I was interested to read that around 10,000 British people were stuck in New York City when their flights were cancelled during the recent storm, so I guess that many New Yorkers must be used to meeting visitors from the United Kingdom these days, which certainly was not the case when I first visited the USA during the mid 1970’s. 

I arrived in ‘The Big Apple’, on business, just prior to the start of cheap flights across the Atlantic being introduced by Freddie Laker with his ‘no frills’ .. ‘Skytrain’. Prior to this time, visiting the USA as a tourist was not within most people’s budgets, so meeting a Brit must have been a bit of a surprise for most Americans.

I don’t know what they made of me, but I ‘warmed’ to my American cousins immediately, when a pretty young immigration lady looked at my passport and said … “Gee ! you don’t look that old”.

I think that the bloke in the car rental parking lot must have thought that I was some kind of nut when I asked him how I turned on the lights as I sat behind the steering wheel and looked at what seemed to me to be the controls of ‘The Starship Enterprise’. I soon learned that it was not only the cars that were big in America when I ordered my first ‘deli’ sandwich.

Now having been brought up on Hollywood films I was used to listening to the stars of the “silver screen”, and so understood everything that was said to me, whether I was in a diner or at a subway station. The problem was that no bugger understood a word that I said ! … Oh ! that is apart from two old black guys who I met in a bar, and who both had fond memories of being GI’s in London during WW2. I won’t go into details !

“Beg pardon ?” … was the reply I received almost every time that I opened my mouth; but strangely enough people still wanted to hear me speak, which was great when it came to arranging business meetings because I only had to say a few words on the ‘phone and I got a .. “come on up buddy” .. and a .. “look forward to talking to you”.

“Hey ! you talk like they do in the movies” .. and .. “Gee ! you sound like Michael Caine” .. were just some of the comments that came my way when my “blow the bloody doors off” accent was heard on the streets of Manhatten: and then something very strange happened …

I met a man who never said “Beg pardon ?” when I nervously asked him for directions.

He was a cop, and I had been warned that police officers in that part of the world were not, shall we say, quite as ‘friendly’ as our British ‘bobbies’.

Well, I won’t bore you with all the details of that day, but my meeting with the cop ended later that evening with me having a splendid dinner with his wife and family, and it was then that I found out why he never had any problem in understanding me, for he had been posted to the UK when in the US Air Force and had married a girl from Scotland.

In later years I travelled to other parts of the United States as a tourist and I still met with a “Beg pardon ?” here and there, and a “I doo no unerstan yoo” from a señorita or two, but the one response to my accent that always made me smile was …

… “You ain’t from around here, are ya ?”     🙂