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����My friend toid me that the prince was a symbol of her Englishness�� and I could see that I had caused offense. I looked at her. She was an English person�� the sort of English person I used to know at home�� the sort who was nobody in England but somebody when they came to live among the people like me. There were many people l could have seen England with; that I was seeing it with this particular person�� a person who reminded me of the people who showed me England long ago as I sat in church or at my desk�� made me feel silent and afraid�� for I wondered if�� all these years of our friendship�� I had had a friend or had been in the thrall of a racial memoy.����[15] I went to Bath - we�� my friend and I�� did this�� but though we were together�� I was no longer with her. The landscape was almost as familiar as my o\^m hand�� but I had never been in this place before�� so how could that be again? And the streets of Bath were familiar�� too�� but I had never walked on them before. It was all those years of reading�� starting with Roman Britain. Why did I have to know about Roman Britain? It was of no real use to me�� a person living on a hot�� drought-ridden island�� and it is of no use to me now�� and yet my head is filled with this nonsense�� Roman Britain. In Bath�� I drank tea in a room I had read about in a novel written in the eighteenth centuy. In this very same room�� young women wearing those dresses that rustled and so on danced and flirted and sometimes disgraced themselves with young men�� soldiers�� sailors�� who were on their way to Bristol or someplace like that�� so many places like that where so many adventures�� the outcome of which was not good for me�� began. Bristol�� England. A sentence that began "That night the ship sailed from Bristol�� England" would end not so good for me. And then I was driving through the countryside in an English motorcar�� on narrow winding roads�� and they were so familiar�� though I had never been on them before; and through little villages the name of which I somehow knew so well though I had never been there before. And the countryside did have all those hedges and hedges�� fields hedged in. I was marveling at all the toil of it�� the planting of the hedges to begin with and then the care of it; all that clipping�� year after year of clipping�� and I wondered at the lives of the people who would have to do this�� because whoever I see and feel the hands that hold up the world�� I see and feel myself and all the people who look like me. And I said�� "Those hedges" and my friend said that someone�� a woman named Mrs. Rothchild�� worried that he hedges weren't being taken care of properly; the farmers couldn't afford or find the help to keep up the hedges�� and often they replaced them .^rith wire fencing. I might have said to that�� well if Mrs. Rothchild doesn't like the wire fencing�� why doesn 't she take care of the hedges herself �� but I didn't. And then in those fields that were now hemmed in by wire fencing that a privileged woman didn't like was planted a vile yellow flowering bush that produced an oil�� and my friend said that Mrs. Rothchild didn' t like this either; it ruined the English countrgside�� it ruined the traditional look of the English countWside.��������