How to Be English Read online

  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.
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br />   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

  IS IT BECAUSE of the use of sheds that the sports of pigeon-fancying and pigeon racing seem so English? Is it that peculiar link that working-class English males have to the wooden shack down the garden, full of nameless intricacies, that pigeon racing seems so much like a national sport? Or is it something to do with the squadrons of pigeons that used to descend on Trafalgar Square in London – until dealt with in one of the first acts of the new mayor of London in 2000?

  That isn’t clear. What is certain is that people have kept and bred pigeons in these islands, or used their homing instincts to deliver messages, for centuries and probably well into Roman times. But the sport of racing pigeons was actually developed by the Belgians, and it was only when the king of Belgium, the brutal Leopold II, gave the British royal family breeding birds that the sport began to take off over here in a big way. The first English pigeon race was held in 1881, encouraged mainly because the Belgians used to start their races from southern England.

  Since then, the sport has been declining steadily – along with cloth caps and whippets – though it is attracting big money in the USA and so will almost inevitably be re-imported at some point. There remains something distinctively northern about pigeon-fancying, and there is the cliché of the clipped and reserved Yorkshireman who lavishes love and care on his pigeons, but finds it hard to do the same for his own children. It is a small slice of the great paradox of the English, for whom animals have often seemed a more comfortable conduit for love than human beings.

  In fact, there is – as so often – rather a class divide involved. The working classes created their sheds out of old pieces of wood and scrap and concentrated on racing short distances, while the long-distance racers had to be aristocratic or anyway someone with the means to pay for it. The pigeons themselves came on to the market at low, affordable prices because the invention of the electric telegraph began to put them out of business as professional carriers of messages.

  The return of pigeon post came during the siege of Paris in 1870–1; the English watched entranced as French pigeons carried over a million messages in and out of the city, over the Prussian lines. Then the rise of football as a working-class pastime in England in the final Victorian decades seems to have driven out the pigeons again. The days when the birds could be described as black caps, yellow boots and chockers, and the husky voices of a pigeon-fancier could be recognised immediately – maybe an early example of what we now know as pigeon-fancier’s lung – have long gone.

  But it has been a slow decline. The London, Midland and Scottish Railway reckoned it carried 7 million pigeons during the 1929 racing season. In 1934, one pigeon racer described his feelings when a fancier could see his own bird returning and stood ‘transfixed, electrified; there comes the faint rustle of wings: almost simultaneously upon the small platform at the entrance to the loft, there is the bird of his dreams’. There is no doubt of the strange mixture of reticence and emotion about the whole thing.

  For George Orwell, pigeon-fancying emphasised what he called the ‘privateness’ of English life. He even condemned as ‘something ruthless and soulless’ the health and safety housing improvement regulations, which attempted to stamp pigeons out.

  He marched off with a bunch of flowers in his hand and several pigeon eggs in his overall pockets … On arrival home, he put the eggs in a basin on the sink, awkwardly, almost abruptly, he handed the flowers to mother. No words, no glances, just a muffled grunt that seemed to say all that needed saying.

  William Woodruff describing his father’s return to Blackburn from a pigeon race in The Road to Nab End (2001)

  THERE IS A certain kind of dull-headed English temperament that deeply disapproves of reading. It still exists, though people rarely admit that they share it these days. Until a century ago, it was almost mainstream. When the future Poet Laureate John Masefield was orphaned (his mother died giving birth and his father had a breakdown and died shortly afterwards) he came into the care of an aunt who shared this disapproval with a passion.

  The young Masefield devoured books and wandered, rather as Wordsworth did, ‘lonely as a cloud’ around his home environs (he was born in Ledbury in Hereford, near where his older contemporary Edward Elgar was also wandering similarly lonely as a cloud – they should have got together). And the more he devoured his books, the more his aunt disapproved.

  Strong measures were clearly required, and it was decided that he should be sent to sea. To prepare him for this, Masefield was sent to school on HMS Conway, the sail training ship and former wooden battleship Nile, then anchored off Birkenhead.

