That's Not English (7 page)

In which our children arrive to collectively lobotomize us.

E
ven if you had no idea what
knackered
meant, you couldn’t miss it in context: “I’m absolutely
knackered.
” It is English slang for “exhausted,” and it usually comes with a certain sag of the shoulders and a little stagger in the voice. There is a particularly English way of saying it, too. Whereas an American might over-egg the
r
—thus sounding far too perky to be knackered—the English elide it. It’s pronounced
nnakk-uhd
: slow on the first syllable, swallowing the second.

But
exhausted
doesn’t quite capture the full sense of
knackered
. The knacker’s yard is, literally, an abattoir for horses that have outlived their ability to stand, run, and carry. The
Oxford English Dictionary
puts an even finer point on it with this definition of the verb
to
knacker
: “to kill; to castrate; usu. in weakened sense, to exhaust, to wear out.” The examples that follow
are of athletes and soldiers. But in my experience, “I’m knackered” is the new parents’ refrain.

Becoming a parent in an adopted country is one of the best assimilation exercises there is. The shared experiences of pregnancy and early parenthood give you the opportunity to meet, and get to know, people with whom you may have had little in common before you popped your sprogs. (That’s English English for before your babies arrived.) You end up on maternity wards, in baby classes and playgroups and Internet chat rooms, with people whose vocabulary for this phase of life is entirely foreign. You can’t help but learn almost as many new words as your
bub
(baby).

First you are initiated into the medical system, with its acronyms and quirks. In England the NHS (National Health Service) assures every pregnant woman a good basic standard of care in a public hospital, free of charge (or at least covered by taxes). Beyond that, the NHS provides each woman with extra care as needed. In practice this means that if you have a problem, you get all the attention you need; otherwise, very little indeed. Anyone experiencing an uncomplicated pregnancy under the NHS feels lucky, if a bit neglected. The standard number of ultrasounds for an NHS pregnancy is two—not the half dozen that a well-insured American would expect. But on the other hand,
everyone
gets two. No one is left out of prenatal care entirely, which still happens in America. And even the best-insured Americans do not walk out of the hospital postdelivery owing nothing. During my entire NHS pregnancy and birth, I was asked to pay a grand total of £2.50. That was for the printout of my second ultrasound. Those who want more personalized care can choose to see a private doctor and deliver in a private
hospital. It will cost you or your insurance company about £15,000—about the same, or a bit less, than the average cost in the United States.

After the NHS, the most important acronym for English parents is the NCT (National Childbirth Trust). This organization operates as a charity with two main purposes: to advocate for parents’ rights and interests, and to educate new parents. Its bias toward natural, drug-free birth is not entirely uncontroversial—some feel the NCT presents too rosy a picture of what childbirth is actually like, and joke that the acronym really stands for Natural Childbirth Trust. It’s hippy-dippy, warm, and welcoming—“crunchy” in a way that wouldn’t be out of place in Park Slope or Portland, but isn’t usually associated with England.

Still, joining the NCT and taking their
antenatal
(prenatal) classes is a rite of passage for thousands of English parents. The greatest benefit may be community. It is not unusual for tight bonds to form within NCT antenatal groups, lasting long after the maternity leave (usually six months to a year in England) is over and even sometimes after the children have left home. The NCT introduced me to the charmingly old-fashioned custom of bringing cake to each new friend’s family as the babies were born, and my NCT group spent so much time together that any of the parents could pick up and comfort any of the others’ babies, as if we were one big family. It was a fascinating experience of permeable or nonexistent boundaries that lasted about a year, until the last of us had returned to work.

Not that we weren’t busy. We took long walks with our pushchairs
and prams
(short for
perambulator
, a word that calls to mind nannies in starched white uniforms rather than
mummies in tracksuits with tricked-out Bugaboos). We had vigorous debates about whether or not babies should be given dummies (pacifiers), and whether to spring for the chicken pox jab (a vaccine not standard under the NHS) at a private clinic. We exchanged helpful tips on how to get posset (spit-up) stains out of Babygros (onesies). Posset is—confusingly, disgustingly—also the name of a creamy dessert, and many desserts were consumed that year as we fretted over the statistics on cot
(crib) death and balanced infants on our knees. We had the camaraderie of trench mates who knew we wouldn’t be judged for whinging (whining) or throwing wobblies (tantrums) over our sleeplessness, our partners’ lack of understanding, or insensitive comments from the in-laws. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most common acronyms on Mumsnet, England’s most popular online forum for mothers, is AIBU (“Am I being unreasonable?”), to which one may respond: YABU or YANBU.

