THE MEANING OF HOME

Drive-by glimpses of former homes bring evocative memories flooding back for Adam Dudding

Adam Dudding drives by past houses and soaks up the memories

I’ve just tallied it up: in my 46 years there have been 19 places, give or take, that I’ve called “home”. Give or take, because it’s tricky identifying the moment when the place where you happen to sleep earns the label. A door key of your own and your name on a bill are good signs, but there are other more subtle indicators that even if you started as a couchsurfer you’re settling in: an established relationship with a cat; mastery of the shower temperature; the way you answer the phone.

Places I lived in briefly I remember mostly as anecdotes: a cop delivering a flatmate to our Ponsonby flat because he’d been found in the CBD near-naked and ranting after overdosing on boiled-up datura flowers; me sneaking down from my room above a pub near Trafalgar Square to steal chicken and Cumberland sausage from the walkin fridge; the libidinous possums who skittered and screeched around our deck during a cat-sitting stint in Warkworth. The homes where you lived longer lodge somewhere deeper. I lived in the same house in Torbay, on the North Shore, from 1973 to 1990, and my mother sold it only a few years ago. I occasionally take a detour to drive by, and just a glance up the path shakes out crumbs of memory: the taste of underripe feijoas; the soapy, rancid smell of towels in the hot-water cupboard, the wonky shadows cast on the living room floor by the buckling leadlight windows.

Actually, it starts even before I reach the house. At the pedestrian crossing near Glamorgan Primary my inner projectionist spools off a few inconsequential seconds from a Friday afternoon in 1978, when a teacher told me off for running zigzags through the dotted lines at the road-edge, before admitting that he, too, was feeling rather excited that the week was over.

The memories get denser closer to Sealy Road: a stretch of pavement that would ice over on winter mornings; the empty section we used as a cut-through; the steep bit on the walk home from the beach where we’d send the frisbee back and forth between two pavements and the towel would fall off your neck when you lunged to catch a wild throw.

Sometimes, when my kids are in the car, I do a different drive-by, past the cottage in Castor Bay where we lived from 2002 to 2012. I had a key. I mastered the shower. It was home – home number 18.

For my son, though, it’s home number three, the place where he buried Matchbox cars in the sandpit and ate his first guava, from a tree I planted. And for my daughter this is, definitively, home number one.

From the road it’s mostly shielded by another house, but if you look up the right-of-way you can see the front bedroom where, in June 2004, she opened her eyes and let out a tremendous wail at the midwife who’d arrived only just in time. When we drive past she tells me to go really slow, because the driveway’s narrow, and you only get the briefest of glimpses. * Adam Dudding’s memoir My Father’s Island (Victoria University Press), is a finalist in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

“THE HOMES WHERE YOU LIVED LONGER LODGE SOMEWHERE DEEPER”