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We moved to England on January 1, 2016. I had accepted a position at the University of Warwick and was due to start in a few days’ time. I had already built a fairly successful international academic career, but I felt I had reached a plateau and that a radical change was needed to move forward. A professorship at a top university in the United Kingdom seemed the perfect next step.
Looking Across the North Sea
Earlier that morning, on a beautiful, bright New Year’s Day, my 12-year-old daughter and I had watched crowds of Dutch people in orange woolly hats dipping into the icy waters of the North Sea at Scheveningen beach near The Hague. It was the annual Nieuwjaarsduik, the local New Year tradition. We looked out across the sea toward England, feeling sad about leaving Holland, where we had stayed for the past year and a half, but also excited about our new life across the Channel. Just an hour-long flight from Amsterdam to Birmingham—things could not be too different there, right?
Finding Our Feet
A little over a month after we had arrived in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the EU referendum would take place on 23 June—Midsummer Eve, a much-loved celebration of the summer solstice across Northern Europe. The Leave and Remain campaigns took off instantly, but our own life dramas and the process of settling in left me with little time and energy to pay close attention to what was happening around us. We travelled to Estonia twice that spring: first to receive the Order of the White Star, a high state honour, and then to attend my uncle’s funeral. Both occasions came as a complete shock.
As an experienced cross-cultural psychologist, I prided myself on both my theoretical and practical knowledge of cultural differences, having previously lived in various European countries. Yet little had prepared me for our new life in the Midlands, or so it seemed. While I tried to figure out how the university operated and deal with the everyday practicalities, my daughter faced her own challenges switching from an international IB school to a local comprehensive school. Her first recollections of daily life at school were like the tales of an anthropologist about a distant tribe whose rituals were both amusing and occasionally difficult to understand.
The Midsummer Night
So when Midsummer Eve arrived, I was not particularly worried about the outcome of the vote. I realised that it was going to be a close call, but not once had I seriously considered that Leave might actually win. My daughter, however, was growing increasingly concerned and, as it later turned out, rightly so.
On the evening of the referendum, she went to bed as usual but set an alarm clock so that she could monitor the vote as the results came in. She first woke me around 1 a.m., saying that things were not looking too good, as Leave was leading by a considerable margin. I told her not to worry and to go back to sleep—surely these were just votes from smaller rural constituencies, and everything would change once London’s results came in.
When she woke me again a few hours later, the votes were still being counted, and Remain was still behind. Again, I told her not to worry and go back to sleep. The tide would turn, I assured her. She finally fell asleep, but by that time, I had a sense of foreboding that was hard to shake off. I lay awake for a while and, a little before 5 a.m., I finally got up and switched on the TV in the living room of our tiny flat. It was already light outside, on one of the shortest nights of the year.
When Morning Came
The moment the TV came on, I knew that my daughter had been right to worry. The first thing I heard was a BBC news anchor saying in a solemn voice that the United Kingdom had voted to leave the European Union. Even though the official result had not yet been announced, the BBC had called it for Leave some 20 minutes earlier. It was indeed a close call, but not in the direction I had anticipated. The screen was then filled with Nigel Farage’s jubilant face, announcing that the sun has risen on an independent United Kingdom. And that was that.
I stood there in total dismay and, for a few minutes, could not quite process what I had just heard. It all felt like a dream. What would we do now, I wondered? Should we stay or leave too? My husband had decided not to come with us to the United Kingdom, so we could go back home and be a proper family again rather than live thousands of miles apart.
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Living With Uncertainty
We stayed. In the messy weeks, months, and years that followed, I first still nurtured a hope that the vote would be miraculously overturned or cancelled. Until it was not, and Brexit did take place. In practical terms, nothing changed for at least several years; life just went on as before. But it was the insecurity about the future, the anticipation of potential change, and the great unknown that were occasionally hard to bear. Nobody knew what would happen to EU citizens, especially those of us who had arrived just before the referendum. But it was not easy for many of my British friends and colleagues at the university either, especially those who had voted Remain. It seemed as if anyone with family connections to an EU country, however distant, tried to obtain an EU passport not only for practical reasons but also because of what it symbolised.
The Orange Hat
My daughter eventually moved back to Europe after her A-levels to study political science and international relations. She may disagree with me, but I am certain that the Brexit vote and the U.S. presidential election later the same autumn, with its equally unsettling outcome, shaped her interests and played a role in her choice of subject.
As for me—I am still in the United Kingdom, 10 years on, holding settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme. I also hold a part-time professorship in Estonia, not because of Brexit but primarily for family reasons. And I still have the orange Unox hat we were handed on New Year’s Day 10 years ago on Scheveningen beach, even though we never went for a swim. My daughter wore it for years as a keepsake and for good luck.
