Home not-so-sweet home

The young often yearn for independence, but leaving home is not always the adventure you imagine, says Laurie Taylor in his weekly column.

I've always been singularly unmoved by songs which extol the virtues of home. It doesn't matter to me whether the singer is longing for the green, green grass of home, or a home on the range, or a home on the hill. That's quite irrelevant.

What I can't stand is the assumption that "home" is where we'd all like to be, that "home" is "where the heart is" - that "east-west, home's best".

I can trace my enduring dislike of home back to adolescence, to the time when my mother used to complain that I was treating the home as a hotel.

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Instead of inducing me to be more polite and considerate in the house, more respectful of my younger sisters, less abrupt in the way I gulped down my meals, this repetitive observation only made me wish that I was indeed in a hotel rather than a home.

Imagine living in a place where your hot meals and clean clothes were delivered to you without an accompanying homily on your lack of gratitude. Imagine living in a place which you could leave and return to at any time you wished. A place where beds made themselves, a place totally free from younger sisters. I might have been less discontented if I hadn't been big friends at the time with Pete Roberts, who had three brothers in the merchant navy and an elder sister called Dorothy who was in my mother's phrase, "running wild".

Worzel Gummidge

Pete never stopped talking about how his brothers had walked out of the family house as soon as they were old enough "to get a ship", and how they now spent their time sailing backwards and forwards between the most exciting places in the world.

But it was still a surprise when Pete made his momentous suggestion. It was, I remember, a warm evening in early June and we'd both abandoned our A-level revision to race our bikes through Sniggery Woods.

What we'd overlooked was the impossibility of setting up a tent on a beach, no sooner was the canvas erected than the pegs leaped out of the soft sand as though fired from a rifle.

As we both leaned breathless against the no-cycling sign on the edge of the pathway, Pete turned to me and declared that he could stand home no longer. He couldn't stand the cushions and the curtains. He hated the carpets and the rugs and the mats. Detested the cupboards and the drawers and the shelves.

And because of his sister Dorothy, he now particularly loathed the comfortable beds. Dorothy, it seems, had read him a wonderful poem about being as free as a gypsy, in which a noble lady had run away from a palace. Pete still remembered the words with which the lady had rejected the pleas to return home:

"What care I for your goose-feather bed
With the sheet turned down so bravely. O!
For tonight I shall sleep in a cold open field
Along with the raggle taggle gypsies, O!"

Sodden plimsolls

"So," said Pete. "Why don't we do it? What are we waiting for?" "Do what?" I said. "Leave home," said Pete. "Leave home? Go to a hotel?" I said naming the only alternative to home I'd so far encountered.

"No, no," said Pete. "I've got it all fixed, I have a tent. We'll take it down to Formby beach. Set it up there, sleep there every night, cook meals on a gas thing. Jump up in the morning and swim in the sea before we cycle to school."

We lasted one whole week. What we'd overlooked was the impossibility of setting up a tent on a beach, no sooner was the canvas erected than the pegs leaped out of the soft sand as though fired from a rifle. We had no alternative but to spend the night in our sleeping bags, with the tent draped across our bodies like a counterpane.

Not a good left-home look

And then something went wrong with the pressure in our cooking device so we had to eat cold baked beans and cold cream of tomato soup. And then the two girls who had promised to come and see us when they heard about the adventure failed to show up.

And then our idea of washing ourselves in the sea had to be abandoned when we discovered after our first early morning swim that we were both heavily stained with the oil that crested the waves in that part of the Mersey estuary.

I might have just about coped with the embarrassment of returning home early if only my youngest sister hadn't spotted me sneaking up the stairs to my room. Hadn't spotted the oil-stained jeans and ripped, dirty shirt and the unkempt hair and the thin stream of sand still gushing from my sodden plimsolls.

"Mum, mum," she shouted. "Come quickly, come quickly. On our stairs - it's Worzel Gummidge!"

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Below is a selection of your comments.

You never appreciate home till you've left it and you're doing everything for yourself. Until that point you resent these boring parent people running your life and complaining about the mess. When you get your own place you discover that they became boring looking after you.
Welshy, Cardiff, Wales

When I left home for the first time it was to university. My halls were catered and the cleaners did the kitchen and bathroom everyday and my room every week. I had more done for me in halls than when I lived at home. Oh how I mocked my mum for all the "you don't appreciate how much I do for you" lectures.
Lou, Manchester

My future father-in-law used to call me Timothy Lumsden (from Sorry) as I was still living at home at 27. But it was £110 a month keep, and I was taking home £1,000. Mum was an excellent cook with a dishwasher, and dad was fairly easy going, why would I want to leave? I only moved out after the late 80s property crash and I could get on the housing market. Dad wanted me to pay my own poll tax and I decided I might as well pay it on my own house. By the time my future wife moved in I was an accomplished cook and even enjoyed doing the washing up.
Nigel Redding, Portsmouth

Parents have only themselves to blame for raising their child in a waited on hand and foot environment. We teach toddlers to load their laundry and wash their (plastic) dishes because we can't take our eyes off them for a moment, then we let them stop.
Diane, Sutton

For some of us leaving home was neither something we looked forward to nor dreaded. When I left home to go to uni (home was at the time in Dubai, and the uni in the UK), it was something that somehow just happened. I didn't unpack, the first two weeks I lived out of a suitcase. Suddenly I noticed my bed wasn't going to magically be made, and that I was running out of boxers so someone was going to have to do the laundry. After the first month, I got used to living alone. I look forward going home and being pampered for a bit, and yet at the end of the first week i miss "my home". We all crave independence to a certain level, yet once we get it we realise that with the new freedoms, come new responsibilities and expenses.
Salvador Madrid, Vancouver, BC, Canada

The day I left home was the best day of my life, I was 17 and had to pay rent, bills, buy furniture, food and wash cook and clean for myself. But it was easy compared to my life at home where I had nothing and had to cook and clean for seven people or more everyday. I loved the peace and quiet and the organised routine - a far cry from home. I have never looked back with regret.
Mary, Yorkshire

Laurie should have appreciated home more. Parents only nag at you to help you learn to be independent and fend for yourself in the big wide world.
Louise Tawn, Bournemouth, England

When I left home (for the University of York, as it happens) my parents went out that very same day and bought a dishwasher! Seems they'd suddenly realised that the 'kitchen porter' had left... Perhaps if Laurie had been that sort of offspring, he'd have found home more welcoming! I always felt "at home" both before my departure and every time I returned.
Megan, Cheshire UK