We moved house when Josh was eight months old. I didn’t know it then, but even as the boxes left our house at one end of the town, and stacked up in our new house at the other, I was already pregnant with his sisters.
The pull of your first family home is like no other. You might laugh at the memory of boozy nights in your student digs, or feel nostalgic for the flat you shared with your first love, but nothing beats the four walls into which you bring an ultrasound scan; a cot; a baby. Those sorts of memories are hard to leave behind.
Half way through that first pregnancy we cleared out the box room. That old desk, the book case, it all moved to the spare room, and in the space of a Sunday afternoon my office became a nursery. It was early September, and late summer sun streamed through the window as I knelt on the carpet, talking to my twenty-week bump and putting together two cots.
The paint was yellow, the curtains lemon-and-white-striped, and dancing elephants hung above each cot. I stood in the doorway, deciding where to put the animal border I had bought that weekend. I imagined the boys in their beds; pulling themselves up to laugh at the zebras; reaching out dimpled hands towards the lions. I added the border at just the right height, and the room was finished.
The babies arrived eight weeks later. It was another three months before Josh saw the animal wallpaper in his nursery, and by then his was the only cot in the room. I filled the extra space with a nursing chair I never sat in, and each day watched the sun set and rise over a baby I could hardly believe was mine. As he grew he laughed at the zebras; reached a still-tiny hand out for the lions; and I pushed aside the grief that had no place in such a bright, sunny room.
Yesterday I saw the couple who bought our house. Lovely people; a delight from their first viewing to the point of completion and beyond.
‘I kept something for you,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure if you would want it, but I kept it just in case.’ She handed me a carefully wrapped section of bright coloured wallpaper I last saw nearly seven years ago.
And I did want it. I wanted it so badly.