I’ve lived more years in the U.K. than anywhere else, including my homeland in the U.S. I’ve always said that British culture was the more elusive, difficult, mysterious one. That it would always be my ‘third home’, because even France, where I spent five years or so, felt familiar. I had a sense of grasping meanings there. Not so, here.
This long estrangement has never been a bad thing. Just interesting. Another variation of the mental shifts we experience when we leave home to live in another culture. It’s been the making of me, for better or worse. First, it has altered my relationship with America. It made me love my birthplace like a lost treasure, mythologize it, and sometimes view it as though the whole thing were a film. From Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Frank Capra to David Lynch, the Coens, Terrence Malick, Kelly Reichardt, and more. Yet when the house lights come up, I see that I have also become critical about my homeland. I have grown an ‘outsider’s eye’ and attached it to an insider’s past. And the more ‘past’ my past becomes, the more bewildering America seems.
Perhaps this growing bewilderment has helped bring about a recasting of things here on English ground. I can’t but notice that some subtle shift has occurred - say over the past decade. A realization that despite my frequent declarations about how utterly incomprehensible England is, some deeper knowledge was forming. Not the knowledge of one born here. Not the knowledge of regions and accents and class slights and divides. Not the grasp of those classic things we talk about – British reserve, eccentricity, concealed meanings. I have a sense of these, even a competence in some of them, but they remain foreign in my mind.
But yes, knowledge comes, even if it hides beneath everyday consciousness. And more than that, affection comes. I am now regularly struck by waves of love for the UK. As with America, it is not uncritical, but it is surprisingly fierce. It’s a love of landscapes and people. Early friends here and recent ones too. Footpaths in Yorkshire and Devon and Scotland. Particular London bus routes and tube lines. The NHS. The BBC, for all its flaws. Labour party meetings that got out of hand. Pub gatherings after Labour party meetings that got out of hand.
Soldered to these general affections, there are tiny incidents that still burn brightly in my memory. Moments of small cultural learning. Particular bad-tasting cups of tea made in order to punctuate arrivals, meetings, minor crises - the sentences and paragraphs of a British day. Last orders in the pub. A mate who, years before digital television and iPlayer, used to cover his muted television on Saturday evenings in order to avoid seeing the football results before Match of the Day. Visiting my dear friend, Rachel, when she lived in Brixton. Waking early to pop to her local newsagent and before I could speak, the guy behind the counter said, “Guardian?” And we both laughed. There are hundreds of these incidents, if only I would stop to catalogue them.
But it’s the fifth of November, as I write this. I recall a cold November evening in 1979. I was exiting Finsbury Park tube station when I heard the kids calling, “Penny for the Guy.” They looked something like this group:
I knew nothing about the Gunpowder Plot. But since that night in 1979 when I first heard of it, there has been a slow decline in Bonfire night celebrations, though there are places – Lewes, for example – that still hold large events.
The kids on corners asking for pennies, I think they will soon be lost to memory. More than the night itself, this is the recollection that remains strongest and seems most ‘English’ - this image of kids, underdressed, feeling the cold, but joyously free for a few hours. Little rebels on London street corners and in the entrances to tube stations.
This is lovely. Particularly: 'I have grown an ‘outsider’s eye’ and attached it to an insider’s past.' This is a great topic, and topical!