Near where I like to go to write in rural Clare, there’s an old church. I walk there often late in the afternoon, when the need to write is overcome by the urge to be out moving under the sky, feeling the weather and hearing the birds. It’s walking as meditation more than for exercise, a practice of presence after the strange practice of absence that is sitting still and writing a novel.
I walk around the churchyard, paying my respects. The names on the stones are the same as the names on the businesses in the nearest towns, and even the oldest graves have fresh flowers from time to time. Some of them name six or seven generations, people whose lives didn’t overlap interred together. The descendants who bring flowers must know where they themselves will eventually lie.
I don’t belong there. I visit respectfully as well as regularly, but in the long view, I’m passing through. In various ways, my family has no plot. My grandparents were cremated, ashes scattered on the hills they loved, not particularly near where they lived, which was not particularly near where they were born. I have no idea about their parents’ remains, because we’ve all moved around.
One side of my family of origin are intergenerational asylum seekers, fleeing for their lives across two continents and at least three generations, survivors of families and communities losing contact and records and stories.
I’m a Brexit-era ‘citizen of nowhere’, trying to settle in Ireland
I was taught to avoid the ‘trap’ of cooking but I take pleasure in domestic life
I had my kids in my mid-20s, which was unheard of among women of my class and generation
Men are deemed more masculine for taking up more space, women more feminine for taking up less
I think it’s relatively easy for the children of refugees and migrants to move again, because once you’ve learned that it can always happen here and it’s often safer to start again somewhere else, you pass on the lesson. Names change with each new language and identity card. You wouldn’t know what to look for in a graveyard even if you knew which one to visit, even if you thought they’d all had decent burials.
Some people inherit belonging, some of us make it. There are kinds of belonging separate from ownership
On the other side, a man left the West of Ireland in the mid- or late-19th century, and settled in the north of England. A generation or two later, a family of nine went to Australia. The youngest son returned to Yorkshire and made his life and family there, but as his descendants pulled themselves up the English class ladder by their bootstraps, they also relocated and relocated again.
If I have a family tradition, it’s moving, being an outsider, starting again. I don’t have a ‘homeplace’, never did. I’ve enjoyed mobility, though I’m trying to settle now, here, midlife. For some people, a migrant will never belong anywhere. We’re Theresa May’s unwanted Brexit-era ‘citizens of nowhere’, dangerously unaffiliated, our eyes always on the horizon. We might claim to belong somewhere or other, but those places wouldn’t claim us.
I’ll never have the kind of blood-and-soil, bones-in-soil sense of exclusive right to any place, but my experience as both writer and citizen is that belonging can be practice rather than an entitlement. Some people inherit belonging, some of us make it. There are kinds of belonging separate from ownership.
For me, belonging comes from knowledge. Not book-knowledge, though that can help, but bodily, sensory knowledge of a place. I’ve always been much more a walker and a cyclist than a driver, able to arrange my life so the commute and the school run and my social life and grocery shopping are outdoor experiences and a car is kept, if at all, for weekend outings further afield. For years, I’ve run every morning, my feet learning the textures of pavements and paths, the weather on my skin, hearing the changing pitches and volumes of traffic, wind and birds.
This isn’t about being ‘out in nature’, which always strikes me as a strange phrase, as if our bodies themselves weren’t natural, as if there were some way of existing other than in nature. I’ve never lived outside a town and don’t much want to; the pedestrian life requires pavements and street lights, shops and schools, friends and cafes close by. I notice suburban trees, new paint on a front door, birthday cards in a window, the gorgeous symmetry of a neighbour’s white dahlia blooms, and also roadkill, air pollution, dog poo, the dwindling of the birds. I see small changes. I remember.
I belong to the places where I pay attention.