‘Cuckoo’
Englishness
(From
The London
Chronicle 1970 – 82)
I
asked myself was I
jumping to conclusions about English
people to accommodate my native prejudices. I spoke to Joab Comfort who
was of
Ulster Protestant stock, and officially British. He said I
wasn’t wrong, only
superficial:
Ruskin’s
‘Contrast the Englishman’s silently
conscious pride in what he is with the vexed restlessness and
wretchedness
of the Frenchman in his thirst for ‘gloire’ to be
gained by agonised effort to
become something he
is not’ is hardly
fair to the French Revolution, but is right for the English. Although,
the
common view is the Englishman’s pride is not in
‘what he is’, but what he is
‘against’. The European Union is a good example of
this. Au
contraire, De
Gaulle’s ‘Non, non’ to their entry,
concurs with Ruskin. While
recognising the innate
repulsion to joining in an institution which could compromise
sovereignty, he
attributed it to bulldog pride, ‘That’s how the
English are. It’s existential’.
However,
England as a nation of
existentialists didn’t seem quite right. I dug out my Ruskin
compendium, and
discovered Joab was fogging his sources. In order not to spoil his
argument, no
doubt, he left out a sentence that appeared in a concurrent letter.
Ruskin
qualifies the ‘what he is’ with
a corrective. ‘While the Frenchman is
content to be just himself until something better is conferred on him,
the
Englishman more sees himself by what his peers think him to
be’. In
other words, Ruskin was in two minds, and so was I, though more
inclined to his
second thoughts. They approximated with what my mother told me (‘the
Englishman knows his place and the place of others’).
Englishness
cannot be separated from its
colonial past. Educated people from Commonwealth countries often appear
to be
more English than the English themselves. Indeed the most recognisable
form of
Englishness is often the reserve of foreigners who assume it. These
‘cuckoo’
Englishmen become what they want to be seen to be. And can even fool the natives when
wearing the right
clothes. Hitchcock knew this, and it’s no accident that in
Hollywood the most
convincing international conmen were butlers and barons in an English
guise.
A
remarkable example of a ‘cuckoo’ was
Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s sidekick and fixer during the
Second World War. He
arrived in England in 1919, presenting himself to the headmaster of
Sedbergh
College in Cumbria as a fifteen-year old orphan from a bush-fire in
Australia,
and a distant relative of Montagu Rendall, the English educationist. He
played
the colonial son returning home with such insouciance that further
investigation into his background was deemed superfluous. The
nineteen-year old
Brendan was accepted as a charity pupil, thus profiting from a Public
School
education, a passport to the Established Order.
His
ancestry could hardly be disguised:
an Irish long head with red hair, and broth-of-a-boy physique. Not to
be
mistaken for convict stock, Brendan claimed that he was Anglo-Irish
gentry
whose Big House had razed by the Fenians, and forced to emigrate. In
fact he
was the son of J.K. Bracken, one of the founders of the Gaelic League,
the
cultural wing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (subsequently the
IRA). His
Australian background was based on a short sojourn there. A troublesome
adolescent, his widowed mother had sent him down under to be
straightened out
by her cousin, a priest.
A
decade later at an Anglo-Irish
conference, Emmet Dalton, an American-born ex-British soldier who, like
Bracken
with Churchill, was one of Michael Collins’s free-floating
adjuncts, recognised
him as a fellow pupil at a Christian Brothers school in Dublin.
Buttonholing
Brendan, he reminded him of their friendship, adding, ‘I can
still recall the
smell of your corduroys’. Emmet’s Proustian moment
met with a blank stare.
But
who was fooling who? It’s difficult
to believe Churchill and the Foreign Office hadn’t an inkling
of the truth. As
the Minister of Information, he attended meetings with King George.
That surely
would have called for security clearance. However, nothing was said.
Just
before Bracken’s death in the 1950s Churchill had made him a
Viscount. Whispers
were that he was Winston’s illegitimate son. It
wasn’t enough that he was an
honorary Englishman. The Established Order wanted the real thing.
On
balance, Ruskin’s second thoughts,
and my mother’s view, were more convincing than
blue-blood pride. English mores was more about placing
oneself and
others. But with an existential twist. The most popular comedies on
television
mocked the quintessence of Englishness. ‘What one
is’ parodied as what your
next-door neighbour thinks himself to be.
Or
your guests, as in Fawlty Towers.
I
resolved, if I was to be put in my
place, it was one I would choose for myself. I wasn’t going
to throw myself
into the English melting plot, and become a good citizen. True, I
worked hard
in the interests of the country, and paid my taxes when Inland Revenue
caught
up with my freelancing. I didn’t vote, or join a club. I saw
what happened to
the identity of Bob Geldof, the Boomtown Rat. Speaking on behalf of
English
youth with an Irish brogue struck me as foolhardy. Still they seemed to
listen.
‘Maybe because outside the Home Counties standard English
isn’t spoken’ Joab
said. ‘And his promotion of global good causes is up your
political street. You
might be able to interest him in Virchowism. I can hear him drone,
‘Putting
health before power politics. That’s
cool’.’ I perished the thought. Sir Bob
became part of the Established Order by accepting the honorary gong.
‘Cuddle
him, and you’ll never play the guitar again’, said
Basil Fawlty to Manuel, his
Spanish waiter, who had made a pet of a rat.
But
who and what was I here in England?
I wouldn’t have minded being a London-based Leopold Bloom. I
could be as Irish,
or not, as the mood takes, as he was neither/nor in Dublin. However I
lacked
the Wandering Jew’s sense of belonging everywhere and
nowhere. AE’s belief that
the Irish had the same pull on the heart-strings as the Jews was
stretching it.
I was content to be outsider looking in.