We had a multicultural group. Two-thirds were English, but we had an American (me), an Italian, and an Australian as well. So there were some English words I had to adopt, or no one would know what the hell I was talking about. I fought this a little. My friend George, an Englishman married to an American and raising a family in New York, had the same reaction. We both feel the need to hold on to some of the vocabulary of our own childhoods—not just for our comfort, but so our children will not be entirely assimilated. Just as I could never bring myself to say
nappy
, George could never say
diaper
. But my daughter thwarted my attempt to make her “bilingual” by making up her own words. Diapers became
gagas
by a strange logic: If her father called it a
nappy
, and her babysitter used the French word,
couche
, and Mama said
diaper
, we must all be making up our
own language and therefore she could, too. We all ended up calling it a
gaga
after a while. But that’s what a shared cultural experience is all about—whether it’s the culture within a country, a chat room, an NCT group, or a single home.

Once a child hits the toddler years and goes off to nursery
(preschool), the cultural confusion intensifies. American parents in England have to get used to saying
trousers
instead of
pants
(underwear), and applying
plasters
or
Elastoplasts
instead of
Band-Aids
. They have to learn that “to go potty” in English English means “to go a bit crazy”—something you would never invite a toddler to do in an enclosed space. They have to get used to their children calling the letter
Z
zed
and not
zee
, and zeros being
noughts
—as in, a game of noughts and crosses instead of tic-tac-toe. And hearing a lie referred to as a
porky
(this comes from Cockney rhyming slang, in which
porky pies
stands in for
lies
). Incidentally, when your child asks for
rubbers
to take to school in year one (kindergarten), don’t panic: He means erasers. And because accents and language tend to be influenced more by peers than parents, you may be in for a lifetime of being called “Mummy,” so by all means, stop picturing the Egyptian wing of the Met . . . if you can.

Nursery rhymes common to children in both countries have subtly different lyrics that will strike the American parent as sacrilegious. The first time your child sings, “Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies,
Atish-oo, Atish-oo
, we all fall down,” you might stifle the urge to teach her to sing it your way. But some of the differences will seem like upgrades. The “Hokey Pokey” will be even funnier as the “Hokey Cokey,” and you might find the chorus of the English version unexpectedly charming: “Whoa, the hokey cokey / Whoa, the hokey cokey / Whoa, the
hokey cokey / Knees bent, arms stretched, RAH! RAH! RAH!” With a rousing chorus like that, who wouldn’t prefer the “Hokey Cokey”? The
Telegraph
reported that HRH the Prince of Wales, on a recent trip to Sri Lanka, walked into a classroom where children were doing the dance and joined in “bending his knees, stretching his arms and turning around, clearly enjoying the chance to ‘shake it all about.’” It seems that some pleasures are universal.

It would be impossible to generalize about differences between American and English parenting styles. There is probably about as much variation in viewpoints and practices between Islington and Kensington as there is between London and New York. Yet the experience of parenting young children is much the same wherever you go: a complete blur.

No wonder everyone is knackered.

In which the rain, it raineth. Every. Single. Day.

W
hen the art installation “Rain Room” debuted in London, more than seventy-seven thousand people visited, some waiting for as long as twelve hours to get in. Its creators, a young London-based art collective called rAndom International, described their work as a “hundred square metre field of falling water through which it is possible to walk . . . without being drenched.” Motion sensors detected where people stood and stopped the flow of water around them. Many of the visitors in London, and in New York when the exhibit moved to the Museum of Modern Art, had the experience of waiting in the (actual) rain in order to know the sensation of controlling the (artificial) rain. rAndom International is made up of eleven artists, eight of whom are from the United
Kingdom. Is it any wonder that queueing and rain are their media of choice?

