Radio 4 on while I eat my lunch. I’m half listening, half focused on my tuna salad. It’s sunny outside, but looks like it might turn any moment.
A woman’s voice: frustrated, indignant, proud. I catch snatches of her conversation with a posh male interviewer. She’s foreign, but it’s not clear from where. She’s lived in the UK for many years; experienced a lot of racism. Her son is in the Middle East. He’s fighting for something or other. She doesn’t understand. It’s not how she raised him. It’s not what she wants for him.
I shudder to myself: impossible to conceive how a young British girl or boy would choose to go and fight a foreign war. Could slip off their cushy life in the UK like a snake shedding its skin and bed down with bearded infidels in some sandstorm shithole. Stop wanting iPhones and Happy Meals and yearn for Jihad and the cold steel of a Kalashnikov on their shoulder. Then I shudder again, check myself. ‘You know exactly how it happens. Exactly.’
The first doll I chose for myself was black. The first boy I kissed was Chinese. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was drawn to difference - not out of curiosity; out of recognition. Growing up in rural Scotland with an English accent, English parents and Scandinavian looks marked me out as ‘not one of us’, and no matter how hard I tried I never managed to fit in. Had to learn to be that square peg, forever squashing myself into a round hole.
My family had very few real Scottish friends – that was the first thing. We lived at the end of a dead end road a mile from any neighbours, and we kept mostly to ourselves. Five years of happy isolation had already made me an outcast, although I didn’t realise it until I started school, whereupon it was rapidly made clear to me: ‘You’re not Scottish. You’re English.’ I soon learned that any reference to an English person was inevitably preceded by the adjective ‘fucking’ and followed by the nouns ‘prick’ or ‘bastard’. The kids in the year above, who hated me on sight, called me FEB, a handy little marker, which could be applied to sassenachs of either gender and meant ‘fucking English bitch’ or ‘fucking English bastard’. I put my head down and got on with things. Learned to be funny. Learned to appease.
In secondary school things improved slightly, as we gradually learned to assume the sheen of civilised behaviour that is required of young adults. The other kids mostly hid their direct hatred of me. But the anti-English rhetoric was constant, and occasionally even my best friends would forget themselves, as in the occasion when my closest friend ended a long bitter rant with the words, ‘I fucking hate the English.’ When he suddenly realised I was present… ‘but not you Kirsten, you’re ok’. By this stage, it didn’t even occur to me to point out that I was born in Inverness, had lived in Scotland all my life. Knew fuck all about England and what it means to be English. I’d pretty much forgotten, because everyone else was so convinced about who I really was. Imagine all your friends and enemies, for years and years and years, saying to you: you aren’t white, you’re black; you aren’t human, you’re from Mars.’ Eventually you start to accept it.
I survived the thirteen years of school by absorbing the descriptions applied to me and just getting on with things. At university in Edinburgh, where for the first time I was surrounded by many English people and people from other parts of the world, the anger suddenly rose in me, fresh and vivid as the blood spurt from a knife wound. I began to think about why. Began to resent what had happened to me. Began to realise how pummelled and bruised my sense of identity was. Began to question the future of this, ‘my’ country.
The result of this intense period of self-examination and reevaluation of the past was a nascent radicalisation. ‘Fuck you all’ was my conclusion. ‘Racist parents filling the heads of children with ignorant hatefulness, and nodding as they do the same to their children and their children’s children. Fuck 1707. Fuck you all. Your beautiful country, which you don’t deserve, needs to be severed from the rest of the world before you infect it. The Romans had the right idea with their wall. Independence is what you need. Then you can’t blame your pathetic inconsequential lives on innocent “foreign” children. You’ll have to stand on your own without me and my kind as a prop.’
This wasn’t Northern Ireland. There was no war for me to join. I joined the SNP instead, sent in my cheque and got my little plastic black and yellow card in the mail the next week. I didn’t join up because I loved my country: I joined because I hated it. I wanted the same thing the nationalists wanted but for a very different reason. I wanted them to leave me, and all the future mes the fuck alone. It wasn’t a mature response. It wasn’t even rational, but it was something. It was the beginning of kicking back, reclaiming my identity.
So what? You might think. Some kids were mean to you at school and you got angry about it. Big fucking deal. Well here’s the thing. Here’s why I listened to that woman on Radio 4 and understood completely why her son is where he is, doing what he’s chosen to do. What happened to me was nothing… nothing at all compared to what black kids, brown kids, Muslim kids, 'foreign' kids have to go through. Especially those who are vulnerable – separated from their pack, without backup, without the social skills or the desire to rise above it all. My school days were a cake walk compared to what so many kids have to endure and yet the rejection - both the outright hostility and the subtle kind - have stayed with me and formed me. Formed my politics, formed my actions, formed my identity. Nothing about me is especially radical, yet I was radicalised, and I know that all I have to do to radicalise another is to make him understand that he won’t ever be joining my gang. I don’t need to beat him, torture him or humiliate him. I don’t even need to say it to his face, but there are a million tiny ways to communicate to him with absolute clarity ‘You will never belong.’
The smug Radio 4 interviewer ended by asking the woman if she loved Britain. The presumption in that question made me want to punch my fist into the radio. Instead of losing her temper with him, as I would have done, she gave a careful, evasive answer. She thought there were many good things about living here. Britain was a very civilised place. She is glad to be here. She’s decided to live with it, in other words. I didn’t. I got out. Left my home. Chose exile. Her son got out too. As will many others, on and on, marching off into an uncertain future, until we learn, collectively, to open our hearts a great deal more: to welcome the strange ones in.
