At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  When Columbus discovered America he can be said to have created Britain also, for he moved the island to the center or crossroads of the world. Since then, all sea traffic across the Atlantic has had to come this way for its shortest routes; the situation has been little changed by air travel. Set free by Columbus, the British discovered their Atlantic, non-European countenance.

  As a result, the Englishman stands between two worlds, living by both. He is a European with a difference. You can prove to him that he is a European who has got his civil institutions from the Anglo-Saxon north and his Christianity and culture from the ancient Mediterranean; but he will insist that he is a fortress afloat off the European coast, unconquered since the eleventh century, and looking across the Atlantic to the countries his race has founded, or his ancestors have explored and exploited. He is a man facing two ways. In this, where he is chauvinistic, he has a national pride; he knows by long experience what it is to be admired, envied and hated, to make profits, commit crimes, to forgive those he has injured, to take punishment and laugh at himself. The songs of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas are full of national self-mockery. For behind the figure of the British as a figure of power, there is another: the kind, good-humored man of the small island.

  Islanders who live close to the great land masses develop an intense defensive, local individuality; they live in continual fear of conquest. The British are nationally united because, in the last four hundred years, they have been in terror of Continental despots like Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV and Napoleon in France and, in our time, Hitler. Fear of this kind creates resolution and the spirit of aggression. In the late Middle Ages, the British were continually invading France, and when the long effort failed, their energies turned toward the New World. In milder times this aggressive spirit has become no more than a fruitful outburst against the claustrophobia which affects people on small islands, and especially one where the gray and relatively sunless climate turns the mind in upon itself. We are liable to burst out. The man who delivers my whiskey dresses up like a gentleman once a year, to let himself go in Monte Carlo.

  Another important basic fact is that no place in Britain is more than seventy-five miles from tidal water; the frontier is the sea. One can see how much of British life has looked outward by the names of many of the little suburban villas: Durban, Poona, Kimberley, Nairobi, Waterloo. Or by the names of the streets in the seaports.

  The main overriding difference in England is between North and South. The river Trent cuts English character in two. It passes through Nottingham—the region called “The Dukeries” because so many dukes have estates there—and turning northeast, runs into the Humber near Hull, the port for the Baltic. The North makes; heavy industry is there. The South rules; the Queen and the government are in the South. The Queen speaks in the standard southern English accent of the upper classes. Oxford and Cambridge are in the South.

  The Southerner is gentler, more leisurely in manner, wittier, more self-concealing, more formal, politic and reserved than the Northerner. He is a bit of a snob, in all classes. If he is well-off he conceals the fact. He is inclined to disparage himself. The Northerner calls him “soft.” But if this north-south division is true of the people in a very general way, the landscape division of the country is really made by a line drawn from the mouth of the River Tweed on the northeast to Lands End in the southwest. The hills and mountains are mainly west of that line. East of it lie smaller hills, green plains and marshes.

  Yet east or west, pastureland or sea marsh, moor or mountain, the delight of England is in the intimate and continual changes of a manmade landscape. It is the most gardened country on earth. The roads are rarely straight for more than a mile or so; there is always surprise at the next corner. One moment the land is arable, the next it is water meadow or heath. We are in an island of oak woods. The beeches have their tall aisles in Buckinghamshire close to the Thames; the willow hangs over the small rivers and mill-races of East Anglia, the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex that bulge out into the North Sea or “German Ocean.” The poplar whitens against the slaty sky, the ash hangs in all the lanes, and the elm, the chestnut, the sycamore and hornbeam are in every hedgerow. The South is a country of hawthorn hedges. We live in a place of hanging woods, coppices, brakes and dells. Only in the flat country of the Fens southeast of Lincoln—a very Dutch part of England on the east coast protected by dykes—does one see trees scattered singly, like separate people in long vistas, with the east wind and the dyke water between them.

