by Jan Morris
I can still hear myself, when I think about it, replying to an American lady in Cairo who asked me if I was British. It was sometime in the late 1940s, I would guess, and being British in Egypt then was not always comfortable. ‘Say, are you British?’ she wanted to know, and I answered in kind.
‘O, very British,’ said I.
What another world it was in those days! To be British then meant something altogether different – to her, to the world at large and to me. But it would not last. Americans would soon begin to lose the inherited respect that so many of them felt towards the Old Country. The nations of the Second World War would presently forget Churchill’s heroic Britain, of the cockneys and the Spitfires. The British Empire was no more, and people would not so often think of themselves as utterly British at all.
And by now, as the very conception of Britain, let alone Great Britain (GB), seems to be fading, and the so-called United Kingdom (UK) is apparently disintegrating, people like me look back with irony to our old certainties. Actually, though, it was never really Britain I felt emotional about. Mine was too complex a loyalty to explain to the American in Cairo that day, but it was by no means a country-right-or-wrong sort of pride. It was pride in an abstraction, and its name was not Britain, but England.
It is subsumed nowadays in my love for Wales and Welshness, but still in my heart I always hear, as poets have down the generations, the English siren call. The gentle beauty of England’s countryside was part of it, and the grandeur of its history, and the humour that ran through its affairs, and the melancholy, and the ironic blend of right and wrong, and Shakespeare, and what people like me always fondly thought of as an essential kindliness.
But never fear! The UK seems to be disintegrating around us, GB is losing its meaning, but no doubt that old dream of England will lyrically survive the debacle.
DAY 96
‘I am dying, Egypt, dying,’ observed Antony to Cleopatra, and actually it went without saying. We all are. The fact is starker, though, when you reach my status in life.
My mathematics never were reliable, but I worked out this morning that I have so far been in this world for 375,000 days! Is that possible? Is that conceivable? Is that how you spell ‘conceivable’?
If that’s the truth, it dawns upon me that I face an urgent task, comparable in kind to the British withdrawal from Europe – my Morrexit from life. I am totally ill equipped for it. Have I made a will? Where is it? Who am I leaving things to?
What is an Executor? What is a Literary Executor?
Who arranges a funeral? Who pays for it? Who tells Authority that I have gone?
Oh, it’s all a mystery to me, like preferential tariff concessions within or without pre-compensatory European agreements, and I greatly envy old Antony, who simply informed his love poetically and kicked the bucket.
DAY 97
In nostalgic mood, at random a week or two ago I picked up a city book of my own to read in the bath, and so embarked upon a recollection of all my twenty-odd books concerning cities around the world.
The piece I read in the tub concerned the Canadian city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and I wrote it in 1990. I had hardly been there before, and as I turned the dripping pages of the volume I realized with a jolt what gross effrontery it had been, all my life, to barge uninvited and ignorant into such a city and write a totally uninhibited critique about its character! Uninformed! Uninvited! What insolence!
And then, in chastened introspection, it occurred to me that all my work about cities really had been one long bit of cheek. I hardly knew what I was writing about in all those cities. I did nearly everything, as musicians would say, by ear, making it up as I went along. Serious historians and geographers must have despised my intentions and techniques; sociologists must have thought me flippant; scholars found lots of errors (I never could differentiate longitude from latitude).
But there we are. Even Saskatooners must admit I got something right – I liked the place! A genuinely characterful city, I called it. They should see what I wrote about Sydney, in my callow days …
DAY 98
A distinguished Arab diplomat brought his wife to visit us yesterday. I never enjoyed a visit more. I was at my most self-centred and complacent; they were most charmingly indulgent. So cosmopolitan was their bearing that only gradually did I recognize in my own responses a spell out of my distant past, a particular kind of charm that powerfully affected my youth: the spell of the Arabs.
What was it exactly? It was partly the beauty of Islam, particularly as it was expressed in its splendid architecture, but also in what I admired about its faith. It was partly the Arabic language, which I briefly and inadequately studied. It was the romance of the Arab landscapes, and the grand sweep of Arab history, and the dust and desert and legend of it all.
Chiefly, though, it was the pleasure of the people – the Arab colleagues I worked with, the Arab neighbours I shared, the Arabs of all kinds I wrote about.
It’s many long years since my stay in the Arab countries ended, and since then the reputation of the Arabs and their noble religion has been coarsened, cheapened and betrayed. Our visitors yesterday reminded me again of the fascination that so bewitched me long ago.
DAY 99
Exercising with T. S. Eliot
If I set out in the morning for my statutory thousand daily paces up the lane, very likely whistling a cocky melody, my friendly exact shadow precedes me on the ground and encourages me to assess myself – my shadow at morning, as The Waste Land has it, striding before me!
In some ways I like myself well enough then. I enjoy the fun of me, the harmless conceit, the guileless complexity and the merriment. When I go walking in the evening, on the other hand, my shadow is less distinct and less encouraging, rising blurred to reproach me as the sun fades. I shall not be whistling then, but humming some more thoughtful theme, and I shall recognize what I don’t like about myself – selfishness, self-satisfaction, foolish self-deceit and irritability.
Morning pride, then, and evening shame. But so what? Either way, I think the poet tells me, no more than a handful of dust …
DAY 100
Ill Temper
Oh, it would be nice on this, my centenary diary day, to contribute some kindly thought. The morning is fine outside my window. A dozen lambs are messing around down there, intermittently breaking off for a suck at their patient mums or a combined attempt to get through a hole in the gate. Somebody has just gone merrily past on a quad bike, and on the face of it you may think it sounds all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
It is not.
