Interview with Kay Hodsdon
Introduction
Coming into this class, I had no idea what to expect as I have never really been thoroughly educated on the topic of immigration in the United States. From learning about the integration of immigrants to migration and emigration, and learning about different processes such as assimilation and naturalization, this class has been a whirlwind of new information that has ultimately swept me off my feet. The unique aspect about immigration is that it is something that occurs in every single state, every single city, and even every single town. Immigration is a huge factor that contributes to the population growth in the United States and also has a huge impact on the different cultural changes that occur all through out the United States. That being said, when Professor Trouille first introduced the class this project, I was super excited to be able to conduct an interview with the perfect candidate, my grandmother. Born in England, the experiences that she encountered while immigrating to the United States were unique and they shaped her into becoming the culturally diverse person that she is today. The different customs and traditions that she brought over to the United States have made an impact on my families lifestyle in many different ways. I am very grateful that I was able to interview her.
My grandparents on their wedding day in 1958 at the Westminster Cathedral in London, England.
Summary and Analysis
My grandmother, Catherine Hodsdon, goes by the name of Kay. She was born and raised in London, England at the beginning of World War II. Her process of immigration was rather unique as she immigrated from England to Canada, and then from Canada to the United States. She got married in 1958 to my grandfather at the Westminster Cathedral that is located in the heart of London. Two years later, she had my mother, Christine Hodsdon, in 1960. Four years later, in 1964, she had a second daughter, who is known as my aunt Jackie. In 1965, my grandmother and grandfather made the big decision of moving to Canada. They moved to Canada because my grandfather’s brother had moved there a couple years prior. He was having such a good time in Canada that he encouraged my grandfather to move there with him, so they did. They moved to Montreal, Canada and stayed there for about four years before moving to the United States. They wanted to move to the United States because of the harsh, cold weather that Canada had, and they weren’t a fan of it. My grandmother wanted to move down south in hopes of having warmer weather, so my grandfather started looking for a job in the states before making the move. They applied for a visa, and at that time the visa process required that one person must have a job offer in writing from the United States. My grandfather was and still is an engineer, and he was offered a job in Lynchburg, Virginia. He took the job and moved down to Virginia, which is how they ended up here. They have been here ever since and have happily been able to raise a family here. When they got to the United States, both of their daughters were just little children so they had to be put into grade school. My grandmother did not get a job the first year she lived here because she wanted to get the kids acclimated and she wanted to get acclimated herself to the new environment and people that surrounded her. After a year, she applied for a job at a hospital nearby and worked at one of the desks in the hospital. She explains the different experiences that she encountered at her job, (which I will mention in another section) and goes on to explain that my grandfather had a fine time adjusting to his job as well.
Differences in the United States
During the interview, my grandmother explains a whole lot of differences that she encountered in England and Canada compared to United States. As a whole, she explains that all three countries are not too different culturally, but some of the differences lie within things like the traditions and customs. When she first arrived to the United States, she explains that it was in October with Halloween right around the corner. In Britain, they did not celebrate Halloween the same way that they did in the United States so they were very confused on what was going on when children started running up to their apartment and ringing the doorbell. She talks about the differences between the workforce in England and Europe compared to the United States. She mentions that the work weeks in the United States are significantly longer than the work weeks back in England. People back in England work about 3-4 days a week mean while in the United States, the work week is typically about 5 days. She explains that the vacation time in England is much more longer for individuals as compared to the United States. England’s workforce allows around 6 weeks routinely a year for people to take off work for vacation time, as opposed to the United States who start off with a couple weeks and then the longer you work there, the more time you are able to take off for vacation. She talks about the differences in her everyday life, including the grocery stores and how she actually had a laundromat located in her apartment complex which is something she didn’t have back in England. The grocery store’s here in the United States typically bag your groceries for you, which is something that does not happen back in England. She mentions that the money systems in England, Canada and the United States are all different so she had to get accustomed to each different money that was used. She want from using sterling pound chillings, to decimal coinage. She explains that the school systems are much different in the United States as compared to Canada and London. The school weeks are much shorter here, and in London they did not have school buses because of the heavy amount of traffic. Different customs like how restaurants typically give children a high chair to sit in and a coloring book with crayons is something that happens often here in the United States that she mentions was very convenient while having two little children. There is none of that in England, which really peaked my interest because I thought that was a universal thing that happened. She explains that when she moved into her apartment in the United States, having a central heating system and a dishwasher was really convenient. I had absolutely no idea that these were things that were non-existent in England, so this was all very interesting to learn about. The political system here in the United States was very different she mentions compared to Canada and England. She said one of her favorite things she has been able to do since she’s moved here is have the right to be able to vote. The differences in the actual area’s was a huge thing that she had to adjust too. She explains how in England, on every side of you the ocean is only about 70 miles away, but in Virginia it is not like that as the coastline is so far away. In canada, the distance system was a hardship for her to get accustomed to, because she mentions that the uses the metric system meanwhile we use the imperial system. All of these differences were just something that provided her with the experience of what it is like immigrating to another country.
