How to Be English Read online

  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.

  When Laurence Olivier played Henry in his 1944 film, borrowing the Irish army as extras (they were paid more if they brought their own horse), he injected a splash of colour and excitement into English culture to coincide with D-Day, helped along by William Walton’s classic score. Together they roused a war-torn nation, and ushered in a sense of colourful Englishness which carries on to this day.

  And when all is said and done, there may be a little bit of some of us in England, now a-bed, who still ‘think themselves accursed they were not here, / And hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speaks / That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day’.

  I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

  Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:

  Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge

  Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’

  Henry V, sounding the charge at Harfleur

  ‘HAD WE LIVED, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.’

  That is the familiar final diary entry of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, found by his frozen body, written in a tent in an Antarctic blizzard. Somehow the words seem to sum up the English obsession with heroic failure. Roald Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole; Ernest Shackleton succeeded in bringing all his men back from the Antarctic catastrophe alive. Yet it is Scott’s failure to do either that somehow endeared him to the English.

  The last sentence also reveals another English obsession: somehow holding together enough money to get by. It was Nelson’s last wish for his family as well. And whilst some nations might shower their heroes and their loved ones with wealth, Nelson’s partner Emma Hamilton died impoverished in her Calais lodgings in 1815.

  Scott emphasised the point just before he died, in a final note written on 29 March 1912. Two weeks later, the luxury transatlantic liner Titanic hit an iceberg and sank with the loss of 2,224 passengers and crew: two of the greatest heroic failures in history, and just a few days apart.

  But there are lighter sides to the English flair for heroic failure as seen in the case of Georgian actor Robert Coates, who used his fortune to finance plays in which he played major Shakespearean roles – especially Romeo – and brought the house down night after night with his disastrous performances.

  During his first performance as Romeo, he got out his snuffbox on stage and offered some to the occupants of a box above him. During the death scene, he was careful to use his own hat as a pillow and a handkerchief to dust the stage where he was about to fall dead. On another occasion, he dropped a diamond buckle as he headed offstage and crawled around, interrupting the performance looking for it.

  His performances were so funny that audience members were regularly treated for laughing too much. He was so impressed by the response to Romeo’s death on one occasion that he repeated it, and would have done it again had not Juliet risen from the dead to
stop him.

  Coates was of English extraction, though he was actually born in the West Indies, and he was to die in a road accident outside the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane – but you can see something of the admiration of incompetence endures to this day. How else are we to explain the popularity of Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards, the heroic English ski-jumper at the 1988 Winter Olympics?

  Edwards continued in the same vein afterwards, releasing a record in Finnish, though he didn’t actually speak the language. An example to us all.

  Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

  Winston Churchill articulates the gentle English art of failing

  IS IT POSSIBLE to pin down English humour and define it? It may only be possible to say that it appears to be part of the national character. This is not just what J. B. Priestley used to call ‘humorous realism’ – the ability to find very ordinary things and people funny, which goes back to Geoffrey Chaucer at least – but also the ability to find yourself rather funny too.

  Which other nation could have poked so much fun at themselves during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony? But then again, it was a British opening ceremony, where the artistic genius was actually Scottish. The English certainly take a particular enjoyment at their own peculiarities, even their own failures, that other countries lack almost completely. American office workers might struggle to publicly admit to ‘an example of when they failed’, but English counterparts remember their disasters as badges of honour.

  This enjoyment of their own peculiarities seems to date back as long as the English have existed. ‘I passed many hours with him on the 17th,’ wrote James Boswell (a Scot) of Samuel Johnson, ‘of which I find all my memorial is, “much laughing”. It should seem he had that day been in a humour for jocularitie and merriment, and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily.’ Yet there was Boswell, not much later, describing his friend’s ‘perpetual gloom’. The two – humour and gloom – seem quite close companions, as perhaps they always are in great comedy, amongst the English.

  Perhaps the clearest view of English humour is available by comparing it more closely to American humour. English jokes in this respect seem to be based on exaggeration – they are whimsical, flights of fancy, imagining the world distorted, pushing those peculiarities to their logical conclusion. It is the exaggeration of an English joke that becomes, at some point, farcical nonsense: and from Lewis Carroll to Monty Python, the English have excelled at humorous nonsense (as opposed to serious nonsense in the Theatre of the Absurd, where the French clearly have the upper hand).

