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“Freedom’s Just Another Word”¹

Leigh Armitage

    “Duck, Drake, Lardy Cake!” chanted the children, as their smooth stones leapt again and again over the sun-dappled water, creating wide ripples which spread out and joined each other until there were no discernible circles, just a general disturbance on the river’s surface.
    Harriet smiled at the memory. “Duck!” she murmured, as the pebble she’d unearthed from her pocket and flung into the ocean liner’s wake disappeared. It was impossible to distinguish its splash amidst the foamy turbulence, just as it would have been impossible for her to see how her decision to be on this ship would ripple down through the years to impact every other decision in her future. But, on that far off evening in May, as the Jewel of England set course for the new world, consequences were far from her mind.
    Her entire family, all twenty of them, had gathered on the pier to wave them off, even her dear old Gramps who could only stand with the aid of his two sticks. Straining to see their receding faces as the tugs eased the ship farther out to sea, Harriet’s tears cascaded down her cheeks but, once the family had disappeared from view, her tears dried in the wind, and she leaned far out over the ship’s rail to watch the gently heaving waves. Her thoughts turned to the cocktail reception awaiting them, and she felt a stir of anticipation about the adventures ahead. It never occurred to her that she was in the act of sentencing herself to a lifetime’s exile from her homeland.
    The decision to leave England had not been whimsical. She and Dan had talked about it almost from the day they moved into their new semi-detached house in the suburbs. During their short marriage, they had quickly accumulated all the material goods they could ever need or want, which allowed Harriet to trade her humdrum office job for a much lower paid position as receptionist at the new five-star hotel in the centre of town. But even this glamorous job couldn’t remedy her boredom or compensate for Dan’s increasing aloofness.
    “I don’t understand how you can give up everything you’ve worked for,” was her mother’s puzzled response when she heard of their plans to emigrate, unaware this was a drastic measure to rescue a marriage, which had been wrong from the start. On the surface, all seemed well, but Harriet could not reveal the underlying reason for emigrating. Her betrayal of Dan was something her mother would never understand, much less forgive. He had, but she believed a brand new country would free her from her past and give them both a fresh start. And he agreed.
    Four years earlier on a cold wet April afternoon, when Harriet entered the ancient stone church of her childhood on her father’s arm, she could not have foreseen how the vows she was about to make would imprison her for a decade and lead to her becoming a foreigner in her own country. She’d fallen in love with Dan, or so she thought, when he was 20 and already fully-fledged. She was 17, an adult still in the making, flattered by his attention, impressed by his well paying job and company car.
    Long before they married though, she knew her feelings for him were no more than a teenage infatuation, but there was no turning back. Breaking an engagement to this decent man her family had taken into its heart was not an option. Her picture was not on any tea-towels, but she was no less trapped than Princess Diana would one day claim she was. The date was set, the church booked. By the time she walked up the gangplank to the ship’s cramped cabin, however, she’d grown far beyond Dan’s small world.
    On that April day, Harriet rationalized her gnawing doubts by telling herself if things didn’t work out, there was always divorce. At 20 she felt wise to know this, but she’d reckoned without the cost. The widening gap in interests and lack of communication between her and Dan soon propelled them in different directions. He immersed himself in his work, and even on weekends she saw little of him. When she did, he was often too tired for talk or love, or perhaps he wanted neither. She craved companionship, and her half-life existence drove her into the arms of an older man who seemed to be a kindred spirit. But, when gossip found its way to his wife, his avowals of love abruptly ceased. It took most of Harriet’s 30-year self-imposed banishment for her to understand his lack of courage. She was a slow learner.
    Being slow at learning must have been a congenital defect, she figured, or else her friends must be smarter because none of them seemed to make the colossal mistakes she had. Certainly, none of them uprooted themselves and severed ties from family and friends. She might have drawn some clues from classical literature, but no one told her it was supposed to instruct as well as delight.