Assimilation and Integration
In class, we discussed the process of assimilation as being a process by which people adopt the mannerisms and behaviors of native-born residents. The process of assimilation I’d like to point out was something that my grandmother experiences very heavily while moving to the United States. This also goes the same for the process of integration, which both of my grandparents did both politically and economically. Typically, immigrants come to the United States with a different language and not knowing how to speak English. Even though my grandmother had an accent, that was something that she did not have to assimilate herself to. I thought it was interesting in class while learning about assimilation that immigrants tend to commit less crimes than native born citizens do. This makes sense after interviewing my grandmother and realizing just how different the United States is from other countries, and how much higher our crime rate is. During the interview, my grandmother explains the different experiences she had that she eventually assimilated into the United States. When she first started her job working behind the desk at the hospital, she noticed that the spelling was different here in the United States when it came to words such as “labor” and “color”. She grew up adding the letter “u” to those words, like “labour” and “colour”. Spelling here in the united states was one of the processes that she had to assimilate to. When she went to the gas station, she would call it “petrol” instead of gas, and said she would get funny looks when she used the term “petrol”. When she was living in Montreal, she explains that all the road signs were written in French, so she had to learn what each road sign meant and had struggled doing so, but she says she would not change it for the world as it helped her learn and understand her french a lot better. The political system, imperial road system, and money system were all examples of systems that she had to learn how to do once she moved to the United States. Overtime, she was able to learn all of these different things and she was able to become culturally assimilated to the American traditions.
My grandparents on their 60th wedding anniversary with the same picture above given to them as a gift!
Conclusion
Surely, my grandmother now identifies as your average American, just with a british accent! Since moving here sixty years ago, she has been able to become accustomed to all of the different kinds of traditions that we experience here in the United States. Her being from England has even changed the way I experience different traditions as an American. For example, Christmas in England is celebrated the day after Christmas in the United States. We call it “Boxing Day” and as a family we celebrate it every year, and I have been celebrating it ever since I was a little girl. Even though I am born in America, part of my culture is being half British and I do celebrate some of the customs and holidays that are involved with Britain. Currently, both of my grandparents, mother and aunt all retain dual citizenship in both the United States and England. To conclude the interview, I go on to ask my grandmother if she has any regrets about moving to the United States, and she says absolutely not as she believes that America has a much higher standard of living. She is very happy that her grandchildren are able to experience life in the United States as she believes there are a lot more opportunities regarding education and the workforce. I am very grateful that I was able to interview my grandmother and learn all of this interesting information about what her process was like moving here to the United States. I learned a lot as a result of this interview and I am happy to say that I love being half british!
Interview with my Grandma: English
By: Maggie Aveson
Speaker 1 [00:00:01] All right. So today I will be interviewing my grandmother, who is from England. And here she is.
Speaker 2 [00:00:09] Hi, my name is Catherine Hodsdon. I’m known as Kay, and I was born and raised in England at the beginning of World War Two. So that makes me in my eighties. So I may not be very fast to answer all the questions. I’m looking forward to working with Maggie on this project. So, Maggie, go ahead and tell me your first question.
