POSTCARDS FROM THREE ENGLAN

wavvistry APR 30 how Anne Applebaum celebrates St George Day

with an outsider's look at an introspective country

IIPIrt Aliso HOW DO you measure a nation's decline? Not by its budget deficit alone, although that may tell you about its standard of gov- ernment. Not by the divorce rate, although that may be a measure of marital happi- ness. Not by the number of false starts in horse races or civil service exam failures or house sales: these are all useful statistics, but they really measure other things — the quality of race-course management, per- haps, or test-taking abilities, or property values.

When Americans speak about decline, we usually mean something quite specific: decline from the puritan values which propelled our ancestors across the seas, decline from the standards of the famous men who wrote our con- stitution. But because American history is so short, the sensation of decline never lasts very long, and the experience Is usually followed by a neurotically triumphant revival'.

Even after several Years spent in this coun- try, I am still not sure what the British mean When they speak about decline. Decline from what? From the days of Elizabethan literary excellence? From the era of imperial overstretch? From the time when English mills supplied India with cot- ton? From an early 20th-century ideal of family values? Nor am I sure about what, in fact, is meant to be declining. All of Britain or only England? The country as well as the inner city, Midlands manufacturing as Well as City banks, the aristocracy as well as the working class?

There are, after all, many Britains. In 1933, J.B. Priestley took a trip around Britain and discovered three Englands at least, 'variously and most fascinatingly min- gled in every part of the country'. First, there was Old England, with its story-book

villages and empty stately homes, a 'luxury country' which had long ceased to earn its living. Then there was 19th-century Eng- land — with its redbrick factories, working- men's clubs and city halls — of which he disapproves: 'At one end of this commer- cial greatness were a lot of half-starved children crawling about among machinery and at the other end were the traders get- ting natives boozed up with bad gin.' Final- ly, there was 1930s England, a country filled with lipstick, dance-halls, semi- detached houses, by-pass roads and class- less suburbs, an optimistic England, but possibly, he concludes, 'a bit too cheap'. Curious as to whether these three Eng- lands still existed — and whether or not they had declined — I followed, metaphor- ically, in his footsteps.

Iwent first to Norfolk, and it wasn't flat at all, gently undulating, rather, and dotted with trees. In a village north of Norwich, the local squire showed me the green and the hall, the church and the blacksmith. He wore a tweed jacket and green cords, drove a dusty car with long scratches in the body paint. He lived in the Elizabethan house at

the far side of the park, surrounded by flat lawns and hedges trimmed at right angles. It was exactly the kind of thing which Americans visit England to see: a family who has lived in the same place since before our country was discovered.

It wasn't true, of course. After the first world war, the family fortunes swung the wrong way, and life in big houses began to go out of fashion. After the second world war, there was a country-house sale, and only the ancestral portraits remained. The squire himself grew up in a cottage on the estate, and the story might have ended there — except that he returned as an adult, moved into his falling- down ancestral home, and started to farm a part of what was once a 10,000-acre estate.

When Priestley visit- ed Norfolk, such a deci- sion would hardly have been possible: agricul- ture was then most def- initely in decline. Of one farmer, he wrote that 'a very bewildered look crept on to his honest face when he spoke of the difficulty of making his farm pay'. But the Seventies and Eighties were good years for farming. With the money he earned, this particular squire restored his house helping to bring his family's corner of Nor- folk back to life.

It wasn't easy. 'A friend came to visit recently, and he kept muttering, "You can't do this from farming, you can't pay for this from farming," but you can — there are tricks.' We stood in the sitting-room, look- ing at what could have been an interior imported from Country Life: curtains, sub- tle upholstery, vases filled with flowers. The squire leaned down and lifted up the corner of the carpet. A pleasantly dull yel- low on the outside, it was a garish orange underneath. 'Cheap Turkish carpet. You just turn it upside down, and no one notices.'

The village had unexpected undersides too. The shop sold Heinz baked beans for the locals, but grapefruit marmalade for the tourists as well. The postcard-pretty main street looked as if it were inhabited by carpenters and roof-thatchers, but bank managers and solicitors who work in Kings Lynn have quietly rented some of the hous- es there too. Selling an older way of life to outsiders, for a day or for a lifetime, is, along with farming, one of the ways they make money in Norfolk. Over time, the practice has brought property prices up, kept money circulating, revived villages which were emptying in Priestley's day. Even the blacksmith stays in business, mak- ing iron statuettes for the day-trippers and shoes for the pony which belongs to the bank manager's daughter.

That was a surprise: to find the past pre- served, but not stagnant. 'When I started in the Sixties, I expected that world politics would continue to move towards the Left, that nationalisation of land would happen everywhere. I thought that if I farmed my land in a way that conserved its visual appeal, I might stand a better chance of keeping it,' the squire told me. He was wrong about nationalisation, although the effort paid off anyway. Nowadays, farmland with hedges intact is worth more than farmland without.

