How to Be English (7 page)

The rivalry is also tempered by our huge admiration of the French, for their bistros and for their patisseries, and the smells of authentic shopping in every small village – for the smell of baking bread and sweat – and for their relaxed attitudes to extramarital affairs.

Somehow the exasperation of the French and English became embodied in the person of President Charles de Gaulle, who was a rather unwelcome, and slightly humourless, arrival in London in June 1940, and who still managed to veto British membership of the European Economic Community (as it was then) in 1963 and 1967.

There is a story told in Westminster of de Gaulle's state visit to England in 1960, when at a formal dinner in the House of Lords the French president looked up during his meal to find himself staring at a huge painting of the Battle of Waterloo. It is said that he grabbed his plate and stormed round to the other side of the table, only to look up again and find himself staring at an enormous painting of the Battle of Trafalgar.

That story tells you everything you need to know about Francophobia. It is more a sensitivity and rivalry between allies – and the French have been English allies now since the Crimean War – than it is outright hatred. It is less blind dislike and more grudging
entente cordiale
, the 1904 side effect of Edward VII's love of the fleshpots of Paris.

But still the English can shake their heads at extraordinary examples of French sensitivity, and the French can shake their heads in despair and remind themselves of the boneheaded English headline: FOG IN CHANNEL – CONTINENT CUT OFF.

In former times, when war and strife

The French invasion threaten'd life

An' all was armed to the knife

The fishermen hung the monkey O!

The fishermen with courage high,

Seized on the monkey for a French spy;

‘Hang him!' says one; ‘he's to die'

They did and they hung the monkey Oh!

They tried every means to make him speak

And tortured the monkey till loud he did speak;

Says yen ‘that's French' says another ‘it's Greek'

For the fishermen had got drunky Oh!

Ned Corvan, the Tyneside music-hall artist,
c
.1850

THE TERM
‘
THE
full Monty' has become somewhat ambiguous. One of its many meanings is a ‘full English', which means in effect a full English breakfast – the only recognisably, unambiguously English contribution to international cuisine.

There is something comfortably luxurious about a full English breakfast, in its complete failure to compromise with the modern standards for healthy eating or efficient throughput of guests through a given dining room. It takes ages to cook, takes ages to eat and takes months off your life with every bite, thanks to the lashings of cholesterol. It is boneheadedly, determinedly what it is – which is, let's not beat around the bush, fried eggs, fried bread, fried mushrooms, baked beans, fried tomatoes, sausages and great wedges of bacon.

Depending on where you are, those wedges of bacon may have shrunk somewhat as the water evaporates. There may also be a snippet of black pudding. There may be hash browns, though there is some controversy about the hash browns, which are strictly speaking an American addition.

There is some evidence that combining these elements into one extravagant dish goes back as far as the eighteenth century, which is pushing it since modern industrial bacon was hardly developed until then (in Wiltshire, or so they claim). Before that, English breakfasts normally involved bread, meat and ale. Even in the nineteenth century, Mrs Beeton was including additions like chops and potted fish in the mix. Parson James Woodforde, who wrote more about what he ate than about the religious services he presumably presided over, barely mentions what he consumed for breakfast.

By the twentieth century, you keep tripping over the full English. The great Edwardian house parties for the gentry and ruling classes were leisurely affairs where guests would drift down in the morning and help themselves from silver pots which were keeping the various elements of breakfast hot. Half a century later, the full English was a pretty classless affair. Every working man by the 1950s aspired to egg and sausage in the morning, come rain or shine.

It has even been suggested that its heyday was as recently as the 1960s, when every bed-and-breakfast outfit south of the Scottish border began offering the full English as its standard fare.

It may not be quite as good for you as a ubiquitous continental breakfast – which these days involves little more than an efficient croissant, coffee and yoghurt – but you certainly know afterwards that you have had breakfast.

Mrs Beeton's full English breakfast:

The following list of hot dishes may perhaps assist our readers in knowing what to provide for the comfortable meal called breakfast. Broiled fish, such as mackerel, whiting, herrings, dried haddocks, &c.; mutton chops and rump-steaks, broiled sheep's kidneys, kidneys à la maître d'hôtel, sausages, plain rashers of bacon, bacon and poached eggs, ham and poached eggs, omelets, plain boiled eggs, oeufs-au-plat, poached eggs on toast, muffins, toast, marmalade, butter, &c. &c …

Full English breakfast, as recorded bt Mrs Beeton in
The Book of Household Management
(1861)

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled;

Of a fresh and following folded rank

Not spared, not one

SO SAID THE
English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1879 when they felled the Binsey poplar trees along the side of Port Meadow outside Oxford. Still there beside the site of the poplars are the hedges and line of trees that marked the ancient boundary between Oxfordshire and Berkshire (the boundary is not there any more, since they reorganised such things in 1974). Hedges are celebrated, quite rightly, for their own sake as an environmental resource – though we have lost half of them since 1950 – but it is their role as boundary markers that make them especially important to the English psyche.

