Look! Look at you looking on Instagram! Here we are, setting off on our country walk with Molly, our sweet-natured Burmese python! Look at this slice of buttered toast next to the modernist lamp. Look! Look on Twitter: our ducks are sleeping under the willow trees! Look at our dining table and its constellation of chairs, look at the art on our walls, our pergola, our salad bowls and oriental poppies, our Victorian porcelain and wild-flower meadows.

Look at the lake we made from natural springs. My colleagues who really did have well-developed bourgeois lives were always trying to be less bourgeois, but I wanted to move into the neighborhood.īonjour, isn’t the air a delight here! Look at our country cottages with their tangle of pink climbing roses. Yes, I had spent a long time trying to have a more bourgeois life. At the same time a mean little voice in my head was always saying, “This is not real, it will never be yours.” Nevertheless, I believed that one day, when I grew up, I would earn myself the keys to a house of my own in the Mediterranean with honeysuckle and balconies. If we were to measure out the love of mothers for their children with coffee spoons there would never be enough spoons for that kind of love.I had spent so much of my life peering into the windows of estate agents, searching for my very own domain, my face pressed against the window, along with the ghosts of other dreamers looking for homes we could not afford. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. There are sea urchins that are almost immortal, older than the mortal mothers and their mortal children fleeing from wars. I know they have to survive in the wilderness of the ocean, their cousins are the sea star and they can grow for centuries. There are other fears I would prefer to lose, after all. I have measured out my life with the sea urchins that have pierced my feet with their spines. You will find her collecting pebbles on the beach of the Bay of Angels in a summer dress, where the sky is always blue and the rooftops of the houses are carpeted in the seagulls that I first mistook for snow. Maybe she’s ha ha happy, maybe she’s not. Also, in these early drafts, there is a quote from Sylvia Plath ( The Bell Jar) in which a nurse says to an unhappy young woman, “Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.” In Swimming Home there is a fragile young woman with fierce intelligence and long red hair (her mother is a cleaner) who writes a poem.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy