A tale of two countries

By: Erica

As both Californian and British, never formally comfortable calling myself one or the other, I have always related to the tale of Christopher and Columbus by Elizabeth von Arnim.  

Nicknaming themselves Christopher and Columbus, the Twinkler twins, orphans of an English mother and a German father, find themselves shipped off to America during World War One. They were “refugees, castaways, derelicts, two wretched little Germans who were neither really Germans nor really English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were both.”  Despite von Arnim’s customary wit and charm, there is also a forlorn sadness to the twins inability to belong.

British pragmatism. 

It is perhaps not surprising that Von Arnim, herself, was a refugee of sorts. Born in Australia to British parents, she married a Prussian aristocrat, and lived in both Germany and England, before ultimately ending up in Charleston, South Carolina.

Although I love nearly all the works of Elizabeth von Arnim, I have always identified with the Twinkler twins.  Unable to define themselves to one specific nationality, they are always at a loss when asked if they are British.  Their standard reply of “Practically” results in “surprise, reflection, and then suspicion.”  Unable to fit neatly into any particular box, they alienate and confuse any new acquaintances.

Born in England, but largely raised in California, I, like the Twinkler twins, always have a hard time telling people where I’m from. I tend to give a long, drawn out, complicated explanation that leaves everyone, including myself, confused.  And perhaps the truth is that I am confused by my own nationality. I would like to be British, but despite a love of baked beans on toast, and Cadbury flakes, I don’t always remember to say lift instead of elevator, or biscuit instead of cookie. And yet, I don’t feel entirely Californian either. I’m not blonde. I don’t surf or skateboard. I don’t eat healthy. And I’m terrible at sports.

Although the twins tell themselves that they must decide what they are, they never do. They are constantly in limbo, neither one nor the other. Their German soul inspires them to love Slush (excessive sentiment), while their British soul tells them to mock it. 

I must admit to the same hypocrisy in many of my own opinions and preferences. I love both the British and American office, Steve Carrel and Ricky Gervais being equally brilliant in my transatlantic eyes. I despise the undemocratic nature of the British aristocracy and yet romanticize William and Kate. I’d be hard pressed to say whether I prefer a good Sunday Roast or an all American BBQ. Roast pudding and hamburgers being equally delicious and decadent. But, I always prefer my tea with milk. And I love clotted cream and jam on my scones.  

So I guess at least when it comes to tea, I am well and truly British. The other areas of my life will have to go undefined.

~ This piece is the second installment in the Strangers in Strange Lands series. Although she is liable to change polarity at any moment, Erica is currently a Californian in Britain. A tea-drinking romantic, she can be found dispensing "old-fashioned advice for life's modern dilemmas" at Teatime with Erica.

Careful Construction

By: Arina 

My baby daughter is British. I am not. 

I was born nearly a third of a century ago in a country that has ceased to exist since then. I acquired my fatherland in 1991, when in the aftermath of a failed Soviet coup, Latvia regained independence. Ten years of carefully constructing my Latvian identity have followed. 

The grass is greener. 

So when I left Latvia for the greener meadows of England, I hoped to come back one day in order to singlehandedly pull the Latvian economy out of the post-Soviet mess. Ten more years have passed, and in contact with reality the dreams of a romantic teenager have withered somewhat. 

During my years spent in the UK, I have learned to hold the swinging doors for strangers, instead of inadvertently slamming them in the face of unsuspecting victims who are used to and thus take the courtesy of fellow human beings for granted. I have also learned to give change directly to shop assistants instead of seeking for a little plate to use as a neutral space in the exchange of coins. 

I got used to the idea that if ever I were to afford a house, it would be a hobbit house with tiny doors and tiny windows and I would always have an uncontrollable urge to stoop before entering it. I no longer fear that the local food will unrelentingly make me go up in dress sizes. And on cold winter days I no longer look with horror at cyclists wearing shorts or mothers taking their babies for a walk without a blanket and with bare feet under never-ending drizzle.

By now I cannot imagine going back to Latvia, where border police never smile, and women in the broad daylight wear skirts so skimpy that Westerners frequently mistake them for sex workers. After the
birth of my daughter I started to feel that London is my home. Yet it still feels so strange to watch Postman Pat with my daughter. It is so quintessentially British. 


