How to Be English (2 page)

The British Empire has long since disappeared, the Union Jack may go the way of the Union, ‘Rule, Britannia' is slightly embarrassing (as the English put it), and the very word ‘British' seems to have given way to a crumbling ‘United Kingdom', which we all know is not
that
united. The days, a century or more ago, when politicians could blithely use the term ‘English' to include everyone on these islands, has now gone.

There has therefore never been a more urgent moment to revive a sense of Englishness, and this book is designed to knit it back together again, contradictory bit by bit.

There was another reason for writing the book. I was wandering down Monsal Dale in Derbyshire, the extraordinarily English beauty spot where John Ruskin campaigned against the dramatic viaduct – built, as he put it, ‘so that every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour'. The viaduct is now preserved and is part of the amazing network of long-distance footpaths that criss-cross the nation. And as I climbed down to the river below, I found myself wondering how my children would ever learn about the traditional stories and songs which are their heritage.

They are hardly going to learn them in school. The national curriculum endlessly repeats the founding myth of the modern British state – the 1940 invasion that never was – but barely goes otherwise beyond the Tudors and an occasional whiff of the Romans. If they go to Anglican schools, they may get a few traditional hymn tunes, but that is pretty much the limit.

So if they are going to learn anything about being English, I'm going to have to teach them myself. But what should I tell them? Should I sing them ‘Polly Oliver', or would they have me locked up? Should I tell them about Robin Hood and the Armada? Should I tell them about Sir John Moore at Corunna and Captain Scott? Should I read them
Children of the New Forest
? Or are these curmudgeonly, backward-looking hangovers from the days of
Downton Abbey
?

Should we still know which clothes are correct for which occasions, and why pinstripe suits exist? Should we extol St George and St George's Day? After all, this sort of English identity can make people nervous.

On one level, this is a manual. It is a book which you could give to a visitor from another planet, and which would given them a complete grounding in the idiosyncracies of the English. It also pins down and captures the absurdities and warmth of Englishness at its best, and why – despite everything – we are rather proud of it. In fact, this is a book that can help us learn to be English all over again. It will show us how by providing, in a way that can be dipped into or read right through, a compendium of the peculiarities and cultural tics that make us English.

And once you set out these little English peculiarities, it is clear how much of a mongrel nation we have always been. So few of those institutions that we call our own are unambiguously English in origin – they have been borrowed from cultures all over the world, just as we have borrowed people from all over the world.

The English have always been a tolerant nation, though it may not have seemed like that if you were a foreign merchant being chased through the backstreets of medieval London by the wild apprentices of the City. They have incorporated and assimilated, not always easily, and not always consciously, and have created a paradoxical, varied culture that seems at the same time to reach back to the past but also to change all the time.

‘What should they know of England who only England know?' wrote Rudyard Kipling, urging the strangely insular English to look beyond their shores to where their fellow countrypeople struggled to live, in Calcutta or Lahore or Shanghai or Cairo or Lagos. It is true that, to learn what is most obvious about yourself, you sometimes have to listen to what foreigners say about you.

Evelyn Waugh puts the negative in the voice of Anthony Blanche, the waspish, camp, half-English gossip of
Brideshead Revisited
, a character he based partly on Brian Howard and partly on Harold Acton, who had famously recited T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
to the rowing toughs on Christ Church Meadow in Oxford. He warns the hero about charm:

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed
you
.

This book is full of English charm, so this is a reasonable warning to bear in mind. It is perhaps that the English insist on a stubborn, perhaps lazy, refusal to demand too much for themselves, their determination to live like hobbits: comfortable, bourgeois, unexciting lives – facing up to challenges and extremes which are different from those of other nationalities. But we need to defend the English a little here. Separately, the garden sheds, tree and football worship, nostalgia, and giant, stodgy puddings with custard, may not amount to much. But, taken together, they amount to a civilised way of life, which is constantly changing and yet always the same.

