Britical

England

I was feeling, at first, quite swish and American at the airport this morning. Just off the red eye from New York, smug in my lack of luggage-ness, I had half an hour to kill before my train and was surprised to discover a little airport cafe with croissant, espresso and the like. But then I am, Reagan-like, perpetually surprised by this sort of thing. Because it still seems so unlikely in England, so…”European”, some sort of glamourous-yet-depressing Eurocentric Pet Shop Boys song come to life. Proper espresso sipped nonchalantly at the airport - imagine! I sat there, very world-traveller, jet-lag infused, in the funny, 2am-seeming daylight, listening, watching the world go by, as my Mother would say. All these strange foreigners! That is to say, Gawd bless ‘em, my countryfolk, the English.

Back in New York, I have never known very many English people (I left England for a reason, after all) and I realise I’ve grown unused to them. Ludicrously, they (we!?) now seem quite exotic. A dress put away in a closet and forgotten; rediscovered, familiar but a novelty nonetheless. In the same way that I’ll look at this or that building or little street in England and be mortified to have that cliched Awful American Tourist thought “How quaint!” flit across my aghast English mind, I am always reliably shocked to feel suddenly and distinctly Other the minute the plane touches down. I return to the old country only to find that I am a foreigner.

I do not know how things work here anymore. Everything seems the same and not the same. I sit with that perfect espresso (unheard of, perfect or otherwise, when I was living here) and find myself smiling inwardly, indulgently, almost tearfully reassured by the two elderly “ladies” exclaiming and tut-tutting at the next table because they are so, well, English. They are even wearing flowery dresses. There is a timelessness to this scene; the women could exist in almost any age (or one of those misty MerchantIvory films so beloved by Americans) because there is still that sense of stiff upper lip-ness clinging to them, and yet simultaneously a posture almost of…apology. Yes, that’s it. It’s particularly common in English women (no wonder I had to leave) but it’s variously expressed in everyone here through sarcastic humour, plus a self-deprecating sense of the self as not that important, and certainly not important enough to make a big fuss about matters that should certainly be laughed off with a philosophical, eye-rolling shrug and chalked up, philosophically, to experience. (We saw this attitude even, especially, during the London underground bombings on July 7th, last year.) Nothing is ever to be taken too seriously, this being a persistent and perfectly normal way to interact and communicate. I have realised lately that I miss these things in America where, irritatingly, the therapized, somewhat navel-gazing culture means that such tendencies to irony and piss-taking may be frowned upon and decreed combative and worse, “negative”.

In New York, I am always amused at being able to spot the English a mile off, yet could not describe how this trick is achieved. Body language, facial expression, some mysterious thing. These women at the table next to mine, the expectant families waiting for flights to arrive, the jostling groups of vaguely rowdy young men fronting bravado - they all exhibit this national characteristic. They are all so clearly English, and suddenly endearing to me in this very thing. I wonder if I am grown sentimental or, since this feeling usually disappears after a good night’s sleep, more likely I am merely an over-tired shallow person lacking the attention span for such would-be profundity.

Later, sitting on the train, the sound of it is electrical, quietly whining and smooth; no longer the swaying clackety-clack I remember. But outside the landscape resonates still. The South Downs and the flashing glimpses of tiny villages and their church steeples across the muddy winter fields are unchanged. They seem to threaten some sort of nostalgia and I push back against it, disconcerted, quickly looking back down at the book I’m reading instead.

There are new, strange words and phrases that have come into vogue or been invented since I left - visible in the newspapers, on the television, in the conversations of the few other passengers on the train, and on the huge, glossy posters at the station advertizing cellphones, absurdly cheap flights to Rome and so on. In a shop at the airport earlier a sales assistant came over and said in a concerned tone, “Are you allright?” I immediately put my hand to my face assuming I have a smudge on my nose, wishing I had a mirror, or perhaps I look ill, but no - I remember with relief that this is how I used to greet customers when I worked in a shop and that it simply translates, over here, to an innnocuous “Can I help you?” I wonder whether I should ask her how to use the public phone outside, but decide against it since my English accent would, in her eyes, surely render this some sort of joke and not a very funny one.

Arriving at my destination, someone - someone disgruntled and muttering - pushes past me off the train because there is now apparently a big green button to be pushed if you want the doors to open and let you off. Who knew? I’m just a tourist here.

Is this what it’s like when you get old, even if you stay in your country of birth? The inability to understand the new words, the gadgets, being pushed aside for your confused slowness, the subconscious superimposing, wishfully, of the old onto the new. The era of Iris Murdoch’s “quaint, dotty little England” barely visible under the groovy new Euro culture of Tony Blair (or, as Christopher Hitchens would scornfully have it, referring to the European Union, the “vast, mongrelized superstate”). Not knowing, because I am never here long enough, whether the one remains hidden under the other, but searching for it in the faces, the voices of those women on the table next to mine this morning. And then there’s the pesky nostalgia thing - a bittersweet feeling at best, but still an awareness of things, places, people that have vanished, gone forever, even if, it suddenly comes to mind, it is in fact me who has done the disappearing.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2007