What defines England most? For Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, the
country was:
This royal throne of kings, this
scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat
of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for
herself
Against infection and the hand of
war,
This happy breed of men, this
little world,
This precious stone set in the
silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of
a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier
lands,
This blessed plot, this earth,
this realm, this England.
In 1941 George Orwell initiated a more prosaic tradition. For him,
England was comprised of
The
clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on
the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of
pin tables in the Soho pubs, old maids biking to Holy Communion through the
mists of the autumn mornings, these are not only fragments, but characteristic
fragments, of the English scene.
T.S. Eliot’s politics couldn’t have been more different, but his
own summary of English culture, from 1948, had echoes of Orwell’s:
Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, the Cup
Final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled
cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century gothic
churches, and the music of Elgar.
Eliot advised that ‘The reader can make his own list’. And
perhaps this is what defines England most: it is not the contents of these lists
that count, but the lists themselves. The English love them. They are the
verbal equivalent of standing in queues. Writing in 1980, Mark E. Smith saw
through this crap. For him, Orwell’s English scene had become the ‘English
Scheme’:
You got sixty hour weeks, and
stone toilet back-gardens
Peter Cook’s jokes, bad dope,
check shirts, lousy groups
Point their fingers at America
Down pokey quaint streets in
Cambridge
Cycles our distant spastic
heritage
It’s a gay read, roundhead,
army career, grim head
If we was smart we’d emigrate
Although Smith has prided himself on his ‘pre-cognition’, it is
immigration rather than emigration that has prompted England’s darkest fears.
Xenophobia marks the nation as much as lists do. In recent times, little
Englanders have seen their fortress breached. They want it to be rebuilt. And
so, the years of European Union have seen the ghost of Orwell rise in the most
unlikely places. Speaking in 1993, when he was Tory prime minister, John Major claimed
that
Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of
long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog
lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, ‘Old maids bicycling to
holy communion through the morning mist’.
Johnny Rotten has witnessed less permanence. He waxed nostalgic
in 2012:
I miss the roses, those English roses, of salad and beer and
summer here and many mannered ways of cotton dresses skipping across the lawn
off happy faces, when football was not a yawn and clear the bomb sites, and all
the days were long. November into winters here, snows would turn my page.
His revelries were shot through with the blues of an ex-pat. In
2011, P.J. Harvey evidenced a different longing for home. She wrote in
character as a soldier who had been posted abroad:
Goddamn Europeans!
Take me back to beautiful
England
And the grey damp filthiness of
ages
And battered books
And fog rolling down behind the
mountains
On the graveyards and dead
sea-captains.
Let me walk through the
stinking alleys
To the music of drunken beatings
Past the Thames river glistening
Like gold hastily sold
For nothing
She is as unromantic as Smith, but these lists are always
slippery. It is February 2016 and voices P.J. Harvey would never have dreamed of are
chorusing her ‘Goddamn!’
