Aged five and a quarter, I was facing a conundrum. One term into my British school, where I knew everybody, I was moving thousands of miles across the world to the US, where I knew nobody. The school year was already well under way, which meant everyone would already have made friends with someone who wasn’t the weird expat kid. My odds of fitting in were, to put it mildly, not great.
And so I took action. When school started, I kept quiet as I furiously learned how to speak just like the American kids – to say “flashlight” and “trunk”, “buddon” instead of button, use round northwestern vowels, and uptalk. By the beginning of first grade, I sounded just like everyone else. Unfortunately, with the baffling logic of the under-10s, I had decided that my parents would feel betrayed if I lost my English accent. On top of that, we’d be moving home in a few years’ time – if I sounded American, I’d be the odd one out all over again. So I landed on my genius plan: I’d be Yankee at school and English at home, and neither side would be any the wiser.