The English do not ask much of their weather. Unlike the French, who never met weather that they liked, the English are stoic about the sodden picnic, the blustery boat ride up the Thames, or the muddy outdoor wedding reception. It takes a lot to spoil their fun, as Starbucks acknowledged when it advertised its first stores in England with images of people wearing summer clothes and drinking iced coffees in a downpour. The English will persist in enjoying their gardens and beaches during suboptimal weather in the same way that Manhattanites will happily swelter while inhaling exhaust fumes and fending off panhandlers at their outdoor cafés. If you visit, do the English a favor and go along with it—don’t insult them by complaining. The English feel about their weather like you feel about certain disreputable members of your family. It is okay for them to whinge (complain) about it, but outsiders had better not.

The English have a reputation for spending an inordinate amount of time talking about the weather, and this is justified. You will never go wrong leading with the weather, or picking up someone else’s weather-related conversational cue, unless you take it upon yourself to disagree with him. Because—
shhh!
—the weather in England is not really that variable. In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes
never
happen. You get some rain, you get some sun; it gets a little warmer and colder throughout the year, and sometimes within the same day. A snowy winter is an anomaly. There isn’t much to disagree about, and that is why it’s such a good conversation-starter for a habitually reserved people. As Shakespeare wrote (though he let the fool sing it): “the rain it raineth every day.”

Rain isn’t so bad if you remember to bring your umbrella, or brolly. Not everyone uses this admittedly old-fashioned and upper-middle-class locution, but it’s still around and, I think we can all agree, far more charming than most diminutives used by the English (like
brekkie
and
biccie
for
breakfast
and
biscuit
). Umbrellas have been around since 1000 BC, and the technology hasn’t changed much in the intervening years. (Though the US Patent Office has four staff members dedicated full-time to assessing new applications from Americans who think they can improve on it.) In my experience, English people are far more likely than Americans to have a brolly on hand when they need it. A sunny day with no rain forecast is no guarantee. It’s not pessimism, exactly—just the triumph of experience over hope. Most people have a small wardrobe of umbrellas for all eventualities, so they won’t be “caught out”: cheap ones to keep under their desks at work, tiny ones that fit in a coat pocket or purse, sturdy ones for country walks, and posh ones to carry to weddings or out to dinner on a wet summer night. There’s almost no place you can’t buy an umbrella in England, but for those who want the best, the world’s first all-umbrella shop, James Smith & Sons, has been serving the public since 1830 at number 53 New Oxford Street.

Brollies are perfect for the rain that rains straight down from the sky, and essential for the occasional freak hailstorm (which usually leads to giddy laughter in the street, even though those little pellets of ice
really sting
). But sometimes it rains sideways, or as an enveloping mist that almost seems to emanate from the ground up. That’s when you need the getup best described by A. A. Milne in his poem “Happiness”: “Great Big Waterproof Boots . . . a Great Big Waterproof Hat . . . [and] a Great Big Waterproof Mackintosh.”

No one does rainwear like the English. Barbour waxed cotton jackets and Burberry trench coats are to be seen everywhere, even in high summer. There is some shame in having a new one, though. The most legit level of wear is somewhere between “rumpled university professor” and “tattered gamekeeper.” Continual wet weather makes it surprisingly easy to achieve this aesthetic ideal.

Some Americans like to make fun of the English for dwelling on their monotonous weather, but those who do are missing the point. Weather talk is the universal small talk among the English—perhaps the only acceptable pretense for starting a conversation with a stranger, or a neighbor for that matter. If you don’t engage in it, you may be throwing away your best chance at connection. Weather talk can be idle or it can be a gateway to something more, and there’s only one way to find out.

