Years and years
There’s a map at my parents’ place. Ostensibly it’s of London but really, it’s only a glimpse of it, mainly of Bloomsbury. Resplendent with bookshops filled to the brim, cosy pubs, and blue plaques, it’s my mother’s favourite area.
I can remember lying underneath the map, legs outstretched on the sofa, head resting against the cushioned arm, book in hand. I’d look up, craning my neck at an awkward angle, to follow the line from Gray’s Inn Road along Theobald’s Road, up John’s Street, past Coram Fields, winding around to Russell Square. I’d reminisce over memories of walking those very streets with family, rugged up in winter coats, scarves wrapped high on cheeks, hands firmly in pockets, umbrellas raised against the soft rainfall, and would wonder when and what future memories would look like, would wonder what my life in London would look like.
*
Twenty years ago this English summer – this June and this July – I visited London for the first time.
I’d grown up with visits from my English grandparents but in 1999 it was time to return the favour. We visited for a month, and using my grandparent’s home in Berkshire as a base, we travelled to London, to Bath, to York, and to visit family.
My grandparents hosted a big, sprawling family party one evening. I don’t remember much of the night – many of the memories of that time are now drawn from photographs, that hazy blur between stories told and recollections of the past itself – but I do remember the buzz, the sense of lots of people spreading out through the downstairs of the house and out, into the back garden. My parents had bought me an outfit especially for the party. It would be the first time I met many of my family members and they wanted me to look smart and ‘presentable’; it was a Big Occasion. I was thrilled with what they’d chosen – a special red tartan kilt, complete with a small leather belt and a silver clip, fastening down the front. I wore it with a white top with lace tips to the collars, and with my favourite white socks, with a rim of lace above the ankle.
I don’t remember much of our time in London from that trip but I have often been told that it was unbearably hot and my parents had not been prepared for it. They hadn’t packed enough warm weather clothes for the English summer, and so were reduced to washing out my one white polo shirt and my navy pinafore dress every evening. Washing it there in the sink of our cramped Paddington hotel room, ready to be worn again the very next day. Over and over again they did this, for the week of our stay.
I do remember the light, though, the long evenings, the length of the summer nights. It must have been around the time of the summer solstice when I remember clambering up to the first-floor window of my grandparent’s bedroom. I waved my parents goodbye, watching them as they went down the driveway and off into the night. They were off to see the newly released Notting Hill and I remember so vividly the sense of the evening. It felt like midnight, so late it was to such a small child, and the light was still shining, held in that magical orange-tinged late evening glow before the deep blue of the evening pulls down the light.
Two years ago today I arrived at Heathrow with my life packed into three items of luggage: a red suitcase, a grey backpack, and a small handbag.
My uncle was there, waiting for me after work, and drove me back to my grandparent’s place. The month before had been a whirlwind of getting a job, leaving a job, farewelling my closest friends, leaving behind a beloved share house, and finding unknown flatmates via an online ad and a late-night Skype call. I yawned for the entire car journey to my grandparent's, despite having slept for much of the previous twenty-four hours, curled up in an exhausted slump.
*
I was recently called a Londoner and asked how that made me feel. I think I replied something along the lines of, 'happy, content, thrilled' but perhaps 'proud' is the predominant feeling. It makes me proud of having carved out a life for myself wholly on my own terms and wholly of my own making, proud of making new and rich and nourishing friendships in adulthood (rarely an easy task), proud of taking new opportunities, new challenges, and gaining new triumphs.
But it also makes me feel incredibly privileged, and incredibly aware of it. Two years is the time when commonwealth visas run out and so-called ‘expats’ are forced to turn home, or hand over piles of cash for visas and legal loop jumping and seemingly endless bureaucratically-determined time waiting. Yet the sheer privilege of being born with a dual national identity, and family spread across the world, means it’s easy for me to remain here. But even more than that - for so many, where and how they live is not a choice. There are no options, no decisions able to be made, no life they can make for themselves.
And yet, and yet, here I am,sweltering in the summer heat twenty years on, still marvelling at the length of light, at the difference of the seasons. Here I am soaking in what London has to offer, making new memories and taking new adventures, ambling, sunshine-filled evening walks along the river, winding under bridges.
*
I’m writing this, curled up on the sofa in my beloved flat in South London, looking up at the map on the wall. This one stretches further, deeper, the streets better labelled, being more factual than decorative. It follows the rolling curves of the River Thames, from Woolwich to Richmond, follows the streets and roads and parks from Forest Hill in the south to the southern edge of Hampstead Heath in the north.
I look at the map and pinch myself, still half unbelieving that I live in London. That it’s been two whole years.
"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
- The Naked City, 1948