Transcendence 2

I have lived in many houses which I have called 'home' and have always felt pleasure in returning 'home', even when, as in Felixstowe (above), we didn't feel very settled, or as when we lived in a small, swelteringly stuffy flat in Kingston, Jamaica, where the neighbourhood dogs howled all night. However, there have been two places in my life where I have had a sense of profound uplift, of euphoria, in knowing that I was 'coming home'.

In my time as a boy in East Africa we lived in six houses but this feeling only applied to the last house we had there, the big house towards the end of Cliff Avenue, Mombasa. Twice I came back to it after ten months at school in England, and each occasion the joy is burned into my memory so vividly that I tried to recapture those moments in the opening section of one of my novels, 'Fifty-two Days'.

The feeling came, not as I arrived in Mombasa, not as we approached the house, but as I walked round the side of the house to the front veranda and the scene opened before me - of a scrubby lawn with its bird table to which the yellow weaver birds came, a lantana hedge, the burnt grass of the golf course and, beyond the swirling blue-greens of two coral reefs, the gigantic rollers and limitless vistas of the Indian Ocean. "I'm home," I breathed, and emotion overwhelmed me.

The only other place which has stirred similar feelings, if not as profound, has been Ardnamurchan, but there the joy came, not as we arrived at either of the two houses in which we lived but seven miles before that, as we crossed the cattle grid by the beautiful bay of Camas nan Geall and the bulk of Ben Hiant heaved into view with, to its left, the first sight of the Sound of Mull.

It may have been that these feelings at Camas nan Geall came in part as a sense of relief, since the journey along the peninsula, some hour and a half from the main road, was an arduous one and the first sight of Ben Hiant indicated that it was reaching its end. Perhaps..., but I think it simply was that, in general, we were deeply happy living in Kilchoan.

I do not expect to have these very special feelings for any more homes though it would be wonderful if I were proved wrong.