~ Written as part of the Strangers in Strange Lands series. Arina describes herself as a mother (translation: waitress, cleaner, transportation device), lecturer (subverter of young minds), theoretical economist (creator of toy worlds), modern art junkie and a traveler.

Strangers in strange lands

I have been reminded by Refugee Week that there is a joy to being foreign, and a joy in knowing foreigners.

Songs of innocence and experience. 

To celebrate this joy, I am handing over the reins to some of my favourite migrants over the coming days, and instructing them to write on the vague topic of 'being and foreignness'.

My guest writers are a handful of the wanderers I have met in the green and pleasant land that I am proud to call my second home.

For me, being foreign is the experience of being a snowflake out of water: forever unique and eternally lost. Of course, being unique ain't always great, and being lost can be pretty cool.

Please tune in daily this week for a new story from a faraway land.

Dreams of home

Proof that he grew up on a farm, Yashar Ismailoglu's first memory is of being kicked by a cow. 

His second memory is of waking from a dream to discover a snake descending on him from a branch overhead. The snake landed on his shoulder and dragged its cold scales down the length of his arm, all the while Yasher's body remained paralyzed by lingering sleep 

Warm welcome. 

There must have been points that felt similarly uncomfortable on Yashar's journey as a young student from Cyprus to Britain in 1972, and then again on the return journey he never took from Britain to Cyprus after war broke out in 1974, leaving him a refugee. 

A friend introduced me to Yashar, and I met with him on the occasion of Refugee Week, to talk about his experiences as one of the first Cypriot refugees to Britain. Yashar welcomed me into the Alevi Cultural Centre in Hackney with a sort of warmth and openness that I imagine comes from having had to rely on the kindness of strangers himself. 

When Yashar arrived in Britain, he insisted to the Scottish boarder guard that he could speak English. The border guard insisted the same thing to Yashar, but neither could understand the other. 

Eventually Yashar convinced the guard to let him through, and he went on to discover some local culinary oddities - for instance, that his new country appeared to have a mere two Turkish restaurants to it's name. Turning to local cuisine, he struggled with the notion that the headless, beer-battered lump on the plate was actually a fish.

Land of plenty.

A long-time community organiser, Yashar admits that one of his initiatives has been far more successful than the others: football. The league he helped found as a "bridge between Cyprus and London" now has thirty-two clubs. At one point it sent twenty-three members of the league to Cyprus, paid for by an enthusiastic community raffle. 

Yashar is a poet, and he writes on the impossibility of going home. Years after coming to Britain, Yashar returned to the village of his birth. he found that people of his childhood were gone. "Our fields, rocks, mountains, hills - had all become houses."

Yashar is cautiously optimistic about the plight of future migrants to Britain. "If you come here and rely on the state you will be starving." He points out that migrants must rely on kindness and serendipity anyway. It was a famous Turkish musician who covered Yashar's bus fare to Ankara, and an Irish produce seller who taught him how to supplement his meager wages with leftover fruit and veg from the Ridley Road Market.

Every week is refugee week if you're a refugee. Yashar writes that home becomes place in one's mind rather than in geography. "There is always somewhere else," he says. 

Stargazers

My papa was a Hotshot in the US Forest Service - those crazy guys who go running into flames when deer go running the other way. The job meant that he was ace with a chainsaw, and could navigate around Big Sur with only a topographical map and the stars. It also meant that, unlike his daughter, he rarely panicked even when fire was involved.

Remember to look up. (JP Stanley, 2006) 

One time my papa found himself walled into a meadow by flames. There was little he could do in the circumstances but wait, so he curled up next to the embers of a smoldering log and decided to get some rest. Back to the burnt earth, eyes to the heavens, he watched the long-dead fires of ghosting stars blink overhead, and felt the resigned peace of a tiny ant in a gargantuan universe.

This is my memory of a story I was told when I was little. Due to the challenges of stargazing through smoke, I am probably embellishing some of the details. But it is true that my papa made a point of showing me the constellations when I was a girl.

When Ana was born, my initial course of action was to obsessively hover over her to make sure she was still breathing. Papa's main concern in the was getting me to stop hovering and go the heck to sleep. His next priority was to take her outside and show her the stars. Apparently - and he remembers this like I remember the Big Sur story - he was taken outside and shown the stars in his infancy.

I did eventually stopped hovering. Ana kept on breathing, and she even got to gurgle at the stars like a baby ant. Thank goodness for papas.

