I guess I’m not the only one going
through an existential crisis at the moment. I’ve spent the last fortnight
pondering on where the last 30 years of my life have gone and where the rest of
them are going, rather like staring out of the window of a railway carriage
watching the landscape outside unfold. The analogy is not without relevance: last
weekend I spent some time travelling on the inter-city between Milan and
Venice, across la Pianura Padana, a part of Italy that I got to know well soon
after I started working in my first job following my move to the Continent in
1984.
I grew up in post-colonial Britain, a
country whose school atlases continued to wistfully colour its former
possessions in pink and whose history books hankered back to the bygone days of
Empire. With its loss however, came the need to seek out new partnerships.
Following the ravages of the Second World War – the worst of which had evaded
Britain - our closest European neighbours, in the spirit of reconciliation,
were forging new alliances in what we knew as the Common Market, a free trade
area from which Britain was initially excluded.
In 1973, after years of negotiations,
the UK eventually joined the club officially known as the European Economic
Community (EEC). I was at secondary school and the years that followed were
exciting times. The subjects I most liked and at which I excelled were French,
German and Geography, all three of which I took at A-level, and the latter
which I went on to study at university. I was fascinated by language and
culture and eager to take advantage of the opportunities which this realignment
with our European neighbours was opening up.
During the harsh years of living in
England under Margaret Thatcher, it was perhaps an opportune time to move
abroad. I could never quite come to terms with the resurgence of jingoism she
managed to engender on the back of the Falklands crisis in 1982. And when she
wasn’t Argie-bashing, she set out about making short shrift of the “enemy within”,
the striking mineworkers. It seemed Thatcher, in rekindling a sense of Empire
and inflicting class revenge, was taking us backwards rather than forwards.
I moved to the Netherlands in 1984 and
though I’d always harboured a wish to live in mainland Europe, I had to
readjust, learn a new language and settle down in Limburg, a region at the
crossroads of three linguistic cultures, Dutch, French and German. After a year
acclimatising, I was offered a job working on an EC-funded disability project
which took me all over Europe to places like Milan, Mulhouse, Heidelberg,
Madrid, Leuven, Luxembourg, Dublin and London (yes, London too was in Europe!)
This first-hand experience of working on European projects told me that
although a lot of time got bogged down in red tape and protocol, these
programmes were beneficial – not only for disabled persons, but for cultural
exchange and understanding as well. Our main partners had offices in Milan and
it was during my many stays there that I spent many happy trips exploring northern
Italy by train.
By 1994 I had started out on a new
career path. I was already earning money from translating from Dutch into
English and decided to go full-time. Writing and languages were in my DNA and
having the flexibility of being self-employed enabled me to be a hands-on dad
for my son Raph who was growing up in the 90s.
My freelance existence also allowed me
to follow another of my passions, photography and I enrolled on a six-year
evening course at the art academy in Hasselt, Belgium. It meant notching up
many miles – a round-trip of 110 kilometres twice a week - and long hours spent
in the darkroom with chemicals, but it was hugely rewarding and brought me into
contact with the Flemish, whose most enduring quality has to be that they are
so unlike the Dutch. Thumbs up Belgium!
Meanwhile back in the Netherlands ...
As if one six-year course wasn’t enough
I embarked on another punishing long-term study, this time a teaching degree
which had the ultimate aim of me combining translation work with teaching.
Although I got my BEd qualifications, my teaching English at secondary schools
here never quite worked out. Eventually I found my feet teaching adults two
evenings a week at the Volkshochschule in Aachen in Germany, a 40-minute bus journey
across the border.
Now you might think that after clocking
up all this European mileage, I was slowly morphing into a foreigner, but
nothing could really be further from the truth. I may have left England in
1984, but I never cast myself adrift. I’ve always tried to retain ties with
friends and family in all the places I lived and worked during my formative
years in Britain – my home city of Manchester first and foremost. As a
well-known geographer and outdoorsy type, of all the landscapes I know, the one
that sets my pulse racing the most are the heather-clad moorlands of Northern
England.
From afar – and often close up - I’ve
continued to follow the fortunes of my home-town club as best as I can:
watching Manchester United walk away with the treble at Camp Nou in 1999 will
be an enduring memory. Another of my childhood passions was cricket, perhaps
the sport I missed most of all when I left England behind in the 80s. That all
changed however, when with other ex-pats, I helped start a cricket club in Heerlen that still flourishes today.
In fact, embracing both a British and
European identity has never presented a hindrance. On the contrary, it has been
instrumental in helping me accomplish much on a personal and professional
level. I’m incredibly lucky to have a bilingual son who shows a strong
allegiance to his father’s country of birth and who is likewise making his way
in the world of languages and translation. Thankfully, his horizons too stretch
a long way further than the confines of his own national frontiers.
As far as translation is concerned, my
years of living on the Continent and my own cultural and linguistic background
have given me a distinct insight into the subtle differences between source and
target cultures so that I am uniquely placed to take advantage of the
profession. Likewise my teaching: I like to think I have dispelled many of the
stereotypes and contributed in a positive way to an understanding of British
and English-speaking cultures.
In short, I feel as much European as I
do British. Up until now, I’ve never questioned the fact that the two might be incompatible. Without a doubt, the driving force behind that sense of duality has been the
political alliance forged between the nation states of Europe, the erstwhile
Common Market, now the European Union. After the outcome of the EU referendum
that balance has been irrevocably upset.
More than anything the moment is
symbolic, the culmination of many years in which much of the British public –
spoon-fed on a diet of falsehoods by a pernicious press – fell into believing
that its hardships and failings had been caused by Europe and not by the
failures of successive governments at home. It was all about emphasising the
differences, not the commonalities, an us-versus-them politics, let’s blame it
on Johnny Foreigner. Pragmatism, common sense, open-mindedness, fair-play and a
healthy dose of self-deprecation - the very fundamentals of what people
believed Britain to be - have gone out of the window, replaced by delusions of
grandeur, irrationality, insularity, intolerance and anger. Britain has never
been so divided. It certainly wasn’t the country I grew up in.
The European Union is no paradigm of
democracy, but neither is Britain, with its unelected upper chamber and an
electoral system that allows one party to govern by itself with just 37 percent
of the popular vote. For all the flaws the European Union may have,
undisputedly its most noble achievement has been to help keep the peace for
more than 60 years on a continent that for centuries was perennially embroiled
in conflict. One country’s leaving of the EU does not necessarily put that
peace at risk, but the symbolic act of slamming the door shut and turning one’s
back on one’s closest neighbours and allies sends out a warning.
