Suburban bliss

It was the first time I took the kids to see my sister’s new house, a joint purchase between her and my mother, causing ructions back in February and a stalemate that meant they hadn’t seen each other in months. But, with a new cousin on the way, and tensions cooled, while the weather warmed up, I set about on Friday, the two and a half hour’s journey into suburban Hampshire for a long weekend spent in a garden you can actually run around in, and a patio big enough to seat us all.

The journey itself was horrific enough, with the children imploring me to trust the sat nav, which promptly took us on an ill advised route through central London. But we got there in just about one piece (the Shoreham air show tragedy still yet to take place,) with little Mabel, recuperating from her recent puppy injection incarcerated in a box having only been sick the once. And with Tom joining us straight from the office, just an hour and a half’s train from Waterloo, we basked in two days of sunshine and family reconciliation, amid the thought that we too could one day flee the London hubbub and afford ourselves a piece of suburban bliss.

Although my sister has always had a penchant for poky new builds on quaintly named housing estates, the illogicality of our mother having a larger house than her a five minutes drive away was not lost, and with a growing family, they decided to join forces. For all I was displeased by the way they went about it, the joint venture seems to be a smart move – help for a newborn on tap, a holiday bolt hole for us, and a large comfortable home for them all, decorated now with luxuriant carpets, splashes of colour, a mishmash of art inherited from the collision of mama’s sophisticated and Katie’s contemporary tastes, and an overall clean airy feel helped by slanting high ceilings and a balconied upper story.

To be fair, they’d been hard at it, transforming the dated 70s tardis into a modern family home whose shingled bungalow frontage opened out into a balconied, six bedroom ranch, where mama dearest had her own wing, complete with living room and kitchenette, while Katie, her husband and little daughter maintained the upper floor.

The space was a tonic. We luxuriated in the en suite spare, while the kids shared a double in the room intended for their new cousin. The living room was airy and cavernous, although the kitchen was a squeeze, and the garden was quite literally a breath of fresh air after our minuscule, astro-turfed, sluggy London backyard, a revelation to Mabel, only just allowed outside, who spent happy hours gambolling on lawn dodging Jonah’s antic with the sprinkler. It made a pleasantly quaint escape from the city, with its unknown yet somehow familiar suburban streets punctuated by leafy green spaces, not to mention industrial estates, shopping centres, and a shingled coastline, making for a particularly English experience that no longer feels quite so stultifying as it once did.

 

In fact, with devices well and truly out of range, the cousins played harmoniously together the old fashioned way, with places to hide away from us in the house, or pebble hunting on a little trip to the beach, running amok at a garden centre to pick up provisions for a barbeque, even content to doodle ahead of a rainy Sunday roast in the pleasant, Portuguese-owned Cricketers Inn in Cudridge.

It all felt like a comforting return to something like my own childhood, away from the sirens and electro-smog of central London. And rather than the sense of oppression I once felt inside such stifling cul de sacs, and the desire to flee a sometimes pedestrian past, it almost felt like we were planning for a pleasant future, one where we could embrace this little slice of England, with its pretty weather and leafy vistas, retiring to gentler pursuits, much like my pioneering mother’s recent foray into the W.I.

We will return at Christmas, and again for holidays, with Jonah demonstrating a penchant for being adored by his younger cousins, and spiky Ava relaxing amid grandma’s distractedly doting interest. But the long term view is to make it, one day, permanent, though perhaps away from the now iconic British suburban sprawl, to find somewhere with a touch more charm, like this, on the river Hamble, with a quintessential quirky gilded Olympic letter box outside, somewhere close to the sea – and the way property prices are going in East London, we’ll likely be able to afford it too, one day. Which, for the time being, gives us all the more reason to stay put in the capital, where, at the very least, the houses are plated with gold…