The Loneliness of an Intercontinental Childhood

I understand my life of aloneness started the day Mum led us kids onto the Qantas jumbo headed to Australia on Christmas Eve 1975.

When my children grew old enough for school, I was very determined they stay in the same school for as long as possible. I’m eternally pleased that both my eldest children attended only two schools each - and both attended the same school for their high school years.

My 20-year-old son plays sports with kids he knew in Year 1. My 23-year-old daughter is still friends with people she’s known for 15 years. Both have healthy social lives across both other young men and women. My son has friends who are girls, my daughter has friends who are boys. Gatherings at our house are multi-gender, with everyone equal.

Yes, there are the ongoing ‘friendship circle’ dramas, I can’t always keep up with who’s in and who is out. However as they become older, these relationships will stabilise, and I’m confident both kids will be playing golf or tennis in their retirement years with at least one person they knew from back in their school days, so many years ago.

My kids have lived in the same place their whole lives. They’ve walked to the same school for years; been members of the same sports clubs; shopped in the same supermarket; swum at the same beach; learnt to drive the same roads they rode their bikes down ten years before. This is their place, their land. Even though they left school several years ago, they can walk down the street and run into a school mate and have a catch-up. And of course, social media provides an underlying connection even when they’ve travelled, or their friends have moved away.

My schooling was the complete opposite, I endured the double whammy - multiple countries and multiple schools. 

In 1975 my family moved from Surrey’s quiet middle-class suburbia, south of London, to Darwin’s topical frontier in Australia. Other than the fact people in my new home town spoke English, or at least the Australian version, it was about as radical change a child of nine could countenance. Of course, aged nine, I had no choice. Mum and Dad packed up us three younger children and moved. Our eldest brother was already in his first year at Cambridge, so we left him behind and moved to the other side of the world.

You can read about the history of Darwin and Cyclone Tracey. The once in a generation mega-storm devastated Darwin precisely a year before we arrived, Christmas Day 1974. We arrived in the early hours of Christmas 1975. The streets were still clogged with the debris of broken houses. Electricity was rationed around the suburbs, the heat and humidity punctuated by the daily monsoonal storms. 

I’d already attended two schools in England - kindergarten and a couple of years in primary school. Though my education, I was a student at least six schools - not only school in Darwin but a couple of years back at boarding school in England in the late 1970s. My final two years were spent at boarding school in Geelong, which is pretty much as far away as you can get from Darwin while staying on the Australian mainland.

The consequence was a perennial feeling of not belonging. At school in Darwin, I was the white pommy kid, chewed by mosquitoes. At English boarding school, I was the antipodean curiosity who was really good at swimming - we’d swum competitively with a local club in Darwin for a couple of years.

Any friendships I formed in one school evaporated when I moved to the next. In the pre-internet era, where communications home from boarding school were by weekly blue aerogram letters, it’s pretty difficult to maintain connections. Finishing my schooling more than 3,000 kilometres away from my home destroyed any real possibility of preserving relationships.

Research has shown this confluence of moving continents and moving schools inevitable had a double impact on me, and any other children in the same predicament.

Moving house takes a toll on children, the more moves, the greater the toll, each transition to a new home accumulating a deficit.

An Irish study suggests that children subjected to multiple house moves suffer a mental health impact. The study confirmed:

“theclose relationship between address change in early years and later poor mental health. Residential mobility may be a useful marker for children at risk of poorer mental health in adolescence and early adulthood.”

The detrimental impact is enhanced when a child moves countries, there’s even a term - ‘Expat Child Syndrome’.

“ECS is most commonly found in children who are aged between 10 and 15. During this period of a child’s life they undergo significant emotional and physical changes and will often utilize their social circles as a mean of coping with these changes. Adolescence is a difficult period in the lives of all children, but when children are removed from their close circle of friends they can often find it even more difficult to deal with the mental and physical changes they are experiencing.

Expat child syndrome manifests itself in many different ways and may impact some children more than others. Common symptoms include seclusion, loneliness, withdrawn behavior and uncooperative or even disruptive behavior. In the majority of the cases children will eventually settle down and will begin to understand some of the benefits of their move abroad.”

The culture shock is considerable. Researchers in the 1950s coined the phrase ‘third culture kids’, to describe young children who move from one culture to another. ‘Third culture’ is the amalgam of the place they came from and the place they have moved to.

Layer on top of this continental move a steady succession of schools, including living in Darwin whilst boarding at school in England and later Geelong.

Kids who move schools can exhibit psychotic symptoms. A study in the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found “school mobility during childhood heightens the risk of developing psychotic-like symptoms in early adolescence by up to 60%.”

The study also found “being involved in bullying, sometimes as a consequence of repeated school moves, may exacerbate risk for the individual”. I was bullied at school both in Darwin and Geelong.

An analysis of student data in the USA showed: 

While students who change schools, especially frequent movers, can suffer psychologically, socially and academically, another important finding is that academic achievement of the “stable core”—the 30 percent of students who stay in one school—is also negatively affected by the school’s mobility rate.

The impact on students of moving schools varies, including problems developing peer relationships, and most especially, like me, an inability to maintain relationships and friendships from previous schools. There is a disruption to the new class - not just the new student, but the existing students because the teacher may need to spend a disproportionate amount of class time with the newbie.

Plus of course, the curriculum is different. In five years, I moved from a school in England, to a school in Darwin, back to a school in England, then a school in Darwin. How on earth could I be expected to maintain academic consistency and personal development?

The answer, of course, is I couldn’t, and didn’t. I scraped through my final year exams with a bare pass. I only made it into a university course because back in the early 1980s, Australian universities were free, funded by the taxpayer, with plenty of spaces available even to low achievers like me.

I lasted a year at university then slunk home to Darwin. Fortuitously I’d become involved with student theatre at university, and that set me on a life path which would see me work backstage, meet my wife, and finally be given my own theatre to manage.

Recently, after 54 years, I realised I’ve been lonely my whole life. Today I realise I still carry the scars of those school years. I understand my life of aloneness started the day Mum led us kids onto the Qantas jumbo headed to Australia on Christmas Eve 1975.

Image

https://pixabay.com/photos/boy-child-sad-alone-sit-1666611/