Typical British children enjoying a jolly time ... Ladybird Books' Peter and Jane
While other American kids were busy shooting squirrels out on the prairie or watching professional wrestling or whatever it is that they do instead of reading, my nerdy siblings and I strove to raise the average, thanks to the steady stream of British fiction that our mother ensured composed the bulk of our literary diet. Although my father's career caused the family to move to New York, compelling my Scottish mother to raise her kids in a hostile, foreign place, she was determined to ensure that we would maintain a sense of British identity through reading.
It was highly effective in making me long for Britain. Shirley Hughes was a favourite when I was really small: from her books I learned that I was missing out on an idyllic childhood in a warm, cosy, but slightly ramshackle semi, having tea parties in the garden and dwelling in a state of glorious untidiness that was utterly foreign to the scrubbed Stepford-y suburban homes of our sub-division.
I then learned to read myself through following the decidedly un-American exploits of Ladybird's Peter and Jane, which gave me a vocabulary not useful for the American school playground. "Yes, let's! That's jolly!" I'd exclaim to my befuddled friends when they suggested a go on the swings.
As I got a bit older, I started reading Noel Streatfeild and imagined that if only my parents would move us back to the UK, I would be able to pursue my true calling as a child star in a dancing troupe which performed on variety shows and at holiday camps. (It would, I appeared to believe, also be the 1950s).
During the summer, I reckoned, my family would have trips to the beach where we'd stay in a caravan and chew on sticks of rock, perhaps solving the occasional mystery; during the winter, it would be grey and windy and I would develop chillblains. I didn't know what a chillblain was - they didn't seem to exist in New York, even though it was often very cold there - but all of the heroines of my favourite books withstood the chillblain plague with girlish bravery, so I rather relished the prospect.
When I decided to quit North America four years ago for London, I was confident that getting settled would be a doddle: there wouldn't be any language barrier, so no problem. I was halfway convinced that my lifelong passion for Brit Lit would keep me cushioned from culture shock: I'd read everything from Jude the Obscure and Brideshead Revisited and Bridget Jones' Diary by then, as well as the entire Irvine Welsh canon.
It took me about three days, of course, to realise how inaccurate my book-fuelled vision of Britain was. A trip to a sunny London Fields, bereft of sinister darts players, shattered the dream for ever: it was time for me to set aside my literature-supported assumptions. I'm embarrassed, a little, when I think about how I once thought life in Britain would be compared to the actual reality. But I suppose that I'm pleased that my inaccurate imaginings made me want to come here in the first place.
Can writers ever accurately inform our imaginings of place, or are their impressions rendered slightly distant from reality the minute they're committed to fiction? Are we doomed to be disappointed, having read Midnight's Children, to discover that India's not quite as mystical and magical as Rushdie describes it, or to feel a little cheated, after reading Michel Houellebecq, that some French people are quite nice?