  The English counties are countries in themselves. Begin at Canterbury in Kent, in the extreme southeast, in the fruit garden of England, and work your way through the widest stretch of southern England to Cornwall in the extreme west. The River Medway still traditionally divides the legendary Kentish man from the equally legendary Man of Kent—the man of the cherry orchards, netting his trees to keep off the birds, in agony about the late frosts—the “frosties,” as country people call them—that are the curse of English agriculture. The russet towns and flint oast houses or hop kilns of Kent change to the birch woods of Surrey, adjoining Kent on the west, a county given to stockbrokers and those golden, hearty, tennis-playing girls whose forearm drives John Betjeman has celebrated in his poem “A Subaltern’s Love Song”:

  Oh! full Surrey twilight! importunate band!

  Oh! strongly adorable tennis girl’s hand!

  Vast Hampshire, just west of Surrey, has its sandy heaths and those lovely houses on the Sussex border that some think as remarkable as the châteaux of the Loire; it has also its large nondescript population of squatters, eking out a hard independent living on a few ugly acres. In Hampshire are the chalk downs and the hangars on wooded cliffs where Gilbert White wrote the most English of small English classics: Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. White is a model for the eccentricity of the English country clergy—the oddest race in the country. All through Kent and Hampshire, and adjoining Sussex, Wiltshire and Dorset run the bold chalk downs, rising like smooth green whales from the beech woods. Pause at Jane Austen’s Winchester, in Hampshire. It is vivid to me, not only because of the cathedral but because there, the only time in my life, I saw a judge put on the black cap and condemn a man to death. It was a scene of horror from Thomas Hardy, but brought up to date in macabre fashion by press photographers who walked backward, like a court, before the mother of the murderer and the mother of his victim as they left the courtroom. I can still smell the brilliantine on the hair of the police. Soldiers were singing in the barracks nearby and the afternoon traffic of the cathedral town spanked on its way to Southampton.

  Those chalk downs run north to Salisbury Plain, to Avebury and Stone-henge (they are pimpled by scores of burial mounds left by the people of the Stone Age and the Bronze); and southward into Hardy’s Dorset, where the Gothic-looking stone cottages remind one that part of the variety of the English villages depends on the fact that they were built in styles, changing from century to century, by local men using local brick and stone. All these counties have their vestiges of dialect and their own accents. The radio is leveling this out; but the traveler who buys a postcard in a village shop or listens in the village pub, will notice that the people talk two languages. They fall back into the dialect of their childhood (English people fall very easily into the talk of childhood) when they drop into craftiness or are telling comic stories against each other. Rustic phrases like “Be’e talking to we?” are the language of succulent local comedy. It keeps the stranger at arm’s length too. I once saw a la-di-da fellow go into a seaside taproom and call out cheerfully to the players, “I see you like playing shove ha’penny heah.” The fishermen went on playing and, after a very long and freezing time, the oldest of them took his pipe out of his mouth and replied: “Some of us buggers be bloody artists at it.” It was the war of town and country, between local and stranger.

  The mass life of England is not prim; indeed one wonders how Puritanism ever got started here. It was strong
est on the righteous eastern side of the country, where the earliest Christian missionaries and abbots installed themselves. Rural England all over is free-spoken and earthy and lazy-voiced. As you travel westward you notice the “I” changing to “Oi,” the r’s burr richly; in Somerset “cider” still becomes “zoider” and the words soften. Traveling in a straight line westward through Berkshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon to Cornwall, getting off the Wiltshire chalk onto the brilliant pink soil of Somerset and then onto the deep chocolate soil of Devonshire, you notice that speech has dawdled almost to a dream on the lips of those pink and creamy-skinned Devonshire girls with their dark-blue eyes and dimpled, double-chinned smiles. They call you “dear” and “love” in the shops and you almost believe they love you.

