Page 158 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 151
point in pretending that I am other than southern English. I am quintes-
sentially English in a lot of those things, but I would be British because I
would feel that that was a politically correct thing to do.
(Interview 15)

There was an ambiguity in Heather’s feelings towards the category
‘British’. While it might have been the ‘politically correct’ position to take,
it nonetheless involved hiding her ‘quintessential’ Englishness. Britishness
was not an identification that Heather felt emotionally. One could not be
‘quintessentially’ British. This had no meaning for her as an identity. None-
theless, in the interview, Heather referred to things English and British in-
terchangeably and generally meant ‘English’. She had a strong sense of her
British/English identity which, like Emma, involved harking back to distant
and not-so-distant pasts and was also illustrated by contrasting it to cultural
and racial others. Heather was interested in what she called ‘earlier British
history’ of the Middle Ages and the Tudors and Stuarts. She was less inter-
ested in ‘getting into Victoria and the Empire’. This may have been a means
of side-stepping some of the more difficult and contentious aspects of British
history. Being British was rooted in the domestic and everyday, for example
in drinking tea. Heather joked: ‘My mother always says, you know, that she
is sure I cannot really be British because I don’t like tea’. Britishness was also
represented by:

classic British costume drama series, things like that as well as things
like stuff like The Good Life that when I was young, was on telly and I
used to really enjoy, and was quintessentially British and, you know, and
Monty Python again could never have come from another country. It is
very British humour.
(Interview 15)

Heather’s reference to The Good Life as being ‘quintessentially British’ is
a good example of ‘British’ used to mean ‘English’. This situation comedy
was based on the cultural clash produced in the encounters between subur-
ban neighbours living two different forms of middle-class white Englishness.
It is hard to think of a more characteristically white, English and middle-
class programme. Heather contrasted this British humour with that of black
adolescents and Germans, who she said both have very different senses of
humour. Thus, ‘foreignness’ and blackness provided boundaries or points
of demarcation to Britishness. When I asked her whether she felt that the
black adolescents that she had referred to earlier had secure claims to be
British, Heather responded by talking of nationality and sense of belonging
in terms of voluntarism. What mattered was simply how people felt them-
selves, rather than how they were viewed by others. They had to assimilate
themselves to the extent that they could ‘feel a part’ of the nation. It is inter-
esting to contrast this view with that of her sense of her own ‘quintessential