What shook them loose from those grim days, news from my mother’s uncle domiciled in Australia, a firelight dream, some cinematic malarkey, a maggot, or just bad memories?  Emotionally ransacked in hospital waiting rooms and cemeteries, the economy’s renewal slower than my mother’s stoic sighs, she read my great-uncle’s blue aerogrammes, creative non-fiction right to the thin pages’ edges and along the sides like ant trails.  An example of English parsimony, or adventure?  Did my parents visualise the journey as a magic carpet ride to exotica, wonderful wide skies the optimistic colour of those encouraging letters as their limit?

The taxi’s extravagance exiting their fed-up pennypinching continued with Paddington station’s ornate Victorian architecture but long train trips can invite retrospection’s sad trap.  By the time we reached Liverpool’s Lime Street my father’s cheer had veered into lecturing me again, my compulsive cheekiness always getting under his skin.  We were without rapport.  Utterly.  Emigration – flight, figuratively – still meant an ocean voyage then.  My mother was already homesick by the time England had diminished to a speck, and when our ex-troopship entered the Bay of Biscay’s trough she became so seasick she was confined to her cramped all women’s shared cabin, a miserable time for a sister of sailors.

At our first Australian landfall after I had roamed like a feral for weeks, the grotty ship my playground, my bazaar, a boy’s maritime adventure, Fremantle’s tin rooftops reminded my mother of her London schooldays.  My father’s mental sums added up to a new car, and growing showpiece fruit and veg he admired in greengrocers’ displays.  She saw her first street drunk in Melbourne, a common sight then that stunned her.  In brilliant sunshine mistakes dogged them but her winter chilblains had been left behind.  After work he sequestered himself, pottering in his lush garden, but neighbours’ lax protocols regarding rules and laws offended them.

We, their displaced children, eventually fled their meanness, misery, and mundanity, our abandoned English days not to be reawakened for many years, now remembered in flashes of sadness.  Towards our parents’ ends, so long ago now, despite the solace of sundrenched home ownership, corn and cauliflowers the size of today’s trophies, did their hearts grieve?  Did the clang of a distant closed door always echo?  Or had their memories become airbrushed as selected soft focus ghosts?

The first long summer holiday; swimmers, sinuous, sunburned, drip on towels laid over concrete at the outside pool – the baths – steaming between oh so casual posed plunges.  I have a problem.  Pale, skinny, but quick, I must master water deeper than my height or wither in shame, both terrifying thoughts.  Most ten year-old English children can’t swim.  Why would they want to where it always rains?  My new classmates are dolphinesque.  I have a sixteen year-old savvy sister who has been sent out to work, who is soon to escape family rancour, who can swim.  She agrees we should execute her plan at exactly pool opening time.

Cool morning, soft early light, a ripper day forecast, that harsh uncompromising glare.  My sister and I hold onto the side at the deep end’s silver gleam, the first in.  Shivering, swivelling, I listen hard for my mates’ noisy arrivals, only half-hearing my sister’s insistent coaxing between her smiling disappearances underwater.  Minutes of hoarse whispering later, voices heard, time running out, I trust her, let go, sink, toe-touch bottom, then urgently dog-paddle, lungs tempting panic.  Breaking the surface gasping, I am elated.  I go again and again, further out each time.  I can swim.  Well, sort of.

My embarrassing parents struggle, mother carping about Australian backwardness despite the drudgery and decay they chose to leave.  Finding schoolwork easy, my buzzing brain gives it a fair go.  I didn’t choose to leave London, want them to adjust but sense they won’t.  An outcast at work, my father, bewildered by Aussie humour, increases his farrago of complaints at home where my local lexical accrual baffles and maddens him.  I flash him incredulous looks he calls dumb insolence.  My mother counsels him as if he is her troubled child.

I hate what Australians sneeringly call Pommy whingers, my parents’ sorrowful bandaged past, and their affronted resentment of my swift integration.  ‘Bastard’, a word much favoured by Australians, but shocking my parents, seems an apt descriptor for my curmudgeonly father who I begin to hate, too.  At first I fitted in at school – fractions and friction – to survive, then grew to embrace where I had landed.  Instead of kings and battles, beheadings and plague, I learn of explorers in an ancient land, bushrangers, and a less austere, rascally winning attitude.

After originally picturing Australia as an African jungle scene from a matinee movie, with me wearing only underpants, huge butterflies flapping around, I arrived in winter.  Despite my dodgy geography I adapted to, and played their football well, which my parents totally ignored, and triumphed at schoolyard monkey bar grappling.  I proved my worth receiving the strap with a smirk for laughing at, and instigating larrikin classroom antics.  So, farewell bizarre illusion.  Australia: bonzer, you beaut, good-oh, suits this former Pommie.  Fair dinkum, cobber.

Diving from the high board at the pool is for drawling bronzed gods, or lunatics, but I can jump.  My sister left for work, a frieze of schoolmates watching, including a sheila whose mother’s newspaper I now deliver, I climb the ladder, a trepidatious ascent, feel their eyes on me, look down, hesitate for fraught seconds, heartrate as if I had just won the Melbourne Cup.  I turn to retreat but a girl has climbed almost to the board.  I must jump, now, into my future.

– Ian C Smith