Ray of sunshine

Last week, Ray left planet earth in a rocket bound for the great beyond.

Humans and aliens both loved Ray, who referred to his craft as 'joy'. His stories helped grown-ups retrieve their childhoods from the attic, and prevented youth from sending their imaginations out with the recycling. Plus, he just seemed like everybody's granddad.

Cult of Ray. (Alan Light, 1975)

Ray said: "Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it." Ray grew up in libraries, and loved paper. But he eventually said that Fahrenheit 451 could go electronic, like a fire balloon casting off into the dark unknown.

He was wise to make his home in Los Angeles, because here in London, it's summertime again. 'Summer' is an ancient Celtic word that means 'three months of rain, just like last year'.

Britain is a land of traditions. Rain or shine, a hose-pip ban must be declared each summer. Yet under no circumstances must anyone contemplate fixing the leaky Victorian sewer system under London. Rain or shine, Union Jacks will flood the streets for Jubilees, and Olympians will flex at appointed times on blinking plasma screens in terraces. Shows and showers carry on, year upon year.

Where traditions are destroyed, it is traditional for the local council to do the destroying. In May, Brent council sent the police to stand guard as they stripped the Kensal Rise Library of its books at 2am. It's not clear whether their concern was ex-military sniper-librarians, or Dan Brown books. In a move that would make Cindy Lou Who cringe, they even removed a plaque commemorating the library's opening by Mark Twain in 1900.

London's libraries are becoming an endangered species. My two local libraries were closed just this year. I'm no economist, but I can't imagine that supplying Kensal Rise with the latest Dan Brown book is anything like bailing out the Royal Bank of Scotland - even given Dan Brown's rate of publication.

Douglas Adams once wrote an excellent profile of local councils. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens as a guy called Arthur Dent wakes to find a wrecking crew in his garden, poised to tear down his house on planning orders from the council. When Arthur becomes agitated, the wrecking crew insists that planning documentation has been posted for months...in a disused lavatory, behind a sign that says 'beware of the leopard'. Of course, only minutes later earth (excepting Aurther Dent) is vaporized by alien bureaucrats called Vogons, who are making way for an intergalactic bypass.

Don't panic. (Megan Trace, 2011)

I suspect the officials who shut down Kensal Rise Library at 2am have posted lengthy justifications for their actions somewhere - likely in a disused mental lavatory, guarded by a leopard. 

When their busy schedule of defending the universe against sniper-librarians allows, Vogons and councilors should both consider spending more rainy summer afternoons in the library. They can bring their Kindles if they like. Ray said: "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

Unrequited cake

Ana wants to meet the Queen.

Faker. 

Not some street fair amateur in a creepy cardboard mask, or a lost tourist toting an inflatable corgi. Certainly not that guy who sashays across Westminster Bridge.

The Queen, dammit. The REAL Queen.

So far no luck.

It was Ana's first, upsetting glimpse of a fake queen a week ago that triggered this fixation. Since then the cacophony of Jubilee hoopla has exacerbated her delicate condition.

Ana is not unreasonable - she merely wants to play with the Queen's toys, and maybe have tea. She has even made a Victoria sponge for the occasion.

Bait. 

Ana knows where the Queen's house is. She promises to share her toys and be sweet. What else could be required?

Grown-ups talk about the Queen till the are red and blue in the face. They throw parties for her, but she never shows up.

Befuddlement is becoming suspicion - Ana reckons people say the Queen is coming just to shut her up. She wonders if the real Queen is stuck in traffic. Perhaps there are the wrong kind of leaves on the line?

Last night Ana left a wedge of lovingly-crafted Victoria sponge on the windowsill, on the assumption that the Queen would be peckish after her boat ride.

Stuck. 

The cake was gone by morning, and the Queen was thoughtful enough to leave personalised stickers in it's place. But it wasn't enough.

On the train this afternoon a nice man noticed her far-off expression and drooping toy flag.

"Have you been to see the Queen?" he asked with the sort of bubbling excitement that only granddads on the train get.

Ana turned her gaze to him, her eyes teeming with the lost empire and unfulfilled Victoria sponge. She sensed that saying the right thing would shut him up.

"Yes" she said "I have."

Where dolls come from

Last week I spotted a perfect doll's house in a dimly-lit shop window. It was real down to the tiny brass knocker on the doll-sized front door.

