Home may be the source of our affections, but it is also the heart of the action. Some female novelists have been chided for being too “domestic”. But what’s narrow about domesticity? Aren’t the minutiae of family life of more lasting consequence than the great events of public life? Two-thirds of our life is spent at home. It’s where we eat, sleep, wake, play, make love, raise children – and, increasingly, do our work. People used to be born and die at home, too, but nowadays most births and deaths in Western society take place away from home, in hospitals, as though life’s most primal experiences were unmanageable without the intervention of professional outsiders. I was glad to be there for the deaths of my parents, just as I was for the births of my children. It felt natural. It felt right. It felt like a kind of homecoming, as well as a departure.

That’s what home is: the place you keep coming back to, either in reality or in your dreams. Most of us have maps in our heads of the flats or houses we lived in as children: we know the layout of the rooms, the colour of the wallpaper, the view out the window, the bric a brac that sat on the mantelpiece. Most of the maps we consult in life are unfamiliar and require interpretation. But the map of our childhood home is permanently imprinted on the brain, and what went on there is embedded in our souls. For me, now, writing this, home is a basement in South London. I’m below the ground, with a view out and upwards on to a back garden. As I look out, there’s nothing to tell me which year or even century this is. Life out there in the world is fraught, demanding, frenetic. In here I can withdraw, lie low, take stock and let my mind wander.

Where it wanders, almost inevitably, is to my other home, the one I grew up in, a stone rectory in the Pennines with a view of distant moors. At times the memories are exhilarating, at times they bring tears to my eyes. “Home is so sad,” Philip Larkin wrote, “a joyous shot at how things ought to be/Long fallen wide.” I know what he means. There are objects which remind me that my parents are dead and that the marriage they had was far from perfect. But whose marriage is perfect? And whose life doesn’t come to an end? I know my childhood was more happy than unhappy and that my parents were decent people doing their best. And the hoarded objects that fill my home confirm that, reconnecting me to lost time. That oak table might not be big enough to host a large dinner party. But I know if I stare long and hard enough the film of my past life will spool across it and the dead will flicker back to life.

Extracted from UK at Home: A Celebration of Where We Live and Love by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, published by Against All Odds Productions in association with Duncan Baird Publishers on April 17. © Against All Odds Productions. Available from BooksFirst priced £17.99 (RRP £19.99), free p&p on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst.

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