by Angus Calder
‘Everyday life’ has been increasingly devalued as the ongoing ‘history’ of wars and recessions has come to seem something outside it, threatening it. Science, an abstract and universal form of knowledge standing outside ‘everyday’ life-worlds, has ousted religion. Work and other routines, since urbanisation and industrialisation, commonly have no connection with a person’s individuality and seem dictated from outside. In peacetime conditions, nostalgia results, as the rationalised and specialised experience of life every day creates a ‘subjective surplus’ – there is ‘more in’ people than can find realisation – and this surplus attaches itself to objects and places and sites which seem to bear meaning in themselves: to ‘heritage’, to ‘history’. But war provides another outlet for that surplus, a counterpoint to ‘the routinised, constrained and empty experience of much modern everyday life’. In war, as Wright puts it, ‘personal actions can count in a different way, routine can have a greater sense of meaning and necessity …’18
The ‘nation’ integrates public images and interpretations of the past. It works by ‘raising a dislocated and threatened – but none the less locally experienced – everyday life up into redeeming contact with what it vaunts as its own Absolute Spirit’.19 This spirit, as Wright’s examples show, digests History (particular history) with Nature: not only with particular human nature, but with particular landscape. War, like exile (‘Oh, to be in England, Now that April’s there’), sharpens within everyday historical consciousness a sense of Absolute National Spirit. Wright quotes a broadcast made on Easter Day 1943 by Peter Scott – son of the famous Antarctic explorer and imperial hero, himself a naturalist and painter of wild-life:
Friday was St George’s Day, St George for England. I suppose that ‘England’ means something slightly different to each of us. You may, for example, think of the white cliffs of Dover, or you may think of a game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe, or perhaps a game of cricket at Old Trafford or a game of rugger at Twickenham. But probably for most of us it brings a picture of a certain kind of countryside, the English countryside. If you spend much time at sea, that particular combination of fields and hedges and woods that is so essentially England seems to have a new meaning.
I remember feeling most especially strongly about it in the late Summer of 1940 when I was serving in a destroyer doing anti-invasion patrol in the Channel. About that time I think everyone had a rather special feeling about the word ‘England’. I remember as dawn broke looking at the black outlines of Star Point to the northward and thinking suddenly of England in quite a new way – a threatened England that was in some way more real and more friendly because she was in trouble. I thought of the Devon countryside lying behind that black outline of the cliffs; the wild moors and ragged tors inland and nearer the sea, the narrow winding valleys with their steep green sides; and I thought of the mallards and teal which were rearing their ducklings in the reed beds of Slapton Leigh. That was the countryside we were so passionately determined to protect from the invader.20
A naturalist assimilates a mythological ‘England’ with a mythological ‘Nature’, in a way that his audience will find perfectly ‘natural’. Every sentence of this easy-seeming pronouncement, as I will show, is laden with the mythology of an ‘Old Country’; and with a mythology which presupposes and enforces a middle-class view of the world. What is natural to England belongs, literally and figuratively, to the better-off classes.
‘St George for England’ evokes Shakespeare’s Henry V, which Olivier was directing (the film was actually shot in Eire) around the time when Scott spoke: St George’s Day is the presumed birthday of Shakespeare. England ‘means something slightly different to each of us’ because ‘England’ signifies tolerance of individual opinions within an overriding community of feeling. Geordie coal-miners or Hull fishermen, whose views of England might well be more than ‘slightly’ different, can count themselves part of this England only if they choose to invest in it ‘subjective surplus’ from their alien everyday experience. Perhaps many such men, or at least their wives, did: ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ was the tune most in request from British cinema organists throughout the war. Of course, anyone who had learnt history at any school was likely to remember that Francis Drake chose to finish his ‘game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe’ when news came that the Armada was sailing towards England, then sallied forth to defeat it. (This is a perfect example of how myth insists on itself against fact. The image was and is quite indelible, though J. A. Williamson himself, the prime scholarly panegyrist of the Elizabethan ‘sea dogs’, had written in his Age of Drake, published in 1938, that while the game of bowls might have been fact – it was first referred to in 1624, when survivors of the event were still living – Drake’s famous retort, ‘Time to finish the game’, looked ‘like a myth, for Drake was hardly the man to suggest waste of time at a juncture when disaster might conceivably be averted by minutes’.21)
I am certain that Scott mentions ‘cricket at Old Trafford’ (Manchester) rather than at Lord’s because he wants to reach out to northern listeners – he doesn’t want his England to be merely southern, he wants to suggest that a northern industrial town can also be part of it. I am equally certain that he refers to this ground rather than Bramall Lane (Sheffield) or Headingley (Leeds) because so many middle-class readers admired the writings of Neville Cardus, the Manchester Guardian cricket correspondent, for whom Old Trafford was sacred ‘home’ turf. Cardus had brilliantly accommodated expert sports reporting with the conventions of the ‘Georgian’ literary essay, and inevitably it had been he who had contributed the volume on cricket to the ‘English Heritage’ series of books published around 1930.
