That's Not English (17 page)

In which the drink—and the rituals surrounding it—are shown to be considerably stronger than they appear.

T
he British Pavilion did not win the 2013 Venice Biennale, but for sheer crowd-pleasing it was hard to beat. With his exhibition
English Magic
, the artist Jeremy Deller struck a balance between exuberance and provocation. There was a mural of a harrier hawk clasping a Range Rover in his talons, payback for the threat to these endangered birds by toffs on the hunt. There were gut-wrenching drawings by jailed ex-soldiers. There was a film of hundreds of people bouncing on a giant inflatable Stonehenge to the tune of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” played by the Melodians, a steel drum orchestra. But what really got the polyglot crowds going was the tearoom at the back of the pavilion. Everyone formed an orderly queue, acting positively English as they waited patiently
for their turn to tell the “tea lady” strong or weak, with milk or without, sugar or no sugar. It brought to mind the World War II–era slogan “Tea Revives the World.” On this occasion it was true, and as I took my steaming cup from the tea lady, I suddenly felt really at home.

The tea that brought the international art crowds together that day—and every day of the Biennale—was the near-caustic-strength blended brew known in England as “builder’s tea” because a strong, inexpensive, often sugary drink is what a builder on a break might have (though in a recent survey within the construction industry, 44 percent of builders said they preferred coffee). Typical brands you’d find in any home are PG Tips, Typhoo, and Tetley. (Twinings is also popular, but considered a bit posh.) People who haven’t spent much time with the English might think that tea-drinking culture is more refined than it is, possibly marked by persnicketiness about blends, china, and the cult of milk-in-first or milk-in-last. George Orwell played into this stereotype with an article he wrote for the
Evening Standard
in January 1946, “A Nice Cup of Tea,” in which he claimed that “the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes. When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points.” I’m sure there are more like him out there, but most people from all walks of life seem happy with the basics. An ad for the tea company Make Mine a Builders declares: “This country wasn’t built on camomile.”

The first thing an English person does on waking, on returning home, on being greeted with good or bad news, or on receiving a guest, is to turn on the kettle. Every English home and office has an electric kettle capable of boiling water quickly, usually in
under a minute. This allows tea-making to be a seamless part of everyday life. According to the United Kingdom Tea Council, 96 percent of tea is consumed in the form of tea bags (an American invention), 98 percent of people take milk, and 45 percent take sugar. Residents of the United Kingdom each consume 2.3 kilos of tea per year to Americans’ 0.2 kilos. That adds up to 165 million cups per day and 62 billion cups per year. Most tea is drunk at home, but the consistent quality of what’s available, in even the humblest places, points to how important this ritual is. It is ironclad and comforting and near universal in England, but it isn’t at all sophisticated unless you count the kettle technology.

Most English people, day in and day out, are drinking tea of a strength that Americans would find a little overwhelming. (Not to mention murder on those expensively whitened teeth.) This explains why 25 percent of all milk consumed in the UK is taken with tea. The English claim that this tea has a negligible amount of caffeine. Don’t you believe it. A couple of months after moving to London, convinced I was having panic attacks, I realized it was simply overcaffeination at the hands of generous friends and colleagues. Every cup of tea I was offered, I took—it seemed rude not to—to the tune of five or seven per day. The cumulative effects were heart-pounding, hand-sweating jitters that abated as soon as I learned my limits.

Not that I didn’t drink tea in America. Lots of Americans do, and from relatively young ages. But according to the Tea Association of the USA, 85 percent of the tea Americans drink is iced. This chimes with my own experience. I grew up in the southeast drinking only iced tea. (Hot tea was considered strictly medicinal, though in colder states it is more popular.) Here’s my family recipe:

Boil a pot of water on the stove. Tie five bags of Lipton’s tea together and drop them into the pot. Leave to steep until the water turns dark brown, about five minutes. Take the tea bags out. Upend the five-pound bag of Dixie Crystals (granulated sugar), and pour directly from the bag into the pot, stirring, until no more sugar will dissolve in the warm tea. When the saturation point is reached, sugar crystals no longer melt but sink to the bottom in a white layer. Pour the tea, which should now have the consistency of syrup, over ice.

