Crime in Britain, part 2: the village edition

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Miss Marple doesn’t live in our village, but she’d be bored silly if she did. We’re short on murdered vicars and poisoned husbands.

What would she have to make do with?

Before I tell you about crime in the village, here’s my disclaimer: After drawing your attention to crime on the Scilly Isles and to the guy who was arrested for charging his phone on the London Overground trains, some of you were left thinking Britain’s a land with no serious crime. That’s my fault. The police really do have better things to do than arrest disoriented seals who wander into town. Or at least other things to do.

Marginally relevant photo: fog stealing the top of the cliff

But for you non-Brits out there, the point is this: Britain’s a real place and part of the same world you live in. That’s another way of saying that it does have crime, and none of it is fun if you’re on the receiving end. Even the petty stuff can feel big. In contrast to the U.S., though, very little of it involves guns. They’re tightly regulated. People who want to get lethal are more likely to pick up a knife, but even so, things can get ugly.

I’m not going to tell you about that, though. I live in a village of some 600 people and I’m going to tell you about what Miss Marple would have to content herself with if she lived next door.

Theft

A few years ago, two men went into the village store in balaclavas. Even in winter the Cornish weather isn’t balaclava-level cold, but that doesn’t really matter since it wasn’t winter. They made the guys stand out a bit.

S. was the only person working there at the time, and when they pulled out a knife and demanded the money in the cash register, she gave it to them. Two of them plus a knife, and one of her? I’d do the same. Then they demanded the money from the post office, which is part of the store but separated by a lockable door and glassed-in window.

Now, the post office in Britain doesn’t just sell stamps. You can start a savings account there. You can buy travel insurance, or foreign currency. You can pay some of your bills. So you might expect it to have a bit of cash. But the village post office is closed on Wednesday afternoons, and this was a Wednesday afternoon.

S. said, “Well you can’t have it, can you? Because it’s closed.”

And they said, “Oh,” and left.

They drove out of the village still wearing their balaclavas and were arrested before they got to the main road. All the police had to do was look for two guys in balaclavas, but in case that got too complicated one of the store’s owners followed them in his own car.

Wild Thing thinks they should be grateful to have been arrested. They weren’t cut out for a life of crime.

Drug smuggling

A few years before we got here, someone tried to smuggle in drugs (I’m not sure what kind, but if I had to guess I’d say cocaine) from a boat. If you don’t live here, you could convince yourself that with all these empty beaches and fields nobody would notice a thing. You’d be wrong. Apparently the police already knew about the plan beforehand, but if they hadn’t somebody would have noticed. Whether they’d have called the police I don’t know, but someone would have seen them.

Arson

A year or two after we moved here, somebody set fire to a telephone box. H., who lived opposite, had done some consulting with British Telecom and told us (several times) that part (or for all I know, all) of his pay was a commitment that he’d always have a telephone box outside his house. I’m not sure why he wanted one, since he had a house phone. Maybe he liked the look of it. Maybe he thought it was good for the village. But you know those tales where someone makes a pact with a genie or a god or the devil and it all sounds great until they read the fine print and find out they got eternal life but not eternal youth or a lifetime supply of cake but it would all be nonfat and dry? Well, he forgot to say “a working telephone box.”

Fast forward to the era of cell phones–or mobile phones, if you prefer–and phone boxes aren’t making money anymore. BT’s getting rid of them anywhere it can. And then someone sets this one of fire.

BT left it in place for a while, fulfilling the letter of the agreement, then they carted it away and H. didn’t protest.

Wild Thing suspects they paid someone to burn it down. Me, I doubt they’d invest the money, but whoever did it hasn’t been caught. In fact, I never heard any rumors about who it might have been. Which in this village is highly suspicious.

More theft

We used to have eggs for sale in several places along the road. They were free range, fresh (or as A. puts is, “Still warm from the hen”), and cheaper than in the supermarket. Plus the money went directly into the farmer or smallholder’s pocket instead of the supermarket’s.

Then someone started stealing the money and eggs. Now most of the egg boxes are gone. I’ve heard lots of speculation about who it might’ve been—a visitor? someone local?—but no one seems to know.

Wild parties

There’ve been two loud dances, which escalated to property destruction (a toilet paper holder was broken) and people harassing the sheep in the nearby field. I can testify that they were loud. Wild Thing and I went to one but stayed outside because it was too painful to be in the room with the band. The rest is hearsay. We left before the party had really gotten going and already people were peeing in the hedges. I don’t know—maybe that’s just part of a good night out.

Other stuff

On a public level, that’s pretty much it unless you count some property destruction. Or rumored property destruction. Stories have a tendency to change shape as they circulate, so I won’t present this one as fact.

We also have some drug use. Or reliably rumored drug use. Sorry, but I stopped doing first-hand research into that years ago. How much is some? Quite a bit. Doesn’t that sound like a more accurate measure, even if it isn’t? No one’s been arrested, so I’m not sure it counts in the crime statistics.

A couple of people have been arrested for drunk driving. And I’ve heard about a theft that apparently involved someone settling an old score. But no one involved the police in that. We’re off the beaten track here. You have to work at it if you want to get arrested.

A couple of years ago, a police car parked on our corner every so often and sat there for ten or fifteen minutes, then drove off. And no, the cop was looking away from our house. In fact, he was barely looking at anything. He did a pretty good impression of someone hiding from a job he liked even less than killing time inside a parked car. The rumor was that it was a community policing effort, although I’d have thought getting out of the car would have made it more effective. Anyway, that lasted a couple of weeks, then he stopped coming.

And then there’s private crime—the kind that happens behind closed doors, within families, and isn’t remotely amusing. Once in a great while these spill into the street and get noisy enough to wake the neighbors. Some of us wonder who it was and eventually someone tells us. The fine art of gossip is alive and well here. Mostly I’d guess that whatever happens inside doesn’t get heard. That kind of crime is as common here as it is in cities, I’m sure, and as unlikely to be known about by outsiders.