In Birmingham, I got lost in the tangle of streets around the station. That, apparent- ly, is what is supposed to happen in Birm- ingham. 'I can't find Brummagem' is the title of an old song about Birmingham; its lyrics mourn the disappearance of old city landmarks. People kept quoting it to me as a way of explaining the mad passion for ripping down old buildings which gripped Birmingham after the second world war: urban renewal, they told me, is part of the city's tradition.

It is hard not to marvel at how badly this particular urban renewal went wrong. Priestley took a tram through the suburbs of Birmingham, which he described as 'a parade of mean dinginess'. Two genera- tions' worth of city planning later, I got on the number 95 bus, which twisted through a maze of motorways — built right across the city centre in an era when the convenience of the motor-car was thought more impor- tant than the needs of mere pedestrians and crossed a no-man's land of empty warehouses and bottle-strewn fields, before entering a wilderness of semi-detached houses, flat-topped supermarkets, endless brown-brick council houses and the ghosts of petrol stations past.

It came to a halt in Chelmsley Wood, and I stepped off with trepidation. While not remotely the worst of English council estates, Chelmsley Wood has the ordinary council estate reputation, based partly on its enormous size, partly on its lack of aes- thetic appeal. And it was true that much of what one expects from big housing estates was easy to find in Chelmsley Wood. In the supermarket, signs screaming discounts Call prices permanently marked down') bedecked the aisles, while tired housewives pushed trolleys piled high with white bread, packaged pies, multi-coloured boiled sweets and washing powder. On the streets, the wind whipped the empty crisp packets into the air, and a man with heavily tat- tooed cheek-bones held hands with a girl whose black mascara covered her eyes like a mask.

But inside the Roundhouse pub, not far from the bus station, all was peaceful. A curly-haired woman and her son were drinking lager. The son worked in building, although he was experiencing a temporary lack of employment; the mother was vague about her profession. She had to look after her old man, she said, the doctor had given him just a few months to live. Both agreed that things were bad and getting worse. I asked whom they blamed. The son looked at me, surprised. 'The government, of course. The government is closing all these factories.'

The government seemed to be the origin of a lot of problems. The government had closed the shops as well as the factories; the government had tried to prevent them from escaping Chelmsley Wood. 'It was Thatcher,' said one man. 'She wanted the yuppies to be up [he held his hand up high] and the working-class people to be down he put his hand below his knees] and she never wanted the working-class people to rise up at all.' They all fell silent for a minute, content with this explanation. They weren't angry, just pleased to have found someone to blame.

But the curly-haired woman put the blame even further back, to the time when the government made her family leave the redbrick back-to-backs she had grown up in. 'Back when we lived down Kingshurst, you could leave your door open and no one would come in. Then they made us move up here. Now it's not safe to go out at night.' Vaguely, she felt cheated by her antiseptic surroundings. 'Back then, we all lived together, smoking and swearing, like. When we moved up here, my husband told me I would have to stop. But the first neighbour I met, the first word out of her mouth was a swear-word. "Would you like to come to our bleedin' party?" Pat said, didn't she.' There it was: nostalgia for the Birmingham which Priestley described as `so many miles of ugliness, squalor, and the wrong kind of vulgarity, the decayed, anaemic kind'.

Still, pity seemed the wrong emotion, `hopeless' the wrong description. 'Under- class', a word imported from America, seemed like an insult to people who had landed on the wrong end of a long series of unfortunate experiments. On the door of the Chelmsley Wood pub hung a sign advertising a friendly Friday night disco. Inside, a banner covered one wall: 'Wel- come Back.' The publican, a Dubliner, told me that the regulars had put it up for her when she came back from Spain; the curly- haired woman pointed to her son's shiny bald head, and told me, 'He shaved his hair for charity.' That had the ring of communi- ty spirit, however meagre. Outside, I walked up and down the rows of houses with a feeling of safety one could never have in what Americans call a deprived neighbourhood. Granted, it was daytime, and the feeling of safety may also have been the stupidity of a stranger one is never afraid of dangers one doesn't know exist — but there were no stares, no young men in gangs, no wildly coloured graffiti or piles of trash. Someone had mowed the grass. It just wasn't that bad. And the process of regeneration — or at least more ripping down of buildings — had already started. Birmingham's development, having reached a dead end in Chelmsley Wood, has already started all over again in the city centre. The hideous ring-road is being forced underground; the redbrick ware- houses along the canals will be renovated; the symphony orchestra has already been revived. The president of the Chamber of Commerce proudly took me to the sixth floor of the building to show me his view of his city, a leafy green Birtriingham lined with trees. After hours, a Japanese manag- er with a large investment in the region sang the praises of English workers and explained, 'I am here thankful to the West Midlands Development Association.' He had only one serious complaint about the city. 'No Japanese foods,' he said sadly, 'n° Japanese foods.'