However, Scott cannot bring himself to refer to ‘football at Wembley’, let alone ‘Rugby League at Wigan’; Twickenham is the arena where England plays international rugby football against Scotland and Wales, and where the annual match between Oxford and Cambridge Universities takes place. Amateur ‘Rugby Union’ in England was and is a primarily middle-class sport, favoured over soccer in the so-called ‘public schools’. ‘England’ was to do with young Apollos and Hectors from the moneyed classes knocking each other about in a violent, occasionally graceful game, not with northern professionals, paid artisans’ wages, playing soccer or professional ‘Rugby League’ skilfully in front of huge working-class crowds.
The ‘English countryside’ is a powerful myth although, or because, it can only be evoked vaguely. Scott refers to a ‘particular combination’ of natural and man-made features which is ‘essentially England’. This cannot be northern English land, with dry-stone walls. But what is ‘essentially England’? The flat Lincolnshire of Tennyson’s In Memoriam? The more variegated Wessex of Hardy’s novels and poems? (When Roman Polanski filmed Hardy’s Tess quite recently, he found his ‘English’ landscape in Normandy: I have heard no English watcher of the film remark on this, let alone complain.) Could this ‘essential England’ be the Marcher orchard-lands of Herefordshire? The wooded Chilterns? There have been, of course, many ‘combinations’ in England, from the days of feudal strip farming to contemporary ‘agri-business’. To quote W. G. Hoskins, master historian of the English landscape, introducing his pioneering study published in 1955:
No book exists to describe the manner in which the various landscapes of this country came to assume the shape and appearance they now have. Why the hedge-banks and lanes of Devon should be so totally different from those of the Midlands, why there are so many ruined churches in Norfolk or so many lost villages in Lincolnshire, or what history lies behind the winding ditches of the Somerset marshlands, the remote granite farmsteads of Cornwall and the lonely pastures of upland Northamptonshire.22
But it is convenient, mythologically, for Scott to evoke the special landscape of Devon. His context in this broadcast has become maritime. Devon was the home of the great ‘sea dogs’, Drake and Hawkins, Raleigh and Gilbert, who harried the Armada, ‘singed the King of Spain’s beard’, and so forth, in the days of Goo
d Queen Bess (and Shakespeare). It also, as Scott himself knows, provides a home for ducks. Why these ducks, mallards and teal nesting in Devon should be essentially English when their species are found elsewhere in Europe, is a question which myth forbids us to ask. It is quite certain that many English people thought of the local bird-life as especially English, essentially theirs. In the summer of 1940, some 300 bird-lovers maintained a day and night guard not against Nazi invasion, but over the nesting places of a rare bird, the kite. Late in the war, Bernard Miles directed a film comedy called Tawny Pipit. Two rare migrant birds appear in an English village. Lest they should be disturbed, military manoeuvres in the neighbourhood are held up. The entire local population conspire to keep off inquisitive ornithologists, by fair means or foul. Mythologically, ‘Deep England’ could assimilate migrants, just as German classical music was presented virtually as ‘English Heritage’ during the dark days of war against Germany.
Myth may distort what has happened. But it affects what happens. The ‘story’ of the Blitz and individuals’ own personal ‘Blitz stories’ were mythologised within ‘everyday life’ in terms of existing mythologies. It was necessary and inevitable that this should be done. War created conditions in which people could invest the ‘subjective surplus’ – which in peacetime had found outlets in the arts, in country walks, in nostalgia for ‘history’ – in an ‘everyday life’ now suffused with ‘history’. Believing that they were ‘making history’ in harmony with the Absolute Spirit of ‘England’ (or ‘Britain’), people tried to believe as that spirit seemed to dictate. Heroic mythology fused with everyday life to produce heroism. People ‘made sense’ of the frightening and chaotic actualities of wartime life in terms of heroic mythology, ‘selecting out’ phenomena which were incompatible with that mythology. But, acting in accordance with this mythology, many people – not all, of course – helped make it ‘more true’.
Such a process had worked itself out in other times and places. Myths had been simultaneously generated and reinforced by the realisation (as it were) in action of a synthesis of existing mythologies. We can see this happening in the Thirteen Colonies from the 1760s through to the War of Independence. As Charles Royster has explained things, ‘the country’s first war both shaped and tested Americans’ ideals of national character’. These ideals drew on existing mythologies; on traditions of colonies founded by men who had left Europe to preserve self-government and liberty of conscience; on the cult of the republican heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome; on the ‘mental habits customary in evangelical religion’, as inculcated by the ‘Great Awakening’ within the last couple of generations; and on ideals of benevolence and disinterestedness emphasised by evangelical Christianity. ‘Everyday life’ consciousness was suffused with a sense of history as present and future: the future of the world and of North America depended on resistance to tyranny now:
A song copied into the orderly book of the Second New York Regiment proclaimed, ‘The riseing world shall sing of us a thousand years to Come/And tell our Childrens Children the Wonders we have Done.’ During the war, when officers started to resign, General Robert Howe reminded them that they were ‘actors upon that glorious stage where every incident is to become an historical fact’.23
Compare Churchill in June 1940: ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’24
But the ‘if’ was significant. The Thirteen Colonies belonged with a ‘riseing world’. Britain in 1940 was an Old Country. The ‘subjective surplus’ expanded during war went into defending an imperial power which was already in irreversible decline, and national institutions which had tottered into anachronism. The war, and the mythical events of 1940, would become subjects for historical nostalgia on the Left as well as on the Right – perhaps more than on the Right – but the effect of the Myth would be conservative. For the Left it would encapsulate a moment of retrenchment as a moment of rebirth; a moment of ideological conservatism as a moment of revolution. Because Blitz was held to have had near revolutionary consequences, to have somehow produced a ‘welfare state’, the Myth would divert attention from the continuing need for radical change in British society. The Left would think that in 1940 it had captured History. In fact, it had been captured by it.
