Dōmum and the meaning of home

Dōmum is the school song, its title derived from the Latin for ‘going home’. Two of the verses are regularly sung at the last night of Cloister Time during which Leavers enjoy Dōmum Dinner. At this year’s Dōmum, the College’s senior prefect (Aulae Prae:), Henry Spoerri, shared his view on what Dōmum had come to mean to him.

“What does it mean to call somewhere home?

As someone who has moved from place to place for most of my life, I have come to the strange realisation that nowhere has felt quite like home to me as Winchester has. Yet to a stranger looking in at these great flint courts and halls that sentiment would no doubt seem baffling.

“Home is where the heart is,” they tell you. After five years here, I can confidently report that no such heart was discovered in the vestries or cloisters. But perhaps the saying misses the point. For Home, this home, is not simply where we felt most loved or comfortable. Rather home was the place that nourished us through set backs and successes into the people we are today. From the bewildered Jun Man who mistook a Winchester notion for a gap in his English vocabulary, stuffed tissues up his nose to excuse his lateness, or watched XVs in complete awe, we somehow, almost without noticing, became the top years who once inspired us.”

“These Wincoll years have been times of extraordinary change, not simply in ourselves, but in the world around us. The successful introduction of girls, the new Sports Centre, the death of a monarch, four Prime Ministers – god, College even won VIs festival. And in that wonderfully Wincoll way, life has been so changeable and busy that we have rarely stopped to appreciate just how far we have travelled.

So, if ever there were a moment for it, I thought I would return to our GCSE anthology, to Derek Walcott’s Love After Love. Like us, Walcott’s speaker comes home to himself, to someone so changed he is referred to as a stranger. I would like you, this once, to celebrate that stranger, to “peel your own image from the mirror” to “Sit. Feast on your life”. For though we are leaving the place that shaped us, the friendships we have made, the tribulations we have survived, the people those experiences have made remain with us.

And so, as we leave these great flint courts and cloisters on to the edge of an unknown future, I find myself returning to the question with which I began. What makes somewhere a home? Perhaps it is not the place itself, but who we together become there. Fortunately, that’s the kind of home that can never be taken away from us. So “Sit. Feast on your life”.”