First Summer
We have been in Canada about a month, and the constant feeling of shock somewhere deep in my tummy, is not abatting. I am just eight years old. I am lonely, bored, and my parents have a lot to do, so my mother takes me out to the local park. There is a day camp with crafts, games and singing, so she signs me up.
Arriving the next morning with a packed lunch, I listen and follow the leaders as they instruct us through the activities. There are lots of children, and some strange adults who act like children. They have developmental delays, but I don’t understand. I have never met an adult with a cognitive disability, and I feel a bit scared of them. At lunch time, we have to eat lunch and play while the camp leaders have a break in the small hut.
One of the women, my mother’s age, wanders towards me clumsily, with a banana in her outstretched hand, laughing and saying words I can’t make out. I move away, but she follows me, chattering. I begin to run, with her running after me, holding out the banana saying unintelligible words through her laughter. Terrified now, I pound on the door of the hut, screaming and hoping for someone to save me. A camp leader opens the door and tells me to go and eat lunch. I am crying. They tell the woman to stop chasing me before shutting the hut door.
What is this horrible land my parents have brought us to?
First Autumn
Brain reeling with change after change, after change, I am standing in my new classroom, next to the desk I’m assigned. I know to do this because all the other children are doing it, and I follow, painfully wanting to blend in. It is September and my second day in the Canadian school in my new country. A country I have never been to before that I was to call ‘home.”
I prefer my real home.
We stand obediently beside the rows of desks waiting in silence. From somewhere near the ceiling music starts playing a song all about Canada. The children around me are still and solemn-faced. Perhaps from anxiety, I need the loo now. I am suddenly desperate. I dare not move or blink as the song carries on, but I can’t hold it any longer.
Now, we all file out of the classroom to go to the school gym. I have no phys ed clothes to change into. We start doing forward rolls on the mats. The teacher takes me aside.
“Have you wet yourself?” I am eight, too old for accidents like that. I look at the floor in shameful reply, She asks why I did it, and I mumble about the Canada song, and standing still in rows. She tells me “next time, just run out.”
Recalling this moment years later, I will still feel sickeningly ashamed.
Some days later, days that I can’t remember as I am exhausted from listening to everyone speaking English with such strange accents, something good happens. We are sitting at our desks, and hardback books are handed out. They are called “Readers” and they will be ours for the year. It looks like a nice book, full of short stories with colourful pictures of fairies and woods, and children enjoying adventures in boats and meadows, friendly dogs at their sides. “Read to page 6 tonight.” the teacher tells the class.
I carry the heavy ‘Reader’ home, excited to get stuck in the stories. I stay up late in bed, reading by my lamp, keen to finish the book, so maybe I’ll be given a new one tomorrow. I have been reading half my life having started school age four, well before the children in Canada. The book is easy read for me.
I approach the teacher’s desk in the morning, with the Reader in my hands. “I’ve finished this…please can I have another?” The teacher’s face is immediately angry. Has she misheard me? I feel frightened and confused. I am a good girl, my teachers always tell me. What have I done wrong?
“That Reader was to last you all year! What am I going to do with you now?” she barks. All the children are staring at me.
At home, I sob unabating tears, I’ve had enough. I am not going back. I have not complained about all this change, this Canada place, none of which I ever wanted. I have stayed quiet to let my parents enjoy their excitement. But now, I speak as I weep. I will be a good girl, I say, but I am not ever going back to that school ever, ever again.
But I have to, so my father goes to speak to the principal. He values reading and is angry with the teacher, especially as she has upset me so. He would recount her poor practice for decades to come. I’m moved into a different class. Another room, a new teacher, 25 more new children. Week two. The new teacher is kinder, but she keeps me apart from the class, teaching me separate work. I am an outcast. The children never speak to me, merely stare.
A family moves in next-door from Scotland, they have just arrived in Canada, like us. Our families bond quickly, over the shared affinity. They have a girl my age, Fiona, and we go to school together. Finally, a friend!
Some months in, Fiona gets sick. She isn’t at school for days and days. I am lonely again and plead for Fiona to come back. My mother tells me “She’s in the hospital….she’s ill…that’s what happens when you don’t wash your hands after using the toilet.” Is that true? I wash my hands really well after that with so much soap. I miss Fiona, she is off school for months.
