It's hard to go home. There
always seems to be one more adventure waiting to be lived out just round the
corner so I suppose it is no surprise that I ended up here. I am still a distance
from family and roots but strangely reassured by the sense of having reached
British shores and a language and culture that are at least partly familiar: a 'halfway
house', as a friend described it. Whether, like Ulysses, I ever finally return
home fully is a chapter in the book I have not yet had the chance to read. However,
in my current novel, the storyteller is a traveller who is temporarily home for
a visit from the other side of the world. She is constantly tormented by the
feeling that everyone at home has moved on and she has somehow got stuck in the
time frame that existed when she left home all those years ago. When she
returns everything has changed. Shops have closed. New ones have opened. Land
has been sold and developed. Old feuds have been swept under the carpet. Relationships
have moved on.
For me too, it sometimes
seems as if life has stood still for me. Going to the local health centre for a
regular screening test I was confronted by a puzzled nurse who asked why I had
my last test in 2004. I explained as patiently as I could that I had lived
abroad and had had numerous tests whilst there, but under a different health
system. She accepted what I said but continued to look unconvinced. Did life
really continue to happen when once you crossed the border?
Financially, I am only just
coming up to speed again. Having moved from the pound to the Dutch guilder, then on
to the transformation to life (and prices!) that was brought about by
conversion to the euro, and back again to the index-linked pound, I have
suffered utter confusion. Currency has lost all sense of value and left me
floundering so for a long while I had no innate sense of its worth and what things
should cost at all. After a year 'back home' a sense of proportion is beginning
to creep in and I no longer feel indignant every time I have to pay for a cup
of coffee, expecting it to be served to me at its 1990s price. The sense of
disorientation is receding and my feet are back on solid ground.
As for my family, they have
moved on without me, growing up, marrying, changing jobs, giving birth and even
dying without my permission. Whilst my daughter still regularly attends
weddings, I have taken to considering whether I should include a set of black
funereal clothing in my luggage every time I leave home - just in case. Yes,
life moves on.
So I am left with a
question. Did life happen to me too? Did I really see all those exotic places,
make all those friends, see my daughter's graduation, wedding and subsequent
move to another country too, receive news of my first grandson's birth, experience working life
in the Netherlands, buy and sell houses and go for bracing seaside walks on the 'wrong
side' of the great divide, that grey, forbidding North Sea? Or was it all a
dream? Did I have a life too? Back here it sometimes seems as if there is no
space left for it all - it is a black hole in the constellations of my life.
New friends are initially fascinated, then puzzled by my expat stories and
quickly tire of listening before dragging conversation back on to more familiar
ground. But I had a life too! I know it. It is just a little buried in my
subconscious and in my photo albums these days. Am I maybe not only a traveller to
foreign shores but a time traveller too from the land that time forgot?
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