Neither Here nor
There
I’ve always thought of my roots as hot and cold- red and
blue. My body a mix of blood, a Petri dish of conflicting cells. My beginnings
a union of different cultures, the clash of them. Much like a frog who hops in
and out of a pond, I too have different homes. My birth place, Croesor, in the
wild Welsh landscape, holds my physical memories, cups my childhood in its
green hands. It is as familiar to me as my own face; the valley that bore me
nineteen years ago is an old friend. My family place, however, where my Mama
was born, where her roots first grew, is far away towards the East.
When I think of Serbia- my mothering country- I think of a
place in the psyche, built of memories, vague notions, secret words. A place
from the photos- exotic, chaotic. When I go there I almost feel a part of it,
like I belong. It’s as if there’s a pull, a gravitational attraction towards
the ancestral pool. And how easy it is to dive in. There is always a fiery warm
welcome, family there means everything. We were forever to be greeted with open
arms- even though we are “Engleski”- by our relatives and their surrounding
orbit of friends and neighbours. How memory works in such a blending of the
senses. Like watercolours, images, sounds and smells swim into each other
creating a distinct flavour, the splutters of car engines, a haze of heat,
husky voices, those deep booming vowels of the language, vibrating your
heartstrings. Always the smoke, a constant blanket of hot smoke wherever you
go.
I remember the excitement of ‘going back home’, my home away
from home, a borrowed home. Walking off the plane in Belgrade, I would feel a
drunken giddiness, the excitement of airports that seems to get lost with age.
The heat would always come over me like a lick of crimson paint, and as we
collected our suitcases and scanned the crowd for familiar faces, I would get
sticky with sweat, and I knew we had arrived. Someone would always meet us,
usually an aunt or an uncle. It would be a jubilant reunion, a generous spatter
of kisses, the European way. Walking out to the car, the enduring smell of the
country would greet us, hugging our nostrils with pollution and cigarettes. If
I paint an unsavoury picture, it is not my intention. The halcyon nature of
childhood memories means everything becomes a patchwork of nostalgia and
innocence. Perhaps had I visited Serbia only in my adult years, I would have
wrinkled my nose at the foggy atmosphere, but my seven year old self thought it
was a wonderful place, any smell a new smell, and therefore to be treasured.
Instead of being dirty or stifling, the sometimes run-down surroundings were
transformed by their unfamiliarity. Wow, look at those towers of flats! I’ve
never seen anything like them in Wales! And everything here is covered in dust
instead of grass!
Relativity was a curious factor in our visits. As part of
our pentagonal family I felt privileged, rich, BRITISH. I would sometimes feel
oddly ashamed of how Mama would always pay the bill, or how our clothes always
seemed newer and trendier than the other kids’. Instead of being a cause of
pride, our wealthiness there was a flashing light bulb, drawing attention to
our Western advantages. Seeing the poverty there was a frightening education.
Gypsy kids, street urchins of sorts, would drag their feet forlornly along the
street, begging for money or asking the street vendors for food and water. They
looked very foreign, like little Mowglis. Walking past I would feel incredibly
white, not only in appearance but in culture, and I would get a wave of unease,
embarrassed by my own luck.
There were sadder sights still. In Bosnia, especially, there
were leftovers from the war. A confused aftertaste of destruction hung in the
air. We would go there to visit my grandmother Baba Rosa, who lived there for a
while working as a doctor. It was a small, rural village, almost a wasteland of
bare brick buildings and rickety roads. I remember seeing a sign outside a
school there, it read something like ‘Donated by the American Charitable
Society’ and I thought, it must be poor here if other countries are helping
them out. That really shocked me. Old women dressed in mourning black would beg
in the streets, frail and wrinkly, they looked like chicken bones in
headscarves. Mama would always give them money, saying her grandmother could
have turned out like that. Grief and hardship seemed to seep from every
crevice. But loyally, the art of childhood memory manages to gloss over these
ugly scars, I still saw beauty in the cracks, if only because I had never seen
them before. The family atmosphere still ran strong, many times we would visit
the houses in the village, meeting the neighbours and eating big tropical
smiles of watermelon, the sweet juice sticking like glue. Even though there
were ruins, and a basic feel to everything that we were not used to back at
home, I never felt superior. We left that British arrogance at customs. In fact
I deplored being an outsider, I wanted in.
