A New Home by Maree Shepherd

After what seemed like eternity, the moment had finally come. I stepped off the plane onto Scottish soil where my family and I were to live from now on. After living in Zambia all my life, this was bound to be a new and exciting experience, but it only hit me just how different this place was when the cabin door opened and it hit me- it was freezing cold! Although my mum and dad had warned me again and again of the temperature difference and forced me to wrap up in layers that I didn’t think it was possible to wear, at seven years old I couldn’t possibly predict quite how bitter it would feel. When I thought about Scotland being cold, I thought of polar bears and igloos and people whizzing around on sledges, none of which I could see evidence of, disappointingly. I certainly didn’t think of the cold to be like this!

This numbness and chattering of teeth, the pinkness of my fingertips and my visible breath in the air amazed me. If it wasn’t such an uncomfortable feeling, I may even have enjoyed the new experience. I was used to seeing the sun all year round, but here the sky was grey and the clouds seemed to stretch for as far as I could see (the whole of Scotland?). I couldn’t even see any blue sky peeking through the clouds, and I saw no evidence of the sun whatsoever. At this point it became clear and I understood that obviously the sun couldn’t be in Africa and Scotland too, they were so far apart that even an aeroplane took forever to get between them and you didn’t ever see the sun hurtling through the air, did you? At this realisation I thought back to African skies, the brilliant blue and the dazzling yellow, smiling sun that never let me down. I felt a pang of sadness to think I may never see the sun again. If Africa was bright and blue every day, maybe that meant Scotland would grey and dark every day?

For such a long time, I had been feeling only excitement at the adventure that lay ahead. I had been told so much about the places we would live: Scotland; the United Kingdom; and Great Britain. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it would be Scotland that we would live in most of the time because that is where my dad was born and that is where we talked of most. For months we had been packing away our belongings, many of them into gigantic boxes the size of circus animals, with ‘this way up,’ labels all over them. Somehow these boxes would end up in Scotland before us and would be waiting for us when we got there. I sometimes thought about jumping into one of the boxes myself and hiding, so I could get to my new home as soon as possible and surprise my family when they finally arrived. Now that I had actually arrived, some of that excitement had disappeared and was replaced by another feeling, something similar to dread, or fear.

Luckily, I didn’t have much time to think of my fears as we were herded into the airport, straight into a sea of people rushing this way and that. My mum and dad seemed to know exactly where we were going and my brother, sister and I closely followed their zig zags in a daze, trying to avoid colliding with all the other tired looking families and men in suits who frantically grabbed suitcases that moved along a long strip of rubber. Once our own bags had been picked out, we moved again through another door where a sea of wide eyed faces greeted us. Most of these faces seemed to be looking out for someone else, but a couple shouted and waved warmly at us and I saw my dad smile and wave back, relieved. These must be The Relatives that I had been told about! My dad’s own family who I had apparently met, but couldn’t remember having ever seeing before. As we reached them I could see how remarkably similar the lady looked to my dad. They hugged each one of us in such a welcoming way that although I couldn’t remember meeting them, I felt part of their family already. As my auntie took my hand, and led us back out into the cold grey day, I thought that maybe never seeing the sun again wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.