My family home felt smaller than I
remembered it. The walls seemed a little closer, my head a bit nearer to the
ceiling. It had been like this for some years now, even before my most recent
and (by some distance) longest absence. Is it just me,
always seeing the places where I grew up, no matter how often I return to
them as an adult, through the lens of my childhood self?
My sense of disconnect was compounded by a recent
refurbishment. Walls I recalled as fading yellow were had been given a shiny lick of paint;
the upstairs lounge, on my last visit a junk shop of label-less VHS clutter,
had been transformed into a ‘cinema room’ (my parents' unnecessarily grand name for it) complete with multi-cushioned
sofa and a TV so large and so vivid I felt I could reach in and give Nicholas
Witchell a well-needed slap during one of his cringingly portentous royal
correspondent crosses on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News.
Ah yes, the BBC. After friends and family, our
national broadcaster - cherished and maligned in equal measure - has been one
of the main things that I’ve been unable to find an adequate substitute for in
New Zealand. It’s not so much the Beeb’s absence that has made my heart grow
fonder, but rather the poverty of the nightly schedules served up on NZ
free-to-air television. When confronted with a line-up that regularly
publicises an immigration control reality documentary as its ‘pick of the day’,
is it any wonder I’ve been reduced to entreating my parents to fly over DVD
recordings of BBC shows to fill our evenings with? Certainly, it felt good to
be plumped down on the couch in the sitting room where I’d spent so many lazy
afternoons as a kid, watching programmes humming with familiar accents while my
family busied themselves in the kitchen with some kind of inevitably
food-related activity.
It was approaching 22 months since I had last set foot
upon home soil, and in that time I had come to feel like I had taken on another
life; not quite someone else’s, but certainly a life different enough from the
one I had left behind in September 2010 that returning to England felt like
being shaken awake from an unlikely dream. The stark reality of it all hit me
almost as soon as my parents drove us out of the bubble of Heathrow airport and
onto the M5’s tarmac artery. Everything seemed that bit older, the vegetation
along the banks wilder and weedier than the New Zealand roads I had become
accustomed to. After two years of green motorway signs, it felt strange seeing
the bright British blue variety again, especially the one that grandly
announces the approach of ‘The North’ as if to prepare you for entry into some
foreign land (no jokes at the back there please). Odder still were the
occasional glimpses of countryside: the patchwork fields and hedgerows, the
ancient steeples and stone chimneys - all so different from the rugged expanses
of untamed wilderness that decorate the great open highways of NZ.
If there was something halcyon about that drive, reconnecting
to a landscape I’d temporarily boxed away in my memory, then my first proper
reunion with British life was a rather more sobering experience. Enter Thurrock
Services, supposedly a “Gateway to London”, but not an entrance you’d dream of
escorting a tourist through on a maiden visit to the capital. I’d grown up with
these places, come to appreciate them even, as havens from the crushing
inevitability of motorway gridlock where you could sink a greasy Full English
and cup of coffee en route to a day trip or holiday destination. But in my time
away I’d become spoiled by New Zealand’s superior roadside offerings – less
frequent yes, but usually independently owned and almost always guaranteed to
serve a city café standard brew and gourmet sandwich made to order. At first,
Thurrock seemed to sum up everything I hadn’t missed about my homeland: the homogeneity of its
shops and food outlets; the price premiums on substandard, production-line
food; the shit coffee. And yet, as I sat cradling a watery Americano and
surveyed the scene from a table in the middle of its crowded communal seating
area, I also saw that it was wonderfully, viscerally alive with people from every walk of life, all
creeds and colours, rich and poor, northerners and southerners. In short:
Brits. Brits like me and Brits not like me, but Brits nonetheless. And it was
then that it really hit me: I’m home.
If the coffee and the people at Thurrock services had
piqued an assortment of feelings, then I was more resolutely cheered by a brief
flirtation with a Marks & Spencer ‘Simply Food’ store on the way out.
Another British institution that I didn’t really think to miss until I found
myself hunting for lunch in an Auckland supermarket and failing to find
anything even approximating a pre-packaged sandwich, M&S stirred happy
memories of a time before Pak ‘n’ Save and Countdown were the destinations of
my weekly shop.
