‘Cuckoo’ Englishness
(deleted from Heavy Years, 2018)I felt I was jumping to conclusions
about English people based on a family prejudice (‘The Englishman knows his
place and the place of others’, my mother), and so I spoke to Joab Comfort who is
of Ulster Protestant stock, and officially British. He quoted John Ruskin:
‘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.
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
were 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 desert 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 Jewish 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.
What
I saw in London was a cosmopolitism that put history in its place. The city had
a future, but burdened with baggage that had to be lost. The year I arrived
fogs were not unknown, but that all changed. The air may not have been pure but
it was relativity clear. But the fogs persisted elsewhere for me, not physical ones.
Dispossessed mine and factory workers disappeared into an unemployment haze of
clubs and pubs. The middle-class nestled in the fog and did as little as
possible in a comfortable way. At conferences I attended, leading lights from
the provinces wore suits and talked amongst themselves. In the 1980s with the
Falkland adventure I began to hear them. Union Jacks as underpants in Carnaby
Street were replaced by flags and slightly embarrassed shibboleths. What was to
come was already there and it had the sort of foggy past that eventually
settled with Brexit. The poor and little old England found their democratic voice.
And the opportunist ‘cuckoos’ were hatching eggs that were not theirs’.
I am
not waiting for the worst to happen. Somewhere out there is a formidable culture
August 2019