Page 156 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 149
constructions of Englishness and Britishness may be seen as ridiculous or ob-
jectionable. She followed the previous quotation with an uncertain question
to me: ‘But do you know what I am [saying]?’ She also recognised that her
own life did not live up to the Englishness of her imagination, or her past,
and that this was not something that her daughters would necessarily grow
up with. Englishness was almost dead and buried in the following account:

Emma: I guess they’ll [her children] grow up British won’t they? Prob-
ably. Because that’s what we live in now. I mean that’s not a bad
thing really. [. . .] if one of them was to grow up to become an
artist, I couldn’t ask for more, or a painter, or a politician, I see
that as quite interesting. And I’d love them to have the same
sense of English culture that I have. But I can’t give that to them
because I no longer live in those circles really.
BB: So it is quite class bound, that sense of English?
Emma: I think it is, but I’m sure it’s just in my mind. . . . yeah . . ..
(Interview 16)

Englishness for Emma was about a way of being, a certain ‘form of liv-
ing’ in Bhabha’s (1990b: 292) phrase, which she could not reproduce for
her daughters. They would inevitably be different from her. Thus, Emma
was distressed that the England she was imagining was being ‘destroyed’ or
going ‘sour’. The ‘nastiness’ that was destroying England was represented
for Emma by all that was ‘British’. This included the demands of the nations
within the United Kingdom – Ireland and Scotland and Wales – and the
racial or ‘multicultural mix’. By associating Britishness with all the things
that she was uncomfortable with, Emma was able to preserve Englishness as
a ‘pure’, white and middle-class concept, headed by the unsullied monarchy.
In talking about the area in which she lived, which she described as ‘probably
more black than white’, Emma communicated a sense of pollution:

I mean, there are not many parts of Peckham that I’d live in. . . . and
we live here because this house was very cheap. And it’s a nice road,
vaguely . . . lots of light . . . um. But I wouldn’t go shopping in some of
the shops. Have you walked round here at all? . . . if you go round the
back there are some, in the market place you get all this halal meat and
all sorts of stuff. I wouldn’t touch that with a barge pole. Not because it’s
different, or because of anything. But just because I think it smells funny.
They’re not, they’re probably not very educated black people. Because
otherwise they would have got out. Because everyone’s trying to get out
really. Everyone’s trying to move on. It’s not like having a little village
shop in the country, it’s not as quaint as that. I don’t think people want
necessarily to be doing it.
(Interview 16)