AND ANOTHER THING
Being English is getting a lot of laughs when others would merely see oddness verging on lunacy
PAUL JOHNSON
The Chief Inspector wants state schools to give pupils a sense of being British. That seems as forlorn an endeavour as the attempt by the Academie Frangaise to ban French schoolchildren from using Anglo- Saxon expressions. There is no such thing as Britishness. There is Scottishness and Welshness, of course: both are or have been subjugated nations, and it is essential- ly alien oppression which brings national characteristics to the surface, hones and sanctifies them. In the days when England was the world's top nation we never thought about being English. We just took it for granted that to be born English was 'to be given the winning ticket in the lottery of life'. But now that the English are them- selves oppressed, for the first time since the Norman Conquest, by Continental bureau- crats and their fifth column and collabora- tors here — the Vichy regime in Westmin- ster and Whitehall — the sense of Englishness is rising fast. Englishness, how- ever, cannot exactly be taught because it cannot be defined. The best you can do is to give examples of what it feels like.
Being English is thinking about the little hill which overshadows our nearby village of Nether Stowey in Somerset. Once, the Norman conquerors used it to build a motte and bailey castle, first of wood, then of stone. In due course, their Anglicised successors, grown rich in the wars fighting France, abandoned it, moving to a fine new mansion overlooking the sea. Then the vil- lagers crept up and removed every single ashlar, using them to replace their timber houses with stone. So England became a civil, comfortable country.
And in due course again, Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to live at the bottom of the hill, and William Wordsworth nearby, and they wrote the Lyrical Ballads, which was the beginning of modern English romantic poetry. They behaved in a peculiar, bohemian way, and Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had dark, sunburned skins. So rumours arose, and it was reported to the Home Office in London that `Frenchies' were secretly working in the vil- lage preparing for an invasion. The Home Office sent down a spy, whom Coleridge called Spy Nosey. But he reported back that they were only poets after all. What really upset the villagers, however, was that Dorothy not only did the washing on Sun- days, but hung it out for all to see. That was going too far and the poets had to leave. Now there is a Coleridge bookshop in the village, and the locals erect a big wooden cross on the castle hill every Easter, letting their horses and cattle roam on it the rest of the year. Being English is getting a lot of satisfaction from these gentle highlights in village history.
It is also a feeling of inexpressible sad- ness when reading, as I did recently, the list of names of the fallen in two world wars outside the chapel of Balliol College, Oxford. The lists were very long, especially for the Great War, and it contained many names I had come across in published let- ters and memoirs, outstanding young men who could write brilliant Greek verse and Latin prose, and of whom great things were expected — all massacred in a Continental war, the origins of which are now unknown to most people. The list for the second world war is shorter, though still long enough in all conscience, and memories of this conflict are greener, but in a few years that, too, will become mere history, and the names on the walls of Balliol College will remain. A few of the names are German, commemorating the young men who died on the other side. The fact that they too are listed there makes one feel very English.
Being English is getting a lot of laughs when others would merely see inexplicable oddness verging on lunacy. The story of Simon Gray, the author, and Stephen Fry, the actor, and the play about the English- men who betrayed their country to Russia — and which was in turn, according to Gray, betrayed by Fry — is so full of English subtleties and nuances and under- and overtones and in-jokes and code words, as told in Gray's brilliant narrative, that it had me rolling in my armchair. Naturally, I know it's a tremendous tragedy for Simon 'We detached it from its owner.' and Stephen, but then it is showbiz, isn't it — middle-class English showbiz too — and so not to be taken too seriously? Fry, I per- ceive, has celebrated his return to England by dyeing his hair blond and riding round in a London taxi which he drives himself, and which has a notice saying: 'Licensed to Carry No Passengers by the Neapolitan Police'.
Being English is celebrating the Proms with minor-public-school philistinism, treating the Booker Prize as the great comic event of the year and telling jokes about Picasso. For instance, Sir Winston Churchill to the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings: 'Alf, if you saw that fellow Picasso walking in front of you down Piccadilly, what would you do?' 'Kick his arse, Sir Winston.' Quite right, Alf.' If you don't think this funny, you are not very English.
Being English is the ability to say the word 'really' in seven distinct tones of voice, each of which means something totally different. It is taking violent sides in the real-life marital disputes of the stars from EastEnders and Coronation Street, and it is also being proud of never having watched either.
Being English is regarding the Tower of London not just as a tourist trap, but as a terrifying, hateful place where great men, like St Thomas More and Sir Walter Raleigh, and innocent women, like Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn, were cruelly done to death. It is taking our history seri- ously but also getting pleasure out of it. It is a shocking fact, but also an intriguing fact, that as recently as 1747 Simon, Lord Lovat, a Scots peer well into his eighties, was brought forth from this dark Tower, blink- ing in the sudden sunlight, to be executed, and that a cockney woman in the blood- thirsty mob screamed at him, 'They will chop your head off, you ugly old Scotch dog!' and that he replied, 'I believe they shall, you ugly old English bitch!' Being English is relishing this healthy exchange, not as ethnic persiflage but as simple, across-the-class-barrier humour. (To be English is also to take careful note of the contrasting use of 'will' and 'shall') All this suggests to me that perhaps there is, after all, a way of training our children to be English — teach them more of our history. It is all there, in Holinshed and Clarendon, in Macaulay and Carlyle, in Trevelyan and Arthur Bryant.
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