‘I gotta use words when I talk to you.’ We all share the predicament of Apeneck Sweeney. To say that the British Left was trapped and conquered by a myth which it had helped to create is to suggest that it succumbed to the language which it had to use. If we need ‘stories’ to make sense of our world, then we need words to tell stories – though we also need pictures, from another language of signs, and music also can help.
John Keegan, in his Face of Battle (1976), showed us how our understanding of war had been confused by the rhetoric of military historians trying to ride over the piecemeal and often chaotic nature of actual conflict. He also demonstrated how hard it is to come by ‘the truth’ of the experience of British troops on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, in 1916: ‘Even sixty years later, it is very difficult to discover much that is precise, detailed and human about the fate of a great number of the battalions of the Fourth Army on July 1st.’ In a phase of intense action, officers wrote up their Units’ War Diaries, usually sketchy in any case, days in arrears. Men at the Front could get no overall picture of events, and found it hard to interpret what was going on around them. Officers behind lost telephone contact with the action once men advanced into no-man’s-land and high command ‘spent most of July 1st in ignorance of how the Fourth Army was faring’. So turning ‘what happened’ into a ‘story’ useful to the men who fought, to the relatives of those who died, and to the British at large, was very difficult. Keegan argues that it was the prose writings of poets – Blunden, Graves, Sassoon – published in 1928–30 which invested ‘the experience of the Somme with the importance it still continues to hold’, and further suggests that ‘from the story of the Somme’ the public had ‘learnt as much as it ever would about what modern war could do to men, and perceived that some limit of what humans could and could not stand on the battlefield had at last been reached’.25
The Great War of 1914–18 could not be mythologised so as to help maintain among Britons enthusiasm for armed conflict or faith in the future of their Empire. It threw up only one individual hero of mythological significance (except, indeed, for certain dead soldier-poets) – and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was an odd, complicated case. After his brave and inventive role in the desert campaign against the Turks, he hid from his own celebrity, changed his name, and joined the RAF as a mere aircraftsman, refusing public honours and appointments. As intellectual, homosexual, and flawed man of action, he fascinated the left-inclined literati of the ‘thirties movement’ as one who, in Christopher Isherwood’s words, had ‘suffered, in his own person, the neurotic ills of an entire generation’.26
Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) examines the crisis of language at the Front of 1914–18. ‘The problem for the writer trying to describe elements of the Great War was its utter incredibility and thus its incommunicability on its own terms.’ It was not that words literally didn’t exist – as Fussell points out, the English language ‘is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit’ – but prevalent modes of rhetoric could not deploy such words so as to convey to non-soldiers what was going on. The ‘hearty idiom’ of imperialistic boys’ adventure stories was ludicrously inapposite. The canonical English ‘literature’ in which many men of all ranks were steeped was more help – richly figurative language from past writers, evoking despair, horror and mortality, could be reproduced as literal:
Finding the War ‘indescribable’ in any but the available language of traditional literature, those who recalled it had to do so in known literary terms. Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Pound, Yeats were not present at the front to induct them into new idioms w
hich might have done the job better. Inhibited by scruples of decency and believing in the historical continuity of styles, writers about the war had to appeal to the sympathy of readers by invoking the familiar and suggesting its resemblance to what many of them suspected was an unprecedented and (in their terms) an all-but-incommunicable reality.
Fussell quotes Alexander Aitken, writing of the scene at the Somme in September 1916: ‘The road here and the ground to either side were strewn with bodies, some motionless, some not. Cries and groans, prayers, imprecations, reached me. I leave it to the sensitive imagination. I once wrote it all down, only to discover that horror, truthfully described, weakens to the merely clinical.’ The war proceeded in an ‘atmosphere of euphemism’, used by the authorities to mask the truth, and by the troops to ‘soften the truth for themselves’. In an official communiqué, ‘brisk fighting’ meant that about 50 per cent of a company had been killed or wounded in a raid. Even a tough-minded Tommy would write that a man had been ‘hit low down’ rather than say ‘wounded in the genitals’.27
But one effect of the general failure of language was the perverse triumph represented by trench humour. Horror was rendered into ‘half affectionate familiarity’, as in the trench song about the slaughtered battalion ‘hanging on the old barbed wire’. What Fussell calls ‘the style of British phlegm’ involved speaking about war conditions as if they were normal. Horror became ‘unpleasant’ or ‘damned unpleasant’. Flooded trenches had ‘a certain dampness’. Letters home by other ranks were characterised by ‘almost unvarying formulaic understatement’: