We immigrated to the UK in 1995, not
because of the regime change in South Africa, but because my father’s Scottish
grandmother talked about Scotland so much that he always wanted to live there. My mother inheriting a large amount of money and, yes, change in political climate enabled us to
leave.
My mother was around three months
pregnant when we left. Unplanned, slightly inconvenient, but too late for us to
delay leaving.
It was a beautiful summer that year. For
two months we lived in Sutton-in-Craven, a little village in North Yorkshire,
as my parents figured out where we should settle. The only difficulty we had
were understanding what was being said to us. A thick Yorkshire accent is not
the easiest of things to comprehend.
My father had always wanted to run a
pub. And so we moved from Yorkshire to a village in Cambridgeshire called
Gamlingay, and lived above a pub called the Wheatsheaf. We got a dog and two
cats. Our belongings arrived. We were home sick, yes, but things we all right and
we’d settle down.
My brother and I started school. Socially
he thrived. With a charismatic personality, he made friends quickly and easily.
I suppose it was also easier being 6. My first day was spent being laughed at,
having my hair pulled and whispers behind my back. I made friends, but was
later bullied by a group of girls in the year above, one of whom I’d originally
thought was my friend. Once I’d told my parents, that was dealt with and things
were ok for a while.
My mother did not have an easy
pregnancy. She had a few scares, had to go to hospital and be checked out a few
times. I can’t remember exactly what some of the issues were, locked as I was
in my own little world. I do know she had preeclampsia, and had to be induced
two weeks early.
We had been in the country 7 ish months
by this point. All her medical care was on the NHS.
My father wasn’t the most popular pub
owner in the village for some people, on account of our family being foreign.
When my brother was a week old, the back window of our car was kicked in by a
disgruntled customer who’d been told to leave as it was time to close. It was the
third week of January. We had to drive an hour to Cambridge in freezing conditions with no heating to
the nearest place that could fix our window for us that day.
My baby brother had pretty bad reflux.
He screamed a lot. My mother had post natal depression. She shouted a lot.
Things were not going well for my father, either. We lost the pub. Again, I’m
not sure about the details, but I think an employee was embezzling, and my
father couldn’t prove it outright. In order to ensure we were still left with
something, my father got us evicted from the pub. My mother, my father, their
10 year old daughter, 6 year old son and 2 month old baby no longer had a home.
My mother couldn’t work. Her years of
teacher training and experience as a pre-school teacher amounted to nothing over here.
Plus she had a baby to look after. My father couldn’t find work very easily as
his years of financial experience in a different country again meant nothing.
We had no one who could take us in and support us until we got back on our
feet.
Instead, less than a year after we came
over to this country, we were given a council house. We were given benefits
that allowed my parents to put food on the table. Sure the house was tiny. Yes
it was a struggle to feed the family properly. But we had a roof over our heads
and we weren’t starving. We moved closer to Cambridge, to a village called
Linton. My father got a job. My brother and I changed schools. He adapted. Once
again, the bullying started. This time it was different.
I was a gibbon from ape town and my
father a donkey. We were to go back to where we came from, we didn’t belong
here. I laugh at the taunts now, the ridiculousness of the names, how clever
they must have felt with what they came up with. Of course I can laugh at the
taunts, because they stopped once I went to secondary school. Once my accent
had changed completely, allowing me with my white skin and middle class
upbringing to blend in perfectly. You wouldn’t know now that I am not British,
unless I tell you.
My parents eventually bought a house. My
mother got a job once Jamie was old enough. They’ve paid taxes for 18 years. My
brother and I have been to university over here. That little baby boy has grown
up and is due to start university next year. I pay taxes. My brother pays
taxes. We’ve put back into the system that helped us back on our feet.
I don’t know what help we would have
gotten today. I don’t know if we would have been helped back on our feet. We
would be labelled scroungers, even though we were not. Not many people come
over here to live on benefits. Why would you? It’s a miserable existence.
I know that UKIP hasn’t had the meteoric
rise that the media proclaim they’ve had. But the reason I’ve written this post
is because too many have their screwed up thinking on immigration. As if
immigrants are the cause of all the UK’s problems. As if immigrants are
scroungers, benefit thieves, lazy and feckless. This is one of UKIP’s policies:
“Immigrants must financially support
themselves and their dependents for 5 years. This means private health
insurance (except emergency medical care), private education and private
housing - they should pay into the pot before they take out of it.”
Where would that have left my family?
For certain we wouldn’t have left South Africa to come to a country with that
attitude. Does emergency medical care include the care my mother received when
pregnant? Or would she have just been a drain upon the system? We’ve paid into
the pot, apart from that brief time that we needed help, since we moved here.
Most immigrants do the same. Most migrants do the same.
This sentiment, these policies, this
rhetoric increases fears around immigration. When we fear something, we tend to
start to blame it. Those election posters put up by UKIP were one such example of
playing upon those fears and increasing them. Racism is still a problem in this
country, there's no getting away from it. There are some sectors of society who hate people who are different to
them, whether it’s culturally, whether they speak another language or have
different coloured skin, those posters only act as incitement for those people.
As soon as I saw those posters, the taunts of ‘go back to where you come from’
came back to me.
Like I said, I blend in. I am white,
middle class and have a beautiful Standard English accent with just a hint of
Leicester accent every now and then. I am the acceptable immigrant. I know
this, because I’ve been told this. Whenever I heard people talking about ‘foreign
nurses and their terrible English’ (I clearly understood every nurse I worked
with) and how they shouldn’t be allowed, I would politely tell them I’m South
African. ‘You’re different, you’re ok’ is what I would be told. Of course I’m
different and ok: my very presence doesn’t make these kind of people feel
uncomfortable, because I look and sound like them. I feel uncomfortable in this
current climate of politics. I can’t imagine what it must be like for those who
don’t blend in as I do. I can’t imagine what it must be like for those who are
British born, but whose skin colour or name marks them out as coming from
immigrant families.
This isn’t the country I immigrated to.
Or maybe it was, but I was blind to it? I don’t know. All I do know is that in
the past 14 years things seem to have changed. Yes, I include the former Labour
government in this because they are far from innocent with their rhetoric and
actions. This isn’t the country that helped my family back on its feet. I’m
pretty certain that should politics and the media stop sensationalising and
scaremongering, that attitudes will change. I’m also certain that the majority
of people in this country aren’t like this, that it’s just politicians and
certain sectors of the media playing on people’s unfounded fears.
At least, I very much hope that’s the
case.
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