Penguin
Review by Linda Lappin
London. Amid the exhilarating social turbulence of the 1970s, Alison, a single mother, packed up her three children and headed off to a commune to help remake society. Struggling in the city, economically and emotionally, her little family was encumbered by ghosts: a daughter’s death, her husband’s desertion. The lure of a big house in the country full of like-minded people sharing daily chores and dreams offered an exciting escape from all that. For the next fifteen years, Alison and her children lived in a commune founded on Marxist and radical feminist principles. What was it like for her kids to grow up as guinea pigs in a Utopian experiment? Alison’s daughter, Susanna Crossman, revisits this period of their life in a page-turning, poignant, and often unsettling memoir: Home Is Where We Start.
This brave new world was housed in a former old people’s home located in rural England on a vast estate, purchased by the community founders. The mansion and grounds were in disarray, and the new occupants, fifty adults, would spend the next year adapting their living space, while numerous children, toddlers to teens, galloped through its corridors, poking into every corner, as there were no locks, restrictions, or taboos.
Residents lived in units, equipped with tiny cold water bathrooms. All doors were open and anyone could drop by or barge into your unit at any time. Intimacy and privacy, sacred bourgeois values, were scorned. Meals were communal; members were summoned to table by a gong. The diet was organic based on food they produced themselves: vegetables, meat, dairy. Kitchen duty rotated, with members taking turns peeling potatoes, baking bread, grinding muesli and preparing recipes, not always successfully, from The Vegetarian Epicure.
At regular meetings attended by the whole community, practical matters and ideology were discussed — exposing the children to the radical worldviews held by many members—such as the assertion that “Marriage is institutionalized rape.” One of the community’s key principles, as the author notes, was that adults and children should “share power.” Children were considered equals to adults, and no topics were off-limits in their discussions. Another core tenet was the rejection of the nuclear family. Parental intervention was discouraged, and children were expected to take care of themselves. Traditional family roles were abandoned, with terms like “Mum” and “Dad” being discarded. Children were not to be coddled, forced into bedtime routines, or interrupted when they bullied one another. Even sleeping arrangements were fluid—children could sleep wherever they liked, whether in groups in the yoga room or in the units of other adults. This lack of structure had disturbing consequences when the children reached puberty.
Although the commune embraced the ideal that childcare should be shared equally between men and women, Crossman reveals that, in practice, the children were largely left to their own devices. They roamed freely across the estate during seemingly endless summers, engaging in rough, unsupervised play, knocking each other down and getting into trouble. All the while, they were also absorbing nurturing impressions of nature, in moments of being reminiscent of a pre-industrial era. At Christmas, the entire community gathered around a massive tree to exchange gifts, and these joyful communal celebrations sparked opportunities for creativity and crafts. Crossman reflects on how she learned to create something extraordinary out of nothing—an ability that would later serve her well in her career as an art and theater therapist. These gatherings were also profoundly inclusive, as she fondly recalls the regular presence of a homeless woman who was often invited to share meals.
But there was also a darker side. Central heating was deemed bourgeois, so the broken boiler remained unfixed. During the bitter winters, it was so cold that the water in the toilet froze, and all the children developed persistent coughs. Personal hygiene was largely neglected. Clad in worn hand-me-downs, the kids were sent to school unwashed, riding in a van that had to be pushed downhill each morning just to get the engine started. At school, Susanna’s precociousness and lively intelligence earned her the admiration of both peers and teachers, who often invited her into their warm, stable homes, offering a glimpse of normalcy.
Throughout these challenging years, Susanna’s older sister, Claire, kept her grounded in the “real world.” At just six years old when they moved to the commune, Susanna accepted the strange bubble they lived in as normal. But for Claire, who still remembered life before, the commune was a disturbing deviation from reality—one she longed to escape. Claire, however, harbored a painful secret. During a trip to India with members of the commune, she had been sexually assaulted. Sadly, Susanna would later endure a similar violation at home. When, at Claire’s urging, Susanna finally confided in their mother about what had happened, Alison dismissed it with a shrug.
Yet, when Susanna’s excellent test scores singled her out as a promising candidate for an academic future, the community stood in her way. As bastions of classist indoctrination, Oxford and Cambridge were strictly off-limits to commune members. And so, Susanna’s most cherished dream was abruptly cut short—so much for the principle of parental non-interference.
In vivid prose, Crossman crafts a luminous narrative interwoven with reflections on child development, insights from her experiences as both a mother and a therapist, cultural criticism on utopia, and musings on the meaning of home. As she delves into child psychology and social experiments, she explores how life in the commune has shaped her identity and set her apart—or not—from others. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s belief that a sense of safety in our first home nurtures imagination, she poignantly shares that it wasn’t until she built a stable home for her own family that she, too, felt a true sense of security.
In the narrative sections of her memoir, the author adopts a child’s wide-eyed perspective and trusting persona. She refrains from passing judgment on the adults, regardless of how skewed, incomprehensible, or even despicable their behavior might seem, nor does she attempt to rationalize it in hindsight. Readers may be troubled by the lack of parental supervision and concern within the community, which allowed instances of abuse to unfold. However, the hardships the children endured—such as their vulnerability to abuse, along with the freedoms they enjoyed—were not entirely unlike those faced by children in earlier times or in less fortunate social contexts today. The dilapidated mansion in which they lived became a kind of time machine, transporting them to the universal condition of childhood: a state of fragility and openness that requires the shelter of a true home for a child to flourish. In the commune, that protection was absent.
Yet, there is another side to this story. As Crossman notes, the experience toughened her and endowed her with an extraordinary self-confidence, enabling her to navigate the outside world as an equal, never an inferior. It also shaped her as a writer. While every door in the commune was open, notebooks could still be hidden, and her desire for privacy and intimacy with her own thoughts compelled her to pick up a pen.
Many questions remain unanswered: What did Susanna’s father and her grandmother, who had both visited the commune, think of this arrangement? One guesses that Alison was not easily reckoned with and could not be dissuaded once she had made up her mind. How did Susanna’s father, an academic, feel about his daughter’s education? How could Alison not have noticed what was going on between Susanna and Lionel, the man grooming her? What happened to the other children raised there? And in the end, how does Susanna really feel towards her mother, the choices her mother made, and the omissions in her explanations? You feel that this story isn’t over yet—there’s more material to mull over and bring to light. Perhaps another memoir will be forthcoming focusing on motherhood.
This remarkable book vividly resurrects a transformative period in history, offering a child’s perspective on a radical social experiment whose consequences she would carry throughout her life. An extraordinary and thought-provoking read.
