At 11 I wanted very much to go to Christian summer camp. My friend Kylah and our friend Kelly were both going, and Kylah gave me the brochure one sunny Saturday afternoon in May when we were riding bikes around the neighbourhood. The kids in the Christian summer camp brochure looked like they were having even more fun than we were on our bikes: they were smiling in groups with their arms around each other, smiling around a campfire, smiling against sylvan backdrops and smiling by a lake.
I read the brochure from cover to cover several times and hid it under my mattress for a little while, unaware that this was a spot normally reserved for pornographic magazines. And after a couple of days of fondling it lovingly, I decided that I was going to chance it: that despite being raised with no faith by mixed-faith parents, they still might send me to Christian summer camp. More specifically, I believed that my powers of rhetoric would be sufficiently agile to persuade my mother that it would be a good idea. I believed this, I really did, until I went down to the kitchen and handed the brochure (now cross hatched with creases from the bedspring) to my mother and realised, from the look on her face, that I might as well be asking for breakfast cereal with marshmallows in it: the answer was going to be no. Even in spite of my trump card line, devised in my bedroom and delivered, in spite of my pained awareness of its futility, after my mother said gently, ‘you can’t go to Christian summer camp, Jean’.
‘I would ignore the religious parts,’ I said.
‘We’re going to Scotland,’ said my mother. I think she kept the brochure.
My mother left Scotland for America when she was a few years older than I am now. Moving to America was not something that she had dreamed of her whole life, in spite of what my history teacher told us about all immigrants. And thus she took us – myself, my brother and sister, and my dad when he was able to take his precious few days of American holiday allowance – back to Scotland whenever possible, for the bulk of most of our growing-up summers. In many respects, these trips served a similar purpose to Christian summer camp (or Jewish summer camp, or soccer camp, even): immersing us in a culturally homogenous setting in order to entrench our sense of identity. Thus while my school friends sang religious songs to guitar accompaniments, canoed with people who shared their beliefs, and acquired boyfriends who went to other schools, we went to museums dedicated to Robert Burns, wore jumpers and dodged cows to play on the beach, and went on walks, not hikes, through the countryside, culminating in packets of prawn-flavoured crisps and cans of Irn Bru (junk food that would never cross our lips in America was mysteriously acceptable in Scotland, and our allowances were much bigger – all adding to the substantial appeal).
The fact was that any envy of my friends and their opportunities to kiss pious boys called Brant behind pine outhouses pretty much dissipated the moment we stepped off the plane at Glasgow Airport and I got the first sniff of damp, hair-kinking Scottish air. As ever, I thought of those summers this weekend, when I went to visit my sister and her partner in Edinburgh.
Our Scottish summers were undoubtedly part of what motivated me to move to the UK nearly a decade ago – but they were also part of the reason that I moved to London, and not to Scotland. As a teenager I’d walk down the high street of my mum’s hometown and note that many of the people looked like each other, and many of them quite a lot like my mother, but they didn’t look like me. For while there wasn’t a summer camp for me to go to in America, I felt quite otherish in Scotland as well.
Every time I head north I get it, a bit, but being there reminds me that I’m not Scottish: I am definitely American, albeit an American who chooses to live in London, and who gets laughed at, invariably (and maybe a bit rightfully), when I say, ‘I’m half Scottish, actually!’ because I sound like one of those people you meet on Boston-Glasgow flights, wearing tartan scarves and seeking to claim the ancestral home they believe someone left behind in 1790. Even though my ancestral home was left in 1980.
I’m an American who feels it make sense to eat porridge with salt, that the best inventions from Scotland, that if things go wrong it’s hard not to suspect that it’s because you kind of deserve it, that drinking tea with sugar in it is a sign of mild moral weakness. And an American who will always feel that a warm coat is the most obvious thing to wear to the beach.
