Why Mum's Kitchen means HOME 00

Nina Stibbe's childhood memories are inextricably bound up with the mug tree, spice racks and fancy gadgets of her mother's old-school kitchen

When a friend recently gave me a book on the art of decluttering, I half-heartedly began the process by moving a stash of jam jars to the recycling and disposing of a cushion with a pug’s face on it that had gone musty-smelling. Soon after this, my kids arrived home for a break from university and wouldn’t you just know it? One of them needed the jars and the other felt desperately sad about the cushion. It made me think about the way we cling to stuff – not just our own but other people’s too.

I was reminded of the kitchen in the last of my childhood homes – a small and awkward shape, in which two doors, a free-standing cooker and a boiler took up most of the available space. In spite of this, as soon as we settled in, we used to congregate there, sometimes all six of us, and soon a new baby and various dogs. There was no table, so we’d hoist ourselves up onto the worktops and try not to let our feet bash the cupboard doors. My mother, after a couple of tough years, felt so at home in this new room – slurping coffee, crunching Ryvita, smoking and compiling pretty shopping lists in different-coloured felt pens – that she once peed in the sink so as not to miss the end of a piano concerto on the radio. I know because it was dark outside and I saw the undeniable shapes through the flimsy nets as I came up the street.