Opinion

Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars

In February 1951 she boarded the MV Cheshire in Liverpool, bound for Australia. Twenty-seven years old, Jean was travelling alone and her £10 ticket had consumed all her savings. She knew nobody at her destination and little about the country itself. But this was no young woman’s adventure, stepping out to make her mark in the world. Jean was fleeing. Along with her meagre luggage, she bore two gifts from her parents: the middle name Antoinette, bestowed by her mother’s love of historical novels, and the scars across her back, made by a belt buckle, from her father’s tendency to violence. Had she stayed, Jean told me many years later, her father would have eventually killed her or else she would have murdered him as he slept. The Assisted Passage scheme was her escape; (with grim irony, the Australian government’s policy was known as "Populate or Perish"). Moving elsewhere in Britain was no option, the first imploring letter from her mother would have pulled her back home. It had to be Australia: not even he could punch that far. So, seventy years ago, a family fractured on the Liverpool dockside. Along with her weeping parents, (her father wailing, “My baby!”), Jean left behind her six younger siblings, one of whom was my father. It would take eight weeks at sea to reach Australia, in those days a one-way ticket to the moon. No telephone calls, replies to letters would take months. Decades would pass before she saw her birth country again. Although I know her story well, I still gasp at its enormity for a young woman alone. I thought of my aunty Jean again recently as I was gazing out over the bay of Llandudno, the picture-postcard seaside town where I grew up. The headland of the Great Orme, whose goats famously sauntered around the streets during the first lockdown, overlooks the Victorian pier in a tableau both familiar yet now strangely foreign. I hadn’t laid eyes on my hometown for two years. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t actually there. I was chatting with my son over WhatsApp as he strolled on the promenade with his two (of course) gorgeous children, scanning his phone through 360 degrees and displaying the panorama for me here in France. I wondered what on earth Jean – and all the other ‘£10 Poms’ – would have made of this science-fiction made real. Those of us who have chosen to make a new life abroad can speculate: Would we still have done so if contact with loved ones meant only stamps, envelopes and long delays? Without the cornucopia of gadgets to keep in touch with our families, everywhere, all the time, would Mrs W and I have moved here in 2015? Hmmm . . . We live in a farmhouse around a century old, the quintessential ‘retirement to France’, tranquil and picturesque. Yet peek inside this ‘maison ancienne’ and it’s the Starship Enterprise. Wi-fi wafts everywhere, a laptop connects us to the World Wide Web; our TV draws down emissions from orbiting satellites as we surround ourselves with automatic this and remote-controlled that. In the kitchen, Alexa perches on top of the fridge, eager to read you an audio book, time your boiled egg or calculate how many fluid ounces there are in a kilometre, (“I’m sorry, I don’t know that one”, she purrs coquettishly). I mean, I grew up in a house with a Bakelite telephone the size of a breeze block, a ‘party line’ shared with other people who could listen in to your conversations. I know! I notice, incidentally, that most media articles describe Brits living overseas as ‘expats’, a genteel word somehow reminiscent of the colonial days of old. Meanwhile, others whose journeys abroad involve dinghies, international shipping lanes and blind terror, are tagged as ‘migrants’, a de-humanising term often favoured by those who would make the denial of compassion respectable. Anyway, what of aunty Jean? She settled in Melbourne and married a veteran of the Royal Australian Airforce who lost his sight in WW2. Despite vowing never to have children herself, (another legacy from my grandfather), she became a mum to his daughters, who adored her. Today’s hi-speed communication dramatically shrinks the space which lies between us. Or at least it appears to, which, over this past year and a half, has had to suffice. But I doff my cap, tip my hat and raise a glass to all those who chose a new life abroad in those long-ago days when absence was total and distance conquered all.

Distant Voices Those of us who have chosen to make a new life abroad can speculate: Would we still have done so if contact with loved ones meant only stamps, envelopes and long delays?