This wasn’t quite M&S as I had known it though.
While the shopping experience it offers has always been unmistakably British,
the stores were not previously known for ostentatious displays of national
iconography. On the occasion of my return visit, however, even the most
indifferent republican (among whose number I, in zestful and impudent youth,
might have counted myself) would have failed to notice the surfeit of British
regalia festooning every shelf. Countless products seemed to carry a Union Jack
or be branded as some kind of Diamond Jubilee ‘special edition’, and you had to
duck for festive flags and bunting. In all honesty, I hadn’t ever seen anything
like this.
Of course, I knew this was an important and historic
year for Britain, what with the serendipitous alignment of London hosting the
Olympic Games and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (and all this only a year on from
the Royal Wedding), but I was not quite prepared for the sheer extravagance of
the celebratory memorabilia that I came to find in almost every high street and
establishment I encountered during our two week trip. My surprise was perhaps a
consequence of having observed over the 27 years I had spent living there
Britain being so spectacularly bad at venerating its national identity. I grew up
watching our flags be abused by fascists in the 80s, tackily reclaimed by
Britpop and the Spice Girls in the 90s, and all but ignored in 00s. All this,
and the reality of me spending two years on the other side of the planet slowly
forgetting the day-to-day idiosyncrasies of British life, meant that my sudden
exposure to these apparently heartfelt displays of national pride caught me
off-guard. Was I really home, or in some Disneyworld version of England where
there’s a red telephone box on every street corner and all the men wear bowler
hats?
Our first weekend back, at the tail end of June,
happily coincided with the final of football’s European Championships, which,
due to the time difference, had proven something of a chore to follow in New
Zealand. In truth, it was not at all a coincidence, for I had ensured our
outward flights were precisely timed to prevent me being mid-air somewhere
above the Himalayas as Wayne Rooney scores the 90th minute goal that
wins England the tournament in a dramatic comeback against arch-rivals Germany.
As it transpired, the Three Lions had been knocked out of the tournament a week
earlier in a lifeless draw against Italy, so my dream of watching our greatest
sporting triumph in some dirty local pub surrounded by my fellow countrymen
would have to wait until the next World Cup. Instead, I had the pleasure of
seeing Spain out-masterclass Germany in a superlative 4-0 victory, but
whichever nations had been in the final, I think I would have found watching a
football game back home amongst family and familiar things every bit as
thrilling.
While acute jetlag contributed the somewhat dream-like
quality to those first couple of days back home, it soon dawned on me how
little time I was actually going to have to enjoy it. A total of three weeks’
leave from work had seemed like a lot on paper, but with the travel time, time
difference and jetlag factored in, it left little more than a fortnight to
reacquaint myself with my old life. This, of course, is the unfortunate reality
of living aboard and so far from home. Few of us have the luxury of extended
leave – not to mention riches – to enable significant or frequent return trips,
and the two years I had spent away meant that I felt a lot of pressure to fill
every minute of my visit with something noteworthy, whether it be a catch-up
conversation with the family, a reunion with an old friend, or even something as
simple as sipping on a pint of beer with a bag of crisps in a traditional
English pub.
While these little reappropriations of my old life
were joyful in many ways, their fleeting nature caused me to belatedly realize
that the true price of living in New Zealand is not the long periods of
physical separation from home, but the fact that homecoming visits must be so
cruelly short-lived. Those two weeks hurtled by like a runaway train. Looking
back now, I see a whirligig of old faces, boozy nights and the best of British.
Loughborough, Nottingham, Lancaster, The Lakes, Manchester, London, Brighton,
Newark – did we really cover all that ground in 15 days? While this frenetic
tour of people and places left me with a degree of sadness at how little time
I’d been able to spend back home, I returned to NZ with an appreciation of it
that I didn’t have two weeks earlier, and in truth probably never had before.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Definitely, but the real tug on the
heartstrings is having a thing back
only for it to be swiftly taken away again. Until next time, clouded hills…
Jonny
