I live in a row of terraces. I have lived here for just over eleven years. Through my kitchen window, as I sit here now, there is a cool breeze bringing with it the sound of doves cooing as they ready for bed, seagulls scrapping and the odd shout of children playing in the lane. The lane is a single track that runs behind the terraces - where we all park our cars in an untidy tangle of garages off to the sides, where snow and ice lies thick in a bad winter and which is a dust-bowl in summer.
I suspect that for each individual - adult and child - who lives along its length, the lane holds a history. It delivered to me the sound of tyres crunching quietly away as my ex-husband pretended to drive to Barnstaple leaving me standing in the garden on a clear June day in 2008 holding our baby. I never saw him again.
The lane has contained and lost numerous balls and shuttlecocks down the years as my son and I played cricket, catch and badminton between its narrow confines. It benefits from the last of the sunshine on a hot day before the sun sinks over the sea in the West, and in the past I have sat in the open boot of my car with a glass of wine soaking it up. When he was two, my son and I built a thin, ragged snowman in an icy lane, with coal for eyes and a carrot nose and if I search my video camera there are moving pictures of him and I sliding unsteadily down the garden path and out through the back gate to inspect 'Mr Noman' and give him a kiss.
My immediate neighbour on one side of our terrace - an old seadog who served in the Navy and barbecued piri piri chicken every summer until illness kept him a prisoner on the second floor of the house, died a few years ago. He was a pigeon fancier and when we first moved here his feathery friends would take flight high over the lane in a dark, silent cloud, swooping over the rooftops. On the other side, my wonderful neighbour Pam is still suffering the agonies of losing her clever, kind, tall husband to an incurable cancer at the young age of 63. Before he died he would cut back his garden's trees that overhang the lane in summer providing refuge for all manner of large birds that like to deposit their dinner on top of my car.
Like a murder mystery there have been arguments, threats and deaths in the lane. Four or so years ago I had a stand-up row in the lane over parking with a thick-set neighbour whose wife and I were friends and ran a small business together. The friendship had come to an abrupt halt for reasons that remain a mystery to me. Fortunately, my even more thick-set lodger at the time threatened to knock his block off and he swiftly backed down. The parking issue was resolved on the spot by my lodger's intervention - for which I am thankful. But neither the neighbour nor his wife have spoken to me since. In fact she is a haunting absence, as I have seen her maybe twice in the lane over the last few years, whereas when we were friends and business partners we ran into each other almost every day.
Then there was Mustardgate. But that's a long story and involved police.
And the fat lady who hasn't spoken to me for eight years after I 'used her property.' The story is short and brutal: two days after his disappearance, I tried to do a u-turn in the lane in the large, unwieldy car my husband had left me with. Strapped into the back seat was the wailing baby and, in a rather desperate and tearful state myself, I backed two feet into the woman's open garage to aid the manoeuvre. She appeared from her gate at that very moment like a wretched crone and advanced on me in a billowing blouse with black curly hair swinging round her angry face and eyes narrowed. I appealed to her telling her of the calamitous departure of my husband and apologised for using her garage. She was utterly disinterested and like I say, hasn't spoken to me since. Perhaps I ought to feel sad for someone with such limited humanity. But I don't. I can't wait to get away.
Once, I stepped out into the lane to find a baby-faced policeman searching the garages, asking if I had seen a teenage thief who had boldly entered a property one street away, stolen a kettle and scarpered. I hadn't, but I admired the lad's derring-do.
I found my beloved cat lying paralysed in the lane, outside our garden gate. He must have dragged himself home. Or maybe he was deliberately run down. I held him while he was put to sleep. My special, adored cat who had travelled all the way home from Australia with me in 2000. The lane claimed him. I have his ashes in a carved wooden box.
The lane stops at my back gate so there is only one way out - back past the rear-ends of all the other terraces that lie along it. It has entrapped and cocooned me. Significant events have visited us here - have tramped up the stony length of it and entered the back gate by stealth: my marriage dissolved here; lone parenthood with all its complicated chemistry arrived to replace it; leukaemia crept in and left its dirty fingerprints in every corner. Loss, Fear and Isolation have chummed up and tried to barge in - a trio of thugs jostling to sit round the fire with me on dark nights.
But the brightest, loveliest of lights has always shone strongly into the darkest recesses of home and heart and seen off the worst shadows: my beautiful son was born here. We drove home from hospital with him - weighing nearly 9lbs, wrapped in a crocheted blanket - and he entered his new home from the lane, the gate swinging shut as we began our big adventure together. He learned to ride a bike in the lane, to bowl a cricket ball, to skip and to build snowmen. He has dug mud pies, chased escaping puppies, played endlessly on scooters at weekends with his two great buddies a few doors down who come to visit their granny. He has been bald from cancer, and thick-locked, brown and bonny in the lane as we have held running races and carried logs in from the garage together. We have shared secrets, listened to music and laughed, sitting in the car in the lane waiting for the rain to stop.
People can be cruel. People can be cold. Those people don't matter. I am leaving the lane and the worst memories behind, but taking many, many more precious moments with me.
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