I’ve spent the last month in the England, first in London for research at the British Library and the National Archives, and then, when my partner joined me, making a trip with her and my sister to Boston, Lincolnshire. I was born there in 1962 and grew up in a council house in a small village a few miles outside Boston before we moved into a larger detached house in town. We spent a week in a beautiful old house in the Lincolnshire Wolds, now converted into a B&B, driving to places I knew as a child, and taking long walks from village to village in the gently rolling landscape. Then it was back to London again, for time with friends from my undergraduate days and others from later in my life who had made their home in London or nearby. For the last week we stayed in a suite in South Kensington, just next to the National History Museum, in one of the tall white Georgian terraces that lead off Cromwell Road. Returning to Vancouver’s West End everything suddenly seems small, almost like a model village, in comparison to London. This brings back for me memories of a reverse journey, of coming back to London in the early 1980s after my first visit to New York, getting out of the tube at Hammersmith, and wondering why the buildings were so quaint and low.

The trip brought up several memories of this sort like this for me. Many of the places in London I visited were like a palimpsest, in which I’d suddenly encounter a fragment of partially erased text from an earlier time in my life. And the friends I met, too, had a similar effect on me. It was strange how easy it was to slip into a feeling of closeness, even after so many years, even for only a fleeting meeting for lunch or dinner. I wouldn’t say that I felt at home, but I did feel more comfortable in Britain than I had done for years.

We left Lincolnshire when I was five or six years old, and I’d never gone back. We went there because my father got a job as a special needs teacher, and we had no family in the area. When we left we left for good: the east of the county, in particular, is a kind of backwater, away from direct transport routes, and there was no reason to come back. This was the part of Lincolnshire I spent the first few years of my life in. It is still called the County of Holland, and the landscape resembles the Netherlands: flat, reclaimed land separated from the sea by dikes, and criss-crossed by canals and drains. Up on the wolds we could see the sea in the distance, now cross-stitched with rows of tall white wind turbines. Descend into the fens, into the County of Holland, and we could only see a level horizon of dikes, with a vast cloudy sky above us. Driving on the flat roads you’d occasionally see a tall structure from miles away: the Gothic tower of Boston stump, the tallest parish church in England, or the spaghetti tracks of rollercoasters and other amusement rides at the resort of Skegness. Failing that, a windmill, or a smaller church steeple or tower that indicated a village was nearby.

In Boston, we were lucky to be able to go into the house that I’d lived in from the ages of three to six. The new owner was renovating, living in a caravan in the front garden as he did so. I’d looked back at my parents’ photograph albums before I returned, and checked on google maps, so I knew that the house was relatively unchanged from the outside: deep red bricks, the curved streamline 1950s steel-framed windows now replaced but the frames still painted white. I remembered many things about the house, which seemed vast in size to me as a toddler but was in fact quite small. The was a weeping willow tree at the front of the garden, its leaves trailing out onto the road on which we learned to cycle, my father desperately running after our bikes with a steadying hand until we learned to stay upright by ourselves. In the rear garden there was a sandpit, and then an old concrete path running back into an orchard of pear (and plum, my sister reminded me) trees, past a rickety old chicken coop to a high wooden fence right at the back. The house itself had no porch at the front door, and you entered into a hall with a sitting room on the left, a dining room with French windows ahead, where we’d play a game that involved assembling long trains of plastic animals on the winter nights, and then a kitchen to the right of this. I didn’t remember my bedroom, with its view over the garden at the back, but I distinctly remembered the stairs, with their shiny white gloss banisters and flights, that led via a landing to the upper storey. This house, I realise, is the house I often map onto other fictional houses in books I read even if they are nothing like my childhood house. When characters in Wuthering Heights or in Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House ascend stairs, when Lu Xun in his autobiographical short stories writes about returning home, forever changed, I see them entering a house laid out in the same way as this house in Boston, often in contradiction to the clues given in the text itself.

Yet viewing the house didn’t evoke very strong emotions for me: I felt almost as if I was watching a movie of some kind of archaeological dig, searching for small clues and buried artefacts. The willow tree was still there, unchanged in size: tiny cedar bushes on the drive were now medium size trees. At the back of the house the chicken coop and the orchard had vanished, although there were still two old, stunted trees — plum and apple, our host said – just coming into leaf. There was no sandpit, but that old, battered concrete path still led out across the lawn into the garden, going nowhere. Inside the house had totally changed, its walls ripped out and windows replaced, but that staircase still led up to the second floor, stripped back to the old white-painted wood in preparation for renovation. As an adult, I found it small and cramped. I ascended, remembering how huge it had been for a child, how I learned to climb up it on my hands and knees without yet really knowing how to come back down, and how I’d brace myself to land on my backside on each flight as I descended.

Coming back to the house, then, was like looking down a very deep well. I had my memories, but I couldn’t really see anything new. At times, having looked at a photograph, or learned something in conversation with my sister – I had a tortoise and its name was Frieda, for instance—I felt as if after a long wait I’d hear a faint echo of something that had fallen into the well and now struck the side and reached the bottom. I’d look down, look for myself, but if I could see anything in the water it was only a tiny smudge, a faint blur. The memories were still there, but the house gave me little more to add to them.

My strongest feeling of connection came on our last full day in Lincolnshire, when I went back to the site of the Catholic primary school in Boston where my mother taught, and where I’d just started school before we moved away to the North of England. The school had closed but the church next to it was still there: churches, the Polish man who did odd jobs around the site told me in a thick accent, are very hard to move. The playground next to the church had been converted into a parking lot, the wing of the school that divided the playground from a garden behind had been demolished, and the garden also tarmacked over. In the small section of the school building which had survived I could see through a window into the classroom where my mother had taught, into which she brought me to sit in the back of classes even before I was of school-going age. Still standing next to where the garden used to be was the hall where fetes and jumble sales used to be held. This was the one building that was open, serving as a polling station for local elections. I remembered entering this building during one of the jumble sales and buying a green cloth-bound book of Greek myths, illustrated with Victorian women in flowing costumes. It was something I wanted even though it was beyond my comprehension, a token from a world I did not yet know and yet which I was confident in the fulness of time I would understand. The woman who sold it to me remarked that it was a very adult book for such a young child to buy. On our way out of the school yard I also remembered being bullied, of finding a corner where two walls met and staying there, fists and legs facing forward, so that no one could approach me from behind. The schoolroom was where I learned to study; the church, with a new anteroom covering what used to be steps up to the entrance, was where I learned to pray. But both of these were locked, and I could not go in.

The past really is, as L.P. Hartley once wrote, another country, one which I could not now re-enter. Later in my trip I’d meet up with one of my first honours students at NIE in Singapore, who had migrated to England soon after, and forged an academic career. She said, over coffee, that what she found so strangely pleasing is that we had traded places. I had now lived longer in Singapore than she did, and she had lived longer in Britain than I ever had. And yet when I flew back to Vancouver, with its pleasant smallness, I still did not feel at home. Singapore’s where my heart is, the place that, obliquely, I was looking for even as I searched those archives in London. And yet borders are starting to go up in my life: distances become longer, the body becomes more weary, and paths into the future narrow and begin to close up. The past is a well I cannot descend into: the future is much wider, but each choice made now forecloses another.