The Delacorte Review

By The Delacorte Review

The Delacorte Review appears three times a year and is published in cooperation with the Columbia Journalism School and the Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543959604

Book preview

Stories do not write themselves, much as writers may modestly insist they do. Stories exist because writers need to tell them—a need so deep that they will endure false starts, woeful sentences, dead-end paragraphs, two-dimensional characters, flabby prose, wrong turns, and shaky narratives. In short, they will risk all the things that, taken together, comprise the writer’s greatest fear: failure. Specifically, failing to tell the story they need to tell.

Still, they persist. If the best fiction is propelled by imagination, we believe that the best narrative nonfiction is propelled by the relentless and often-lonely business of finding out things that are often maddeningly difficult to find. In a word: reporting. Nonfiction storytelling can be as compelling, riveting, and transporting as fiction—so long as you come back, as they say, with the goods.

Our mission is discovery, and it comes in two parts: First, for our readers to discover new, original works of ambitious narrative nonfiction, often by writers they are reading for the first time. And second: allowing our readers to discover how those stories came to be told. And why a writer needed to tell it.

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Founder and Publisher: Michael Shapiro

Editor: Mike Hoyt

Senior Editor: Cissi Falligant

Associate Editors: Abigail Covington, Natasha Rodriguez

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Podcast Producer: Katie Ferguson

Web Design by Mario Garcia and Andy Rossback

Advisory Board

Daniel Alarcon, Helen Benedict, Jelani Cobb, Samuel G. Freedman, David Hajdu, Lynnell Hancock, Marguerite Holloway, Dale Maharidge, Alissa Solomon, Jonathan Weiner

The Delacorte Review appears three times a year and is published in cooperation with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and The Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism.

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Dean: Steve Coll; Director of The Delacorte Center: Keith Gessen

Copyright © 2019 The Delacorte Review

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

ISBN: 9781543959604

The Delacorte Review

2950 Broadway

New York, New York 10026

www.delacortereview.org

We wondered: Where are you at home in the world? Five writers came to us with answers. One tells the story of an English town she could not wait to leave but cannot bear to be apart from. Another tells of his father, alone, on a remote French mountaintop where he has taken refuge after a lifetime running from everyone close to him. One tells a story about a girl from the Bronx who finally found happiness, fleetingly and tragically, on a longboard. And yet another of being a middle-aged surfer in landlocked London daydreaming of the days when he can once again be on his board, riding wave after wave. And then there is a story about the tens thousands of people who, having braved the ocean, the desert, bandits, and fear of arrest to make new lives in the country they saw as their haven, and who now discover that they need to go.

Home, these stories remind us, is where you need to be.

Table of Contents

1. True North

It Took an Escape from her Gray, Struggling, Brexit-voting Hometown in Northern England to Feel its Magnetic Pull

By Emily Dixon

2. And Now You Can Leave: Israel and The Other

For You Were Strangers in the Land of Egypt

By Sonja Sharp

3. Balance

The Diary of a Middle-Aged Surfer in Landlocked London

By Carl Friedmann

4. You Could Die!

The Story of a Girl and Her Longboard on New York City’s Streets

By Irene Nwoye   

5. Pupil of the Nation

My Father Spent a Life On the Run From the Ghosts of Wartime Betrayals, But They Are Hard to Lose

By Diego Courchay

True North

It took an escape from her gray, struggling, Brexit-voting hometown in northern England to feel its magnetic pull

By Emily Dixon

The posters looked pitiful in the windows as my mam pulled the car onto the drive. I’d taped them up a few weeks earlier, two in the living room window, two in my parents’ room above. But since then I had given them little thought. Their slogan—I’M IN, in bold capitals on a royal blue background, matching both the British and European Union flags—seemed self-evident then, before the Brexit referendum.

Shortly before the June 2016 vote I’d filled out my absentee ballot, then left South Shields—my hometown in the North East of England—for London, where I had an embassy appointment to secure a US visa.  I was leaving Shields: first for London, but, eventually, for New York. And I was desperate to get out.

