Give up, go home?

A young woman I know sent me a message on Facebook.  She has emigrated from an Asian country to New Zealand.  After 7 months she is wondering if she has made the right decision. 

I have responded to her note as I always do when asked by young people what they should do next – with the best mix of affirmation and common sense I can manage. 

But as I finished the reply, I suddenly thought of a story told to me by a man who was once in a position not entirely dissimilar to that of my friend.

My maternal grandfather was an Englishman who emigrated to New Zealand in the 1920s.  He was then in his mid 20s.  He had fought in the trenches of northern France as a teenager, where a brother lies forever.  He lost his father shortly after the War – and then found that the family fortunes were not what he had expected. 

He told me 50 years later that he decided he wanted to go somewhere new – and start afresh.  He could not recall then why he had had chosen New Zealand – he said he might as easily have gone to Canada.

He arrived in Wellington Harbour on a clear still morning the type of which there are few.  He remembered the little painted houses on the hillsides. 

He went to work at what he knew best – which was farming.  In England he was more towards the gentleman end of things, but in New Zealand he ended up cutting scrub for someone he called a ‘hard man’.  Weeks and months on a cold, wet Taranaki hillside working ‘til he was near to dropping.

I think it was more than 7 months, but there came soon enough a time when the young Englishman had had enough.  He was a musician, a bit of a bon vivant – and in New Zealand … he had access to none of that, none of his old friends or family - or his Clumber Spaniel.

He also decided to ‘go home’.

While he was getting together what he needed to implement his decision, he was staying in a 1920’s version of a Backpackers hostel.  One night he struck up a conversation with the stranger in the next bunk – and, eventually, poured out his sad story. 

The stranger said he was the son of a farmer – and harvest was coming up.  Could he do with a bit of work before he went back to England?  My grandfather said yes. 

The stranger became a friend, and then a brother in law.  Grandad stayed in New Zealand and built a good and full life – a life that still anchors my own and those of many other descendants.