A Rose by Any Other Name.

The other day, on an Internet forum, I found out that the National Flower of America was the Rose.

Now it's not the fact that this, to me (who has, after all, never set foot on their soil) seemed, of all the flowers in the world to be the most incongruous of any symbols I would ever associate with America that had me gobsmacked.

It was the fact that, since around the mid 1400's, the Rose has been the symbol of England.

  Actually it is the flower chosen by, I think, about 4 other countries back in the mists of time: but it was the rose of England that the first colonists  in North America would have been familiar with.  The fair flowers of our womanhood (some of whom took ship and sailed off with never a backward glance) are known as English Roses.  We had, - prior to the departure for the Colonies - gone through the infamous War of the Roses; Juliet had immortalised the rose for generations of sulky schoolchildren; and the great Tudor dynasty (you know, those nasty symbols of Royalty at whom the Americans had turned up their noses) was symbolised by the Rose.

Indeed,  one of America's Founding Fathers had been so homesick for the fragrant flower of his old country that he had caused various species to be transported to America and spent all the time he could spare from framing the Constitution, industriously propagating the damn things and spreading them all over the New World.

So at first I thought it was all part of some Machiavellian plot: something equal in intricacy to those ever-popular books about secret societies and abstruse symbols, that were all the rage a few years back.  Perhaps continuing to use the rose as their symbol was a deliberate ploy by some of the early colonists to secretly signal their allegiance to England after all? Perhaps, by choosing the rose the conspiritors, if they lost the war to gain independence, would all creep out from under the bodies and declare their allegience to the country they had left behind.  Hell, perhaps it was set up with some master plan to re-take the colonies?  I was well on my way to a plot that would rival the Da Vinci Code and make my fortune.

Until I found at that the rose (our bloody rose!) hadn't become the flower of America until 1986! Wotha?  Nineteen hundred and eighty six?  Americans had been sneering at the Brits for a couple of hundred years by then. They had been celebrating their uniqueness and their independence and their superiority over the "Old country" every 4th of July practically every year since they threw all that (Chinese) tea overboard into Boston harbour.  But in 1986 they suddenly decide they want our national flower?

Today I walked through Rudyard Kipling's garden. His house was still slumbering in the sunshine as it did when he wrote the Just So stories and Kim there.  Croquet was being played on the lawn. The serious of walled, interlocking Sussex stones still divided the spaces into herb garden, deciduous garden, kitchen garden and rose garden as they have traditionally done in English gardens for centuries.  Fat, gaudily striped bumble bees still wobbled around intoxicated in every lavender bush and, over it all the rich, heady, English scent from the rose garden cast its peaceful, almost unbearably beautiful perfume, as it has done on English poets and priests, farmers and soldiers, mothers and children, for centuries.

In the narrow streets of the village which was there before the Normans arrived a thousand years ago, before The Colonies had even existed, and before Coca Cola and chewing gum had even been dreamed of, old flint cottages with uneven roof lines and doors modern men and women have to stoop to enter, slumbered in the late sunshine.  Roses crawled across the ancient flint of lintels and walls, of bowers and windows.  Roses burst in sensuous luxury from cottage gardens and twined round centuries old pubs, and stretched the roots down into the rich black soil which Picts and Angles and Jutes and Saxons have dug for centuries. Carved wooden roses and stone roses on ancient lintels and church spires; painted roses on china plates; enameled roses on house signs; paper roses in a children's playroom; plastic roses in the greengrocers; bunches of fresh roses in the shops; and velvet  rose petals blown from gardens underfoot - the symbols of England were all around.

Even standing on the white chalk cliffs overlooking the sea, where the green seaweed-strewn rocks thrust upward and guarded the ancient tunnels of smugglers and druid, pirate and prelate, there was that English sea-side village smell that brings the soft wisp of perfume to to the stringent, salt-laden air.

How could anyone  think of England and not think of roses?

Which is when I realised something: 1986?  Well.  There's your answer. That's what happens when you  let movie stars run your country for you: roses become all glamour and expense and grow pre-wrapped in cellophane to be handed out at Premiere's and Awards.  They lose their scent when competing against Chanel and Dior.  They become ramrod straight and perfect and symbolise money and red carpets and 5 star hotels and luxury.

So let Reagan declare his American roses the symbol of whatever he wanted them to symbolize and bloody good luck to him.

As far as I'm concerned a rose is a rose is a rose.  It is England.

Breathes there the man...

For most of my life, Scott's famous poem used to make me squirm with embarrassment. In the language of my Grandmother, he was 'making a cake of himself'.  In my grandmother's view, nothing was more to be frowned upon, more calculated to cast anyone beyond the Pale, than to make a cake of oneself.

I had only an imperfect knowledge of what making a cake of oneself entailed, but I had the vague idea that it meant you should not act soppy. Scott I considered was, in this poem, being soppy.

My students, however, love this poem as it fits in with their notions of hyperbole being the best way to express oneself. I have been known to ham it up disgracefully when I read it aloud: and the crowd goes wild.

But one day while reading it I found myself suddenly, and consumingly, overwhelmed. Which meant by extension that I was being soppy, of course.