The US embassy approved my visa application, cementing my plans to study in the States. I ordered pizza to my brother’s London flat and sat in front of the TV, watching the returns, waiting to hear the media’s predictions confirmed: that Britain had voted to remain in the European Union.

Instead, I watched Newcastle, just to the north of Shields, vote Remain by a far narrower margin than expected, followed by Sunderland, just to the south, vote Leave. Increasingly, the outcome appeared less certain. I leaned closer to the TV. The pizza grew cold.

Later, 62% of South Shields’ borough, South Tyneside, voted to leave the EU.  Followed by the whole country, which voted Leave by a margin of 51.9%. For the next two days, I listened to affluent Londoners joke about the capital seceding from the rest of the retrograde, Leave-voting country, before I took the long train journey back home to the barbaric North.

I left the posters up for weeks after the referendum, an act of protest as churlish as it was futile. I looked at neighbors with a new suspicion, imagining them sneering at the posters as they walked to the polling station down the road to vote Leave. I made dramatic proclamations to my friends, declaring that the Left was finally dead in South Shields; that the only UK constituency never to have elected a single Conservative MP since the 1832 Great Reform Act had abandoned that proud history in favor of isolationism and xenophobia and fear.

My despair was disingenuous on two counts. The first: South Shields didn’t lurch from a socialist utopia to a hostile right-wing stronghold, and whatever shift did happen there did not occur at precisely the moment the referendum was declared. In recent years, my town has flirted with a far-right, fearmongering candidate from the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, the populist party that’s anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism, anti-Islam, and anti-European Union. It’s also hosted the frothing Islamophobia of the English Defence League, a protest group known for its aggressive anti-Islam rallies. In more distant years, white residents of South Shields had directed racial violence toward the local Yemeni community. Though there were elements of Shields’ political history to take pride in, there were others that twisted my gut with shame.

And the second: I questioned, secretly and guiltily, how I could expect a town I’d spent a lifetime disparaging to be beholden to my expectations.

I questioned what claim I had on the town where I grew up, where my parents grew up, where my parents’ parents grew up, if all I’d ever intended to do was leave. An almost inaudible part of me wondered whether my dismay about Brexit was a convenient smokescreen for my disloyalty; that my pride in my Northern-ness, in my accent, in my working-class heritage, meant nothing if I was so reluctant to stay in the place that gave these things to me.

South Shields had an identity once—though one exclusively constructed around the white working man. Its people were miners and shipbuilders and steelworkers, or their wives and daughters. The men left school and stepped into a skilled industrial job, where coworkers and superiors impressed on them the mechanisms of working class masculinity. They were left wing, motivated by the immediate challenges faced by working people rather than the lofty ideologies debated in the universities that few of them attended. They were a community, though imperfect, forged in the mines and the pubs and the clubs.

They were poor, but they were something.

As the traditional industries of the North East dissolved—as pits were filled in, and the last ship built on the Tyne sailed—a vacuum opened. The trajectory once promised to the working-class man, with a skilled job and a family at home and a dependable salary with which to provide for them, became an inheritance denied. It was no longer possible, for the white working classes of the town, to base an identity on what South Shields was, since they were miners and shipbuilders and steelworkers no longer. All that remained was what they were not—not posh, not Southerners, not the political elite. Not foreigners, not Muslims, not migrants. Not the European Union.

And maybe not me.

***

I grew up believing that I hated my town, and believing with even greater conviction that my town hated me. To me, there was no division between the kids who bullied me, or the social groups I couldn’t fit into no matter how desperate my contortions, and the town itself.

I was clever, and self-conscious, and I wasn’t funny or pretty or socially magnetic. I studied other people’s easy, effortless conversations, and measured them against my own stilted interactions. Academic success was all I had, I concluded, and I pursued it to the point of obsession.

