by Erin Moore
You can get an iced tea in Starbucks in England, but it qualifies as something of an eccentricity to order one in a restaurant. That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be denied. My mother unknowingly ordered an off-menu iced tea at one of our favorite restaurants, Le Café Anglais. My seat faced the bar and I watched with amusement and some anxiety as the staff conferred, brewed a pot of their nice, strong tea, pulled out a cocktail shaker, filled it with ice, poured, shook, tasted, winced slightly, and brought the mixture to my mother. She said it tasted fine. I’m sure it was better than anything the English are able to get in America, where even the finest hotels will serve a tea bag on a saucer next to a cup of lukewarm water—ensuring it will never brew to the desired strength and eliciting the kind of barely suppressed exasperation usually reserved for careless mistakes by small children.
In America, the “pause that refreshes” has traditionally been Coca-Cola. The average American drinks about four hundred Cokes per year, double the English average. But the hot drink of choice, since the time of the Revolutionary War, has been coffee. The Boston Tea Party—an act of protest in which American colonists destroyed crates of tea owned by the British East India Company in 1773—was the culmination of colonial disenchantment with the motherland. Soon after, Americans fought a bloody battle for their freedom. However much they had once loved tea, it was now seen as the drink of the oppressors. Coffee was the choice of a new generation of patriots, and so it remains. Just ask the Red Cross, whose official policy when assisting at a crisis is to offer disaster victims a calming hot drink before anything else. In America, it’s coffee. In England, it’s tea.
Is it any wonder that Jeremy Deller decided tea was a necessary component of English Magic? Asked if he’d included the tea room to reinforce cultural stereotypes, he demurred: “Well, it’s very Chinese to have a cup of tea. It’s very Indian to have a cup of tea . . . But that’s not an artwork. There’s no art there. It’s just somewhere to sit, you know?”
Way Out
In which the Moore family comes to an enchanting place, and we leave them there.
To a new arrival or a tourist, English street signs can seem very weird. Sure, there’s MIND THE GAP, and they are serious about that one—the “gap” between a Tube carriage and the platform in some stations being wide enough to lose a whole family in, or at least an ill-fitting shoe or carelessly dangled bag. But there is also the HUMPED ZEBRA CROSSING, which sounds like a zoo genetics experiment gone horribly wrong. (Really it’s just a pedestrian right-of-way with a sleeping policeman—also known as a speed bump—in the middle.)
Some signs might even take on existential significance, depending on the mood in which you first encounter them. Months before our wedding, Tom and I came across a road sign that read CHANGED PRIORITIES AHEAD, and the phrase has been a minor touchstone for us for the past fifteen years (though we never did figure out what it meant in the context of the road work that was taking place in Oxford that day).
As a student, in England for the first time, I was charmed by the signs everywhere reading WAY OUT. This is the English version of the simple EXIT and it spoke to me then of the odd and disconnected way I felt arriving to spend a whole year in a country where I didn’t know a soul and no one knew me. England seemed “way out”—so exhilaratingly strange. I could take nothing for granted. After a while, these signs stopped seeming so foreign. But apparently I myself did not. I’m perpetually mistaken for a tourist, constantly asked how long I’m staying or, more to the point, when I’m going “home.” There was a time when this seemed like a problem.
For a couple of years after moving to London, I felt we’d made a mistake, trading our life and stable friendships in New York for an uncertain future in a place where we might always be strangers. Before I left America, I never realized how American I was in every word, attitude, and mannerism, or that a common language would not be enough to bridge the gap between American and English culture. For a while, that gap seemed big enough to lose myself in. It wasn’t until I left my job in New York and committed to London fully that I began to feel like it could be home. Making friends who embraced our differences and found them fruitful and interesting allowed this fish out of water to breathe again.
These days, I’m always happy to get back to America for a visit, but it’s hard to ignore the things about my home country that feel foreign after years away. The frenetic pace of New York is so overstimulating that it keeps me awake all night, wondering whether I ought to be in the gym, at a bar, or getting a pedicure at midnight just because I can. Leafy London is somnolent by comparison. The cars, stores, and houses in the suburban enclaves where our families live feel enormous and unwieldy. A friend’s “modest” suburban house is almost as big as the grocery store we frequent at home. Even so, the chance to reconnect with friends and family puts me at ease and, after a few days, I re-adapt. The transition back to England, by contrast, is usually seamless now.