We did find out about the guy who was arrested for trying to kill his wife with a knife, but there was no mystery involved. The police came, and the papers ran a story. It wasn’t good for much more than a paragraph. It’s by far the most serious crime I’ve mentioned, but I’ve dumped it here under Other stuff because it’s not funny.

Still, some of us—including me—watched the papers for details. It’s horrible, that fascination, and I indulged as much as anyone else. Miss Marple knew how to harness it, but the rest of us? We just pass the tales back and forth and shake our heads. J. works with a women’s center that deals with sexual violence, putting her head-shaking to good use, but all I do is write the occasional blog post.

The current crisis

Last Sunday night, Wild Thing woke up to hear a crash and a car alarm, then a car racing away. She looked at the time so she could remember it. Why do people do that? Because on TV shows it’s what the cops want to know. Or Miss Marple, only she’d ask if it happened after the vicar took the trash out. (Do vicars take the trash out? I don’t really understand what a vicar is or does, but it sounds good, somehow.)

The next morning Wild Thing told me the exact time it happened, but it involved numbers so I promptly forgot.

It’s all very suspicious. And you heard it here first.

Community life in a Cornish village

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Some days you find an adventure around every blind curve in the narrow road. At least if you’re 144, as Wild Thing and I cumulatively are (I think; don’t trust me with numbers), it’s enough to pass for adventure.

We drove to a garden center on Sunday to buy a dwarf hydrangea. Doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing you do when you’re cumulatively 144 years old?

Irrelevant photo: St. John’s wort, or rose of sharon

We weren’t yet at the main road when we saw a ewe and two lambs on the road. I slowed to a crawl and thought I’d edge past them, but they weren’t having it. The ewe led her lambs straight ahead, so that I was either driving them back toward their field or further from it, only I had no idea which. Either way, I was adding stress to their day.

City kids that we are, we’ve lived in the country long enough to know we needed to stop at the nearest permanently occupied house (this is second-home country, and vacation-rental country, so not just any house would do). But we weren’t near the nearest house—we were near fields, none of which had sheep in them.

Wild Thing got out of the car, thinking she could edge them to the side of the road, but they treated her the same way they treated the car: They kept going down the road.

Eventually we—me in the car and Wild Thing on foot—came to a field gate and they plastered themselves against it. I drove past and got out of the car while we talked about what to do. It was tempting to open the gate and let them in, but it was a recently mown, sheepless field. Wherever they came from, this wasn’t it. (If it had had sheep, we’d have had no way of knowing if it was the right flock, but never mind, it didn’t.)

We drove on and stopped at the next house, which turned out to belong to people we know slightly. They narrowed the possibilities down to two farmers and promised to call them both. In the meantime, a litter of six springer spaniel puppies swarmed us in that charming, brainless way that puppies have and they—that’s the people, not the dogs—said they had two left, did we want any?

I dragged Wild Thing away before she could claim them both and we got back in the car feeling very much like part of the community. Which is something, I suspect, that only people who aren’t quite part of the community bother to feel, but never mind, it felt wonderful.

We drove on and about a mile on the other side of the main road picked up two hitchhikers carrying skateboards. They were, at a wild guess, somewhere in their late teens and facing a long, long walk if they didn’t get a ride.

Wild Thing’s part of a group of people trying to create a skateboard park in the village. The group was kicked off by a couple of fathers whose kids—well, one of them is just walking and the other hasn’t gotten that far. So you can think of this as a long-term project. The village is a great place for young kids but not so great for older ones, and a skate board park wouldn’t solve the problem but it would help a bit. And it might keep the kids from skating on a stretch of road between two blind curves, where sooner or later somebody’s going to get smooshed.

So Wild Thing talked with them about skateboard parks and they loved the idea that someone wanted to build one. The three of them happily traded information for a few miles. They talked about how adults tend to treat skaters like a threat to the fabric of society—I’m paraphrasing here; I can’t remember their exact words—and I talked about how generation after generation adults are convinced that whatever kids are into is a threat to the fabric of society. The only thing that changes is the activity. When Wild Thing and I were kids it was hanging out on the street corner.

We dropped them in Launceston and left feeling like—you got it—part of a community. Then we bought a blue dwarf hydrangea and some pansies. I’d told Wild Thing just the day before that I wasn’t going to grow pansies anymore because the slugs and snails love them (yumm, salad) but they were so cheery that I bought them anyway. And I’ve been out slaughtering slugs and snails pretty consistently in recent weeks, so I might be able to get away with it.

From there, we drove home and walked to a village tea that was raising money for the Air Ambulance. We shared a table with two women from a nearby town and Wild Thing got a conversation going, which isn’t always easy but she has a gift. As they were leaving, Wild Thing said we’d stop by on Monday to help them eat the cake they were buying. They said we’d be most welcome. It was gracious thing to say, and since we don’t know their address(es), a safe one.

Then some people from the village joined us and J. wanted the recipe for a chocolate cake I brought to a party last week. Actually, she’d asked the day before and I hadn’t gotten around to sending it, but she explained that she needed it that day because she wanted to make it on Monday.

The recipe’s based on one in The Joy of Cooking, and I’m in love with it at the moment. British pie crusts are richer than the ones we make in the U.S., but their cakes tend to be drier. And I’m on a mission to mess with British baking anyway. Not because I don’t like it–some of it’s wonderful, and I’ve learned how to make a mean ginger cake. But what culture’s national cuisine couldn’t be improved by peach cobbler and New York cheesecake?

Anyway, being asked for the recipe left me with that same feeling of being part of a community, and we waddled home, happy and full of cake and scones.

Does my vocabulary look too British in this?

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

The differences between British and American English are an endless source of—well, pretty much anything you can name: confusion, fascination, amusement, bad temper, accusations (subtle and otherwise) of either ignorance or stuffiness, depending on which side of the Atlantic taught you your rash assumptions.

