Origin and belonging

One evening, many years ago, I was in a pub with work colleagues when out of the blue one of them stood up (slightly the worse for wear) and let rip in a strong, deep, Northern Irish voice:

"It's alright for you feckers, you know where you come from. Me? I've got a Belgian father, a French mother, was brought up in Belfast and have lived most of my adult life in London. What does that make me? Who the feck am I?"

He had a point. He didn't feel an affiliation to any one single place, let alone a country. It got me thinking, and 35 years later I still think back to that outburst and how, when I came to consider the question of belonging, realised that I too would find it hard to pin myself firmly to one spot. The more time I spent weighing up the past the stronger came the realisation that I had in fact attached myself to several. The ease with which I have done so suggests that I'm easily persuaded and that my patronage is not hard to secure. Shall we look at the evidence?

1958. Balham, London. My birthplace, in a maternity hospital that has now been converted into flats. Apart from my fortnight as a new born baby attached to my convalescing mother this is the only time that I can claim to have lived in Balham, but regardless of the short stay it has an undeniable hold on me. Well into my adulthood the only things that I knew about Balham was that it was often referred to as the 'Gateway to the South' and in Bedford Hill it had an area with a colourful reputation (lit by red lights). But the location that was written on my birth certificate meant something to me all the same. In later life I went in search of the building I had been born in and stood outside wondering if any of the windows that I could see belonged to the room in which I had come into the world. I imagined being carried out through the front door and onto the street, no doubt heavily wrapped against the chill January weather, to be taken home. I felt quite moved by these thoughts and looked around from where I stood with an undeniable sense of belonging - this came very easily to me. 

1959 - 1962 Streatham, London. My claim to be a south London boy was maintained for just a few years longer. It was here that I experienced my very first memory (ants crawling over a garden path) which is my sole memory from this time. Subsequent understanding of any 'belonging' rests on visits made in the mid-to-late1960s when returning to visit my aunt and uncle (who lived in a prefab) and was then shown my historical footprint by my parents, such as the church I was christened in; where we lived; and my grandparents home. It is also when I fell under the spell of the orange street lights and the hum of a city - trains, traffic, people - sights and sounds that the Hertfordshire countryside largely lacked. It was, to my evolving mind, exotic, something that would have been mine but for the move away a few years previously. So I adopted them by proxy, took back what I felt belonged to me. And later, when we moved back ‘south of the river’ in 1971 I would often catch a bus from our then home in Sutton and get off at Mitcham and take the long walk up Mitcham Lane and into 'my' part of Streatham. Again I easily fell into feeling as if I belonged here and thought of these streets as a part of my DNA. I was, after all, a South London boy.

1962 - 1970 Tring, Hertfordshire. They say you never forget your first love, and this picturesque market town was mine. I was joyously happy here, the sun always seemed to shine and my infant and junior school days were carefree and untroubled. I have already written about my 'Tring time' on this blog which can be read by clicking here. When my father announced that we were going to move back to South London I didn't want to go and can see with hindsight that doing so triggered a domino effect that made life pretty crap for the next four years. During this unhappy spell I harboured dreams of one day returning to Tring to buy my childhood home, which I can see now as a desperate attempt to resurrect what had been lost. I didn't, but Tring is undeniably a special place to me. I last visited in 1990 but almost dare not do so again - I don't want to trample over those golden memories, ruin my visions of the places I cherished. Tring for me will always be a sunny day in 1967, riding my bike around the neat and manicured streets to the sounds of the pop music that populated the 'summer of love'.

Well, here I am as an 11-year old, surely by now the seeds of belonging would have been sown and the outcome of where I truly felt at home would have been finalised. But there is one more contender, a place that I have never lived in at all...

All Cannings, Wiltshire. Back in the late 19th-century my paternal great-grandparents moved from the Vale of Pewsey, an area of farmland nestled at the base of the Pewsey Downs and took up residence in South London. A number of family members remained in Wiltshire however which is why at the height of the Blitz during the Second World War my father was evacuated there. He always spoke fondly of his time in All Cannings and painted a picture of carefree roaming across the fields and along the banks of the Kennet and Avon canal. It left such an impression on him that he moved back there when he retired. It was then, on frequent visits that I myself was exposed to the areas potency. It didn’t take much for the fantasist and dreamer within me to accept its warm embrace. I could see the gravestones of my ancestors; enter the churches in which they were christened and were wed; drink in the pub where they once drank. I would take myself up onto the hills that look down onto this rich farmland and see the satellite of villages orbiting around All Cannings - Stanton St.Bernard, Alton, Honeystreet - all places where the Gale family line had once lived. There was an undoubted connection. I felt as if I belonged. Fanciful? Most probably, but there was a deep-seated feeling of welcome that came from the ground. A welcome home.

So, do I belong to the Wiltshire farmland (ancestral home), South London (birthplace) or a sleepy market town in Hertfordshire (happiest time)? Before I try and answer that, there is one other place of belonging that needs to be considered, and that is a very large place indeed…

Chalk. I seem to have unwittingly gravitated to the chalk, especially the downland. It’s as if it has drawn me to its crumbly white substrate. Those hills above my ancestral Wiltshire home are of chalk, the Chilterns that rise above Tring are also chalk. I have lived on the North Downs chalk for 40 years. When it comes to being out in the field, whether birding, botanising or just enjoying a good walk, it is downland - chalk downland - that I seek out and feel at one with. Southern chalk. It doesn’t matter where, it could be in Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Sussex, Surrey or Kent. The smell of wild thyme and marjoram, the banks of orchids, migrant birds moving along its contours, Eric Ravilious's landscape watercolours, the White Cliffs of Dover, ancient dykes and barrows, carved hill figures, pilgrim’s footpaths, big skies. All mine, as if my white bones and the chalk beneath my feet are as one. Connected.

My origins and belongings? All of the above. Can I have them all? I can, and not through some compromising gymnastics within my thought process but with a genuine acceptance of them all being of equal merit. I often used to think that it must be a pleasurable thing to be undeniably tied to one place, to live in a village all your life, to be able to seek out the entire family history within a mile or two of where you live, have roots that would run deep and true and could not be up for discussion as to their provenance. But now I'm not so envious of such things. I'm quite proud of the many places that I call 'home'.