Moving Back “Home”
“We’re moving back to England,” mum told us in the car on the way to school. My stomach dropped. “What? Now?” I was just finishing 11th grade, in the middle of the 2-year International Baccalaureate program, getting ready for my final year of school and starting to think about university. How could we leave now? And, where the hell were we going? What was it going to be like moving back to a country we had, for so long, only visited for the holidays? What about our friends? What about the dog?
In Germany, at the international school in Munich that we’d attended for 7 years, I was a good student, a bit of a teacher’s pet, I had a close group of friends and was active in after school activities. I hugged the teachers goodbye and I remember lugging my yearbook around on that last day asking every friend or passing acquaintance to sign it. I didn’t want to leave, my younger sister barely had any memories of having lived in the UK and my parents didn’t want to leave either. But work is work, and the recession was hitting hard, so we had to follow my dad’s job offer.
Off we went. In the UK, our parents got us into an “Anglo-European” school in a tiny village called Ingatestone in Essex. I spent lunch and breaks crying in the toilets.
I had a ‘weird’ accent: “Oooeee, where are you from, Canada? Ireland?” International school kids have this particular semi-American accent, and speak clearly as they are used to communicating with people from different backgrounds.
My new school flagrantly touted its “international” 6th form. There were only 2 international students in my year, a Hungarian girl and I. We became fast friends. Aside from her, it was difficult to make friends initially. I was inquisitive, but people were standoffish⸺they had their friendship groups, many had grown up together, and knew each other’s families. Since it was our last year of school, everyone was ready for exams and graduating, not making new friends.
Eventually, I fell in with a group of girls, misfits who seemed friendly and welcoming, which I appreciated. But no one asked questions and had no curiosity about me and my previous life. My own questions hung in the air. We sat in silence at lunch. I was bored out of my mind. They liked to go to the shopping mall and “hang out”.
In Germany, we lived next to lakes and forests and would swim or ride bikes after school, or ice skate in the winter. We built igloos. There was fuck all to do in Essex.
At school, I was no longer the teacher’s pet. These teachers didn’t know me and saw me as trouble. I had taken a year of the IB in Germany at a well-funded private school and here I was having taken different elective classes, from a slightly different curriculum and I was messing up the status quo. I had already studied World War 2, while students in my year in the UK were starting to learn about it. I had completed high-level maths, which they didn’t even offer in my school. I was fluent in German, which the British German teacher was intimidated, and seemingly irritated by. She never called on me when I raised my hand. In other classes, I received sarcastic responses to my questions. Suddenly, I was being given Cs in classes where I had been an A+ student in Germany. One day I honestly forgot my homework at home and was given detention, which I had never had in my life. I was horrified.
I received no support, neither academic nor compassionate.
Not one of these teachers had any interest in the fact that my whole life had been uprooted, leaving behind friends that I had spent my formative years with, to go back into a culture that I had very little understanding of. A school advertising its appraised international sixth form and accepting culture turned out to be a scam. To them, I was an outsider, they didn’t know what to do with me, and treated me with disdain. I wasn’t their student, I was their problem.
Luckily (unlike my poor younger sister), I only had to endure 6 months of school in Essex before I left for university. Yes, I really was a good student; I far outperformed the meagre grade predictions my teachers had given me and got into my first choice university. Screw those teachers, they didn’t know me.
At uni, I made friends with a group of expats with whom I have remained close friends over the years.
An Italian born in China who grew up in France and America, a British girl who grew up in France and had never lived in the UK until her first day of university, a British girl born in Ecuador who grew up in Sweden, Switzerland and a British boarding school. I feel at home with them. We don’t fit in and we understand each other.
What would I have done differently? That is hard to say. Moving countries was such a culture shock, especially at that age. I tried to bond where I could. I briefly dated a local boy who was sweet and kind but we had nothing to talk about. I made an effort to join in with other kids and find commonalities. I studied hard. What I learned from that experience was that I had resilience. Despite being torn from our life in Germany, treated poorly by teachers, finding it hard to make friends and be understood, I did well in my final exams, which was probably what I really needed to achieve while I was there. That resilience has continued to show itself at difficult times throughout my life: through a Ph.D., moving across the Atlantic, job transitions and a difficult breakup. I honestly have very few good memories from that place and time, but, I left still standing, ready and open for the next stage of my life.
- Edited by Ava Senaratne.