  The village inn is still the place to see the main country types. The evening is the time when the beer flows and the pipe tobacco is strong. I think of a Wiltshire inn in a valley of water meadows, bad in the winter fogs. One of the first in is an old man who is one of the few surviving thatchers in the county. He is notable for his huge boots and distorted feet, and likes a joke about them. In his youth he had walked all over England from job to job and had a few fights on the road, but now he and an old widow, who polices him and her neighbors from the cottage window, are mostly at home looking at TV. That does not keep him from his couple of pints—a couple being five or six. There is the tall lean woodcutter, father of six and of many by-blows, a handsome fellow and in the money. There is a gardener who was a shepherd in Patagonia and speaks Spanish. The talk is dull at first: the estimates of the weather which absorb so much of English talk (for it changes every few hours), the eternal talk of onions and broccoli. The cricket team enters in flannels and blazers; the garage man plays bar billiards. Four van drivers are playing darts, and at harvesttime there may be men traveling from farm to farm with their combine. The inn is run by a man from Cumberland with a pretty wife who is the queen of the local dances. Their daughter is a fashion artist. There is the usual strange English spinster in pullover and trousers, guarded by a huge Airedale dog. She is mad about horses. A lady, she enjoys “drinking up” with the men. There is the deplorable Irish lady with her blue, doll’s eyes, her racing tips and her jockey.

  Next door, in a private bar full of flowers, are two respectable women from the post office drinking a glass of black stout which makes them swell into an even greater appearance of respectability. It is needed. For they must affect not to hear the language or notice the behavior of the eccentric cavalry colonel who has a compulsion every few minutes to shout—even when stone sober—“Stand to your horses,” as a mysterious, deeply private contribution to the talk. It is a tolerated madness. He has a test pilot with him, a dandy who likes to kiss the ladies’ hands and offer them a large door key. It is, he says, “the key to my heart.” Before addressing the colonel he always uses the old R.A.F. catch phrase: “Colonel, may I drop the ‘sir’ socially?”

  These people are well on the way to becoming “characters”; as for the villagers, they are a canny clan; all are related; all know every detail of one another’s lives. The men have, most of them, been overseas. It is the publican’s distinction that he was once asked to a circumcision party in Turkey. “Ah felt awkward,” he says.

  Rich cities strung across southern England, like Canterbury, Winchester, Salisbury, Wells and Exeter, establish the type of the cathedral town. The achievements of moneyed men, not the merits of the saints, are celebrated in the elaborate epitaphs and tombs of the cathedrals. The British worship position and power. New red suburbs and factories surround the city; closer in are the Victorian parks, the botanical gardens, the beautiful green circle of the cricket field with its white pavilion; in the center are the older narrow streets and the cathedral with its close, as ripe in its red brick as the faces of old men in Reynolds’s portraits. The small shops were mostly built in early Victorian times, but their line will be broken by the vermillion and chromium plating and the neon signs of the twentieth century. There is always one good old-fashioned family grocer with his black-and-gold tea canisters.

  But the contrasts are violent. That handsome town house is no longer the home of a wealthy family; it has become the office of the Inland Revenue or the Electricity Commission now. The Milk Bar and Cafeteria stand by the old-style cretonned teashop which always has its ladies at the proper hour. The TV aerial rides on the seventeenth-century gable. Market day crowds these towns with food and junk stalls and cattle. The place is a sallow sea of raincoats and peculiar tweeds washing round the stalls, and of spick-and-span double-decker buses. And then, almost suddenly, between five and six o’clock, the shops close, thousands of bicycles rush down the streets taking the people home, and a city has become deserted and silent. There may be a few girls going to a dance at the Corn Exchange, which was a real corn market 150 years ago, or a few Teddy Boys and lost soldiers hanging about in doorways, but that will be all. The Teddy Boy with his long jacket and very narrow trousers is the postwar version of the adolescent corner boy or loafer.

  A stranger could die of loneliness at this hour. The public faces of the English look sad when pleasure approaches; a worried mulish kindness is their expression when they speak. They “break out” only in intimacy. Eavesdrop on their conversation and you will notice how often the word “right” occurs. “It is all right.” “I don’t think it is right.” “She has no right.” It is the sad official hypocrite refrain of English speech. English life is lived in the home in the evenings. The Englishman must be pursued to his armchair or his back garden.

