From the age of nine I have been a migrant - part of a family of four that now resides half the world away from the suburban semi-detached house, the town centre, swimming baths and local primary school that formed the centre of our lives for a decade. What was once the occasional utterance or very hypothetically natured conversation swiftly evolved into creaseless trouser suits and a myriad of job fairs in London. The nature of which, from learning about second-hand, I assumed took the format of a round-robin tournament. With a zealous but ultimately unsuccessful attentiveness I tried to digest all the names of countries and schools that my parents would attempt to be offered teaching posts in. My mental image of a black-and-white house in the tropics was surprisingly accurate when I finally encountered one, though the absence of herbaceous vines from which it was supposed to hang did not quite correlate. With a child-like slowness of perception I acknowledged the permutations that could easily be a reality until the day my father made an announcement, the prelude to which was the question "do you like long flights?"
For the months that ensued, life was portrayed through the medium of
bubble wrap, packaging tape and the tantric practice of constructing cardboard
boxes. The unacquainted contents of my bookshelves now met one
another in a dull thud against the walls of a box - a monosyllabic applause
that sent permanent clouds of dust into the air. Ten years' worth of a home
soon compressed itself into (what was planned to be) two year's worth of
luggage. The kitchen began to stock only two weeks' worth of groceries, which
soon became two days', and even sooner became two hours'.
Every year on 13th August quiet acknowledgement manifests itself for
the day that uprooted us entirely. (Though it must be remembered that it was a
day of which hours were spent recumbent on our suitcases outside Heathrow, much
later followed by a twelve-hour flight devoid of hand luggage). In a sad sort
of entanglement my three lasting memories of home's valediction comprise
a refrigerated pizza, the tear-moistened cheeks of my grandparents
against my own, and the image of my mother in the first of her waking hours,
touching up the walls' idiosyncrasies with the remains of pumpkin- and
cream-coloured paint.
Four apartments and two schools later and we're still here, still with
the requirement of half-a-day's flying in return for our old lives. On a -
loosely - annual basis our summer plans take us back to Britain. There was at
first a two-year gap between leaving England and returning, and I can only
describe our five weeks of return as the biggest culture shock I had ever
experienced - far greater than the time I spent 36 hours with two complete
strangers in a cramped six-berth train compartment in Vietnam, or the first
time I made way along a narrow, ankle-threatening trail for a string of
porters, their shoulders burdened with loads by far surpassing their height and
weight, in the Himalayan foothills. It was the unspoken level of
assumption, a state of expectancy, that everybody we had said goodbye to had
changed to the same degree of extremity as ourselves. But the space of two
years bear such a spectrum of significances to different people, different
lives. Red-faced goodbyes and solemn hugs are but a farewell for the
left-behind, if we are lucky it may signify the presence of a slight void in
their lives, and prove that we were – and still are – important to them.