Yet what I always used to dismiss as Jingoism became the impetus, finally, to waft me back to my native land.

But I'm finding that bellowing out "This is my own, my native land" and letting one's heart swell is not an automatic process.

 I remember coming back to England when I was 26. I stood on the upper deck of the ship as the Dover cliffs grew into view and howled my eyes out; while when one of the baggage handlers called me "Darlin'" I felt instantly accepted.

 I thought that was how it would be this time around too, but it isn't.

Perhaps too much water has flowed under too damn many bridges since I was 26.  There's been so many times I thought I was home and found I was mistaken. I just can't seem to adjust to the fact that I'm not passing through.  I'm not a foreigner.  For the first time in my life.

Like many other Expats, I grew up living in postings in various countries, but always regarded England as Home.  The place you go to between postings, and for holidays, or on Long Leave. Through all of my wanderings since then England has always remained Home.  The one with the capital H.

No matter where I've lived I've always been English.  It's part of what defines me.  It's a part of establishing my identity on a thousand documents. It's one of life's incontrovertible truths: I'm English.

So when I arrived here and found I had to fight for the right to come and live at Home again, I was both frightened and disbelieving. And this culminated when I was told rather sneeringly that, as I had never worked - i.e. paid taxes - in this country I was hardly English now, was I?

If I was 'hardly English' then what the hell was I?  Ever since, it seems, I can remember knowing I was "Cireena", I've also known I was English.  Without that, I'm only half me.  And, more prosaically, if I'm not English then where on earth would I go from here?

It did not seem to be the time to point out that my grandfather was a Gypsey - albeit an English Gypsey.

I've had the experience of having to get a plane out of one country and not knowing where on earth one is going to go to. It was scary. I'd thought that by coming to England I'd never have to be in that position again.  I'd never have to get on a plane and not know where to go. I'd have a permanent address.

However; slowly, slowly, in almost imperceptible increments, I'm starting to burrow in.   I finally was given a Social Security number. I now have an NHS number. And last week, though I've been here since October, I at last was able to open a bank account.  I'm becoming English.

The problem is that I don't actually feel English.  I am so used not to being part of the dominant population group; to being Other, that I just can't slip into Englishness as one would a pair of favourite old jeans. I don't feel like Us.  I still feel as though I'm Them in comparison to the 'real' English. The tax-paying English. With them I feel like an impostor.

Then to-day I forced myself out of the flat. Over the last 10 days or so the temperature has gone up a few degrees.  Not that I would have noticed this too much but the English certainly have.
Suddenly there are more cars on King's Road in front of the flat, and one has to use the lights to cross.  People are to be seen here and there in short sleeves. The occasional slices of pallid, white thigh can be seen slipping through the breeze.

 From getting dark at 4 in the afternoon it's now staying light till around 6.30.  This obviously is the timer; the signal to all that this is Spring.  Since the last time I walked in the Pavillion grounds crocus and snowdrops have joined the daffodils and colour is thrusting through the greys ad the browns. And  Brighton is coming to life.

Workers are erecting the Carousel.  Art galleries and shops have pulled up their shutters, beach umbrellas and chairs have sprouted up, music is playing, and people are walking on the shingle in bare feet.

The skeleton of the burnt pier just up from my flat was set, black and stark, in flat, pearl grey sea while the gulls circled noisily around and the Worthing headland was green instead of grey. So, just like a true born English man, I pushed a chair under an umbrella and sat in the light drizzle, outside, with a hot chocolate warming my hands and gazed around.

For the very first time I got a glimmer of what it was like to feel part of - if not the entire country - at least this small part of it.  That was my headland, and my pier.  I was not a visitor or tourist.  I'm not passing through - this is where I live.

Things are still precarious and I still remain poised, ready for something else to happen to cause me to leave. To have to move.  To be made, by circumstances, to go away.

But that glimmer of feeling must have meant something.  While not quite feeling as though I can claim the whole country, at least I can foresee the possibility (if I'm good; if the gods don't decide to 'ave a larf; if things don't take a sudden turn for the pear-shaped once more) that one day I will start to spell Brighton with a capital H.
                                                    ........................................

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.

Guess Where I've Been?

Strange. I was looking for an image from the hundreds I took which would encapsulate England for me: - but in the end this little gateway did it more than all the flowers and meadows and city-scapes.

It's the gateway to a Roman temple which was built in Colchester at a site which had had significance for the small collection of huts that had squatted there since long before 43AD. It was around here that Boudica challenged the Roman Empire after her treatment at their hands..

After the Romans left it fell into disrepair but a Saxon chief decided the site was a good one on which to build his own fortified encampment in the period long - and erroneously - called The Dark Ages.

Once the Normans had invaded and taken over England in 1066 orders were given for a Norman castle to be built on this same hilltop. The Norman castle in time became a hospice and then, in the Middle Ages, it was rebuilt by an English family before once more falling into disrepair and becoming a prison, then a warehouse. It has recently been taken over by The National Trust and preserved as a museum which showcases the many stages of English history from its misty beginnings to its present.

To me it epitomises so much of Britain where history is part of the fabric of life.

