This is an extract from a work-in-progress by Angela Griffin, about coming back to Scotland on the cusp of 60 after spending all her life apart from the first 16 months in Canada.

In the snow picture, taken in 1968, Angela is in the baby blue parka. She’s unwrapping her Christmas presents in 1977.

Dùthchas

The Gaelic word dùthchas refers to belonging to a landscape. When you’re Scottish, you can never be anything else. When you’re taken out of Scotland, you can never be fully Scots either. You’re a perpetual outsider in both places, forever without a country, forever without a home.

In Scotland during the 1960s, advertisements encourage worker Scots to immigrate to Canada. My father visits Canada House in Glasgow at a time when employment in Scotland is erratic. A tall man with a soft Canadian accent unfurls a map before my father and asks where in Canada he’d like to settle, what sort of work he’d like to do, and when he’d like to emigrate. My father feels that Scotland has no place for him while Canada is presented to him like a Proverbs’ bride offering him home, hope, and a future for his family. The Canadian government pays our plane fares across the Atlantic, and we’re away.

I howl and kick in my mother’s arms at Glasgow’s Prestwick Airport on the April day in 1966 that we leave Scotland. I’m sixteen months old. My mother hands me to my father but sensing an ending, a beginning or both, I cannot be calmed.

We live in newly constructed apartments on Hamilton Road in London, Ontario. A Dominion grocery store stands behind the apartments, its neon-lit red maple leaf brandishing its mocha-colored brick. A Thames River flows between the tenement and the Dominion. I’m three- and four-years-old and my mother routinely sends me to the Dominion with money and a note for the store clerk crumpled in my small hand as if we’re still living in Clydebank where the local shop stood next to their flat.

Within three years my parents are homeowners in Canada, and I grow-up a North American, blue-eyed blonde who tans, swims, wears cut-offs and runs barefoot through hot Canadian summers. We return home to Scotland for holidays or family in Scotland comes to Canada. I go to teacher’s college in Glasgow in 1990 and through a marriage, divorce, and many career transitions, I continue to long for Scotland.

I become a headteacher in an Indigenous community in Canada where family, land, language and culture is valued above all else. Living there for five years reinforces in me that undying desire to return to the land that bore me to stay for the rest of my life.

In 2024, I receive a job offer to teach English in the Scottish Highlands. I resign my headship in Canada, give away all that I own, sell my car, and on January 31st, 2024, the day I turn 59, I get on a plane and fly home to Scotland determined to find my place and people here.

Dùthchas refers to the place of one’s birth. One’s hereditary right, one’s native, natural, indigenous country. It’s this that I’ve come home to Scotland to claim along with that vital part of my heart that’s always been absent even unto myself.