There's a place for us

HENRY James called it "a great good place" - a special place of calm and retreat that's just for you, no one else.

HENRY James called it "a great good place" - a special place of calm and retreat that's just for you, no one else. A place where your eye rests. Where upon arrival you just ... breathe out. The prospect of it: a renovation of your serenity, a tonic. We all should have one. Do you?

It's often connected to childhood in some way. If not physically then in memory, a whiff of some happiness from long ago, like a Chinese whisper of solace. I think there's something spiritual in the urge to embrace some kind of homecoming as we age; the way we're drawn back to places where we began. The great circularity of life, perhaps, often acutely connected to landscape. "We wove a web in childhood, a web of sunny air," Charlotte Bronte wrote, and how beguiling that sounds, how understandable the want to recapture the sheer, unadulterated happiness of childhood; the very air of it, shift of its seasons, light. "I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love," Marilynne Robinson wrote in one of my favourite novels, Gilead.

My great good places have always involved that quiet, humble, undervalued quality: simplicity. They're almost ridiculously anti-materialist. Shining hours in simple places; not much in the way of furniture or possessions; sometimes just a swag in a desert by a certain tree in a cherished riverbed, a secret place where the silence hums. With age I've needed the reparation of a great good place more and more; commensurate with a loss of materialism. Life is a process of simplification, isn't it? A stripping back.

The soldering principles of the great good place are leaking increasingly into the regular life. Right now, bound by the cram of kids, there's no time or means to seek one, to detach. So it has to be created around us. OK, that's a challenge. The office: a plywood plank resting across an armchair in the loungeroom. Six of us in three bedrooms, one bathroom, no bath - the baby's washed in the kitchen sink. But the happiness plumes through me in this lovely old teapot of a house, which rings with air and light and simplicity. Through wide windows the garden greenery tosses in the sea breeze like the heads of wild ponies; most of our London possessions are still unpacked, we're surviving with the bare minimum; but the joy to be had from just a trampoline, sprinkler and piece of soap! I'd dreamed of a place like this for so long in England, the homesickness increasingly corrosive over the years. But I can't say it's a break from the sheer intensity of motherhood. I'm dreaming of a new great good place to escape to, now and then.

They always involve an immersion in nature. Being still and quiet with the land around us. We humans have such a vexed relationship with our planet, are like recalcitrant children with Mother Earth; fighting it, plundering, careless, unappreciative, rude. Australian writer Archie Weller said he could always sense the joy or sadness of places. Oh yes. For years, on and off, I lived in Sydney's Kings Cross and that was when a great good place was needed to flee to, desperately, because something feels so sad about that little city strip - someone said once it was the site of an Aboriginal massacre and goodness knows if it's true but it always struck me as a place crowded with lost, jittery, lonely ghosts.

Don't we all need to be closer to nature the closer we get to returning to it in death? When life is pummelling we need to seek out the solace of the land. Nature pressing close, feeling the great thumb of it, drawing strength from it. I hope you have a great good place to escape to, where at night you can feel as calm as an eiderdown lying snugly, quietly, in readiness on its bed. If not, seek one out.

Nikki's new novel, With My Body, is out now.