Speaker 1 [00:00:36] All right, Grandma. So tell me about what your process was like coming to the United States.
Speaker 2 [00:00:43] Okay. Well, my husband and I were in our mid-twenties and we had two little girls at that time. We lived just outside London and my husband’s brother emigrated to Canada. And he was having such a great time and really encouraging us to leave England at the time. We thought it might be a fun thing to do and an interesting thing to do. So we applied for passage to Canada and we immigrated there and arrived in 1965. We stayed in Canada four years and we were in Montreal and it was absolutely freezing. We really couldn’t stand the bad weather. So we started to look at coming further south in order to go on with our relationship with North America. My husband’s an engineer, and so he applied to some companies in the United States, and he was offered a job here in Lynchburg, Virginia. At the time, when we applied, we went through a question and answer process and then an interview. We took a medical and after several months we were issued a visa that we had to use within six months. And one of the things that the visa needed was we had to have the offer of a job in writing from an American company. And we got that. And we used the visa within six months as we as we had to do. And then we came down to Lynchburg, Virginia, and my husband started work then.
Speaker 1 [00:02:48] Okay. So what would you say you and grandad’s main reason was for moving to the United States?
Speaker 2 [00:02:58] Well, as I say, we did not like the really cold weather. Although, I must say, we loved living in Canada. There were lots of British people up there, so in many ways it was just like being at home. I’d gotten over my homesickness by that time. I was very homesick when I first went to Canada. But after four years, it was exciting. We had never intended to be away from England for more than two years. At the beginning it was very much, “We’ll for two years and we’ll see what it’s like and then we’ll go home” and somehow rather that that never happened. So we applied for a visa, as I say. Did finally get one after the interview processes and the medical and I guess everything checked out on the US side and my husband got the job offer, and thats when we came here. Now, it was very strange to come to a small city after living in Montreal and London, but it took a while to adapt. And we’ve been here ever since.
Speaker 1 [00:04:19] Okay. So in your opinion, what was it like trying to obtain a job here in the United States once you actually got here?
Speaker 2 [00:04:31] Well, Granddad had to have one already. That was part of the visa process. And he could not take the job that the company could prove that an American could do better. And the thing was that the company that he went to, they had advertised for engineers and haven’t been able to get them within the US. So they expanded out and to other places. And at that time, the US operated on a quota system for people coming into the US as immigrants. And Britain never, ever filled their requirements. But that was something that we had to do. We had to fit in with that visa requirement. And we did, and we came south here, and my husband fitted in to his job very easily. He was knowledgeable and could do the work so he did very well. For the first year, I didn’t go to work. Your mum and your aunt Jackie were actually in grade school and it was only because, once you were in school, I was alone all day and I knew nobody. So I applied for work and I found it really quite easy to get an office job. And that’s what I did. I went to work for one of the local hospitals, but in there offices, not as a nurse or anything like that.
Speaker 1 [00:06:30] Uh huh. Okay. So once you got that job as a nurse here, can you tell me about like the differences in, like, customs that you notice from like England to America, like anything different that you had to do?
Speaker 2 [00:06:52] Sure. Well, as far as work went and I was not a nurse, I was in the offices. I think one of the very first things I had to do was change the way I did my spelling. In England, we put U’s in a lot of words and I was in the human resources department at the hospital, so I had to learn things like “labor” and “color” and not put U’s in them because otherwise it just looked like spelling error but it was natural for me. I’d say people were very kind. They were very interested in where I’d come from and what my life had been like in both England and Canada. And they welcomed me very much. The officers were more streamlined and forward-thinking then they’d been in England because I hadn’t worked for several years. And so things like electric typewriters and Xerox machines, I had to really learn how to use them from scratch. But everybody was very kind and I found that the English accent that I had went a long way. People just love to hear me talk and I’ve never had much trouble doing that as you know.
Speaker 1 [00:08:33] Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s really interesting. So what are the cultural differences you experienced in the United States compared to England and Canada?
