We have just a week left in the old house.

We hired a van this weekend to take the large furniture – which really wasn’t much, and looks very old, small and shabby-looking suddenly. But it’s all the stuff. The stuff you accumulate and hold onto in a life, because you might need it; but mostly because it has been touched or played with, made or given by someone you love, or used in ‘service’ to someone you love. These objects, these things, this tat, otherwise landfill, are totems and signifiers, connections, memory and love. What do we do with that?

It was a wake-up call when the baby changing table came cantering out of the attic on its four legs – smoothed by all our babies’ bottoms and the back-and-forwards movement of nappies, and muslin cloths, giggles, raspberries, baby rages and parental tears of exhaustion. Our youngest has just turned 18. It really should have gone a long time ago, and now it has; to a young family just starting out, along the lane nearer the common.

I find myself stopping occasionally, a box in hand, halfway down the stairs, to rest my cheek against the cool of the house’s walls. Or to place a hand on it as if to say something: you are loved. You have been a place of love.

I feel cut loose. But also bookended. We’ve been bumping about between two houses for nearly ten years now, when Mum and Dad moved to our village, back to the area from retiring away. And where Mum has made a new version of a life on her own after Dad died. But the house, a bungalow (we are stubbornly calling it a barn) is too big for her, too much; and there is nowhere smaller. And nowhere else we can afford, even to rent realistically, certainly not buy. That’s unlikely to happen now. But also, we need and want to be close. We want to stay in the village we all love. It made sense to pool resources, build a little annexe for Mum, and move in to hers.

If the houses are bookends, two estates, two farms, two birthdays, two barn owls are bookends too. Two actual books, as well. Plus, as everyone keeps mentioning, a whole, huge library of my own reading. So many books, now queuing up in all the bags for life we could muster, like buses along the corridor. Waiting for a new depot of bookcases to be built.

Almost all the furniture has gone, some of it walked the half-a-mile down the lane to Mum’s. My aging writing hut travelled down the hill on the back of a truck, and has been rebuilt and patched, but not yet weatherproofed or insulated. I’m writing at a desk in the corner of what we grandly call the dining room (just because it has a table jammed up against one of the fireplaces, opposite the dresser.) With my back to the empty house, the paintings and pictures still on the wall behind me, I can believe everything is as it was. I am not typing away in an empty house that badly needs cleaning. Where everybody else is in the other house, making room. But the wind thundering down the chimney is making a different sound through the rooms.

We have disturbed many large house spiders in the process of moving things, when they are already active. We are all a bit silly about them (excluding my husband) and when my youngest called ‘MuuuUM’ down the stairs, I inhaled a breath of courage and picked up the spider catcher. But it wasn’t that. She stood in the near-empty husk of the bedroom she’s shared with her older sister since she was a baby, the walls now peppered with blu-tack grease spots, and said, ‘I can hear an echo. The house is emptying of us.’

We moved in when my now 21 year old daughter was born, and we’re moving out the week of our youngest’s 18th. All their childhoods done. Yet still, the herd of model horses, the childhood books, the lego, even a wooden sword, come with us.  

It’s Michaelmas-time, the feast of St Michael and All Angels (and for whom our little flint-and-chalk village church is named) and the year’s third quarter day, that marked the beginning and end of the new agricultural year. The hiring fairs still happen as a remnant of that time, though as funfairs now – Newbury’s Michaelmas Fair, the Marlborough Mops. It seems fitting we are leaving one farm, to live on the skirts of another, at this time. And though I’m not a farmer, I tried to make a difference to the farm wildlife here and ultimately failed. The new place borders, not only the farm I have written about in my new book Ghosts of the Farm (out this week!) but also a place where a former shoot and tired farmland is being ‘rehealed’ for wildlife. I have been invited to become ‘writer in residence,’ and may, in time find, that there, I can make a difference.

So as my new book escapes the farm gate and wanders out into the world, it embraces both the farm we have lived on for 21 years, and the one we are moving alongside. I’m trying to find and re-tie the guy ropes. It feels like a buffeting. An unmooring. And the old fear that I can only write here creeps in. What if I can’t write anywhere else?

But then, in packing, I unearth old diaries nobody has any business reading, from when I was 18 myself. Such a turbulent year. In a few months, I failed my A Levels, passed my driving test, cracked a bone with a kick from a horse, fell in and out of love (over and over with a boy who was immature and a bit horrible to me) took one to many risks with contraception, became an artist, became a cowgirl in Canada, and came home again. But what strikes me in all my teenage angst and trials and ramblings, and trying to work out who I was, is the realisation that I knew who I was, and still do. There are the connections I keep making with outdoors, professing my love. In all the giddy nonsense and excitement of those boys and flirtations, what I loved, what was sacred and beautiful and me and home, was the trees, the fields, the horses, the downs. The mountains in Canada. The prairies. That is where I am and always have been. Outside. I’m trying to hold on to the bookends; the inner walls of houses; but I can still see the hill, Gallows Down, from Mum’s garden, and still hear the rooks that swirl between the two houses and farms, and go beyond those boundaries. I feel that the woman farmer I wrote about in my new book, Miss Julia White, has somehow led me to this; a twitch of amusement and twinkling challenge on her lips. Has shown me a way. ‘Have a try,’ she says, ‘you might do it.’