My earliest memory. California. Five years old. My family’s sun dappled sabbatical. Views over the Berkeley hills. My mother in white sunglasses and a checked bikini.

My pipe smoking father, still young, is teaching philosophy in the coolest university in the world. He’s brought us to Berkeley for the academic year. Swapping winter clouds for vivid Californian skies. Who wouldn’t choose the San Franscisco bay area over Britain?

Until it dawns on all of us. We miss home. 

My bookish, chess playing brother has been right all along. At Cragmont Elementary school, where you can glimpse the Golden Gate Bridge from the playground, he refuses to pledge allegiance to the American flag. I’m British he says, crossing his arms firmly.

Unlike me, his younger sister, in my swiftly adopted Californian twang: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands…”

In truth, as the year goes on, I too miss my friends, British schoolbooks, the Chronicles of Narnia, playing rounders, Blue Peter on the BBC. 

When it was over and we’d handed back our vast, low slung station wagon and flown back to Britain, I was torn. Happy to be home, yet I’d lost a part of me to the West Coast. In my all-girls British school, I was teased for my American accent, my sneakers, and my unforgivable habit (as my teachers saw it) of dotting ‘i’s’ with a circle and underlining sentences with a squiggly line. 

California dreaming, they would tell me, never forget you’re in Britain now. At my desk in my scratchy uniform, I’d gaze out the window and think, I’ll get back there someday. One day when I’m grown up, I’ll do a job that takes me to America.

And luckily enough, it has. Regular assignments, and a California holiday with my own husband, daughter and son. We knocked on the door of the house I lived in as a five-year-old, and in true American style we were welcomed in and invited by the owners to sit on the terrace, overlooking the Berkeley hills. 

Drinking in the views, the skies, and the warmth of the sunshine, I was a child again. The call of the new world, the tug of the old. The places that shape us. The glimpse, like the Golden Gate Bridge, of a golden future. Life and the infinite possibilities ahead.

‍