Boundaries are important to private people like the English, which is why English suburbs – a kind of reflection of at least one English state of mind – emphasise them as much as they do. In fact, boundaries are so important that, in ancient days, the children of the town were beaten at key points on the borders so that they remembered them – a ceremony known as beating the bounds, and which combined two of the less attractive English vices: an obsession with borders and a predeliction for corporal punishment.

Hedges are there as the remains of woods, or to provide a tall covering for the Saxon roads which, as G. K. Chesterton put it, were built by the ‘rolling English drunkard'. They are there still to provide a crop of fruit for the villagers around the common land and the field strips, or (at least in Kent) to protect the hops from wind. These days they also provide a home for the birds and insects that are needed to seed the crops and support the basic underpinning that the natural world provides for all our lives. Of course, they also marked out the patterns of patchwork fields that tended to follow the enclosures of common land.

If you hurtled back to earth from space, the main clue you might find that you had landed in England are the hedgerows. They give an absolutely distinctive pattern to the countryside. If we never win a Test match again, wrote the poet Edmund Blunden in 1935, ‘we shall still have the world's finest hedges'.

Quite so. The English are a nostalgic lot. Their very psyche is spaced out in hedgerows which divide their relationships and their lives. They feel emotional about hedges just as they feel devastated sometimes when their trees start disappearing in one of the increasingly common arborial epidemics. They wept over the elms in the 1970s, just as Hopkins wept over his aspens. They will weep again over the oak. Yet it is also part of the English character, for some reason, to do almost nothing about it.

Hedgerow plants:

Holly

Alder

Willow

Elm

Hazel

Maple

Buckthorn

Crab

Elder

Dogwood

Guilder rose

Privet

Wayfaring tree

Bramble

Tamarisk

Fuchsia

Dog rose

Burnet rose

Sweet rose

Sallow

Sloe

Blackthorn

IT IS HARD
to entirely like Henry V in the Shakespeare plays that portray him either as king or as the calculating Prince Hal (in the two plays about his father), or even perhaps to like him much once he has become king and has slaughtered the nobility of France on the field of Agincourt. Perhaps anybody could be forgiven for a speech like ‘the feast of Crispian' and other moments of heroism and charm which Shakespeare calls ‘a little touch of Harry in the night'. But still, there seems to be a disturbingly calculating core to the man.

Despite Henry V's healing domestic policies, which involved restoring the exiles and being generally nice to people, he did a lot more than simply cut poor Sir John Falstaff on his coronation day (‘I know thee not old man'). The original of Falstaff, the Lollard leader Sir John Oldcastle, was burned at the stake at the spot between London's Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road now marked by a tower block called Centre Point. In fact, it was Oldcastle's public execution that is supposed to have cursed the spot so absolutely that the tower has never been fully tenanted, but don't let's be superstitious.

Clearly this reflects what Shakespeare felt. After all the sound and fury of Agincourt and victory over the French, and marriage to the beautiful Katherine of Valois, there is a brief epilogue explaining that Henry died young, handing the crown of France and England to his baby son ‘whose state so many had the managing / That they lost France and made his England bleed'.

Henry certainly provided a glimpse of Arthurian glory for those who want it, but he was the Nearly Man of history – creating the conditions for one of those moments when France and England seemed set to merge (the other was 1940) but expiring of tuberculosis in a field in 1422. His intestines remained buried where he died and were recently uncovered in their original box. They still smelled bad.

His birth is a little obscure. Nobody recorded the date because he was never expected to be heir to the throne – let alone king – but he was always known as Henry of Monmouth and therefore had a good claim not to be English, but Welsh. In fact, as he says in Shakespeare's play, explaining how he occasionally wears a celebratory leek: ‘For I am Welsh you know, good countryman.' Case closed.

But don't let's be curmudgeonly about Harry, or pour scorn on his strange pudding-basin haircut, or his poor luck in the annals of history. He still provides inspiration for English pluck and daring, especially when they are up against impossible odds – about double at Agincourt. And he inspired a great play.