  The three years he spent there from 1891 gave him a fascination for the sea, sea tradition and sea lore, but it certainly didn’t cure him of books. This love of the sea was entrenched even further during his first seagoing position, on a four-masted barque called Gilcruix, which took him from Cardiff to Chile, via Cape Horn. Masefield’s diary at the time recorded heavy seas, porpoises and flying fish and a rare nocturnal rainbow, but it ended all too soon, invalided home with sunstroke.

  He abandoned his next ship altogether in New York Harbour at the age of seventeen, became a tramp, a barman and an employee in a carpet factory, where he saved enough money to buy the complete works of Chaucer. Back in England two years later, and through a series of happy meetings, he began to write poetry, thanks to the friendship of some of the most prominent poets of the age, on the fringes of the group that would eventually be known as the Georgian poets.

  Masefield married an older woman called Constance Crommelin, introduced to him by the poet Laurence Binyon (author of the remembrance poem ‘They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old’) and soon there were children on the way. His work for the Manchester Guardian wasn’t exactly lucrative. It was time to capitalise on the handful of poems that he had managed to get published.

  That was where ‘Sea Fever’ came in. It appeared for the first time in his 1902 collection Salt-Water Poems and Ballads. His other famous poems like ‘Cargoes’ and ‘Reynard the Fox’ were all in the future, but this salt-water stuff sold reasonably well. Later versions changed the first line to the more familiar ‘I must go down to the seas again’ – originally it had omitted the word ‘go’. It has a kind of mystical quality, not only able to conjure up the English love-and-hate relationship with the sea – the compelling way in which English history has intertwined itself with seafaring – but to do so in an era of semi-detached houses, ribbon development and commuter suburbs.

  Somehow Masefield’s poem speaks especially to the English life which gets no closer to the nautical than the garden pond in their semi. It speaks to the yearning for the wild in the commuter and the call of the running tide to those who peer out of their tower block. It is a deeply English poem, partly for the mismatch between the wildness described and the calm rhythm, which was so beautifully used in the musical version by John Ireland, but also in its prevailing melancholy. This is the English soul speaking trapped next to the office coffee machine, but still ‘it may not be denied’.

  Masefield managed eventually to make ends meet as a successful playwright and novelist. His children’s novel The Box of Delights has survived, and his other adventure stories – Dead Ned, for example – had an obvious influence on children’s writing in the great age of Puffin Books in the 1960s, but have rather slipped from view.

  Masefield was never the staid conservative he seemed. One of his poems (‘The Everlasting Mercy’) was condemned from the pulpit, he was a supporter of women’s suffrage, and he ran the amphibious ambulance during the Gallip
oli campaign. Still, he managed to beat Rudyard Kipling to the post of Poet Laureate, twenty-eight years after the publication of ‘Sea Fever’, and held the post until his death from gangrene in 1967.

  He was a great survivor of the age of Georgian poetry, a friend of W. B. Yeats who lived long enough to see flower power, and he managed to hold the post of Laureate longer than anyone apart from Tennyson. He also managed to be the first English writer to release an LP reading of his own poems (just as Tennyson was the first to be recorded).

  There is something about ‘Sea Fever’ which speaks to a certain mood of English ennui, and the poem prefigures death rather as Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’ does. Masefield did after all experience the vagrant gypsy life himself, and he clearly looked forward as a young man when he wrote the poem to ‘quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over’.

  I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

  And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

  And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

  And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

  THERE IS SOMETHING very English about suburban semi-detached homes, and especially those built between the wars, with their generous gardens, their little garden gates and garages and their twee stained-glass front doors. There is nothing like them anywhere else in the world, the product of the desire for family homes in limited spaces.

  For some reason, they have been execrated in England, and have become deeply unfashionable, despite being one of the most popular and humane types of housing built anywhere.

  The English invented commuter suburbs, when the railways allowed the middle classes to live on the outskirts of towns, in suburbs which centred on the railway station and the high street.