Life

I was lucky to be able to go to university. Very few people from where I grew up carried on to higher education. It wasn’t really an aspiration. Few homes had books on shelves and our town, bigger than Brighton, had no bookshops at all. Foor most young people who did well at school, their preferred path was to the City of London to become brokers, bankers and bookkeepers. Our town did have a good public library, where I found novels, political tomes and plenty of books about science.

On the first day of sixth form college, I suddenly decided to change the A levels that had been suggested to me. I was down for maths, physics, chemistry and zoology. I dropped the maths and physics and added botany. I’d made the decision to become a biologist. Two years later, I headed to London, bypassing the City, to study Life Sciences at Imperial College. Sadly, university disappointed me. I had no idea what to expect. I guess I had built up a vision that I would end up truly enlightened, in some mystical way. It didn’t happen. What did happen was I ended up saving the lives of dozens of hamsters that were destined for the incinerator. These were lab hamsters, the subjects of undergraduate experiments. There were no scalpels or electrodes involved, the experiments were to see when the hamsters were active and whether their daily rhythms could be altered or disrupted by changing when the laboratory lights were on or off. Apart from being a little confused at the end of the experiment, the hamsters were unharmed. When I was one of the undergraduate experimenters, I asked the lab staff what happened to the hamsters afterwards. The answer gave e no choice but to say “I’ll have them”. Each year for three years I took fifteen hamsters home on the underground and distributed them to new homes. Some went in pairs and great hamster dynasties were founded, many with intriguing genetic consequences and colour combinations. In the big scheme of things, a hamster’s life is insignificant, but the annual hamster rescue mission lifted my time at university out of the doldrums. Maybe it gave my life some meaning and taught me that I could make choices beyond those simply expected of me.

Life imprisonment springs to mind. Then freedom of living, freedom of choices. And happiness. I have just summed up my life in a few words. Started off feeling like a prisoner, with nowhere to go, no choices, no value, no freedom. Trapped in my home town, trapped in my parent's unhappy marriage, trapped in a society with a mentality I never felt I belonged to. Women are supposed to stay home to look after their children, cook and clean? Says who? I do all that now of course, I have become a mother and a wife (which is exactly who I swore I would never become), but love takes over and life goes on. I am a different wife I would have been if I stayed in my home country, if I didn't fight back for my right to a decent life.

I was twelve when I decided I was going to chase my freedom. I wrote in a school essay, "I am going to live in England'." I remember reading it out loud to the class. Everyone laughed, but it was ok, because I knew that's exactly what my future held. My life, my decisions. I know it is easier to look back now and paint myself as a strong character who always knew what she wanted, but the truth is that I wasn't strong. I simply knew that if I stayed where I was I would have died. Life is hard enough when you have reasons to live; but when you seem to hate everything and everyone around you, then what? Life is good now. I feel loved, I love in return and I am grateful.