Leaving Trumpsylvania

Initial reconnaissance

I’m a recent expat, living in England. If I’m not envied now by my friends back in the states, I will be soon — after January 20. But I feel guilty, like I ran out of a restaurant without paying the bill.

It wasn’t, however, a sudden departure. I’ve been preparing for eight years, if you put aside the decades of fantasies — generally following U.S. presidential elections — about moving to Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Cuba or New Zealand. In the wake of Trump’s election in 2016, and during a sabbatical from Northwestern University, my English wife Harriet and I took a long holiday that was in fact a reconnaissance mission. Our goal? Find a rural retreat – a “bolt hole” in British parlance – that could serve as either a modest, second home or a primary residence if conditions in the U.S. went sideways. We limited our choice of destination to the United Kingdom because of Harriet’s nationality. A spouse has presumptive right to obtain “Permission to Remain” and eventually, British citizenship. Even a vegan, Marxist, atheist Jew of retirement age.

In most circumstances, migration to another country is arduous to say the least. The unspoken rule of neoliberalism is free trade in everything but people. Depending upon your choice of destination, you’ll need a lucrative job offer, a close family connection, a large bank account, or some combination of the three. The exception is migrant laborers, but along with permission to enter, they receive bad pay, poor housing, physical abuse, and only seasonal residence. There’s an International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers administered by the U.N., but many nations are in breach of its rules. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. is not signatory to the convention.

New Zealand bars almost all immigrants except “Active Investors” – people who provide at least $3 million in NZ capital investment. Many other countries too have so-called “golden visa” programs, including Greece, Portugal, Spain, Canda, and most Caribbean Island nations. But while my wife and I are comfortable, we are not golden. So, other than the U.K., the only plausible destination for us was Romania. One of my grandmothers, Bess Berkowitz, was a Romanian Jew – born in Iași, in 1890. (At the time, the city had a population of about 90,000, half of which was Jewish. Today there are only about 300 Jews in the city.) That would have been basis enough for us to emigrate and obtain citizenship. If we moved to Iași, or perhaps picturesque Sibiu, the oldest city in Transylvania, we’d have full access to EU citizenship and could move to my preferred Netherlands or Finland. Prospective migrants to Romania beware, however: politics there are turning sour. The far-right, crypto-fascist Calin Georgescu finished first in the recent presidential election; he’s favored in the upcoming runoff.

Even migration to the U.K. for someone with a close family tie is challenging and expensive. Application for “Permission to Remain” costs about $2,500. Then there is the mandatory Immigration Health Surcharge – basically access to the NHS – another $4,500. If you need legal help with all this (and you will) that’s $1,000 at least. Those costs only cover you for the first 33 months; after that, you must do it all again, before applying for citizenship – that’s $2,000 more, plus legal costs. The online U.K. migration application site is notoriously balky – it was long ago privatized by the Tories; it made us pay twice and then apply for a refund. Finally, before naturalization, you must pass a UK citizenship test. Here’s three sample questions (and answers):

Who was the tribal leader who fought against the Romans? (Boudicca)

The Scottish Parliament made Roman Catholic service illegal in which year? (1560)

What flower is associated with Wales? (Daffodil)

I missed all three, but if you are over 65, like me, you don’t have to take the test. I don’t know if the rationale is that older people are ineducable or beyond assimilation.

Then there is the cost of moving itself. If you have an average sized household of goods, transport to the U.K. from the east coast of the U.S. is at least $15,000. I own a bunch of art and a lot of books (as do most professors of art history), so that added another $5,000 or so. On top of all that, we needed a car in the U.K. to visit parents and kids – another $25,000. Then, there is the matter of real estate.

“The Hunt”

Harriet’s family members in the U.K. are like billiard balls scattered by a break; her elderly parents, Sally and Michael, live on the North Norfolk coast; her brother Simon, is in London; one daughter, Daisy, lives in Brighton on the English Channel, and a second daughter, Molly, far to the west on the island of Anglesey in Wales. We therefore decided to cast a wide net in our search for a new home. My online quest became an obsession – real estate porn is a recognized addiction — but it was only when we hit the road in a rented Vauxhall saloon (sedan) that we got serious. In the spirit of the New York Times popular real estate column, The Hunt, I’ll share three of our favorite houses, and let you decide which we chose. Our budget limit at the time (2017) was about 300,000 GBP ($380,000). Today, the same house would cost about 425,000 GBP.

A cottage in the Shropshire hills

The first house we liked was a secluded, three-bedroom cottage near Brockton, close to the Welsh border. Named Hampton Lodge, it was architect designed and set on a slope with views of the Shropshire Hills. The sales brochure accurately described a “burbling brook” dissecting the woodland across the road. The interior of the house had vaulted ceilings held up by bleached oak beams, a kitchen with a giant, Aga stove that heated the adjacent dining room, and a wood burner in the living room. This would be an ideal place, I thought, to grow old and think about the foolishness of youth. I’d imagine I was raised a Shropshire lad.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

(A.E. Houseman, A Shropshire Lad, 1896).

