Mobile Homes

Friday 21st May, 2021

By Kathy Burrell

‘Stay Home’ – it sounds so simple at first, such a clear message designed to keep people safe. We can, and have, unpicked so many issues hidden in this directive, not least the privilege of being able to stay home and the assumption that home is – automatically, heteronormatively – a safe place to stay. But we also need to acknowledge that for many people home is more than one place. If you are staying in one home, you may well be absent in another. 

This has played out in so many different kinds of scenarios in people’s lives. Through my teaching I have seen how difficult the Stay Home directive has been to navigate for many of my students. For those who had moved to go to Uni it suddenly forced a question to which the answer was still pending, perhaps deliberately so. Is ‘home’ the parental home ‘back home’, or is it the new life forged in halls and shared houses? Sometimes the parental home did provide a resolution and refuge, offering luxuries such as a family pet, proper central heating, clean carpets and on-hand emotional support – especially when weighed against halls being too closely policed by wardens, the loneliness of self-isolation and the patchy and overloaded Wi-Fi of student rentals. For others the parental home offered no such easy return – no calm and quiet workspace, often claustrophobic, and taunting a biography which had been moving forwards with stasis and limbo. Many though fell between the two, in the end moving back and forth almost clandestinely, at home in both places in different ways and missing one while at the other. I was not supervising or acting as tutor for any international students this year, so did not get to hear any stories first-hand, but we know the kinds of hardships they have been facing too, emotionally relocated further away from home than had ever been planned.

The lockdowns made me realise how much my own sense of home is stretched out. Beyond my immediate household I have no family in Liverpool, and I have left my best friends in the Midlands, precious evidence of a previous home. My pre-pandemic life was always comfortingly punctuated by long car and train journeys, visits and meet ups, replenishing these intimate networks. The now closed Birmingham John Lewis coffee shop was almost a home from home in itself, the amount of hours I have spent there catching up – a space which came to represent, for me, familiarity, relief and excitement all at the same time, somewhere where I could fully indulge my identity as ‘friend’. The annual Christmas tour of the country we had become accustomed to, taking us from Liverpool to Plymouth, and back again via Newport, was reduced last year to swapping presents with my parents on a chilly December lunchtime in the carpark of an M6 Services. While I was actually happy to stay home, and was very grateful to be able to do so, the ‘stay local’ directive seemed to cut deeper. FaceTiming (now a proper verb) just isn’t the same.

What I take from this is something I already knew theoretically, but perhaps didn’t ever have to reckon with so personally before Covid – that home isn’t fixed at all, and for many people requires different kinds of mobilities to be brought into being. Home and mobility – the two are not in opposition, but are mutually reinforcing. When mobility is truncated, home is also implicated. In my research on migration so much of what I have explored is the way home and mobility are inextricably interlinked. If you crave Polish food at home, you really need a local shop to import the brands and ingredients you want. The domestic demands the local and the translocal, and all three rely on the various mobility infrastructures which connect them. As Patricia Ehrkamp underlined in her research with Turkish families in Germany, transnational links enable you to physically relocate a sense of home. Turkish shops in Germany don’t pose a threat as an embodiment of stubborn ‘non-assimilation’. They are evidence of rooting and grounding.

This link between home and mobility came through strongly in research I have done delving into the material links people keep after they have migrated. Interviews with people from Poland and Zimbabwe in the UK revealed a whole range of activities sustaining tangible connections across borders, not least the phenomenal efforts invested in sending parcels back and forth – carefully selected items designed to show care and stake a claim to a physical presence in people’s lives, and domestic spaces, in the absence of the sender. People were sending clothes for special occasions, toys, medicines, bedding, and there was even one example of someone sending a sofa from Leicester to Zim, with people clubbing together to buy a container lorry to do so. In return, people were receiving special foods, Polish language books, magazines and DVDs, and all sorts of other things, either sent back via friends and family or through courier and shipping services. These courier services were integral to many of the Polish accounts in particular – usually dependent on a man in a van driving hundreds of miles across Europe. I wonder what impact Covid has had on these links, and whether homes have had to adjust to a diminished flux of loving exchanges of homely things (and that is without even taking Brexit into account).

The starkest juxtaposition the stay home directive has forced is likely to be the impact on travel and visits back and forth. I have spent a lot of time researching the transnational mobilities of Poles in the UK, and in particular the plethora of low cost airlines and new routes which emerged after EU expansion, reducing real-time distances between Poland and the UK. For a while there was much talk of ‘hypermobility’, and a belief that this was a new kind of migration, normalising an intensification of easy mobility. This movement seemed to be aided not only by the new governance regime within the EU, but also by increased affordability and fresh technologies of online booking and checking in, as well as the emerging social scaffolding of texting and Skyping. One respondent, Rafał, who came to Britain in 2005 aged 24, seemed to encapsulate these new possibilities: “I go back to Poland even more often, every month, it is so easy to travel right now. It is very cheap. From Stansted there is a direct flight to Wrocław, I paid, how much did I pay, from Stansted to Wrocław it takes 2 hours and I paid only £33 twice.” Behind this idea of easiness though, the emotional tensions surrounding home and distance were still clear. In the words of Adriana, who came to the UK in 2005 aged 31: “When we entered the Union you could just go then, provided you have the money. You can call them every week. There is the internet, so if you want to it is no problem. Of course it is not the same, like I sit here with you and talk”. This is what may well have been lost during the pandemic – that promise of human contact that for many anchors home through mobility. All the time Covid has prevented travel, parents will have become older, grandchildren grown taller, old haunts will have become slightly less recognisable, and life will have moved on in all sorts of directions, with only those virtual links to hold the threads together. 

Stay home, then, is not a straightforward directive. For many, the retraction of mobility that the pandemic has forced is likely to have led to new understandings and experiences of home all over again, and this, with all its poignancy and pathos, is what our project is exploring.