But I didn’t see South Shields in the books I read. I didn’t hear my Geordie accent spoken in Parliament, or reading the news on television, or in the films I watched. (It appeared sporadically on TV, confined to soaps or reality shows.) When I did hear it, it was spoken in social circles I couldn’t infiltrate, or it was weaponized against me. I didn’t think of it as the way my parents spoke, or my grandparents, or my siblings. And I didn’t know then about classism, about the systematic denigration of working-class accents and working-class towns that permeates politics and media and people in the United Kingdom. Instead, I considered my accent and my town a deficiency that I needed to shed.  

When I was little, my oldest brother—also academic, also bullied, and also committed to escaping Shields—left for Cambridge, and lost his accent almost overnight. University, I was reassured throughout my childhood, was where I’d find my people—people who I’d connect with as easily as the rest of my schoolmates seemed to connect without me. At seventeen I applied to Oxford, stammered through my interview, and spent the drive home tearfully ignoring my dad’s gentle attempts at conversation, convinced I’d squandered my route out of Shields. Weeks later, waiting for the metro home, my mam called to tell me a letter had arrived. I screamed across the tracks to my best friend, standing on the opposite platform, to tell her I’d got in.

But in Oxford the unanticipated happened—I missed home. I missed it with a fervency rivaling my lifelong desire to leave.

In South Shields, strangers are insistently friendly, something I’d bemoaned as a socially anxious teenager. It’s difficult to wait for a bus or board a metro or stand in a queue without a conversation starting, one that assumes a familiarity typically reserved for only the closest relationships. Sitting alone in an Oxford café, I thought wistfully about the woman who sat next to me in a doctor’s office in Shields and, after complimenting my strawberry blonde hair, proceeded to describe every ginger in her extended family tree. Or the woman who, within minutes of my arrival at a bus stop, informed me that her sleeping medication was causing her to hallucinate. At eighteen, I still considered my own mental health issues a shameful secret. But it was only upon disembarking the bus, half an hour later, that I began to wonder whether I should have told a stranger about the vivid dreams resulting from my antidepressants.

In the city, though Oxford is so small as to barely qualify, I missed the South Shields coastline I’d always hated when I was there. My bus to school had traveled the coast road, and I quickly came to associate the dread of another school day with the gray waves I stared at out the window. But in Oxford, I thought about the beach where the River Tyne spills into the North Sea, which fills with locals in the smallest possible amount of clothing at the slightest suggestion of sun. And I thought about the crumbling limestone cliff face further south, which curls into hidden coves and pebble beaches. I pictured the grassy clifftops, where my mam took my brother and I for Minchella’s ice cream, a Shields fixture, the week after my granddad died. We sat on a bench overlooking the sea and talked about him as the wind threatened to unseat us. At home, I rinsed out the ice cream that ended up, as always, encrusted in my hair, and realized that I felt better.

In Oxford, I took ballet classes led by a peppy blonde woman a few years older than me. There, I thought of my ballet school at home, opened in 1960 and run singlehandedly ever since by a gentle, elegant, and seemingly eternal woman now in her eighties. I danced with Miss Burdon from the age of six; she taught in various primary school halls, class projects stapled to the walls where studio mirrors should be, and dutifully dragged a wobbly portable barre out of a storage cupboard before each class. She produced few stars: Most of us pulled on a misshapen leotard only once a week, could barely touch our toes, and slowly faded out of her class as our teenage years progressed and the shops or the cinema became more appealing places to spend a Saturday. She didn’t raise her voice when we chatted during combinations; didn’t despair at our flat feet or half-hearted arabesques. I missed her, a Shields institution I couldn’t imagine encountering in any other town.

More than anything, I missed the accent that I’d plotted to shave from my speech since I was a child. I missed its ripe vowels and dropped g’s; I missed hearing canny and howay and alreet and every other dialect word gifted to us through generations from the past. I missed sounding like my teachers and my friends and the man in the corner shop. I missed speaking without immediately flagging myself to everyone around me as an anomaly, something to be questioned and imitated and mocked. I stared pointlessly at my parents’ house on Google Earth, read The Shields Gazette online, and scoured local history sites from my bedroom, attempting to absorb every aspect of the town I’d spent a lifetime rejecting.

