I honestly don’t have a clue what being “English” means any more. In fact I don’t think I ever really knew. I suspect that I am it and that I am not it at the same time. Which is OK. I lived in the UK until I was nine and then spent five years in South Africa. When I returned, it was with a slightly dodgy accent. My current philosophy of life is loosely based on Hinduism’s pair of opposites. This theory holds that you can be two contradictory things at the same time, like Kali (goddess of creation, and destruction, no less). In my case this allows me to be very English/ not remotely English, very pious/utterly devoid of moral scruple, very tidy/ a total slut without any sense of unease/hypocrisy.
We are all – every last one of us – little walking paradoxes, and the sooner we learn to accept this fact the easier it will be to understand why the England football team is such a mess (arrogant/self-loathing, brave/cowardly, talismanic/laughable). I did an event at the Edinburgh book festival last weekend and felt my bold assertion that I was “an American writer” generated a measure of incredulity. My logic is that my work isn’t remotely interested in class (well, except for the odd novel) and the psychological landscape I inhabit is one of wide open spaces: the tundra, the plain (except for the books I’ve set on small islands – duh).
In this spirit of contradiction, I am naturally quite private, but will happily chat to a total stranger for several straight hours on a train. On a recent trip to Wales, I met a lovely man and among the subjects we covered were: a dream I had about the true nature of hell (it’s very lonely), growth hormones, how the village of Icklesham in East Sussex is “only really a road”, gout, the difference between a structure being “phallic” or “iconic” and his experiences in Rwanda as a soldier during the genocide. The conversation started when I noticed that he had folded his coat and placed it in the luggage rack where I needed to put my holdall. I said, “I’m sorry, but I would hate to crush your jacket with my bag.” He answered, “I would love you to crush my jacket.” I then tried to sit down but he had moved over into my seat so I said, “I’m sorry, but you are in my seat. My ticket is by the window. But if you prefer to sit by the window then you may have the seat.” He said, “I hate windows and I hate sitting by windows.”
And he moved. So that was that.
On my way to Edinburgh, I was in no mood for conversation, though. I had what I laughingly call “work” to do. Luckily for me, the handsome, American boy in the seat next to mine had no intention of talking. He was too busy texting and watching little films on his Instagram. As it turned out, the train had been criminally overbooked. There weren’t enough seats and we were late to leave because luggage and people were blocking all the aisles. Then another train broke down in front of us. In total, the journey took over five hours with people standing throughout. Near to me was a pretty young Indian woman with her brother and her mother. Two people offered the mother their seats and she cheerfully refused them, but every so often she would talk in Hindi or Urdu to her daughter and it was obvious to all parties that she was ripping the piss out of us seated folk (“Look! I can see his bald spot!”, “Oooh! That skinny woman has spinach in her teeth!” etc)
Especially tragic were a Japanese couple with a Boston terrier in a pet carrier. At one point I literally screamed “Let me hold the dog on my lap!” But they spoke no English and thought I was demented (which, in all sanity, I am). We were actually doing fine, though. There was a genial middle-aged Scottish man who seemed eager to try to create a blitz-spirit atmosphere. The rest of us were having none of it. He managed to nab a seat at Peterborough.
Then, at the next stop, a woman got on and – by sheer force of personality – acquired a seat next to his. She was devouring a book about functional health by Dr Jeffrey S Bland, and, on discovering that her Scottish neighbour was a Methodist, and a doctor by profession, and that they both deplored the Aberdeen bus service, proceeded to discuss her colon with him for the following three hours. She was abominably, quintessentially English and had lived all over the world, so everyone in her vicinity got to hear how her colon had performed under different social and dietary regimes (Nigeria, Stockholm, Costa Rica – in Costa Rica they eat spicy beans for breakfast, which was apparently fabulous, but a special vitamin-impregnated chocolate milk they handed out free to teachers in west Africa had been “tricky to digest”). After an hour or so the boy next to me started to groan and bang his head repeatedly against the back of his seat. The Indian girl leaned down, and, rolling her eyes towards colon-woman, said, “You’re a doctor, too?!” He nodded – “Accident and Emergency.” “Paediatrics!” she sniggered.
Of course, this was Englishness par excellence. To be surrounded by doctors from disparate places too damnably polite and reserved to tell the actual English woman to put a bloody sock in it.
On my way home, I was seated next to an impeccably dressed Japanese girl who was glued to her phone. At one point, while “meditating”, I fell asleep and ended up in her lap. A short while later, the woman sitting behind us opened a can of lager and sent a jet of foam shooting through the gap between the seats, drenching her with beer.
So, in brief: 1) the English should be banned from their own public transport. 2) Foreigners are way more “English” than we are. Um. Whatever the heck that means.
Nicola Barker’s latest novel, H(a)ppy, is published by William Heinemann (£20)
