Clover Stroud: Why 3 Years In The US Only Strengthened England’s Pull

After three years in the US, author Clover Stroud is returning to England – and its birdsong through open windows, a rug spread out on the grass, and the sound of a bumblebee in the climbing roses.

Clover Stroud On Returning To England

Three years ago, I left my home in a wet, green corner of rural England and moved to Washington DC. It was highest summer when we arrived in 2023, and the hot, damp air vibrated with the sound of cicadas. This was not the gentle, late-night clicking that’s the sweet sound of a summer holiday in the Mediterranean. This was more like a rattle, chickpeas in a plastic bottle; so loud I sometimes wondered if someone might be trying to start a motorbike engine outside my bedroom.

When I stepped outside my house to walk past block upon block of gorgeously beautiful houses, with their wraparound verandas and white picket fences containing gardens trimmed into obeyance, the sticky, swampy heat would instantly grasp me, like cling film on my limbs. At night, I lay in bed, air artificially cooled by the pump of ever-present AC, and beyond the chopping sound of a helicopter overhead or the scream of a distant siren, I’d always hear those cicadas rattling beyond the windows, which were always tight shut. I dreamed, often, of mellow, English summer evenings, sleeping in my bedroom in Oxfordshire with the windows flung open, surrounded by the sweet scent of honeysuckle scrambling up the side of my cottage, the only sound the distant, lonely call of an owl.

Leaving England had been a wrench, and in the months after we arrived in the US, I went through something that I later realised was grief. I know grief: my mum died after a long illness in 2013, and my sister Nell died of cancer just after, in 2019. I’m familiar with the disbelief, the fury, the fog, the panic, the exhaustion that are all part of the grieving process.

And while I am absolutely not suggesting that losing a place you love is comparable, in terms of pain, as losing a person, both experiences of grief must involve a sense of letting go. I clung on so tight to the memories of my sister after she died, stuck in my own life while I tried to will her back to life. It was only really when I let go of the immediate past, and walked onwards – painfully – into my new life without her, that I really found her again, as an embodiment of everything I did. Now, she is with me all the time, in the way I love, parent, cook, decorate, breathe and laugh, but that letting go had to happen for her to return.

Likewise, after I moved to the US, I had to let go of memories of England and stop dreaming of it, longing for it, crying about it. I unfollowed people on Instagram who walked and rode the paths around my house or crossed the Ridgeway – that ancient track over the Berkshire Downs, which is visible from my home – as I found seeing familiar views I missed so much was simply too painful. Instead, I started to learn the grid of Massachusetts and Connecticut Avenue and how that connected to Downtown, to the National Mall and the Capitol Building, which were just a few minutes from home in my new life. I made myself read American novels, and consume American TV shows, and I bought an American cookbook to try to make sense of the sometimes mystifying American food.

It was really painful at times, though. Most of us think we know the US: I grew up in the 80s, and some of my most vivid memories are of watching ET saucer-eyed but really wanting a BMX, a mum with an endless supply of orange juice in a glass jug, and a life in the suburbs. My mum worshipped at the church of that 80s classic, Dallas. I swear she went to sleep dreaming of Bobby. And sometimes JR, too.

But the real US of everyday life (or the occasional purse-stretching west coast holiday, or glam New York weekend) are very different beasts to the kind of American culture we think we know. I scooped my three youngest children out of their tiny village school in rural England and deposited them in big, multicultural state schools in the capital. My daughter started at junior high, trooping off to class, a backpack strapped to her tiny frame. The huge pillars and head’s voice that I could hear over the tannoy from home made me constantly ask her: ‘Is it just like Grease?’ The reference was a little lost on her.

When I let go of England, it all got a bit easier. I’ve come to love the expansiveness, the incredible diversity and cultural mash-up of American life. I’m happiest when we leave the city and spread out into the hills of Virginia, or along the coast in Maryland, or – best of all – the weeks and weeks I’ve spent decamped from DC in the landscape of west Texas. We only came here for two years, but now it’s three, and England is beckoning me again. We’re moving back to our old house on the Oxfordshire-Wiltshire border in May, the loveliest of months. I’m already giddy with the thought of being there when spring is at its ripest; when summer is a lemony glow spreading across the country; when the verges are frothy with cow parsley. England is small, comically so, compared to the US, and there is a heartstopping expansiveness to the American west which I’ll always love, but there’s a true, innate freedom to England. Although we don’t have a complete right to roam, we are able to walk freely over a lot of the countryside. You might encounter a grumpy landowner, but you won’t get shot.

I’m looking forward to gritty cheese sandwiches on a beach in Wales, something I dreamed about while sweltering in the Delaware humidity. I’ve missed the mellow English countryside, which is so much gentler than the wilds of the US, where nature is genuinely red in tooth and claw. There are no beasts that might kill me in England – no rattlesnakes, no snapping turtles, no bears – and although these have been fun to observe and wonder over, my home is barefoot, in the green fields of England.

I’m dreaming of spreading a rug on the lawn and falling asleep with the sound of a bumblebee in a rose clambering up the house beside me, or a wood pigeon in the spreading branches of the oak tree, lulled by the smell of cut grass – and the sweet, perfect beauty of an English summer.

Clover Stroud is a journalist and the author of The Giant on the Skyline, amongst others. Keep up with her return to England on Substack.

This feature appears in the 2026/27 Great British & Irish Hotel Guide.