Back in North Wales, we were not especially privileged. That
air of having it all faded with our tans. This accentuated how little some
people had over there, and still, they lived in a culture where glamour and
materialism ruled all. Brought up in a down to earth middle class family, I had
never been exposed to flash displays of wealth. In Serbia people would wear
clothes screaming misspelt designer names and show off their new phones. It was
a curious swap of roles- we were usually seen as the rich British relatives and
yet everyone made fun of our country bumpkin ways, lacking in gadgets and
gizmos. The attitudes towards sex and sex appeal over there are also a much
brasher, overt affair compared to what I was used to back home. The women all
seemed beautifully made up- bright make up, curvaceous bodies with tight
clothes to show them off- exuding glamour I had only seen in films. My aunties
Sandra and Irena were like real life twin Barbie dolls. I would reach the
height of luxury when they painted my nails or plucked my eyebrows. They were
so different to Mama, who rarely shaved her legs or wore lipstick, my aunties
were real women. I suppose, not that
real, as both of them have gone on to have excessive plastic surgery. The
ingrained female sexualisation there seemed almost aggressive.
My aunties would always say that I looked like them, that I
was a proper Serb, my dark eyes given to me from Mama, my high cheekbones
echoing a Slavic femininity. My skin also tanned well. I was proud of this, it
seemed to show that I was more Serbian than my brother and sister, who glowed
an Anglo-Saxon pink, and hid blue eyes behind their sunglasses. Our blood, on
the other hand, would measure out equally, a perfect half of Serbian red, the
rest a cold British blue. But appearances meant more to me, my competitive side
strived to be the most exotic. I even had an advantage with the language as
Mama had spoken Serbian to me as a child (which I eventually rejected as
‘weird’, ‘different’- how the tables turn!) so I could understand snippets of
conversation.
“Aide bre!”- “Lets go!”
“Kako je lepa”- “Isn’t she pretty”
“Ja hocu pivo”- “I want beer”
I revelled in the deep notes and cutting consonants, yet all
the while we remained in our bubble of English. The words sounded familiar,
they would dance around my ears with their bobbing rhythms, never to be fully understood.
I envied Mama talking fluidly, laughing to jokes I could never grasp, the punch
line would always get lost in translation. Even though we were accepted because
of our family ties, it would bug me that there was such a gauze of
misunderstanding between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet that is the linguistic side of
the coin, flip over and love transcends verbs and nouns- generosity reads the
same in any language.
The evenings there were the most magical of all. Those husky
dusks, the sun setting with a long kiss goodnight. We would walk along the
bustling streets, in Novi Sad or Belgrade, and I would invite the chatter and
smell of popcorn gladly. Group outings with the whole family were common; we
would sit at the outside tables of cafes that were sprawled across the city quarters.
I would guzzle up fizzy drinks and ice cream, sponging the atmosphere until I
was heavy and dazed with it.
One of my favourite places was our great aunt Tetka Mira’s
balcony in Belgrade. She lived in an apartment block that was one of many on a
long street following on to a shady leafed park. The main road was not far, we
would climb up a row of steps, passing all the old women selling bric a brac,
to the buses and cars and the roadside watermelon stalls. This balcony though,
felt like a little square box of paradise. Whether it was a hazy morning with
sleepy eyes and the smell of Turkish coffee (thick and syrupy, with the grains left
at the bottom) or a midnight hour where the heat became bearable, sitting at
the table, looking at the city’s vastness was transporting. We were transported! It was otherworldly.
