All three of my children had Irish passports. Terry had gone through the entire process herself — Malachy's lineage, the paperwork, the Irish consulate — and credit to her, she'd got it done. Mikey, Angie, and Ollie were EU citizens. My brother and sister, living overseas, both travelled on Danish passports. And there I was, the only member of my immediate family stuck with the green mamba.
I looked into the Danish angle first. It was a dead end. Once you've lost the passport under the twenty-two year rule and you're living outside Denmark, the door is effectively closed. I knew this in my bones but needed to confirm it before moving on.
Then I called Clinton. We'd stayed in touch since Fishy Pete's, and I knew he'd been trying to get a British passport through his grandfather's lineage. He told me it hadn't worked — the rules required a direct parent, not a grandparent, which had left him with only a heritage visa. But he gave me the details of his immigration attorney in the UK, a man who clearly knew his way around these things.
I sent the attorney an email. He replied promptly and asked me to send through whatever I had. So I sent him my mother's birth certificate, her 1947 passport, and my own details.
His reply came back within days.
You're British. Of course.
I sat there reading those three words for a long moment. My mother, Dorothy Wilkinson, had been born in British Malaya in 1921. That made her British by birth. That made me British by descent. It was, as the attorney pointed out, entirely straightforward. I was ecstatic.
He sent me the forms. I filled them out and drove to Pretoria, to the British High Commission — a big, serious building that takes itself appropriately seriously — took a number, waited, and eventually got a pleasant gentleman at one of the three serving counters. I was quietly relieved not to have drawn the woman at the adjacent counter, a lady in her mid-fifties who radiated the particular energy of someone who had smoked heavily for thirty years and had long since made peace with despising her job and everyone in it.
The pleasant gentleman went through my documents carefully. He got to my mother's birth certificate — an old wax copy, recording her birth in the Dindings, British Malaya, 1921 — and paused.
"I'm afraid I can't accept this as a copy. We'd need the original."
I pointed to her 1947 passport, the one with the corner clipped when she became Danish upon marrying my father. "She couldn't have had this," I said, "if the birth certificate wasn't valid."
He considered that. "Fair enough. But I'm going to need more proof of lineage." He gave me a list.
I sent the list to the attorney in the UK. At some expense, a courier arrived a few weeks later with a full genealogical package — my mother's family traced back through Yorkshire, Leeds, generation by generation, documented and certified. Very much a Yorkshire lineage, as it turned out. I filed everything neatly and drove back to Pretoria.
This time I drew the other counter.
She went through the documents with the focused energy of someone looking for a reason to say no. She found it immediately — the same wax copy of the birth certificate.
"We can't accept this."
"I was here recently with the same documents," I said carefully, "and I was told that given the passport, the copy was acceptable." I pointed to the gentleman in the adjacent booth. "He told me that."
She looked at him. She looked back at me. Then she took a pen and wrote across the top of the form: Authorised by Albert.
"Go and pay over there."
Six hundred rand at the cashier. Three weeks later I was back in Pretoria for the swearing-in ceremony — standing in a room, hand raised, swearing allegiance to the Queen. I didn't mind in the slightest. I would have sworn allegiance to a reasonably sized houseplant if it got me what came next.
The citizenship certificate arrived by courier shortly after. Then the passport.
I have reflected many times on what would have happened if I'd drawn that woman first time around instead of Albert. It's not a small question. I had already established, through my cousin David — Sally's brother, still living in Malaysia — that the chances of finding an original birth certificate from the Dindings in 1921 were roughly equivalent to the chances of snowboarding in a blast furnace. If she had shut me down on that first visit, before Albert had put his authorisation on record, I'm genuinely not sure I would have found a way through. The whole thing might have collapsed on that single wax copy of my mother's birth certificate.
It's strange to think about. The course of a life hinging on which counter you're called to. Albert was there, the authorisation was written, and everything that followed — the passport, the EU, the open borders, the new horizons, eventually Denmark itself — all of it traces back to that one small moment in a waiting room in Pretoria.
If I'd got her first, none of it happens.
I cannot adequately describe how liberating it felt to hold that passport. This was pre-Brexit — a British passport was an EU passport. Every border in Europe, open. It was, as I said to anyone who would listen, fan-flipping-tastic.
But something else had shifted too, something quieter and more significant. For the first time I found myself thinking about leaving South Africa. Mikey was heading to Denmark for a gap year after matric. Niels and Carey were in Copenhagen. Briony was in London. Terry and Blair were in Nigeria. My mother was gone. I was the last one standing, and now — for the first time — I didn't have to be.
New horizons. I had no idea yet where they would lead.
As it turned out, they would lead somewhere I never could have predicted.