England is not exactly like I pictured it´
But they dont have cars like we do, do they?" said my mother, her voice echoing on the phone. I said, "What are you talking about, Mom, of course the British have cars. Havent you heard of Rolls Royce?"
"And what about the toilets?" she wanted to know. "Mrs Lovell at the church said they´ve .~ still got out-houses, even in the city."
"Mom, Mrs Lovell at the church was in England during the war, for Pete´s sake. She spent most of her time in a tube station."
"What about food?" asked my mother, "Should I bring some with me? Mrs Lovell says it´s hard to get fresh fruit."
4~. "Mom, you´re coming to London, not trekking through Katmandu."
Americans tome to Britain because it is still, for many of us, the motherland. Britain gave us our language; many of our ideas of literature and culture; our founding fathers and our first presidents; and mercifully few of our ideas on cooking. Americans corne to Britain because their grandparents came from Glasgow, or their great-grandparents were starved out of Ireland, or
M their mother´s mother was bora in Chiswick. They corne here because they recognise place narres and they tan read the menus. Because everything is both foreign and familiar.
Americans love England because it is so quaint and charming; so old. Coming from a country where anything older than 100 years is ancient, they can´t get over the fact that Britain´s past is so visible, so close at hand. You walk through London, for instance, and every alley holds
20 secrets. Every church and every row of shops and houses tells a story. It is not like that in America. America does not build on, it builds over. There are no medieval ruins in New Jersey. There are no 700-year-old castles in Nebraska.
Most of the Americans I know who live permanently in London left home for a single, clear, uncluttered reason: they wanted to get away from Florida or Pennsylvania or Texas or Minnesota.
2 5 Most of them have chosen to stay for