Home Front
Special relationships
Olga Franklin
I'm hoping someone, if not Mr Enoch Powell, will come forward to help stop all this immi. gration! My concern is that most of them appear to be my relations. They arrive — usually with-. out so much as a postcard warning to give me time to get out of the way — from Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and• now, God help me, from Los Angeles. I could take Cousin Marc, and at a pinch my niece's parents, Cousin Ralph and Cousin Anne from California. But this week I got young Jimmy fresh from Yale, with a blond beard, Afro-Asian hair-do and a very progres.
sive education climaxing with a PhD and all that that implies.
When it all began, roughly two years ago, with the arrival of Cousin Marcel's boson, chums Wilbur and Winifred from Chicago, announcing they'd come to test if Britain was now the place to live, I wasn't really worried. In fact, I took it all quite cheerfully. GOY I pointed out that the miners' strike was a mere nothing. "Wait till the dockers and the dUst; men and the gasmen start," I chuckled. ' wined them and dined them and felt secure that come Christmas they'd be gone, if not to Paris then on to Capri or Minorca or settling down happily on some Greek island. But no! By Christmas they'd moved to a Stately Home at Bromley, Kent where theY announced themselves cosy as kittens 10 a centrally-heated mansion belonging to arl English colonel who appeared happy to en' sconce a contented American couple in n house big enough to take a regiment of coaples. Winifred rang me this week, to announce that her brother is on his way. They've 1)01 got jobs, he in real estate and she in — wel for it — Psychology. "We just love it here in Britain," Winifred said, "and all our friends just love it here. So there's a crowd of us hoP' ing for work permits for a year, so we can stay. We don't care if we never see America again." "What about all this violence?" I crt'—"A' "surely you know about the dangers. we've got muggers and murderers and vandals the lot! Why it's worse than Chicago even,
said, forgetting that's where they've come from. All I got was peals of laughter. "Don't worry dear," they said. "We can take it." Yes, but can I take it, that's more to the Point, And where's it all going to end? Cousin Marc says not to worry as they're only planfling to stay a decade or so and then move on to Spain and build a little villa or two. So the Senior Cousins and some of the Senior Aunts and Uncles can join them to.
America, I said, can't — surely — be as bad as all that? Well no, said Jimmy-from-Yale, Parts of America are okay but no one would actually want to live in the States unless they had to. Whereas Britain was so, well, so unspoilt, so charming; you could really grow here, Jimmy said. Cousin Marc who spent the whole of one weekend just sitting at the Savoy Hotel, mut tering about it still being "the best service in the world and you couldn't get it any more like this back home," said he knew a lot of Other Americans who were all planning to do like him and emigrate to Britain, if they could get the work permit. The idea is you come to Britain for a year and the Home Office give You a work permit for one year while you lust "look round." If you like it, you can apply to stay and then you get another permit from the Ministry of Social Security.
All right, the figures aren't enormous yet. A few hundred Americans here, a few thousand Americans and their wives and Children there — what's the difference among SO many millions of us. And most of them are WASPS; that is they're White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or White American Jews of French of German extraction.
As Jimmy put it to me: "Don't know why You're panicking about it all, Aunty. You
won't find us so difficult to get along with, really you won't. We've all had analysis and we're mostly okay." He tells me his grandparents, who a year ago sold their chicken farm in Los Angeles to Move into one of those Golden Autumn Rest home garden suburbs for senior citizens, aren't getting along at all well despite fairly recent Analysis. However, they're planning to sell up and move into Britain soon. Jimmy says he knows his Grandad is going to just love the Peace and Quiet of Britain, and all the Quaint Charm of everything . . As for me, my quaint charm has pretty well run dry ... which is why I'm calling on someone to help me stop all this immigration! EsPecially those who are my relations ...
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