The parallel universes of the expatriate

When I arrived at JFK airport in New York on July 3rd, 1980, I had never crossed the Atlantic before. I had left England earlier that day and was on my way to what turned out to be a new life overseas. I remember looking around the airport and having a distinctly peculiar sensation. It was as though I had somehow stepped into a parallel universe.

The people didn’t look particularly foreign to me like they would have done in Athens or Madrid. They were dressed more or less like people I knew and they spoke English, yet everything was slightly wrong. The voices were different, the money was different, familiar objects had unfamiliar names, and there were products and institutions everybody else understood without explanation. People behaved according to conventions which they plainly regarded as completely normal but which I had never encountered before.

The most peculiar thing was that none of them seemed aware that they were living in a parallel universe. Why would they be? To them, this was simply the world. An American in New York wasn’t constantly conscious of behaving like an American any more than somebody in London or Leeds was constantly conscious of behaving like an Englishman. It was only the visitor who noticed the differences.

I continued on to Bermuda the next morning, and during my first decade away from Britain my connection with the old country became surprisingly tenuous.

Occasionally I would get hold of UK Sunday newspapers that passengers left behind on the 6-hour British Airways flight from London. I could listen to a few BBC radio programs at night on shortwave, complete with the fading and crackling that were part of the experience. There was no internet, no clicking on The Times after breakfast, watching live BBC TV over lunch or listening to a British podcast while washing the dishes. If you left a country in 1980, you really had to leave it behind.

Of course I returned for visits occasionally over the years, but three years ago I went back to England for the first time in more than 20 years and something very odd happened. I had the parallel-universe sensation again. but this time it was England that was the parallel universe.

This ruined barn had not changed in over 40 years.

The landscape was familiar enough. Stone buildings and even a ruined barn were there exactly where I remembered them, trees and hills had not moved, and roads followed approximately the same routes, though sometimes wider and straighter. Churches, graveyards, railway bridges and old houses provided constant reminders that this was unquestionably the country in which I had grown up. The physical continuity was remarkable, but culturally something had happened and England had moved on without me.

This should hardly have been surprising. More than four decades had passed since I left in 1980. What surprised me was how familiar the physical surroundings could remain while the society occupying them had changed. I even saw a few elderly people hobbling around whom I had known as children in a parallel universe.

But accents and popular sayings and idioms had changed, shops had changed, pubs had changed, television and newspapers had changed, and so had the vocabulary of ordinary conversation. Ideas about class, race, sex, work, authority and manners had changed. Things that people once said without thinking had become unsayable, while things that would once have caused astonishment were now completely unremarkable.

None of this had happened overnight, and that, I think, is the important point. The people who stayed in Britain did not experience what I experienced because there was never a morning when they woke up to discover that the Britain of 1979 had disappeared. One shop closed and another opened; one television programme ended and another began; a new expression appeared and an old one disappeared. People stopped writing checks and then stopped carrying much cash. Railway tickets became electronic, newspapers shrank, telephone boxes vanished, offices became less formal, high streets acquired different shops, new populations arrived and children grew up speaking English with accents that hadn’t existed when I was young.

If you had never moved away, Britain always looked sufficiently like the previous year’s Britain that there was never any reason to make an announcement that the country had changed. Accumulate those almost imperceptible alterations over more than 40 years, however, and eventually you have a completely different country. This is one of the peculiar experiences of the long-term expat.

We are sometimes accused of remembering an imaginary country, reconstructed by nostalgia into a place where the sun always shone, policemen were friendly and every village had a butcher, a baker and probably someone manufacturing candlesticks.

Memory certainly edits, but the country we remember wasn’t entirely imaginary. The Britain of my childhood and youth really did have local bakeries, telephone boxes, three television channels, enormous newspaper circulations, British Rail, bus conductors, betting shops, public and saloon bars in pubs, handwritten letters, stamps that you licked, reusable glass milk bottles with foil caps on doorsteps and an extraordinary collection of social conventions and mannerisms which have subsequently disappeared.

That doesn’t mean it was better. Some things undoubtedly were better and quite a lot of things were worse. Nostalgia becomes useless when it turns history into an argument that everything was wonderful until approximately the year one turned thirty. But it was different, and I happened to leave at an unusually interesting moment.

In July 1980, Margaret Thatcher had been prime minister for little more than a year, and the great changes associated with her government were only beginning. The transformation of British industry, trade unions, housing, finance, broadcasting and retailing still lay largely ahead. Satellite television didn’t exist, mobile telephones effectively didn’t exist and the World Wide Web hadn’t been invented yet. I left a country that was still recognizably the post World War II Britain in which I had grown up, a country still littered with bomb sites,  then went off and lived in other countries while Britain continued being Britain without me.

Ironically, I probably have more contact with British life today from thousands of miles away in Ecuador than I did when I lived much closer to it in the 1980s and 1990s. Today I can read British newspapers every morning, watch British television, listen to radio programmes and podcasts, watch Parliament and discover within seconds who some columnist is when her name comes up in a discussion. Geographical distance has become almost irrelevant, yet cultural distance remains.

Recently I was looking up a British journalist named Sarah Ditum. She was born in 1981, almost exactly 30 years after me and shortly after I left Britain. It occurred to me that practically her entire remembered Britain begins after mine ended. She grew up under Thatcher and Major, became an adult around the beginning of the Blair years and entered journalism in the internet age. She and I can both talk about Britain, but the word refers partly to two different countries.

And then I remembered that airport in New York in 1980, where I had looked at Americans who seemed simultaneously familiar and foreign and thought that I had somehow crossed into a parallel universe. The Americans, naturally, had no idea that they were living in one. More than four decades later I returned to England and discovered much the same thing. The buildings and hills were still there and England had not gone anywhere; everybody had simply carried on living there while I was away.

From their point of view, of course, I was the one who had disappeared into a parallel universe, while from mine, they had. Both perspectives are perfectly reasonable, and perhaps that is the strangest thing about being an expat for most of your adult life.

Eventually your home country becomes somewhere you can never quite visit as either a resident or a tourist. You know far too much about it to be a foreigner, but you have been away too long to feel entirely at home.

Somewhere underneath the England that exists today, I can still see another one. It had glass milk bottles on the doorstep, newspapers pushed through the letterbox cut into every front door, red telephone boxes on street corners and a collection of habits and assumptions that nobody thought particularly remarkable because, like those Americans I encountered in 1980, we didn’t know we were living in a parallel universe either.

It was simply the way the world was.