Guest post by Tamara Lowe.
In late April 2019, we packed up our life in Sydney and relocated to live on the outskirts of London. Touching down at Heathrow last year, I was full of hope and eager to embrace an unwritten new chapter. As my family enters our twelfth week of lockdown, cooped up in a rented Edwardian semi-detached house in Hertfordshire, I ache for the life we left behind. The UK death toll from COVID-19 now exceeds 41,128; and community transmission of the virus in England continues to rise by many thousands each day. Staring down the current unimaginable global apocalypse, I long for the familiarity and security of my enormous island at the bottom of the world.
Put simply, the UK’s decision not to follow the example of other countries and immediately lock down is now widely acknowledged to have cost tens of thousands of lives, leaving devastated families reeling for generations to come. With the high rate of transmission still prevalent, respected scientists openly voice grave concerns the government’s decision to ease some lockdown measures may lead to widespread re-seeding of the COVID-19 virus here. Despite shops beginning to re-open and meetings of up to six people permitted in parks or private gardens, the safest thing for Britons in the months ahead is to greatly curtail interaction with the outside world.
Having voluntarily uprooted our family from a good and precious life in Sydney to take up a new job for my husband, living in England through this moment in history, has taken me deep into my heart, asking myself where I truly belong. Moving abroad was something I’d dreamed of for years; lured in part by the pull to visit other lands and cultures, and partly by a desire to live away from Sydney, where family tragedies had fractured my bond with the beautiful city of my childhood. I hoped leaving Sydney might soften shockwaves of grief rippling through my life for the past quarter of a century, after the untimely deaths of my mother and younger brother.
So, when my husband was offered an opportunity to work in London in his chosen field, we embraced the chance to live on the world’s doorstep and hopefully explore Europe on short hops. Our boys, aged 10 and 11 at the time, were understandably devastated to leave the only home they had ever really known. We consoled them with promises of cricket and travel and grand family adventures.
In February, I began despairing at the UK government’s lack of response to the global pandemic. Inaction and chaotic messaging from Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his government started to frighten me. I spoke many times a week with my two sisters, one in Israel, the other in New Zealand, whose adopted countries had already launched immediate widespread measures to protect their citizens, including strict home confinement. I kept informed of news in Australia through daily current affairs podcasts and regular contact with friends. The catchphrase heard often from the Johnson government has been they are ‘Taking the right decisions, at the right time.’ It is difficult to fathom. As an outsider and newcomer to England, it is impossible to quell my deep unease throughout the crisis in an administration short on detail and appearing to govern by slogans.
By the second week of March, with the deadly contagion spreading exponentially in London and neighbouring Hertfordshire, and still no official lockdown ordered, I began schooling my sons from home. The following day my husband’s company invoked a mandatory work from home policy. This week my husband was informed he will likely be working from home for the duration of the year.
The lockdown was finally imposed here on March 23rd. By then the virus was rampant, and we were caught in the English epicentre. All around us hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients. I spent hours in virtual supermarket queues, trying without success, to stay hermetically sealed inside and have groceries delivered to feed my family. Feeling stranded in an unfamiliar country has, at times, been too much to bear.
On May 9 the government’s slogan changed from Stay At Home, to a vague, confusing instruction to Stay Alert, when employees in limited sectors in England unable to work from home were ordered back to their jobs. The devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland refused to follow step fearing the easing of measures would risk the lives of their citizens.
Looking back, even in the absence of the global pandemic of 2020, I was naïve and ill-prepared for the upheaval we inflicted on ourselves. We arrived with the country in the final grips of Brexit madness and uncertainty, meaning very few rental properties were available. Having not anticipated this extreme shortage, we had only arranged four weeks of temporary accommodation. My new life began with a scramble to secure a roof over our head, while trying to help my boys settle into new school surroundings. My sense of adventure and free-spirited lightness of being quickly drained away.
By day, as I searched desperately for somewhere to live, notions of home and belonging began circling ferociously in my mind. As the deadline neared to find a house, thoughts of my place in the world sent me into free fall, feeling utterly displaced. Rather than the expansive, joyful, new life I had imagined moving to one of the world’s great cities, I was in a state of hypervigilant survival mode creating makeshift family homes to make the best of our situation. In the end we moved three times in our first five months. In trying to keep our circumstances in perspective, I reminded myself of my grandparents’ immigration struggles coming to Australia from Europe on the brink of Second World War.
Growing up as a second-generation Australian in Sydney, I have always been immensely grateful to my country for the safe haven provided to my four Jewish grandparents eight decades ago, who arrived as refugees from Germany and Hungary fleeing brutal Nazi persecution in their homelands. They had secured life-saving Landing Permits for the Commonwealth of Australia, without which they would almost certainly have been hunted down and murdered as part of Hitler’s Final Solution to eradicate Jews from the face of Europe. As soon as I was old enough to understand, I thought often of the miracle fate had dealt my siblings and me. How blessed we were growing up in Sydney. The first decade of my life was blissful and carefree. What right do I ever have to complain?
But when my mother died of cancer weeks before her fiftieth birthday, it broke my heart the way only the death of one’s mother can. Three years later, unable to cope with schizophrenic episodes, the body of my younger brother was found hanging in his tiny Bondi Beach apartment. He had just turned twenty-one. For me, leaving Sydney meant escaping daily reminders of the absence of the people whom I loved, and who loved me.
I began dreaming of creating a symbolic home far away from the fires that ravaged the family of my childhood. How could I have guessed how wrong I would be. Sometimes leaving home is the only way to know where home truly is. The global COVID-19 pandemic has helped me see what was unclear before. Australia is my home and my place in the world. It is where I feel anchored. It is the country I understand. And it is where I feel safe. I pray we will ride out the pandemic in England over the coming months. And one day, when it is possible for us to go back to Sydney, I will return stronger, able to live among beloved ghostly angels of my past.