Page 166 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

How English am I? 159
work was being done on the construction of Englishness. At the same time,
at the level of the everyday and domestic, Rosalind felt that there was little
tradition or culture that she had to ‘pass on’ to her children. What she did
with her children was, by the nature of its normality, somehow not about
tradition, unlike the routines of her childhood, which she looked back on,
for instance in the household around food. The rhythms and priorities of life
were different, shaped by different material conditions and gender relations.
There was a possible suggestion that now, in this domestic space lacking in
tradition, life was somehow less English:

They eat differently from me at that [. . .] well they eat a much more
cosmopolitan, they eat pizza and pasta, they eat Italian food. Yes, and
the kind of meat and two veg meals that we, in some form or another,
that we had every day is just one choice in ten or twenty to them. So,
you tend to do it . . . but that’s changed because you’re not . . . the fo-
cus of the day isn’t around me shopping and cooking the meal for the
family. And I guess the other thing that’s different about family life is
in Shropshire, you know, everybody was home at 5 or half past 5, and
you had a family meal. I mean, in London, that’s impossible, and so it
would actually never . . . we would never attempt to have . . . maybe
when they’re older we will . . . to have supper with children. And all the
children round here have tea, you know, they have their tea at 5 o’clock
and then adults eat later.
(Interview 20)

It is suggested here that national or cultural identity was constructed
through everyday, domestic routines and consumption. It was a lived and
felt construction that changed as ‘forms of living’ change.
Liz, a professional woman living in Camberwell, also said she had little
sense of Englishness or Britishness (terms she used interchangeably). It was
only when she had spent some time in America that she got a sense of being
culturally different ‘And I just knew I wasn’t part of that culture. I was there
for about 2 years and the longer I was there, the more of a foreigner I felt’.
But she expressed her cultural difference as feeling ‘European more than
British’. Nonetheless, she did recognise an albeit nebulous sense of culture
‘as far as feeling English, . . . I mean obviously I am, in terms of values and
cultural life is deeply rooted here. But it’s not something that I really think
about that much [laugh] you know’ (Liz, Interview 43). Liz also compli-
cated the question of Englishness and culture by referring to her husband’s
Jewishness. Although he was English, he also had a different set of cultural
resources, which came from being brought up in a Jewish family. In Liz’s
account, this Jewishness was racialised in that it was ascribed to both genes
and phenotypic features. The daughter who looked most like her husband
was also the one who had inherited his ‘racial memory’: