This week adult TCK (Third Culture Kid) Gill Gouthwaite reflects on what it meant to come ‘home’ to England as a missionary kid.
To me, England was a land of aniseed balls and liquorice, sticks of rock and gobstoppers, dolly mixtures and wine gums. It was a land of daisies and dandelions, cowslip and hawthorn, where the most dangerous nature got was the occasional bramble or rose-thorn, or on a particularly bad day, a nettle sting. Food was sausage rolls and quiche, scalding hot tea or instant coffee in church cups (never with sugar, which rots your teeth in England, though presumably not in Brazil), smoky barbeques in spring showers, aspartame-flavoured orange squash and overdone lamb. Hillwalking in cagoules, wet feet, the excitement of clambering over a stile, of reaching the summit and being lifted to stand proudly atop the trig point, eating soggy sandwiches, and sipping a well-deserved taste of mint liqueur at the local pub after a long day’s walking. The Beano and the Dandy, stamps printed with pretty pictures, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This was England.
Naturally I knew when we returned that I didn’t know what the English were like. Logically I knew this, but in my heart they were a simple, sweet people who saw my parents – and me by association – as heroes, willing to leave Everything to do the Will of God.
But to people at school this was not who I was. I was the Brazilian girl who, disappointingly, turned out not have luxurious Latin locks or olive skin… I was the American who had never lived north of Mexico. I was the English girl who wasn’t even born here. I had the right to whichever countries they chose, when they chose. England, it seemed, was a land of Eurovision politics and sarcasm, of ‘health and safety’, of the infernal ‘Spice Girls’ and of ‘Steps’, where one could dislike any and all of these things, but one must absolutely know who they were and why one disliked them. England was also a place of profound ignorance and apathy about international suffering, which, when it impinged on one’s consciousness, could be assuaged by putting £2 in Oxfam’s collection bucket.
This was how I felt for years. Things have changed now, both in me and in this, one of my countries. But the changes did not come easily, or quickly. I wish now that someone had taken me under their wing and taught me why it is that we don’t like Eurovision, but still we watch it; who ‘Posh Spice’ was, and to pity her; and to laugh aloud at the absurdity of a ‘wet floor’ sign in a shower room. I could not laugh then, but now I do, by the grace of God.
Gill still likes to stand proudly atop trig points, but no longer needs to be lifted. . .