I’ve written about the differences between British and American English before, which means I’m supposed to slip in a link or ten to tempt newcomers deeper into the blog. That sounds ominous—step deeper into the dark and trackless blog, my dears. But I have to do it anyway. Who am I to defy the rules of the blogosphere? (Note: I already do with my irrelevant photos, and I’m not likely to stop, but once in a while I should behave like a serious blogger.) So here’s the link: This will connect you to a whole category of posts. You can pick through and see what interests you. Or not. I’ll never know.

Semi-relevant photo: What's more English than morris dancing? I like this shot because the guy on the right looks like he's about to brain the guy on the left. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Semi-relevant photo: What’s more English than morris dancing? I like this shot because the big guy on the right looks like he’s about to haul off and brain the guy on the left. If you squint, the whole thing begins to look like a brawl. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Where was I? I’m returning to the topic because Karen wrote to say my writing sounded British to her. I asked what specifically struck her that way and she said what “sounds to my American ears not-so-American” were the phrases “‘he wasn’t being immensely clever” and “trying to conduct a bit of business.”

I’m probably the last person who’d know if those are not-so-American. When I talk, I still sound American enough to get asked if I’m enjoying my stay (well yes, although it seems like I’ve been here for years), but Britishisms have crept into my brain and my speech. I’d like to think I notice them and build walls around them—you know: the kind with turnstiles, so I have to sacrifice a coin before I can get at them—but I’m not sure the system’s working.

In the first phrase, I wonder if what struck Karen isn’t the word immensely, which is formal—a tone I fall into a lot when I’m kidding around, although I’m never sure if it works. On the other hand, clever may be more common in Britain than in the U.S. Emphasis on may. I’m not sure. But I can call up the sound of an English accent saying “you clever girl” or “clever clogs” (one is a compliment; the other probably isn’t), but I can’t come up with anything like it in an American accent.

What about the second phrase, trying to conduct a bit of business? Bit shows up a lot in British English. Bits and bobs. Or Zadie Smith’s wonderful phrase about nudity in a movie, the dangly bits. Do we use bits much in American? Ask someone if they’re tired and “a bit” wouldn’t be a strange answer, although “a little” might be a bit more common.

Did the bit in that last phrase jump out and sound British?

Conduct again has a formal tone, and although I’d guess it’s used equally in both versions of the language, we (the we here being Americans) do tend to think British English wears a corset (or at least a top hat) while American English slouches on the couch with its feet on the coffee table. That’s because we think everyone in Britain is belongs to the aristocracy. Even when we know better. We know the laws of physics decree that you can’t have an aristocracy without a whole lot of peasants to keep them fed and et cetera’d, but somewhere underneath whatever our good sense we have we still believe the British are all aristocrats.

We (again meaning Americans) are both right and wrong about the formality of British English. It can be more formal. It also can be gloriously rough and informal—like, I’d guess, any language or national version of a language.

Karen went on to write, “Isn’t this a problem writers encounter all the time when they create characters who are ‘other’? How does a woman writer ‘sound’ male? How does a thirty-something author ‘sound’ like a teenager? How does an American ‘sound’ British?”

The answer is that at their best, writers listen, deeply and actively, and learn their limits. I don’t hesitate to write dialog in a man’s voice, or to write from a man’s point of view. We’re not as different as the world tells us we are, and even if we were I’ve lived around men I don’t live with one, but I know what they sound like.

I wrote from man’s perspective in parts of Open Line (and here we go with the links again) and felt that I knew the character well and did him justice. He wasn’t an admirable person, but I ended up liking him. I’d lived inside his head.

Writing the male characters in The Divorce Diet was different. I only got to see them through my central character’s eyes, and if she was fed up with them, so was I. They’re not as fully realized because of the point of view I chose. You can’t tell every story from every perspective. But their dialog? It didn’t feel like a stretch.

But I know my limits and I stay well away from the edges. I’ve watched writers write dialog that goes past theirs. At its best it embarrasses me as a reader and makes them look ignorant. At its worst it comes off as racist. For myself, the rule is this: If you haven’t lived with it, don’t write it. If you don’t know the accent and vocabulary and attitude and life first hand, don’t write it. That doesn’t mean limit yourself to characters who are replicas of yourself. It means know your limits, and if they form too tight a circle, learn more. Live more widely.

Sorry: I’ve expanded the issue beyond vocabulary, but dialog isn’t just about word choice, it’s about the character. And writing about someone from a different demographic group isn’t just about finding the right words. If you don’t know the reality of another person’s life, you won’t write it with any depth or power. Or respect, no matter how good your intentions are.

Maybe that’s why so many male writers have written paper-thin women: They couldn’t see beyond what they wanted from women, or how women affected them, so they couldn’t create any depth in the women they wrote. You can plug other categories of writer and character into that sentence in whatever combination you like, but I have an English degree and ended up reading a dismal lot of paper-thin women. My patience wore thin and it doesn’t seem to be one of those things that repair themselves with time.

But let’s come back to the original question about words. It worries me when Britishisms creep into my brain. Picture me as an auto mechanic and someone’s slipped metric wrenches my toolbox, which would be fine except I work on American cars and nothing but American cars. They’re fine wrenches, but they don’t fit anything in the shop.

I’d love to work on both kinds of car, but I’m just the kind of maniac who couldn’t keep my wrenches apart.

I’ve tried keeping British words out of my head and it’s not possible. My brain loves words, and it vacuums them up wherever it finds them. And as I typed that, a voice in my head supplied the phrase hoovered them up. Because vacuuming’s a brand-name verb here, based on the Hoover vacuum. Like the American word band-aid, which in British is the generic (if, to me, bizarre sounding) sticking plaster.

