Open Writing

Thirty years ago, the four of us stood on the tarmac of Dunedin airport, suitcases in hand, and wondered if we had done the right thing.

Forty-eight hours previously we had left Heathrow as emigrants, now we were immigrants in a strange country where people spoke with different accents, thankfully not a different language, and we knew no-one. It was raining. We were tired, dirty, disoriented and confused.

The broad smile of the secretary of the firm Martin was to work for soon put the smiles back on our faces and we were whisked off to a champagne lunch, a look at the brand new house that was to be ours and deposited in a motel, where, finally, showered and clean we fell into bed and slept the sleep of the truly exhausted. Our new life had begun and what a life it has turned out to be.

In no time at all, it seemed, we had furnished our house with the basics, while we waited for our treasures, which would turn a house into a home, to arrive by sea. The children were enrolled at the High School, Martin established himself as the town’s pharmacist and I was recruited onto the High School staff.

All the neighbours made us welcome, we were asked to speak at the local service clubs, joined Rotary and were pulling our weight in the community, working for P.T.A. and other such things. In short we were accepted and New Zealand has been good to us.

But yesterday the phone rang. Phone calls in the early hours mean problems “at home.” Problems which make you realise you are a long way from home.

Such a call, fourteen years ago, had me two days later, on a Jumbo jet heading for Britain. My father was dying, my mother could no longer manage and my brother said I should come.

I took six weeks leave of absence, boarded my plane and, thirty six hours later, touched down at Heathrow. For five weeks I was able to be by my dad’s side, in hospital, and could look after mum and sort things out for her.

He died the week before I was due to return. I was the last to see him alive and the first to hear of his death, and I can still feel his arms round me when I walked into the hospital ward.

I was able to organise the funeral and to be there. Family and friends gathered round to share with us the “rites of passage” and the busyness of it all helped. I had something to do. Three days later, in Changi airport, I sat alone in the transit lounge and grief, like a brick wall, hit me, and there was no-one to put their arms around me, no mother, no brother, no cousins to share my sorrow. I was completely alone and I felt lost.

How much worse would it have been for those early settlers. Put ashore in dense bush or flax clad hills. Clearing a space to build a hut and hoping that their meagre supplies would last until their first harvest.

Perhaps, every eight or ten weeks, if they were lucky, a letter would arrive from ‘home,’ telling of the birth of babies they would never see, marriages of brothers and sisters to people they would never meet, and deaths.

They would observe their “rites of passage” with a smile or a tear, as they milked the cow or drew a pail of water from the stream. There would be no-one to share their emotions and no Jumbo jet to take them home, and their sense of loneliness would be far greater than that of the modern immigrant. No phone or email could put them in quick contact.

Apart from the separation from family, there are other things which the immigrant must contend with. The accent or strange language, the different customs and attitudes to life, the knowledge that you are a stranger in a strange land and you must earn your right to be there, and not belonging to anyone.

The old settlers have established their families, they have ancestors and intermarried, so a network of extended family exists. People gather for weddings and christenings and funerals and get together for Christmas.

You feel you have made friends, but they are new friends, you have no history. You don’t meet your old school friends in the supermarket. You can’t identify people as “Aunt Jessie’s second cousin.”

You are a tree severed from its roots and planted as a cutting in foreign soil. Your roots don’t go deep. Maybe your great grandchildren will have deep roots, but you are on shallow ground.

Your true friends tend to be immigrants, like yourself. You gather together and swap stories of Walls pork pies and “bacon butties”. You watch “The Last of the Summer Wine” and “Coronation Street.” You talk about the things you have in common and you form a network amongst yourselves.

Christmases, birthdays and wedding anniversaries are shared and we all know how we feel. Your children have no aunts and uncles to visit, don’t know their cousins and can’t go round to gran’s when mum doesn’t understand them.

You miss the places you belong to, the church you always attended, the local pub, grandma’s house and your old school. You miss the sense of history which a new country cannot possess.

You can’t stand where great events in the distant past took place. There are no masses of bluebells in woods where new buds are bursting, there is no sound of the first cuckoo and no robin redbreast, and Christmas isn’t the same.

Here our world is turned upside down. Christmas is in the middle of summer and, even though the shop windows are decorated with artificial snow and red clad Santas go around to the sound of “Jingle Bells,” it isn’t the same. Turkey and plum pudding are served and you sing “In the bleak midwinter” at the Advent service, with the sun streaming through the windows. Christmas dinner gravitates to the garden and you sit in the shade, sipping your drinks. Pavlova and fruit salad soon take the place of plum duff.

The day after everything is cleared away and families head off on summer holidays.

Christmas is a time for log fires and dark nights, snow and people gathering together, not thinking about mowing the lawn and weeding the garden. It belongs to winter. Christmas will never be the same for those of us who have ventured “down under.”

For, to emigrate now-a-days, you really must be going “down under”. The retirement home in Spain or France is only a short way from Britain. You can yo-yo back and forth, family and friends are not lost. Air travel means that America and Canada are only a few hours away.

But what a miserable article this is turning out to be. You probably, by now, envisage me sitting with a sopping wet handkerchief in my hand saying, “I want to go home.” Nothing could be further from the truth. New Zealand has been good to us. It turned out to be our kind of country and our sort of people.

I love this land. I love its mountains, its lakes, its bush. I love its warm seas and safe bays and the crashing surf of the Otago coast. I love its cleanness and lack of congestion and I love its people with their relaxed attitude to life. We have been back many times to Britain and when the plane comes in over those snow clad southern Alps and the rolling greenness of the Canterbury plains opens up beneath us, I feel the thrill of “coming home” and I am glad to be home.

On our first return trips to Britain we were V.I.P’d as the relatives from New Zealand. Shown off. But after a fortnight it became obvious we were in the way and disrupting the routine, so we would hire a car and become tourists in our native land. We no longer belonged as we used to, it was time to go home, but New Zealand wasn’t really home, Britain was home. No matter how well you succeed, how much you love the country you chose, the land where you were born is home.

Many people emigrate, few are truly successful. Homesick wives drag their husbands back because they miss mum. People come out thinking they are doing the country of their choice a favour and find it is the reverse. Others seeking “the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow” realise that there is none unless you work for it, and some seek Shangri-La but they bring their problems with them and there is no Shangri-La except the one you personally create.

I am sat here with the sun streaming in through the window. The first of the snowdrops and crocuses are in bloom and the tuis and bellbirds are feeding from the nectar containers I have hung in the trees.

We are on the edge of spring, you are entering autumn, our days are lengthening and yours are shortening, it’s early evening for me and morning for you. I am happy with my thirty years here and I would not turn the clock back.

But soon the phone will ring again and I know that I will want to be touching down at Manchester airport and stuck in a traffic jam on the M62. We have gained all we dreamed of but there is a price to be paid.

Glen Taylor.