Not Me by
Debbie Broadhurst
“Dad,
last night I had these dreams about the English Countryside”
“But how could you? You’ve never been there.”
“I know, and…I felt terribly homesick, I think I’d like to go
back there one day.”
“If that’s how you feel, then perhaps you should.”
I'm sixteen; it's sweat pouringly hot. Dad and I are walking a
short distance up a street in the midday heat, mad dogs and Englishmen.
Safe suburban Jo'burg, where I was born and grew up and when white people
still walked. Homesick for England? For a place that I’d never been to?
It made no sense, but the feeling did. A strong, inexplicable sense of longing
that I don’t feel for South Africa. Yet somehow it's supposed that I should,
that it's a given, that people who leave their countries of birth, long for
them and want to return to them; that this is only natural. In South Africa, we
were always two things, and South African came second. I was English-South
African, my best friend was Portuguese South African, then there was Yasaar who
was Indian and a second class South African who had to live in a place where
only Indian South Africans lived. In my mind, my best friend had a Portuguese
accent when she spoke and Yasaar has an Indian accent, I suppose I must have
had an English one, yet when I came to live in London, I realised how South
African my accent is. How flat my vowel sounds are and how I use phrases that
are South African, and struggle to remember that a traffic light isn't a robot
neither are trousers, pants. How deluded I had been for so long. Naively
imagining that I would leap off the plane and blend seamlessly with the general
populace, that they would see me as one of them, all because I find Stephen Fry
amusing and have a weakness for pork pies and scotch eggs.
“So, where you from then?”
“South Africa.”
"Oh, really, you don’t sound South African.”
“Yeah, I know my fath....”
“I thought maybe you were Australian or from New Zealand. So
how long have you been here?”
“About 6 years now.”
“Why on earth did you come live here? Such lovely weather! Are
you from Cape Town?
“No, I’m from Johannesburg”
“Oh, I was thinking of going to Cape Town."
"Yeah, it's great."
"So how do you manage to live here, are you on a
visa?"
“I have a British passport.”
“A British passport? How come?”
“My father was English.”
“Was English?”
“Well, he’s dead now…”
“Oh I’m sorry… How long ago was that?”
“That's OK. He was from London...”
“Really? So, do you think you’ll go back?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I hate the place...”
“Surely it can't be that bad! How about your mother?"
“We don't get on.”
“Right. Don't you get homesick?"
"No, never, haven’t felt it once.”
“I don’t believe you, that’s not possible."
Yes perhaps that’s true. Peas. I can see the boiled frozen
peas on the plate with the slab of battered fish and oven cooked chips. Exactly
as Mum makes them. Except I’m not at home. I’m in a pub in Kingston-upon-Thames
and outside: it’s nasty. Grey, dark, cold, wet. In a snug, smoky pub,
staring at the menu, feeling homesick. Homesick for Sunday roasts, bangers and
mash, pie and chips.Home, the word sticks in my throat. Home to me is my
cupboard flat in Greenford, not Jo'burg. Why does my heart ache when I leave
London, even for small periods of time? Why is it when I got off the plane at
Heathrow, 6 years ago, I thought as my feet touched the tarmac, that I had
finally come home?
Standing here in my skin, with my bones, and molecules. I feel
more at home than I ever did in the place I was born and grew up in. I love the
cold, the long winters, truly. We are the sum of our ancestors. Our skin, bones
and molecules was theirs to begin with. I can’t explain it, but I suspect that
my molecules come from here and I belong here, that if you cut me up and analyse
my DNA you’ll find that I am English. This is how I walk in my head: I’m
English, I always was, even back in the oven. I’m reminded every time I open my
mouth to meet someone for the first time that I’m not. To them I am and always
will be South African, despite my fanciful notions about blood and sinew and
molecules and I'm angry and confused about my identity and every time anyone
asks me where I'm from, I feel like I'm going to explode, deluded Debbie
emerges and she wants to say: isn't it obvious? I'm English like you, why are
you even asking? Don't I look it? Don't I seem it? I guess not, otherwise they
wouldn't be asking now would they? My uncle says perhaps people are just being
polite, trying to make small talk, which if that is the case, I've been getting
angry for all these years for the wrong reasons and I'm really not as English
as I think I am.
Copyright
Debbie Broadhurst 2006
Not Me was read by Debbie Broadhurst at the Lyric theatre in
2006, part of Shepherds Bush Writers
Group's
contribution to the Westwords festival.
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