Humiliation was a constant companion back then. When I arrived in the States, I had a shock of dyed-black spiky hair, and I was given to wearing the uniform of the punk movement: the tight black pants, the big black boots, the tatty T-shirts. This was before such fashions had made their mark here, and so people stared at me on buses — slack-jawed, eyebrows merging with their hairlines, tut-tutting to each other behind cupped hands. Sometimes people stopped me on the street and asked me what the hell I was thinking. I had more than one person inquire, with a deliberate lack of delicacy, about my sexual orientation.

On one occasion, I was jumped by a gang of teenage thugs. One of them aimed a karate kick at my head — and I remember thinking that this, too, seemed a very American thing to do. As I beat a hasty retreat down Mass Ave, cackles and hoots of derision rang in my ears. First the cop, then the squirrels, and then this — America, apparently, was as violent as everybody said. And so, to fortify myself, I would walk around mumbling the yobbish songs of Chelsea Football Club: "Carefree, whoever you may be, we are the famous CFC, and we don’t give a fuck whoever you may be, ’cause we are the famous CFC." The truth is, I wasn’t carefree at all. I was scared.

After a while, even the pettiest things began to fill me with unease. I’d walk into supermarkets and confront Great Walls of breakfast cereal. I’d switch on the TV and have to grapple with what seemed like thousands of stations. Although the Americans and the English ostensibly share a common language, I found myself having to say things like "yOWghurt" and "tomAYdoes" and "vIdamins." When I needed to use a "pay phone," I’d have to put the coin in before I made my call, and that coin was this piddly little thing they called a dime. People put lobsters in front of me and expected me to rip them apart with my bare hands. The whole America thing began to wear on me. The loneliness. The horrible beer. Those bloody cars thundering about on the wrong side of the road. And the job I’d been doing — lugging furniture for the moving company — that began to wear on me too.

After a summer of this, I decided to go home.

recalling THIS period now, I can see that I was already carrying a little bit of America with me. Back in England, I went to a football match and, much to the amusement of those around me, reacted to one particularly close miss with: "Hot-diggedy-dawg!" But it went deeper than this.

I did window cleaning for a while, a job that entailed a lot of bartering with clients: "You charge how much for a window?" A couple of years earlier, I’d probably have reacted to this question with "Er, er, er"; now I was almost lordly in my responses: "Yes, madam, two-pounds-fifty per window is our standard rate. But I’m sure if you take a look in the Yellow Pages you’ll find someone willing to work for less." More often than not, people were so taken aback that this bucket-bearing yobbo could muster such imperiousness, they’d pay up without another word. Before long, I’d raised my rates to three pounds per window, with extra charges for difficult or dangerous ladder work.

I was brimming with chutzpah. After all, I’d arrived back in England as a sort of Heathcliff figure. I had a few thousand bucks in my pocket. I was a man of the world, a man of experience. My time in America had afforded me an air of intrepidness completely lacking in my peers, many of whom considered the town of Bognor Regis to be an exotic locale. I frittered cash at my local pub and regaled my friends with tales of guns and cars. I constantly said things like, "Well, so-and-so’s are bigger in America" and "In America, they have incredible such-and such." I’d even learned how to talk to girls without passing out from sheer terror.

Soon enough, however, the money started to dry up, the stories started to grow stale, and it became increasingly clear that people were sick to death of hearing me utter the A-word. My window-cleaning career never really took off. With no permanent place to live, I hitchhiked around the country, staying with friends and family, picking up the odd laboring job here and there, struggling to get by. A year after my return to England, it was like I’d never left. One day, standing in line at the dole office, where I went through the biweekly humiliation of signing up for my government handout, I looked around at the flat-eyed men and the wailing kids and the tattoo-fisted teenage boys and I said to myself, "No more."

I was lucky. I had what most members of England’s welfare class could only dream of: a way out. I would escape my situation by escaping England. Even so, I told myself that I would only stay in America for as long as it took to save enough money to come home and make something of myself. Maybe start up my own moving company in London. Or have another crack at the window-cleaning game. That was the plan. At Heathrow Airport, as I boarded the plane that would take me back to Boston, I began to sob uncontrollably. Perhaps I knew something I didn’t know.

I’m not sure I can put my finger on what, exactly, made me stay in America. Certainly, there are things about the country I love. I love the sense of space we have here. I love the geographical diversity. I have visited Seattle and New Orleans and San Francisco and loved them all. I’ve been to the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, the Rocky Mountains and Cape Cod, the Everglades and the great wilderness of Northern Maine. That vast array of cereal that so unnerved me on my first visit now seems like a symbol of the country itself. I understand now that mind-boggling diversity is built into America. Today, instead of excess, I see possibility.

