THE ORIGINS OF THE SPECIES?
Some people, and I’m mentioning no names, would claim I emerged from the underworld. Others, however, maintain that at the very least, I am heading in that direction at a high rate of knots. “Wrong! Wrong!! All of you are wrong!!!”
Look up ‘Home’ or ‘Roots’ in any book of quotations and you will be presented with a torrent of sentimental, mawkish and saccharine platitudes on the topic. You will find within its pages a myriad definitions from the terse to the windbag, ranging from where one’s origins lie, through that location which cannot be left behind to anywhere where our loved ones are to be found plus a plethora of other syrupy maxims designed to stick in the craw.
Please do not think I am totally heartless or entirely without feeling. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is just that thinking back over the 70 years that my memory serves me; I cannot see a single place amongst all those I have spent any time in that I can honestly say I would truly miss. There are many locations and abodes for which I have huge affection but not one of them has ever qualified as ‘home’. Ever! Furthermore, some places which I once thought had entered my DNA have moved on to become nothing more than highly agreeable parts of my one-time hippy-loving past.
My ears invariably perk up on hearing Liverpool mentioned, but is it ‘home’? Woe betides anybody who slights Liverpool FC, but I feel no scouse energies pulling me towards The Mersey. Similarly, nowhere could have proved a better place to be a student than London in the late sixties, and I certainly made good use of the varied opportunities the capital presented a carefree, young spirit. However no sooner had I returned there a few years later to further my career, then I realised I detested cities with the deepest of loathing and was immeasurably grateful to have found a new wife who shared my wish to flee to the country. Had I thought about it, I should have long since realised that when a teenager, my constantly heading for the wide, open spaces of Snowdonia, The Peaks and to a lesser extent The Lakes as well as taking my second job in an isolated corner of The Welsh Marches, proved the urban life was most certainly not for me.
I still frequently think of the first apartment we lived in after marriage, but these recollections are a heady cocktail of young love and optimism. I would have felt no different had we slept in a tent, tenement or chateau, but that flat never became ‘home’. Soon we contentedly installed in a charming 2-up 2-down ex-railwayman’s cottage, but it too was never ‘home’, merely somewhere where more memories were made, and the family began to grow. The same applies to our 3 characterful dwellings in Oxfordshire; from which I cheerfully moved on taking nothing but furniture and recollections with me.
And so, upon retirement I find myself in Scotland, arriving there with no regrets other than it added 6 hours on the drive to Burgundy. But do I feel ‘at home’ here? Hardly! The house has a myriad charms, the locals are not the dour Misérables the English would stereotype them as and the surroundings are stunning (at least on those rare occasions when the sun condescends to appear), but that does not make it ‘home’. It is nothing more than a place that suits my current life extremely well but no more ‘home’ than Yosemite, Yokohama, Jičín or Jaffa. Mind you, even though I never lived .in any of these, the latter two probably came closest to feeling like ‘home’ – though neither for very long.
Having a father who grew up in the farthermost recesses of Bohemia, I now realise it is little wonder I became a country boy at heart. I thrived upon hearing stories of his rural childhood, reading of his country’s long, troubled history and admired its facetious, defiant attitude to authority. Add to all this the fact that one of my very few twentieth century heroes is Václav Havel and, for a time at least, Czechoslovakia might have achieved the status of ‘home’. Sadly, Václav passed on much too early, leaving only joyous anecdotes of a Head of State roller-skating along the presidential palace corridors. Thereafter the country immediately descended into yet one more satellite of the European pipedream governed by the usual assortment of talentless, charmless and useless politicos. Sorry Dad: while my origins may, and some influences certainly are to be found somewhere round there, my ‘home’ definitely lies elsewhere. Jičín too is now just another place of delightful memories.
Israel parallels Bohemia in many ways, and has the added advantage that I speak the language. This time though it is the scene of my mother’s background and she raised me on accounts of the back-breaking work to create a nation out of desert or mosquito infested swamp. Unsurprisingly therefore, arrogant twit that I am, in 1967 I set off on Day 3 of a war to offer that country my services. Back then I would have risked anything for its survival, buoyed by a curious mishmash of immense pride for what it was achieving and intense sympathy for what its (my!) peoples had suffered. It definitely proved to that country’s and my benefit that I only reached its shores some 10 days after victory had been achieved. Like Havel, Israel’s founding fathers were spiritual giants who succeeded so outstandingly because they strived for nationhood without once entertaining any notion of becoming one of its leaders. But now, it too is governed by nonentities with no desire other than a craving for power. Indeed some have proved to be Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s finest recruiting sergeants.
So where are my roots or where is ‘home’? You tell me but my best guess is that it is located approximately 7 cms. to the left of my right ear.