First Winter
The winter is brutish, freezing with record snowfalls. A blizzard swirls in late one morning and we are to be sent home from school early. My parents are stranded in the snow. There is no one to pick me up and I have never walked home alone. I do not know the way.
A lady from the office tells me that the Carson boy next door will be walking me home. He’s in Grade 4. Children leave in a trickle, out into the biting cold, snow whirling so fast, it was impossible to see. Tommy Carson doesn’t come for me.
How will I get home? Will I be left at school? Will I get lost in the snowstorm? I rarely speak, so I do not ask, just sit with the panic.
A message arrives, the neighbour’s son has gone without me, excited to get home and play in the drifts with his pals. His mother has sent him back to school to get me. I am one of the last to leave. We trudge home, Tommy and me, cold, silent and barely able to see. I’m scared and I hope he can find our street safely. I know he’s mad that his mother sent him back for me.
Christmas holidays, and my uncle is visiting. He takes me across the street where children are sledging on the hills of the golf course. I whizz down the hill a few times. It was fun, but the walk back up was hard.
The hill is full of kids ,and I am a little nervous. I go to the edge of the slope, lay down on my stomach on my plastic sledge as the other children are doing. I push off with my hands, and fly down the hill. I’m going very fast and heading for a tree, headfirst. No way to steer. Petrified I lift my chin skyward at the last second in a futile attempt to avoid the tree.
I wake up, lying in the snow. How long have I been there? What’s happened to me? I feel strange – fuzzy and weak, and I want my mother.
My uncle is standing over me, speaking to me a little gruffly. He tells me to get up off the ground and walk. I half-crawl back up the hill, following my uncle. I cry all the way home. My parents are horrified at all the blood, and rush me to the hospital. The doctor says it will be too hard to stitch my face and mouth, so many cuts and grazes. He sends us home. Decades later, I would know I had spared myself from a serious head injury, but I risked my spinal cord and my face is a mess. My father jokes that I look like a Planet of the Apes character due to the swelling. I am afraid of that TV show, so I am too worried to look in the mirror for ages afterwards.
First Spring
Finally, it’s spring. I am excited for my birthday, I ask if I can have a McDonald’s party. There’s a train carriage beside the restaurant, with balloons and party games inside. I invite Fiona and a few children from school.
The gift I hope for most is a Lindsay Wagner Bionic Woman doll. She is so pretty on TV ,and she can outrun anything. I’m thrilled to open it on my birthday. I want to cheer my mother up, she’s mostly sad nowadays. She takes a photo of me holding my special doll in front of a sapling outside the house. I ask to take a photo of her holding it, too. I still have the two photos somewhere. The sadness in her eyes is clear in that Polaroid.
I take my new Bionic Woman doll to school. One of the girls asked to play with it. She pulls the rubber skin up on Lindsay Wagner’s arm to reveal the electronic board. You’re supposed to roll it up. I couldn’t ever get it back to how it was after that. I feel sad my special birthday gift is a bit damaged. But I don’t say so later on, I just keep trying to make my mother smile.
One day, a note arrives for me in the mailbox. I open it excitedly, I never get mail. But it’s a mean note, from Fiona and a bad girl called Carmen up the street. They want to be friends and don’t want to play with me anymore. I am so upset, Fiona is my only friend in Canada. My mother speaks to Fiona’s mother and Fiona cries as she says sorry to me. I feel bad she got in trouble.
My parents don’t tell Carmen’s family because Carmen is a foster child. My parents are social workers and I know foster kids’ feelings matter more than mine, so I agree to not tell. So Fiona and I stay friends. But I never feel the same about her after that.
*Epilogue
Born and raised in Lancashire, England, I was six when my father visited Canada. He loved it, and promptly decided we should immigrate. I did not want to go, I did not want to lose my friends, and give away my toys. I loved my school, my teachers, my best friend who lived in the flat above the chemist shop. My parents were so excited those next couple of years, I couldn’t rain on their parade.
So I kept quiet.
I never truly settled in Canada. Within two years of the plane landing, we moved six times, my father had left us, my mother was severely depressed, the house burned down, we were homeless, my grandfather died – the experiences of complex childhood trauma just kept mounting up. By age 13, I made my mind up to return to England for good, one day; I visited as often as I could. Then finally returned with a one-way ticket one day in March 1998.
Returning home to England was the best decision I ever made.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
