Opening the front door on your personality: Nicholas Roe discovers that his various homes have altered his life as much as he has altered them

THE first home I could call my own offered one room, sloping walls that leaked, a broken window and a crippling lesson in sexual politics.

I did not see it as a lesson then, of course. It was just a fact of life that the man who owned the rent book owned the right to guard his tenant's morals. His walls, his rules: one body to one room. So I sneaked upstairs at night saying 'Ssh' to girls who giggled, and crept back down again next morning wondering if we would be caught and whether, therefore, my garret would be forfeit.

'Keep to the sides,' I whispered. 'It's quieter . . .'

The shame of it; the awful links between sex and disgrace and homelessness. These incidents left scars long healed, but the reason I mention it is that the wider point has just become clear to me: that houses always make marks on those who live in them. We change the style of our living-rooms and move on, but internal decorations alter, too, as front doors open and close on bits of personal history.

You have to look at it in order to see it properly. For me, one day I bid goodbye to my landlord, wishing him privately in hell for his dusty sexual attitudes, and the next took three rooms with a girl on the second floor in another town.

It was nice there, with pictures on the walls and other rooms to go to when we argued. The universe had multiplied by three, and because of that homely niceness, or perhaps despite it, we went out much more, and people came to stay, sleeping on lilos. Fun, sex.

But which way round was this working, exactly? Was I bringing a bigger perspective to life, or did that new space tell me of other possibilities, with this doorway leading to that hall? I wasn't sure. Anyway, I soon moved again - we all do.

The usual corridors of bare rooms with leftover Blu-tack on the walls opened up as years passed - and I thought I was growing, until marriage brought a landlady who sniffed our unaired rooms and said, 'Do I smell damp?', in a voice that echoed from dark stairways and secret morning escapes.

No, we were not growing at all, because the house would not let us. Gratitude for rented space in a sellers' market is a crippling thing eventually - ask any student. There had been too many bare-armed sofas, too much knowing our place (which always belonged to somebody else). Was it coincidence that we fled, living in a van, jobless, flatless, abroad?

Each morning when we opened the door another country shone straight in and no one sniffed when it rained and the van got damp.

Here is an odd truth: living with bowed heads under a low, cold steel roof and washing where we ate and slept made for wonderful times. Was it the absence of work? Or were those advantages cancelled out by consequential poverty, and was the real advance the space outside, where we lived most of our days?

It was perplexing, but as the links in the chain of homes increased, other truths began to dawn.

The funny bit is that after another brief flat or two, here and there, we ended up in a red-brick commuter's house in Haywards Heath, Sussex, not far from the station. At least it was ours, a truly important advance; and, as it happened, the place was also big enough to have a baby in, so we did - what can be made of that? Was it the fact that we could afford the house (not thinking of children); or did those wastefully empty rooms say something to us?

So here was another soul living in another room, a human outpost under our control: this house taught me empire, and something worse.

A friend came and said, 'It's a real house, you can walk round it'; so the first unpleasant sting of pride in property, keener than any other kind, took hold. Looking up and down the road,

I wondered where I was, exactly.

The commuter snuggery became smaller than we could afford, and a certain shame crept into conversations with better-housed colleagues. Four walls and a roof are all you need? Oh, no.

I could not imagine matching the investment colleagues had made in their homes, mind you; it was wrong, extravagant. This was a reversal of the pride touched when friends walked round and round the house making jokes, but don't forget that these were the years when Ernst Schumacher sat on so many bookshelves, and Robert Pirsig and Erich Fromm: a period of conspicuously being, not having. But being in what, precisely? Houses became a point of moral conflict.

Looking at friends' converted barns and homes with guest rooms, it was no longer enough to have living space, there had to be more. There were endless arguments about how much space an individual actually needed, but compromise between statement and inner conscience became inevitable, so the neatest trick that this house ever taught me was personal duplicity. The messages of property were becoming more complex.

Moving to the semi was hard after that. I had thrown myself out of work for reasons mixed up in the last few paragraphs, and had to break away. The place we found needed renovation, so we learnt to live with brick dust in our eyes and drawers (no small education in tenacity; a house can make you sweat like nothing else - great levellers, homes).

But there were sadder lessons, too. The street was so ordinary, so neat, its nodding neighbours so full of doll's-house pleasantries, its parked cars too polished. Something was burnt away the moment we picked up the key from the estate agent; it was the last remnant of any idea I might have had that progress was inevitable.

When dogs messed on the wide, green verges of our road someone would run out of a house and stick a flag on the little pile. The flag would say: 'We know who you are. Please do not allow your dog to do this outside our house.'

With a school-age child we discovered that the social soil of this neighbourhood was too refined for our roots. And so the house gave us a lesson in community, and the value of association. These were not People Like Us. We grew lonely.

But the lesson did not stop with a single discovery.

When friends visited we were at pains to explain how little we had changed as personalities, but in reality this was a secret message: we did not equal the

neat lawns outside, the flags on the

dog shit. I knew this in a way I would never have been able to give voice to had we not owned that house, in

that village street. Was it snobbery, or honesty?

So things changed again. In work once more, we moved to our present house and here I began the archaeological act of piecing together messages about my own past, discovered in remembered brick walls going back years. It is a nice house, you see, it lets you do that. There are enough rooms to feel content in, a good enough view of the South Downs to taste freedom, no one dictating moral decisions, only me. It has been a long parade of passages and avenues and cul-de-sacs, but here we are at last.

Houses are milestones, so when you look back at them you find out what you were at any stage of the journey: what you could afford, what taste you had, what pressures you were under to abandon taste itself; what neighbours you could cope with then (could you now?), what desperate vanity you needed to satisfy.

But it does not stop there because, looking back, you also recognise marks still visible on your personality: stairs not dark enough to hide in, streets too mean to bear. These things are here and now in the back of the mental slums, slums that you can never quite bulldoze to the ground.

When I look behind me sometimes I know I am a tortoise, crawling slowly towards something, while pressing down on my back all the time, is home.