Some words get planted more deeply because I use them, however hesitantly. There’s no point in asking where the band-aids are if no one knows what I’m talking about. Others plant themselves deeply because they sound good. People here have such a way of leaning into the word bloody that it makes me want to say it myself. If I find myself in the right time and place, cells in my brain jump up and down like popcorn in the microwave, begging, Can we say that? Please can we say that?

The wall-and-turnstile approach to keeping my vocabularies separate hasn’t been a screaming success. I might have more luck if I think of myself as having two toolboxes (or if I run those pesky foreign cars out of my garage), but I doubt it. It’s a problem I haven’t solved.

Any comments on what I sound like to you are welcome. Or on anything else that comes to mind. This should be interesting.

British weather: is everything bigger in the U.S.?

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

From the July 3 Western Morning News I learned that Americans call the July full moon the Thunder Moon.

We do? I never did. I checked with Wild Thing and she’d never heard of it either. The only moon I ever heard given a name was the harvest moon, and that was only because of the song, “Shine on, etc.” And the writer William Least Heat-Moon, and he’s a person, not a celestial body.

As you might guess, the Westy isn’t the most news-driven of papers, but unless Wild Thing and I are the only two Americans who never heard of a Thunder Moon I’d expect a bit more in the way of fact checking.

Having said that, we’d just had a thunderstorm here in North Cornwall and lost power for a few minutes, and it had led us to compare Midwestern thunderstorms to the ones we’ve seen in the U.K. which strike us as short on drama.

Irrelevant photo by Ida Swearingen

I know, I know. I sound like one of those everything’s-bigger-in-America kind of Americans. I’m not, I swear. I could give you a list of things that weren’t any bigger, but maybe it’s enough to say that I wasn’t. The storms, though? They were. The thunder here rumbles instead of crashes. The lightning tends to stay in the clouds instead of striking down. Yes, we’ve seen lightning strikes since we moved here, but they’re rare, and because of that, memorable. We stood on the cliffs once, watching lightning strike down into the ocean. I was riveted and would have stayed longer but Wild Thing reminded me that we were the tallest things on the cliffs (which is a comment on how low the vegetation is, not on how tall we are) and we’d be the most likely targets when the storm got closer. I was tempted to argue that we had plenty of time but good sense and kindness got the better of me and I followed her to the car.

I do miss those Midwestern thunderstorms. They gather all the energy from half a continent’s heat, then let it loose.

The tornadoes, on the other hand, I wasn’t so crazy about. Wild Thing spent a lot of childhood summers in Oklahoma, in what’s called Tornado Alley, and since she’s lived through plenty of tornadoes she’s convinced she will again. I’ve never been as sure of that. Even after forty years of living with them, when the sirens went off, my body sent out panic signals that didn’t bother to consult my brain.

In spite of that, I never managed to memorize which siren meant this is an early warning and which one meant get to the basement and stay terrified till you hear from us again.

We only went to the basement once. We gathered up the dog and found the cats were already in place. They know. Our basement wasn’t—how can I say this and not sound panicky? It wasn’t a place you’d want to be trapped if the house collapsed on top of you. We believed that basements should be cleaned every twenty years, whether they need it or not, but this being year nineteen we were still coasting. So it would be us, the dog, the cats, the dirt, the junk, the litter boxes, the asbestos lining that was, back then, still in place on our old, old furnace, and who knew what else. On top of that, water leaked in through the walls in heavy storms. Our neighborhood was built—we found out after we bought the house—on what had once been a swamp and wanted to be a swamp again. After a heavy storm, you could walk the alleys and know who had a finished basement by the rolls of soaked carpet waiting to go to the dump. So I pictured the house collapsed on top of us and all our dirt, junk, kitty litter, and asbestos, with the water rising—

And I couldn’t remember which corner they advised hiding in. The southwest? The southeast? Or was it under the stairs?

I looked under the stairs. Some old storm windows were stashed there, so add broken glass to the list.

I was tempted to take my chances upstairs. At least I’d die clean. Then the all clear went off and it all became a funny story.

Tornadoes are strange beasts. They can drive a piece of straw through a tree. They can lift up a house, drop a car in the basement, then put the house back down more or less on top of it. Not undamaged, mind you, but still in place. One that touched down in the Twin Cities picked a bunch of fish out of a Minneapolis lake and dropped them in a St. Paul suburban mall’s parking lot. You could almost think the storms have a sense of humor, although the fish weren’t amused.

Last January, a tornado touched down in London. No, make that a suspected tornado. The damage was minimal (I wouldn’t say that if my garage that been hit, but still, given what’s possible, yes, it was minor) and it wouldn’t have been national news if they weren’t so rare.

The storms you’re used to set your expectations of what storms are. Any tornado in Britain is newsworthy. And the thunderstorm that got us talking about how mild they are here? A couple of friends commented on how wild it had been.

Which brings me back to the Westy and its conviction that Americans call the July moon the Thunder Moon. If anyone’s ever heard it called that, I’d love to know.

Tea on the lawn: what could be more English?

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Is anything more English than tea on the lawn of a great house? We’ve were talking about stereotypes since I fell for an inaccurate one about Americans, but linking tea on the lawn—especially the lawn of a great house—to Englishness seems like a safer gamble. (Feel free to take me apart on that if I’m wrong.)

Cream tea at Penhele

Recently, Wild Thing and I went to a cream tea at Penhele, a great house not from where we live. It was a fundraiser for the Charles Causley Trust, which (I just checked the website) keeps alive the memory of a local poet and promotes writing in the region where he lived. I’d love to give you a link to some of his poems, but although I’ve been impressed by some of his poetry I didn’t like the only one I found online. Others are under copyright and that makes them a no-go zone. Sorry.

