

Reluctantly, the decision was made to leave. My father, probably, didn’t much want to go: he was in his eighties by then, and he had spent nearly his whole life in Trinidad. My mother was the opposite: she had always yearned to return to Ireland, where she had grown up. The arrangements dragged on endlessly – Hey, does anyone want that porcelain jug with the blue flowers? How about this mildewed book with half its pages missing?– until finally, the house was sold. Someone came to collect the car. The dog was taken in by a friend. For the last few days, my parents moved to a hotel, where they sat by a pool, my father reading the paper, my mother drawing in her sketchbook. A taxi drove them to the airport. I knew they would eat dinner at the food court, that they would queue for check-in, watch their suitcases taken away by the conveyor belt. My father would have been practical, he would have behaved as if this was any other flight, holding up his boarding pass at the last counter, and trying to walk briskly through the departure gate, although by that stage his back was weak, and he walked with difficulty. I kept track of them online from London, every few seconds refreshing the website. I pictured them buckled into their seats, the plane humming at the top of the runway, ready for take-off. My mother would have closed her eyes and counted the seconds, so long had she waited to leave. But my father, I knew, would have taken a last look at the place that had been his home. He would have told himself it wasn’t that he was being sentimental; it was that, sitting on an airplane, there was nowhere else to look but out the window. But I imagine that he would have looked at the grey-green hills, the goldening sky, the little open houses, the security guard fanning himself with his hat in the shade.

They came to London and cheerfully settled themselves into their new small flat. We rarely spoke about Trinidad or the past. Then, maybe six months after they arrived, my mother told us that their house, the one with the pool and the thunbergia, had burned down. ‘Burned down, or been burned down,’ she said: the circumstances were unclear. We tried to make it into a joke: one house bulldozed flat, the next one burned down! The message is loud and clear: get out of here! Goodbye and don’t come back! We laughed, and I imagine we each vowed, privately, not to speak of it again. What was there to speak of? A house is just a physical object, we may have said to ourselves, a physical object like a table or a telephone or a car. It means nothing. Houses mean nothing. And yet I often still think of that house, and the one before it. I remember the feeling of smooth wooden floors underfoot. I remember sitting on the patio in the evenings, and watching the lights switch on in the houses on the hill. I remember sitting on the back step with the dog and looking up at the other hill behind the house, and birds pecking at the yellow flesh of a fruit. That the physical reality of the world has changed, such that these places I remember so vividly no longer actually exist, is infinitely puzzling to me. It is something to contemplate in private, I think, and to speak of as little as possible. After all, I am not the only one to whom this has happened; there are so many of us, around the world, who share a similar grief. Time passes, things are lost. All we can do is be grateful for what we had.

*

I did settle down: I got married, had children, bought a house. A flat, actually – a nice flat on the top floor of a Victorian building in London, with old oak beams with strange markings made by people who lived here long ago. It is a good flat. We are lucky. The windows are modern, double-glazed; they have brass hinges that allow them to open only a few inches, although it hardly matters, I suppose, since they are nearly always closed. I still haven’t gotten used to it. I haven’t gotten used to the seasons either, or to the behaviour of the sun. Some times of year, all we can see of the sunset through our kitchen window is a sullen smear of red; other times, the low rays shine like laser beams so that we scuttle away to the living room, to eat with our plates balanced on our knees. Some mornings, I pull chairs up to a different window, and I hold my children steady as they gaze at the sunrise; other days, the sky is grey from morning until evening, so that it is impossible to distinguish any one hour from another until darkness falls completely. In the tropics, it is always possible to know what time it is by observing the particular quality of the light; here, in England, it almost seems as if there is no pattern to it, as if the sky may be dark or bright at any time at all. I know what causes these changes, of course, and yet the whole thing makes me feel deeply suspicious: any sudden twist might be possible in a place like this. I think of all the hours I spent sitting on the edge of our driveway in Trinidad watching the changing colours of the sky as the afternoon came to an end, watching those brilliant final moments when the light was high and molten white, before the colours began to decompose to pink, red, purple, green. Every day it was the same, day after day, year after year. The spectacle, I knew, was the manifestation of some tremendous power; the same force that brought the ending of one day would bring the beginning of a new one. Even as a child of seven or eight, it gave me a great sense of peace.

But I try not to dwell on these things. In any case, my life now is lived mostly indoors, within these walls or the walls of other buildings, and the passing of time is marked only by what needs to be done: time to wake the children up, time to give them breakfast, time to wash up. Time to take them to the park, time to give them lunch, time to wash up. Cook, eat, wash up. It is as draining as it sounds, and yet we do it, and so many other people do it, because – what other way is there? Children need to be fed.

But I would like to tell you about a particular moment of some months ago. I was at my kitchen sink, as usual, getting ready to make a meal. It had been a warm day; a day, unusually for England, of abundant sunshine. I had been with my children to the park; they had come home hot and sweaty, with dirt on their hands, and leaves and sticks in their hair. I was scrubbing at a saucepan in the sink when I sensed a shift, as if a new presence had entered the room, and I looked up and noticed the light. And it just so happened, for the only time in all my years of living here, that there was a moment of alignment, of congruence: the light in London was the same as the light I knew from Trinidad, and for those brief moments, I felt I had my bearings again. It was the light of that particular time in the tropics – six, quarter to six in the early evening – the time when children begin to draw a little closer to home, when mothers in kitchens are stirring pots, when parrots fly squawking past the clouds, headed to their nests in the mountains. There was the familiar sense of yielding, of the day in its final moments, on the brink of dissolving. One day nearly over, but tomorrow another day would come. In London, the oak beams glowed. Beneath the beam, one of my children sat on the floor, playing with a toy. Another child was stretched out on a sofa somewhere else reading a book. I stood by the sink, the soapsuds dripping from my hands, and looked around at the brilliant light that silently filled the room.