If you order iced tea in a restaurant south of the Mason-Dixon Line (which I like to call the Dixie Crystals line), you will be asked, “Sweet or unsweet?” and to answer the latter marks you immediately as an auslander, possibly a Yankee. In the northern and western states, all tea is unsweetened unless otherwise specified (and unless bought in ready-to-drink bottles and cans, which account for 25 percent of the market, worth $4.8 billion and growing, as of 2012). So a Southerner will find, to her horror, that Dixie Crystals do not melt in tea that is already cold, but sink forlornly to the bottom of the glass. For some Southerners, this is the extent of our science education.

The English don’t really drink iced tea because it requires a large quantity of that foreign substance, ice. Americans like to complain about the lack of ice in drinks throughout the United Kingdom, and this is largely warranted. I was once served a gin and tonic in a fancy Pall Mall club with only two cubes in it. And even the coldness of the renowned martini at Dukes Bar in Mayfair is achieved by freezing the gin and not adulterating it. On arrival in America at age two and a half, my daughter was given
a cup of water that contained about one-third liquid and two-thirds ice. She stuck her hand in the cup, pulled out a piece, and said, “What’s this?” I am raising a stranger.

You can get an iced tea in Starbucks in England, but it qualifies as something of an eccentricity to order one in a restaurant. That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be denied. My mother unknowingly ordered an off-menu iced tea at one of our favorite restaurants, Le Café Anglais. My seat faced the bar and I watched with amusement and some anxiety as the staff conferred, brewed a pot of their nice, strong tea, pulled out a cocktail shaker, filled it with ice, poured, shook, tasted, winced slightly, and brought the mixture to my mother. She said it tasted fine. I’m sure it was better than anything the English are able to get in America, where even the finest hotels will serve a tea bag on a saucer
next to
a cup of lukewarm water—ensuring it will never brew to the desired strength and eliciting the kind of barely suppressed exasperation usually reserved for careless mistakes by small children.

In America, the “pause that refreshes” has traditionally been Coca-Cola. The average American drinks about four hundred Cokes per year, double the English average. But the hot drink of choice, since the time of the Revolutionary War, has been coffee. The Boston Tea Party—an act of protest in which American colonists destroyed crates of tea owned by the British East India Company in 1773—was the culmination of colonial disenchantment with the motherland. Soon after, Americans fought a bloody battle for their freedom. However much they had once loved tea, it was now seen as the drink of the oppressors. Coffee was the choice of a new generation of patriots, and
so it remains. Just ask the Red Cross, whose official policy when assisting at a crisis is to offer disaster victims a calming hot drink before anything else. In America, it’s coffee. In England, it’s tea.

Is it any wonder that Jeremy Deller decided tea was a necessary component of
English Magic
? Asked if he’d included the tea room to reinforce cultural stereotypes, he demurred: “Well, it’s very Chinese to have a cup of tea. It’s very Indian to have a cup of tea . . . But that’s not an artwork. There’s no art there. It’s just somewhere to sit, you know?”

In which the Moore family comes to an enchanting place, and we leave them there.

T
o a new arrival or a tourist, English street signs can seem very weird. Sure, there’s
MIND
THE
GAP
, and they are serious about that one—the “gap” between a Tube carriage and the platform in some stations being wide enough to lose a whole family in, or at least an ill-fitting shoe or carelessly dangled bag. But there is also the
HU
MPED
ZEBRA
CROSSING
, which sounds like a zoo genetics experiment gone horribly wrong. (Really it’s just a pedestrian right-of-way with a
sleeping policeman
—also known as a speed bump—in the middle.)

Some signs might even take on existential significance, depending on the mood in which you first encounter them. Months before our wedding, Tom and I came across a road sign that read
CHANGED PRIORITIE
S
AHEAD
, and the phrase has been a minor
touchstone for us for the past fifteen years (though we never did figure out what it meant in the context of the road work that was taking place in Oxford that day).

As a student, in England for the first time, I was charmed by the signs everywhere reading
WAY
OUT
. This is the English version of the simple
EXIT
and it spoke to me then of the odd and disconnected way I felt arriving to spend a whole year in a country where I didn’t know a soul and no one knew me. England seemed “way out”—so exhilaratingly strange. I could take nothing for granted. After a while, these signs stopped seeming so foreign. But apparently I myself did not. I’m perpetually mistaken for a tourist, constantly asked how long I’m staying or, more to the point, when I’m going “home.” There was a time when this seemed like a problem.