But we didn’t go there to support the Causley Trust. In fact, we didn’t know what the event was raising money for. We didn’t even go for the cream tea, although it was a welcome bonus. What we really wanted was to see the gardens and the house, which are well enough known around here that we ran into half the village almost as soon as we walked in. One of them, J., was a carpenter before he retired (only they say joiner here, or builder, and I’m not all that sure what the difference is) and worked restoring historic buildings. Basically, once he’s done you can’t tell he’s been there. I asked if he knew how old the house was and he pointed to a stone plaque above a doorway in what he told me was the hall. It carried a date in the 1600s—1660, if I remember right. For all I know, other parts are older.

“I worked on those windows,” he said, pointing to the right of the plaque.

I felt like I was sitting next to a rock star.

Most of us—maybe all of us—lined up to buy tea and either scones with jam and clotted

Walking by the lake. Photo by Ida Swearingen

cream (that’s the cream part of a cream tea) or cake, then we drifted along paths and past fields, a lake, a swimming pool (covered), in and out of a series of open rooms formed by a high, dense hedge, and past an empty flowerpot stuck deep into the hedge and looking like a place for someone to hide his or her cigarettes, although I didn’t reach in to be sure since that seemed like an invasion. We paid closest attention to what I’ve learned to call a herbaceous border (you pronounce the H on herb here; I still don’t, but I’ve gotten to the point where both pronunciations sound odd to me), stopping to admire this flower and that one.

Part of the herbaceous border

According to Wikipedia, herbaceous borders became popular in the Victorian era. They’re basically a bunch of flowering plants—what I’d call a flower bed—and they’re gorgeous but take a lot of work. The Wikipedia entry talks about digging up and splitting and replacing plants, but even more than that they take weeding. Endless weeding.

Did I happen to mention how many weeds Wild Thing and I have grown since I started blogging?

I haven't a clue what the flowers are, so I'm not going to try identifying them.

I haven’t a clue what the flowers are, so I can’t identify them.

I overheard several people saying the same thing that came to my mind: “I wonder how many people it takes to keep it looking like this.” No one had the answer, but quite a few seemed like a fair guess.

It all felt a bit like something out of a BBC costume drama—the great house opened for an afternoon so the villagers could put on their company manners and enjoy a day out. It’s less lord-and-lady-of-the-manor these days, but you can’t help noticing the difference between the place you’re admiring and whatever you call home. Still, whatever people’s feelings were about class and inequality—and I expect they ranged all over the scale—everybody seemed willing to put that aside for the day and enjoy the beauty and the hospitality.

Both class and people’s feelings about class are more open in the U.K. than in the U.S., where we break out in a rash if anyone uses the word in any context except middle. And the tradition of a grand house opening its gardens to the public is also something I never heard of in the U.S. Wild Thing and I speculated on whether it dates back to Victorian times or to the medieval period. I’d put my money on medieval, because, as crushing as the lord-peasant relationship must have been, it did lay a few obligations on the lord, and those may have included fetes or feasts.

The inescapable raffle

But that’s guesswork. What’s certain (or as certain as I dare be about anything right now) is that the tradition of great houses opening their grounds for fundraisers is part of an English summer.

At the end of the afternoon came the drawing for the raffle. You can’t hold a fundraiser in Cornwall without holding a raffle. There’s no law on the books, but it’s just not done. So at Penhele they held a raffle. And we didn’t win anything.

British stereotypes of Americans–and my own

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

In the U.K., Americans have a reputation for bluntness, but do we live up to the stereotype?

In my last post, without even noticing it I went along with the stereotype, and Belladonna Took wrote, “It absolutely fascinates me that you consider Americans ‘blunt and to the point.’ Maybe that’s true over on the East Coast, but here in the Pacific Northwest? Oh dear, hmmm, I think perhaps it may be a little different. (Note: Everything in the preceding sentence after ‘Oh dear’ is Pacific Northwestese for ‘Oh hell no.’ And it’s pronounced in a lilting smiley voice, so I should probably insert lots of smiley faces. Only stuff it, I won’t, because I’m from Johannesburg.)

“…I had lived here two years before it finally dawned on me that when smiling women remarked, “You’re very direct, aren’t you?” they weren’t actually complimenting me.”

Irrelevant photo: flowers growing in a drystone wall

Well, damn, it’s amazing what I can learn when I listen to people.

Although I lived in Minnesota for forty years, I’m a New Yorker by birth,by accent, and by attitude, and I don’t think I’m the only New Yorker who’s blunt, but having fallen for one stereotype I’m starting to question everything I take for granted. Still, I think that’s what we’re generally like. Not all of us, but enough to set a pattern.

For years after I moved to Minnesota, I felt like a steamroller. With no particular effort and no intention at all, I seemed to leave people flattened on the pavement, and hell, all I was doing was talking. It’s not that I like an argument, but I do like a good, spirited discussion, and to the people I was now around in Minnesota that sounded like an argument. I guess. You’d have to ask them what it was really about, although they might be too polite to tell you, because if New York’s known for its directness, Minnesota’s known for Minnesota Nice: a relentless effort to keep things bland. Smooth that surface, folks, because it’s all that matters.

Years ago on A Prairie Home Companion (and the link’s to the show’s general website, not the specific shows I’m about to mention), Garrison Keillor did some bits about how Minnesotans talk. They were, I think, from Howard Mohr’s How to Talk Minnesotan. One that stayed with me was what a Minnesotan would say to someone using a welding torch on a full gas tank. It was, more or less, “Y’know, most fellas wouldn’t want to do that.”

In Minnesota when you’re making people uneasy, they’re likely to say either “that’s different” or “that’s interesting.” Ditto if you’ve thoroughly pissed them off. It took me a long, long time to understand what the phrases meant.

So I had a hard time those first few years. Or was that the first few decades? From this distance, it seems like no time at all. For a while, I tried toning myself down and ended up furious at everyone. Eventually I gave that up and let people look after their own welfare. They lived through the experience and I was happier, which it made me easier to be around, so I’m guessing everyone benefited. I was never going to blend in, so the only question was to handle my difference.

