Swindon? It's mention as must-see stop in southwest England begs the inevitable question: why?
Not so much off the beaten path as off the guidebook radar. No quaint history, no monument of note, no picturesque setting to entice casual detours. Whatever its other qualities, Swindon isn't one of those "finds" savvy travelers happen upon, never mind set out for.
Unless, of course, you happen to be us. Three sisters on a sentimental journey.
In 2012, my two sisters and I—plus a friend I manage to drag along (the invisible shutterbug above)—set off for our father’s home in Swindon, England. Lucky coincidence and generous happenstance conspire to create a memory-lane itinerary—highlighting Swindon and Cardiff—of our father's design. Growing up in Trinidad, at the southern end of the archipelago known in the day as the Lesser Antilles, England was be-all, end-all mother country and cultural beacon still to colonials like us. Years after the Queen's arrival to proclaim independence, my younger sister and I still sat common entrance exams and shared the fever dream of studying in Britain via scholarships. America and Canada might be bright up and coming stars, but England was the sun.
In 1973 I graduated from high school in Florida where my family had decamped after leaving Trinidad four years earlier. (See October 1970 backstory.) That summer my parents decided to take me and my younger sister still living at home on something of a “grand tour.” England, including our dad's old stomping grounds of London and Swindon, formed the heart of our travels.
A lifetime later, my older sister— the one "born there"—returns to a place she's connected with incidentally, not from memory. It’s an unremarkable place to include on any visit of the sceptred isle. On arrival at our destination, I find the hedges and lushness of distant memory literally paved over. The small front lawns—so typically "English" in the early 70's, as in my father’s day—now parking stalls. The elderly couple next door who came out with their middle-aged son to greet my father—their neighbour from so long ago—are themselves long gone.
What's missing in tourist pamphlets and billboard advertisements is the house's situation as my older sister’s birthplace. That she has spent her life away from this isolated event, having been removed as a young child under the worst of circumstances, her mother’s painful demise. My sister’s mother—our father’s first wife—had left Guyana—then British Guiana—for England shortly after the War ended. She would have met and courted her fiancé largely through photographs, family, and letters. For all intents and purposes a latter-day picture bride, she would have found life in Swindon, then a sleepy semi-industrial town, entirely foreign. Like the man she married, she was well past youth. How she got along in her marriage, whether she was content, how she coped with what we now conveniently ascribe to culture shock—none of us can guess. Not long into her marriage, however, and shortly after my sister’s birth, she developed uterine cancer. Her husband, who had spent years carefully building up an accounting practice as a precursor to family life with a new bride, must have been devastated. Whenever he spoke of those times to us as children, it was always with a sense of fatalism, as if no other course was possible or even thinkable. As if the only path for him was to sell everything and take his little girl and dying wife home to her birthplace, where she could at least be in familiar surroundings, with her own family for comfort.
I can’t imagine the shock and distress he must have suffered. Or the upheaval and disorientation my sister must have gone through. One of the family stories regularly told was my sister’s first encounter with black people in Guyana. Almost on cue, she asked why they didn't (just) wash. We jeered at her ignorance then; her only contact—aside from her parents and maybe rare Chinese acquaintances—would have been with white people in England.
We arrive at 30 Langford Grove on a Friday morning to find the fondly recalled cul-de-sac of family lore mostly empty of cars and hum. On first impression the street looks drab, less English quaint, less cared for than a lifetime ago. This time, however, there is no garden enclosure, no barrier to the front door. Against both my sisters’ better judgment, I knock on the door. We have come so far, I silently insist, we will not go away quietly. After a pause, a man appears. He’s a scuffy, middle-aged bloke with glasses and a close-cropped head, probably stunned to be facing down no less than four Asian women on his doorstep.
I relate who we are and why we’re here. Assessing our threat, he essays us in. We crowd into the large, newly renovated kitchen at the rear and listen to John recount how he came into the house from his grandfather. The same man who built the homes of Langford Grove that sold to our dad. John relates how his grandfather divulged details of what, apart from its coveted location at the "end" of the cul-de-sac, set this particular house apart from the others he built along the street. A sensible, modest project for its time. An appealing home in which to settle and raise a family. As the compact scale of the original house reminds us, these were modest dwellings built right after the War, the likes of which are probably widespread throughout Britain. Our dad, a Chinese bachelor, took a chance on Swindon, a quiet unassuming town near Wales, to settle into.
Swindon didn't disappoint him. That he was accepted—even sought after in one account, by a particular divorcée—was no small feat. Not only was he able to establish himself as an accountant —albeit under an English pseudonym—he became secure enough to acquire and operate a second business, a beauty salon. His social stature in town was a source of fond pride; he enjoyed participating in Swindon life as a business owner, even joining the local association of beauty salons. I picture him on his rounds at the beauty parlour—inspecting the equipment, interacting with staff, making small talk with customers.
In all he spent more than 20 years becoming English. His wife’s untimely death forced him to a second crisis—the first left him bald not long after arrival—that saw him sell off and abandon a life he had taken great care to build. He returned to the country he had left as a hopeful young man. It was like stepping back in time; very little progress had occurred, nothing like the sweeping changes he had seen in England. Here he found himself odd man out, almost a foreigner in his own country. Gradually over time, Swindon receded into a trove of amusing vignettes of bachelor life highlighted by very occasional glimpses of withering isolation.
John hesitantly offers tea, which we politely decline; intruders, after all, hardly guests. We are fortunate catching him, a car mechanic, home on one of his off shifts. The room we're in, he relates, is an expansion of the small functional kitchen of the original house. He has lived here probably longer than our dad ever did, long enough to convert the modest backyard of previous owners—where our dad grew brussell sprouts and hoped for frost to sweeten them—into a Japanese-style garden with pond and bridge.
For an unremarkable place—its depressed core showing signs of the global recession—Swindon is ordinary even shabby, a kind of nowhere young people escape from. And perhaps more than occasionally—as with John—come back to. Unexciting, perhaps, but more importantly, affordable. Swindon's selling point—its safe dependability—sustains lives like John's. After the Blitz in London, and working on agricultural teams early in the war, it might have seemed a relative haven of potential to David Bennett. Somewhere you could keep your head down and get on with the business of ordinary life. Here he could imagine settling down, putting out a shingle, finding a wife and raising a family. Not to pin his hopes too high, but there could be a future. It was close to Wales, a beautiful place he was sure to visit—didn't they name a saint after him there? With a bit of luck and hard work, he might even thrive.