Even so, through all these years, I have doggedly held on to my English identity. An acquaintance of mine once asked me a question: if England and America went to war, which side would I be on? "Let me put it this way," I replied. "If there were a war between our two countries, I would kill you in a heartbeat." I was joking, of course. Sort of. The point is, my true loyalties always remained with my native land. I may live in America, I told myself, but I am very much an Englishman.

And being an Englishman in America had definite perks from the start. People — okay, women — would approach me and say things like, "I just love the accent." In the romantic arena, my accent was the equivalent of an all-access pass. And yet it was what my accent didn’t say about me that had a much more profound and lasting effect. When I talked to Americans, the way I spoke no longer served to pinpoint my social status. I was English now, not working class. It’s hard to overstate the relief this brought me. For the first time in my life, I no longer felt encumbered by the English class system — or, more pertinently, my place at the bottom of it.

This, in turn, gave me confidence. It’s something of a clichŽ to say so, but I really did feel as though I could make anything of myself in America. At the age of 28, having spent my entire adult life as a laborer, I enrolled in university — UMass Boston — and I loved every minute of it. While my classmates grumbled about papers due and exams looming, I walked through the campus’s stark modernist buildings suppressing giggles of delight. That the world could accommodate this. That I could spend my days deconstructing Hamlet or pondering the problems of perception. I walked around saying things like, "Yes, but how do we know the table’s really there?" I began to write poetry. I served as an editor at the school arts journal. I graduated with honors and within weeks landed a job at the Boston Phoenix — where I work today.

In my six years at the Phoenix, I have discussed literature with Martin Amis. I have talked politics with Norman Mailer. I get paid to sit around writing down my thoughts. I’ve even won prizes for my efforts: me — who left school at 16 with no qualifications and no hope, who became a familiar and, I’m sure, dispiriting sight at my local dole office, who was once called a stupid cunt by a construction manager, who then fired me on the spot. Would I have risen to such heights in England? Of course, I’ll never know the answer to this question. The point is, I made something of myself here, and for that I will always harbor a great affection for this country.

It’s a much rarer thing these days for someone to point out my accent. I’ve learned the rhythms and idioms of American speech, if not the inflections. I mix the odd "Whoa, Nelly" in with my "Blimeys." I can even say GarAAAHge without tripping over my tongue. I can boo-hoo about the Red Sox along with the best of them. I can find my way from North Station to South without getting lost. I can recall past summers spent on the Cape, remember when cigarettes were $2 a pack, and reminisce about the Dukakis years. I am, at the very least, an honorary Bostonian.

Despite all this, last year I started to toy with the idea of going back to England. In fact, I decided that’s what I would do. I have contacts there now, prospects. The fear of sliding back into the old, degrading lifestyle has dwindled. I miss my mother and my sister and my brother. I miss London. I miss the little things: the humor, the newspapers, and even the food. I was sure of it, that the time had come for me to go home. And yet, when it came to making the leap, I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it. I was puzzled by this, and a little annoyed with myself.

To this day, I often feel like something of an outsider in this country. I still speak with an accent. I still like my bacon meaty. I still find Fawlty Towers funnier than Friends. In the World Cup, I cheered for England with as much enthusiasm as I always have. It doesn’t matter how many years I stay here, how many American memories I accumulate, how much cultural arcana I pick up — I am an Englishman, always will be. So what could keep me from returning to the country I so obviously love and so sorely miss?

In the weeks following September 11, I began to understand. "How could they do this to us?" I would say. "What will we do now?" It felt strange to be talking like this, but also perfectly natural. As I saw the sorrow in my friends’ eyes, I knew exactly how they felt — because I felt the same way. The fact is, these aren’t just my friends, they are my family. The terrorists, in a very real way, did those awful things to us. Perhaps you need something dramatic, even catastrophic, to lead you to these kinds of realizations.

So now I understand. The reason I love this country is not because of the time I’ve spent here, the adventures and opportunities I’ve had here, the money I’ve made here, or the hardships I’ve overcome here. The reason I love America is because so many of my loved ones are here. This, I know now, is why I couldn’t bring myself to go home last year. The fact is, I’m already here.

This piece was originally delivered as a speech to the British Charitable Society. Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com