In the late 1970s, when Susanna Crossman was only six years old, she moved with her mother and siblings from her ordinary suburban terraced house to a rambling mansion, deep in the English countryside. Along with 60 or so other adults and children, they were turning their back on the bourgeois, capitalist, sexist rules that governed society, and setting out to create a utopian future.
It won’t be a surprise to hear that it didn’t go well. But that is not really the point of her intriguing, revealing memoir Home is Where We Start. Now an arts therapist who has published novels and lives in France with her partner and three daughters, Crossman has not come to damn the way she was brought up, but to re-examine it, and to look at what academic research and those with similar experience have made of it.
As she writes at the end of the book: “In attempting to understand my own story I’ve placed with within a larger perspective, historically, sociologically, and philosophically.”
Crossman told me when I interviewed her for a Welldoing CPD in front of of our therapists, there were good and bad experiences during her childhood and teens. The Kids ran pretty wild, and bullying and sexual experimentation was common, though not necessarily more than in some schools or more usual communities.
More problematically were the times that adult men in the commune had sexual intent. Crossman was abused on the cusp of adolescence, while her nine-year-old sister was raped while on a trip with other commune-dwellers to India. Sadly, neither thought of their mother as the first point of contact; Kids only had one short period a week in which they were able to spend solo time with their parents.
And yet, Crossman survived, and in many ways thrived. Her education was not conventional but much of her present resourcefulness and open-mindedness comes as a result of this rather haphazard upbringing, that set about to dismantle the nuclear family, remove sexism and euphemism in language, liberate children from narrow educational expectations, to reach out and explore as they wanted.
In one strange but amusing section Barbara, an Adult leader comes to the Kids Room to propose they create a manifesto. Even though they literally were children — Crossman was six at the time — she said: “You have the power to become anything, rather than being protected and controlled by adults. You aren’t going to be bank managers or shave your legs. You are free from intervention and manipulation. What do you want?”
But as Crossman realised from her own experience, and her research into similar projects during this period, it suited the adults running such communities to offer a long leash to the youngest members of the household. Adults didn’t actually want to take responsibility for the kids — as Crossman said: “Looking after kids can be boring, difficult, and stop you from doing other more interesting stuff.” By rejecting their parental roles, parents let the children go free, but they didn’t consider that children want homes, secure and predictable places where they will be fed, kept clean, and feel loved and looked after.
Some might feel the casual neglect of the children makes this book too difficult a read, but — having met others who have been raised communally — I could also see that Crossman was eager to see all sides of their experience. She does not think it was a disaster, and is gentle with the blame that some might pour down on her parents. But she is also a very different mother to her own children.
Home is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream is our Welldoing Book of the Month for July 2025. See previous winners here.
