How to Be English (9 page)

EVEN MORE THAN
the works of William Shakespeare, the translators of the Old and New testaments into English during the Reformation and pre-Reformation years left behind an extraordinary wealth of quotations, and a legacy of language which we all share in. Because of that, it is hard to imagine English without the great translation of the Bible ordered by the new king, James I, newly arrived from Scotland after the death of Elizabeth I.

The problem was that nobody could agree on a proper translation of the Bible in English. There were the translations of John Wycliffe and his friends, banned back in 1409. There was William Tyndale's version which formed the basis of Henry VIII's Great Bible, and the so-called Bishop's Bible designed to bring it all up to date – but it was vast and very expensive to get a copy. There was the Geneva Bible, translated by Protestants in exile during the reign of Queen Mary – known to history as Bloody Mary – which included a series of notes and comments which some people found offensive.

The problem for James and his churchman friends was that the people who had taken the trouble to translate the Bible into English had tended to be Protestants. And the translations showed a certain bias – the word ‘congregations' rather than ‘church' and other things that stuck in the Anglican gullet. What was needed was a translation that assumed the existence of bishops and ordained clergy.

Hence the conference at Hampton Court in 1604 which kick-started the project. James had been mulling over the idea of a new translation of the Bible since 1601 when it was put forward as an idea by the Church of Scotland general assembly in Fife. Three years later, the translators were appointed, unpaid, to six translating committees in Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster to get the job done. In practice, the sheer beauty of Tyndale's version echoes still through the words of the new committee, with its starkness and simplicity.

Not everyone liked it. During the English Civil War a generation later, the Puritans had their own version of the Geneva Bible produced, and there were some important scholars who had been left out. Nobody would work with the greatest expert on Hebrew of the day, Hugh Broughton, so he didn't like it. In fact, he said that ‘he would rather be torn in pieces by wild horses than that this abominable translation should ever be foisted upon the English people'.

But foisted it was, and all over the English-speaking world. The misprints and omissions of the early years – especially the notorious Wicked Bible of 1631 which left the word ‘not' out of the adultery injunction in the Ten Commandments – were all put right in one definitive printed version in 1769.

Few people choose the King James version for everyday use these days. But for sheer poetry, you can't beat it.

In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth. And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darkenesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God diuided the light from the darkenesse. And God called the light, Day, and the darknesse he called Night: and the euening and the morning were the first day.

The beginning of Genesis Chapter 1, from the 1611 version

ONE OF THE
most English of all the English eccentricities is the pursuit of bizarre archaeological theories and, the more they irritate mainstream historians, the better people seem to respond. Whole cults have grown up around the real identity of William Shakespeare, the fate of the princes in the Tower, the original rituals carried out at Stonehenge and much else besides. And who is to say they are wrong?

And so it was that businessman Alfred Watkins, an amateur archaeologist, was travelling in Hereford with his son – on 30 June 1921 to be precise – and looked up to see the ley lines criss-crossing the countryside, lit up like ‘fairy lights'. He regarded them as notches on the hills to allow the Neolithic travellers to find their way from one place to another, as prehistoric trackways, dead straight. They seemed to stretch for miles and align ancient mounds or churches, and for no obvious reasons (one critic made the same case for telephone boxes).

It wasn't until 1969 that John Michell bundled the whole idea up with an English version of feng shui, plus geomancy and various other esoteric traditions, and shovelled them into his book
The View Over Atlantis
, and – at one stroke – founded the English tradition of earth mysteries. Soon writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd were exhuming myths of sacred geometry about the alignment of churches in London, the city founded, after all – according to Geoffrey of Monmouth – as the New Troy.

Mainstream archaeologists still resist the idea and there is little agreement what these alignments actually were – whether they were simple ways of finding your way across dense forest or whether they were some other kind of psychic mystery, or lines of force. Or the roads by which the dead left the world, or the paths by which witches flew. Or the outward manifestations of the energy flows of the earth itself.

Michell single-handedly added this kind of sacred English exoticism to the hippy and underground movement, popularising Glastonbury as the heart of the cult – transforming a rural backwater into an alternative mecca for the new movement. It was Michell who pointed out the existence of one of the longest ley lines of all, known now as the Michael Line, which stretches from Land's End in Cornwall all the way to Hopton-on-Sea on the Norfolk coast, in the direction of the rising sun on 8 May (St Michael's Day) or alternatively on May Day, depending on who you talk to.