The shop had no sign up, and no indication of its purpose apart from a hand-written note on the door declaring it to be "a toy collection, not a toy shop".

Intrigued and possessing of few manners, I barged in.

Down the rabbit hole. 

Inside I found a fairy godmother towering over a miniature floor-to-ceiling kingdom of dolls' houses and related paraphernalia. Everything in her magical world was intricately non-standard, from the wonky chimney pots to the tiny jars of rainbow sweets.

I asked the landlady of wonderland where such amazing things as this came from, and she whispered that her collection had been forty years in the making. 

Her collection, I discovered, is an entire house of dolls' houses - room upon wondrous room. The dolls' houses are chock full of the stuff of miniature life - light fixtures, plumbing, and sumptuous dinners that won't come unstuck from perfect porcelain plates.

No two houses are the same, but one is more special than the others: the one arranged by the landlady's favourite little farm boy, decades ago. The boy is grown, but there are still wooden cats napping in the kitchen of his house, and plaster ducks socializing under a grand chandelier in the loo.

Fake plastic tea. 

Why a grand chandelier in the loo? The boy wanted to look at it while he took his bath. And why ducks? They are waiting for the boy to return for his bath under the grand chandelier - they want to play in the puddles that form on the floor as he splashes about.

You may not have realized that fake plaster ducks had so much patience. Neither did I. There's a lot us grown-ups don't know about fake plastic ducks.

This magical toy collection is absolutely real, but I can't tell you how to find it. Rather than advertise, the landlady of wonderland waits for all those who truly believe to find her. 

So should you ever find yourself in Kentish Town, follow the second star to the right and carry straight on till morning. You may meet the two bad mice along the way.

Wandering lost

I always end up writing about places when I intend to write about people. I'm not sure how to kick the habit. These nicotine patches certainly aren't helping.

Last week I gave a guest talk to a travelling troupe of writers from my alma mater. I was invited along by my friend, Leslie Brody, who published an excellent biography of Jessica Mitford last year.

Domesday skyscraper. 

Her book should be required reading for anybody who wanders around and hates being told what to do - like how to sing for instance, or what to read.

I took the gang to my favourite pub in an alley off the Strand, and someone asked: why do you wander? 

It's a good question. I don't really have a good answer.

Tolkien is currently shouting at tired commuters from lampposts: "all who wander are not lost!" His travel enthusiasm is in promotion of the British Library's current exhibition Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands.

Some who wander are suckers for this kind of thing, so I found myself there this week. I quickly discovered that many great British writers have appalling handwriting (except for Charlotte Brontë  - hers is exquisite).

You there! Scratch my nose!

The British Library is wonderful. Glass bookcases scrape the ceiling, and apparently the basement descends to 25 meters. Guys with coiffed hair stare down from the architecture with a sternness that can only come from decades of being unable to scratch a nose-itch. 

Writing Britain  uses text and illustration to chart the Green Man's long walk from Hobbiton to to Dog Island by way of Wessex, Metroland, and Jerusalem-upon-Thames.

Kipling said: "Out of the spent and unconsidered earth, the cities rise again". Islington was a quiet suburb, and Marylebone a dairy farm.

Satanic Mills, then and now.

If you walk from Moorgate to the Museum of London, you can see chunks of the old Roman wall waiting patiently for the surrounding steel and glass to fall. 

The message of the British Library's exhibition is that writing about places is writing about people. Which makes me feel much better about my bad habit circa line one.  

In addition to wandering all over the place on paper, I wander in and out of London every few years. Thomas de Quincey once said: "my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep."

Champagne and a lie down

I don't know what the American way of birth is like, but apparently on private British wards you a bottle of champagne and a lie down afterwards. Sounds peachy, yes?

Smell the roses, but do keep going.

On the NHS, the midwife gives you about thirty minutes before she tells you to sit up and start breastfeeding. If you are a reasonable human, you insist that you need to rest, and surely it can wait till later. 

The midwife tiredly responds that all that jazz is over - it's time to get up and get on with it. NHS midwives excel at ripping bandages off quickly.

So happy day to all the great mamas I know, who don't rest and never get to wait. And happy day to our beloved ones, as tired and relentless as we are, who make it possible for us to carry out our task with joy.

May the lot of us spend the distant future drinking champagne and napping. For now, let's get up and get on with it.