My Mumbling Thoughts

This would be my second newspaper article that I wrote for my uni that DIDN'T get published. I was a bit sore when I searched for my article in the newest printing and couldn't find it, but whatevs, I'm over it now, and don't want to write for the newspaper anymore, because everyone up there is retarded in one way or another. And I can say that because I know both of the editors, and if you knew who they were as well, you'd fully agree with me.

Anyway, I've decided to post it up here, because I can, and it makes me feel better that it did get published, one way or another. Hope y'all enjoy.

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The thing about when you go to another country, is that it’s strange to encounter other people from back home. Your ear will catch a word or two and you’ll listen in to confirm their accent. And when you’re sure that they’re from where you’re from (in my case, it’d be the U.S.), it’s almost as if you want to run up to them and shout, “oh my god! Are you from the states too? Whereabouts? What are you doing over here?” blah, blah, blah… It’s like an instant bond is made because you’re both from the same country.

Instead of bombarding the person like a mentalist though, you simply stay where you are and continue on, remembering that yes, you are not the only American that lives in London. Others are allowed into the city as well.

However, there are some times when you can sit down and question someone until you’re blue in the face.

Enter, Sarah Turvey, one of Roehampton’s great lecturers who teaches Early Aspects of American Literature. Born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, she moved to Houston, Texas and then over to Surrey, England when she was only 9-years-old. Her father, who worked for an oil company, moved her, her mother and her five brothers and sisters (one brother was born after they moved), to build an oil refinery in 1963.

As I sat with her in her office, she told me about the culture shock she was hit with, how it was a hard adjustment that sometimes left her feeling like an outsider, but how she now likes being able to play two different cards at her own discretion.

“You have to remember that I moved from Houston, Texas, which was, in 1963 an oil boom town, but it was still in some respects, a place at the edge of the known universe. And I think ‘hick’ would be a not unfair description of it.”

Starting with the school list of things to buy (i.e. art smock, knickers/knicker liners, and a complete set of silver plated cutlery with her name engraved on), she was introduced to an entirely new world, and had to learn all of the new rules and customs.

“None of these words meant anything to me, or if they meant something to me, they meant something quite different.”

Irish nuns taught her at the all girl convent school that she attended, and whenever she did something they didn’t approve of, they would say to her, “Sarah Turvey, I don’t know what you do in America, but over here we cut our bread,” or “we don’t pass the vinaigrette before we pass the salt.”

Aside from the more obvious changes in day-to-day life, there were also the more subtle differences that took her longer to disentangle and understand, like the class structure of England. It’s fair to say that the majority of the girls that she was schooled with were upper-middle class, but she took note of how different certain things could be, such as teatime.

“When I arrived, the first thing you had to do was take your shoes off, and put slippers on. And then I noted with interest that we drank tea with the evening meal, an evening meal that was also called ‘tea’. Now I had been to tea with chums, but we had cucumber sandwiches and sponge cake, and suddenly we were having a meal that was being described as tea, but was actually a meal that I recognized as breakfast.

“What I subsequently came to understand was that this was the difference between the solidly upper-middle class girls, whose tea was eaten at four o’clock with cucumber sandwiches and sponge cake, and the families where tea was the evening meal, at which you drank tea, but ate an evening meal. This was the cultural conventions of the lower middle classes.”

Being born in America though, and essentially raised in England has been, you could say, a slight tug-of-war game for Sarah.

“I moved from an initial sense of being intimidated and bewildered by everything, and wishing desperately that I weren’t an American, that I didn’t stand out as different, and that this was my country, my culture, my nationality…to at some point, […] thinking, ‘actually I like being in some ways outside of this’, and perhaps even being seen to have a kind of critical eye upon it all.”

Living in England now for forty-five years, she feels privileged on many levels to live in the country that taught her what a ‘fish knife’ is, where she went to the prestigious university of Oxford and where she raised her children, but she also considers herself lucky to be American, and to be able to flip flop, so to speak, when she so chooses.

And while it can sometimes be confusing whether she’s “too English” or “too American”, she’s perfectly comfortable to seamlessly flick one switch on and turn the other off. It comes as a handy advantage, like when she traveled to the United States to teach American students at the University of North Carolina.

I think it’s safe to say that Sarah Turvey has lived a very full life that most other people probably never experience. She has the best of both worlds (in my humble opinion), and Roehampton is one lucky university to have a lecturer like her.