Americans like their weather big and dramatic—and their weather obliges with hurricanes, tornadoes, nor’easters, and snowstorms. There is tremendous variation in temperature within most states and from one end of the country to the other. This appeals to Americans’ self-dramatizing tendency to believe that weather happens not just
around
them, but
to
them. Some types of storms are even given names. The National Hurricane Center has been naming Atlantic hurricanes since 1953, alphabetically in chronological order: Ana, Bill, Claudette, Danny . . . (Until 1979, hurricanes were given only feminine names, but now the genders alternate.) The lists are recycled every six years and a name within a given list is changed only when a particularly devastating hurricane comes along—at which point its name is “retired.” Ironically, it is often the mildest-sounding storms that wreak the most havoc: In the beginning, Hurricane Irene may have sounded like a storm
that you could have asked to babysit your kids, or sent to Starbucks to buy you a venti skinny latte, but before the week was out she had the coastline in a chokehold, causing sixty-seven deaths and approximately sixteen billion dollars in damage.

The Weather Channel has recently begun to name winter storms, aiding the fast spread of information via Twitter and other social media. Storm-name hashtags were popular already. Americans jump at the chance to name a big snowstorm, and their unofficial, non-Weather-Channel-sanctioned names are mostly derived from the titles of Hollywood movies: “Snowmageddon,” “Snowpocalypse,” and even “Kaisersnoze” after the quietly diabolical character played by Kevin Spacey in
The Usual Suspects
. American weather can feature such oddities as “thundersnow,” which is just what it sounds like. It isn’t hard to see how some goofball hit upon the concept for the movie
Sharknado
: “When a freak hurricane swamps Los Angeles, nature’s deadliest killer rules sea, land, and air as thousands of sharks terrorize the waterlogged populace!” It almost sounds plausible.

Americans talk about extreme weather with a
Where were you when?
nostalgia they otherwise reserve for political assassinations. They watch the Weather Channel obsessively, and not just for local news. There’s always a state of emergency being declared somewhere. Storm-chaser shows and storm-chaser tours, disaster tourism—all were invented by Americans. Deep down, we all love it when “regularly scheduled programming” is interrupted, as long as the storm isn’t bearing down on us personally. As the atmospheric pressure drops, spirits rise.

The exception to this weather-induced excitability is quite important, though: It is okay to get worked up about weather that is unusual, or happening elsewhere in America, but you
must not react too strongly to weather that is considered normal for your area. There are places where extreme weather is just business as usual. In Minnesota, several feet of snow can fall within a few hours—in April—and go unmentioned, even by people with flights to catch. A couple of Minnesotans I know are happy to run outside whether it’s 85 degrees or –34 degrees Fahrenheit—this, they cheerfully describe as a “nice broad range” of temperatures that would surprise no one in their neck of the woods. A Floridian friend wouldn’t be caught dead running when the temperature dips below 30—but then again, she’d consider it pathetic to complain about the humidity where she lives (which is like being hit in the face with a wet sponge every time you walk outside).

Both the English and Americans look on bad weather as a test for their elected officials’ response in a crisis. Woe betide if they are found wanting—the schadenfreude alone could kill, but in the worst of these failures, the damage is shocking and nothing to laugh at. On the one hand, you have Georgia governor Nathan Deal’s public apology for the state’s poor preparation after a several-inch snowfall in January 2014 caused residents to abandon their cars on highways and required intervention from the National Guard—an event the locals of “Atlantarctica” genteelly dubbed “ClusterFlake.” On the other hand, there’s the response of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which left 80 percent of his city underwater and killed more than 1,800 people, many by drowning. Perhaps frustrated by the way everyone kept looking to
him
for answers, Nagin decided to blame the man upstairs: “Surely God is mad at America. He’s sending hurricane after hurricane after hurricane.”

English politicians don’t have it any easier. Excessive rain
in England leads to terrible floods in the countryside every few years, with homes and businesses, livestock and livelihoods at risk. Whenever this happens, London-dwelling politicians of all parties rush out in their Land Rovers to comfort the afflicted, only to be derided for “wellie tourism.” Articles appear in the local and national papers with headlines like “Wallies in Wellies: Flood Victims Face a New Deluge of Politicians.” (
Wally
is slang for a useless or ineffectual person.) Princes Harry and William earned praise during the latest inundation for showing up with the military to help with sandbagging, but it was too little, too late. There are few elements more implacable, destructive, and downright terrifying than water. When you’ve seen what a bit more rain than usual can do, the English fascination with weather stops seeming like a punch line. And a room where rain bends to human will starts looking pretty brilliant, even from the back of a daylong
queue.