How to Be English (3 page)

It is nearly a century and a half since Jesse Collings began his bid for ‘three acres and a cow' for anyone who wanted them. Even at the time, when the campaign reached its height in the 1880s, it seemed politically impossible to provide that amount of land to everyone. His work culminated in the 1908 Allotments and Smallholdings Act, which – for peculiar reasons – Collings actually opposed, and which gave local councils a duty to provide allotments to anyone wanting one.

There have been bursts of enthusiasm for similar ideas in the century that followed – perhaps not for acres and cows, but for a small strip of land to grow vegetables, to feed the family or to get closer to nature. But now the demand is suddenly unquenchable. There are thought to be about 6 million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as forty years in one London borough. It isn't quite clear why this change of heart occurred, but it may be that the real question is why their popularity ever went away, given the success of the Dig for Victory campaign in the Second World War.

Going Back to the Land was promoted between the wars by right-wing romantic groups like English Mistery and English Array, and by Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Mosley's enthusiastic acolyte, the novelist Henry Williamson, took it so seriously that he bought a farm in Norfolk and struggled with farming it throughout the war. His agricultural advisor Jorian Jenks – later one of the founders of the Soil Association – urged that Britain should grow all its own food, with fixed prices, low-rate loans for farmers, small-scale farming, and so on.

These were exactly the policies brought in by the agriculture minister Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith in 1939. Dorman-Smith was a former member of English Mistery, with its opposition to tinned food and the degradation of the soil, and also the architect of Dig for Victory.

Dig for Victory changed everything. There were 1.4 million allotments by 1943, by which time over a million tonnes of vege-tables a year were being grown in gardens, parks and on wasteland. There were radio programmes (3.5 million people tuned in to C. H. Middleton's gardening slots), even Dig for Victory anthems. By 1970, only a generation after the end of the war, there were just 530,000 allotments left, and a fifth of those were vacant. What went wrong?

Perhaps it was the end of rationing in 1954, and the beginning of self-service supermarkets (1950) which ushered in a new sense of plenty. Perhaps the remains of the sturdy working-class image of allotments made them seem old-fashioned. Policymakers had a housing crisis on their hands, and then a balance of payments crisis followed by an energy crisis.

Maybe that is what went wrong for the allotments movement in the 1950s. Official policy turned against romantic enthusiasm for growing things. Whatever happened, something has now shifted back: and we appear to be going through another period of the most English brand of radicalism of them all – the idea of going Back to the Land.

I discovered at last, that even in all that labyrinth of the new London by night, there is an unvisited hour of almost utter stillness, before the creaking carts begin to come in from the market gardens, to remind us that there is still somewhere a countryside. And in that stillness, I have sometimes fancied I heard, tiny and infinitely far away, something like a faint voice hailing and the sound of horse hoofs that return.

William Cobbett

THERE'S SOMETHING IN
the English soul that believes apologies should always be reciprocated. It is important somehow not to be out-apologised, and it is quite possible for the English – especially the middle classes – to pre-empt apologies with agonising politeness when someone treads on their toes or runs into them in the street. Though, of course, they would be deeply offended if the person failed to apologise back.

Where does this delicacy come from? It isn't really that the English are any more tentative or nervous than other nations – quite the reverse. But they do hate confrontation, which the pre-emptive, polite apology is designed to avoid. And so the English grasp at opportunities to diffuse or avoid dangerous incidents which risk developing into unseemly fracas. This can give the impression to outsiders that the English are a formal nation. Actually, they can be a good deal less formal than their continental neighbours. It's just that they don't like the intimacy of a stand-up row. It is just so embarrassing.

Puritanism, along with the British stiff upper lip, which appears to have been invented by the Duke of Wellington, perhaps during the long summer evenings of the Peninsular Campaign, have won out over old English spontaneity. But this was not always the case. ‘English girls are divinely pretty and they have one custom which cannot be too much admired,' wrote Erasmus on a visit to London at the end of the fifteenth century. ‘When you go anywhere on a visit, the girls kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away. They kiss you when you return. Once you have tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you could spend your life there.' This is not a view of London that has been passed down through history.

An unfortunate side effect of the culture of the pre-emptive apology is that the English tend to suffer poor service or poor food in silence – not because they don't resent it (the English moan on with the best of them in the privacy of their own kitchens), but because they don't like to complain.

