What does home mean?

Is it 'anywhere I leave my hat', or is it about your roots?

Sometimes I envy people who live in small towns, have done their travel, maybe gone away to college, had a career, and then go back to their roots. Especially if today’s hybrid model of working allows them to continue to work from anywhere. I love hearing about people who still live with and love their childhood sweethearts in the place where they were born and bred, where everyone knows their name and their business. Is home for you, a fixed place that will never change, or is it the place where you currently reside?

I’m reminded of a couple of years when I lived in Nelson, a beautiful town at the top of the South Island of New Zealand. I had some wonderful times there and played a very small part in their music scene.

This is one of the houses I flatted in. My room was upstairs on the right. You can’t see it well but there was a sleeping porch in the corner, and the trees weren’t obscuring the road. It was a great spot to play guitar and watch foot traffic passing. The house was on the property of the famous Rutherford Hotel, where all the top acts that made it to Nelson played. I also spent a lot of time in the public bar playing pool. It was like an extension of our house. Over the last 20 years or so it has housed Radio Fifeshire and now belongs to one of New Zealand’s two duopoly media companies, MediaWorks. More on those days in future substacks. Nelson will provide many stories.

I experienced a bit of that small-town familiarity there. Many more people knew me, than I knew them, and long before social media was a thought, many seemed to know what I was going to do before I did. I liked that more than I disliked it. I lived in Nelson twice and would be very happy to join the large population of retirees who call it home. These days, for me, home is where my children and grandchildren live.

I don’t know offhand how many places I have lived in. But it will be fun to try and work it out.

Given this is my autobiography, I am going to return and explore what life was like in those places and times. It won’t be chronological, because that’s not how my memory works. I will of course consider the music that belonged to those periods of my life.

I started by having a look at my Top #500 playlist that goes with this substack, and there were remarkably few songs that specifically reference home in the title.

There were:

• Darling Be Home Soon, by the loving Spoonful

• Bring it on Home to Me, by Sam Cooke

• Take the Long Way Home, by Supertramp

• Sweet Home Alabama, By Lynyrd Skynyrd

• Homeward Bound, by Simon & Garfunkel

• She’s Leaving Home, by the Beatles

• Our House, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

• Temporary Home, by Carrie Underwood

• The House That Built Me, by Miranda Lambert - One of my favourites which will merit a post on its own.

• Homeless, Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo - Love this one

• Sweet Home Chicago, by Robert Johnson is in my post about meeting his granddaughter.

I’ve created a Spotify Playlist for this if you’d like a listen.

I have to start in the attic where I was born (at my grandparents’ home in Bakkum, North Holland). I spent my first 2 and a half years living there and would return again to live with my grandparents when I was 11, although not in the attic. The next time it would be in the room that was my father’s bedroom before we became our own family and needed the space of the attic.

To get to the attic, you had to pull down hinged wooden steps in the garage where the bikes and mopeds were kept.

It was basically one room, the size of a master bedroom, with a tiny little room partitioned off, which was my bedroom. This is it below, with my father looking on.

You can see how narrow my room was. On the flip side, we had a huge backyard with loads of pets, which went right up to the edge of the sand dunes, that protect Holland from the North Sea. The property was at least an acre in size. It was a fun place for adventures, in the summer sun, in the snow, and on the frozen pond in winter. My grandparents, my father’s 2 sisters, and 3 brothers lived in a 3 story house on the property, which had 2 kitchens, a lounge, a dining room, and a sunroom, so we weren’t stuck in the attic all the time.

Life was good there, and I don’t fully know why we left to immigrate to New Zealand. I had some theories, such as perhaps it was to distance ourselves from my mother’s first husband. There were times I wondered, perhaps even hoped, that my father actually wasn’t my birth father. The sequence of events felt odd to me. My parents had a registry wedding and at the time my mother was 3 months pregnant. They both had good jobs, although for some reason they had no money.

Two and a half years after I was born, they still had no money and we were off to a country as far away from the Netherlands as you could get, with no job. Why would you do that? With my mother still being friends with her ex-husband, who also remained a good friend of her mother, was it fear of losing her?

Eventually, with the help of DNA testing, and after comparing some pictures of my father in his early teens, that I hadn’t seen before, I accepted that he was my biological father.

Perhaps he wanted to get as far away as possible from Germany. WWII gave my father nightmares for much of his life. Some of his wartime memories are recorded in his Substack biography,

We were the only family members on my father’s side, to leave the Netherlands. All my uncles, aunts, and cousins still live there and have made good lives for themselves.

Did we get a better life? I love New Zealand, and having traveled the world many times, I believe it is one of the best and safest places in the world to raise a family. But is life better because we came here? I don’t think so. Just different.

That house in Bakkum was my first home, and I would live there again for a couple of years from the ages of 11 to 13 with my grandparents, uncles, and aunts who were still at home. I have visited and stayed in that house many times on trips to the Netherlands, as an uncle and aunt now own and live in the original family house.

Whenever I go back to Holland, which I have been fortunate to do on many occasions, I also feel like I am coming home. The roots remain strong. I would have loved to have lived and worked there for a time.

The reason I didn’t which I deeply regret, is that my parents convinced me to naturalise as a New Zealand citizen when I turned 21 so that I would not have to do military service. I understand from their perspective, but I hadn’t done my research. The Dutch army is one of the most liberal in the world, and most of its work is peace-keeping and supporting communities that need help. Two of my uncles served (one because my father didn’t, as the eldest male of every family used to have to do military duty). Both of them loved it, and I suspect I would have too.

At that point, I had to renounce my Dutch citizenship. Later dual citizenship became an option, but I missed the time frame, sadly. I am proud to be a Kiwi but still consider myself Dutch. I have a tattoo on my leg of a Kiwi (the flightless bird) carrying a tulip in its beak.

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