Breathes there the man...

For most of my life, Scott's famous poem used to make me squirm with embarrassment. In the language of my Grandmother, he was 'making a cake of himself'.  In my grandmother's view, nothing was more to be frowned upon, more calculated to cast anyone beyond the Pale, than to make a cake of oneself.

I had only an imperfect knowledge of what making a cake of oneself entailed, but I had the vague idea that it meant you should not act soppy. Scott I considered was, in this poem, being soppy.

My students, however, love this poem as it fits in with their notions of hyperbole being the best way to express oneself. I have been known to ham it up disgracefully when I read it aloud: and the crowd goes wild.

But one day while reading it I found myself suddenly, and consumingly, overwhelmed. Which meant by extension that I was being soppy, of course.

Yet what I always used to dismiss as Jingoism became the impetus, finally, to waft me back to my native land.

But I'm finding that bellowing out "This is my own, my native land" and letting one's heart swell is not an automatic process.

 I remember coming back to England when I was 26. I stood on the upper deck of the ship as the Dover cliffs grew into view and howled my eyes out; while when one of the baggage handlers called me "Darlin'" I felt instantly accepted.

 I thought that was how it would be this time around too, but it isn't.

Perhaps too much water has flowed under too damn many bridges since I was 26.  There's been so many times I thought I was home and found I was mistaken. I just can't seem to adjust to the fact that I'm not passing through.  I'm not a foreigner.  For the first time in my life.

Like many other Expats, I grew up living in postings in various countries, but always regarded England as Home.  The place you go to between postings, and for holidays, or on Long Leave. Through all of my wanderings since then England has always remained Home.  The one with the capital H.

No matter where I've lived I've always been English.  It's part of what defines me.  It's a part of establishing my identity on a thousand documents. It's one of life's incontrovertible truths: I'm English.

So when I arrived here and found I had to fight for the right to come and live at Home again, I was both frightened and disbelieving. And this culminated when I was told rather sneeringly that, as I had never worked - i.e. paid taxes - in this country I was hardly English now, was I?

If I was 'hardly English' then what the hell was I?  Ever since, it seems, I can remember knowing I was "Cireena", I've also known I was English.  Without that, I'm only half me.  And, more prosaically, if I'm not English then where on earth would I go from here?

It did not seem to be the time to point out that my grandfather was a Gypsey - albeit an English Gypsey.

I've had the experience of having to get a plane out of one country and not knowing where on earth one is going to go to. It was scary. I'd thought that by coming to England I'd never have to be in that position again.  I'd never have to get on a plane and not know where to go. I'd have a permanent address.

However; slowly, slowly, in almost imperceptible increments, I'm starting to burrow in.   I finally was given a Social Security number. I now have an NHS number. And last week, though I've been here since October, I at last was able to open a bank account.  I'm becoming English.

The problem is that I don't actually feel English.  I am so used not to being part of the dominant population group; to being Other, that I just can't slip into Englishness as one would a pair of favourite old jeans. I don't feel like Us.  I still feel as though I'm Them in comparison to the 'real' English. The tax-paying English. With them I feel like an impostor.

Then to-day I forced myself out of the flat. Over the last 10 days or so the temperature has gone up a few degrees.  Not that I would have noticed this too much but the English certainly have.
Suddenly there are more cars on King's Road in front of the flat, and one has to use the lights to cross.  People are to be seen here and there in short sleeves. The occasional slices of pallid, white thigh can be seen slipping through the breeze.

 From getting dark at 4 in the afternoon it's now staying light till around 6.30.  This obviously is the timer; the signal to all that this is Spring.  Since the last time I walked in the Pavillion grounds crocus and snowdrops have joined the daffodils and colour is thrusting through the greys ad the browns. And  Brighton is coming to life.

Workers are erecting the Carousel.  Art galleries and shops have pulled up their shutters, beach umbrellas and chairs have sprouted up, music is playing, and people are walking on the shingle in bare feet.

The skeleton of the burnt pier just up from my flat was set, black and stark, in flat, pearl grey sea while the gulls circled noisily around and the Worthing headland was green instead of grey. So, just like a true born English man, I pushed a chair under an umbrella and sat in the light drizzle, outside, with a hot chocolate warming my hands and gazed around.

For the very first time I got a glimmer of what it was like to feel part of - if not the entire country - at least this small part of it.  That was my headland, and my pier.  I was not a visitor or tourist.  I'm not passing through - this is where I live.

Things are still precarious and I still remain poised, ready for something else to happen to cause me to leave. To have to move.  To be made, by circumstances, to go away.

But that glimmer of feeling must have meant something.  While not quite feeling as though I can claim the whole country, at least I can foresee the possibility (if I'm good; if the gods don't decide to 'ave a larf; if things don't take a sudden turn for the pear-shaped once more) that one day I will start to spell Brighton with a capital H.
                                                    ........................................

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.

My Little Corner of the World

Amongst all Phyl's (my mother's) hundreds of copies of sheet music was a song called My Little Corner of the World. She hardly ever played it so I can't remember much about it other than the fact that it contained some dreadful lyrics...I always kneeeeew I'd meetsomeonelike yeeew being among them - which was probably the reason it was rarely played. In any case, its not the song - merely it's title which has stayed with me for so long.

