#introduceyourself - Identity and Heritage: Who Are You Really?

Beer was my mother's maiden name. Late in life and possibly for untoward reasons, she decided to change her identity. She adopted the familiar, shortened first name that she'd always been known by, and dropped my father's family name for her own. As a child, I'd been faintly embarrassed by its pub connotations. I was amused by my grandfather's shenanigans, courting girls by persuading them he was a scion of the diamond mining South African brothers, and their dubious associate Rhodes, camouflaging himself in south London by losing the Dutch pre-fix.

He was a bit of a lad, by all accounts, and a match for his father-in-law (occupation: gentleman), about whom there was some question of Great War profiteering. It was said among my mother's generation that The Darling Buds of May was based on him. On the other side of the family, there's talk of a Jewess who escaped the pogroms on foot, travelling across Europe and arriving in a small fishing and military town in Kent, filled with soldiers for the Napoleonic war, to become my father's mother's grandmother, an early curly-haired immigrant among the fair, light skinned, long limbed Danes.

Myself, I took my husband's name on April Fool's day, casting aside family and history and seeking a new identity, one I created for myself, adrift from either his culture or my own. He was a visitor to my small Kentish town, arriving by way of Djibouti, Angola, the DRC, Marseilles and the French Foreign Legion, from Oregon and, later, Texas and New Mexico. His mother and father were Polish and he had that Slav look, six feet six, drawling accent, chewed cheroot and aviator glasses. Bored witless, working in a pub, unable to imagine a future, he caught my attention.

I find myself, though, unmistakeably English, "that's so British" the comment from my Chinese guest as I accompanied her outside to wait for the taxi to take her to Heathrow and then home to her parents, holding my mug of tea. And English of a time and place: shocked by people putting their feet on seats in buses and trains, or leaving litter, a discarded Guinness bottle, placed precisely, upright, on the kerb, or eating in the street - my sister says the same about smoking a cigarette. The pang of replacing or throwing away something before it is broken or worn out, hanging washing neatly and methodically, maximising space on the too short line, to dry in the sun, perfectly slicing tomatoes and wiping splashes from the sink and drainer before putting tea towels to soak in a solution of bleach. Ah Prufrock, Barbara Pym, Jack Frost on the windows.

I loved the Internet when it arrived. It felt like swimming through an endless, warm, clear ocean, turning in the water like a seal, breaking through the surface to dappled sunlight on my closed eyes, warm even to my toes, but cool and cleansing as well. Talking to many people, across continents, the intricacies of internet relay chat and dial up and AOL chat rooms and, most of all, trying on identities like new frocks, new words and language and concepts, people playing in the shallows, occasionally caught up in the currents and rip tides of deception, fraud, corruption, but emerging, as from a baptism, whole, identity changed but intact. Harm done? Any more than the women who come and go? Any more than the bruising confrontation of school or work or family?

Sign up, it says, choose a user name, identify, verify, we'll check it over and let you know. In no time at all, you'll be one of a new community. I smile.