Tfind Priestley's England, the England of 1933, I went to Worthing, on the south coast: Worthing has the highest percentage of pensioners in the country — the highest number of people, in other words, who still remember 1933. Worthing is the kind of place which calls its sports centre a 'leisure centre', its napkins `serviettes'. On the High Street, there were tea shops and a restaurant called the Cockle and Bacon, a Laura Ashley store and places to buy Os' tel-coloured towels, flowered sheets and three-piece suites. Mock Tudor houses boasted nameplates — Winter Haven, Robinwood, Kings' Gate — along with gar- den benches, stone gnomes and birdbaths. Cut-glass vases and painted plaster kittens glinted from behind the lace curtains. Along the waterfront, contented bathing cabins stood facing the slate-grey sea, while the neatly painted pier had none of Brighton's shabby decadence. Instead, Worthing exuded a restrained, reserved, upper-lower-middle class niceness. 'Bour- geois' is too strong a description; the best word for Worthing is 'genteel'.

To me, Worthing seemed familiar, but not from books. Oddly enough, Americans know Worthing from English pop music. Worthing is the kind of place Mick Jagger rejected, singing about the nasty habits CI take tea at three') which would never allow him to fit in there. The Beatles mocked Worthing culture more gently. Eleanor Rigby, who was buried along with her name, probably lived somewhere like Wor- thing. Growing your hair long and smoking dope was something you did in order to escape her fate.

But had it been so bad to live there? In the large, sunny sitting-room of a local retirement home — run not by the state but by the Worthing Area Guild, a charity the residents of Worthing told a story of gradual upward mobility, remembering Poverty as something past. 'We used to put cardboard in our shoes, if we got holes in the soles.' Our school had a boot club every week you brought a little bit of Money, and finally you had enough for a new pair of boots.' Taking advantage of the Classless, inter-war culture which Priestley described (Notice,' he wrote, 'how the Modern things, like the films and wireless and sixpenny stores, are absolutely demo- cratic, making no distinction between their patrons'), they had happily moved out of Poor villages or slums, into the twee sub- urbs.

One man had started life in a northern textile mill and finished as an assistant sales Manager in London; one woman was the daughter of a miner, now she had her own bungalow by the sea. Most of the others had modest ambitions, which had been modestly fulfilled. Until interest rates fell, Worthing's living standards (and Wor- thing's property prices) remained among the steadiest in the country: that is because most of the town's resident pensioners live Off investment income, as well as social security. People who retired to Worthing always planned to end up somewhere like Worthing. They had accepted Worthing's values — agreed to work hard, to save money week by week, to play by the rules and, within the framework of Worthing, they had attained success.

Perhaps that was why they seemed per- Plexed by the more confusing lives and Fomplicated dreams of their grandchildren. When I was a child,' said Winifred, a Wor- thing resident for 85 years, 'we looked for seashells under the bathing machines if we wanted entertainment. Now they say they're bored, that explains the crime, but they've got television and video, I don't see what they've got to be bored about.'

I thought of Winifred on the train back to London. Sitting across from me was a young man whose long, brown hair had been carefully knit into thin plaits, each one with a bead on the end. He wore trousers which contained every colour you could think of, heavy black combat boots and a black leather jacket. He slumped low in his seat and stared, bored and angry, out of the window at the suburban towns rush- ing by. Born in the post-Beatles generation, he was travelling away from Worthing as fast as he possibly could. Once you've rejected Worthing, you probably can't go back.

0r can you? It is true that the English often seem to be in a hurry to leave the past behind. They leapt from Old England straight into Dickensian factories. They rushed from Dickensian back-to-backs right into concrete tower blocks. They did their best to remove landowners from the land, to dislocate working-class communi- ties, to escape the morally upright suburbs, all in the name of progress. But none of these sudden shifts proved fatal or final. Whereas Americans always measure progress from the year 1776, in England, the definition of progress itself changes with time and with place — as does the definition of decline.

Priestley linked decline — unemploy- ment, pollution, economic depression — to the excesses of industrialisation and the failures of capitalism. He, like many of his time, believed that a more rational eco- nomic system would bring back progress. `The old rules aren't working,' he wrote, `and we haven't found new ones yet. There's a dreadful lag between man the inventor and producer and man the organ- iser and distributor.'

Nowadays, when the English speak of detect a slight improvement in the economy. It's definitely gone from worse to bad.' decline, they usually mean the opposite problem: the excesses of the modern state and the failures of intervention. Attempts to rationalise Victorian housing created tower blocks; taxes meant to make people equal destroyed ancient estates, but did not make the poor happier. That is why progress no longer means New Towns and public spending, why progress can also reject the values of the immediate past. Progress can mean that the squire returns to his estate, that the citizens of Birming- ham hide their ugly ring-road, that a new generation of pensioners come to love Worthing. The English will be good at this kind of progress. When you have a tradi- tion, you have something to draw on. When you have one of the world's most stable political systems and the world's most humane intellectual traditions, you have something to fall back on when things go wrong. England is an old country; old assets can always be put to new uses.

Often, when Londoners talk about the decline of England, a note of petulance creeps into their voices: if their city is no longer an imperial capital, then they feel obligated to denounce and dismiss the whole country. But why shouldn't Faken- ham, Birmingham and Worthing hold themselves to different standards? Parts of the country rise while others fall, just as they always have done, just as they always will.