Because of its remoteness, the house was surprisingly cheap, but Harriet noticed there wasn’t much level terrain to plant a garden. In addition, the nearest significant town, Shrewsbury was almost 20 miles away via a narrow and twisting road that often saw snow in winter. The closest pub was five miles distant.

A quaint cottage on three acres (with sheep)

The next candidate was a small, 17^th C white-washed farmhouse on a hill in Wales with an ocean view. To pronounce or understand its name and address would require a course in the Welsh language: Fferm Buarth, Lôn y Buarth, Upper Llandwrog, Caernarfon. It had walls two feet thick, a slate roof, stone floors, and plenty of land – three acres with grazing sheep. But an American and an Englishwoman would have been unwelcome intruders in an insular, Welsh farming village. Our intention was to deliver the sheep to a sanctuary (along with a retirement annuity), and re-wild the land.

A beached ocean liner in St. Leonards-on-Sea

Thinking we might have gotten things wrong way around, we considered whether the safest bet for a happy, self-imposed exile was urban. First, we looked at a one-bedroom, Victorian-era flat in Battersea in London, but it was dark, depressing, noisy and above our budget. Giving up on London, we headed south to the harbor and resort town of St. Leonards-on-Sea, where we found an inexpensive two-bedroom flat in the famous Marine Court apartments. The massive, Art Deco building, which was inspired by the ocean liner, the Queen Mary, dominates the waterfront. When it was completed in 1938, it was, at 14-storys, the largest apartment block in the U.K. The flat we were considering had preserved Moderne details, including metal casement windows, portholes, and a galley kitchen. It also had a west-facing wrap-around balcony like the promenade deck of an ocean liner. We could watch the sunset from the ship’s prow.

Marine Court was never a commercial success. A year after it opened, the war started, and fashionable design felt unpatriotic. For a while, RAF fliers were billeted there. That may have been the reason it was targeted by the German Luftwaffe on May 23, 1943. The raid killed Ethel Twist, age 28, who was visiting Marine Court’s two-story night club that night. Was a big band playing “We’ll Meet Again” when the bomb landed? In the 1960s and early 70s, the same club saw performances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and David Bowie among others. Did Bowie sing Kurt Weil’s “Alabama Song?” (1978). Today, Marine Court is under almost constant restoration and repair, and monthly maintenance fees are therefore high.

What did we buy?

We rejected the Shropshire cottage and Welsh sheep farm because they were simply too remote from the family billiard balls – at least a five-hour drive to any of them. We almost bought the historic Marine Court apartment but didn’t because of a “Gift of the Magi” misunderstanding. After a second showing of the flat, Harriet and I retreated to a nearby pub to decide. Careful not to prejudice each other, we discretely wrote down our decisions on folded pieces of paper and opened them at the same time. I wrote “yes” and Harriet wrote “no.” I immediately acceded to her choice. Only months later did we exchange the information that I wrote “yes” because it’s what I thought she wanted; and she wrote “no” because it’s what she thought I wanted. In fact, we both wanted to buy the place!

By that time, however, it was clear that Donald Trump’s incompetence, combined with Democrats retaking the House in the 2018 midterm elections (the “blue wave”) meant that our worst fears of an emergent American fascism were premature. On a whim, we bought a one-acre lot in the town of Micanopy (pop. 650) in north-central Florida, and built a small, modern house surrounded by a garden with native plants. (It was cheaper than any of the houses we looked at in the U.K.) Our pond attracted passing alligators and tortoises; our small lawn was a landing strip for sandhill cranes. For the next five years, we cherished “the idiocy of rural life” – gardening, attending Town Commission meetings, having lunch among the tourists at Coffee and Cream, and trying to avert our gazes from the rightward slide of state politics — though I bought a shotgun and kept loaded, under my bed, just in case. I later sold it to a cheerful young man with a beard who said he had a wife, four children and five other guns, but no shotgun.

In 2018, Florida was a purple state with competitive elections, an increasingly diverse population, and a top university system. Cities and town enjoyed considerable local autonomy — freedom to pass laws more liberal or more restrictive than state legislation. And of course, abortion was legal. But after the election of Ron DeSantis in 2018, and the onset of the pandemic two years later, there came into the state a flood of conservative retirees from the Midwest and East, plus young libertarians seeking a mask and vaccine-free sanctuary. I recall our gentle friend and sometimes gardener Shawn (aka Bubba) telling us about the marijuana and ayahuasca fueled gatherings he attended in which unemployed and uninsured young men — self-styled entrepreneurs – sat around campfires getting stoned and bemoaning the heavy hand of the bureaucratic state. How dare it mandate masks, close schools, and shutter bars? This was at a time when as many as 400 Covid deaths per day were being reported in Florida.

