Reclaiming

It’s still there in the rooms of my memory, the house I knew as home. But it exists now in no other form, razed as it was over half a century ago in the name of city progress.

I didn’t watch the bulldozer topple rows of Victorian, slate-roofed dwellings, some meticulously maintained, others displaying the poverty of inner city life. I didn’t listen to the sounds of crashing bricks demolishing what had been my neighborhood.

That day saw the severed connections of people living in houses built so close together that privacy was an impossible ideal. Gossip drifted up and down the narrow street, was exchanged across doorsteps where housewives chatted to each other, or hovered inside the corner store that doubled as a gathering place.

The postwar age was a time when male and female roles were clearly defined, and very separate. Women tended the family and the home. Men did the mostly physical jobs in a town noted for its industries, and spent their evenings inside the local pub.

I grew up hearing their footsteps along the street, as I lay in bed, my window bathed in yellow light from the nearby street lamp. Voices muttered, doors slammed shut, and the road fell into its night time silence, broken only by the occasional rumble of trucks in the abutting shopping area.

The condition of immigrant has its own duality. After almost fifty years of living in the United States, it feels like home. My children were raised here. My husband and I pursued our careers here. I love the friendships I have made, the communities I am connected to.

But England too is home. Its way of life, its customs and language differences remain much as I remember them. Always when I think of it, I conjure it up as it was in my early years. I know it has experienced changes, but I cannot feel them.

It was disorienting when I visited, to walk the downtown area and see still familiar buildings, but not one familiar face, not one. Yet still I let my footsteps guide me to the street of my birth, into what I wanted to be my past, expecting at some level to see my parents in our home.

All I found was a soulless inner city artery, devoid of any echoes of what had once filled that space: the shouts of children at play; the clip clop and rumble of vendors’ horse drawn carts; the busyness of neighborhood.

I know now that if I go again it will be as a tourist, allowing me to separate myself from a time long gone. But here, in my immigrant life, shielded from that reality, I can return to it, savoring memories, and lingering in what was once vital and meaningful to me.

Being an immigrant sometimes fills me with a longing to see and hear what I left behind. As it turns out, it is my immigrant status that allows me to reclaim it.