Apple Gidley – 5 stars
Having led a nomadic existence, and therefore having house hunted through through many countries, although not always to purchase, I read Roz Morris’s latest memoir out of curiosity, and because I know she is a writer able to capture emotion with sky-blue clarity.
Turn Right at the Rainbow is a book full of wit and wisdom, and all the time questioning the very meaning of ‘home’. Not only do we follow Roz and Dave on their search for somewhere new to call home, we are taken on a tour of her childhood, and how memories believed to be purely our own, are actually sometimes a mirror of someone else’s. Morris describes with beautiful lyricism the similarities of her 1970s childhood at Alderly Edge with that of novelist Alan Garner, in the same place in the 1940s. She writes, “I am reading someone playing at being me, before I was born.” Morris’s description of the weathervane on the church steeple following not only her journey through childhood but that of Garner, and his father before him, reminded me of the hand game played as a child—here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and there are all the people.
The history and memories of the bricks and mortar of our homes become almost tangible, and something as buyers to which we feel we can add. “Old houses will suffer from persistent infirmities, bad previous surgeries, and bad previous exorcisms.” Or in the case of a new build, start from scratch while understanding the land on which this modern home now stands once also belonged to someone else. There is always a chain.
Touches of humour, along with despair at times at the machinations of the real estate industry, move the book through the rigmaroles of house buying, with always the pathos of what went before. Viewing Edge Croft, her childhood home, now demolished and with a modern edifice in its place, took me straight back to my childhood home in Malaysia—that site is now the Petronas Twin Towers.
That’s what Turn Right at the Rainbow does. It will take you back, make you question your own perception of home, wherever it was or is. This is a book to dip into time and again, a book to treasure.
Roz Morris, author 