When our daughter was born, my husband and I were eager for her to have the experience of growing up in two cultures at once. What we didn’t understand at the time was that our child would not feel American at all. She is not experiencing England as a different culture since it’s the only one she’s ever known. She’s confused when American friends and family ask how we feel about living “abroad” and when we think we might come home. Anne is home, with her English passport, her English accent, her school uniform, and her bedroom at the top of a Georgian house.
When Tom and I arrived in England by ourselves, not much made sense about the move, except our earnest desire to “make a go of it,” as the English say. But when we chose to stay, we chose as a family, and it made all the sense in the world. More and more, I realize that home is wherever my husband and children are—and wherever people love and welcome us. Home is not a country; home is other people. It has no boundaries and we don’t need a passport or a plane ticket to get there. There is no exit plan, no way out. We could live anywhere we like, but we like it here.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Lynne Truss and George Lucas, for inspiring and believing in me; Charlie Conrad, for commissioning this project, for his invaluable advice, and for the benefit of his experience; William Shinker, for his friendship and mentorship, and for countless opportunities including this one. Thanks to the team at Gotham Books: Sabrina Bowers, Stephen Brayda, Leslie Hansen, Lisa Johnson, Lauren Marino, Beth Parker, Janet Robbins, Andrea Santoro, Susan Schwartz, and Brian Tart.
I am grateful to many friends for their help and support, including: Benjamin Abel, Catherine Blyth, Dan Bobby, Noel Bramley, Daniela Burnham, Lisa Gladwell Calhoun, Erin Delaney, Kathryne Alfred Del Sesto, Paul Dougherty, Jessica Johnson Downer, Leslie Eckel, Maggie Elliott, Dominique Garcia, Anthony Goff, Ellen Goodman, Amy Grace, Anne and Peter Hatinen, Alex Helfrecht, Steven Hill, Trish Hope, Catherine Ingman, Rachel Kahan, Sterling and Jon Lanken, Sara Lodge, Bristol Maryott, Doug Miller, Peter Morris, Carole Murray, Ashley Green Myers, Helen Madeo Niblock, Charlotte Nicklas, Elizabeth and Michael Psaltis, Jenna and Arvind Rajpal, Lizzie Reumont, Kathy Richards, Erica Arnesen Roane, Alastair Roberts, Shelagh Rotta, Ann and Peter Rothschild, Fiona Saunders, Michael Sellman, Andrew Shore, Rhian Stephenson, Jörg Tittel, Lucia Watson, Mike Weeks, Crystal Weiss, Hannah Wunsch, and Gina Zimmerman.
Thanks to my parents, Lynne and Alan Bush, for letting me go, and for their unconditional love; to Barbara and Andrew Moore, and their extended Anglo-American family, for always treating me like one of their own; and to Marie-Laure Fleury, whose nurturing and loving presence in our home has allowed me the room to write. My undying devotion to Nana, who will never read this, and to my darlings Anne and Henry, who will. And finally, my love and gratitude to Tom Moore, who makes everything we’ve ever dreamed of seem possible.
Selected Bibliography
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Blogs
Dixon, Thomas. “The History of Emotions Blog.” http://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/.
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Martin, Gary. “The Phrase Finder.” http://www.phrases.org.uk.
Monroe, Jack. “A Girl Called Jack.” http://agirlcalledjack.com.
Murphy, Lynne. “Separated by a Common Language.” http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk.
Wicks, Kevin, ed. BBC America’s “Mind the Gap: A Brit’s Guide to Surviving America.” http://www.bbcamerica.com/mind-the-gap.
Yagoda, Ben. “Not One-Off Britishisms.” http://britishisms.wordpress.com.
Periodicals
The Daily Mai
l
The Economist
The Financial Times
The Guardian
HELLO!
National Journal
The New Yorker
The New York Times
Stylist
Vogue
Websites
BBC Archive’s first-person accounts of life in WWII: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/92/a1110592.shtml.
BBC Lab UK’s Great British Class Survey: https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/class.
Debrett’s: http://www.debretts.com.
Macmillan Dictionary: www.macmillandictionary.com.
Ordnance Survey: www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk.
Oxford English Dictionary: www.oed.com.
Urban Dictionary: www.urbandictionary.com.
World Wide Words: www.worldwidewords.org.
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