Going home...

The next leg of my journey is more personal. When I was seven years old my family emigrated from Germany to Australia. My dad is German, my mother Australian. Dad had gone to Australia in 1960 to make some money and have an adventure. He met, fell in love with and married my mum in a wild outback town that she was only visiting on a working holiday after finishing university.

It was spontaneous and unplanned; two strangers they dragged in off the street were the only witnesses to their wedding. They spent their earnings on a flight to Germany to meet my father’s family and discovered something else unplanned: my mother was pregnant with me. They stayed, my brother was born, time passed and my mother’s holiday turned into an eight year sentence.

Eventually she’d had enough. ‘We’re going home to Australia,’ she announced, and that was that. My brother and I nodded and then promptly forgot all about it. We were going to Australia, it might have been to moon for all it meant to us. If I thought about it at all I thought that we would go for a visit and then, naturally, come back to our home in a village outside Frankfurt.

For, whatever Mum might say, this was home. Our friends were here, our school was here, my grandparents and aunts were here, the garden, the rabbit, the streets where we rode our bikes after school it was all here. To leave it forever was unimaginable.
But on a cool May morning, a pale grey overcast spring day, we do leave. We catch a train that speeds us south. We pass the Alps where my brother and I crane our necks and push our faces against the window to try to see the impossibly high peaks, snow covered and awesome.

We arrive in Genoa, alien and exciting. A vast harbour is filled with huge ships. We take a ride on a row boat with an Italian guide and this time crane our necks to see vast walls of steel as huge cargo ships tower above us, dwarfing our tiny boat with their grey, blue and red sides. We walk through narrow alleys, with houses that rise high above us on both sides, the sky almost hidden by washing strung between them. We crane our necks again for glimpses of blue among the heavy flapping wings of white sheets. We eat unbelievably crisp rolls that crumble when you bite into them, filled with ham and pungent, veiny blue cheese. We soak up the hot sun and the incessant tooting of scooters, cars and trucks on the roads and roundabouts by the hotel.

One afternoon, my father takes our cases and we all follow him up a shifting gangway on board one of the metal behemoths that squat in the harbour. We run squealing down corridors, identical and endless, deeper and deeper till we find our cabin: two bunk beds, one for Mum and Dad, one for us, in a tiny windowless room. Then with the sound of a deep blasting horn that makes the steel walls of the ship tremble, we hurry up and to the rear of the ship.

There we throw streamers of paper to a crowd of people gathered on the wharf. We don’t know any of them but it feels as if they are here for us. They catch the streamers and wave as they holding on to them. It’s like a carnival and I’m smiling. It takes a while to realise the ship is moving.

Slowly, inch by inch, it draws away from the land and slowly, inch by inch, the streamers break and we lose our connection to Europe. We stand there for a long time, long after everyone else has gone. We stand and watch the land, slowly, inch by inch, fade into the horizon. I’m still clutching my end of the paper streamer, my hand is pale green where the dye has run and it dawns on me, slowly, inch by inch, that this is it. We are leaving. We’re not going back home.

Standing there, watching the land slip away, I make a promise to myself: I am coming back. I’m filled with rage and sadness and powerlessness so I say it again. ‘I’m coming back Europa. Wait for me. I’m coming back.’

I carry that promise with me over the next 16 years in Australia, through good times and bad, and when I’m 23 I pack my bags and I come back. I live in England, some reason I can’t explain keeps me away from Germany.

But now, 35 years later, I’m finally coming back. I’m moving to Berlin for four months to find out a little bit more about the German side of me and to see if Germany can still feel like home.