I’d lived there for several decades when my supervisor at work pulled me aside to tell me I was intimidating other (unnamed) staff members. Not by anything specific I’d said or done, just by my way of being in the world. If it had been something specific, I’m pretty sure I’d have reacted differently, but since this was about who and how I was, I surprised us both by laughing. She was twenty years too late, I told her, because I’d stopped thinking it was something I could change and anyway I’d stopped wanting to change it .

Twenty was a random grab for a largish number, but the rest of it was as true as anything can be in this complicated world of ours.

If you’re looking for a nifty strategy to help you get along with your supervisor, I don’t recommend that one, but to her credit she dropped the issue, and if she held it against me she kept it to herself. She wasn’t a native Minnesotan, but she’d adapted better than I had. So how did she really feel? I had no way of knowing and I was happy enough to leave it there.

At times when we lived in MInnesota, Wild Thing’s translated for me, because indirection isn’t a language I’m ever going to understand well. But she grew up in Texas and indirection is as natural to her as what other people think is an argument and I think is a discussion is to me. When her mother was bone-deep furious at someone, she’d do what she called heaping coals of fire on their head, which meant smiling and being nice to them to prove how angry she was. And, I’m guessing, how much better than them she was.

So, yeah, Wild Thing made a great translator.

One time we’d gotten a—no, I can’t resist it—whole shitload of manure for the garden and it was sitting in a pile by the alley, where I usually parked. And being the let’s-do-it-later kind of gardeners that we are, it sat there long enough that a neighbor said something about it. I don’t remember exactly what, but it had to do with there being a lot of it. Or how long it had been there. And I smiled and nodded and said yes it was a lot and yes it had been a while.

I’m clueless but I’m not unfriendly.

Then Wild Thing explained: The neighbor wanted some, and wanted to be invited to take it. And wasn’t going to ask. Ever. So we invited and she took and we all lived happily ever after.

I’m not sure how much of the U.S., geographically speaking, values directness and how much values indirectness. I’ve only lived in New York and Minnesota. If some of you want to fill in from your own experiences, it would be fascinating.

I can say two things, though. One is that stereotypes are powerful. If they match any tiny breath of experience in your head, as this one did in mine, you can find yourself blown right into a wall on a full-out storm wind. So thanks to Belladonna for providing the wall. I’m grateful.

The other is about the grain of truth in the stereotype. What I think gives rise to the impression of American bluntness is a sort of surface openness. In public, we take up more physical, emotional, and auditory space than the British. I wouldn’t say we’re uninhibited, but we can give that impression. And we recognize different rules of politeness. It’s easy to mistake all that for bluntness.

I offer than last piece especially as a theory, and I’d love to hear what you think of it. Am I anywhere near the mark?

A government decides to promote British values

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

The British government worries that Britain may not be British enough. It worries so much that the Department for Education has instructed schools to promote British values.

Part of this is meant to counter the lure ISIS has on a (let’s be realistic, limited but highly publicized) number of young people, but I seem to remember that they started talking about British values back when Scotland was voting on whether to leave the U.K. So I’m guessing that some more general unease lies behind the decision.

Let me be clear: I take ISIS seriously. Hell, I take Scotland seriously. What I don’t take seriously are people who think “promoting British values” is a response to either of those very distinct entities. Especially since the British values campaign forces everyone to confront the awkward question of what those values are. I mean, they’re not , say, the flag or apple pie. They’re hard to define.

Irrelevant photo: an old shed at Trebarwith Strand. The pink flowers are red campion. I don’t make this stuff up. Really I don’t.

As prime minister, David Cameron defined them as freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility, and respect for British institutions. Nick Clegg, when he was deputy prime minister, added gender equality and equality before the law. Then his party tanked in the elections and no one’s consulted him since. Michael Gove, when he was secretary of education, defined them as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. Awkwardly enough, in 2007 he said trying to define Britishness was “rather un-British.”

Oops.

Since Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, which should really be OSECSS) will have the joy of assessing the schools’ efforts, it’s published the official set of British values. They’re democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.

Can we tolerate people with different, non-British values? Sorry, the question’s too complicated. Ofsted lives in a true/false culture.

Do other countries hold to these same values and if they do are the values still specifically British? Sorry, that’s not on the test and we can’t discuss it now.

Can we tolerate politicians offering three sets of non-identical British values plus one opinion trashing the whole idea of codifying them? Of course we can, because by now everyone’s swung their weight behind the official version and has forgotten that they didn’t always agree. Except possibly Nick Clegg and, see above, no one consults him anymore.

In joyful response to this attempt at unifying the nation’s beliefs, a whole lot of people cut loose on Twitter under the hashtag #BritishValues. According to The Independent, some of the early tweets summarizing the aforesaid values included:

Being wary of foreigners while having a Belgian beer with an Indian curry in your Spanish villa wearing Indonesian clothes.
Queuing; dressing inappropriately when the sun comes out; warm beer; winning World Wars; immigration & Pot Noodles.
Wearing socks with sandals
complaining about immigration

The Independent article online was open for comments, and they included a few more suggestions:

Seeing a rogue traffic cone and immediately working out the nearest sculpture in need of a hat.
Denouncing immigrants, while we have a royal family made up of immigrants.
Loving fish and chips even though the potato migrated here from abroad.

The comment thread quickly degenerated into arguments, name calling, and “This comment has been deleted,” so I stopped reading. Instead, I went to Twitter to check out the more recent comments. Not all of them are funny. Some are bitter-edged comments about homelessness and not rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean. Others are about trash in the hedges and dog-poo bags left by the side of the road. But, hey, we try to keep laughing here, even when the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. The lighter tweets included:

The bloke in front of me just put his entire body weight on my foot & I said sorry.
Forming an orderly queue.
Pie and chips done properly!
Get an exclusive 15% off any order from @TwiningsTea

None of these answers the question (and I do understand that it wasn’t posed as a question) of what British values are, but it does point us in the right direction: Whatever they are, they include an ad for tea and a sense of humor. So brew yourself a nice cup and tell me something silly about British values, would you?

