Life Changing Times

I’m heading home to London today – from Lusaka, my home for the last two months. I can’t wait, I am beyond excited to go home, to be back in my own flat, to be with my children, to be back where everything is familiar and of my choosing.

And for the past nearly 8 years, I have written or said that about London multiple times – it has been my base, despite constantly leaving it for varying lengths of time for work. Work that brings me away, so that I can continue to be able to afford to live in London, ironic, much?

This would be the same London, which I left kicking and screaming, vowing that they would only bring me back in a box. And I stayed away for the next 27 years.

To say that London and I have had a love/hate relationship would be simplifying it, my associations with both the UK and London are complex.

I grew up as the child of two immigrants, people who came to London to make better lives for themselves. My father was fleeing the tyranny of Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, my mother came from what was then Yugoslavia – they met and then stayed for the rest of their lives in London. My father never once returned to his native Cyprus for the rest of his life.

The working title of my book, the part at least of my formative years, is “My Poxy Childhood’, which will give you some idea that things were very different behind the often glamorous and very polished external images of my childhood. But that is for another time.

I grew up in Wimbledon Village in the ’70s and ’80s, it was very white, elitist, wealthy, and British and despite my mother’s best efforts, we did not fit in. Like many children of immigrants, I grew up between our adopted country’s cultures and my parents birth ones. With the added dimension that my father was a professional gambler and he was loud, brash, and larger than life and cut a very striking figure in quiet, reserved, stiff upper lip Wimbledon.

I didn’t fit in for a whole list of reasons that would be a book in itself – I was awkward, socially inept, I viscerally disliked the show of wealth and privilege around me that others seemed to revel in and I was very, very different to pretty much anyone else. Leading to a whole lot of acting out.

Which in turn, led to me at 17 being packed off to Israel to a kibbutz for a year to get my act together. An unusual decision, but one that I believe inspired my lifelong love of travel, learning about new cultures, and the experiences that only immersing yourself in a new country can offer.

I went from there to the Netherlands, following the Dutch love of my life as he left the Kibbutz and realised after a couple of months of living in a small village called Wierden, mainly in the company of his 75 year old father, that perhaps love did not conquer all.

When I was coming close to my 19th birthday, back to London I went – you may see this theme running throughout this blog, I suppose the title may give that away. It was a turbulent 2 years there, yet again, events that could warrant another book in themselves.

As a slight aside, this is actually why I am slightly struggling to prioritise what to write in my book. I see many books written about any one of the many experiences I have had, people saying how transformative things have been, how a,b,c changed their lives irrevocably, how getting through and coming out the other side was an incredible journey, and so forth.

I quite genuinely don’t know where to start with my life, because the one constant I have is that those experiences keep happening. Ones that people talk and write about as life-defining, as one-offs, as I say, the content of entire books, are for me, par for the course. They are just as huge for me as for anyone else, but the difference seems to be that they just don’t stop.

I finally left London, for what I believed to be the last time. Over the next 27 years, I lived in Ireland, Bosnia Hercegovina, Kenya, and Lebanon and traveled and worked extensively across many countries around those regions.

Given this is not a travelogue, I will spare you the details of all the different countries and places, but I am extraordinarily grateful for some of the most incredible experiences. And some decidedly hair raising, (that word could also be traumatic…) ones that I am, with the gift of time and a lot of distance, equally grateful for.

For the first few years after I left, I traveled back and forth to London frequently, visiting family and friends. By the time I left Ireland, I had made the decision to estrange myself from my remaining family of origin, and almost all of my friends in London had faded away as my life was being lived elsewhere. I left Ireland for Kenya with one child and one husband, I left Kenya 7 years later with no husband and 3 children.

In 2010 I started working for Save the Children Somalia, and since the HQ was in London, the tendrils started to pull me back in – I had to travel back for meetings, conferences, and many other things. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been back and the first time I arrived in London, in Spring, it was like coming back to an entirely different city and country. (Note I mentioned that it was Spring..winter in London is a different experience…)

I loved it. I felt joyful, I was in parts of the city that held no memories or meaning for me, I felt the buzz, the diversity, and for the first time, I saw that London is an extremely beautiful city.

I still had no intention of returning, but I loved that I could see my hometown in this entirely new light. I’ve never belonged anywhere, to this day I do not feel allegiance to any one country, but I did like the fact that at least by virtue of my passport and my accent that I was as much a Londoner as anyone else there.

Fast forward to 2014. Racism had reared its ugly head and I needed to protect my family and get them out of Lebanon. The world becomes a very small place when you are looking for safe, welcoming places for a bi-racial, neurodivergent family where the only breadwinner has a career working in humanitarian settings.

Running the response to Ebola was one suggestion, but hardly a family posting. My eldest had recently finished university in South Africa and was with us in Lebanon, so we looked at moving to Cape Town. Looked hard in fact, and would have done so but South Africa made a sudden change in their visa requirements, making it impossible for us to go.

Then a job in London was reluctantly offered. I ignored the grudging nature of the offer as it was the least the organisation could do, given I was forced into leaving a posting because my family was experiencing racism. Not least I had absolutely smashed the job I had been sent there to do. So I found a fantastic school for my youngest two, my eldest was going to do a Masters which I would fund and she in turn would continue to live with us and support with the two little ones, who were then 7 and 8 years old.

They went ahead in late August 2014 so everyone could start their school and college years, while I finished up my contract notice period, to join them two months later. The two months when the reluctant London job offer was rescinded.

Another story for another time. But despite that rocky start, we loved London. Thanks to a friend in Lebanon, I managed to secure a consultancy contract to tide us over, and all four of us began a new life in London. The little kids loved their school, my eldest had never lived in the UK before and missed her life and friends in South Africa desperately – it was a mixed time for her, but she also loved what London had to offer.

From October 2014 to July 2015, I was incredibly happy. I felt proud that I had managed to set us up in London, that all of my children were thriving, we were all together, and that I could support my family somewhere that was undoubtedly good for them. I started to rekindle the joy, the love of life, the inner positive drive and I fed off the London buzz and energy, really feeling that despite all the setbacks, I could make it work.

In July 2015 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’m not sure, have I mentioned that life changing experiences just keep on happening?