Speaker 2 [00:08:46] Well. I think some of the things and at the time, as I say, I wasn’t working and I was a mother at home with two little children and so many of the differences that I found were to do with my day to day life. It was lovely to go into a grocery store and have somebody bag my groceries for me in England, you bag your own groceries and that’s not always easy if you’ve got one or two little children around you. Getting used to the money was also a little strange because I’d gone from sterling pound shillings and pence in Britain over to decimal coinage in Canada and then came down to the States. In Canada, all bank notes are green. So when I came down to the States, it was really strange to have different colors for different banknotes. But I kind of got used to that. I loved the big supermarkets because I hadn’t had anything that big. And you’ve got to remember, we’re talking the sixties here. The sixties in the seventies. So it is very different now. What was also very different for me was the school. We used to go to school from 9 to 4 each day and we didn’t have school busses because we were in the middle of London. But when we came here and when we were in Canada, the school days seemed much shorter. It began earlier, but it was finished by about 3 or 3:30. So that was very different. But I always thought it was a really nice place for families because when we used to go to restaurants, very often the restaurant would have like a highchair, and very often they would give your mum and your auntie a picture and a little couple of crayons so that they could color while they were waiting. And you never got anything like that in England at that time. So that was always great that you could actually sit and have a meal and the children would just be coloring and enjoying themselves that way. So things like that. I loved the idea when we were in Canada that the apartment was so warm. England can be a very cold country and at that time our central heating wasn’t good and I spent a lot of time really being cold. So even when I went to Canada with their terrible winters, it was wonderful to have a warm apartment. The snow was something that I had a lot of trouble adapting to. We simply didn’t see snow like that in England in those days. And then when we came down to the US, and we moved into an apartment at the beginning to have things like..oh, gosh, a dishwasher and central heating and everything was absolutely wonderful. And then there was laundry facilities right on the premises, and that made things really easy. So those were the things I always said, it was wonderful for families and for mothers because it made our lives so much easier than it had been.
Speaker 1 [00:12:22] Oh, okay. Well, that’s wow. That’s a lot. That’s interesting. So would you say it was rather easy for you to adapt to a different culture like moving to the United States?
Speaker 2 [00:12:36] I would say so. I think my biggest, one of the biggest things was moving from London to Montreal, which is a French city. So there was a lot of, you know, French road signs when you drove, the signs were in French, the newspapers came in French. And so it was good for me to be able to practice the French I’d learned in school. But I was very homesick at the beginning because I’d left my mother and father and my family 3000 miles away. And of course, your granddad was working all day. So for a while, until I made friends, I was pretty lonely and pretty homesick. But after four years in Canada, when we came down to Virginia, then I’d already kind of got over that and everybody was so welcoming. It was interesting for us to start learning about things like politics, because everything was very different in the US than it is in England. And so there was lots of adjustment. There was adjustment in learning how things are talked about. And for instance, when I went to get gas for my car, I called it a petrol station. And back in those days people used to come and fill the gas tank for you. You didn’t do it yourself. And if I asked for petrol, I’d get some funny looks. And, you know, just the way I say things like I still say “tum-aught-oh” and not “tomato” and I say “buh-nah-nah” and not “banana”, I still can’t say that. So I find that people were always very interested. But it was relatively easy for me to adjust to Virginia because of my four years in Canada. The strangest thing for me was this is the smallest place I’d ever lived. And you can’t drive around London. London just sprawls out for miles and miles and miles and Montreal’s another big city. So this was the first place I’d lived where I could actually drive around the perimeter of it. And there was nothing then except a while away the next place, like Bedford or Charlottesville. But they were separated from their Lynchburg by miles. And that took a lot of my getting used to.
Speaker 1 [00:15:38] Okay. So you would say it was probably easier for you to, like, get accustomed to things from moving from England to Canada to the US as opposed from moving from England straight to the US?
