Home

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
― Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

As a child of separated parents who never lived together, home has been multiple places for me since birth. When I was growing up, I hated this, wanting only for my parents to be together and not have to lug my stuff around every weekend. As an angsty teenager I loathed my hometown; I felt trapped and small and too child-like – all I wanted to do was grow up and move away. I never anticipated that when I did just that, home would mean so much more than it ever did in my formative years. I moved away to university in 2018, and although Leeds is only around an hour away from my hometown of Beverley in East Yorkshire, I began to realise that my feelings about home had evolved. And when I moved to Germany in June of this year, I started to truly understand the value and importance of home, and how incredibly lucky I am to have one. Of course, this has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis.

The nature of home is different to everyone, naturally. Walking in to my mum’s house and smelling Chanel No. 5 perfume and faint cigarette smoke grounds me like nothing else. When I’d come home from a long day at university in Leeds, one of my housemates would be cooking, the gorgeous smells of garlic and onion wafting through the house. When I go back to uni from my parents’, as soon as I see the Parkinson building, which is Leeds’ main building, at the front and centre of the university, I think: this is it, I’m home. Also, it is my favourite building in the whole entire world, and when we drive past it, I never fail to say ‘Look guys! It’s the Parkinson building!’. Going home to my dad’s is the sound of the football on the TV in the living room and the exact same game on the radio in the kitchen, always inescapable. I absolutely adore hearing what brings people home because it is always so vastly varied and sometimes weird to others – who would want to smell cigarette smoke?! But to me, that’s my mum. Always will be. 

When we talk about home, we are usually referring to a place, wherever that may be. Away in Germany, I ached for the familiarity of my hometown. All I wanted to do was walk along the streets I knew like the back of my hand, not having to get Google Maps out just to go to the shops. I missed knowing what to expect everywhere I went, and seeing people I vaguely knew on the street. The anonymity of moving to a new place, especially a city, is a thrilling novelty. But in a year so chaotic and as simply sad as this one, the novelty wore off for me quite quickly. The confusion and chaos of 2020 made me crave the certainty of home like I never had before.

Another definition of home is home as a person or people. Due to the technology of today, of course I was able to talk to all of my friends and family back home almost every day but as we all know by now, that is nowhere near as good as the real thing. I have met an abundance of new people this year from all over Germany and the UK alike, and in that process my brain was begging to talk to someone who already knew me completely. Someone who I didn’t have to explain the intricacies of myself to. When you are trying to form connections with new people you have to present yourself in the best light possible and say this is me: these are my beliefs, my values, my experiences, my likes and dislikes. I didn’t have to do that when I was 11, meeting friends at secondary school who I still consider my best friends today. But as you grow up and live more life, this is what has to happen to establish intimate friendships with people you have just met. And it can be so exhausting, mentally and emotionally. It was a problem I first encountered when I started university, but is even harder to deal with now because I feel I did most of my growing up in these past few years at uni. 

The part of home that I have been able to access while abroad is the home I have made in culture, namely music, television and food. In Germany, I can listen to songs that completely transport me back to a particular place, feeling or person, which comforts me. Listening to music that reminds me of home makes me feel that all of the things I left behind there are real, the people I loved and the places I’ve been to and the feelings I have about them still exist. Even though I have changed a lot and will forever continue to change, I can still be nostalgic about the past. I would also like to thank Spotify Wrapped for this as well. Some of my favourite songs that remind me of home include:

In My Life – The Beatles

Real Love Baby – Father John Misty

Trigger Bang – Lily Allen feat. Giggs

Mardy Bum – Arctic Monkeys

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go – Wham!

While a few hundred miles away from home, I can watch TV shows that I have watched a million times over throughout different parts of my life, and they are still there, unchanged. This is something I do all the time, when I am particularly homesick. My favourite characters are always there, on the screen, making the same jokes they always have. Again, with the utter uncertainty that 2020 has brought, this comfort cannot be understated. Nothing makes my heart swell more than hearing The Office theme tune (sorry everyone, I prefer the US version). 

Finally, making easy comfort food that my parents would usually make me is still quite an easy task in Germany. Scrambled eggs on toast and tomato soups are my go-to. One time my mum even sent me my favourite snack as I couldn’t get it here, which was amazing (it cost her £9 to send me some Hula Hoops and I am eternally grateful).

All of these different aspects of home made me realise how privileged I am to have a home to go back to. The coronavirus, naturally, made me miss home a lot more than I thought I would. I wasn’t able to do all the things I had planned to do in Germany, and spent a lot of time on my own. It was harder to establish friendships, especially when the new restrictions (a second lockdown in November) came in. When the second lockdown was announced, I thought back to the first and how I only got through it because my dad looked after me so well. On top of this, I wasn’t sure if I would make it home safely for Christmas, due to the virus and work obligations. I felt a pang at the pit of my stomach at the thought of this. And yet, this is what people in a diaspora feel constantly; for example, refugees are completely unable to go back to their homes. Due to horrific, unjust reasons, it is impossible for them, even when there isn’t a global pandemic plaguing the world. Even if they can go back at some point, their homes might be unrecognisable. This is one of the plethora of reasons we should treat them with the utmost respect: I had a hard time moving to Germany, another European country where the vast majority spoke English, and sometimes felt alienated. I flocked to other British people, longing for them to understand my references and to be able to relate to my homesickness. Immigrants are constantly chastised for not integrating or assimilating well enough into society, but it is so completely understandable why they stick together.

Every day I thank my lucky stars that I have a place that I can call home. A few places, in fact.  What a wonderful thing it is, to know you are understood somewhere. Even if you do not have a place of four walls that you can honestly call your home, please know that it is possible to find or make a home anywhere and in anything.

Alice Tradewell

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