Arriving in February

Text 1: The Orange, by Adaeze Morland

An original twentieth-century memoir.

We landed at London Airport on a morning in February 1962, and the first thing I learned about England was that the sky could come right down to the ground. In Lagos the sky had always been somewhere above you, high and hard and blue. Here it lay across the runway like a damp grey blanket, and the buildings were wrapped in it, and the people were wrapped in it, and so, within a minute of stepping off the plane, was I.

I was ten. My mother had dressed me for the occasion in my church clothes: a yellow dress with a white collar and white socks folded neatly at the ankle. I had thought I looked very fine. On the steps of the plane the wind went straight through the yellow cotton as if it were not there, and I understood at once that my mother, who knew everything, had not known about this.

Inside the terminal it was warmer, and very loud, and everything was the colour of porridge. People walked fast, with their heads down, and nobody looked at anybody. I held on to my mother’s coat. I had been told that my father would be waiting, that I would know him, though I had not seen him since I was four and remembered him mostly as a smell of soap and a laugh that came from very high up.

And then there he was, behind the barrier, in a brown overcoat with the collar turned up, much thinner than the man in the photograph on our wall at home. He was holding a woollen hat in one hand and a paper bag in the other. When he saw us his face did something I have never forgotten. It seemed to come apart and put itself back together in a new shape, all at once, like a window being opened.

He knelt down on the dirty floor in his good coat. He put the hat on my head, pulling it down over my ears, and it smelt of him. Then he opened the paper bag and gave me what was in it, which was an orange.

I stood in the noise and the grey, in my thin yellow dress, holding the orange in both hands. It was the only bright thing in the whole of England, and he had brought it for me.

Explore how Adaeze Morland uses language and structure to present her feelings on arriving in England.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.