My name is Mollie Somerfield, but my family name – Kneath – has roots as old as those that splay beneath the trees in our rural corner of Swansea.
As the eldest of five, I was never without a friend growing up, and our home was never without voices – from tears, to song, to joyous laughter. So in those first weeks at university, when I was met with muffled audio from the other side of a flatmate’s door at best, and silence at worst, I felt alone.
Home is something that’s baked into my bones and my lived experience. The Welsh language itself is overflowing with ways to explore this idea: from direct and literal translations, like ‘cartref’ or ‘adra’, to the more symbolic turns of phrase, like ‘aelwyd’, which literally means fireplace or hearth and refers to your household and the warmth they provide. The most famous, and the one I found myself tied up with the most, is the word ‘hiraeth.’ There’s no direct translation into English. Some will tell you it means homesickness; it doesn’t. ‘Hiraeth’ describes longing for a home that isn’t there anymore, for a time or place that is lost to the past. I used to worry that this is all I would have left, and that feeling at home would be lost to a life of rushing and rental property inspections.
Then I met Jason. A curly haired, 21-year-old, brown-eyed boy from Nottingham, whose love of surfing sub-cultures had us on bikes and trains to whatever coast we could reach for a tenner or less from Lewisham. We eventually moved to the Cornish coast, got married, and ended up living on Lowenna, our 28-foot Stag sailing boat. Life on board gave me a greater sense of peace and belonging than I’d felt since I was a child in Swansea, and my understanding of home began to shift back into place. For the first time in years ‘hiraeth’ was replaced with ‘aelwyd’.
We should all care about the idea of home, and we should all feel entitled to one, whether it is a house, a flat, a boat, or a horsebox. Yet it is the community I have gotten to know through more informal and alternative housing that have taught me more about home than traditional experiences ever had before, and I am excited to see what lessons I can learn from them, from you, and how these little pearls of wisdom can carry me forwards into my future.
Roots and Mooring Lines 