Exiles

My Danish-born mother, Ella Pedersen, lived for most of her life in England, from the early thirties until her death in 1989. But despite the acquisition of a British passport, she never felt at home there.

I can sympathise. Having lived in Ireland now for nearly thirty years, I still feel temporary. But for me the notion of "home" has always been a difficult one. However unsettled I feel here, I never felt particularly at home in England either. And while I enjoy my trips to Denmark, I feel no real link there. This doesn't bother me: to be an outsider isn't a bad condition, especially for a writer.

For my mother, however, the absence of her big warm family was deeply felt. During the five years of the Second World War, she heard nothing from them, in occupied Denmark. She didn't know whether they were alive or dead. Nor did they know whether she had survived the bombing of London. In fact, a bomb fell on the corner of our street, and I remember as a small child in the early fifties playing, against strict instructions not to, on "the bomb site". 

Our family's first trip back to Denmark after the war was in 1947, when I was a baby. My sister, Ann, has told me how we crossed a North Sea that was still full of mines, in a storm that made the hem of a coat hanging in the cabin hit the ceiling every few minutes. My poor mother, always a terrible sailor, must have been desperate to rejoin her family under such adverse circumstances. At last, hours late, with the port of Esberg visible in the distance, my mother, father and Ann peered at the quayside to see if any of the family were there still waiting or if they had given up on them.

"There's Bops," mother said in excitement, recognising her sister.

The people were still tiny, far in the distance.

"How do you know?" Ann asked.

"I can tell by her legs," mother said. Poor Bops was bandy, and indeed it was she.

This homecoming was the most emotional ever. The Danish family had all survived the war although certain friends and neighbours hadn't been so lucky. My mother's war had been difficult, too. She had been made to feel unwelcome by ignorant people who took her for the enemy. "Why don't you go back to where you came from," was the mildest of the abuse. To compound the problem, she never fully mastered the English language and always spoke with a pronounced accent. She never taught me Danish but I picked some up anyway. I can still count po Dansk because she always did. And curse. She also had the habit, mortifying to me then, of making derogatory remarks in her native tongue about other people in their presence. So it came as a shock to me to learn from cousins many years later, that my mother made mistakes in Danish, too. Like many emigrants, she had no complete mastery any more of any single language. I don't think it worried her particularly, but for me, who depends on words, it seems a fundamental loss: losing part of your identity.

She used to doodle her married name -- Ella Knight -- over and over, covering  sheets of paper. I can't help wondering whether she was trying to make sense of this strange hybrid, puzzling what chance had caused a young Danish girl, en route for America, to come to this point, living out her days in a small house in a London suburb?

Hers wasn't a tragic fate but sad, nonetheless, the lot of the exile. Towards the end of her life, having given up her dream of returning to live in Denmark, she turned to my sister one day and said, "You know something: I belong nowhere."