Lights under bushels
Kate Chisholm Here's a question for all of you who can claim to be (or would wish to be) English. When was the last time you sold yourself short, modestly claiming, 'Oh, it's nothing really. I just botched it together in a rush'? Or, 'I'm sure I know nothing about politics,' when in reality you're an avid reader of Fraser Nelson's column? Or to a climatechange fanatic, 'What was that? I didn't understand what you said,' when you've got a degree in environmental science? In recent years, we've been told such self-deprecation is bad for us and we need to go into therapy to retune our responses. But no longer. Or so Andrew Marr argues in Unmasking the English, his four-part series on Radio Four (Mondays).
Marr, we must remember, is a Scotsman (a nation of such primitive origins that, as Dr Johnson once said, they had to be introduced to the virtues of cabbage by Oliver Cromwell's men). Despite this, he has bravely gone down avenues of sociology where no one else would dare to roam, teasing out the essence of what it is to be English. In his first programme he decided that the modest self put-down so typical of the descendants of the Angles and Saxons is a Pavlovian response, a tactic, a useful way to deceive the enemy. We can't help it. It defines our national character, and we should nurture and preserve it, not school ourselves out of it.
It's best personified, said Mr Marr, with irreverent enthusiasm, by Agatha Christie's fictional amateur detective Miss Marple. She always succeeds in outwitting the plodding professionals, hiding her beady-eyed brilliance so successfully that no one realises what lies behind that image of cardiganclad primness. 'There she goes,' explained Marr, 'tootling placidly off to check that the Victoria sponge is ready or that a passing badger hasn't devoured her begonias,' having just outed, to astonishing effect, the villain of the piece.
The seeming effortlessness with which Miss Marple unravels the plot is what Marr most admires; indeed, he claims that it's the key to England's imperial success. It's a dodgy argument, since Miss Marple does not make her fictional appearance until 1930 when Empire's almost done, and then only as a very minor character in a much earlier story by Agatha Christie. Marr was reminded by P.D. James, the grande dame of crime writing, that her emergence as the lady detective par excellence depended on Joan Hickson's portrayal of the character in the TV series.
Unabashed, he went on jauntily to claim that the Miss Marple for the noughties is none other than our very own former editor, that bumbling personification of self-effacement, Boris Johnson (who, incidentally, is English crossed with Turkish). Boris actually profits from being underestimated, says Marr, presenting himself as a gentle fool in a deliberate, and very English, attempt to mask his steely intellect. Boris = Miss Marple, in fact.
Marr did have the grace to confess that his arguments are fantastically unscientific. They're also rather irritating. I've spent years of my life retraining myself to think big, talk big, act big. Have I been wasting my time? But Marr's enthusiasm is infectious, and when in the next programme he spends ten minutes debating with his interviewees the correct pronunciation of Raleigh, as in Sir Walter, I began to think he was on to something. Only the English could worry away about something as trivial as 'Rawlee', 'Railey' or `Raw-lie'.
Marr has not so far mentioned the role of landscape in shaping the national character. Why, for instance, do the Scots have a reputation for dour religiosity? Could it be something to do with all that punishing horizontal rain, and those deep and gloomy valleys, where the sun never penetrates and all is dank, dismal, eternal chill. This week's evocative Words and Music (Radio Three), produced by Zahid Warley, took us into the 'Wild Wood', a place of magic enchantment and bone-freezing fear. The success of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (which was first published in 1908) depended on a nostalgia for those fast disappearing wild places, uncultivated, swept by whistling winds and filled with sprites, where survival depends on a natural intelligence and an ability to hide, to merge into the undergrowth.
'It was a cold, still afternoon with a hard, steely sky overhead when he slipped out of the parlour into the open air,' we heard late on Sunday night as the wind whistled round the roof on a moonless night. It's the beginning of Mole's adventures. 'The Wild Wood lay before him, low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.' A conflation of images that could only have arisen in the mind of an English writer, threatened by the sea on one side and encroaching nature/untamed civilisation on the other.
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