“I thought you’d look like someone from Home and Away.”
The cheerful woman greeted me in the lobby. I didn’t look anything like a Summer Bay resident in my suit, blue hijab and heels coated with dirt from my walk up the gravel driveway. I was frazzled and only just on time.
Foolishly, I’d assumed that my non-driving urban lifestyle could still be supplemented with ride-sharing. I did not yet appreciate that there were none going to the village of Leek Wootton. The taxi driver had dropped me at the back of the enormous grounds, and eventually I found my way to a stone-fronted mansion. It looked more like the Downton Abbey estate than a venue for a job interview. As I was introduced to my future colleagues, I was struck by their friendly curiosity about how I’d found myself here. I didn’t blame them; I was wondering the very same thing.
Up until the age of 25, I’d lived in the same house on the same street. I’d been lucky enough to travel extensively, but I’d always returned to the familiar comforts of home. Getting married and moving out of home was my first big move, but when my husband was offered his dream job shortly thereafter, we made the decision in 2017 to relocate to a town in the English Midlands with the charming name of Royal Leamington Spa.
The well-trodden path of the Australian working holiday in London was not for us. Although the city was just down the M40, it seemed a world away from the region best-known as “Shakespeare’s county” by virtue of being the bard’s birthplace. It was a lot for a girl from western Sydney to take in, even if the town had been ranked the happiest place to live in the UK just that year.
While my husband plunged into his new job, I busied myself with the logistics of setting up our new life. I struggled with the central heating, calling the electricity company to tell them it was faulty, only for the technician to come in, laugh and switch it on instantly. I took daily walks past the Royal Pump Rooms, a former spa bath where 18th-century gentry flocked to “take to the waters”. I applied for jobs and battled through feelings of shame when I tried to create a bank account and was refused as an unemployed foreigner. Trying to cheer me up, my husband bought me a bicycle, and I began to ride along the canals of the River Leam and into the neighbouring towns of Warwick and Kenilworth, names I recognised from Elizabeth Bennet’s fateful tour towards Pemberley.
By the time I’d found a job, winter was setting in. I’d visited London in the winter twice before, but I had certainly never encountered the dreaded Beast from the East. My Australian coats proved to be grossly inadequate. As I shivered at the bus stop, slipping and sliding on the slushy aftermath of yet another snowfall, I resolved to get my driving licence and to make some friends. In my fragile state, both seemed impossible tasks. I studied the giant octopus-like roundabout at the edge of town, trying to understand how its many tentacles operated. My new colleagues were invariably kind and welcoming, offering lifts and endless cups of tea, but there was no one I even vaguely recognised from my former life.
As the long winter finally turned to spring, I too began to emerge from the fog of isolation. I breathed in the crisp air on my daily bicycle commute, past a flock of baby lambs grazing on lush fields, ending near a medieval castle originally built by William the Conqueror.
Instead of focusing on all the things I could no longer access, I decided to throw myself into the new things I could: jousting displays at the local castles, stately home tours and strolling the cobblestone streets on my lunch breaks. I began to fall in love with not just Leamington’s Regency architecture, manicured gardens and charming cafes, but also its less obvious grit and community spirit.
Occasionally, something jarred. I had never felt especially Australian in Australia, but I certainly did here when my references and jokes failed to land. I was also far more visible in towns and villages than I would’ve been in London. In those moments, I felt like a curiosity, a hijab-wearing woman with a markedly antipodean accent.
But for the most part I was thrillingly anonymous and accepted just as I was. I began to see that while the stability of my life in Sydney had been nurturing, it had also made me complacent, reliant on people and context to define my sense of self. Here, I was forced to examine who I was when all of those structures were removed. As the months turned to years I got my driving licence; travelled across England and beyond, solo and accompanied; wrote a novel and met incredible people.
Slowly, I felt myself becoming more confident in an identity untethered to any place and intrinsically my own. After three years, when our time in Leamington came to an end, I brought that identity back with me, along with a lifetime of memories of castles, winding country lanes and Shakespearean costumes.
Zeynab Gamieldien is the author of The Scope of Permissibility, out now through Ultimo Press (RRP $34.99)