Or American values. Or any other nation’s values. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

Intercultural adventures: Reading road signs in the U.K. and the U.S.

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

How do the British and U.S. cultures differ? Read the road signs and you can learn a lot.

Ice Badger called my attention to the issue in a comment about calling cats. I admit, the link between the two topics isn’t obvious, but it made sense at the time. So fasten your seatbelt, please, because we’re going to investigate road signs and I hate driving while someone’s bouncing around loose in the back seat.

A few weeks ago, Wild Thing and I drove past a temporary road closure sign on the slip road onto the motorway. I’ll translate that: The sign was about repairs and it was beside the freeway entrance.

Wild Thing was driving, so she asked, “What did it say?”

Damn near relevant photo, from Wikimedia. An American road sign--apparently part of a Highway Department test of dangerous signs. The speed limit isn't really 625 mph, it's 62.5. Why would anyone bother with .5 mph in a speed limit? Never mind. Someone had fun with it, I hope.) And the edge of the sign went through the windshield in a test crash.

Damn near relevant photo, from Wikimedia. An American road sign–apparently part of a Highway Department test of dangerous signs. The edge of the sign went through the windshield in a test crash. And the speed limit isn’t really 625 mph, it’s 62.5. Why would anyone bother with .5 mph in a speed limit? Don’t ask.

Signs announcing repairs are so wordy here that we’ve stopped trying to read them while we’re driving. They say things like, “We’re terribly sorry to announce that this road will be closed between the hours of 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on the fifth day of March in the year of our lord 2016 for repairs. We regret the inconvenience but the work is necessary for the smooth functioning of the United Kingdom’s infrastructure.”

I exaggerate only slightly. The repair work is done county by county, so they wouldn’t say “United Kingdom,” they’d name the county. But the fine points don’t matter. If you’re going to write a 500-word essay on a movable sign, you have to use small print, and that in turn means that drivers can’t begin to read it until they’re on top of it. And then they’re past it and they’ve only gotten as far as “terribly.”

When I’m the passenger (which isn’t often; I tend to get carsick and do better when I drive), I try to pick dates or times out of a sea of letters. If I see “p.m.” after the first number, it’s overnight construction and I can toss the road closure into the mental drawer marked “Stuff I don’t need to know” unless we’re planning some late-night driving. If I can’t pick out p.m, I have to shove it into the drawer labeled “Things I don’t know much about but that worry me.” In an odd way that’s good, since it’s overstuffed and this particular worry won’t get much individual attention.

On the other hand, if the road’s going to be closed for days at a stretch, I might actually need to know that and I won’t. So it’s worth a bit of worry. Maybe I’ll lay it neatly on the top layer.

To all of that, the Highway Department (which isn’t called that, I’m sure—I’m importing an American term) says, “Tough.”

Or “We’re terribly sorry, but this is the way we do things here.”

What would an American sign say in a similar situation? “Road Closed, March 5, 7 a.m. – 4 p.m.” Or something along those lines. In large print.

It all goes to reinforce national stereotypes, I’m afraid: Americans are blunt and to the point. Or rude, if you like. Road closed. No apologies and no explanations. The British say about themselves that if someone stands on their foot, they’ll–the person whose foot is being stood on–will apologize, so their signs first apologize and then throw in a bunch of extra words to soften the blow.

Cross-cultural adventures: Two Americans call a cat in Britain

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Fast Eddie went over the fence for the first time this week. We knew the day was coming, but we’d hoped it wouldn’t come quite so soon. He’s still a very small cat in a very large world. He’s built for climbing, though, and climb he did.

The first we knew about it was when we heard a bird doing what Wild Thing calls checking and our neighbor calls alarming.

Fast Eddie, the fiercest kitten for 10 yards in any direction

Americans and Brits agree on what the noun alarm means, but use it any other way and we get into that odd stuff that happens when we think we share a language. In the U.S., if you’re alarmed, you’re moving in the direction of panic. It’s a feeling. Once you cross the Atlantic, though, being alarmed is more likely to involve wiring, as is demonstrated by the signs that say, “This door is alarmed.”

And there I was thinking the door was an inanimate object. So now I’m alarmed myself. The announcement seriously destabilized my world view.

Alarm can also involve actions—for example, the bird we heard was alarming, as in making an alarm call, not as in scaring the hell out of us.

So, with today’s language lesson out of the way, let’s go back to the bird. We heard it making a checking / alarming sound, and Wild Thing asked if I knew where Eddie was.

Insert a moment of, ahem, alarm here, because he was nowhere in the house. We went outside and called. He still wasn’t in the habit of coming when we called (we’re working on it), but we did it anyway because, what the hell, humans are a very strange species and it was something we knew how to do.

I need to interrupt myself for a minute here to talk about cross-cultural cat calling. I can’t swear that this is universal, but the Brits I’ve noticed calling cats tend to bend over, rub their fingers together, and say something quiet, like “puss, puss, puss.”

How do Wild Thing and I call our cats? With a two-note call that’s approaches a yodel: “kitt-TEEEE. KITT-teeee” You can hear us most of the way to Devon. Even in Minnesota, it marked us as not being local.

Okay, it wasn’t the only thing that let people know that, but I do remember standing on our open front porch one night when the air was so cold I thought my lungs would shatter and calling our cat by yodeling, “FUZZbucket, KITT-teeee.” (Go ahead, laugh at the name. Everyone else did. A friend used to call him Fuzzbuster and Fuzzduster, with the occasional Fussbudget thrown in for luck. I still think it was a great name.) From the far end of the dark street, a man’s voice echoed, word for word and note for note, “FUZZbucket, KITT-teeee.” I’d call, he’d call, I’d call, he’d call. He had the notes and the tone down perfectly, and I figured if Fuzz had any intention of coming in the echo wouldn’t hurt.

