During the last few lunch breaks, as respite from scripting e-learning, I’ve been watching chunks of a film I recorded over the Christmas break: Barry Levinson’s An Everlasting Piece.
I had high hopes when I recorded it, because it was set in my old home, Belfast, Norn Iron. It’s a film about two chancers who try to sell hairpieces to the baldy-men. The dialogue and the feel of the old place were ‘dead on’, but the girls didn’t really catch the drift of the dialect or the humour when we all sat down to watch it after the Christmas festivities. I felt the kind of embarrassment I feel when watching sex scenes with my parents or my child.
So, guiltily, I’ve watched on alone when Debs is at work and Tilley is at school. In truth, it didn’t really work, certainly not as a Barry Levinson film. It was no Diner, no Tin Man, no Rain Man. Yet I laughed my leg off, as we used to say over there, and it made me feel incredibly and inexplicably homesick.
Why on earth would any sane man, living in one of the most beautiful parts of this earth, feel such pangs of longing and nostalgia for an often damp and dreary industrial city riven by sectarian strife? Well, I don’t know, but it brought it home to me just how the soul of a place can infiltrate the soul of a man.
I love the home we’ve created here, but I’ve never really felt ‘at home’ as an Anglais in France. My wife spent roughly the same proportion of her childhood in Germany as I did in Belfast. Our formative years. As a result, perhaps, she feels European, while I still feel very much British. Continental Europe is still a strange and slightly scary place.
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| Under leaden skies - Belfast, Norn Iron |
When I took my wife to Norn Iron on the ferry from Stranraer some 15 years or so ago, I felt immediately and profoundly at home. I hadn’t been back for aeons. But, on driving through the tree-lined suburban streets of West Belfast and later spotting the bluish outline of the Mountains of Mourne further down the coast, I experienced nothing short of euphoria. It rendered me wobbly-kneed and moist of eye and I knew, if ever I had forgotten it, that this place had to be my spiritual home.
What is it about a place? Is it the people? Everyone knows the Northern Irish people are quite mad, but some of the most welcoming people in the western world. So is it because I’ve always found the French people ‘difficult’ and because we don’t partake of the same cultural references that I don’t feel entirely at rest here?
I suppose that what I have become is a rootless expat. It’s a strange label to carry around with you, expat. It conjures up images of Ian Fleming and his cronies drinking rum cocktails in Jamaica or bands of Brits on the Costa del Something, congregating in bars that sell pork scratchings and tepid beer. It’s not a label or a self-image that I’m comfortable with and I tend to avoid enclaves of British expats and do what I can to integrate with the local people.
No matter, my actual home is a house in a country that just doesn’t feel like home. The three of us always get very excited about any trip back to see friends and family in England and talk about ‘going home’. Then I get there and realise that England is just a country where I happened to be born a long time ago and where I lived in a series of different houses that were all home for a while. But England’s not home now either. After a few days, I start champing at the bit and longing for my actual home.
It’s a complicated business being a restless, rootless expat. It must be a lot easier to be born in somewhere like Wolverhampton and to spend the rest of your life there. At least you know where you are. So, from time to time, and particularly after watching a film about chancers and baldy-men, I ask myself: should I stay in a lovely home in a country that’s not home, or sell up and find a nice enough home in a country that’s really home?
France, England or Northern Ireland? Uch, I think I’m just being a silly tube and making life difficult for myself. I guess, to paraphrase the words of Marvin Gaye, ‘wherever I obey my cat, that’s my home’.
Profound and honest. It struck a chord as we were discussing the subject only yesterday during the four hour journey home from the ferry.
ReplyDeleteWe usually find trips the the UK unsettling to the emotions but it's not as simple as home-sickness. Nostalgic familiarity is balanced out by a cloying claustrophobia, terrible traffic and an amazement that so many people can be packed into such a small space. We have often speculated, if we returned to the UK, where would we try to settle ... and it's not at all clear.
Did you catch this recent article in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/08/expat-dream-turned-sour-jon-ronson ? A tragic tale of exactly the type of expat that you (and we) choose to avoid, people who make no effort to learn the language and integrate into French society.
We'll be here, happily, for many years to come but we do wonder what choices we will make as we get older. And, of course, the World will change a lot too over the coming years. I will always be an Englishman living in a foreign land and, however much I integrate, never a Frenchman or a Breton.
So, it's a compromise and a choice. I imagine a scene where I am sitting in a small lounge of a small terraced house in an English town with my head in my hands, rocking back and forth, crying out, "Why did we move? Why did we think it would be better? What have I thrown away?"
I'll be honest with my nostalgia and content with my (French) lot (Lot for you!) at least for the time being.