“And where are you from?” is one of the hardest questions I have to answer on a regular basis. Depending on my mood, I can handle it in many different ways. I usually say “I’m from England, but I’ve lived here for 18 years now”. Recently, I’ve added that I became an American citizen three years ago. I just want them to know I am an equal here.



I was first asked that question at a Hilton hotel in Memphis in 1993, by a waitress who commented “y’all are so polite” about my family on our first US trip. Back then, I answered “Nottingham”. “That’s in England, right?” she clarified. It dawned on me then that I was a long way from home – though time has changed my idea of what that is.

I like to tell people I grew up in the shadow of a coalmine because it sounds so very salt-of-the-earth, dragged up by the bootstraps: a quintessentially English working-class existence. When we moved, just under one mile away to a bigger home with a larger garden next to my grandparents, it seemed we, as a family, had progressed. My friends would visit and comment on how the home was “posh”.

I began to understand then that perceptions of class identity in Britain could change quickly based on a number of factors. The council estate that I walked through and the other housing developments near my large, concrete block comprehensive school gave me the impression that I was perhaps part of this different “middle class” that my grandmother in particular aspired to. I soon learned I wasn’t.



I was shocked to discover the vast difference in social classes in England in the 1980s, when I moved south to university. My peers there had stories of flights across Europe and further afield, parents who worked in government or law, even television, and some discussed their second homes.

While there was a mix of students from across Britain at Luton College, in a run-down former hat manufacturing town in the late 80s, I was initially incredulous about those “other” students. They would become my friends, and equals, but I began to find my world had opened up and see that I was a regular kid from a working-class background in a provincial English city.



When I came to the US nine years later, I gradually realized that my identity and the language around class – along with customs, references, and, most significantly, attitudes – did not translate. I was lost.

Jokes about football (or is it soccer?), drinking culture and Coronation Street were foreign. But most New Englanders took my comments in good humor and annoyingly consigned them to “English humor” and quaint “ye olde” quirks. Yet my class identity, which I had previously elevated, had no place in the discourse.



The American Dream is real. I have come to fashion a new identity here based on the idea that anyone can become more educated and successful – and I do feel that. While there is a definite class structure in the US (often based around race, sadly), as a white American, the opportunities are not viewed as limited. Success and social mobility are valued and greater latitude is given here for workers to prove themselves by merit, not class.



Yet I struggle with these two, clashing identities. One is bound up with nostalgia for my life as a boy and young man, and that always provides me with consolation and security in a changing world. My co-workers and friends here will not know the joys of mates laughing in a cozy pub on a drizzly night or the unbridled joy shared by a community of terraced football fans when their team gets the winner. Class identity is not a burden but part of who I am.



My new identity conflicts with the old, as I am increasingly comfortable with the fact that America is my home. Nevertheless, I do now know where I am from.