8. A Place to Stand, A Place to Sit.

In the autumn of 1998 I became a grandfather for the first time. My granddaughter, Courtney, was born in Saudi Arabia and, at the age of four weeks, made her first overseas trip, travelling with her American-born mother to visit myself and my wife in London and her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Courtney has three passports, British, American and New Zealand.

Courtney’s father, my eldest son, has two passports, British and New Zealand, and an American green card. He made his first overseas trip when, as a child of five, my British-born first wife and I took him, together with his four year old sister and two year old brother, on a package holiday from Britain to the Black Sea coast.

 

I was born in Scotland and first acquired a British passport at the age of nineteen in order to hitchhike around Europe. My first air travel, at the age of twenty seven on a rackety old Vickers Vanguard turboprop from Heathrow to Glasgow, was paid for by John Laing Construction who I was contracted to at the time on a research project. In my thirties, after becoming a New Zealand citizen, I obtained a New Zealand passport too. In 1998 my renewed British passport also became a passport for the European Community. 

 

My mother, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and father, born in London, England, obtained their first passports in their late twenties to take up nursing and teaching posts respectively in Nigeria. Although living in England for most of their lives, they never travelled to Europe.

My paternal grandparents never travelled outside Britain. Nor did my maternal grandfather. My maternal grandmother had one overseas trip when she went to South Africa in her seventies to visit her eldest daughter.

The potential for cultural dislocation in these changing travel experiences is clear. One of the conventional concepts of culture is that it provides a localised focus for a sense of personal and group identity, a shared sense of place. Here, across the five generations from my grandparents to my grandchildren, there is increasing dis-place-ment, geographically, socially, psychologically, culturally. And it is a common pattern.

 

It is relatively easy to ‘place’ my grandparents in their economic, social and cultural contexts. On my mother’s side, lowland Scots, hard working petit bourgeois Edinburgh shopkeepers whose social and cultural life was built around family and the Presbyterian church. On my father’s side, Londoners, granddad travelling to the city daily and working his way up from office boy to boardroom in an import-export merchants, grandma managing the suburban Wandsworth home of five growing sons. Both families are readily defined by the parameters that social scientists long considered appropriate for capturing and mapping social structure and social change - ethnicity, nationality, class, occupational status, social mobility, residence, religion, marital status, family size. Such categorisation, while it simplifies and distorts the reality of my grandparents’ lives, and masks the richness and sadness of their experience, nevertheless gives them an apparent location within relatively fixed boundaries, a ‘place’ of their own.

The categorisations of social science, the storylines and scripts of history, the images of portraiture and photography, the selectivity of memory, all have the power to fix our forebears, to locate them, to give them a substance that they possibly never had, and to provide stereotypes and veneers that hide the anxieties, confusions and terrors of their subjectively lived experiences. For the generations who lived through two world wars and The Great Depression, for example, how could it be otherwise?

Our desire to pin our ancestors to some fixed place is a function of our own sense of dis-place-ment, dis-location, a mirror trick of perspective. In reconstructing our ancestors we construct a sense of ourselves. Indeed in many societies, naming conventions from generation to generation, usually predicated on patriarchy, reinforce a sense of family continuity - Johan Rasmussen’s son, Erling Johanssen; James A Baker II’s son, James A Baker III. In Maori society knowing your whakapapa, your genealogy, is part of the process of knowing yourself and of identifying you within the wider Maori community. Magazine articles on prominent Maoris respect the tradition. A profile of the poet Hone Tuwhare, an ‘elder statesman of New Zealand literature’, identifies him as ‘Northland Maori of Nga Puhi, Ngati Korokoro, Tautahi, Uri O Hau and Te Popoto ancestry’. The success of Alex Haley’s Roots, and the massive growth of interest in genealogy in recent years, are testaments both to our need to find a psychological place for ourselves in the modern world and to the displacements of our personal and family histories. It is as though grasping something from the past provides the ballast to stabilise the present, an emotional compass for that night sea journey that is life.

But emotional compasses change in strange and surprising ways as a consequence of physical and cultural dislocations. For many years I thought of myself as a Londoner of Scottish nationality. Early in my working life I travelled each week to various parts of the United Kingdom. When I returned to London on a Friday evening, however grey and damp the atmosphere, I knew I was returning to my city, a city with all the excitement and confidence and unapologetic brashness of one of the great capitals of the world. Familiar accents, a shared sense of humour, the by-play of everyday encounters, the anonymous comraderie of the football terraces and the summer lunchtime crowd in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Hamleys toyshop, the Christmas lights in Regent Street, triggered an emotional response, as did the internationally recognisable icons of the city.

Other emotional roots of my early life were in Edinburgh, the city of my birth. Although we moved from Scotland when I was six years old, I returned many times on family visits or to stay with my aunt and uncle and cousins. We attended the Edinburgh Castle Military Tattoo. My heart swelled at the skirl of a bagpipe on the Castle battlements, the massed bands of pipes and drums, the whole tartan array. How surprised I was, then, forty years later, after living in New Zealand for twenty six years, attending, on a beautiful starlit autumn night, a Tattoo more magnificent than any preserved even in childhood memories, to find myself close to tears when the Fijian Army brass band came into the arena bringing in their train the warmth and colour and songs and dances of the South Pacific. Where is my Scottishness now?

Like many a six-year-old boy, I suppose, I wanted to be a driver of something – the local bus, The Flying Scotsman, a Spitfire, a crane on the London Docks, a fire engine, a steam roller, a racing car. Well, a tram driver really, but trams, other than the Edinburgh ones, were in their death throes, though I can just remember the trams in London when we went to visit my grandmother at Wandsworth Common. They only ran as far as Harding and Hobbs department store at Clapham Junction (‘arding ‘n ‘obbs as Dad liked to mimic), so we had to wait at the bus stop up the Northcote Road for the forty-nine bus to take us on to the Honeywell Road stop, and Dad used to irritate and amaze us because, with his long sight, he could pick the numbers of approaching buses long before we could. I think a lot of my childhood must have been spent at bus and tram stops and at underground stations waiting impatiently for the right number or the right destination to come down from Fairmilehead or along the Edgware Road or round the Circle Line and then scrambling on, hoping to grab the ‘best’ seat.

To this day I’m on the look out for the right destination and the best seat. Whether in buses, trains, boats, planes, theatres, cinemas, sports venues, at home or on the beach, I’m very picky about where I sit. I can dither around with my theories about the ‘best’ place from which to see whatever there might be to see – upper apartment or lower, north-east corner or north-west, lower deck or upper deck, back seats or front, facing the engine or back to the engine, window or aisle, forward or back of the wings, circle or stalls, behind the goal or by the touchline, the angle of the sun, the seaward side or the landward side, the flight path over the mountains. As some French poet (Baudelaire?) observed, we live in a hospital ward in which everyone wants to change beds. The folk by the window want to be by the door, and the folk by the door want to be by the window. There’s certainly a lot to think about if you wish to feel comfortable in the places you occupy in life, however temporarily.

And Courtney's grandchildren? Where will they stand? Where will they sit?