BOOKS

Chronolo of rice pudding

Eric Christiansen

ISLAND STORIES: UNRAVELLING BRITAIN, THEATRES OF MEMORY, VOLUME II by Raphael Samuel Verso, £20, pp. 391 Both England and Britain have fallen on hard times. Within living memory the former meant a great civilisation and the latter a great empire. Now they are smears on slides, squinted at by inquisitive journal- ists, lifted by the tweezers of historians and placed in boxes marked 'Outmoded Ethnic Denominators' and 'Fabricated Traditions' and 'Imperfect Nationalisms'. As for the famed English language, which has a life of its own outside the laboratory, it is

widely and publicly despised, not least by the teachers nominally charged with initiating students into its mysteries or children into its disciplines . . . [thanks to] a generation of cultural studies lecturers who have constitut- ed it as the main enemy.

For almost any subject of the Queen over 60 years old, it's enough to make you go and paint a Union Jack on your face. This was not a camouflage affected by the author cited above, but even Raphael Samuel, at the end of a lifetime of creative Marxism, was moved by the suddenness and strangeness of this collapse to write about it with no suspicion of gloat. At the time (1996) we were drenched by a tidal wave of wisdom on the subject; it had become a Rees-Mogger. Samuel was a scholar and a gentleman and his contribu- tions are a cut above the rest, even when unfinished and incoherent. Two of the pieces in this collection, 'The Discovery of Puritanism' and 'The Tower of London', are memorable historical essays which ramble round their subjects and rely on story-telling rather than argument for their effect. They touch the nationality debate by showing the positive value of two obvious historical fakes.

Neither the Godly Englishman nor the Tower were foisted on the country by the authorities; they were gradual incrustations of wishful thinking, patriotism, commercial enterprises and error on the part of imagi- native individuals. They grew out of English history without much assistance from historical research; what Samuel was doing for most of his life was bringing research to bear on this kind of self-sown historicism, and on the people, stories and buildings connected with it.

This mission began with a doctrinaire conviction that the world of workers is more important historically than the min- utes of cabinet meetings; it ended with a love of the whole past which was closer to Burke than to Marx. He was panoptic: reluctant to look away from anything that might be a historical source, as everything is. 'Writing history from below' is what he called it, and never acknowledged the ambiguity of the term. A salaried academic careerist who advances by studying mediaeval lunatics or turf-cutters, and a folk-singer who revives an old train- spotting ditty, are both, in some sense his- torians from below; but in a different sense.

In 'Empire Stories' Samuel notes that underdog history can be just as misleading as any other kind; as in the mysterious dis- appearance of the Empire from school textbooks, suppressed to allay

a set of anxieties relating to 'identity' and the way both on the right and on the left of

`Yes, we're trying actively to encourage young people to find work'

politics, and in the centre, it [the set] is sup- posed to regulate both what children learn at school and the way they learn it.

Instead, they are being offered a slice of confectionery called 'Four Nations History' as if the natives of these islands had not had better things to do with their time than getting ready for devolution. All the world becomes a multi-ethnic playground of tribes far gentler than those in the real playground, all through history; not because anyone seriously thinks it was like that, but because the sea-green incorrupt- ibles would like it to be like that in the future, and feel 'that education should pro- mote this notion.

In that climate, a country that crushed others becomes an embarrassment. Out goes empire. But this has been happening for a long time, not only in the 50 years since Crouchback discovered that Hoop- er's version of English history differed from his own: Brideshead Revisited pro- logue.

Samuel's remedy for the imperial deficit was to urge teachers to trace the conse- quences of empire on everyday life: 'The chronology of rice pudding might be simi- larly instructive for the domestic repercus- sions of the colonisation of Malaya.' This is a pleasant concept, but it won't do, for several reasons: Malaya's rice seldom reached these shores, or left those of Malaya; it was never the lure for colonists or conquerors; and in any case this is exactly the teaching method which has been used in many schools for 100 years and more, with considerable success. Nowadays they seem to be better at the rice pudding than at the chronology, but that no doubt reflects a general aversion to what Mr Samuel himself called 'the fetishi- sation of dates'.

