Oh, England, My Lionheart*
I had lived in England in a thousand different ways in my imagination.
I first visited England with my parents and sister when I was 9 years old. I can only describe the experience as arriving home. Of course, I loved my life on Gambier Island, British Columbia: the woods, the beaches, the ferry rides to school, the long dusks of summer, and the ice crystals that crunched under our boots in winter. But all of those things were only a re-creation of growing up and living in England and the lives that I had lived in a thousand different ways in my imagination.
These include: a waif in the streets of Camden town, a modern and fashionable young woman strolling purposefully down Oxford Street, a suffragette dressed in white while storming the parliament buildings, a spinster writer in a cozy, thatched-roof cottage in the Lake District, a forlorn and moody young novelist standing in the windy fields of the Moors. It was the love of this mystery that has shaped much of my life from my early choices of boyfriends and partners, to my academic studies, and eventually my Ph.D. in British Romantic-Era Literature. A complete and overwhelming fascination with this mysterious island country.
Our first stop in our family’s England and Portugal adventure was Folkestone, the home of my mother’s cousins, Janet and Allen. Folkestone was where my grandmother’s large, working- class family was born and raised before moving to London during the war. It was a simple house in the “suburbs” of Folkestone, backing onto hills that I could clamber up and look over. The cliffs between Folkestone and Dover were recognizable white chalk associated with soldiers heading over the channel to the beaches of France.
Allen, who did all the cooking, served my sister and I a heaping Sunday dinner, all the vegetables stewed to the same colour, with a rich gravy poured over top. And then because they knew we were not allowed to eat sugar, he produced two full-sized Cadbury chocolate bars!
The next day we wandered into the town as a family, down the cobblestone streets of the old Folkestone high street. We stopped in a pub along the way, where I was first enchanted with being allowed in a pub, and then fascinated by the salted cockles set on the tables instead of peanuts.
All of our experiences were captured in photos: the quaint town of Rye with the Mermaid pub, the ‘Sam The Pie Man’ tea shop with cream cakes, the castles with tiny doors that only the tiny people of my family could fit through, the museums of London, the history poking like bones through every side walk, building, and city view did nothing to dispel the romantic, starry eyed love that I felt for England. Not even the late evening phone call from Canada with the terrible news that my granddad had drowned. My granddad, my mother’s father, the man who had moved his entire family from London to Vancouver for a more promising future after the war, had fallen off his fishing boat drunk and sunk to the bottom of Gibson’s Harbour.
My English heart further developed through a connection to other things that seemed irrefutably and integrally British: the Duran Duran teen magazines sent by Janet and Allen and added to my bedroom shrine; the teased hair and lipstick-glossed Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, John and Roger Taylor; Kate Bush’s synthesizer and haunting melodies; the music videos of people in grey reaching out and clutching one another or running along fields with high grass sweeping their waists; lyrics that explored the complicated relationships of the iconic Heathcliff and Catherine of Wuthering Heights. England was everything I could feel and far removed from the small resource town, the misogyny and racism of high school hallways, the cruelties of the 1980s. I could lose myself in the possibilities of all these other lives that I might inhabit.
I did indeed live in England for a time, in the armpit town of Dunstable. I lived a mundane life in a house with my British boyfriend and his two friends, worked at a pub and in an office, had Saturday nights in with the other lads’ girlfriends, drinking wine and sharing cigarettes. I reached for Football and take away on Sunday evenings with VHS recordings of Cheers when I felt homesick for North America.
I am heading back to England again this summer. I will visit my 102-year old grandmother who moved back to Kent and the small village of Hythe, only fifteen minutes from Folkestone. When she was 94, my grandmother moved home to where her own imagined lives began.
*Bush, Kate. “Oh England My Lionheart.” Lionheart, EMI, 1978.
