In pursuit of Englishness

The nation clings fondly to a distant rural image because it cannot embrace the present, says Ian Jack

THIS week I asked several people, friends and colleagues, to shut their eyes and think of England. What did the word mean to them, what flashed upon their inward eyes, what were the qualities of Englishness?

Almost all of them used one word - the countryside - and almost all of them immediately qualified it by saying that they knew, of course, that this was a mythic England, the real England being one of the most urbanised countries in the world. As for its human character, "reticent" and "private" were popular words. Nearly everybody had trouble with the idea of England. Nobody mentioned Drake, or Shakespeare, or Nelson, or the picture of Westminster on the HP Sauce bottle.

A woman publisher from Liverpool said that "snobbish, servile and stupid" best defined the English character and then remembered a village on the Suffolk coast on a summer's day and softened. "I would like to say the country, but that idea's been so abused by politics. You know, Major and Orwell, warm beer, the sound of leather on willow, all that kind of stuff."

A man, a writer from Devon, said: "The trenches in Flanders are in there somewhere. Soldier poets like Sassoon. That double nostalgia, where you you are nostalgic about their nostalgia for an England that probably vanished in 1914. But now England tends to mean Little England, and I'm not very keen on that."

A housewife from Newcastle said: "Coolness, trees, green, a northern light." She remembered reading The Wind in the Willows and The Lord of the Rings as a child and thinking that they were set in wonderful, invented landscapes, until she came south to study in Oxford and discovered that they were simply descriptions of Oxfordshire. England was a lush, southern idea. As for the English character: "Decency and a kind of restraint, which also means a lack of warmth and collective responsibility. Bad schools, a tatty health service, and those little greengrocers in the back streets where they sell only root vegetables and oranges."

A retired draughtsman in Edinburgh said: "It's the kind of person we've got up here now. People called Miranda braying at each other from four- wheel drives with bull-bars. It's the place you pass into just north of Berwick, and the place you come back to from abroad with a sinking feeling."

A poet in London said: "It doesn't include blacks or the working-class. I don't know an English person who doesn't feel slightly marginalised by the word in some way, and anxious to find something that slightly separates them from it - ancestors from Cornwall or Ireland. I'm from Yorkshire and that's how I tend to describe myself."

Others made the same point. As one young woman from Watford put it (and talking about England rather than Watford): "I'd almost prefer to be from somewhere else." If you believe an article published in the current issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly that attitude stems from a conspiracy by schools, academics, politicians and the mass media to "produce a public ideology designed to a remove any sense of pride or sense of place in the hearts of those who are unequivocally English". The "conspiracy" is better known as multi-culturalism - the recognition that England (or Britain) is no longer a monoglot, monorace society - and by the phrase "unequivocally English" the writer, Robert Henderson, meant white people born in England.

This was a profoundly racist piece which last week caused so much controversy that on Friday the magazine's editor apologised for publishing it. But, in fairness, we should try to follow the argument, prompted by the poor performance of recent English cricket teams.

Henderson says that, as cricket is a long, complex and relatively thoughtful game, the relationship between players is more important than in other games. Recent English teams have tended to include white players born abroad (particularly southern Africa) as well as black players raised, if not born, in England. These black players - and "black" here includes people of Subcontinental descent - will never feel "unequivocally" English, even if they have been born in England, because as Henderson puts it, they share "a generally resentful and separatist mentality". Thus they will not give of their best. Worse, their attitudes will infect the "unequivocal" Englishmen in the team, who are already feeling shaky in their Englishness because of the multi-cultural conspiracy.

Henderson concludes: "For a man to feel the pull of 'cricketing patriotism' he must be so imbued with a sense of cultural belonging that it is second nature to go beyond the call of duty, to give that little bit extra. All the England players whom I would describe as foreigners may well be trying at a conscious level, but is that desire to succeed instinctive, a matter of biology?"

Henderson implies that it is. And so the English team's inadequacy does not rest so much on a lack of athletic or technical skill as on the introduction of genes that do not stand up to salute summer pudding, or perhaps the poetry of AE Housman. This is absurd, though at the height of empire, which is where so many ideas of Englishness still come from, it would have seemed normal enough. The French, at least in theory, believed that a citizen of their colonies could become French by being "evolved" or "lifted up" to the level of a Frenchman born in France by the simple method of speaking French, eating French, and generally subscribing to French culture. But in the British Empire, you could not become English (or British, which tended and still tends to be a simile). You could only be English, in Henderson's inchoate genetic way.

The English were then a magical race; you couldn't buy, speak, write or bribe your way into membership, because the members could never quite define what the qualifications for membership were, other than being a member already. Take, for example, Henderson's idea of "cultural belonging" and then try to devise a test that would give you "unequivocal" Englishmen. Say:

1. Are you fond of roast beef? 2. Are you a master of English prose style? 3. Can you name every battleship that fought under the White Ensign in Jutland? 4. Do you live in England?

One 97-year-old writer who lives in Oxford could certainly answer yes to those, and almost any other questions, about English culture you cared to think of, but he is Nirad C Chandhuri, born and bred in Bengal and, I would think, rather equivocal about his Englishness. Or say:

1. Could you as a boy tell a Meteor from a Vampire? 2. Can you say who Wilfred and Mabel were, and why a table was important? 3. Did you buy your children small plastic Union Jacks for the VE Day anniversary? 4. Have you lived most of your life in England?

I could say yes to every one, though I am by parentage and upbringing (though not by birth) Scottish rather than English and have never felt part of "England" in its mythic sense (and because I live in London, have never needed to). However, I felt odd - equivocal might be the word - about buying Union Jacks when we took the children to see the Queen on her balcony. When I see the flag now I think of drunks with shaven heads, or Mr Portillo, or Mr Major in his warm-beer mode, and the nasty, narrow nostalgia of so much of the Tory party that wants to forget that England has changed, and needs to change even more.

At school in Scotland we read the famous description of the village cricket match in England Their England by AG Macdonell. It was delightful; it made us laugh. I have always remembered the blacksmith, the fast bowler, who retreats over the hill and out of sight to begin his run. "At last, after a long stillness, the ground shook, the grasses waved violently, small birds rose with shrill clamours, a loud puffing sound alarmed the butterflies, and the blacksmith ... came thundering over the crest."

Years later I read the whole book and discovered that though it was published in 1933, it had a modern and almost modish theme. The main character, a Scot, is commissioned by a publisher to discover the English. "Extraordinarily difficult," says his publisher, a Welshman, "I don't understand them but I love them ... I've got an idea that all their queerness and oddities and incongruities arise from the fact that, at heart, fundamentally, they're a nation of poets. Mind you, they'd be lurid with rage if you told them."

A fond book, then, with a fond conclusion. Rural England is the "real" England: "An ancient man leaned upon his scythe ... the parson shook hands with the squire. Doves cooed. The haze flickered. The world stood still."

Sixty years later the English - or those I talked to last week - see that plainly as a myth. How interesting, though, that it has stubbornly persisted through a world war, the loss of the empire, immigration, and the near-collapse of almost every important national institution. And how alarming, perhaps, that nothing more intelligent and intelligible, more inclusive rather than exclusive, has replaced it as a national idea.

Peter Corrigan, Sport, page 11