His own education is the subject of `Country Visiting: a Memoir'. It was highly selective: progressive schools, communist camaraderie at home, heroic hiking in the remoter British uplands, songs of socialist solidarity. On holiday, there was no dawdling round the decrepit arable, now treasured as 'countryside', no consorting with yokels in pubs or paddocks, no visits to big houses — he claimed that he had never entered one in his life. In those days, when there was a war on 'holidays were a sacrament, a way of leading the simple life . . . not so much a relaxation as a way of strengthening body and soul' for the true urban life. Ruins were ignored. Sightseeing was 'anathema'. There was no historical dimension to these rich and rousing experi- ences. This piece is the most poignant in the collection, where it serves as a reminder that the current fuss about rural England is quite a new development, an aspect of 'The Return of History' which he applauded in 1990. He loved the proliferation of the past in these decades, through myriad enterpris- es undertaken 'from below' as well as by scholars. The country at large seemed to have been going his way, for a change. He never seemed to notice that mindless pro- gressivism (or modernisation) is not dead and now forms the dominant ideology of all the main political parties, and that it continues to appeal not to old-fashioned communists but to millions of Britons for whom it means employment, profit and lib- eration. If the heritage industry survives, it will only be on terms set by these poor deluded wretches. Those who venerate the past have no cause for self-congratulation, despite the listing of 460,000 houses as 'his- toric'. If this kind of proscription is another `displaced expression of contemporary utopianism', it wars with the undisplaced expression of ditto.

Samuel preferred to encourage rather than to warn, irony to vituperation. But his journalism was occasionally almost caustic. Back in 1982 he wrote a fairly scathing piece about 'The SDP and the New Middle Class' in which he accused these Adul- lamites of such offences as 'dressing down rather than up, for parties, in tight trousers rather than dinner jackets, pinafores rather than gowns'. Trousers rather than jackets sounds odd, but the new dress was a symp- tom of the new agenda: to abolish the working classes. This censure was accom- panied by a protest at the new party's invo- cation of R. H. Tawney as a sort of mascot. The contrast between this clique of time- serving bourgeois defectors from the Labour movement and the intransigent socialist historian is elaborated to the dis- advantage of the former; the sheer stupidi- ty of the public relations culture that inspired the Williams-Jenkins-Tawney rap- prochement is not overlooked. Of course, all this must seem dated or dull to most readers, unless they find the tirade applies to the present Labour party, in which case it was worth reprinting. Those pieces may still rouse a flicker of annoyance in their surviving targets, but it is unlikely that the Samuel critique of Thatcherism (`The Tory Party at Prayer', Mrs Thatcher and Victorian Values') con- tains anything with which the lady disagrees or at which she could take offence. She comes out of it rather well, as a skilled jug- gler of ideologies:

In a remarkable inversion of the Marxist theodicy not capital but labour appeared as the fetter on the forces of production, the feudal integument which had to be broken if capitalism was to resume its forward march.

She

after her own fashion was offering her party a history from below, one which gave pride of place to 'ordinary people' . . . she domesti- cated the idea of tradition and feminised it.

She became a heroine; and again, she was enacting a part which Samuel finds inescapable in the world of 'from below'. He defends hero-worship more elegantly than Carlyle, as something people can do for themselves without the assistance of Lord Skidelsky or Kenneth Baker, who were at one time trying to reintroduce this servile tendency into the state school cur- riculum. His own contribution to that par- ticular debate was to recommend 1066 and All That to school libraries, ignoring the fact that every joke in the book depends on knowledge of a sort of history which has not been taught for over a generation. Still, it would give pleasure to some; as will this collection, which includes some of the best book reviews written in our time.