A conversation with Passenger 22J
Friday, 5 December
On my flight over to Australia, I wanted to strike up a conversation with whoever ended up sitting next to me, and find out where they were going, and why.
I was the first person to reach row 22 on my flight to Doha but I had been dealt the middle seat. So, I patiently waited to see which two unsuspecting passengers were going to join either side of me.
A middle-aged man who had a striking resemblance to Mike from Breaking Bad (pictured) but who was far less intimidating, and decidedly English, scooched past me to get to the window seat. When he was making his way down the aisle he made a passing joke to the person behind him about the fact that due to their cabin layout, Qatar Airways always made economy passengers walk through business class on their way to their seats. Essentially, the riffraff get a sneak peek into the high life of individual booths, TV sets and prosecco on arrival. There’s a funny awkwardness about it. The people in business class stare straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with the economy passengers walking past. After seeing ‘Mike’ openly mock the situation, I knew he would definitely be up for a good chat.
Before I spoke with Mike, however, another middle-aged man pulled up alongside me to sit in the aisle seat. He was a small-ish Pakistani man who was travelling with friends from London to Lahore to visit family. He was a little quieter and spent most of his time trying to use the Wi-Fi on the plane (there’s Wi-FI now?!) to watch the Ashes via a sport platform he’d downloaded on his phone.
Turns out he was a big cricket fan. We chatted a little about our time playing cricket when we were younger and how sad he was that his son isn’t interested in the sport at all. I was keen to tell him about my recent debut performance for Broken Wanderers (a local London-based team) where I got 62 runs, not out, but the chat was cut short due to a seatbelt announcement from the cockpit.
About ten minutes later he noticed that I was eyeing his phone in an attempt to watch the cricket. I think he felt sorry for me and said ‘Take it - honestly I think you’re more invested than I am’. I was surprised but thanked him and took it. Following this, when he saw that I was struggling to prop up the phone to watch it Mike on the other side of me gave me his headphone case (pictured). It might not look like much but these small gestures put me right at home. Maybe being in the middle isn’t so bad after all.
But back to Mike. I asked him where he was headed and he explained he was going to see his daughter. She had given up a teaching position at a local school in the UK to become a full-time nanny for a wealthy family. The family were Swiss billionaires and she travelled the world with them. He showed me pictures of a yacht they had just bought. He was keen to tell me about this situation but added that he often felt awkward and out of place whenever he got invited to an event or dinner at the family’s expense. I asked him if he was visiting anyone else and he told me that he was going to visit his birth mother.
The phrase ‘birth mother’ led me to ask a few more questions. Turns out Mike’s birth mother was a ‘ten pound pom’. This term was coined during a programme by the British Commonwealth from 1945-1972 where around one million Britons were encouraged to migrate to Australia. Mike told me that he’d paid £900 for his flight to Brisbane last month, whereas in 1960 his mum had spent £10 (hence ‘ten pound pom’).
But when he was born, his mother put him up for adoption and he was brought to the UK by his adopted parents. He was told about this when he was ten. Obviously this is an incredibly hard bit of news to try and grasp at such a young age. And then, when he turned forty, Mike made the decision to contact his birth mum. After learning his ‘real’ second name, he found a Yellow Pages book and saw that there were only six people registered with the same name. He rang all six until his mum answered. After some difficult conversations, he decided that he wanted to visit her where she was living in a borough not too far from Brisbane. During his visit he found out that he had two brothers. He met them in a pub where they told him, ‘There are parts of you that really remind me of Mum’. Whilst he was happy that he had two brothers, he was conflicted by the fact he was the only one given up for adoption.
The truly heartbreaking episode of Mike’s story came when he described how his adoptive mother felt about all of this back in the UK When he told her he was going to make the journey to Australia, she said, ‘You should go to her - she’s your real Mum, not me’. He spent a long time trying to convince her that this wasn’t true and that she was indeed his real mother. She was the one who fed, clothed, and put him through school (where he misbehaved a lot). It’s a uniquely painful situation. From what I can tell, Mike still carried a tremendous sense of guilt - guilt, even all these years later, that he had somehow betrayed his adopted parents.