The Russian guitarist and the ex pat.

A few days ago I was sitting in the Seaman’s Mission lounge area with a group of seamen from a number of countries. There were Russian, Chinese, Burmese and Ukrainians. Some were playing table tennis, some were reading by the fire, and some were watching television (I sometimes wonder what a Chinese thinks of some of our soap operas, but that’s a subject for the future).




One of the Russians, picked up the acoustic guitar that sits, often neglected, in the corner. After a few moments of fiddling with the strings and re-tuning it, he started to play some Russian folk songs. Quite quickly the television sound was muted, after a further few minutes the table tennis players stopped playing. The two or three seaman around the fire put their newspapers aside and slid back comfortably into the seats. At least one of them (Chinese) closed his eyes and completely relaxed. The Russian continued playing. He had a good voice and he started singing some Russian folk love songs (or so he told us afterwards). After this he moved on to a couple of the Cossack dance tunes; they start very slowly and get faster and faster, ending with a tremendous crashing finale. No one in the room was involved in anything but listening to him.
He came from St. Petersburg; I asked him if he was homesick? He simply nodded.

This whole incident started me thinking about homesickness. As an ex patriot pom (Englishman in Australia) I have lived in Australia nearly forty years, and from time to time one goes through this experience. I think most ex pats do. I came to Australia when I was twenty six, with my wife and two very young children, so my formative years were English. I have spent far more of my life in Australia than I did in England, so one might have thought that English imprint would have been overlaid with an Australian one, but it hasn’t. It is strange how music often seems to trigger the emotions. I am not a particularly musical person, but that Russian music somehow triggered some thoughts of “home”. My sister, at Lucy’s blog http://boxelder.blogspot.com/ with her poetry references and family references has the same effect. In fact this is a very pleasant experience, but I have returned to England quite a number of times over the years and you realize that people, places and circumstances change. They move in one direction and you move in another. As I think Catalyst http://oddballobservations.blogspot.com/ said about his birthday, one of the nice things of getting older is that you have more friends. I understand what he means, and it’s very pleasant, but those friends don’t have the same connection to the ones you make in the first twenty years of your life. However, try to pick some of those friendships up after forty years and it doesn’t always work, even on the internet! Anyone who migrates to another culture, even if it is one with the same language, finds that it is a one way street. Some people only discover this when they return. If the time away has been short one can perhaps re-adjust but for any length of time it becomes progressively more difficult and sometimes painful. When I was regularly traveling between Australia and Europe, I used to think that I was perpetually living on an aircraft somewhere over India!
Coming back to our Russian guitarist seaman, I wonder if the job of seafaring has the same effect on these men. I suspect it does.
When the Russian had finished playing, all the seaman clapped and applauded him. They all felt the same about home.
As a final note, our Russian pointed out that the guitar had two broken string adjusting knobs. I said I knew this; he hesitated and then said “As its broken, I will give you A$20 for it. He said he had no guitar on the ship. As he had entertained us so wonderfully I felt the guitar would go to a good home; I said “Yours for US$20”. He said “Done”. After a few moments I asked him if he could fix the broken adjusting knobs. In a very proud voice (I had insulted him) he said “I am first engineer on ship, I can fix”. Another Russian who had witnessed the whole episode said “If he does not fix it and play well, the captain, a Pole, will toss the guitar and maybe the player overboard!” I am not sure that I had done Russian/Polish relations any good!