SEE YOU SOON
by
Greg Sudley
This is the story that is not often told about the feelings of those we leave behind when we emigrate. Greg's story is typical. Here it is in full.
(The feelings of those we leave behind when we emigrate has long been a subject we at Brits Abroad have stayed away from. We did several articles in the newsletter many years ago which led to a full article in The Sunday Telegraph Supplement, and the mail we received then made us realise the plight of those left behind can indeed be a very sad one. Greg Sudley has wriiten a series of artcles for us about his own experiences with his parents, and with his wife’s parents, and his grandparents, and although it is very sad to read his story I think the time has come to reveal what most of us do not want to know - that we have been less than caring when we packed up our own lives and emigrated abroad).
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR THE ENTIRE FOUR PART STORY.
Part One
We lived in a beautiful part of England close to Windsor and Maidenhead, and I had a first class collar & tie job at the industrial estate in Slough. Life was good. I was married, in my late 20’s, had two young children then aged 8 and 7 (Peter and Rachel) and we were buying our own three up, two down, typical modern English home. My wife Beryl worked in a bank, had good hours, and our kids went to a good school. The car I was buying was a reliable Hillman Estate and our weekends were spent exploring the superb countryside that lies west & south west from Windsor. Fishing, boating, hiking, and in the seasons we gathered bluebells, blackberries, and damsons. Our parents were all thriving and lived within a few hours drive. The kids had grandmothers and grandfathers, and we ourselves had an old spaniel dog named Whisky - he was that colour and that good!
So why, with all that going for us should we suddenly decide after just a few discussions and inquiries decide to change our whole life by saying goodbye to everything we had worked for, and chance all our lives on a journey to another country where who knows how our fortunes would turn out. Why? To this day, if I sit down and try very hard to think about it all, I don’t really know why. Bravado? Because it’s there? Pushing the envelope? Selfish adventure? Perhaps we thought we could go where we wanted to go, do what we wanted to do, and if it’s not to our liking we can all go back to what we had. More like the latter perhaps. But in all this we gave little thought to one huge emotional problem - our stay-behind families. Why did we think so little about them? Because when we thought about leaving them it made us sad, and life tells you not to think about things that make us sad, even if we have the power to deal with those sad thoughts, and put things right. I think it’s better labeled as ‘selfishness.’
When we all sat down with our parents and talked about leaving they were the first ones to reassure us that ‘your lives are ahead of you, we’ve had ours,’ and that other good old stand-by, ‘look at it this way, you’re doing it for the children.’ Let’s get one fact straight. We didn’t emigrate for the sake of the children. They had no say in it, they were not consulted or considered in the final analysis. Their schooling, their life, their friends, never came into it. They were content living the way they were, and they would have done just as well, if not better, if we would have stayed in England. No, the initial idea was mine. I’d heard about Canada from friends at work who had friends in Canada. I heard about the wide open spaces, the big apartments, the job opportunities. It was America, without the glitz and the glamour. It was close - but not too close.
Part Two
I’ll skip the part about our feelings and how we all felt arriving in a different country from England. As an avid reader of the Brits Abroad website you get many stories about the adjustments the newly arrived British immigrant has to make once emigrated. Like everyone else who emigrates we didn’t look back and only looked forward. It was fun to start with. Getting a place to live and getting a job, neither in fact were hard to attain at all. Soon we had our place furnished, bought a good used car, and began settling down to our new life. Peter and Rachel started school and like most children their age (8 & 7) settled in very quickly. Kids that age are all the same, no matter who they are or where they’re from.
After the first six months (September 2000 through to the February 2001) we had now got used to most things and had only a few things we were finding hard to adjust to. These were minor in the complete picture of settling in so we gave everything our best shot. We didn’t find the Toronto area that interesting, but then we were just feeling our way around. We knew we’d seek out other places in Canada to live. Then, in the cold winter of 2001 as February drew to a close we got a telephone call from my brother Grant. Dad was ailing. His smoking had finally brought on emphysema and he was not going to last much longer. My first reaction, selfish as it seems now, was, ‘okay, keep me posted, and if he gets worse let me know.’ My brother called again a week later. ‘Dad wants to see you.’ ‘I can’t just up and leave,’ I said and Grant replied, ‘well you bloody well did last year giving little thought to Mum and Dad then.’ The words suddenly hit home. I up and left with an ease that now on reflection frightens me, and here I was being asked to return home to visit my dying father and I was coming across as if I was being put out. I told Grant I’d be there but I needed a few weeks to arrange the time off from work and to see Beryl and the children were alright. The cost wasn’t a factor. Bank loans were offered to me from every corner so I just took out one to cover the flight and a few other essentials, and called Grant and told him I’d be over on the 21st March and I’d stay for two weeks.
Dad was very ill. He was put into hospital just before I arrived, and when I was at his bedside, with tubes up his nose and oxygen being pumped into him, he smiled a weak smile through his shattered eyes and squeezed my hand. Three days later he died. I called Beryl and she was devastated. She wanted to be there at the funeral, but that was out of the question. We bore Dad to his grave three days before my return flight and I spent those three days with Mum, Grant, and Beryl’s parents, Bob and Sandra. The atmosphere of course was over-bearing and full of sadness, but I detected something else. Mum was not as close to me as she had been in the past. Grant was being difficult, saying, ‘well, fulfilled all your dreams have you?’ I knew there was a barrier building between us, and when he finally said very sarcastically, ‘Don’t worry old chap, I’ll call you when Mum gets ill.’ It hurt. Even Beryl’s parents were distant. I’d taken their daughter and their grandchildren across the world and it now appears we’d only be back for funerals. I flew back with a heavy heart.
