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Everybody in the street was the same. Blackout Thursdays were common.

We had no car, no phone, and no central heating. In winter the windows froze on the inside.

We were usually cold but I don’t remember being upset by it. My dad had had no socks when he was a little boy, so our feet, if not the rest of us, had made progress.

We had a coal fire that I learned to lay and to light when I was five, as soon as we moved back from Grandad’s centrally heated house to our own draughty and damp terrace. My dad taught me how to make a fire and I was so proud of myself and my burnt fingers and singed hair.

It was my job to make twists of paper and soak them in paraffin and keep them stacked in a sealed biscuit tin. Dad collected kindling and axed it up. When the coalman came he gave my mother free bags of the stuff they called slack because he had wanted to marry her. She viewed this as an insult to her moral character but she kept the slack.

When my mother went to bed – around six in the morning – she spread the thin dusty tarry slack over the fire to keep it low and hot, and left coal for me to get the fire going again at 7.30 a.m. She sat up all night listening to secret broadcasts of the Gospel to Soviet Russia behind the Iron Curtain. She baked, she sewed, she knitted, she mended, and she read the Bible.

She was such a solitary woman. A solitary woman who longed for one person to know her. I think I do know her now, but it is too late.

Or is it?

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

Mrs Winterson left behind things that she could not do.

One of those things was to make a home.

The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade talks about home – ontological as well as geographical home – and in a lovely phrase, he calls home ‘the heart of the real’.

Home, he tells us, is the intersection of two lines – the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical plane has heaven, or the upper world, at one end, and the world of the dead at the other end. The horizontal plane is the traffic of this world, moving to and fro – our own traffic and that of teeming others.

Home was a place of order. A place where the order of things come together – the living and dead – the spirits of the ancestors and the present inhabitants, and the gathering up and stilling of all the to-and-fro.

Leaving home can only happen because there is a home to leave. And the leaving is never just a geographical or spatial separation; it is an emotional separation – wanted or unwanted. Steady or ambivalent.

For the refugee, for the homeless, the lack of this crucial coordinate in the placing of the self has severe consequences. At best it must be managed, made up for in some way. At worst, a displaced person, literally, does not know which way is up, because there is no true north. No compass point. Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity.

A nomadic people learn to take their homes with them – and the familiar objects are spread out or re-erected from place to place. When we move house, we take with us the invisible concept of home – but it is a very powerful concept. Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside – and that structure is built in part by what has happened on the outside. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety. I left home at sixteen, and after that I was always moving, until finally, almost by accident, I found and kept two places, both modest, one in London and one in the country. I have never lived with anyone in either of those homes.

I am not entirely happy about that, but when I did live with someone, and for thirteen years, I could only manage it by having a lot of separate space. I am not messy,