1. Where Exactly is Home?

When I visit England, though, I don’t feel at all British, either! I have lived so much of my life outside of Britain. I stare at the British coins in my hand, as I go to pay for something in a local shop. I don’t recognize any of these coins. I must turn them over to make sure which is which. I need to ask at a post office how much it costs to mail a letter, and, in the days before cell phones, I had to ask passers-by how much it would cost me to make a telephone call from a nearby public phone box. Yet I sound so very British. Whenever I go to Britain now, which is infrequently, I get to the point of prefacing every conversation, involving a transaction, with, “I know I sound British, but I haven’t lived here in decades, so I don’t know these things.” I am a stranger in Britain, too.

We were foreigners when my parents and their three children went to Zimbabwe, as well. We were disliked by just about everyone, but for different reasons. The Africans didn’t like us because we were white, and had taken over their country, not allowing most Africans the right to vote, nor to be educated as were the Whites; the Afrikaners, who were farming in the bush, didn’t like us, because we were British, responsible for fighting the Dutch-born Boers, at the turn of the 20th century, for control of South Africa and its riches. The Indian, or Coloured, population didn’t like us, because they were caught between the Whites and the Blacks, not feeling part of either, not to mention the fact that we, Brits, had been responsible for all sorts of injustices, committed by our forefathers, in their attempts to colonize foreign lands, including India itself.

One other country needs to be added to the above list: France, where I lived in the very rural backwater of Murat, in Cantal, Auvergne, for a year, and where I was a foreigner, too. Although I soon spoke fluent French, and still do, even now, my accent would give me away every time, not to mention the occasional faux pas I might make, too.

So where exactly is home to me? Nowhere, or somewhere? I have concluded that it must be here, in Canada, in what was once a town called Nepean, now simply part of the city of Ottawa. This is where my house is, the same house which my husband and I purchased when we arrived here, with our two young sons, all those years ago, in October 1987. Fortunately for us, and for many others like us, Canada is very welcoming of immigrants, and is used to many different accents and cultures. So, this, then is now HOME, to me. The past is, indeed, a foreign country, but this house, this city and this country, are home to me. Long may this continue!