For a couple of years after moving to London, I felt we’d made a mistake, trading our life and stable friendships in New York for an uncertain future in a place where we might always be strangers. Before I left America, I never realized how American I was in every word, attitude, and mannerism, or that a common language would not be enough to bridge the gap between American and English culture. For a while, that gap seemed big enough to lose myself in. It wasn’t until I left my job in New York and committed to London fully that I began to feel like it could be home. Making friends who embraced our differences and found them fruitful and interesting allowed this fish out of water to breathe again.

These days, I’m always happy to get back to America for a visit, but it’s hard to ignore the things about my home country that feel foreign after years away. The frenetic pace of New York is so overstimulating that it keeps me awake all night,
wondering whether I ought to be in the gym, at a bar, or getting a pedicure at midnight just because I can. Leafy London is somnolent by comparison. The cars, stores, and houses in the suburban enclaves where our families live feel enormous and unwieldy. A friend’s “modest” suburban house is almost as big as the grocery store we frequent at home. Even so, the chance to reconnect with friends and family puts me at ease and, after a few days, I re-adapt. The transition back to England, by contrast, is usually seamless now.

When our daughter was born, my husband and I were eager for her to have the experience of growing up in two cultures at once. What we didn’t understand at the time was that our child would not feel American at all. She is not experiencing England as a different culture since it’s the only one she’s ever known. She’s confused when American friends and family ask how we feel about living “abroad” and when we think we might come home. Anne
is
home, with her English passport, her English accent, her school uniform, and her bedroom at the top of a Georgian house.

When Tom and I arrived in England by ourselves, not much made sense about the move, except our earnest desire to “make a go of it,” as the English say. But when we chose to stay, we chose as a family, and it made all the sense in the world. More and more, I realize that home is wherever my husband and children are—and wherever people love and welcome us. Home is not a country; home is other people. It has no boundaries and we don’t need a passport or a plane ticket to get there. There is no exit plan, no way out. We could live anywhere we like, but we like it
here.

I
am indebted to Lynne Truss and George Lucas, for inspiring and believing in me; Charlie Conrad, for commissioning this project, for his invaluable advice, and for the benefit of his experience; William Shinker, for his friendship and mentorship, and for countless opportunities including this one. Thanks to the team at Gotham Books: Sabrina Bowers, Stephen Brayda, Leslie Hansen, Lisa Johnson, Lauren Marino, Beth Parker, Janet Robbins, Andrea Santoro, Susan Schwartz, and Brian Tart.

I am grateful to many friends for their help and support, including: Benjamin Abel, Catherine Blyth, Dan Bobby, Noel Bramley, Daniela Burnham, Lisa Gladwell Calhoun, Erin Delaney, Kathryne Alfred Del Sesto, Paul Dougherty, Jessica Johnson Downer, Leslie Eckel, Maggie Elliott, Dominique Garcia, Anthony Goff, Ellen Goodman, Amy Grace, Anne and Peter Hatinen, Alex Helfrecht, Steven Hill, Trish Hope, Catherine
Ingman, Rachel Kahan, Sterling and Jon Lanken, Sara Lodge, Bristol Maryott, Doug Miller, Peter Morris, Carole Murray, Ashley Green Myers, Helen Madeo Niblock, Charlotte Nicklas, Elizabeth and Michael Psaltis, Jenna and Arvind Rajpal, Lizzie Reumont, Kathy Richards, Erica Arnesen Roane, Alastair Roberts, Shelagh Rotta, Ann and Peter Rothschild, Fiona Saunders, Michael Sellman, Andrew Shore, Rhian Stephenson, Jörg Tittel, Lucia Watson, Mike Weeks, Crystal Weiss, Hannah Wunsch, and Gina Zimmerman.

Thanks to my parents, Lynne and Alan Bush, for letting me go, and for their unconditional love; to Barbara and Andrew Moore, and their extended Anglo-American family, for always treating me like one of their own; and to Marie-Laure Fleury, whose nurturing and loving presence in our home has allowed me the room to write. My undying devotion to Nana, who will never read this, and to my darlings Anne and Henry, who will. And finally, my love and gratitude to Tom Moore, who makes everything we’ve ever dreamed of seem possible.