(Please excuse my delay in posting this week: I was called into work unexpectedly today, otherwise this would have been published for the noon deadline.)
When I was a child, I remember always, always wanting to know more about my family.
From the time I was primary school to perhaps the age of sixteen, I was repeatedly astonished to find that so many of my friends and classmates often could not even recall the their grandparents’ names, let alone details of their lives, what they had done, who they had known, or where they had been.
I suspect that my own interest in these questions very likely grew out of the fact that for most of my life, most of that family seemed to live fantastically far away. Most of them, my father’s many, many siblings, had scattered within the last thirty or forty years, chasing opportunities for work or simply the hope of a better life. I remember counting off the places to my two closest primary school friends:
Australia, Ghana, New Zealand, Los Angeles.
In theory, I had even visited two of them, in better days, long before I could actually remember them. But really, they were more like words to me than actual places, more imagination than tangible reality.
Yet even much closer to home, in some of my more enduring memories of my family, it is possible for me to trace a continuing fascination with place: that peculiar mix of connection and disconnection, of familiar and exotic, and always the questions of where? how far? what is it like?
Between occasional trips to see my grandparents and the regular reminiscences of my own mum and dad, it happened that from an early age, ‘Up North’ was cemented in my mind as not so much a relative term as a defined place on the map, beginning somewhere in Sheffield and mysteriously melting away at the Scottish Borders.
By the age of five or six, I had learned to recognise the final stretch of the journey to my Nana and Granddad’s house by the glowing ‘57’ sign of the Heinz factory off the M6 motorway, the red lights of the mast on Winter Hill, even by the peculiar shape of the street lamps: neither lantern-shaped nor the usual upside-down Ls, but plastic-y looking squares with rounded corners, looking down and guiding us to our destination.
By the age of seven or eight, I could name every service station that we would pass on the route. The perennial ‘are we there yet?’ of earlier journeys was transformed into a continual live update on our progress. And for years after, when I looked at a map (and I looked at maps a lot), my distances were measured not by the given scale at the foot of the page, but by the sacred knowledge that it was 200 miles from Reading to Wigan on the M6 motorway.
But while Wigan, at least within the walls of our grandparents’ house, seemed like a sort of second home, my grandmother’s adopted home in Leeds felt like another country entirely: a greyscale jungle of high-rise flats and pebbledash houses connected by a sprawling delta of roundabouts and dual carriageways. Then, at the centre of it all, the rows and rows of red-brick houses where my Mum arrived ‘home’ for the very first time at the age of twelve when her father came out of the British Army.
My mother’s side of the family, nominally the Powers after her father, was ever the more difficult case when it came to my questioning. Certainly, their history was the more intriguing, boasting a veritable treasure trove of transnational connections and experiences.
These came to me first through the story of my mother’s life. Born in the British military hospital in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (then the Federation of Malaya) in 1957, my mum’s early childhood was revealed to me in glimpses, through other people’s memories and flickering video footage:
A frowning baby in the arms of my grandmother. The young Malay woman who worked as a housekeeper for the family, whose name is half-remembered, the spelling unknown, who might well be still alive. A tropical storm which sent a bolt of lightning crashing through the entrance of their home, along a central corridor, and miraculously out the other side.
Three years later, when her father was posted to Monchengladbach, near Düsseldorf, Germany, and the scene changes yet again:
A house in an army compound on the site of a former psychiatric hospital (then more properly known as an asylum), still partly visible on Google Earth. Primary school with the British Forces Education System. My mother’s parents, each the leader of a Scout pack. Her mother, a Scot, who spoke German ‘as well as the Dutch’. My own mother, whose snippets of German were just sufficient to scrounge sweets and biscuits from the cleaners before running off to cause mischief.
She was not the only one who returned to an unfamiliar home nine years later, in the winter of 1969.
For my grandmother, at least, the decision had been a tactical one: not wishing to return to her own family troubles in either Scotland or to their offshoots in South of England, their settling in Leeds was a deliberate act of avoidance, much more her choice than it was her husband’s.
For my grandfather, the ‘return’ to England was even more dubious. For although he had served in the British Army for over twenty years, Richard Power spoke of himself first and foremost as an Irishman and a Catholic, though he had nominally rescinded his faith in order to marry my grandmother (who belonged to the Church of Scotland) shortly after the end of the Second World War.
And beyond the matter of his identity within the British Isles – or the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’ as it has more recently and properly been known – there is the issue of his actual life.
For Richard Power was not born in Ireland, and nor did he ever actually live there. After the war, when we know that he served for a year or less in Africa, but little else, he spent a short period of time in Scotland and then in Germany, during which he met and married my grandmother. Two children and two postings later, to Singapore and Malaya respectively, and we are caught up with his story.
But the true crux of the matter was that my grandfather’s family had not lived in Britain or Ireland for a whole five generations, following the emigration of his own great-great-grandfather to India, probably to the port of Madras, at some point in the 1830s or 40s. His second son, an engineer in various parts of India and husband to three consecutive wives, had twelve children in all, although we know that at least four perished during infancy or early childhood.
Of the surviving children, the eldest, Charles John Power, would come to hold the position of Deputy Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Bombay Police by at least 1910. Yet after 1911, we know that he most likely fell into a state of disgrace, following his failure to prevent the escape of a notable Indian political prisoner from the RMS Morea, who had been bound for trial and probable imprisonment in his— dare I say their? —home country.
The transnational reach of the Power family would nonetheless expand yet again through lives of his children. Of the four, two of his daughters were to make the strange journey ‘home’ to England while the youngest would eventually emigrate to Brisbane, Australia. His only son, Terence Charles Power, would be buried on European soil only after perishing en route to a German prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War; his own son, my own grandfather, would face the terrors of that conflict in Africa not long afterwards.
And then we come to 1969. A husband and wife arrive at a place they call home with five children in tow. My grandfather, whose age, apparent foreignness, and unusual qualifications made it difficult for him to secure a job despite countless applications and interviews. My grandmother, for whom the loss of security and structure provided by the army meant a steady decline into drink, depression, and eventually a divorce from her husband. Five children, who were bullied relentlessly for their use of Queen’s English and who, within a year, were speaking as if their family had descended from five generations in West Yorkshire rather than five generations in British India. These including my mother, who had never acclimatised to the cold in Germany, let alone in northern England, and who suffered tremendously with asthma and recurring chest infections for all of her young life.
The Power family disintegrated upon its proverbial ‘return’, in terms both material and emotional, and much of the bitterness remains. But so too do conflicting memories: of places and identities which were never truly theirs, but also of knowledge and experiences which unquestionably were.
At seven years old, I remember my abject confusion when my Year Two teacher suggested I was using a nonsense word when I said that we had eaten ‘kedgeree’ for dinner the night before: apparently an Anglo-Indian dish which I had no idea was anything out of the ordinary in most British households. My Mum was perhaps sixteen when she was startled to hear her father argue with a local shopkeeper in fluent Urdu for some unpleasant remark he had made about the two of them, over a quarter of a century since he would last have used it.
There is great uneasiness in this story, as in all stories of the passengers, pioneers, and servants of empire. Yet it is a story that I have felt for a long time it is necessary for me to write down, if not for mere posterity’s sake, then at least for the sake of its essential humanity.
I am glad that I have now had a good reason to do so.