  From Gilray to Giles cartoons, the root of English humour is exaggeration to the point of caricature. The way it is exaggerated may change – we don’t find the humour of W. S. Gilbert, Dan Leno, Arthur Askey or ITMA funny in the way their our grandparents might have done – but that is just the nature of passing time. The basis remains the same, and the greatest English humorists – Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, P. G. Wodehouse, Stan Laurel or Charlie Chaplin – do still keep their ability to make people laugh, whether it is in the novel, the newspaper, the music hall or the comedy club, and there are certainly comedians to choose from in every generation.

  This is what the great eighteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt said on the subject:

  The French cannot, however, be persuaded of the excellence of our comic stage, nor of the store we set by it. When they ask what amusements we have, it is plain they can never have heard of Mrs Jordan, nor King, nor Banniser, nor Suett, nor Munden, nor Lewis, nor little Simmons, nor Dodd, and Parsons, and Emergy and Miss Pope, and Miss Farren, and all those who even in my time have gladdened a nation and made life’s business like a summer dream.

  All these names who once strutted the boards of London are now forgotten, but their places are taken by others like them. There is perhaps a basic laziness about the English, an acceptance of life as it is, which makes us yearn for someone to make work feel like a summer dream – then we can forget ourselves for a moment, unbutton our buttoned-up coats, and just be a little less serious.

  A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says: ‘Ugh, that’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen!’ The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her: ‘The driver just insulted me!’ The man says: ‘You go up there and tell him off. Go on, I’ll hold your monkey for you.’

  Voted funniest English joke in a poll of 36,000 people in 2010

  NATIONALITY GETS TO be a bit of a problem when it comes to King Arthur and his knights. If he existed, which he almost certainly did as the leader of the Romano-British kingdoms against the marauding Saxons, then he wasn’t exactly English. Welsh, perhaps; Cornish, possibly. Roman, almost by default – his uncle was supposed to be the Roman general Ambrosius Aurelianus.

  When it comes to his knights, the English claim on him becomes even more shaky. Sir Gawain definitely sounds Welsh. Sir Lancelot first appeared in French literature. Worse, the battles Arthur fought in recorded history – Wallop, Mount Badon – were almost certainly against the rampaging and still pagan English, not on their side at all.

  This caused consternation among the authors of Edwardian boys’ adventure stories, who were determined that heroes should be on the side of the Anglo-Saxons, but were also disconcerted that this meant he would have been fighting the Christians.

  The first mention of King Arthur in any chronicle was in around 820, at least two centuries after his battles, and one of the candidates for the original Arthur – a king called Riothamus – was actually from Brittany.

  What we can say about the great romantic tale of the British Isles, as the historian John Morris points out, is that ‘Arthur’ was suddenly and briefly a popular name for chieftains after this period, and that the great events probably took place on what is now English soil. Arthur’s castle of Camelot may not have been ‘many-towered’, as Alfred Tennyson suggested, but the best-known site for it is South Cadbury, a vast windswept hill fort in Somerset. His round table – a medieval fake – is celebrated in Winchester, later the Anglo-Saxon capital of Wessex.

  Then again, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the first stories in Middle English to survive. Gawain manages to resist cowardice and sexual temptation to keep his promised encounter with an axe-wielding green giant.

  It was the Victorians who really took all that sacrificial chivalry of the Arthurian legends to their hearts, churning out great sombre poems (Tennyson, etc.) and even more sombre paintings (Burne-Jones, etc.), to encourage similar behaviour in the next generation.

  Obediently, the Scott Antarctic expedition, and the upper-crust passengers on the Titanic – not to mention the officers at Mons and the Somme – went calmly to their deaths, thinking of Galahad, Tristram, Percival and all the others, vowing to be perfect knights.

  HIC JACET ARTHURUS REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS (Here lies Arthur, the king that was and the king that is to be)

  Tomb inscription in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur

  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 offensiv
e.

  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.