One-way Ticket by Catrina O'Donnell

When I left Black Mountain, North Carolina that afternoon I knew I would be in Edinburgh before the end of the day.  The 24 hours might not be a conventional dawn to dusk sort of day and this one certainly wasn't.

I had given notice at work when I learned how serious my cousin's condition was and my parents agreed I should go for however long it took, but it looked like days rather than weeks.  So I packed dark clothes and woollen things, bizarrely, at the end of May, because a Scottish summer, my mother recalled, would not be the same as North Carolina.

My American passport was in order but the British one that proved my newly-realised dual nationality was being processed in Atlanta and would need to be sent on.  Things had suddenly got worse with Elaine and I was going now.

Connecting from Asheville to Charlotte and then overnight to Gatwick should have been a bit of an adventure, a first solo flight for a young, single woman, had it not been for such a sad reason. 

‘If you've ever wondered which side of the Atlantic you belong on,' Elaine urged me 6 months earlier, and I had wondered, ‘then you need to apply for your British passport now, before Mrs Thatcher changes everything.'  We'd always supposed we had to choose between US and UK when we were 21, but Elaine had taken off years earlier and travelled through Europe, India, North Africa and settled in Scotland, where our parents had come from, while I was still shut up in classrooms and libraries churning out essays in university.  I had never thought to be taking up her advice within the year to be seeing her for the last time.

The cover of Newsweek magazine I picked up at the airport showed a grey battleship Falklands-bound with the patronising headline:  ‘The Empire Strikes Back'.  The only way to endanger my US citizenship as a dual-national was to serve in a foreign military the congressman's office had advised, and they doubted that would happen in this day and age. Right. 

Another article about a new film Gregory's Girl said it had to be dubbed into English for the American market.  I thought they spoke English in Scotland, so what was going on here?  Sunset Song  and Chariots of Fire had recently reassured me there was more to Scotland than Burns, Scott, Stevenson, tartan,  haggis, and my granny's miners' row, but I was beginning to feel a little anxious. 

Going to be delayed upon landing the voice told us as breakfast trays appeared.  Special security arrangements at Gatwick this morning because the Pope is arriving at the same time we're scheduled to set down.  My connection to Edinburgh was going to be tight enough, once I'd cleared Customs, without this.  Would a Hail Mary help just now or was it going to have to be a Memorare?  Better try both.

Should've gone for the whole 30 decades of the rosary and looks like I'll have plenty time for them now, I thought, as I clenched my  fingers in a small square holding tank of a room waiting for the mighty Customs officials who'd dumped me here till it was my turn.  I think it was the one-way ticket and my candour in replying that I wasn't sure how long I intended to stay (it depended on my cousin's lifespan, but I didn't think it necessary to say that) at the routine passport checkpoint. 

Later, while being interrogated by the officious Immigration Officer who was enjoying the cat-and-mouse power trip game he was playing with me, I did explain about Elaine in an oncology ward in Edinburgh and my dual nationality, but with no evidence and no intention on his part of phoning Atlanta , as I'd naively suggested  ‘middle of the night there, and why should we waste a call for you?  And a likely sob story, no doubt' I was left trying to convince him not to deport me there and then.  Didn't I know the country was in recession?  The unemployment rate?  There weren't enough jobs for real British nationals and here was I saying I might stay on and look for work! 

The compromise, after a good deal more browbeating, was to inscribe a menacing time limit of 5 months on my passport and threaten that if I tried to take even voluntary work, I would end up in jail.  Have a nice day.  I was thinking of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour, ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming  shores . . . .'  My parents had remained ‘resident aliens' in the US, never willing to renounce their British nationality, but I was beginning to get a glimpse of why they may have left.

At least I was out of that windowless room, but my conscience wasn't.  When they'd ushered me in and shut the door, I sat down beside 12 impeccably dressed very dark African gentlemen and I sighed, wondering how long it would take to get through such a long queue to me.  After 45 minutes, when no one had moved, I began hammering on the door, thinking of my missed connections, my abandoned luggage and my dying cousin. 

But when they opened the door and saw my face, I suspect they thought the little white southern girlie wanted out of that room for other reasons.   I was born in New Jersey and black people were my equals but I jumped the queue that day, scarred with the guilty memory of the industrial union-evading ‘whiteflight' that had moved our family 10 years earlier.  If the Pope was still hanging about out there I could ask him about it, over a coffee perhaps.  

So those 24 hours have turned into 24 years, 26 actually, and still I reside, like Jekyll & Hyde.

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