I was walking home from my job as a language assistant in a Spanish primary school and there, at the end of the road, the word BRIT stared me down from the side of a ferry. I had left Britain for Santander, Spain, but it seemed that Britain would not leave me.
I had always wanted, desperately, to live abroad, and yet, in Spain, I found myself faced with the fact that I was unavoidably, helplessly a Brit. When I first moved here, it felt like everytime I spoke Spanish, or even when I was silent, some signal (a grammatical mistake, a mispronounced word, the way I dressed) seemed to scream ‘FOREIGNER’, ‘EXTRANJERO’, strange, different, other, causing people to switch to English, or even avoid me completely. I had always taken for granted the privilege of fitting in: of being a native speaker with the right accent and the knowledge of how to interact effortlessly. But that was striped from me in Spain: my neighbour asking me if I was English after I simply said ‘Hola’; my co-workers taking months to talk to me or even acknowledge me because they assumed I didn’t speak or understand Spanish; people at bars and clubs turning their nose up at me when they heard I was British - ‘Your people ruin our country’. These small events piled up against me, a constant reminder that I was seen as an invasive Brit, characterised by the worst parts of our country and culture. I felt trapped by that which I had always wanted to escape: the expected ignorance, arrogance, and disrespect which ties so closely with the Brit abroad stereotype.
However, these frustrations of the first few months were not mine alone. My flatmates and friends, also English Language Assistants, were facing similar difficulties. Despite all of us being able to communicate in Spanish, we all felt like failures, claiming knowledge of a language within which our confidence was slowly deteriorating. Especially for them as they were all American, and had learnt Latin American Spanish - not only were they foreigners, but their Spanish sounded doubly foreign, a mix of American and Latin American whereas mine was just mangled English-European Spanish. But within this shared struggle, we found solace.
In Santander’s coffee shops (shout out to Gallofa and Peter and Pan), on its many beaches, on the benches by the sea, we started to see the beauty in linguistic difference: it was not the alienating factor it first seemed, but a source of hilarity and joy. First, in English, we discovered how baffling the word baubles were for Americans; the fact that we sang ‘away in a manger’ to different tunes; the way we pronounced our vowels so differently (my own name was a struggle for them). And then in Spanish, we started to accumulate differences and similarities like small gems: the Cantabrian word for a very Cantabrian light rain that will drench you, ‘calabobos’; the Chilean word for boyfriend/girlfriend ‘pololo/a’; the fact that Spanish also uses green as the colour to signify jealousy which stems from Othello; and that in English we have a whole verb for queuing (a cornerstone of British culture).
We traded in slang and sayings together and with our cantabrian friends, and at last we started to feel accepted by Spanish again. It seemed obvious now: the fact that we, of course, weren’t Spanish and therefore had our own accent and pronunciation quirks was not to be changed, but embraced. The fact that my friend Olivia’s Spanish was steeped in Chilean pronunciation with both Mexican and Chilean slang was not something to be removed to suit an European Spanish ear, but something to be maintained in spite of that - an ode to her journey as a Spanish speaker. My own Spanish was not something to be ashamed of, my English accent not something to be completely eradicated. I am English after all, which for the first time felt like a positive: all my Britishisms and Englishisms had become points of joy with my American friends, so why would I want to lose that in my second language? Together, by accepting that we could not, should not, exclude our own identity from our Spanish, we flourished.
The disgust I had always felt at the thought of my country, its bloody history, and embarrassing politics slowly began to be replaced with something akin to pride. Being British was a part of me, a part of my language, how I thought, and how I interacted with the world. It is home, for better or for worse, and I do miss broken Britain, in all her glory.
It might be embarrassing being British, but I wouldn’t be anything else. And that is one conclusion I did not expect at the end of my year abroad.