He didn’t, of course. He was a cat. And an old lady down the street used to feed him canned shrimp and keep him with her during the coldest weather. I’m sure he told her he had nowhere else to go.

But that’s a different story and a different place. In this place, I was worried that Eddie might have gone over a fence and discovered that the other side didn’t offer him a way to climb back, and there he’d be, a very small kitten on the wrong side of a tall wall.

So Wild Thing went to our over-the-tallest-fence neighbors. They don’t live on our street and to get to them you more or less have to run up to London, then Hamburg, and then come back to Cornwall to our village to a different street and go through their front gate, which sometimes sticks so badly that you need a chisel and a hammer to get through, and all of that is necessary because, unlike Minneapolis, the neighborhoods here don’t have alleys and the yards here don’t have back gates. In fact, they’re not yards at all, they’re called gardens, and if they’re close together they have barricade-like fences or hedges meant to screen you and your thoughts from any awareness that you have neighbors. It gives back yards (sorry—they’ll always be yards to me) a sense of privacy and quiet, but it could strike someone used to American yards as unfriendly. (I’m not one of them. I like that sense of quiet.)

So Wild Thing was gone for a while, hiking to London and Hamburg and Cornwall and then through the neighbors’ gate, which didn’t happen to stick that day, and I couldn’t think of anything useful to do with myself so I worked on the bread I was making, which was ready to shape into loaves. And at some point something almost weightless brushed against my ankles and I looked down and found Eddie, who hadn’t a clue in the world that he’d just caused an uproar and wouldn’t have minded much if he had known.

So I did what any dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker would do: I went out back and bellowed for Wild Thing. When I was a kid, that’s how the mothers in our neighborhood called us—they leaned out the windows and bellowed our names. (What the ones whose apartments didn’t have windows on the street did I never stopped to wonder. Chose not to reproduce? Lost their kids forever? Waited till they got hungry enough to wander home? I just don’t know.) That was also how we called our mothers: We stood on the sidewalk, tipped our heads back, and bellowed up. To this day, my voice–well, no one who hears me is left with the impression that I’m shy. If you want to bring down the walls of Jericho, leave the trumpets at home and convince me that they need to come down.

Back in New York, every mother somehow knew her own kids’ voices well enough that they didn’t all pop their heads out in unison when one of us bellowed, even though we all yelled the same word, “Mom.”

Oh, damn, I’m getting teary. Thanks for being able to pick my voice out of the maelstrom, Mom. I miss you.

Minnesotans never seemed to bellow for their kids. I don’t know how they got them home. Compared to New Yorkers, Minnesotans are indirect. Or repressed, if you prefer. Or well behaved. It’s all in how you see it. Maybe the intensity of their frustration sends out a vibe that the kids pick up.

But however long I’ve been away from Manhattan, I’m still a New Yorker, so I bellowed. And Wild Thing, who’d just gotten into the neighbors’ yard, answered in true New York fashion (she lived there for ten years and picked up the important skills).

She started the long trek home, and our neighbor, G., who’d somehow managed to hear all this (damn, that man has good ears) popped up on his side of a different fence (we have three immediate neighbors), which is about shoulder height, even on me, and said he’d heard the bird alarming, then seen Eddie running along the top of the fences. The fences make a fine highway if you’re a cat.

Then, G. said, he heard us calling Eddie.

And no doubt laughed his ass off at the volume and sheer uselessness of it all, but he was far too kind–or maybe that’s well behaved–to say so.

Publishing on Medium.com

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Apologies for the extra post (what do you all do with your week when you’re not hearing from me?), but I just published a piece through The Coffeelicious, a magazine on Medium.com, and since both of them are new for me, I’m going to shamelessly promote it. And introduce Medium to anyone who hasn’t explored it yet.

“I Pledge Allegiance to the–Queen?” is about taking U.K. citizenship, which turned out to be a surprisingly emotional issue for me. If you like the essay, it would be great if you’d hit the Recommend button at the end. If you don’t like it, you won’t reach the end, so don’t worry about it. (Seriously, I wouldn’t ask you to recommend anything you don’t like. It’s almost like–am I really going to say this?–faking an orgasm. Yes, apparently I am going to say that. I’m not sure what I think about it, never mind how I feel.)

Shockingly relevant graphic. Not mine. I found it on Wikimedia.

And with that out of the way, the rest of this is for those of you who either write more than blog fodder–and I know that’s a good number of you–or read more than blogs. Because not everything belongs in a blog, and I’ve been looking for outlets beyond mine. I’m hoping this will move me in that direction.

Medium describes itself as a place “where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends.” In theory, at least, it helps you find your audience. We’ll see. Technically, Medium makes it fairly easy to publish, although I obsessed about the mechanics for weeks before submitting anything, and only did it after investing something like $10 (it seems to be $12; never trust me with numbers) in a probably unnecessary but still helpful manual.

From what I’ve read, the good thing about Medium is that stories have a chance to build slowly–it’s not all about the first few hours, or days, or even weeks. Stories recommended by a lot of people become more visible. And we all like to believe that those are the best ones. They may be. It would be nice to think so. It also explains why I was asking people to hit that Recommend button. (I should mention that you have to sign up to recommend anything. It’s not a big deal, says the person who closes down her computer and hides under a chair when asked to sign up for anything. You can do it with Facebook or Twitter–and if you plan to publish on Medium, you should eventually add both connections.)

Medium also sets it up so that as a reader you can follow writers you like and get a notification when they publish something new (which, of course, lets writers, with luck, build a following) or follow magazines that filter and gather the work that’s most relevant to you. I’ve found some good writing there. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a browse.

Notes from the U.K.

Exploring the spidery corners of a culture and the weird stuff that tourist brochures ignore.

Tag Archives: Americans in England