The opportunity to spend 50 nights in London came at a crossroads in my life. I thought it would be a kind of swansong, wrapping up my English research to focus on something closer to home: Australian archives, Australian themes, more easily achievable. That’s not going to happen.
An
archive at the end of a gravel driveway in Canberra does not have the same energy
as an archive reached by way of the cobblestones of the ancient Clare Market, and a 150 yard journey passing through five hundred years of history in bricks and stone, and half a million people.
It is more than 50
years since I left London as a child. I thought it was symbolic to spend one night of Sabbatical here for
every year I have been away. It would lay to rest the inexplicable
yearning, because whichever side of the world I am on, I ache for the other side. I would be satiated.
I have observed this call of home in others and regarded it as
misplaced ethnocentrism, as though something in the old world is
intrinsically superior to the new. These, I thought, are the emotions of ungrateful and unsettled people. I am
deeply attached to the Australian landscape and the seasons of the place where
I live, its ancient culture. But it has taken a lifetime to discover all this. But then, although I don’t
believe I am ethnocentric, I love London more now, than ever before. Not satiated.
I was not quite eleven when my family left England as Ten
Pound Poms. On the boat there were people who were emigrating because it was
cheaper than moving from Edinburgh to London. It confirmed for me that London was
the only place worth living, and so I wondered why we were leaving. My best
friend was confident we were only going to Austria on holidays. We knew nothing
about our destination except that it was sunny and there were kangaroos –
although it would be 20 years before I saw one. In the early years I did not
want to be here … and my parents had some reservations, too.
Among the boat people we were uniquely privileged: my father had
a good job to go to, a house to move into, people to meet us as the ship
docked, and we had enjoyed the journey on the A deck in a spacious cabin
because someone thought my father was a GP, which would prove handy in someone
broke a leg. His expertise was the pathology of venereal diseases and
tuberculosis.
In the 1960’s children were not considered, not prepared and
not helped in any way to adjust to emigration, or any other life event. Within
five years some of us were plotting our escape, and by the time I was 21 I was
indeed back in England. When I returned to Australia of my own volition I knew it was
the place I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I returned to London, briefly, often.
Children trying to settle in Australia were beleaguered by post war parents who had lost their
youth and were trying to get it back. Children were often like baggage,
shunted around, parked, moved on, and rarely given a map or a plan. At
school immigrants were bullied: we had Pommy accents, and our parents’ lack of understanding
of the school system, and the curriculum itself were a problem - what the hell
is Cuisenaire and why are we not reciting our times tables? The history teacher could not pronounce Thames. We learned French from a teacher
who had never been there and confidently predicted none of us would be going,
either.
Social isolation in an inland town is deafening. We moved to
a dust bowl with wide unsealed streets and miles between houses. There was swimming
and tennis – but both were miles away and cost money and equipment that we didn’t
have. There were no buses, and no destinations, no attractions, no museums or
art galleries, not even a cinema. In our family it was mandatory to appreciate the
sunshine and the wide open spaces: doing what?
In our past life in London,
noisy, overcrowded, wet and dark, we had wandered heedlessly, usually in groups
of neighbourhood children. It was an age of trust. We lived in a prized end-of-row
semi-detached Victorian house – two up and two down - in a nice-ish housing estate on the edge of a
factory district whose few fields were being swallowed up by a vast motorway….the
first, I think. I was four when I started running errands to the corner shop,
the baker’s, the sweet shop. I was eight when I joined a walking expedition to
the swimming baths at night, led by someone’s father who counted us on and off
the bus and collected our pennies.
As older children we walked down mysterious Gypsy Lane to the
Camp of surprisingly friendly rogues; to the gates of the factories where a black man would appear at 4pm and
wave to us; to the jumble of shops along Forest Road, antiques, books,
curiousities, loud Cockney shopkeepers; to Lloyd Park where there were giant iron
and timber swinging ships that carried 40 children at a time - demolished now, too dangerous – but the
worst we suffered was splinters. There was a duck pond, playing fields – the place
I first saw teenagers having furtive sex behind the stands - and the William Morris Gallery – the place
where I first saw erotic art and developed an appreciation of complex patterns,
symmetry and colour. Every Saturday we went to the Grenada cinema that attracted a rabble of kids at a shilling each,
all bellowing advice to cartoon characters in unison, interspersed by communal
singing about our loyalty: We ARE the
Walthamstow Grenadiers!!! Then it was Sunday School, and in the afternoon
it was back to a puppet show or pantomime at Lloyd Park Pavilion. On Wednesday
night there was more activity at the Methodist Church which was 200 yards down
the road – weaving baskets, knitting dishcloths, developing an acute social
conscience by learning about the poor starving children in Africa – followed by
great quantities of orange drink and biscuits. The library just down the road had
plenty of books and the librarian ushered in the enthusiasts and guided us
through the shelves.
Perhaps more importantly, for my future passions, I was immersed
in history: statues, monuments, plaques on buildings, bomb sites still not
cleared up more than a decade after the war, canons in gun turrets, the
displaced families behind wire in Nissen huts, waiting for homes: even today
churches of central London carry scars. My first misguided belief about Australia was
that it had no wars, no history. As an adult I see the problem was my lack of personal history anchoring me to a new nation.
History, whether it’s personal, corporate or political, provides individuals with a sense of symmetry and structure that defines hope and future. It addresses place, belonging and identity. It helps us understand our own historical moment, the transitory continuity of life itself, and it is particularly instructive if it guides our future as it governs our excesses.
The immanence of English history explains a lot about the resilience
of the English people and even their independence. They do history very well.
In Australia our encounter with the history of the land, Indigenous
history, is very recent, and for many people history begins with exploration
and the strange nobility of convict history. The great European tour is no
longer a rite of passage, and young people are just as like to go to Peru
or Iceland as the UK, which is health.
Rural centres will always have difficulties engaging and retaining their young
populations. Geography offers differing opportunities, and families know the
kids will not stay on the farm. It’s normal to be restless in youth.
And here I am coming to the end of 50 nights in London, not young but wanting
more. I still have swathes of the city to explore, a thousand more things to experience.
Is it just the spell of the ancient City of London? I equally want to return to my own Australian
soil, where the landscape will be turning gold as we go into the heat of summer,
the kangaroos ravening the pasture, the Alpaca ready to be sheared, the old dog
still dying.Where to belong? There is no need to choose. Having it all just requires tickets for long haul flights.
Theresa May, the English PM strategist for Brexit, has said that if
you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. But
politicians have shaped our citizenship always. Part of my family was driven
across across multiple nations; brothers were rejected as alien and enemy on both
sides of the 1939-45 conflict; in one line of the family, my children represent the first generation to be
born and remain in a nation long enough to bring up the next generation. This is a moment
when we must be citizens of the world, because nations suffer too much xenophobia
and ethnocentrism.We embrace anywhere cuisine, design, fashion, so it's not a stretch to be a world citizen.
Today I read Julie Neuberger’s interesting decision to seek a
German passport https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/rabbi-german-passport-nazi-brexit-europe. A Rabbi and MP in England, the daughter of
persecuted Jews, she is reclaiming her roots for entirely personal reasons and
because Germany itself today is not that nation that facilitated an evil empire. In a sense, if we refuse the politically prescribed
dimensions of identity and received histories , we can retrieve parts of our self without shame or
limitation.
Sometimes the personal in history is most informative...and that thought is the key to all of my research.
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