Here and There (28 page)

This is an intense and fraught stage, live with expectation, and among the lounging, bored drivers with their scrawled cardboard signs of misspelt names and company logos, there are also the worried faces of family, friends. And as you slide past them, you can see little narratives: a woman waiting for a man she fell in love with over the internet and has never met, an immigrant's child finally given a visa, the divorced parent coming for a brief summer holiday – all the gossamer loose ends of human relationships waiting to be tied up in this concourse.

It's the constant darning of the oldest plot in the world: departures and arrivals, the most ancient saga of travelling and returning. You realise that leaving your clan, your protective family group, is fraught. Our natural genetic impulse is to stay close: our history, our tribal instinct, pulls us back together. Our emotions twist the pressure with homesickness and longing, missing the taste of familiar food, the smell of childhood. All that nostalgia, that awkward nag of belonging, the tug of home, all tell us where we should be.

Still, there is also that itch and excitement of getting away, the adventure, the experience. These are contradictory human urges that are all exposed in the airport. And I'm not used to being here as a non-traveller. I haven't seen Flora for five months. This is the longest absence in her whole 19 years of life, this gap-year thing that is peculiarly Anglo-Saxon. Australians do it all the time, being caught at the far distant end of Europe's elastic. Every autumn thousands of middle-class kids finish their A-levels, work for a few months and then, in threes and fours, wander out into the world.

What surprised me was my reaction to Flora going. I've always encouraged my children to be inquisitive, to get out there, to see the world. We only pass this way once, I tell them, this globe is where you live, not just this corner of this one city. See your birthright, meet the neighbours, don't just leave your travelling to the TV and glossy magazines. There've always been maps in their rooms and travellers' tales on their bookshelves. When Flora finally hefted my old rucksack and left, I was completely unnerved by it, irritated that she was so insouciant about the journey, so candidly trusting in the goodness of the world, that it would all be all right. I became peevish and nagging with warnings and fears about mosquitoes and bed bugs, mopeds, footpads, jellyfish and amoeba, money belts and etiquette. She was smilingly oblivious and disappeared into the great migration of public school teenagers slogging around the Far East for full-moon parties, inner-tube floating, 12-hour bus rides, huts on beaches, buckets of Red Bull and vodka, flaming limbo dancing, DayGlo face paint and tattoos.

What I felt was the old Velcro rip of affection and connection. My old bore's experienced cautionary instructions were really just displacement for a siren of worry and sadness about the passing of childhood. Of course, it was only a holiday. How much worse would migrating have been? For the past 200 years, so much of Europe moved away. Now, even you at the end of the world, you're as close as a computer screen or a phone in your pocket. But in the '60s when the 10-pound Poms arrived, their families must have known that the likelihood was that they'd be able to count the number of times they'd see them again on the fingers of one hand – possibly never.

I've been writing a lot about migration recently. And I'm aware of the great black mere of tears that immigration leaves behind, the terrible mourning and loss and the sadness of economic and political migrants. It marks countries. It marked Ireland and Scotland and it's marked many others. We rarely notice or acknowledge that the greatest gift of being members of the First World club is that we can afford to stay close to our parents and our children and that we can travel with the comfort and assurance of knowing we can get back from anywhere within 24 hours.

While I waited for Flora at the arrivals, I was surprised by the depth and the sharpness of my own anticipation, how much I'd missed her. I watched a trickle of travellers returning. In front of me were a huddle of family: a father and mother and a couple of boys. They were subdued; they had been waiting some time. The children were bored and unhappy, the man kept a protective arm around his wife. Then in through the doors came a woman with a small hurried bag. She was plainly the wife's sister. A called name and the two women ran towards each other and hugged and the connection, the touch, unlocked a dam of tears and they sagged into each other's shoulders and sobbed. The father and children hung back. Without words, you knew that a parent had died. That the immigrant child was returning for the funeral too late to say goodbye or thank you. And as they moved slowly towards the exit, there was a shrill call of ‘Daddy!' and Flora in crumpled brightly tie-dyed cotton, with matted hair and barnacled with bangles, dropped her bag and ran to the barrier, a grin like a sickle moon, relieved, I think, to find that I was still here with the living and that, finally, there was someone else to carry her rucksack.

Acknowledgements

Firstly I must thank Anthea, the Editor of
Australian Gourmet Traveller
, for inviting me to write for
her magazine, and then putting up with my writing,
particularly the firm but fair things I've occasionally had
to say about Greeks. And I owe a huge debt of gratitude
to Pat Nourse, who has chased me for copy, recorded my
sleepy, ungrammatical rants and turned them into the
glowing pearls you now hold in your hand,
without ever once losing his temper.

The pleasure of the craft of journalism is that you
start to work for money, but end up working with friends,
and collaborating with Pat's humour, erudition and
encouragement on these essays has made them a
pleasure to write, and this collection a source
of pride and happy memory.