***

At school in South Shields, I learned disjointed fragments of the history of the place: Under Roman rule, it hosted a fort named Arbeia. During the Blitz, the marketplace was decimated by Luftwaffe bombers, killing almost seventy. As a restless teen I considered the bombing to be grim but reassuring evidence of South Shields’ significance to the wider world—though important enough to bomb was, I’ve since recognized, a wildly insensitive metric of influence. And some time later I read an article in the local paper that suggested the bombers had confused a small local bridge with the far grander Tyne Bridge in nearby Newcastle, and recalibrated my adolescent opinion of my hometown accordingly.

In the 20th Century, if a South Shields man didn’t work down the mine at Westoe Colliery, he might work at St. Hilda’s, or Whitburn, or Marsden, or West Harton, or Boldon. Or build ships in Shields, or Wallsend, or Sunderland. But the mines closed one after the other—St. Hilda’s in 1940, Marsden and Whitburn in 1968, Boldon in 1982, and Westoe in 1993, the year that I was born.

The shipbuilders disintegrated similarly. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the wider North East was decimated: As Newcastle MP Chi Onwurah told Parliament after Thatcher’s death, employment in the region dropped by 1.3 million under her rule. Ninety-seven mines closed by 1992, and Sunderland’s shipyards, once a major employer of South Shields workers, fell defunct.

Today, the North East consistently boasts the highest rate of unemployment in the country, according to national labor statistics; from mid 2016 to mid 2017, the unemployment rate was 8.3% in South Tyneside, South Shields’ borough, compared to 6.5% in the North East, and 4.6% nationwide. According to the 2015 English Indices of Deprivation, 22.3% of South Tyneside’s population lives in an income-deprived household. The same study exposes South Tyneside as the English borough with the greatest increase across multiple indices of deprivation since 2010.

There’s a bitter joke in South Shields. Improbably, the town boasts three winners of the talent show The X Factor—Joe McElderry, followed by Jade Thirlwall and Perrie Edwards of Little Mix. Thus, the joke: The only person hiring in South Shields is Simon Cowell.

***

At the center of South Shields is King Street, which leads onto Ocean Road, which leads to the beach. Established in the 19th Century and still Shields’ commercial heart, King Street comprises two short rows of terraced shops, overlooked by a metro line transporting passengers to bigger shopping centers in nearby Gateshead and Newcastle. In the early 2000s, it was the site of my first unsupervised shopping trip. My friends and I scuttled gleefully from shop to shop, buying plastic jewelry and inelegantly sticky lip gloss before taking the bus home, newly initiated into independence.

Scores of shops on King Street have closed since then. New ventures occasionally occupy the empty units, only to meet the same fate within a few years. In 2014, Marks & Spencer, a major British food, clothing, and home goods retailer and arguably the biggest name on the street, moved out after eighty years. It’s not uncommon, now, for the wide pedestrianized street to be largely populated by seagulls.

My mam, born in the late 1950s, remembers King Street differently—as the vibrant street where her mam took her to buy new Easter clothes before she’d march in the local Palm Sunday parade. It was the home of distinguished department stores—Binns, Goldman’s, T&G Allan—plus a cinema with red velvet seats that she’d smuggle sherbet into from the corner shop. King Street was regal buildings and old-fashioned streetlamps and curbstones so high that as a little girl, she once fell off them into a bank of snow. Snow slipped into her wellies and melted through her woolen socks as she trailed her mam from shop to shop. There was nothing you’d dream about going anywhere else for, my mam told me. King Street had everything.

