Part One:
It was homesickness that got me started on doing a newsletter in the first place. I have suffered from it for countless years, and I still do to this very day. Oh, it’s not your cruel debilitating desease that requires doctors visits, medicines and anti-biotics, but it still is a very real inner pain that there is no medicine for, and something not much understood by your stable and un-nostalgic friends. So what is it? Why is it? And how do you deal with it.
Let’s go back in time to when I was a kid of five in a hospital (it was a converted country house) near Bridport in Devon, and I had just broken my arm. I was taken from my home and my mother, put in a bed in a Dettol smelling room, that looked out across a very large and tidy garden. I was scared. Scared to be alone in a strange place. So fear of sorts is a part of being homesick. A loss of something familiar, something that felt safe, and people around you you knew.
A few years later I was leaving my home and mother again, this time as an evacuee from Lewisham in London to a farm in Owlesbury, Hampshire. The first few days on this farm, in spite of a most friendly lady named Mrs. Pritchard, drove me to bouts of tears, and terrifying nights in a bedroom attic with a candle, and one other terrified boy. Plain and simple - I was homesick. With other evacuee boys and Mrs.Pritchard’s own two boys the homesickness subsided and my stay there turned out to be one I had tears for when I left over a year later.
As the war ended I found myself being cared for by a woman in Chandlers Ford before my mother left her factory work to come and join me and bring my baby sister Ann with her. I was less than a year in this woman’s care, and although she was kind she was not the type that read bedtime stories or gave you any praise. Under her control I felt an unusual kind of homesickness, a sort of - do it or I’ll tell on you!
My days in the army when I was posted to Kenya and Germany brought on its own kind of homesickness that was really just a mild longing to get your service over with and get back home. There were many times during my five years of army service when I longed to be home, but you always knew you’d be going home eventually. But the worst kind of homesickness I’d ever feel began in my middle years and is one you cannot count on ever coming to an end.
Emigrating is a whole set of hopes and dreams you pray will all come true, and the last thing you contemplate is homesickness. After all, you’re a grown man and you know exactly what you’re doing - right? Actually, the answer is, no. I never figured most of the things I took for granted in everyday life in London would not be available in Canada. I never figured people might not like me because I’m English and because of what my ancestors did to the Irish in Ireland and to the French in Canada! I never figured my favourite sports, like football (soccer), rugby, and cricket would be second and third class sports in Canada. And so on.
Soon, the homesickness came flooding in, and I fled back home, only to find you can’t reverse the migrant leap that easy. Your balloon has burst. Your bridges are burned. You’re in no-mans land. So back you go for one more try. And once again all you fled from is still there - only bigger and nastier!
