Family Album
“Somewhere within, she has this other resource, this speech that she could call on at any point if she so wished, and that does sometimes well up spontaneously—in a dream, or making some comment—but it is shut away, set aside, it refers to pre-Allersmead days, which are now very long ago. It refers to young Ingrid, girl Ingrid.
Ingrid today is far from that other Ingrid, who seems indeed like a person who speaks a different tongue. And that person is succeeded by yet another—an Allersmead Ingrid... who is still bilingual, just, but subsumed within Allersmead culture, gone native. Ingrid today is still in touch with that alter ego; from time to time that other Ingrid surfaces and bears witness.
I was amazed, when I saw Allersmead first. I did not know there were such homes. I had no home then, my mother was dead more than a year, I was living in a hostel, doing waitress work by day.
And before that there were the different places with my mother, the bedsits and the flats, here and there wherever she decided to be, and sometimes the man who was my father coming for a bit but not much, and in the end he went.MoreLess
Ingrid today is far from that other Ingrid, who seems indeed like a person who speaks a different tongue. And that person is succeeded by yet another—an Allersmead Ingrid... who is still bilingual, just, but subsumed within Allersmead culture, gone native. Ingrid today is still in touch with that alter ego; from time to time that other Ingrid surfaces and bears witness.
I was amazed, when I saw Allersmead first. I did not know there were such homes. I had no home then, my mother was dead more than a year, I was living in a hostel, doing waitress work by day.
And before that there were the different places with my mother, the bedsits and the flats, here and there wherever she decided to be, and sometimes the man who was my father coming for a bit but not much, and in the end he went.MoreLess
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