TEXT Charmaine Joshua, the narrator, was born in 1969 in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, to second- generation South African Indians. At the tender age of twenty-three, having graduated from the local university, which I had been able to attend with a bursary, I accepted an offer of employment from a large law firm in Johannesburg, and left my little town for the big city. My father had tears in his eyes when he hugged me goodbye in my little flat in Hillbrow, one of Johannesburg's seedier suburbs, before driving the 500 kilometres back to my home town. That night, my first away from the family home, was long and dark and filled with the strange street sounds of a violent city. I covered my head with my blanket and waited for the dawn. 10It was a rehearsal for a greater separation to come, for in that same year I won a scholarship to 11 study abroad at the university of my choice. 12So miraculous did the idea of my going overseas seem that my mother could not believe it until she saw an article with my picture in the local newspaper. Later, my father made a copy of the article which he framed in our lounge and proudly showed to visitors. I had chosen to enrol in a master's programme at Cambridge - a university myfamily had never heard 16of before - partly because there was a precedent of South African law graduates doing so but mainly because, all through my childhood, England had been the land of my dreams. When I was very young, my sisters would read me stories with brightly coloured pictures of castles, forests, princesses and fairies. They always told me that these pictures were of England. Later, England became the land of the Famous Five, and later still, 21 of Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and Shakespeare. And what greater fairy tale could there be than 22 royalty? As a child, 231 had stood in a jam-packed prefab classroom to watch the wedding of Charles and Diana on a tiny 9 black and white television which our teacher had brought in for the occasion. Imagine the impact 25that the image of a horse-drawn glass carriage and the towering dome of St Paul's Cathedral had 26 on children growing up in a slum, the vast majority of whom would be working in a shoe factory by 29the age of eighteen. It was magic. 28I hated Cambridge. I had arrived in mid September, a week before the start of the 30 academic 29 year, and grew steadily more depressed as the days shortened and became colder and wetter. I 30once counted fifteen days of incessant gloom without any sunshine. To feel some connection with 31home, I would call each night from the payphone in the kitchen of the house I shared with four other graduate students, and I would listen to my mother, or my father or my boyfriend saying, Hello, hello', just for 35 a few seconds before the line was disconnected. Charmaine Joshua, "Of Mango Trees and Monkeys", in From There to Here: Sixteen True Tales of Immigration to Britain, 2007 ​