(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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I was a child, I remember always, always wanting to know more about my family. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019 names<\/em>, let alone details of their lives, what they had done, who they had known, or where they had been. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Australia, Ghana, New Zealand, Los Angeles.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet even much closer to home, in\nsome of my more enduring memories of my family, it is possible for me to trace a\ncontinuing fascination with place: that peculiar mix of connection and\ndisconnection, of familiar and exotic, and always the questions of where? how far? what is it like?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Between occasional trips to see my grandparents and the regular reminiscences of my own mum and dad, it happened that from an early age, \u2018Up North\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the age of five or six, I had\nlearned to recognise the final stretch of the journey to my Nana and Granddad\u2019s\nhouse by the glowing \u201857\u2019 sign of the Heinz factory off the M6 motorway, the\nred lights of the mast on Winter Hill, even by the peculiar shape of the street\nlamps: neither lantern-shaped nor the usual upside-down Ls, but plastic-y\nlooking squares with rounded corners, looking down and guiding us to our\ndestination. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By the age of seven or eight, I could name every service station that we would pass on the route. The perennial \u2018are we there yet?\u2019 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<\/em>), 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But while Wigan, at least within the\nwalls of our grandparents\u2019 house, seemed like a sort of second home, my\ngrandmother\u2019s adopted home in Leeds felt like another country entirely: a greyscale\njungle of high-rise flats and pebbledash houses connected by a sprawling delta of\nroundabouts and dual carriageways. Then, at the centre of it all, the rows and\nrows of red-brick houses where my Mum arrived \u2018home\u2019 for the very first time at\nthe age of twelve when her father came out of the British Army. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My mother\u2019s side of the family, nominally\nthe Powers after her father, was ever the more difficult case when it came to my\nquestioning. Certainly, their history was the more intriguing, boasting a veritable\ntreasure trove of transnational connections and experiences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These came to me first through the\nstory of my mother\u2019s life. Born in the British military hospital in Kuala Lumpur,\nMalaysia (then the Federation of Malaya) in 1957, my mum\u2019s early childhood was\nrevealed to me in glimpses, through other people\u2019s memories and flickering video\nfootage: <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three years later, when her\nfather was posted to Monchengladbach, near D\u00fcsseldorf, Germany, and the\nscene changes yet again: <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s parents, each the leader of a Scout pack. Her mother, a Scot, who spoke German \u2018as well as the Dutch\u2019. My own mother, whose snippets of German were just sufficient to scrounge sweets and biscuits from the cleaners before running off to cause mischief. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She was not the only one who\nreturned to an unfamiliar home nine years later, in the winter of 1969.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For my grandmother, at least, the\ndecision had been a tactical one: not wishing to return to her own family\ntroubles in either Scotland or to their offshoots in South of England, their\nsettling in Leeds was a deliberate act of avoidance, much more her choice than\nit was her husband\u2019s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For my grandfather, the \u2018return\u2019\nto England was even more dubious. For although he had served in the British\nArmy for over twenty years, Richard Power spoke of himself first and foremost\nas an Irishman and a Catholic, though he had nominally rescinded his faith in\norder to marry my grandmother (who belonged to the Church of Scotland) shortly\nafter the end of the Second World War. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And beyond the matter of his\nidentity within the British Isles \u2013 or the \u2018Atlantic Archipelago\u2019 as it has\nmore recently and properly been known \u2013 there is the issue of his actual life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For Richard Power was not born in\nIreland, and nor did he ever actually live there. After the war, when we know\nthat he served for a year or less in Africa, but little else, he spent a short\nperiod of time in Scotland and then in Germany, during which he met and married\nmy grandmother. Two children and two postings later, to Singapore and Malaya\nrespectively, and we are caught up with his story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the true crux of the matter was that my grandfather\u2019s 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<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>, who had been bound for trial and probable imprisonment in his\u2014 dare I say their?<\/em> \u2014home country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018home\u2019 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Power family disintegrated upon its proverbial \u2018return\u2019, 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018kedgeree\u2019 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s sake, then at least for the sake of its essential humanity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I am glad that I have now had a good reason to do so. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (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.) 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