Whilst in London Bea Campbell was introduced to someone as being from Newcastle and as someone who has "stuck to her roots". Bea thought this introduction was sweet but very "Southern" and was bound up in the notion that the North means "roots, connection, class, community, a little and a local life, family, home".
Bea grew up in "a little grey house with a front and back garden and built-in cupboards. Our mother said happiness is built-in cupboards". After Bea had left home and moved to live in London where she learnt that "home is everywhere and nowhere", she found returning to her family home rather an odd experience, "I felt like Gulliver, a giant, too big or too old or too strange for our little house...home began to be a strange place."
Home for Bea had initially meant revisiting "my old cup, my old bed and the patois of my own people." but then home began to mean "as much a journey as a place, comings and goings between points of origin and points of departure, meetings and greetings, and leavings, trains, snacks and strangers. Going somewhere, living somewhere, feeling at home."
Since Bea has returned to Tyneside in recent years, she's gained a sense of being at home but among strangers "the place speaks a language that no one else seems to understand. It's not an ancient language but more a code that is endlessly improvised by each generation making it's own mark on the sounds of the city, making the city belong to them."
