During lockdown, who do you pine for?

In the latest of his reflections on places and pathways, Will Gore yearns for the family home – not just his parents, but the beautiful gardens and vegetable patches, the cherry tree

Will gore at 16, surrounded by the beautiful garden (Will Gore)

Is it people or places you miss most? In this interminable coronavirus lockdown – the wisdom and necessity of which do not dilute the frustration it causes – we have become limited versions of ourselves; confined to barracks, yet not at home to guests. But given a choice, where would you go and who would you see if you were permitted a single day of normality?

We are, it is remarked ad nauseam, deeply social animals. But to be truthful, there are very few people I feel emotionally desperate to see. Most of my good friends are of longstanding – university mates; school pals. We see each other rarely as it is, so a get together on Zoom is better than we usually manage.

It is only the closest of relatives from whom this enforced absence feels truly painful. Like many people, being unable to see my parents is the most particular sadness; made worse by the disrupted bond between them and their grandchildren. In their case, Zoom or Skype doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

This week, my mother rang to say that a duck had made a nest close to the house, and had laid an egg. My son was thrilled, then dismayed to think that we could not go and see it hatch

But it isn’t only as individuals that I miss my mother and father: it is as custodians of the family home; as the keepers of the beautiful gardens and vegetable patches; and guardians of the cherry tree whose blossom I have seen every year since we moved to that house when I was eight. They are inextricably linked to a little corner of the earth.

For a period in my early twenties, returning “home” felt oddly uncomfortable. I had moved on, first to university, then to London, with all that entailed – new friends in shared flats; fresh preoccupations and fancy ideas. Yet back in the village I had grown up in, nothing seemed to have changed. My parents’ house no longer felt like my home at all: I would look forward to visiting, then end up feeling desperate to get back to my “real” life in the capital.

I’m not exactly sure when things shifted. It preceded children by a distance, though their love of the place – and of the space – has given my love of it a new dimension again. Perhaps I came to recognise that for all its glories, London is – for many people – a transient stopover; beguiling and ultimately unsatisfying. I realised that, in the end, I probably wanted a life that was more like my parents’ than my own.

Then, the home I had spent my childhood in seemed less like something I had consigned to the past than an aspiration for the future – and a joy to be shared, from time to time, in the present. It was, after all, the place I had been made, inhabited by the people who had made me. And if I had, for a while, felt out of sync there, what must my parents have made of me? Yet their loving embrace never wavered.

When our children arrived, their own bond with their grandparents was created largely in that same place. It is where their relationship has, like the cherry tree, blossomed. They feel as happy there as they do at home, maybe more so. They have their own rooms; they have a trampoline; they have a den under a fir tree. And the garden is big enough, and flat enough, to play in without fear of crashing into fences or falling down steps. They spend school holidays there regularly, and we visit often at weekends. At least, we did.

This week, my mother rang to say that a duck had made a nest close to the house, and had laid an egg. My son was thrilled, then dismayed to think that we could not go and see it hatch.

Life all around is moving on, as it must. But for us, it is paused, so much out of reach. Still, that doesn’t mean that the people and places we love lose their meaning. And when we can, at last, go back, perhaps bonds will be stronger than ever.