    Greek mythology did neither. The teacher, a desiccated stick of a woman, made sure of it. Miss Roberts reminded Harriet of the December roses her mother kept in her front parlour. They were the last to be picked before the frost could kill them, but they never bloomed. Eventually they faded, became petrified in perpetual bud. Judging by her frumpy clothes and yellowed skin, hot passion had never flowed through Miss Roberts’ veins, so Harriet thought. The moral lessons of the classics were lost on her. Years later she came to understand the myths, in particular the allegory of the labyrinth with its warning about keeping a firm grasp on a lifeline. By then, she had dropped the ball of string so long ago she had no hope of finding her way back.
    She didn’t know she was exchanging one prison for another until she landed in the alien land where everything familiar no longer was. She’d exchanged a modern city for a rural hamlet where, paradoxically, she was overwhelmed by the sheer size of everything. In this vast new country even the birds and butterflies seemed huge. Man-made machines were also bigger, and gaudier. Dan was in awe and admiration especially of the cars. He bought the largest one on the lot. It floated like a boat on the highway, and it terrified her. She mourned the loss of familiar touchstones to her past life, from their small car to her compact kitchen with its appliances, miniature in comparison to those around her now. As for furniture, she’d never seen so much chrome and dark wood. She longed for the clean lines of her Scandinavian teak, but this had been sold off at a fraction of its worth, on the advice of friends who, like her, had never crossed the ocean or seen the land to which she’d so blindly sailed.
    They’d always had plenty of money in the bank but now they were reduced to one wage, Dan’s, and it was far less than he’d once earned. He worked just as many hours, but Harriet no longer had the temporary escape of visiting family and friends. She was alone, and time hung heavily on her idle hands and mind. No decent jobs were to be found, and she was shocked to realize her grammar school education counted for nothing here, and that no one responded to her application letters even to reject them.
    Finally, after several dismal weeks of confinement in their spartan non air-conditioned apartment (it was June and humid), she was forced to accept the only job on offer. It was minimum wage factory work sorting pulpwood. Each morning, she would tape up her soft hands to protect them from splinters and stuff her blonde curls into thick netting to keep them out of the machines.
    She stuck it out for a month, until the day came when she won the coveted task of stamping the company logo on slats for fruit baskets. Standing in the sweltering heat with her foot automatically slapping down the printing pedal, she drifted into a semi-trance. In this unwary state, she was smitten with belated recognition of all she had so carelessly tossed away. The rush of awareness made her giddy, and vomit rose in her throat, yet she dared not leave the machine for the reeking latrines as she wasn’t due for her break, and the bull-necked foreman was lurking nearby.
    Beyond a gut-wrenching loneliness and longing for home, the reality of her nightmare overcame her. Just a few short weeks before, elegantly decked out with her Jaeger suit, coiffured hair and lacquered nails, she’d been hobnobbing with the glitterati. How the gods must be laughing to see her now. Through tears of mortification, she shoved some stray hair from her sweaty face and inspected her begrimed hands with their torn nails. She quit the job the same day.
    From this humbling experience, though, she gained some steel in her character and some self-knowledge. Not least was the confirmation, after a few weeks of rural existence, that she was truly a city girl with concrete in her veins. She detested the village. The women who lived there detested her more. They saw her sophistication as a threat, though she had no interest in their men. To compound their outrage, she openly scoffed at their local custom of segregating the sexes at social functions and was soon ostracised by men and women alike. Not that she cared. She wanted neither their friendship nor their approval. She would not be staying.
    She learned book-keeping skills and typing at evening school and eventually found an office job though this was only supposed to be temporary. All her thoughts were directed towards leaving. But she’d reckoned without Dan who was made of stronger stuff than she realized. Having embraced his new life, he refused to leave. There was nothing to go back to anyway. Their house and belongings had gone. He was not prepared to start from scratch a third time. She was just homesick, he said. It would pass. Although he never went so far as to say it, her homesickness was not the fault of the country she had come to. It was a great place, full of opportunity. The fault lay entirely with her, and she knew it.