Because, though I knew I never wanted the picket fence/McMansion stereotype life (and divorced one husband to prove it), I was always confident that I would indeed find a corner of the world and finally stay put there.

It seems like each place I've ever lived in was never it. It seemed that, wherever I was, I was only there temporarily. As a kid changing schools was so much part and parcel of the school experience that I went almost immediately from being The New Girl to being an Old Girl continuously throughout my educational career. That's just how school was.

Of course, boarding-school when the time came, was always temporary as everyone just lived marking time till they could go home from the moment they arrived. But I remember one rather sickening period when I was absolutely convinced that I had no home, nor parents either.

My parents had moved to a country I had never heard of to which I was to fly for the next school holidays. Well my father had disappeared into the ether first, and, at the time of my leaving our last home at the end of those holidays, no confirmation of his arrival had been given. Actually, once I lived there I could think of a hundred reasons for this not to have happened - ranging from his secretary having a new boyfriend to the lines having been accidentally cut by someone digging a hole. (Both true at various times).

But at the time I was not even sure Papua New Guinea even existed so had no idea of island time. Or life. But, what happened after my mother followed my father out in the great unknown - and subsequently into dead silence - was that I panicked and roused a dozing nun to come and help me find the place they were ostensibly going on the huge convent globe.

We found Papua New Guinea at last (in a completely different place to where either of us were looking for it) but of this city called Boroko, supposedly the capital city, we found no trace at all. I was definitely an orphan.

Later, I discovered that Boroko was merely a suburb of the capital city, Port Moresy (seems impossible now that I had gone 14 years into my life without ever encountering it before) and that Phyl and Gee were fine and excitedly kitting out the new apartment which would be home until we found a house.

So I first went to PNG to a temporary place I'd never seen...and then my parents moved into a place I didn't see until the next holidays. I was probably the only 15 year old kid in the world who had no idea what her own home even looked like. But that was just temporary.

After that, everywhere I've ever been has been "just until...." Just until I finish Uni; just until my father gets better; just until I'm sick of it;just until I've had this baby; just until I manage to escape from this homicidal maniac; just until I get my head sorted.

I now find myself in another just until period and it has dawned upon me that this just until has no noun or dependent verb clause. Just until.....what?

My job here has definitely passed its use-by date. Oh, not that I wouldn't stay if offered a consultancy job with appropriate fees and my own accommodation downtown. But in the absence of a fairy godmother pausing in her pumpkin- to- palace work to conjure that one up, my time here is coming to an end. What the hell am I gonna do now?

I know this is not an unusual question. It strikes most of us, with vary degrees of urgency, anything from once a day to once in a lifetime. But, hey, I really MEAN it. What the hell am I going to do? As Lewis Carroll put it "But answer came there none."

Now this is not one of those existential meanderings into the deeper mysteries of life and our purpose in the universe. (Though I can toss one of those off every so often when prompted enough). Instead I find myself with two positions which are unceasingly chasing themselves around in my head:Am I irresponsible and immature?
Or am I a carefree spirit who lives up to her ideas?

Because it's probably all very well, if not de rigeur, to go gadding around the world, living in places most people aren't gonna get to go to even if they stayed home on Saturday nights and saved for year, when you are young and unattached. But, once you hit mid-thirties it becomes brave. By the forties it becomes sort of enviable but with a touch of sniffiness about it. But after that, I am beginning to fear, it is considered decidedly eccentric. Thus attracting such less-desirable judgements as silly bugger, crazy woman and the ever-popular off-with-the-fairies tag, just in case you thought you had a shred of credibility left.

I have come, since my last trip to the UK, to acknowledge that there is something a little unusual about a woman of my age, with two fully-grown sons, having no fixed abode. And not having a bank account. The two are mutually dependent: you can't get a bank account if you don't have a place, country, address of residence.

For the past two years I have given this as my address. After all, its where I'm living, isn't it? But when my contract is over where do I get them to book me a ticket to? There is no family home, no white-haired mother waiting by the fire with her knitting, no life-long friends, no family that has met me or the boys more than once or twice, nor any town with an old apple tree where I carved my initials.

Not even a trace, it seems, of my little corner of the world.

So is it time I settled down, bought a dog, shut up the cows and started to carve one for myself?

Should I claim a country/town/place and put down roots, and make friends and make sure my pension cheque is going to get delivered when the time comes? Should I start learning about income tax and super-annuation, and Getting Seriously Down to Work to Ensure my Future? Do I owe it to my boys to establish a home base? Am I - once again - scarring them for life.(Both of them ought to look like the Phantoms of the bloody Opera by now, with the amount of scarring I've bestowed upon them already). Should I have a verandah and learn to knit for the grandchildren that will one day (but please not too soon) be crying piteously for their Gran? Should I grow organic vegetables and brew herbal teas and become one with the earth?

Or, should I rejoice in the fact that I am at last free to make my own decisions? Should I continue to trust in the world and its inexplicable way of working things out? Should I go with my gut? Or acknowledge that my gut is actually situated these days up in my head. Which tells me that I am just not ready, gimme a break and anyway I might just fall under a bus tomorrow and all the questions would become moot anyway?

And finally...the one that just about clinches it for me, every time: if I don't see all the little corners of the world, how am I ever going to find out which one is mine?