Return to Gaschurn, Sixty Years Later. Part One.

Many years ago -- 59 years to be exact -- my then guardian Mrs Williamson asked me a crucial question. ‘Where shall we go, Jo?’ she asked. ‘Would you like a summer or a winter holiday?’

(Why she called me Jo – well, that’s all part of my recently published childhood memoir, The Girl from Lamaha Street).  I was, at the time, attending a girls’ boarding school in Harrogate; Mrs Williamson, who ran a riding school in the north-west county of Cumberland, was the woman my mother, back in Guyana, had appointed to look after me during the school holidays. Mum  had offered us both a holiday, and I could choose the destination.

The answer to that question was easy and obvious: ‘Winter!’ I replied immediately, without a second thought.

 I hated winter. I hated the cold and the icy wind and the sleet the grey skies. For two years now, I’d longed for sunshine – proper, hot, sunshine, white beaches, blue skies and aquamarine seas. I longed for the Caribbean, or if not the Caribbean, for the familiar warmth of the ambiance and the people of my own country Guyana: people who looked and talked just like me, who knew what I was about. Yes, I was beginning to feel homesick.

 So the shock was huge when, a few months later, Mrs Williamson announced our destination: Austria, a skiing trip, in the snow-covered mountains! She had misunderstood my choice of destination. She thought I wanted a winter-sport holiday.

Being the shy, introverted girl I was, I did not show my shock, and did not object. I accepted her choice. And so December 1963 found us both flying off to Basle airport in Switzerland. From Basle we took the train and the bus to the quaint little village of Gaschurn, nestled into a valley in the eastern Austrian province Vorarlberg.

I remember being dazzled by the glorious mountains that surrounded us, jagged and white, etched against the brilliant blue of the sky, the snow glistening and sparkling in brilliant sunshine. I remember thinking this was the most beautiful place in the world; being overwhelmed by the majesty and magnificence of the Alpine landscape. 

At first everything was fine. Mrs Williamson and I, and another friend who had travelled with us, stayed in a Pension -- German for Bread-and-Breakfast – called Haus in der Sonne at the edge of the village. I loved it there. The house fascinated me mostly because it was all of wood: actual massive logs, not planks painted white as in my native Georgetown but in the typical traditional chalet style so prevalent not only in Austria but in the Alpine regions of Germany and Switzerland.


The chalet had a cosy atmosphere, with a wood-burning stove lending an sense of Gemütlichkeit– a wonderful and untranslatable German word which combines that very cosiness with warmth, relaxing with good friends or family, and a deep sense of spiritual wellbeing.

I started to learn German; I had always loved learning new languages and this one fascinated me. I learned to ask for the translation dictionary in German, and to count to one hundred. I had made my peace with this unwanted holiday, with snow, with skiing, with having to wait a year or two for my yearned-for tropical beach.

I felt culturally integrated – a concept that had never concerned me back then. People, almost all adults, fellow guests at the Pension, were friendly and I was a part of it all.

And yes, at first everything was fine. I began my children's skiing lessons.
I was in a children’s beginner group on the gentle slopes. I put away my original reluctant prejudice and applied myself to learning to ski: sidling up the slope, whooshing down again. To my surprise it all turned out to be quite enjoyable...


It hadn’t really registered that I was in any way a foreigner, different. I was used to being the odd one out, skin-colour-wise, having lived in a very white England now for two years. Yes, I was, as the cover or my memoir hints, the only brown girl in an English boarding school. As one reviewer of my memoir puts it:

At this point the reader is conditioned to expect a tale of prejudice and discrimination but in fact Sharon was happy at the school and did well academically and socially, being accepted in spite of her colour.

But now, in Gaschurn I was to be given a rude awakening.

I hadn’t even realised I was different to everyone else. Or rather, I wasn’t different, but I looked different. The children of Gaschurn must have decided among themselves that I needed to be informed of how terrible it was to look different, because one afternoon, on my way home alone from the slopes, they gathered, about twenty of them – or maybe it just seemed like twenty or more, I didn’t count. I just know that I was suddenly the centre of a circle of children, all chanting: ‘Negerlein! Negerlein! Negerlein!’

Once again, I didn’t need a translation. I already knew that the suffix -lein is a diminutive. So I was a little one of those N’s.

I stood there in their midst, shocked to the core, and when they dispersed, I walked back to Haus in der Sonne, tears misting my eyes, trying to comprehend and make sense of what had just happened.

I never forgot that incident; neither did I speak of it at first. I never told Mrs Williamson or my mother or any adult, for that matter, and it was years before I spoke of it to friends. I'm of the "sticks and stones might break my bones but words will never hurt me generation", and I tucked it away in my mind as just one of those things.

But it had hurt. It did hurt. Yes, these kinds of wounds don't bleed, and nobody will see them and sympathise if you don't talk about them. If you don't tell others, they remain your own problem, the kind of wound that you need to address yourself, deal with yourself, heal yourself. And Mother Nature has generously gifted us all with the inner means to do so; that's how we develop resilience and inner strength. 

We have all heard anecdotes of people who went through horrendous childhood experiences who nevertheless grow up not only unscathed but strong; strong for having gone through hard times and come out the other side, mature and resilient, even without adult assistance. Even young children learn to do this, teach themselves to do this. I certainly had, and I was already pretty tough, and as far as bullying experiences go, this one was pretty mild.

 So yes: it had hurt. No, I hadn't been traumatised, as a friend once conjectured, but certainly my self-confidence, once so unassailable, had taken a pounding. And  its remnants were still there, in the form of an ugly memory niggling at the back of my mind, a memory that left me with a feeling of coldness, being shut out, an alien, unwanted. 

Frozen out, when everything in me yearned for belonging.

Years, decades, passed. I married a German citizen, a cellist from Frankfurt, and then, after divorce, another German. I became a German citizen. I lived in Germany for over forty years. I became fluent in German.  

Over the years I visited neighbouring Austria several times, at first on holiday, later to visit my oldest granddaughter, who is Austrian. I was in her hometown Salzburg at her birth, and returned there year after year. 

In both Germany and Austria I navigated through many an incident which could be called racist, and learnt to deal with them, small, inconsequential things I could easily shrug off. But I never once encountered anything as blatant as what I later referred to as the Negerlein drama. And I never went back to the idyllic village of Gaschurn in Vorarlburg.

But that drama gnawed at the back of my mind, and I always knew that one day Gaschurn would beckon me back. I needed closure.

 
Last March, I did return.

Part 2: Return to Gaschurn 2022.