Page 151 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

144 How English am I?
Deep England can indeed be deeply moving to those whose particu-
lar experience is most directly in line with its privileged imagination.
People of an upper middle-class formation can recognize not just their
own totems and togetherness in these essential experiences, but also the
philistinism of the urban working class as it stumbles out, blind and
unknowing, into that countryside at weekends.
(Wright 1985: 86)

For some interviewees, this sense of ‘deep England’ did indeed have po-
tency and offered a contrast to the ‘developing turmoil of the modern world’
(Wright 1985: 86). However, this nostalgia was inevitably combined with a
sense of loss as it failed to be achieved in urban and racially mixed London.
As Wright suggests, it also requires a certain class position to maintain any il-
lusion of deep England, and this national nostalgia may be combined with an
individual trajectory of loss of class position. Some interviewees suggested
that a sense of ‘deep England’ is not limited to a particular relationship with
the countryside, but also to cultural products and practices, including those
associated with the more traditional wings of the Church of England. It is
also not just defined against the working class, but also racialised others.
I will start with the two women who saw national identity, and in particu-
lar Englishness, as a particularly positive identity to hold. This made them
rather unusual among the interviews. For both Emma and Heather, to dif-
ferent extents, Englishness was about myths of history, civility and honour.
Their England was rooted in the past and, in particular, class and gender
relations. Both realised that the place in which they lived, and the ways they
lived, were very different from their imagined England, and they experi-
enced this difference with a sense of loss, although again to differing extents.
This loss was expressed as hostility to those seen as threatening this image of
England. In one case, this was represented by ‘Britishness’ and in the other
by America. ‘Race’ clearly played into both these frameworks. Class was
also central to both their accounts of Englishness. To some extent, for both
Heather and Emma, the loss they felt about the perceived changes in English-
ness was mirrored by a loss in their own class position. Both women came
from middle- or upper-class provincial families. They were at the younger
end of the spectrum of interviewees, Emma in her late 20s and Heather
in her early 30s. Heather worked in the arts, although at the time of the
interview she was caring full time for her 2-year-old daughter. Heather lived
in Camberwell. Emma lived nearby in Peckham and worked in Camberwell
part time. A change in material and social status had occurred for Heather
at an early age following the death of her father. In contrast, Emma’s loss
of social status came with marriage to a man who was perceived as working
class by both herself and her family, despite his professional status, and it
also involved living in what she regarded as an undesirable area. For these
women, to a certain extent, diagnosis of the state of the nation provided a
route for articulating personal experiences and concerns.