BECOMING ENGLISH

By Catherine Temma Davidson

My children’s grandfather arrived in the United Kingdom from Germany as a baby on a boat bound for Australia. On route, his mother fell ill, and his parents disembarked to find shelter with distant relatives. What if they had not been let in? My husband would never have been born and I never would have had a chance to fall in love with him, move to England and have two beautiful English American children.

Today, the news is filled with stories about a new wave of refugees seeking shelter; so far the UK has only taken a handful of Syrians, but the public response to recent stories has been striking and immediate: within a day of its posting, 200,000 people had signed a petition in favour of opening the borders and sheltering more people. The Prime Minister has promised “thousands” will be given refuge.

Amid the moving signs of my adopted country’s compassion and sense of fairness there is plenty of dissent, and I have read some shockingly xenophobic and paranoid responses to those who call for greater aid.

Fear of the other is one of the great themes of our time. It echoes from Donald Trump’s diatribes to Hungary’s fences and far beyond to the many places tearing themselves apart in the name of religious, ethnic or political tribalism.

In America, those who fight on the side of hope over fear can counter hysteria with the long history of immigration at the heart of our national mythology. Whatever the historical reality, our idea of about ourselves includes welcoming the tired, poor and huddled masses.

But what about here in Europe? How does the era of mass migration and open borders really work in places, like England, where the collective mythology is based on a unifying myth of national identity — the tribes who became nations?

As a foreigner, with more or less ease, you can take on European citizenship. But is it possible to become European? And can that identity include your otherness, the way it often does in America? Can you be Algerian-French? Turkish-German? Or even American-English in the way you can be African or Italian or Greek-American?

I remember not long after I moved to England, feeling a bit downhearted and homesick one afternoon, and settling into a session of comfort snacking. I had a box of American organic wheat crackers I had brought back from a recent trip and a jar of English jam. As I put the jam on cracker after cracker, I had time to read the labels.

According to the American manufacturer, my wheat product was new, revolutionary and life-changing. Eating it would not only change my life but save the planet. On the other hand, the packaging on my jam assured me nothing had changed in the recipe for two hundred years. The strawberries had been harvested and sweetened with the benefit of tradition and long experience.

I understood the appeal of the crackers. I was not sure I would ever get the perspective of the jam. How could I — a rogue strawberry — fit into such neatly ordered rows? Where “new” is always “improved” immigrants, like my Greek grandparents and Lithuanian Jewish great-grandparents can ease themselves into the mix more easily. Could I ever really become English?

A few years later, I took a group of students to the Museum of London. They were having an exhibit about the city’s history of immigration. Starting with displays about how London was founded by Romans, occupied by Danes, expanded by Normans and beautified by a German King, I discovered waves of immigrants and refugees had washed successively over its island shores — from Huguenots and Jews to West Indians and Asian Ugandans.

As it turns out, English history is all about assimilating foreigners. Though I have learned never to probe, I have had many conversations with people who seem as white-linen-purely “English” as any character on Downtown Abbey where I have accidentally discovered they have an Italian parent or a Native American grandfather, or often, like the mother of the future King of England, a hidden ancestral Jew.

Yet the English do not have a concept of themselves as an immigrant nation. London is the most multi-cultural city on earth, but its rich caravansary does not stretch beyond its borders. My husband and I have a running joke when we are heading out of town. As soon as we pass beyond the M25 we say to each other, “Welcome to England!” — England being a place we recognize as somehow alien and unknown.

So I have had my own uneasy relationship with my adopted homeland, wondering whether or not I could ever really fit in. My children are English — they have been born into it. But can I ever really be? When people ask me I say “I’m a Londoner”, or if pushed, “I’m British,” which seems a bit more inclusive (because it includes the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish).

But a few years ago, I had an experience which made me think I could not only fit in, but would proudly join my fate to that of my island home. I found a myth of “Englishness” I could finally understand and embrace.

It was August 2012, and I was coming back from a visit to America to get my kids home in time for the London Olympics. In the lead-up, I had been less gung-ho American than typically English in agreeing with my husband (and most of the press) that it would probably be a mess and a bore, but that for the sake of the children, we had to participate. We’d made a low investment in easy-to-access events — men’s indoor volleyball, archery.

When I got to the door, my husband gripped me. The night before, he and some friends had come back from the pub and turned on the opening ceremony, fully intending to poke some mild fun at it while eating a take-away. We HAD to watch it. Right away. He told me he had never seen anything like it before.

I watched it. And I cried. Why? Danny Boyle had been deliberately evasive and secretive in advance, hiding the nature of the ceremony under a green sward, making everyone think it was going to be a typically pastoral view of this pleasant land. Instead, industrial Britain exploded out of the grass, fuelling artistic and social inventions from music to computers to the NHS. Boyle’s pageant was rooted not in class or hierarchy but in something that belongs to everyone: creativity, innovation and invention.

It’s “Englishness” was open to all comers. And it was a world which had a sense of humour about itself in which even the Queen could display a bit of irreverence.

Sometimes hope does win out over fear. The naysayers are not always right. A national identity which makes room for the new and even welcomes the outsider is much better prepared for the future. As Boyle, brought up in a working class Irish immigrant family in Lancashire, reminded us, it is possible to imagine a national myth based not on what was but what can be.

As it turned out, by the way, the Olympics were a great success. We rooted for team GB (although our favourite team turned out to be the cool archers from South Korea). During those two weeks, rainbow flags flew over the streets; the sun shone; strangers smiled at one another. The city made room for all of its outsiders. It was like a giant street party, and it was a blast.