Home at last

The very first time I woke up in this place, I was 15 years old. A roaring from somewhere had jolted me awake, and it took me a few minutes to realise that the sound was traffic 6 storeys below on Edgeware Road, London. It would be hard to find a greener, fresher, dopier adolescent than the girl I was at that time. I had never been overseas, and growing up in the unofficial apartheid that was Australia in the 60’s and 70’s, I had rarely had any meaningful interaction with any person of colour. I remember feeling scared of the West Indian ladies who worked at the Victory Services Club; their deep voices, serious eyes and dark faces were so unfamiliar to my narrow little white-bread life. Everything about London frightened me, and I avoided looking anyone in the face, in case I attracted unwanted attention, especially from men, who were another scary category of person. I might add that, at this point in time, my fears have only been justified by the latter category haha.

Now, 42 years later, here I am, staying at the same place and feeling the deep joy of unfraidness and security that seem to be one of the rewards of getting this far through life. I am on a solo trip for 5 weeks in Europe, after spending 2 years living alone for the first time in my life. Actually, I have had a couple of short periods of living alone, for a few weeks at a time: once when I was in Perth doing my Dip Ed, and the other in my very first rental when I was 19. This was supposed to be a house-share with another girl, but she was often away for weeks at a time, leaving me alone and frightened in a rickety old dump on Cambridge Street. I did have the sporadic comfort of my first boyfriend, but as he had untreated psychosis and paranoia, and was handy with his fists, his reassurance didn’t go far. My kind older sister was drafted by my parents to come and babysit me, but it became increasingly tricky to find plausible explanations for things like broken windows, or cryptic notes left on my bed from “your friendly neighbourhood psycho”.

Yet, as frightening and crazy as it was, I truly longed to be a grown-up who could handle the world, if only I knew how. My self-assigned crash course in adulting meant that I was not only living in this house, but training as nurse in the hospital across the road. That really was intense. At 18 and 19, we student nurses were laying out the dead, listening to people scream in pain as we rolled them over and trying to comfort grieving family members. We were too young to offer anything of great use, and most of our attention was focused on the frenetic business of becoming grown-ups. My trauma-free childhood of library visits, symphony concerts and predictable parenting hadn’t prepared me for any of this. With no claws or fangs for the jungle; no tools of any kind, save a childish charm, this was a very high cliff to jump off. Luckily I found a strong protector in my best friend on the course: a street-smart survivor who was grown up at 16. She was the person who dragged me out of childhood, and taught me how to be an adult in every way it is possible to be an adult; and I will always love her for that.

So, begin as you mean to go on, I continued to depend on the protection of others to keep me safe, until I finally landed on the unfamiliar shore of solo life at the age of 57. I never wanted to live alone, or be alone. One of the main reasons I lived on a rural block in the country for so long, was because it felt safe. No marauder would be bothered walking all the way out of town to my place, and by the time they arrived in a car, I would have found a place to hide in my huge, rambling house. Besides, the dog sounds like Cerberus, and would frighten the scariest baddie out of their skin.

When I first moved to Perth in 2020, I was living with my incredibly old parents at our decrepit childhood home. As the only capable adult in the house, and knowing that a five year old child could have easily broken in, I often lay awake at night, transfixed by phantom sounds. I’m a bit mortified to reveal that I called the police one night, because I “could hear” the footsteps of the monster man heading downstairs. It must have been a quiet night in Scarborough, because almost immediately, two teenagers in uniforms arrived, looking like the entertainment at a hen’s night. They were kind enough to roam through the entire house with their torches, and I was saved the embarrassment of telling my parents, as their deafness and proximity to death meant that they slept right through the whole thing.

By the time I finally moved out into my own home in this big bad city, I had two choices: roll with the fear, or go bonkers. Excellent security screens helped, as did the desire never to return to the cold, lonely dungeon at my parents’ place, which had seen so many tears.

Then something strange happened as I spent night after night, day after day alone, with only me to fall back on: I started talking to myself. My Mum and I had become single at about the same time, and we realised that we were both talking to ourselves. Swapping notes, we found that our self-talk was usually encouraging and supportive, a wonderful legacy of the careful parenting that we had both received. It generally ran along the lines of “It’s alright darling, just try it this way” or “what do you think ? Well, I think you should do this”, or occasionally, “come on old girl, buck up, worse things happen at sea.”

The upside of this business is that I have a little friend with me wherever I go. It sees what I see, does things with me, screams with laughter at my jokes and does a lot of problem-solving. Its constant presence means that I feel at home wherever I am, instead of being overcome by the strangeness of everything. So, even in a mediaeval setting of my childhood dreams, or looking up at the most iconic and recognisable monuments in the world, I feel the same me-ness as I do in my 1980s blond brick quadruplex in Osborne Park.

The downside is that my capacity for the excitement of displacement is diminished. The absence of splitting between real life and a fabulous, glamorous elsewhere means that the wonder and hit of being here is so much less than when I had to escape to be myself. It’s a solid feeling, but a bit unexciting. So here I am, alone in London at the Victory Services Club with half my life behind me, not teetering tremulously at the edge of my life. I’m happy to say that I no longer fear people who look different to me. I continue to recover from endemic racism and am not a complete dickhead. It feels so bloody good heading out onto the streets of Westminster alone at night, knowing that the whole neighbourhood is up for a late night feed and a hookah session till all hours, Mums, Dads, kids and grandmas. I’m home with them and I’m home with me. Life’s good