Part Three.
Returning to Toronto after attending the funeral of my father was one of the hardest times of my life. My only moment of joy was to be back with my wife Beryl and our two children. Beryl had taken my fathers death a lot harder than I expected and had become very depressed. We talked a great deal about the recent events and she became very clear just why she was having a hard time. ‘What do we do Greg if my mother or father suddenly become ill. We can’t keep on flying back to England everytime someone gets ill. I couldn’t go on my own anyway. I couldn’t leave the children.’ She looked at me as she often did with her eyes begging me to come up with the right answers. I didn’t have any right answers at that moment, and a fear of having done the wrong thing in emigrating in the first place started to build. We all go through the required period of ‘positive adjustment’ where we justify our decision to emigrate and see everything new to us through the best rosey coloured glasses we can mentally put on. We rarely start out with a negative reaction to everything that’s foreign to us, so keeping a good attitude was important, but it wasn’t helping with what was actually happening to our lives.
Our telephone bills began to climb even though we had a rate of only 10 cents a minute to the UK. Beryl and the children spent many hours on the telephone talking to her parents and to my Mum. I talked at length on the telephone with my brother Grant trying desperately to reverse his attitude about me leaving and not caring about our parents, but he still wasn’t convinced. ‘Tell me,’ he said in a firm voice, ‘is it really, I mean really, any better in Canada than it is here in England. Are you happier, better off, and loving every minute?’ I had to pause after he said that, because at that very moment, with Beryl missing her parents and the kids wanting to be with their grandparents, and me missing my Dad and wanting to be there to comfort my mother, the thing I wanted most, at that very moment, was to be back with them all. I did tell Grant that I had achieved a great deal in the short time I was in Canada by getting a well paying job, an excellent place to live, and a good car, all, in a few short months. ‘So you’ve done well laddie, but tell me, are you happy or are you just waiting until all this sadness goes away so you can get on with your barbecues and your trips to Niagara?’ I didn’t answer him, but what he said that day hit home, and hit hard.
The hardest thing any newly arrived immigrant can admit after making that huge, gigantic decision to emigrate, is that you might have made a mistake. You ask yourself: ‘How can I be wrong. It works for just about everyone else from Britain, so why am I having a hard time to adjust?’ I had heard through friends that quite a large number of Brits have returned home, some after as much as seven or eight years in Canada, and that most of them would not admit to making a ‘mistake’ in emigrating, saying only ‘family commitments’ called them back home. Well I was getting a ‘call.’ A call that said to me I belonged with my family, with Beryl’s family, with my own countrymen, with my own habits and pastimes, in my own country where a Brit truly belongs. The fact is people there still needed me. They still needed Beryl. They needed to be around our children. We were being missed. And we were missing them.
FINAL PART:
It seemed as if my life was not my own and that people and circumstances were forcing me to make changes that deep down I really didn’t want to make. Canada was growing on me. Toronto was taking longer, and since arriving we’d done well. But what we had left behind was now foremost in our thoughts and foremost in what we should do to make things right. Being forced into doing something you don’t want to do can make a person single minded, awkward, and difficult, and sadly that was happening to me. I knew I had to be with my family back in England, if my family back home was indeed that important to me. It was not the biggest consideration in my original plan to emigrate, as it isn’t for all of us who decide to emigrate who have parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends, otherwise we wouldn’t leave. But we do, in our hundreds of thousands, and we give little thought to those we left behind. All the ‘good lucks’, the ‘see you soons’ from them do not sink in until you’re settled abroad and along comes a huge family problem back home.
With my father buried, my brother giving me a bad time, and my mother now feeling heartache and isolation, let alone the gentle but consistant pressure we were getting from Beryl’s parents, mainly about ‘their’ grandchildren, it was obvious we had to return to England. I knew what I had to do. I had to take my family back and move into my mother’s house and look after my mother until she passed away. This would end all the worry for all of us and make my mother happy, my brother who was married and had his own life in England - happy, and send Beryl’s parents over the moon. So our about face would settle everything and make everyone happy - except maybe me.
My dissapointment was not matched entirely by Beryl and certainly not by our two children. Baryl was going home to her parents and taking ‘their’ grandchildren back to them. Our children, whilst settling in well at school in Canada, missed a lot of the things they had grown up with and missed being part of a huge visiting-back-and-forth family. Me, I missed my now departed father, and of course my mother, but I now had to resettle (house fully provided thank goodness), get a job, and start all over again.
Every emigrant knows that once you up and leave and start your new life abroad the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do is - go back. Most of us are committed to staying in our new country even before we arrive there. We are full of optimism, full of get up and go, and even if things do go radically wrong we are loathe to admit it. I met a chap from Manchester who had been in Toronto 22 years. He’d lost his wife (she left him), lost job after job, was living in a basement, ran an old clunker of a car, but still, in spite of being close to destitute himself kept saying through his craggy moustache and beard, ‘I couldn’t go back no matter what.’ Do, or die. Never say die. To the bitter end. Your choice.
We decided to return. We told everyone, and a huge ‘coming home’ party was arranged at my mother’s house. My brother even got a few job interviews lined up for me. The day came to fly out and I handed the apartment keys to the manager. ‘You’re not the first who’s done this,’ he said, ‘and you won’t be the last.’ But to me it felt like I was the only Brit to ever give up and go back. But as Beryl told me, ‘you’re needed Greg. We need you, your Mum needs you. This is for them as well as us.’ Moral of this story? Consider those left behind.
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