If Nigel Farage forms the next UK government and adopts the immigration policies of his hero Donald J. Trump, I am well and truly fucked. Having been born in Britain of a British man and a Dutch woman, I’d been thinking that I’d be safe from any government purge of the impure. The latest assessment of my DNA suggests that I am on my way out.
One of Farage’s Reform Party UK Ltd MPs Sue-Ellen Braverman, who calls herself Suella Braverman, presumably because Sue-Ellen makes her sound like an alcohol-soaked character from yesterday’s TV soap Dallas (one for the teenagers, there), thinks no one can be British unless they are pure and have no foreign bloodlines at all. She includes herself in this. The even more right-wing Rupert Lowe, who runs the actual fascist leaning Restore UK party, refuses to call the actual King – that’ll be Charles the third – British because his old man, Prince Phillip, was born in Greece. I shall be packing my bags tomorrow.
My ancestry is complicated by the fact that my late dad, one Anthony Johansen, was the son of a Norwegian migrant. His father Alfred and much of the rest of his family came over here by boat – I am not sure if it was a small boat, but I don’t think there were that many big boats around at the turn of the 20th century – settled in Portishead, near Bristol, opening the Mustad Nail Factory. Alfred married a local Somerset girl, Nellie Ladd, producing my dad back in the year of our Lord 1929. When Anthony met Neeltje Verburg in Rotterdam sometime in the early 1950s any bloodline they produced was bound to be complicated. But not anywhere near as complicated as it is today.
Obviously, my DNA was settled a long time ago – it’s hardly going to evolve in real time, is it? – but knowing the precise details does seem to be more of a moveable feast. On the simple timeline of who was born where, I have long considered myself to be half Dutch, a quarter English and a quarter Norwegian. But here’s where the DNA comes from:
- The Netherlands: 31%
- Norway: 30%
- England:19% (Divided up as follows: Southeastern England 10%, Devon and Somerset 8%, Cornwall 1%)
- Belgium: 12%
- Northwestern Germany: 7%
- Bavaria and Western Austria: 1%
Much of this is news to me. The references to Belgium, Bavaria and Western Austria, Southeastern England and Cornwall are right out of left field (or left out of right field). Previously, part of my ancestry was from Germania, covering a large area of Northern Europe. I’d assumed it was an unspecific description of my Dutch heritage, but no, that’s impure, too. I am, as many of you already know, all over the place.
While Messrs Farage, Lowe and other assorted fascists may have an issue with my non-Britishness, it’s not something that concerns me. I quite like being a big of a mongrel, a crossbreed, if you will. There’s a bit of warm beer and old ladies cycling to communion about me, as well as a far bigger whack of Viking and clogs, not to mention the possibility of being a distant relative of Adolf Hitler. Come to think about it, perhaps my chances of being deported would be reduced if I could prove to Farage and Lowe that Hitler was actually a family member? I might try that one out if Farage’s version of ICE comes knocking on my door.
Am I proud to be British/English, Norwegian, Dutch, Belgian, German and Austrian? Well, how could I be? It’s not as if I had any say in the matter, is it? The only reason I am here at all is the same reason you are here: by the accident of my birth, defying odds of one in four hundred billion to be born at all. I just have all these varying bits of DNA.
Being born in England and living here makes me feel English, despite the 81% of my DNA that’s not English. I’m Bristolian, despite having little or no Bristolian DNA. But does any of this stuff matter? I very much doubt it.
If we are looking for purity, quite a few of us would be in bother, I suspect, but frankly, why should we be? I don’t feel any less of an Englishman because so little of me is English. I rather like the widely spread aspects of my DNA even though it feels a bit mad since I have never been to some of the places my forefathers (and foremothers?) came from. I’ve never been to Germany, Austria or, you might think more significantly, Norway but I quite like the idea that there are people in these places who may be distant relatives.
I’m pretty confident that most people couldn’t care less about racial, or even just DNA, purity and that anyway they would never elect a government that would pursue purity in the way that One Ball Adolf did in World War Two.
I doubt that my grandparents, and maybe at least one parent, my mum, had the vaguest idea their past was scattered so widely. But it’s been fun to find out. Sue-Ellen Braverman won’t count me as English or British, but that’s her problem, not mine. I think you are what you feel and that’s it. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
The header picture is Gjovic, the land of my grandfather’s.
