The first time it happened I wrote it off as inexperience. By “it” I mean lying on a concrete floor covered in cow shit and wondering how many bones had been broken by the cow I’d been trying to milk. Great skill is needed for the apparently simple task of attaching suction cups to a cow’s teats – especially if she has painful warts.
The cows hated me (rightly so) and I hated them. Maybe I mean feared rather than hated, but it amounts to the same thing. And the more experienced I became, the more I was forced to admit that my idea of a farm in Wales becoming the home I had always longed for was ill advised if not utterly stupid.
Owning beautiful fields was one thing. Being forced to spend half my waking hours mending fencing to stop the cows wandering was another. Owning a lovely cottage was a joy. Burning it down after spending a few years and a small fortune renovating it – by overstuffing an electric heating cabinet and leaving it to catch fire while I was out milking – was not.
So I sold the farm, swore I’d never buy another, and then, a few years later, bought another. No cows this time. But, once again, the house – a 16th-century Welsh long house – was a ruin. It didn’t even have a roof. So I renovated it, and in some ways it was the perfect home. My neighbours, who had persuaded me to buy it, were two of my oldest and closest friends.
And, yes, neighbours matter.
I discovered that when I became the BBC’s first television news correspondent to cover America. All of it. From the north slope of Alaska down to the tip of Chile. A dream job for an ambitious young reporter. Often a nightmare if you have very small children, which I did.
I rented a house just outside New York in December 1972 with plans to give them the greatest Christmas ever. But instead of helping to hang up the stockings on Christmas Eve I was en route to Nicaragua. A massive earthquake had ripped the country apart. I almost made it back home in time for New Year’s Eve but only got as far as Miami. One of the first jumbo jets had crashed in the Everglades.
But the kids had a wonderful time because the neighbours made them part of their own family. My three-year-old’s greeting when I finally got home was not, as I had imagined, a sobbing “Daddy, we’ve missed you!” It was: “Daddy, when are you going away again?”
I also owed my career (sort of) to the father of that hospitable household: a congressman called Peter Peyser (then Republican, later a Democrat).
By summer 1974 the Watergate crisis was at its peak and we were living in Washington. On the morning of 8 August, when the whole world was asking: “Will Nixon fight or quit?”, I got a call from Peter. He had just come from a prayer meeting at the White House. Richard Nixon had told him he was making a live TV broadcast that evening. He wouldn’t say why but might I be interested?
You bet I would.
An hour later I was making a rare and very expensive satellite broadcast telling the nation Nixon was about to resign. Thank God he did.
After Watergate I wanted to come home, but the BBC asked me to open a TV news bureau in Johannesburg. So I did. The president gave me an interview soon after I arrived and then resigned. Don’t let anyone tell you that success as a reporter is not about being in the right place at the right time.
My years as a foreign correspondent included several homes that were enviable in their different ways, including an apartment off Fifth Avenue, a mansion on the Hudson River and a house in a posh Washington suburb where my delightful elderly neighbours kept his and hers pistols in their bedside cabinets. And a house in apartheid Johannesburg where I broke the law by letting a married black couple live together in a little cottage in the garden – and got away with it.
But none of them felt like home. That’s because home is more than a location. It’s where, especially if you have been on the BBC payroll when it was at its most generous, you get at least a little of everything you need.
In my case that includes a garden where you are not overlooked and a park on the doorstep. Trees and grass matter. But there’s something that matters much more.
My youngest child may have long since left home, but the kitchen is still not for cooking: it’s for remembering walking around and around before his bedtime with him on my shoulder tunelessly singing Elvis Presley songs to him. Or his bedroom when he was old enough for me to read him books that I probably enjoyed more than him.
It’s memories that make a home.
John Humphrys is a presenter on Classic FM after 51 years at the BBC