  The town will not wake up again until 10:30, the gloomy hour when the public houses close and the buses pick up the cinema crowds. (The Englishman—it is astonishing to find—spends far more hours in cinema-going than the American; on reflection, this seems quite natural, for we spend a good deal of our privacy, and our avoidance of one another in this crowded island, in daydreaming.) For half an hour or so the buses and motorbikes roar, the fish-and-chips shops do their trade, the people queue up talking quietly; a group of youths, with the beer in them, will go home singing very flat; the fantastic old ladies who sit like tropical insects in the hotels, and who are an English specialty, put down their brandy and go to bed; the cathedral bell strikes eleven, the last dogs and cats are called in—the day is over.

  After eleven o’clock if you want to eat, or drink a cup of tea, you will have to dig out some soldiers’ or lorry drivers’ “caff” on the outskirts of the town. These “caffs” are shacks. They are not very clean. Busy, steamy, motherly women and slatternly girls pour the strong tea and serve some fry or sandwiches. One of these disheartened places looks snug but may have a sideline in petty crime. You can’t tell. There’s a pale, breathless man called Pop on the West Road, known to all the lorry drivers in England—as far as I can make out—who is always called “more sinned against than sinning.” He had the ill luck to be put “inside” for some black-market offense years ago, and the drivers are indignant. (“So ’e’ad a fiddle? So what?”) There is a dear old lady sitting in a tiny shed on the same road outside Bath who starts business at four in the morning to catch the long-distance truck drivers with a cup of tea. About six at a time and a tired policeman can squeeze in.

  The Great West Road from London to Bristol is the road of Fielding’s Tom Jones, and when a Wiltshire squire is weaving down it, and the heavy lorries are pulling in at the “caffs,” and the fruit pickers or harvest people are on the move, it seems to me that the mock-pious, ribald England goes on, not so differently from the England of Fielding’s time. It merely moves faster.

  Southwestern England from Devon into Cornwall is warmer, wetter and richer to look at than the rest of the country. One feels the air softening and, on the Atlantic side, getting stronger. It becomes so strong that it drugs the stranger with earth and ocean smells and reduces him to indolence and sleep. The soil becomes red; the short, sharp, steep hills pile up, crowned by their tors of rock; lanes twist and deepen between
the high banks and the gray stone walls that run beside the woods, and these walls are mottled with delicate mosses and are rife with ferns. The oak and the ash close in on sudden ravines where fast black streams worry and curdle among the rocks under old stone bridges. The rhododendron empurples the woods; flowers seem larger and the leaves of the woods shine.

  We are on Exmoor, in the north of Devon. Down in its gorges is the hidden country described in Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. Toward the south is Dartmoor, where the fogs come suddenly down; that south-coast air is relaxing. We drop down hills that fall one foot in four, with the grasses and wildflowers brushing the fenders of our car, and we pray we won’t meet a car coming up.

  On the north side of Devon and Cornwall from Hartland Point all the way down to Lands End you are on the most dangerous and violent coast of Western Europe. It is the open Atlantic coast of wrecks. The sea has smashed up the cliffs and the rocks, and has broken the coast into enameled and dangerous coves; if we climb over the shore in the bad places, we see the rusted plates and iron wreckage of lost ships, old mines and old torpedoes. Two hundred years ago this used to be the coast of the wreckers and smugglers; and it is still a place where the country people know the important legal difference between flotsam and jetsam—between the wreckage that is still afloat and can be claimed and the wreckage which is thrown on the shore and belongs either to the Excise or, possibly, to the lord of the manor. They brushed up their knowledge profitably in the last war. Granite breaks through the coastal fields, and in the lanes the ragged robin and speedwell grow hedge high. On the high lands the Atlantic gales have stunted the dark-leaved trees and land is poor; but in the deep dales all is suddenly rich. In Cornwall each little field is enclosed by banks and fortified against the wind and the drenching Atlantic squalls.