WHEN my dog ran into the pretty large grounds of the big house — not quite an old demesne, too modern for that, not quite big enough, but substantial all the same — the man came over to me.
He opened the large electronic gates and walked over in his shorts with his hand stretched out. He was friendly and welcoming, and the dog wasn’t a bother.
He was Drew and he was American and more than pleased with his new house. Someone else waved over from the doorway.
The unruly dog meant I had little chance to glean any more details from friendly Drew, but I knew the house had been up for sale and here they were, the new owners. Fair play to them.
At this time of year there are a lot of visitors around, tourists enjoying the scenery and the pubs, and we’re all secretly pleased with ourselves for living here. The visitors take up a lot of space and the streets are more crowded, and the roads too, but no one really resents the buzz and the life.
In the supermarket there’s barely a parking space, though in a matter of weeks there will be.
In the last few weeks I’ve twice noticed, in the aisles of this supermarket, family groups moving around, distinguishable by their accents and clothes and something else that is quite hard to identify.
They’re Americans.
Living in a tourist area, you become accustomed to small signs in the behaviour of visitors and, even though I can’t quite trust that I’ve become so attuned, I noticed something about these family groups on both occasions.
Something that made me ask myself the same thing as I passed them by. Are they visitors or are they newcomers? Are they on their holidays or have they moved?
I’m talking to a friend about the summer and the heat, and I don’t see him that often. He lives much further west than me, in the family place on his family’s old farm.
I don’t mention the Americans, but he does. He says that, in conversation with someone working in an auctioneer’s office, he was told something about who is now buying up those old houses in the west, on the poor but stunningly beautiful land. They used to be from the UK and scattered parts of Europe, but not now. Now they’re Americans.
This is anecdotal, of course, not statistically confirmed. But there you go. The Americans. The Yanks are coming. Are they?
Now I have a bit of a problem with Americans.
I have to admit it. I could claim some kind of moral high ground and link that to the current, lamentable state of their politics.
I could say it was on account of the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming right from the very top of American power. I could mention ICE. I could mention a lot of things. I could simply say it was Donald Trump.
But none of that would be true. I’m afraid it is pettier than that. I have a resentment about America because of the hierarchy of Irish emigration.
It’s like this. It has always felt to me that Ireland has treated emigration to America like a success story in itself. The emigrant could be sleeping in a hovel in the Bronx, but the returning Yank is still thought of as having golden shoes.
The emigrant to England could be sleeping comfortably in a semi-detached house in the salubrious suburbs, but he still went to England, the pity — an act of questionable loyalty and one completely lacking in romance.
And now he has English kids. Not the emigrant to the States. His kids are American-Irish.
There’s no similar phrase for us apart from those we’ve fundamentally created for ourselves. Birmingham Irish. London Irish.
My son has been working in a café for the summer and told me a story about a customer mentioning, while paying at the counter, that she thought the toasted sandwiches were a bit burnt but didn’t want to say anything at the table because “we’re with Americans”.
It’s the Irish deference. One place is the cars big as bars and rivers of gold. And one place is the I-haven’t-got-a-penny-to-wander-the-dark-streets-of-London.
It’s not the reality of either place. That’s not the point. The Yanks are coming. It doesn’t matter that we came every summer. A little bitter? Y’all better believe it.
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