That day 12 years ago...

Since it was the anniversary of my arrival to this country a couple of weeks ago, I thought that I would write a bit about it. It feels just like yesterday and it's hard to believe that time flies by so quickly!

My first memory of England is the grey sky. As I was to find out in the years afterwards, grey sky and rain were the symbols of English weather and England as a whole. It was the winter of 1998 and me and my mother came to spend the Christmas with my stepfather in our future home. It was a house with a garden in the suburbs of Worcester, which was a great surprise to me. I had always dreamed of having a garden full of beautiful flowers and wildlife as we lived in the flat in Mostar, my hometown in Bosnia & Herzegovina. The next surprise was when I was shown my room-a room all to myself! In our flat I had always shared the master bedroom with my mother, because my grandparents also lived with us (a common cultural thing in that part of the world), and I remember bursting into tears because I could not remember a time when I didn't share a room with my mother. I eventually calmed down when my mother reassured me that she would be in the next room and that everything would be ok.

That Christmas passed in a flash, and although I missed my grandparents, I remember being pretty happy and being satisfied with the gifts I got. Near the end of February 1999 we left Bosnia & Herzegovina for good. The day before my departure I was at school, and I remember my teacher announcing to the class that we had to say farewell to an important member of the class. She asked me to stand up while the entire class wished me good luck, and I felt quite sad, though I didn't cry. I'm not sure it actually occurred to me that I would never be coming back to this class. When I was woken the next morning it was horrendous-I remember screaming and crying for my grandmother and grandfather, and as we sat off in the airport in neighbouring Croatia in my stepfather's jeep, and I don't think I calmed down for a good 15 minutes.

A few days after we arrived I started at my new school. The week before that we visited the school and my future teacher, Mrs Blow, gave me some colouring pencils and a plain paper notepad for me to draw some pictures. When I got home I drew a house on top of a hill in vivid colours and a decorative cabinet, as my previous teacher in Mostar had taught me and my classmates. I wasn't totally delighted with the first picture because I scribbled the sky in blue instead of carefully colouring it in, and I remember her looking in delight at what I drew then me making a sad face and doing scribbling motions. I think she understood.

School was a massive shock. For a start, it was on just one floor; my previous school had around three floors. Next, we sat on on tables in around groups of 4. And finally, the school had carpets! The room was also smaller and more square in shape. My old school was a typical Communist one, and my classroom was rectangular in shape with a massive green blackboard at the front. It had stone floors and desks for two kids each to sit on, all of which directly faced the front. "Oh how I wish we could have carpets" my old teacher, who we all called "Teacher Senada", often used to remark. Now I was in a school with carpets, and I couldn't believe it. I remember thinking that Teacher Senada would be very happy if she came to this school to teach.

Language was an obvious hurdle for me during those first few months. Before that point, I had been under the impression that everyone spoke my native language. But now I was in a room full of children who couldn't understand a word I said, and I couldn't understand what they said. I often tried to communicate with these children in Serbocroatian, but of course it never worked. I picked up English very quickly though: I was given supplementary English lessons by a lovely old lady at the school, who's name I cannot remember, and my mother also forced me to learn new vocabulary at home. By the middle of that summer, before the term ended, I was more or less fluent in English. Spelling was a struggle for years though: Serbocroatian is a phonetic language, and the concept of learning how to spell words was alien to me. It wasn't until I got to my early teens that my spelling began to significantly improve.

That summer we moved to the city of Bristol, where I still live. I'll continue this post in a second part tomorrow as this is getting very long now, but although there have been some very rough times, this country has generally treated me well and I'm very happy to have all the opportunities which are presented to me here and which I would never have otherwise had I stayed where I was.