By the time I’d been down and nearly out in London for four or five months I was rejected everywhere I applied for employment. Indeed, my lifelong talent for harvesting rejections in the face of all odds took wing during my year in London. Job hunting went from ludicrous to impossible. When I complained, my landlord pointed out that I dressed like an out-of-work 1920s-era socialist: baggy corduroys, faded tunic, and scuffed boots, and that this would inevitably dim my luster, except possibly at auditions for working-class plays in Lancashire. So I borrowed a suit and locked myself in my laundry room and wrote, not powerful fiction, nor even feeble fiction, but fiction nonetheless: a resume, which I then circulated to universities, publishing firms, newspapers, comprehensive schools, department stores, brewing companies, pubs, London Transport, and Securicor, a security service. Days and weeks hobbled by and I eked out my beer and curries with the odd loan and die-hard French tutorial. And then I heard back from Securicor: I fit the security guard’s profile and uniform admirably. I was burly enough without being obese, educated without being too much of a ponce; I had no criminal record, nor any outstanding debts (well, I didn’t confess to any) and overall I was in pretty fair nick, considering: in fact, I was just about ideal for the job. The relief was like the sun breaking through heavy clouds. I celebrated at the Onslow and envisioned moving out of the laundry room into a room of my own.

             Then, at the last minute, the day before I was due to pick up my uniform and report to a lock-up storage unit near Heathrow, I was summoned to Securicor HQ and turned down in an atmosphere of considerable bitterness on both sides. It had apparently emerged (after a cursory go-through of documents for the Home Office johnnies) that I wasn’t actually a U.K. citizen, nor even one of the European Community, not even Ireland. I was, to put it bluntly, a Yank. They accused me of misrepresenting myself and threatened jail or a lawsuit. I protested. But I don’t consider myself a Yank, I said. Balls, said they. A Yank’s a Yank. Yet in all fairness I barely remembered my citizenship, after a lifetime spent in Europe and four-plus years as a kind of student at two different universities in two nations of the United Kingdom. By language, inclination, culture and taste I’d blended in with the British mainstream, much as I’d become virtually Swiss after ten years in Geneva, only to be coldly told at the end of it that I was…yes…an American. Never did the unfairness of allocating citizenship based on circumstances of birth and parentage become more evident. But it was an insurmountable fact of life: I, who was more European than most Europeans, being at home in three or four different cultures and countries, was really an American and therefore less of a European than, say, a Finn, and quite unemployable, thank you very much, barring intervention from high-level sources. But I had no high-level sources to draw on, or none that would extend a helping hand. It was time to move on, again.