So, with a view to capturing all the rich foibles, traditions and quirks of English culture and history for the next generation, before they are forgotten, I have selected the hundred entries that follow. Everyone in England would probably select different things – that is partly what makes them English – but I hope readers will forgive the personal selection, my own desert-island choices, and use it as a starting point to make their own. And then pass them on.

Key to logos

SOME NATIONS RENAME
their high streets and airports when their dead heroes are still warm. Others use the epithet ‘great' to describe every statesman they produce who stays the right side of the law, and some who don't.

For the English, it is the other way around. Only one king of England was ever called ‘the Great' and he was born and died so long ago that it is hard to verify whether he was great or not. We don't even know where his bones lie, though they were scattered by Puritans during the Eighteenth Century, so perhaps that is forgivable.

It is strange that we know so little about Alfred the Great. Perhaps the only inhabitants of England who are constantly reminded of him are those who live in his former capital city of Winchester, where a prominent statue of the man, wielding a sword, dominates the entrance to the city from the south.

Traditionally, what everyone knew about Alfred was the story of the cakes. This was a tale told by an anonymous monk writing the life of Alfred's advisor St Neot. It explained how the king, cornered by the Vikings at Athelney, goes wandering among his people deep in thought, knocks on a swineherd's hut and agrees to mind the stove for the wife. He was so deep in thought that he let the cakes burn, and received a heavy tongue-lashing – even perhaps a beating – without revealing who he was.

Now this story is pretty much forgotten, yet it has something in common with many English tales. It isn't really about the humiliation of the king, or his dutiful acceptance of chastisement. It is about the ability of an ordinary housewife to upbraid the monarch. It is about the importance of practicality over intellect – a very English idea – and also about the importance of trying again. Alfred was soundly beaten by the Danes when he was hiding in Athelney, but he was thinking about how to have another bash at them. Alfred and the Cakes is the English equivalent of Robert the Bruce and the Spider: it is a story designed to encourage you never to give up.

The fact that Alfred didn't give up was partly what made him great. There he was, encircled with his followers on the Isle of Athelney, poking out over the waterline in the Somerset Levels, and yet he managed to gather an army, harry the Vikings and eventually defeat them – forcing his opponent Guthrum to become a Christian as part of the peace settlement.

Alfred was born in 849 in Wantage, into a world that was under threat. The Viking raiders had emerged from the sea to attack the monastic island of Lindisfarne in 793, and from there they went on to take over most of what we now know as England. Like Winston Churchill, Alfred inherited power at the moment of complete disaster, in 870 – but fought his way back to strength.

The Victorians loved Alfred as the symbol of the Anglo-Saxon race, which they believed was the basis of English greatness, for his wisdom and his books and translations, for founding the English navy and for building the first wharves that turned London into a port. They worshipped the Anglo-Saxons even though they had been pushed aside by a ruling class descended from Norsemen, or ‘Normans' as they were called by then.

Yet they loved Alfred also for overcoming adversity – not just the Vikings but continual ill health. There is some evidence that he suffered from Crohn's disease.

Yet, even before the Victorian middle classes got hold of his memory, Alfred was a symbol for radical generations before, as the author of what they called the Laws and Liberties of Old England, which had been bundled away into history by William the Conqueror. In fact, Alfred's laws are a little vague, about keeping oaths and promises – and being able to write in English if you wanted to be a judge. Important in their own way, but not exactly Magna Carta.

Ironically, given how little has been preserved in writing from this time, Alfred's son insisted that it was important that laws should be written down so that they should not be ‘brought to naught by the assault of misty oblivion'; a fate Alfred himself has so far managed to avoid, but only just.

Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.

Alfred the Great

THE ALLOTMENT MOVEMENT
has become an increasingly popular part of life in England, and a political ideal that began with the Agricultural Labourers' Strike of 1878. The idea of a small patch of land for the landless stretches back directly to the medieval commons, where ordinary people could use land to graze a cow or provide themselves with basic necessities. It certainly didn't begin that day of the great farmworkers' rally in Leamington during the strike, but the demonstration launched the political career of one campaigner in particular who was to make the allotments ideal central to his political life.