Coming from the sticks and stones of our little Welsh village, the contrast was
mind boggling. Sand coloured apartments, high and repetitive, stood tall and
proud instead of mountains. The sound of sheep and twittering birds was
replaced by far off sirens, connoting mayhem and a constant flux of events. We
would sit at the balcony and look down on the passing pedestrians, walking
along the pathway towards the park. We felt so high up and to prove this we
would spit watermelon pips off the edge to watch how long they would take to
hit the ground, which seemed miles away. It was like those games of ‘pooh
sticks’ we would play at the rivers around Croesor, throwing sticks into the
water, just to watch them come out at the other side of the bridge. There was
fun in throwing things into the oblivion.
In Serbia the climate is sticky and humid like a stewed
peach. Dust and sand seem a part of everything, lending my mind’s eye a filter
of yellowy brown. There are not many mountains or hills; everything seems to be
on the same plane. Instead of beaches, the coastless country offers its wide,
murky rivers as places to swim and sunbathe. The water is grey and uncertain,
with a bed of waterweeds which can twist around your ankles as you swim.
Back in my birthplace I admire the levels of the countryside,
there seems to be more clarity. From the peaks of the mountains to the earthy
underground, I can sense the creatures high and low, living in their element
much as we live in our four walls. I can scan the bumps and curves of the
mountainside, finding surprises of purples and yellows in the textured quilt of
grass and stone. My surroundings feel like a multi coloured canvas you can
paint with your feet. Growing up in the V shaped valley, in our old farmhouse
Croesor Fawr- Big Croesor, one notices the timeless quality of the untamed. If
you were to watch a sped up video of the last fifty years, you would see a
flurry of the seasons: white, green, grey, sunset pinks. No new roads built, no
upheavals of architecture, no growing fog of pollution. The changes of nature
remain unchanged.
Growing up in the open air was a free and happy affair. I
was allowed to roam the fields as I pleased, finding spots to play in, an
abandoned, crumbling barn where I encountered my first game of Truth or Dare,
or at the river bed, sunbathing and paddling in beneath the canopy of trees. It
was much easier to believe in fairies in a place like this. Croesor is a
village placed beneath the mountain Cnicht, allegedly named after the English
word ‘knight’. It has a protective quality, I always thought it looked like a
gorilla. It has always attracted a variety of characters, people from all
around the world, and once housed the ‘Orange People’ in the 60’s, a hippie
commune who wore orange robes and must have stuck out amongst the Welsh
farmers. I attended the primary school that used to run in the village, which
only had two rooms and had thirty students at most, meaning we all knew each
other as family.
Even though I was born in a tiny cottage at the foot of
Cnicht, it was hard to place my finger on where exactly I had come from. Other
children of the village were part of a long generation of Croesor inhabitants,
with grandparents next door and a solid sense of national pride. Where were my
aunties and uncles and cousins? Where did I grow out of? It didn’t seem to
matter that I had gasped my first breath on Croesor soil, while my school mates
had been born in the local city hospital, because they had family here, they had it in their blood. This feeling of one foot
in, one foot out, carried through into my family life. My parents split up when
I was a few months old, so I have always lived with Mama, my stepdad and my
half brother and sister. I was always slightly out of focus at home, a full
figure, yes, but blurred around the edges. Visiting my dad on the weekends
meant an ongoing upheaval, not quite belonging with him either. Now he has his
own family, I am even more of a floating cloud. It is the same when I question
my identity, which part of me is British? My bones? My hands? Are my lungs of a
Serbian origin? My lips? I suppose I should count myself lucky, not many people
can claim such duality.
What contradictions, what opposite poles, these places I
call home. I have always found a beauty in that, the differences, the feminine and
masculine, the yin and yang blending of darkness and light. There is beauty in
this mix of flavours- the sweet and savoury of family trees and childhood
roots. I bask in this mixing bowl of memories and mismatched cultures,
celebrating this distant place where I also belong. My blood has travelled far
from the Adriatic Sea, which is neither here nor there, but remains in me.