Speaker 2 [00:15:58] Yes, I think that’s I think that’s safe to say. One of the things that really blew my mind at the beginning was the sheer distances. We were in Montreal and my brother in law was in just outside of Toronto. And I think it’s like 400 kilometers. And that was something that was difficult in Canada. I think they did things the “metric” way. So everywhere I saw like how many miles an hour you could drive or how far something was. I had to kind of translate it backwards to work out what it really meant to me, you know, kilometers are shorter than miles. So I had to work that one out. And yes, but it really helped to have those years away from England. And by that time, the urge to go home had abated. You know, it took us a while to settle down here. It was several years. We would go home for vacations and we’d say, “Do we want to live here? Do we want to go back? Do We want to uproot the family and go back to England and make a life there while the children are still small?” And what we found was that we started to feel homesick for the United States, for the jobs that we had, for the houses that we lived in, with the fact that your mom and your auntie Jackie, they’d made friends and they had lives of their own, with school and everything else. And all of a sudden it seemed as though it wasn’t our decision any more it was more of a family decision. So, you know, when we really realized we were going to stay, we did apply for citizenship because we’d come in as landed immigrants and we have a green card, which at that time never expired, but we couldn’t vote, things are different now.. Green cards do expire I believe and there were other ways, but we went ahead and took out our citizenship, and I think that was 1980. So we’ve been Americans for quite a long time now. And matter of fact, we are dual citizens. We are citizens of both Britain and the US. So we all hold dual citizenship because your mom and aunt, and of course Grandad and I were all born in England.
Speaker 1 [00:19:14] Okay. So did you encounter any struggles while trying to move to the United States?
Speaker 2 [00:19:27] Well, no, not struggles as such. But we did have to be very careful to follow the rules. I mean, for instance, you know, when we decided to go ahead and immigrate, we had the interview. We went ahead and I don’t honestly remember where it was. I can’t remember whether we came across the border into the US to be interviewed or whether we went to the embassy in Montreal. I don’t remember which of those we did, but when the visa came through, we knew we had six months to use it. We knew that we had to have the offer of a job in writing for an American company. So we were very careful in that way to follow all the rules. So no, we didn’t have much trouble simply because, as I said earlier, there was a system which allowed for a certain amount of British people to come into the US as immigrants each year and other countries too. But of course we were only concerned with the English part, or the British part of it is what I should say.
Speaker 1 [00:20:53] Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2 [00:20:56] And, you know, your granddad is an engineer and his credentials were great. So he was able to get a good job. Well, he came down for an interview here and then was offered a job and then we all drove down a few weeks later after he accepted the job. So, yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:21:22] Okay. That’s so interesting. This is crazy that I’m actually, like, finding all this stuff out right now during the interview, but, um. So would you say that the United States has different traditions than England and Canada?
Speaker 2 [00:21:43] Well yes, and in for instance, when we came down to the US, when we first went to Canada from England, it was in October and we went into an apartment complex and at the end of October. It was Halloween. And all evening our doorbell in our apartment went… we had no idea how Halloween was celebrated. I believe it is now, but certainly back in the sixties it was not celebrated like that in Britain. So we had no idea what was going on. When we came down here and as your mum grew up, when she got to be 16 or however old.. 15, she wanted to start driving. We were like.. we just don’t drive that early. There were things like proms, which we never heard of. We never knew what that was. That was all new to us. And there were a lot of things that were, I cant remember too many off the top of my head, certainly the working week here, is much longer than England and Europe. We will work 40 hours a week and did all our working lives in Britain. Even when we left, people were only doing 37 and a half hours and many of them now only do a three or four day week. Vacations are much longer, holidays as we used to call them. When we first came to the US, we got two weeks holiday and after five years you got three weeks and it did go up the longer you stayed. But in England, routinely, companies offered six weeks holiday a year.
Speaker 1 [00:24:00] Uh huh.
Speaker 2 [00:24:01] Now not all at one time. But you’d get like two weeks at Christmas and four weeks in the summer. The vacation system is much more lenient over there than it is here. I think Americans work very hard.
Speaker 1 [00:24:20] Uh huh. Okay. Um, do you think it was hard at all since Mom and Jackie moved here at like a younger age, do you think they had any struggles?
