Going Home

“Are you from England?” said the Uber driver.

“Many years ago,” I replied.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

He was English himself, he told me. Well, he was actually from South Africa, but he figured it was more or less the same thing and his Mum really was from England so he always reckoned that made him English, so that was what he always said he was. He had been brought up mostly in Johannesburg, but his Dad’s sister had married a farmer, well, he used to be a farmer but had sold the farm and taken to running a hotel which was convenient for bringing the family to visit, which was about fifty, well, closer to forty miles, really, outside the city, so the family had spent most of their summers there although a few times they’d been to visit relatives in Britain, in Reading, or just outside it, well, a few miles away, but close enough to call it Reading, so that was what he did.

“Which part of England are you from?” he asked.

“London,” I said.

His Mum had been from Brighton, in Sussex, well, not really from Brighton, she was really from Hove which was next door to Brighton, but he always said Brighton because that’s the place people had heard of. Her parents had originally come from Yorkshire, her mother had come from Sheffield and her father from Grimsby, which was also in Yorkshire, although a different part of it, because Yorkshire was a big place, they’d moved South for work, and they did like it down there because it was easier to live, although his Granddad, that was his Mum’s Dad, not his Dad’s Dad, who had died young in a bicycle accident, always said the best beer was from Yorkshire, he never forgot that. They didn’t stay with his grandparents when they visited England, because his Mum hadn’t got along with his Gran, although that wasn’t the reason his Mum had emigrated, she’d done that to marry his Dad, so when they visited they stayed with his Uncle Derek, his Mum’s brother, well, her half-brother really because his Mum’s Mum had been married before but his Mum’s Dad had brought Uncle Derek up just like his own, and his Mum always called him her brother so that’s how they’d always thought of him, and he lived a few miles, maybe seven or eight, outside Reading where he had worked for the electricity company, in a semi-detached house with an older retired couple who kept to themselves in the other half, and when they came, Uncle Derek and his wife Auntie Joan would move into the spare room, leaving the main bedroom for his Mum and Dad while he and his brother would sleep in sleeping bags on the living room floor, they were just kids then of course.

“What do you do?” he said.

“I’m a journalist,” I said.

He had had many careers himself. He had been a plumber as a young man, although he hadn’t much liked it and it was really only something to do to fill in the time until he decided what he really wanted. He had worked for a while as a clerk at a law firm and then he had moved to London, well, just outside London, Borley Wood really, which was close enough to get into town but quiet enough to get some peace when you wanted it, where he had had a job at a men’s outfitter’s, and then he had left the men’s outfitter’s to move to Los Angeles because he fancied a change of scene, he’d settled on the South Bay because he liked being near the water, he always said it was the Brit in him, and had worked at a family-run shoe store, which had been fine while the old man was running the place but then the old man had died and he hadn’t got along with the son so he’d retired and got a job driving an Uber, which his family said he shouldn’t do at his age – he was 71 and could still touch his toes, how about that? – but he’d only been in one accident so far, at the corner of Venice and Western, when a woman in a brand new BMW had stopped suddenly in front of him, which you’d think she’d know better than to do in a new car but that was Americans for you, it was all easy come, easy go, and he’d crashed into her, which hadn’t been his fault although you’d have thought it was the way she carried on, so he figured he was doing OK for a Brit, all things considered.

”How often do you manage to go home?” he said.

This is a question that some immigrants from the more fortunate countries will ask each other when they really don’t mean “How often do you go home?” at all, but “How often do you go to visit the place where you grew up but chose freely to leave and live somewhere else instead?” As questions go, it happens to be something of a bugbear of mine; but civility, I reminded myself, costs little.

“I live at home,” I explained, I thought politely enough.

“Well, yes,” he agreed, briefly surprised into participatory conversation. “But I’m talking about … you know … home.”

I looked out of the car window at the palm trees soaring above the jumble of tiled Spanish casitas, miniature French châteaux, and angular apartment buildings decorated with sunbursts against the blue evening sky, and thought of the long, low ranch house in the friendly little side street to which we were returning, where for the last twenty years Mr. Los Angeles and I have eaten, slept, kept our clothes and our books and our ever-growing collection of reading glasses, entertained our friends, picked artichokes, lemons and rosemary from our garden, watched television, played Scrabble and made up after arguments.

“Los Angeles is my home,” I said.

For some reason, this appeared to offend him, and he finished the rest of the trip in wounded silence.

If I’d known he’d take it like that, it would have been my opening statement.

first published May 28 2024