On Home Novelist Alex Miller writes about emigrating from the UK and the pain of leaving family behind.
The distant memories of home and loved ones can tantalise and haunt you for a lifetime, as this award-winning novelist discovered.
More than 50 years after I left England to go alone to Australia, my younger brother Ross came out to visit me for the first time. On the last evening, he and I were sitting in my back garden under the apple tree, enjoying the last of a very large bottle of duty-free Glenfiddich he’d brought with him. Ross is nine years younger than I am and was not yet eight years of age when I left home as a boy of 16.
Since my departure from England, I had retained an image of my family standing there on the platform at London’s Liverpool Street station. In the steam and smoke of that dark November day in 1953, it was a tight little group watching my train pull out for the port of Tilbury and the other side of the world. In this last remembered image, Ross is standing between my father and mother, holding my father’s hand. My older sister Kathy and my younger sister Ruth are holding each other’s hands, standing close up against the skirt of my mother’s coat.
Sitting under the apple tree that autumn evening with my brother, who was now a man close to 60, I turned to him and said, “Do you remember seeing me off for the boat?” His wicker chair creaked. “Of course I do,” he said, and laughed. “We were all crying.”
“Was our dad crying?” I asked him. I was surprised. My memory of my father was of a tough, kind-hearted Glaswegian who never cried. “No,” my brother said. “No, Dad wasn’t crying.” How could I have thought our father might have been in tears? It surely showed how little I’d known him.
We sipped our whisky in silence. After a minute or two I said, “And you? Were you crying?” I wanted to know. I loved my brother. I was the one who had made up stories for him when he was little, to get him off to sleep at night. And I remembered his birth; my father coming out of our parents’ bedroom, his collar off and his sleeves rolled up, his face shining in the light of the coal fire, the three of us children sitting close together on the hearth rug in silence after all the wailing and screaming from the bedroom. “Come in a meet your wee brother,” my father said.
He had a lovely, happy smile on his face such as none of us had seen since he’d come home from the war. Our little brother’s arrival healed my father’s wounded soul and we loved Ross in a special way for it. His presence restored harmony to our family, and there was always a deep gratitude in the way we loved him.
Fifty years after leaving my family, I wanted to know that Ross had shed a few tears at the moment of my departure. When he didn’t respond to my question, I let the silence go on for a bit, then said again, “So, tell me, were you crying or not?”
My brother’s laugh was light and untroubled, as it always was. “Of course I wasn’t crying. Whenever we had a bit of a crisis in the family, Dad’s way of dealing with it was to promise we’d all go to the pictures when it was over and done with.” He twisted around in his chair and looked at me, a smile in his eyes. “I couldn’t wait to see the back of you.”
He picked up the whisky bottle, then carefully poured equal shares of the last of it into our glasses. “Whenever anyone in the family has ever mentioned the day you left home, I’ve always thought of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster kissing in the surf.”
Bynowthesunhadgonedownandtheairinthegarden was getting a bit of a chill in it. I suggested we go in and see how dinner was coming on. “At the end, when our mumwasdying,”Rosssaid,“Iwassittingwithher,holding her hand. The last thing she said to me was, ‘It will be all right when Alex comes home.’” He turned on his creaky chair and looked up at me. “Mum spent her life believing you’d be coming home one day.”