It was then that Governor DeSantis, formerly the state’s self-appointed Covid czar, became its anti-mask liberator. “Floridians,” he might have exclaimed, “you have nothing to lose but your masks!” Upon this crusade, he piggybacked his “war on woke” (empowerment of bigots), shuttering whole university departments and transforming New Collage, a highly regarded liberal arts institution in Sarasota, into a bastion of Christian nationalism. Then came the raft of obnoxious laws – “don’t say gay”, school library restrictions, anti-trans legislation, and the six-week abortion ban. In addition, the state legislature in Tallahassee began to restrict home rule. Liberal Alachua County, home of the 60,000 student University of Florida campus in Gainesville, was politically hamstrung. In nearby Micanopy, we couldn’t even legally pass an ordinance protecting our ancient trees.

Day-to-day life in Micanopy wasn’t obviously impacted by the reactionary turn in state politics. If anything, our town was a sanctuary for odd bits and misfits. Surrounded by thousands of acres of state or county nature refuges, it was easy to forget there was a state or federal government at all. Businesses in the historic downtown continued to muddle along – supported by the tourist trade – and the live oaks still draped Spanish moss over cracked asphalt and dirt roads. Our house too was a refuge – a two-bedroom glass box nestled in a one-acre, native garden. But however gilded your surroundings, rot still stinks. My neighbor’s permanent Trump banner, Gadsden flag (”don’t tread on me”) and state flag drove me to distraction. The Florida banner, with its diagonal red saltire, increasingly resembled to my eye, the similar Confederate flag. In all places where the latter would have been flown, the former now waved. Though we had a small grove of orange trees on our property, it wasn’t any longer their sweetness I tasted in the air; instead it was the rank smell of a blossoming hatred: toward queers, liberals, Blacks, immigrants, Jews and women.

By late 2023, the “trump of doomsday”, to quote Housman again, was impossible to deny. Anxiety about the coming presidential election, combined with my parents-in-law’s increasing frailty, persuaded us that emigration was the best choice after all. Less than a year later, we settled on a new flat in the cathedral city of Norwich, just 35 miles from Harriet’s parents in Burnham-Overy-Staithe. I wrote a bit about Norwich in an earlier essay, and will return to it in a later column. Let me just say for now, that I’m doing my best to become an Englishman, but I hope without chauvinism.

For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
Or perhaps Itali-an!
Or perhaps Itali-an!

For in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!
He remains an Englishman!

(Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore, 1878)

I recently bought a waxed, Barbour jacket to protect against the cold and damp, and a newsboy cap, though I refuse to wear Wellington boots (Wellies”) for walking through muddy fields. I still prefer coffee, but tea is growing on me. I like Marmite, crumpets and (vegan) sausage rolls. I have yet to try a “chip butty” (a sandwich made of French fries and butter between slices of white bread), but what’s not to like? I’m a regular listener of BBC4 and enjoy The Archers, a radio soap that has the distinction of being the world’s longest running drama – more than 20,000 episodes since 1951. I’ve been trying to master British words and idioms. On the road, there are lorries, boots, kerbs, drives, car parks, and lay-bys. In the market, there’s aubergine, rocket, courgette, and swede, and in the caffs, bangers, chips, crisps, and baps. (The last term also means women’s breasts – pay attention to context!) In the bedroom, you remove your pants or knickers to expose johnnies and fannies, and if all goes well, have a shag. Much of this is working-class slang, which I would never, ever attempt in public, though it is hard to resist words like gobsmacked, shite, knackered, wanker, and the two essential b’s: bloody and bollocks.

Norwich, I have discovered, is a congenial place for retired academics. There’s an outstanding uni, the University of East Anglia, which like everything else of quality in the U.K., is badly underfunded. There are also art museums, bookshops, coffee houses and many, many pubs. I have visited the local NHS surgery (no surgeries are performed in a surgery) on several occasions and found them kind and caring. But forced economies create peculiar policies. For example, NHS patients are more of less limited to one ailment per visit. Have a rash? That’s fine, but the nurse (rarely a doctor) won’t look at it if your appointment was for a raspy throat. Sore shoulder? Ok, but the specialist can’t examine it and your bad knee at the same time – you’ll need to make another appointment. The new Labor government says it’s going to fix the NEH – some of its hospitals are literally crumbling – but are disinclined to spend anything close to the money required. That would entail new taxes on the rich, and the investor class simply will not have it.

William Cobbet’s description of England in Rural Rides (1822), “rich land, poor people” is as true now as 200 years ago. Nearly 30% of children live in poverty. Incomes of the poor continue to fall and those of the rich to rise. The statistics are slightly better in the U.S., but the poverty threshold is lower. The U.K. appears for the moment to be trepidatiously edging away from fascism, not rushing towards it. So, for at least the time being, I’m glad to be where I am. If things go as Trump plans, I can expect to have some new, American neighbors.

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