You might wonder how a person not born on British soil could be become so obsessed with all things English. Well, I blame my grandmother. Masie Julia. She was born in England in Hampshire which is on the very southern tip of England. Her father, my great grandfather, was a butcher and as a teen she worked in the shop. This was during World War I and with American soldiers in and out of the shop, romance was bound to blossom. She married my grandfather and travelled over to the United States on the Lusitania in 1919. And because my mother, Dottie, was very close to her mother, she fell in love with all things England and travelled with my grandmother back to England just after WWII the only time my grandmother ever returned to the land of her birth. And since I was close to my mother, well, the obsession continued. So I guess you could say, I wasn't born in England, but England was born into me.
I like that, "England was born into me." I feel a little the same. My grandmother wasn't British, but all her ancestors were. "Axtells" have their family tree all the way back to the first Axtells who left English shores for America. Daniel Axtell was a roundhead who was one of the ones who signed Charles I's death sentence, so when the royalists came back into power, Daniel had to skeddadle...all the way to America.
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