Little Place Called Home (HARDBACK)

INTRODUCTION

Home is where the heart is,” that’s what people usually say.

It’s debatable whether they mean your heart lies with the place or the people you share your living accommodation with.

After all some people loathe their families and prefer to live elsewhere.

Do you and your heart even want the same things?

And how does your heart know where it wants to be, anyway?

I imagine for most of us, that’s an easy question to answer.

It’s the place you grew up in.

The place your memories are; that’s where I fell off my bike, that’s where I had my first kiss, and that’s where I got married.

Perhaps you can trace your family through the streets; that’s where Aunty Pauline lives, Great Uncle Henry lives there, and here’s the cemetery where seven generations of my family are buried.

The situation is a little harder for some of us.

My parents emigrated when I was young, and I barely remember the old country.

I visited for a couple of years, but it was literally (and figuratively) a foreign country.

I don’t know Aunty Pauline, so why would I care where she lives? It’s not like she’s invited me over or anything.

We moved a lot when I was a child, so you’d need a week’s vacation to follow my life around.

My first bike crash is three suburbs away from my first kiss, and they’re both on the other side of the country to the place I got married.

We moved so often I can barely remember most of the houses.

I do remember forgetting at least once where I lived and having to call home to get the address.

Terrifying!

And yet, now that I’ve grown up, it’s a funny dinner party story.

And thanks to my father, for whom it was also a funny story, the memory is forever linked with the old English music hall song Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way by Charles Collins and Fred W. Leigh (1919).

He used to relate the story, and then sing the song, in a ridiculous and overbearing way.

“My old man said: “Foller the van,

And don’t dilly-dally on the way””.

And of course, my parent’s friends knew the song too, so they could sing along.

“Oh! I’m in such a mess.

I don’t know the new address –

Don’t even know the blessed neighbourhood.

And I feel as if I might

Have to stay out here all night.”

Thankfully, most of my friends do not know the song.

But the place your heart calls to, as it turns out, is far more coincidental and complicated than that.

It starts with the age old debate of city versus country. Inner city or outer city. North or South. East or West.

Sometimes it’s about the way the light feels; too bright and harsh, too soft and dim, or just right.

Or the sound of the wind in the trees, or the surf crashing to the beach.

The look of the house, or the smell of the garden.

Perhaps even the quirky mailbox.

These stories, all set in Australia, relate in some way to finding the place your heart wants:

• In Cry in the Darkness Tom struggles to find his place taming a grant of land.
• While Millie and the Mountain shows sometimes the place finds you.
• As Mrs Pearson discovers in Dream House, letting go can be harder than you expect..
• Meanwhile, in Dingo Hunting, Katie finds a place when she finds a new family.
• While in Dance of Death, Li Quan finds his place in the afterlife changes according to where his heart is.

Perhaps being an immigrant has made the search for my place more meaningful.

I chose it.

Or did it choose me?

 

Alexandria Blaelock
Melbourne, Australia
November, 2022

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