Page 164 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 157
words, but, you know . . . people feel it when they’re coming
home, don’t they?
BB: Which you don’t feel when you go near [old home town]?
Helen: No, no, not at all.
BB: And so does it . . . why do you think it takes a long time for that
to happen?
Helen: Roots. Putting roots down, feeling comfortable and feeling that
you’ve not just got a shifting base of friends, which is when
you first start out, anybody could go anywhere ’cos . . . the wind
wafted you down here, you’ve got no commitments, it could just
as easily waft you somewhere else, but after all this time, people
are starting to buy places now, and a few have started to have
children. Life just becomes more static, and so you know that
these people are going to be around, they know you’re going
to be around, so it all starts to feel more homey. [. . .] It’s about
friends, it’s about feeling comfortable in a place, and I mean, I
moan about London, who doesn’t? But then I guess you’d moan
about wherever you were. If I lived in a small village, I’d moan
about it being boring. I live in London, I moan about it being
big and dirty and not having enough space, but, you know, that’s
just human nature. At the end of the day, this is where my root
has grown.
(Interview 26)

Here, Helen provided an interesting model of performativity. Identity was
created in the ‘doing’. She had become a Londoner through the repetition of
both actions (settling down) and identifications. Yet the metaphor of putting
roots down had both genealogical and organic or natural associations, sug-
gesting an alternative model to construction which she might be understood
as elaborating. Helen needed roots to feed her self.
The view that Englishness was empty or contentless, or that it was losing
its meaning was shared by several of the interviewees. Like Helen, and unlike
Heather and Emma, they did not express much concern about this. Part of
the reason for the relative lack of concern about the loss of Englishness was
the feeling that it did not contain much in the first place. This is illustrated
in the extract below from an interview with Rosalind who discussed the lack
of cultural content in Englishness. Faced with celebrations of other cultures,
she was left with the question of what she was actually passing on to her
children. Earlier in the interview, Rosalind had displayed the complexities
of national identity as she explained that she would not call herself ‘English’
but ‘British’, as she was Welsh in that her father was Welsh and she was born
in Wales. However, having grown up in England, she would only call herself
‘Welsh’ ‘if pushed’, adding ‘but I’m not, you know’. National identity was
thus not something that was simply inherited, but had to be learnt and felt.