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Rumination:  Becoming British

When I first arrived in Britain in 1987 at the age of 24, the ink barely dry on my degree certificate, it was the start of an adventure which I expected would last maybe a couple of years.  After which I would return to the U.S. and get on with the business of becoming a grown-up.

     I’m still here at 42 through a combination of inertia and circumstance.  My life in England just sort of grew up around me, as life has a habit of doing.  And I’m still here, of course, because I love it, in the way that only foreigners can love their adopted country. 

     But I have become increasingly fed up with the hassles and restrictions of being a ‘resident alien’—that old chestnut, ‘taxation without representation’, always bothers us Yanks.  And waiting for hours in airport immigration queues when I come ‘home’ is not fun either.  So I decided late last year that it was time to make it official. 

     I printed off the thirteen-page citizenship application form on the Home Office website and took the first step into the surreal, looking-glass world of government bureaucracy.

     The process seemed straightforward at first:  send in the completed form with a cheque for £218 and wait 8 months for a decision.  If it was approved, I would have to attend a Citizenship Ceremony, after which I could apply for a British passport.  If I was lucky, I might get in before the introduction of the citizenship test in the summer of 2005.

     The first problem to present itself was the requirement that the applicant’s passport accompany the form.  As I travel frequently for work, it is not possible for me to surrender my passport for up to 8 months.  Besides, my passport is the only place where my ILR (Indefinite Leave to Remain) is recorded.  I would sooner eat my own knees than trust it to the post.  The only alternative was to engage a solicitor, who would certify a copy of the passport, leaving me free to carry on with my work, knees intact.  The estimated cost was £450 plus VAT, which seemed a reasonable price for peace of mind.

     Each foreign trip of the past 5 years appearing in the passport must be recorded on the form, which in my case meant reconstructing approximately 35 trips from the blurred stamps in my passport.  But finally everything was ready, and the solicitor sent it to the Home Office.

     Six weeks later, the solicitor emailed to say that my application had been rejected because I had not demonstrated proof of my proficiency in English.  Apparently, neither writing for national newspapers, nor working for 18 years in academic publishing, was sufficient.  (I did not stop to ponder what this might say about the Government’s attitude towards the Guardian).  According to the solicitor, I needed a Notary to attest to my language skills.  She glossed over the fact that this requirement had somehow been missed in our discussions.  But my bill had risen to £680.

     Amazingly, I was able to get an appointment with the local Notary for lunchtime the same day.  His services would cost £70, but I did not care.  I was due to take another foreign trip, which meant creating another certified photocopy of the passport if I did not resubmit the application that day.  Not only that, if I did not resubmit the application that day, I would transgress another rule:  the applicant must have been physically present in the UK on exactly the same date 5 years previous to the application.  As it happened, I was out of the country exactly 5 years + 2 days previously.

     But just in case something else had been missed, I checked the Home Office’s website, where the proof of proficiency requirement did indeed appear.  However, it also said that they would accept a copy—not certified, just an ordinary copy—of a higher degree certificate from an English-speaking country.  I just happened to have my Bachelor of Science certificate (ink now dry) amongst the possessions which have followed me through three changes of country.

     I cancelled the Notary appointment, copied the certificate, and resubmitted the application.

     Eight weeks later, an email arrived from my solicitor to say that she had received a letter from the Home Office saying that my application had been approved.  I was very pleased to get approval in far less than eight months, but mystified why it had taken 11 days for the letter to travel from Liverpool to Oxford (vindication of my postal anxieties).

     The delay meant that, according to the letter, I had only one day left in which to organise the Citizenship Ceremony.  An applicant has only 2 chances to get to a ceremony, after which the application process must be repeated.  So I phoned the county Registrar, who said that they had a ceremony going on in my area in 2 weeks’ time, but that I would need to answer questions from the information pack included with the letter.

     The solicitor had received no such information pack, but did ask for another £100 plus VAT, I assumed to cover the cost of opening the letter.  The Registrar would not book the ceremony until I had the pack.  The Home Office Citizenship support line was permanently engaged.   An urgent FAX requesting the information pack went unanswered. 

     And then I noticed, attached to the letter, a couple of pages with the questions that the Registrar was so insistent about.  ‘Information pack’, it turns out, was something of an overstatement, but at least I had it and could book the ceremony before the deadline. 

     This prompted me to look more closely at the letter itself, which was when I noticed something very, very odd.  Below is a direct quote:

     ‘During the ceremony you will hove to soy the Ooth or Affirmotion of ollegionce to Her Mojesty the Queen…If you sweor the ooth this meons this is before Olmighty God, if you offirm the ooth it is not.’

     Ooth of ollegionce?  Her Mojesty the Queen?

     At first, I took this to be some archaic, ceremonial version of English, maybe dating back to the Middle Ages.  After all, this place is awash with quaint traditions.  But in fact the explanation is far less colourful:  every ‘a’ had been changed to an ‘o’.  And ‘loyalty’ had come out ‘Inyolty’; elsewhere ‘allegiance’ as ‘alle glance’. If I were an immigrant with a shakier grasp of English, I would turn up at the ceremony and read the words exactly as they appeared in the letter.   I felt as if I had wandered into Monty Python’s Hungarian Phrasebook sketch, where John Cleese maliciously supplies the hapless foreigner with mistranslations guaranteed to get him slapped or arrested.

     The weather on the day of the citizenship ceremony was perfect for the occasion:  freezing rain, trying to be sleet, lashed us on the way to the town hall.  The room itself, a council meeting chamber, was adorned with photos of previous mayors in their robes of office, sporting heroic amounts of facial hair.  Our mayor was clean-shaven and draped in heavy gold chains.  His white hair had been whipped to a froth by the strong wind. A sullen, sodden pigeon lurked on the window ledge.

     We were six hopeful proto-citizens, three from the US, one from Turkey, one from Fiji, and one from Spain.  The mayor’s speech, welcoming us to the locality, was a masterpiece of understated comedy.  Haltingly he extolled the attractions of Wiltshire, including a valiant but doomed attempt to make Swindon sound glamorous.  ‘And not forgetting the Oasis Leisure Centre,’ he said, eying us meaningfully, ‘from which the band gets its name.’  He informed us that Marlborough has the widest High Street in England.  ‘The reason is that, in the 1600s, all the houses in the middle burned down.’  He paused. ‘So now you can park there.’  That well-known tourist attraction, Honda’s car plant, also came in for a mention, made poignant by the fact that Rover used to make cars here.  ‘Alas, but times move on,’ he said sadly.  In that one phrase was the loss of a whole empire.  Richard Curtis himself could not have written it better.

     The Registrar, a quiet, moustached person, led us in his Wiltshire accent through the Oath of Allegiance (or Ooth of Ollegionce).  It was one of those strange moments when, just by saying a few words, one is profoundly altered, in the eyes of the law and society.  We each received a handshake and a Certificate of Naturalisation.  We stood in silence, heads bowed, while the national anthem played on a scratchy CD.  The officials welcomed us into the British family.  They seemed genuinely pleased that we wanted to be one of them.  The new citizens beamed at each other.  We waited our turn for a photo with the mayor, who smiled gamely for each camera.   Then we went back out into the cold and wet. 

     It was, in every respect, a very fine day.

 Vanessa

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