I spent the whole of the summer in UK and came back to China to find a virus had chewed up my computer. Once fixed, it quickly succumbed to yet another virulent invader and then, with pressure of work in a new semester, keeping up this blog became the lowest on my list of priorities.

However, this summer changed a lot of things for me. I realised that as long as I stayed in China my post-graduate studies would probably always remain more of a dream than a reality. I also realised how daft I'd been to choose to specialise in the women writers of England in the 17th Century from thousands of miles away. I thought of all the days, weeks, months I had spent chasing up information from books and pamphlets that weren't even available in Australia when, in Cambridge, I simple walked into a museum, idly asked if they had anything concerning, say, Margaret Cavendish and was given access to the full collection of the correspondence she and her husband William had before they were married. (And not one person said "Who?")

I also re-discovered the joy of like minds. Once I stepped outside the campus environs at Uni in Australia, I was back again in the world of Centrelink payments, of dole bludgers and people who thought that Literature was a dirty word and History the preserve of eccentrics.

Yet everywhere I went in Cambridge the talk was of the past - it was inescapable when one was buying one's lunch in an 800 year old pub, sleeping in an old chapel, punting on the River Cam underneath the bridge that Newton built, or visiting at the college that Erasmus attended, or crossing the very gutters which gave us the idiom of Hobson's choice.

Even when I left Cambridge and went to Warwick and further afield I was still surrounded by people whose knowledge of the subject which had always set me apart from most of those with whom I mixed, was instead a bonding feature. I no longer felt like a nerd. Anyone else who has ever been considered one will get what I'm on about. When I engaged in long conversations with totally random people I was free to talk about stuff I knew about without being considered a show-off. It was totally liberating.

Since I've been back I have even gained the courage to join a blog group called "I judge you when you use bad grammar " - a site I wouldn't even have clicked on to before I left for fear that someone might discover my search history and consider me an elitist. Yet, having clicked on I found that this site is fun and funny and while I still not might actually post on it much, I get great joy out of the empathy I feel with other people who also laugh out loud when they see a sign outside a fish and chip shop that says 'we sell "fresh" fish!'.

Another way this summer changed me was to give me reassurance. Since I have been out of the West I mainly keep up with the news through the Internet. And its usually Australian news and blog sites that I access.

What this has done for me is to depress me unutterably. The West has come to seem like some vast Dantean dream where paedophiles give art shows and cops are all corrupt and progress is an unstoppable Leviathon which is transforming our landscape and way of life beyond all recognition. Love and peace and justice are words that belong to the Hippy movement of the 60's, people who disagree with one have the right to abuse, slander and defame, strangers are The Enemy and everyone is suspicious of everyone else. Indeed, on one of the sites for which I write occasional articles the Battle of The Sexes is daily and acrimoniously fought tooth and claw, religious fundamentalism seems to be considered the norm and all Immigrants should be thrown into the seas.

What I found this summer was that my impressions were a load of cobblers. Gender wars were a non-event, policemen were still polite and helpful to the general public at least, strangers were still kind, people still went out of their way, and the sleepy hamlets of England's green and pleasant lands were still as green and pleasant as they had been when I was a little girl. Yep, the primary school I remembered was still there and though the actual town in which it was situated might now be rather seedy, 5 miles out of it were still the green meadows and little cottages I remembered. Not a single bus driver, train conductor, shop assistant or teenager was rude to me, and, all in all, there was no evidence that we were all going to hell in a handcart.

But perhaps the main thing this summer did for me was to stem my rootlessness just a little. I have always dreaded the polite enquiry - de rigeur as a prelude to every conversation in China, especially - "Where do you come from?" as a sort of multiple choice one. Depending on the circumstances, geography or time some people know me as "That Aussie" others as "The girl from South Africa", some as "The chick that comes from PNG" of "The Pommie bird" but, by far the greatest majority as "that foreigner".

While it is still impossible to point to any particular place and claim that I am a product of that environment or culture, going back to UK did at least pencil in a sort of provenance. Stepping out of the bus in Coventry where George, my father, was stationed briefly during WW2, I was confronted by a statue of an Air Force officer, hand negligently in pocket, familiar cap at a jaunty angle, and immediately felt kinship. The famous George Hotel in Grantham that my Great Grandmother ran might have been subsumed into a large shopping complex, but it was comforting to know that my Grandmother had shimmied out of its window from under her mother's watchful eye and run down that same street to elope with my grandfather. Even when I had to spend a night sleeping on Birmingham station which, though refurbished and updated and split into two, still stands, it was with a kind of wonder that I realised that it was here my father would have disembarked from boarding school in his school holidays. A trainride listening to a group of people on their way to Crufts brought back memories of reading my mothers first prize-winning essay in an ancient school newspaper, of the first time her father took her with him on that very trainline to show Brian O'Rouke, their famous bulldog. While the spinney that I used to play Roundheads and Cavaliers in with my cousin Julian, now tamed and tidied, still held the echoes of our childhood laughter.

So, as much as anything, I guess, this summer taught me irrevocably, that there is "some part of me that is, forever, England."