Author Q & A - Home Is Where: The Journeys of a Missionary Child.

Margaret Newbigin Beetham discusses her new book about life as a Missionary Child in India with her father, Lesslie Newbigin, and beyond …

Where did the inspiration for writing Home Is Where come from?

I don’t think I would call it inspiration it was more like a compulsion, at least to begin with. After my sister, Alison, died over fourteen years ago, I began to feel that I must record some memories of our early life. I had not talked about my childhood with friends or colleagues or even with my children. I wrote bits off and on over several years and I was encouraged by my Writing Group who read material as I wrote it and by one or two friends. As one friend said, when you open the cupboard door which you have shut on the past all sorts of things fall out.  I published a version of a couple of chapters in a collection from Manchester University Press called ‘Writing Otherwise’ edited by Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolf and I began to think of it as a possible book, though various literary agents I contacted thought otherwise. I am grateful to DLT for making it happen now.

Can you elaborate on why you chose the title?

The idea of the book began in some ways with that early puzzle of how the place my parents called ‘Home’ was England, where I and my sisters had never been. As I describe in the book, my early experience was one of dislocation, not only because we moved so often across continents and between cities in Britain and India, but because I was early separated from my parents, the people who make home for us as a child wherever we are. The question ‘Where is home?’ like the related  ‘Where do you come from?’ still floors me, though it does not carry for me the potential threat it does for some friends and neighbours for whom it can mean  ‘Go back to somewhere else where you may never have been.’ ‘Home is where’ is almost a question but could be the start of a statement… ‘where the heart is’.

What were both the personal and literary challenges involved in revisiting the past writing this memoir?

Personally, I found it hard to write about the painful aspects of my early experience in part because I had also internalised the lesson that we were ‘fortunate girls’ and because I knew that our parents loved us. Perhaps because of this I found I could not write in the first person. The use of the third person to tell the story was in part a literary device but it was also a way of enabling me to speak about painful memories as well as to acknowledge awareness of my privilege as a white, well-educated girl. I also wanted to gesture towards that problem which confronts us as we get older and look back on our youthful selves of how far we are the same person now as we were then. I begin and end the book with a river which in each case is an actual river, the Mersey in the opening, the Thames at the end, but it is also a metaphor for that problem. I would like to say that by using the third person I also wanted to indicate the ways in which my experience of moving away from my original ‘home’ to somewhere strange is a disruption shared across generations and geographies today. However, I have to be honest; that was a perception which became stronger as I wrote.

Did formative years spent at boarding school influence your views towards religion, faith and God in later life?

Yes, it did, though I am not sure quite how. The school head when I was a pupil there, Miss Blackburn, was convinced that silence was important to the life of faith. I think she had a feeling for the Quaker practice of silent waiting on God or the spirit. Sitting in absolute silence at the end of a talk or story read to us on a Sunday evening was a hard discipline for the young but now I am grateful for the practice of being able to sit in silence and wait for you don’t always know what. School assumed that faith was an important part of life and to that extent continued the assumptions of my home.  

How do you think your experiences resonate with current patterns of migration and dislocation across the continents?

Every story of migration will be different but what they share is a sense of the potential other place or perhaps the other self. My experience of childhood dislocation was not as traumatic as that of the children on the Kindertransport or of present-day children separated violently from parents by war or the anti-immigrant policies of our Home Office or the administration of President Trump. I live in a city which has been enriched through its history by immigrants and incomers and have friends and colleagues from many different countries and cultures. Many of them came as adults to study, join partners or family or to take up jobs. Though they, too, share a sense of dislocation, they do no necessarily feel this as traumatic.

Why do you believe it is important to write the role of children, women and families back into the histories of mission?

This desire has its roots in my politics, my academic practice and in my personal experience. As a feminist and historian of print culture my academic work has been on the history of print media in nineteenth-century Britain and in particular on making visible the role of women as writers, readers and contributors to magazines. As part of this I began to explore the vast outpourings of print from British missionary societies. I noted, for example, how the figure of a woman, ‘Ruth’ from the Old Testament, appeared on the cover of the CMS magazine called ‘The Gleaner’ while actual women were invisible inside these covers. I read some missionary lives where the work of wives was acknowledged in passing but children were not mentioned. Where was my experience and that of my mother, herself a missionary child and then a missionary wife? I want us to hear the voices of past children like myself and my school friends but, also, I want to hear what my grandchildren and their friends have to say to us now.

Lastly, how do you evaluate your father Lesslie Newbigin’s legacy?

I am not competent to evaluate it as a theologian or church historian. I am neither of these. He was my Dad and I loved him as such. I heard him preach often enough to know he was a good preacher. I know he was loved by a lot of people. In terms of his Indian legacy I think he would be grieved to see how the old caste system which he and others tried so hard to eradicate in the church of South India, has crept back in and how corruption defaces the promise of that bold experiment in ecumenism to which he devoted his life. However, that does not negate other aspects of that work any more than the difficulties I and my siblings experienced as children meant that our parents did not love us.  

Margaret Newbigin Beetham’s new book, Home is Where: Journeys of a Missionary Child, is available now in paperback.