    She endured those early months by making plans to return without him, but guilt always got in the way of carrying them out. Because of her Dan had suffered, and because of her he’d given up his secure job and comfortable home. She couldn’t betray him a second time. Besides, her family would never forgive her for abandoning him after pushing him to emigrate in the first place.
    So, she stayed, and her belated (if not pure) loyalty compounded her previous errors, because six wasted years later the marriage finally disintegrated. By then, they had acquired most of the material goods they had lost, but she felt only relief after summoning up the courage to walk away empty-handed to face the censure of her parents. But, with no financial assets, economics now robbed her of choice.
    Years passed, and the prospect of life in England slipped further from her grasp to become as unreachable as the Holy Grail. She developed friendships and rebuilt her life in the town she’d moved to, but always she felt isolated, as not even her immigrant friends seemed to miss the countries they had left. They had fully integrated and had no desire to return. For her, the yearning remained as strong as ever, an extra layer in her mind.
    By now, she’d learned some lessons, and her choice of a second mate was a happier one. He also seemed to hanker after the old country but, once the children arrived, he lost interest. She finally understood she would lose them all if she didn’t abandon what he called her obsession. Hope gone, the walls closed in again. She would never leave this place. Now resigned, her loss manifested itself as a tight painful band around her heart. Not life threatening, but often debilitating. 𔄀Costochondritis’, the doctor called it. She asked him to spell it. He smiled. 𔄀The devil’s grip’ was the common name for it. She didn’t need it spelled out, but she did wonder what demon had been sitting at her shoulder when she’d made all those fateful decisions.
    Whether or not demonic influences had played a part in her choices, certain it was that her torment was ended by an epiphany, which played out in two ways. She often sought the solitude of the river for quiet reading, and one day she sat on the bank gloomily flicking pebbles across the water, reflecting for the umpteenth time on how she had spent so much of her life trying to escape her circumstances and get back to where she had started — all to no end.
    As always, the ripples spread out until they lapped gently against the bank. They were no different from those on the far distant river where she had once skimmed stones. They did nothing to permanently change the river from its course. Not so in life. Those ripples were fickle. They might all look the same, but the underlying currents ran more treacherously for some than for others.
    The ripples from her choices ran fathoms deep, but not apparently for her friends. Why had none of them suffered such a harsh punishment as hers, even though they’d often acted as badly or worse? It wasn’t fair! The blood rose to her face. What a fool she was, how presumptuous, to imagine she knew what they did or didn’t suffer! How could she know what anguish might lie beneath the surface of their lives, any more than they knew of the regrets she harboured yet hid so well.
    Chastened, yet strangely consoled, Harriet pulled out her book. If literature had failed her in her youth, it had often since helped lift her melancholy or at least give her a temporary escape from reality. She rarely read non-fiction but had bought this book because it was a biography on one of her favourite authors — Robertson Davies. She was not far into it when she found herself wishing she’d read it thirty years earlier. Wishing thinking. It hadn’t been written then!
    She quickly realized that Davies had been far wiser than she in valuing his heritage. The biographer spoke of his understanding of the importance of family and home, and how in Davies’ opinion, abandoning one’s roots was a form of 𔄀spiritual suicide’. These two words leapt off the page, and a liberating wave of recognition washed over Harriet. Davies had the writer’s gift to understand, without experiencing it himself, how it was to be exiled. He had perfectly defined what she, who was living the experience, could not. He had given a name to her grief and in two words had released her tortured soul. Such a gift! If only she could have told him.
    Incredible though it would seem to anyone other than Harriet, Davies’ words also acted as a balm on her troubled heart. She took a deep breath as the band around it fell away, the pain along with it. A smile touched her lips. It had been a long slow learning, but she had no doubt her mourning was over, and she was truly free.

 

    ¹ From “Me and Bobby McGee” by Janis Joplin.

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