Speaker 2 [00:24:41] Jackie didn’t because she was so young. I’m not sure about your mum because she came with the British accent, and I’m not sure that she wasn’t teased maybe about the way she spoke. I don’t remember her ever being upset about it, but I know that when granddad and I went to work, people were fascinated by the way we spoke and would say to us you know, “Oh, say something for me” and they would want to talk to us. I’m not sure whether the children did that. Jackie was going into kindergarten, so your mum would have been in like third or fourth grade. And I believe she was. Well. Not ahead but in line from what she learned in Canada with what she’d learned here. So I don’t think she was ahead of anybody. But I don’t think she was behind either. But it’s hard for me, you’d almost have to ask her the answer to that question. But I don’t remember ever her being upset about fitting in.
Speaker 1 [00:26:12] Okay. All right. Well, yeah, I just figured I’d ask that because I didn’t know if, like, age was a factor. I know you and Grandad moved here when, like, y’all were adults, but I didn’t know about them. But I definitely should probably ask her that.
Speaker 2 [00:26:27] And also, this is what I meant earlier on when I said decisions about whether we were going to move back to England or stay in the US and it became a family question because when children are little, when they were little, we took them to Canada and Jackie was only a year, just over a year old, and your mom was about five. They didn’t really have any choice. You know, they just came with us because that’s where we went. But when we’ve been here a few years and they had their friends and their hobbies and, you know, they were both on the swim team and they both did various other things. You know, it was like, do you want to go back to England? But by that time, they barely remembered England and this was home, especially once we moved out of the apartment, and into a house, then that really felt like home.
Speaker 1 [00:27:32] Okay. And I don’t know if you’ve already mentioned this, but when you moved to the United States, what family did you still have back in England and Canada?
Speaker 2 [00:27:46] Okay. I had my mother and father still in England and granddad’s mother and father was still in England. My sister at that time was still in England. But dad’s brother and his wife and your two cousins, they were living in Toronto. And then about six months after we moved to Canada, my sister and her husband also moved to Canada but where we were in Montreal, they were in Ottawa. And then your Uncle George and Aunty Barbara, they were in Toronto. And so there’s a long way between each of those cities. And that was one of the things that we found very difficult, was that we just didn’t, that the distances were so incredible that we just took us a while to adjust. You know, in England, you can never be further than 75 miles from the ocean or from the sea, and that was really strange to move to somewhere like Virginia. Who even though we’ve got a coastline, it’s a good couple of hundred miles away. And that was really strange for us.
Speaker 1 [00:29:13] Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2 [00:29:19] And will say, one of the things that was very different in Virginia than England was how hot it gets in the summer. Then again, global warming now has made all the climates of all the countries really crazy. But back then, we never, ever knew anything like 90 degrees. It just never happened. And so the heat of Virginia was something that we found very difficult to get used to.
Speaker 1 [00:29:59] Uh huh. Okay. All right. Well, we got the final question here.
Speaker 2 [00:30:08] Okay.
Speaker 1 [00:30:08] Do you have any regrets about coming to the United States?
Speaker 2 [00:30:15] Absolutely not. I think we’ve got a much higher standard of living. I believe that the education system for the time gave everybody the opportunity to go to college, which at that time in England you didn’t get. And I think that all our grandchildren, like you and and the rest of them have a much better life than you might have done in England. I mean, you could never say that for certain, but looking back, I think we did the right thing and i’m glad we did it. And I’m glad to be an American because I can vote.
Speaker 1 [00:31:10] I love that. Oh, gosh, I love that, grandma. All right. Well, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking your time to have this interview with me and give me all the information you did for my professor and my class. So I just wanted to thank you so much for that.
Speaker 2 [00:31:30] And you’re very welcome, Maggie. And if there’s anything I can clarify later or if there’s anything your Professor needs to know that he’s unclear care about, just follow up, and I’ll be glad to help where I can.
Speaker 1 [00:31:46] All right. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 [00:31:48] All right Dear.
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