I’m feeling grumpy and uncharitable. I’m having to move house and I’m finding leaving here really hard – it’s been my home for more than ten years and I’m not going through choice. I rent and my landlord decided that he wants to sell – except now he doesn’t, but I can’t live with the precariousness of his whim. For the last three years he’s been making noises about it, then just over a year ago he knocked on my door at eight in the morning to tell me that he’d made his mind up – he’s a farmer and has had a bad back, so he’s giving up farming and cashing in his assets. He wasn’t giving me notice as such, just letting me know, in no uncertain terms, that I’d better start looking elsewhere.             

I live with this knot of fear in my belly; single and now in my sixties I suddenly find both my job and my home at risk, both as a result of capitalist policies that favour the haves and punish the have-nots. Most of my peers are secure in their home-ownership, but I missed the boat on that one – a single parent of three at thirty, I chose poorly paid self-employment to be home for my children as they grew, so was never in a position to buy a house, to afford a mortgage. And be clear, I have nothing against renting – we’ve lived in some wonderful, magical places through the years, but it’s the unsettledness that gets you, the lack of security – and the absence of choice.

This is the third time I’ve been forced out of a home I was happy in. On the first occasion, I was in a lovely, old, unmodernised farmhouse back in those halcyon days of security of tenure – but my farmer landlord’s son was getting married, the house was part of the farm and they wanted it back for him and his bride; it was the one way you could retrieve your property – if a family member needed it. Off we had to go. Then the relationship broke down, the marriage was off and the owners re-rented the house under Thatcher’s new shorthold tenancy rules where the landlord has all the power and the tenant loses out big time. I don’t know what’s happened to that house now – I pass it occasionally and wonder, but I do know that the son never did live there. Why would he want a crumbling, draughty old place when a new-build bungalow was his for the asking?

The second time was from the house we lived in next, the home my children have most childhood memories of. We’d been there years, juggled the indoor and outdoor spaces to make it ours, to make it fit; we were happy and settled. We’d filled it with friends and fine times, the children’s growth measured on door-jambs. Then a bolt from the blue in the form of a letter from the landlord, whose daughter was coming back from her world travels – and despite owning several other properties that he rented out as holiday lets, he’d promised her this house and me and my young family would have to go.

I went to see him to plead my case, to see if we couldn’t come up with a solution together. It turned out his daughter was temporarily renting a flat in a large, old, cooperatively owned country house, but he wasn’t happy about it because it was ‘very damp’. We talked on, batting ideas back and forth, then he said, “I don’t suppose there’s room for you in the cooperative house?” I was tempted to snap that I’d heard it was very damp, but the power dynamic didn’t allow for that. Not good enough for his adult daughter but fine for me and my children? I found my own solution and moved on.

And now I have to leave here. I have somewhere equally, if not more beautiful to move to, but it means uprooting everything, leaving behind more fabulous memories of happy times and starting again. I shall miss this high moorland, the isolation and the vast open vistas. I’ll miss the wildlife, flora as well as fauna. I’ll miss the turning of the seasons marked by the returning curlew, cuckoos, winter thrushes, the extremes of weather. I’ll miss the deep privilege of sharing a habitat with nesting barn owls, kites, kestrels, crossbills, the occasional hen harrier or roe deer and the hares that regularly pass through. I’ll miss standing on the doorstep and hearing skylarks, watching for the summer redstarts and flycatchers. I’ll miss the little wood in front of the house; the scots pines with my hammock-hanging points, the elders, the tall and stately lime and the sycamore I’ve hated. I shall miss having space to throw wild and wonderful parties, filling the place with family, friends, music and laughter. What times we’ve had.

But it’s time to move on – and I’ll grieve but be grateful. I know that in time I shall remember without this belly knot of pain and anxiety and loss; I’ll be thankful that I was gifted custodianship here for more than a decade. I shall leave to create another wonderful home and fill it with more splendid memories. After a lifetime in the hills, I’m headed to the valley, beside the river, nestled in woodland… a whole new and unknown environment to explore and make mine. 

Life changes and goes on.

It was a dull Saturday afternoon in early June as I glanced out of my dining room window towards the moor and saw what I first assumed to be a kestrel sitting on the gatepost. But no, I’d made a mistake in identification… despite being mobbed by a meadow pipit, the beak was wrong, the body not quite right and it was then that I recognised it as a cuckoo.  We have them here each spring, the male frequenting the trees around the house on first arrival and for several years there was one that made me laugh with his vocal tic; cuck-squeak, cuck-squeak rather than the more familiar cuckoo call.

As I watched, this bird patrolled the fence posts between my garden and the moorland, flying back and forth with the distressed pipit harassing desperately and I realised I was watching a female scouting for somewhere to lay. After hopping up and down the fence posts a few times, she flew down into the hummocky grass, then straight back up to the gate post. The pipit was going mad. After another couple of runs up and down the fence, still chased by the pipit she dived down into the grassland a second time, disappeared for a few seconds, reappeared and flew straight off into the distance across the moor – she was gone.

You could spend years waiting to see a cuckoo lay her egg, even if you knew where to look. This view from my window has been a constant delight in the time I’ve lived here – I’ve sat and watched barn owls hunting low over the fields at dusk, green woodpeckers anting, crossbills silhouetted on the topmost branches of the pines, red kites catching thermals, hen harriers quartering the moorland, gangs of curlew circling the house with their plaintive cries, skylarks filling the air with their fluting song as well as more familiar garden birds on the nut and seed feeders. There has been the occasional deafening clatter of a starling murmuration, hares have been constant neighbours and there was one memorable occasion when a roe deer came close then bounced off across the fields, its white rump bobbing; but nothing, nothing compares to the extraordinary privilege – and sheer chance – of witnessing a female cuckoo in full, single-minded, egg-laying action.

Thirty-seven years ago I had a miscarriage. I was at about fourteen weeks (standard gestation is forty weeks) and it was one of three I’ve knowingly had and the furthest along. I have no idea why my body rejected that foetus or why that foetus rejected me, but I remember discussing it with a catholic priest and asking why, if life is sacred from the moment of conception, was there no church ritual, no sacrament for that lost life? And if the spontaneous abortion of a wanted embryo wasn’t considered worth the sacrament (presumably to be cast into eternal limbo) what the hell was the fuss about with those damaged or unwanted pregnancies that were deliberately ended? He had no acceptable answer.

Since then the years have uncovered untold institutional catholic horrors in Ireland – the enslavement of women, considered insane or depraved, in the laundries (as if pregnancy happened by parthenogenesis), dead babies disposed of in septic tanks or buried nameless in mass graves, children sold to childless Americans, the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of boys, girls, young men and women by priests and nuns – and the cover-ups and denials which still go on… and on. Just how sacred were… are… those lives?

A No vote in Ireland’s referendum tomorrow is not about the sanctity of life; it’s about misogyny, patriarchy, hypocrisy, a desperate clinging to power and to the old order where laws were driven by a church which held a vice-like grip on all aspects of politics and society and still considers women second class citizens.

Despite my Irish passport I have no vote tomorrow, but from this side of the water I for one – and I hope for the masses – am holding out in solidarity for Yes. 

 Trust Women