It goes via a whole range of ancient sites, including St Michael's Mount and the church tower on the tip of Glastonbury Tor dedicated to, you guessed it, St Michael. But it wasn't for another fifteen years or so before the dowsers Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst took some dowsing rods and traced the line all the way, and found it really wasn't straight at all – and neither was the so-called Mary Line that intertwined it all the way (see
The Sun and the Serpent
, 1990).

Dowsing, incidentally, is the skill which usually allows people to sense the whereabouts of water. It is another esoteric – though highly practical – skill which is much used in England, and equally ignored by a sceptical mainstream, though it was declared illegal in 1572 because of supposed links to witchcraft. The fascination with the esoteric in English culture is accompanied by an instinctive fear of anything unusual in its bureaucracies and authorities. The unconventional archaeologist Frederick Bligh Bond lost his job as director of excavations at Glastonbury Abbey when he started using automatic writing – receiving messages from a long-dead medieval monk – to guide his decisions about where to dig.

Still, whatever ley lines may or may not be, they provide an added layer of deep history – and maybe even deep mystery – which only underlines the sensible respectability of the National Trust or English Heritage. And they're enjoyable, if only for irritating the English academic establishment, who are no longer able to fall back on witchcraft legislation.

I knew nothing on June 30th last of what I now communicate, and had no theories. A visit to Blackwardine led me to note on the map a straight line starting from Croft Ambury, lying on parts of Croft Lane past the Broad, over hill points, through Blackwardine, over Risbury Camp, and through the high ground at Stretton Grandison, where I surmise a Roman station. I followed up the clue of sighting from hill top, unhampered by other theories, found it yielding astounding results in all districts, the straight lines to my amazement passing over and over again through the same class of objects, which I soon found to be (or to have been) practical sighting points.

Alfred Watkins,
Early British Trackways
(1922)

‘
PUT YOUR FOOT
down, Tony. They're getting rather close,' says Camp Freddie in the passenger seat of a turbo-charged, strengthened Mini Cooper, dashing through the back streets of Turin with gold in the boot.

The Italian Job
(1969) includes many of the trademark elements of English cinema in the 1960s: a crime caper where the rogues almost get away with it but not quite, where the humiliation for Johnny Foreigner is pretty complete, and where the diverse English classes rub along together upside down and inside out – the snobbish Mr Big of crime is in prison, and the action is led by a heroic cockney (Michael Caine).

The apotheosis of the Mini was undoubtedly this film, where red, white and blue Mini Coopers whizz through the Turin sewer system to escape from the Italian police. In fact, all three of the original Minis – which were supposed to be carrying more than one and a half times their own weight in gold in their boots – were written off in accidents in the sewers during filming.

By then the Mini, originally called the Austin Seven and the Morris Mini-Minor, was ten years old. As so often in iconic English style, it was designed by a man who wasn't English at all, but from the Greek community of Smyrna, whose grandfather had been awarded British citizenship after his work on the Smyrna–Aydin railway.

Sir Alec Issigonis was an instinctive designer. When one engineer asked him what size to make the wheels, he held his hands apart and said: ‘This big.' The engineer measured his hands at ten inches and that was how big the wheels were.

Issigonis also designed the Morris Minor, which stayed in production between 1948 and 1971 as the quintessential preferred conveyance of the impoverished English middle classes. The Mini emerged from the energy crisis that followed the Suez Invasion of 1956, when Issigonis was asked by the British Motor Corporation to design a car which used less petrol.

It was launched in the summer of 1959 to an uncertain reception. This was just too new a concept, for people still used to running boards and strange indicator lights that stuck out of the side of the car. It wasn't until the Queen was photographed at the wheel of a Mini that the car began to gather to itself its extraordinary cachet. Soon there was hardly an English celebrity, whether it was David Niven or Peter Sellers, without one. The Beatles snapped up four of them.

The size of the Mini, which became such an iconic version of 1960s London, was achieved by mounting the engine sideways – a leap of imagination which had eluded car manufacturers before. That meant the car was only ten feet long, but could carry a whole family and their luggage. Over 5.3 million Minis came off the production line before it was finally stopped in October 2000, after an amazing forty-one years. In fact, it is quite impossible to imagine English life in the Elizabethan years, the second half of the twentieth century, without a Mini somewhere in the corner of the picture.

There was something of the era of miniskirts and instant mashed potato and instant coffee about the Mini – not just hassle-free, but compact, a pocket-sized car.

The right to use the name Mini was then taken over by BMW, but the new BMW Minis are not the same as the original designs, though even these bigger, sportier Minis – built at the BMW Cowley plant in Oxford – have been selling well. Whether they are quite Minis in the traditional mould remains a controversial subject.

Just remember, in this country they drive on the wrong side of the road.

Charlie Croker in
The Italian Job