More than that, King Street was the center of the community. Everyone used to go down to the shops every Saturday morning, my mam said. When you were down town and it was so busy, and you bumped into everybody you knew, you felt part of something. Recently, South Tyneside Council has established several community centers, or community hubs, in an attempt to foster what once existed organically—including one on the site of the former Westoe pit. They host exercise classes, children’s parties, and crafting groups. But my mam, now a career advisor, only attends to offer CV workshops and employability classes. For many, she says, the hubs are just another place to look for work.

South Shields exists on two planes: the current, and the nostalgic. Older residents rarely discuss the former without invoking the latter. It flourishes online, in a Facebook group titled South Shields In Old Photos; both my parents—late Facebook adopters who largely use it to share cat memes and unflattering photos of me and my siblings—were members within weeks of opening their accounts. It’s populated by both expats and current residents, all rhapsodizing about the Shields of the 20th Century. A thread on Binns, the department store my mam adored that existed from 1927 to 1995, runs 136 comments long. People write about the trivial yet meaningful: meeting Santa in the 50s, or their Saturday job, or their mam managing the cake department. Others discuss a toyshop, Rippons, where they bought plastic farm animals, model airplanes, fishing tackle, and school uniforms. A group of expats lament their distance from the stottie cake—a flat, dense Geordie bread—and discuss how best to freeze and transport it down South.

The demise of King Street is typically attributed, by newspapers and politicians and members of South Shields In Old Photos alike, to the opening of the Metro Centre, an enormous shopping center in Gateshead, alongside improved public transport to the nearest cities, Newcastle and Sunderland. Even I, who beelined to Newcastle as soon as I was considered old enough to take the metro alone, occasionally succumb to reminiscing about down town, remembering the dance shop where I bought my ballet shoes, or the toyshop where my brother and I awoke a shelf of dormant Furbies. In South Shields, nostalgia is a local pastime; even children of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, born long after the boom remembered by older residents, grow up and grow into it.

Nostalgia is corruptible. And it has been in South Shields: by the campaign to vote Leave, by far-right UKIP political candidates, and by hate groups like the English Defence League. Islamophobes confidently place the town’s current woes at the door of the local Muslim community, now largely of Bangladeshi origin. They ignore the inconvenient reality: that South Shields has had a sizable Muslim population since at least the 19th Century, when Yemeni seamen made the town their home. UKIP candidate Richard Elvin ran on an anti-immigration platform in 2013 and received almost a quarter of the vote, a startling result in a seat held by Labour since 1935. And in the three months after the Brexit referendum, race hate crimes increased in the region by 48%, according to local police figures.

In 2013, the English Defence League (EDL) and the North East Infidels, a fellow hate group, marched through South Shields. Initially, they targeted Ocean Road, home to the majority of the town’s Bangladeshi and Indian restaurants. Redirected by police, they stormed down neighboring streets, holding aloft English flags and banners bearing racist slogans. They claimed to organize against three Bangladeshi students who stood accused of raping two fourteen-year-old girls. In reality, the march was an excuse to vent their frothing Islamophobia, as evidenced by their banners: No Sharia Law, one read; We stand against Islamic terrorists and pedophiles, another.  In photos, the 350 marchers—all white, most men—roar at their police escorts and curl their lips.  The EDL returned to march in South Shields in 2017, citing this time the case of a Muslim man, suffering from severe schizophrenia, who spat on a white baby.

The Facebook page for the North East division of the English Defence League has more than 10,000 likes; its members post incessantly about sexual assaults purportedly committed by British Muslims, and rail against supermarkets’ plans to stock more halal meat. I signed into Facebook with some trepidation, expecting to find friends who’d liked the page. For a brief moment, I was relieved—no likes. But I’ve been rigorously purging my friends’ list for years now. I accelerated the process recently, after a man I once went to drama club with called for all those designated as people of concern by MI5 to be interned until they could prove their innocence. I’m afraid I’ve curated my own South Shields, one comfortably absent the classmates and neighbors and relatives who echo the hatred of the EDL.

A reader of some accounts of South Shields in the 19th and 20th Centuries