we are english

When I was 18, in the 1970s, I went to Florence to work as a full-time ‘babysitter’ for six months, before I began university.

Friends of mine did the same kind of thing in Germany and America; one braver one, venturing further into the unknown, worked on a kibbutz in Israel. Our idea of travelling abroad was very romantic. It came out of books from a more leisured age of privileged wandering. We were charged up with novels and poetry, ready to fall in love with the otherness of elsewhere, to discover its richer possibilities inside ourselves. The prospect of looking after a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and a five-month-old baby seemed only incidental.

And mostly we did fall in love with the otherness. We weren’t sophisticated, none of us had much experience of abroad – a couple of package holidays at most. Several of us never recovered from falling in love – someone I knew in those days still lives nearly half a century later in Brazil, someone else in Portugal. It’s impossible for an 18-year-old in Britain now to imagine the shock of my first encounters with Italy. Real coffee! I had only ever drunk Nescafé, or once in a blue moon something boiled and nasty from a percolator. Delicious, chewy, salty bread! All the bread in Britain then had the texture and taste of cotton wool. Peaches not out of a tin! Renaissance architecture and painting! I began to teach myself to see. But I loved what was more intangible too. The Italians seemed to have such a gift for pleasure, for taking their pleasures gracefully – I loved the ritualised patterns of every day, the meals served with decorum, the cafés with their tables out in the piazza in the sunshine, the exuberant talk. I wanted to take this back with me to Britain, this new style I was learning. I wanted to live like this. I wanted to transport this home.

I knew next to nothing then about Italian politics, Italian history – even Italian films. And, incidentally, it was very difficult, looking after three small children, with no prior experience. I cried on the phone to England, told my mother I was grateful for all she’d done for me. In retrospect I’m horrified: I wouldn’t have let my 18year-old self look after my children. I dropped the baby once onto a tiled floor – although when I visited them years later he was cheerfully riding a bike, so I hadn’t done him any lasting damage.

Needless to say, I couldn’t transport back to Britain the things I loved about Italy. I packed a Bialetti coffee pot and coffee into my luggage, but when I brought them out at home, the coffee I made didn’t taste quite right. It needed Italian water, Italian air, an Italian expertise. I could cook better pasta, but had to make the pesto I loved with walnuts and parsley, because you couldn’t buy basil or pine nuts. I couldn’t take home the decorum at the table or the exuberant life on the streets, or the fish market, or the sunshine. And although I had thought at first that I would go to live for a while in Italy or France as DH Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield had done, and make up my personality out of these mingled ingredients, I never did. I began to realise that I didn’t want to.

I realised I was one of the stay-at-homes. I liked to live where I knew what I was doing, where I could read all the myriad cues and signs that bristled in every scene, in every material object and every person. Perhaps that hunger for reading signs was part of my preparing to write stories, but I was also just working out how to live. It wasn’t only the words in English that I knew: it was the implications of the words, their echoes and associations. I knew nothing about the constraints of Italian decorum. I knew something about the decency of Britishness in the 1970s, and the nastiness, the wit and the woodenness, all bundled up together, the grey areas and the ambivalence. I wasn’t religious, but I knew the hymns people my age had sung at junior school, because I’d sung them. I knew the taste of Instant Whip – and of that percolated coffee. I remembered teenage pilgrimages to shop at Biba in London. I knew the histories of my parents and grandparents, all those nuances of class and place. In Italy, the signs and cues were enchanting just because they were unfathomable – for a young Italian they might not have been so enchanting.

Not everyone shares this preference for home. For some people the difference of exile is a thrilling stimulation in their lives – and for writing, too. It’s true that living in Italy I was feeling the edges of myself for the first time: starting to know, because I was different, the thing that I was. And for too many people, there’s no choice over displacement. Forced by politics or poverty into exile from everything familiar, they have to learn painstakingly to read cues in an alien culture, to make a new life out of that. And then, in turn, their reading and learning alters the cues, their own histories become part of the story, the culture changes and renews itself. Britain in the 1970s turns into old history.

I feel intensely British, but not because I think it’s better than belonging anywhere else. I feel British because I grew up that way. I accept the arbitrariness of belonging, its accidents of birth and upbringing. Identity is as layered as an onion, with place and class and race and generation and family character all contributing to the whole, so much of it given and some of it chosen. And I’ve never stopped responding passionately to other cultures – to all the things Britishness isn’t. I can’t imagine living and thinking and writing without this otherness as a constant reference, a necessary nourishment, mind-travel.

Tessa Hadley’s new novel ‘Late in the Day’ (£16.99, Jonathan Cape) is published on 14 February.