Page 163 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

156 How English am I?
Their father’s half Asian, his father’s Asian, his mother’s white Eng-
lish, so . . . you know . . . So from that point of view, you know, they
are themselves, not totally English . . . so sort of genetically, if you like,
they’ve got a head start, they’ve got a foot in a different continent. And
the Indian side of the family, if you like, is no longer around, so there’s
no um, no cultural input and their dad looks quite Indian but he’s, like
this girl who was at school where I was at school, he’s totally English
in every sense of the word. But . . . personally I feel that they have an
advantage. And I in some way would like to underline that and . . . just
remind them that they are in some way not totally English, are part of a
wider world, and it’s an advantage for them.
(Interview 12)

Helen viewed her children’s parentage as a ‘head start’ in dealing with
‘this huge world that we live in. With all different sorts of peoples and races
and customs and cultures’, and she did not hold the loss of Englishness with
much concern. Her children did not live with their natural father, but she
intended to take them on holidays to India to reinforce the fact that they are
‘in some way not totally English’. Helen again reiterated the idea that Eng-
lishness was exclusively white. It was also contested between the north and
south of England as Helen, who grew up in the north of England, explained:
‘for me at the time, we thought we were right and they were wrong and we
thought we were English. But I’d say that now, as an adult, an adult that lives
in the south, probably Englishness that is perceived by the outside world
is embodied by the south of England’. Here, the divisions and exclusions
within Englishness became clear. Englishness was internally contested with
different regions and classes having stronger or weaker claims to belonging
and determining its meaning.
While at some stages in her life, Helen had felt that England clearly in-
formed the ways she saw herself, she had a range of other collective identi-
ties to fall back on – such as those of Europe and London. In the follow-
ing extract, Helen described her sense of belonging in London. This was a
constructed identification, built slowly over time, once she had ‘wafted’ in
to London:

BB: So, do you think you now have quite a kind of London identity?
Do you see yourself as a ...I mean, you say you’ll never move.
Helen: It feels like home, but it’s taken a long time for that to happen.
But it does feel like home.
BB: So, why? How . . .
Helen: I know because when . . . because I love going away, I love going
to visit relatives in the country and . . . especially in the summer
when it’s hot and horrible. But when I get on that motorway
to come back, I have that home tug. You can’t describe it with