The great English comedienne Joyce Grenfell played the ultimate cringe-making complaint scene as the manager of a small guest house in Brighton, in the 1953 film
Genevieve
. Hot baths are to be procured only between two and four o'clock in the afternoon, she explains to her arriving guests. The room is decorated in brown and opens out on to a deafening chiming clock. When the young couple storm off, the manageress is mortified and turns to the other guests with English horror.

‘No one's ever complained before,' she says.

One old lady stares up at the disappearing couple and asks: ‘Are they Americans?'

How to apologise in English, according to Bloomsbury International English courses:

1. Sorry.
   
2. I'm so / very / extremely / terribly sorry.
   
3. How careless of me!
   
4. I shouldn't have …
   
5. It's all my fault.
   
6. Please don't be mad at me.
   
7. I hope you can forgive me / Please forgive me.
   
8. I cannot say / express how sorry I am.
   
9. I apologise for … / I'd like to apologise for …
   
10. Please accept my (sincere) apologies.
    

THERE IS A
strange paradox about the English global image: on the one hand it is about bucolic self-satisfaction and order (‘There'll always be an England, while there's a country lane'); the English are seen to exude tradition and stuffy decorum; and are portrayed in foreign films as stiff idiots or as psychopaths seeking global domination. Yet look at England: there's an eighty per cent urban population and has been for a century. The English are forerunners in technology, from the Industrial Revolution to the Internet and are pre-eminent in advertising and youth culture.

When the Beatles emerged from Liverpool with their first hit record in 1962, they embodied this mismatch between the image and reality of England more than anything else, before or since. There was the prime minister, an Edwardian buffer called Harold Macmillan, the changing of the guard, the old men who – as the poet John Betjeman put it – ‘never cheated, never doubted'. Then suddenly, there were these four young men with long hair, who took the hallowed American pop charts by storm, grasped the 1960s by the throat, dominating the psychedelic wave that followed and have been pasting their songs all over our memories ever since. They provided a backdrop to everyone's lives during the late twentieth century, and way beyond England.

The paradox goes deeper than that. John Lennon's middle name was Winston, though he later swapped it for something more appropriate. Paul McCartney's lyrics for ‘When I'm Sixty-Four' may have shown a delicate understanding of the England of their parents' generation too – and the simple longing for ‘a cottage in the Isle of Wight / If it's not too dear' – but it was McCartney who wrote it; Lennon explained that he would ‘never write a song like that'.

The band began as the Quarrymen and managed to test out a number of other names – the Blackjacks and Johnny and the Moondogs – before they settled on the Beatles, and Lennon's friend and early band member Stuart Sutcliffe had his hair cut in the famous style on a trip to Hamburg with the band. They attracted the attention of local record-store owner Brian Epstein in 1962 and the recordings at Abbey Road Studio in London followed. By the autumn of 1963, hundreds of screaming fans greeted them at Heathrow Airport in the rain and Beatlemania had begun.

The Fab Four (a phrase coined by their press officer Tony Barrow) – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – hit the American market in 1964 and it was in the USA in the summer of that year that the folk singer Bob Dylan introduced them to cannabis (their dentist secretly added LSD to their coffee the following year). It was an important cross-cultural moment. By the time the band broke up, just six years later, they had become the most famous and successful rock group in history, selling around 600 million records.

Their cultural influence was immense, whether it was the creative flair of
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
(1967) or any of their later work, but between them they seem to have laid the foundation of a fusion of English and American culture that still resonates.

Lennon was shot dead in New York in 1980 and Harrison died of cancer in 2001, though the two surviving members of the group continue to play their part in English life – McCartney playing at the Queen's Golden Jubilee concert and Starr narrating
Thomas the Tank Engine
– another seminal cultural export from the English north-west.

Beatles statistics:

Number of Beatles albums sold worldwide: 600m

Number of copies of
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
sold in the UK: 4.5m

Number of No. 1 hits written by McCartney: 32

Number of Beatles' songs with a woman's name in the title: 18

IF MANY OF
the quintessentially English elements listed in this book actually came from somewhere else, the exception is beer. The link between England and beer goes back so far that it actually pre-dates the English themselves, because it was being consumed in these islands for some centuries before the arrival of Hengist, Horsa, Cerdic or any of the other Anglo-Saxons.

The Celts certainly brewed ale from malt, water and yeast, and the Romans – having sent Caractacus off to Rome – carried on the same tradition. In fact, we even know the name of one Roman brewer. He was called Atrectus the Brewer and he came from Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall, a place where surviving the winter probably required a great deal of beer-drinking.