Our Stories of Home is a series of works by writers from the NHS Restart Project Writing Group in Bridgeton, Glasgow. As part of Arkbound’s Bridging Divides During the Cost of Living Crisis project in early 2025, one of our authors, John McGlade joined the NHS Restart Project’s long-running Writing Group for two sessions to work with the group on developing a piece of writing on a theme of their choosing. Together, they decided to focus on stories of home and produced some beautiful, personal pieces about places they call home.
Here is Naby’s piece about home and the bush:
The Bush
When I was 7 years old I ran away from home.
Full of young outrage, I collected myself, two Beano annuals, several soft toys, an apple, and a blanket, and committed fully to a new life in a bush. This was my new life, with my own rules, without the restraint of expectations; without the hardships and unfair burdens of being a child. It wasn’t long before my sister, unconcerned and slightly irritated, shuffled around the corner to my bush, which was situated in the two hundred metres between our house and Granny and Grandad’s flat— to tell me it was time for tea.
“Mum wants you to come back now” she sighed.
It may have only been at this point that I realised the absence of any long-term plan: yes, I had an apple, books to keep me occupied, my soft toys to keep me company, and a blanket to keep me warm, but it would be dark soon, and I wasn’t particularly hidden by my bush, which was on the main road of the village.
In fact, a few people had walked past with dogs or prams or shopping, “Hello, Naby”, they had smiled, diminishing the drama of the moment. And feeling obliged to respond politely, “Hi”, I had returned, sheepishly, from within my bush.
So just before dinner, I had trudged back home, ten steps behind my sister, the bundle of my belongings in my arms, feeling foolish, though relieved that I would not miss The Simpsons that evening.
I often think back to this, and the feeling that at that moment in time, I craved so desperately some other kind of life; that I wanted nothing more than to be independent, and to be regarded by everyone with new-found respect and acknowledgement; to be seen as an individual— not defined by my position at home with my mum and my sister.
I was desperate to create a new life in which I would create my own legacy. In this life, I would need nobody else in order to know who I was.
A decade later, when this new life finally did start to fall into place— first, with the departure of my sister to university, then a couple of years later when my mum and new Stepdad began their life in Germany— that feeling from ten years earlier had been replaced by a sense of numbness and fear. I finally had complete independence; the ability to do whatever I wanted and to become whoever I was going to be in the world, but there was no longer ambition, no relief, and no excitement.
I didn’t have a home, and this should have been liberating, but it felt instead like a heavy weight; the burden of having to make a home for myself, and for it to meet the standard of what I had known before. Of course, without my mum and my sister and the life we had lived, the roles we had assumed in our house, there was no place to start. It was devastating to slowly reach the realisation that without them, there was nothing defining about me: without being a daughter and a sister I was just a person, and without a sense of comfort and familiarity, a person lives only in a house, not a home.
It hadn’t occurred to me that throughout adulthood, I had been trying to find my way back home. Wherever I’ve gone I have been following streets, turning corners, looking for familiar paths like a lost child; searching for something that long ago concluded.
It is almost as if, subconsciously, but with full assurance, I have always anticipated at some point ending up back in that house with my mum and my sister, just the way that things had been: the potted herbs still growing outside the front door, the kitchen cupboards still stacked with spices and herbs and tins waiting to be cooked into delicious dinners; the pile of shoes and cluster of coats in the hallway; the shelves of DVDs and books I would stare at for hours lying on the living room floor; and most fundamentally, the people I knew I would see every day marching in from school and slamming the door, arriving home from work at 5pm with a sing-song greeting: “Hello girls”.
I had never stopped to process the reality that this was a temporary life, and now they were gone— still in my life, but no longer tied to me, no longer a primary feature of my life.
I have attempted, unsuccessfully, to recreate the feeling of this home, by surrounding myself with photographs and possessions which hold some of these memories, though they are somewhat diluted when hung or placed on the walls of an unfamiliar flat in the city. It is almost disconcerting, as if looking at a woman who is similar to your mother, wearing all of her clothes, imitating all of her mannerisms, and yet not providing any of the same warmth, safety, and love. I sometimes think that I might be preventing myself from finding any sense of home in adulthood by refusing to let go of the one I used to know.
When I sat in that bush, I was ignorant of the fact that I was running from something I would spend my adulthood trying to return to. Now it feels as if I am sitting in a bush of my own design, permanently paralysed between everything I knew in the past and everything unknown in the future, as the feeling of home moves further and further away into the depths of memory. I worry now, ironically, that I will remain sitting aimlessly in this bush for the rest of my days.
But what I have to find a sense of completeness in, is that in my childhood I was shown what a home was, and how it felt to be part of one: that I did belong. I remain in some small way in that home, and despite it having been gone for years now, I return there in my mind to remember who I am.