In 1922, when Paul Julian was eight years old, he and his family moved to 814 W. Valerio Street, Santa Barbara, California. When I try to look at the address with Google Street View, I find that this particular house has been blurred out – presumably at the request of the current residents. Julian lived in this void with his brother, mother, and stepfather, whose surname he had taken a few years before moving there, until he was eighteen.
When my own mother was eighteen, her parents’ volatile relationship broke down and the family was splintered. As a precautionary measure, she was encouraged by a local priest and friend of the family to leave for America with her younger sister. While my aunt finished high school in New Jersey, living with relatives, my mother was taken on as an au-pair by a wealthy couple in New York.
During this time, her own family home in Little Hulton, Salford, was the subject of an arson attack. I have never asked about the circumstances of this; all I know is that owing to the fire and subsequent demolition, there is almost nothing material left of my mother’s childhood besides the still empty lot on Ladywell Avenue.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes:
the houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us; […] they insist in us in order to live again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living. How much better we should live in the old house today!