EP Back-Track: "Summerdown"
How some time in England rooted me in a firmer sense of belonging and the
concept of "home" through growing closer to the spiritualism of my birth-place.
I never thought I could a write a song about my hometown.
Life as a TCK -or any other traveller who leaves their home for a long period of time - definitively deconstructs this worldwide human attachment to place - defined succinctly as "home".
As a child of expat parents, my connection with England was intermittent. I was born there, but I left after 6 weeks. We returned for summer holidays (we'd kept our house), we met with the relatives, dropped in on the grandmas.
When my family left Kuwait when I was 5 we went back for a few years. I did my nursery school and first years of school just down the road from our house. I made friends, I wore the uniform; I have fond memories of walking the green Wiltshire road to my classes with my mother and doing the same the way back, salivating to get to my peace-time with a cup of sweet, milky tea and biscuits and sit in front of the children's hour on TV.
We had school fêtes and sang hymns in the morning, sang at the village church for Christmas and I played with my friends in the woods (sometimes my friends garden with its elaborate, Dad-made treehouse). And then we left. England was no more.
Since then, it was the Netherlands for five years at a very international school, we returned to England for three months (there was some moving trouble so we had no choice), then Qatar for the rest of my youth. I can recall strongly in Holland when the school did an International Day. Fun right? Everyone brings something from their national cuisine, maybe wears a national dress, does a bit of stage performance of some kind - poetry, song, theatre, comedy. Sure, easy enough when you've been in your country long enough to know something, or there's something about your nation that you're particularly proud to share.
What did I share? What food did I bring? How did I dress? Nada.
My family were so much travellers that we weren't too interested in carrying England with us, we had more to bring from Nigeria or Kuwait than we could collectively exchange about England. On another note: what would interest people about England? I know more now, and it was an adventure over a long period of time to understand what there was to love and share about my country.
After visiting Uganda and Brazil in the winter of 2018-19, I found myself back at home in Wiltshire, where my parents had been living once again after leaving Qatar in 2014. It was on training for a planned bike tour of Wales that I properly got to know and fell in love with the English countryside. I felt once again in a foreign country, with so much to know and understand, and to explore. On my bike I was free to roam. Eventually I'd worked the strength to carry my guitar up Wiltshire's undulating hills (my money-maker and companion-to-be on the Welsh adventure) and began to busk in the towns and cities around.
From the Wessex Downs through the Pewsey Vale to Devizes, Marlborough, past the ancient stones of Avebury to the megalith of Stonehenge in Amesbury, I would soon land in Salisbury, spreading my voice around the stone facade of its grand cathedral. So much history in this little county of England. My mum once called it the "last frontier of the English countryside"; a few towns and small cathedral cities dotted around an almost untouched wilderness surrounded by farmland. Even then, the Celts built Stonehenge and the other megaliths 6000 years ago, the largest of its size on the isles and soon discovered to be a homing point for the ancient Celts of Western Europe to gather and pay homage to their gods and customs - a sort of Celtic 'mecca'.
It soon became apparent that my home was truly fascinating. I began joining folk music circles in pubs around my home, and was enthralled by the talent and tunes to be listened, bringing this - my - enclave of the English kingdom to life and enchantment.
Being English was finally fun, and I was growing more happy of what I had been given (in any 'loose' sense of the word) to call home.
Home is where the heart is, they say... Home is where I lay my hat... As a TCK, traveller, migrant, nomad - whatever - you can wear many hats, and fragments of your heart can be shared infinitely to each new place.
But defining a place as home, somewhere to cherish above the others, or more: your pin on the compass, your heart centre, "stopping point" - homebase - is valuable.
Just like the Celts had Stonehenge and the Muslims have Mecca; I have Wiltshire, my spiritual centre... and a little house overlooking one of its seven White Horse Hills, an iconic image of my childish mind. A house on the Avon River called "Summerdown".
