Chapter Two: The refugee camp years

We still have the photographs. Creased at the corners, the colour gone slightly amber with age, but there, our grandparents, our mother as a young woman, our father before he was anyone's husband or anyone's father at all. Taken in a place that was never meant to hold anyone for long, and ended up holding entire childhoods.

We don't know who took most of these photos. An uncle, perhaps, or an aid worker, or someone in the camp who had managed to keep hold of a camera. What we know is what's in them: rows of bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters. Dirt paths between them, worn smooth by thousands of bare and sandalled feet. People queuing, for food, for water, for news, for the chance at an interview that might decide the rest of their lives.

Our mother has told us, in the unhurried way she tells most things, what the days were actually like. Not dramatic. Just long. There was a rhythm to it once you'd been there a while, when the water came, when the rations were handed out, which corner of the camp had shade in the afternoon. Children still played. People still found small things to laugh about. Our grandmother, by all accounts, kept a vegetable patch going in whatever scrap of dirt she could claim, because growing something, anything, was one of the only choices still hers to make.

That detail has stayed with us more than almost any other. Years before any market stall, our family was already growing food in difficult soil, simply because it was something to tend, something to be proud of, something that was theirs.

Life in the camp was simple in the truest sense of the word, not peaceful, not easy, but stripped back to what mattered. Family. Food. Shelter. Each other. There wasn't room for excess, not in the cramped quarters and not in the rationed days. You learned quickly what you could live without, and what you absolutely could not.

For our parents, this was most of their early lives. Our father was a young man here, not yet certain what kind of life he'd be allowed to build, or where, or with whom. Our mother was an orphaned girl who became a young woman inside the camp's borders, watching her uncles and aunties hold onto dignity in a place designed to strip it away. They didn't choose this chapter. Almost no one in those camps did. But they lived it with a steadiness that, looking back now, set the tone for everything that came after.

Years passed this way for some families. For others, mercifully, less time, a successful interview, a sponsor found, a country willing to take a chance on people the world had mostly stopped paying attention to. For our family, the wait eventually ended. A door opened, narrow and far away, leading to a country none of them had ever seen, where the seasons ran backwards and almost no one would recognise their language in the street.

They took it. Of course they took it.