It is most certainly not.
For the fifth day running the garage man has not, as promised, returned my car after its servicing.
Has he not lent me a car in its stead?
He has, and a ghastly old thing it is, obliging me ignominiously to inquire of him how I could make it go backwards.
Have I an urgent need to use it?
Well, no, but that’s not the point.
What’s wrong with it?
Nothing in particular. I just don’t like it.
Do you like the garage man?
He’s all right.
You like him?
Well, yes, I do actually.
Well, then, what’s the matter?
Those lambs are driving me crazy, that’s what, and when is that person going to stop driving up and down the lane, that’s what, and it’s five whole days, going on six, since the garage man promised my car would be back with me, that’s chiefly what.
Anything more you want to know, Nosey Parker? No? You thought I was going to end this centenary thought with some gentle, kindly quip, didn’t you?
WELL, YOU’RE BLOODY WELL WRONG.
DAY 101
Alas, I’m growing out of touch with Manhattan, one of my favourite places on earth, but from time to time faithful friends report to me about curious goings-on there. To one recent event I here make my own contribution.
It concerns the statue of a bull, eleven feet tall, which stands at a traffic junction in lower Manhattan, in the heart of the Financial District, and was erected in 1989 to celebrate Wall Street’s recent recovery from a stock market crash. The Italian-born sculptor Arturo Di Modica made it, and he declared it a symbol of revived prosperity and strength – of American bullishness, in fact!
However, not long ago a rival bronze appeared, altogether unofficially, on the same plinth. It was only four feet tall, and depicted a small pigtailed girl in a wind-blown skirt facing up to the bull. It had been placed there by supporters of women’s rights, and to the dismay of Mr Di Modica gave to the sculpture group an altogether different symbolism. Now it became known as the Fearless Girl facing the Charging Bull, and was generally assumed to honour indomitable Womanhood challenging Male Supremacy.
The response was overwhelmingly favourable. The little bronze girl was given temporary civic permission to stay there, but I hear there is controversy about her permanent future. One of my Manhattan contacts has asked me what I think about it, and what name I would give the group if it were to remain permanently there among the money-makers.
Well now, thought I this morning. Fearless Girl and Charging Bull is hardly apt. The child certainly seems dauntlessly cocky, but the bull actually looks rather geriatric, and the whole ensemble suggests to me not a challenge at all, but a fond great-uncle having fun and games in the garden with his patiently obliging little niece. Here, then, is my suggestion for a permanent title:
Playtime in Wall Street.
DAY 102
I have always felt an affinity with the little armadillo known variously as the woodlouse or the doodlebug (a nickname it shared with the wartime German flying bomb, the original cruise missile). I admired the little creature’s roly-poly powers, when I was a child, and had my own name for it – the dabblyjoo. Of course, I know now what an infestuous curse it can be, especially in a house like ours with lots of wood in it, and I have learnt that most varieties of woodlice cannot in fact roll themselves into a ball. Never mind, my dabblyjoos certainly could.
This morning, when I went to run my bath there was a woodlouse waiting for me. As the woodlouse custom is, it had doubtless climbed the incoming water pipe, and as my custom is, I prepared to push it safely down again, with a little dribble of water to ease its passage.
Alas, I could not budge it. It didn’t exactly make a ball of itself, but it squashed itself flat on the bath’s bottom, and disregarding all my fond entreaties, obliged me to scrape it off and send it back down the pipe, with a powerful squirt of water to hasten the process. In short, I murdered it.
‘Oh, I am so very sorry,’ I said aloud to it, ‘that’s the very last thing I wanted to do to an old friend, a lifelong colleague and compatriot. Do please forgive me.’
But no, there came no reply, not even a gurgle, from that implacable dabblyjoo. Nature’s not what it used to be …
DAY 103
Today it’s all Irony, an abstraction that has long enthralled me with its amalgam of humour, tragedy, cynicism, mystery and surprise. In fact, I’ve written a short book about it, concerning the Japanese battleship Yamato, the most powerful of her day. Beautiful but lethal, she went to her end in the Second World War heroically but unnecessarily, efficiently but ineffectively, stylishly in a squalid cause – ironically, in fact. And all around me this morning, it seems to me, an almighty, universal irony is in performance.
On the one hand, outside my window is happening the loveliest, richest, happiest springtime I can remember. Green, green young Easter leaves are everywhere, late snowdrops jostle early bluebells, impertinent daisies crop up, crocuses lurk among primroses and everywhere birds are enthusiastically nesting. Over the way, yesterday’s lambs are lambs no more, but strenuous young sheep showily ignoring their mothers, and all in all this morning the world seems to be halfway to heaven.
It is not. The world is halfway to hell.
Consider the situation out there, beyond the garden, beyond the field with the gambolling young sheep. The unpredictable leader of one State has lately dropped upon another the largest bomb ever dropped anywhere in the history of the world, the loony leader of another is furiously developing nuclear bombs and firing rockets into oceans, the implacable leader of a third has lately been killing opponents with chemical poisons, a fourth is scaring all his neighbours stiff with the possibility of invading them, and through all the arteries of the earth there pulses a poisonous compound of terrorism, bigotry, greed and homeless misery.
Irony! Up the road from us a tall, handsome cherry tree is in glorious flower, ‘wearing white’, as the poet had it, ‘for Eastertide’. Its bunched blossoms remind me of clusters of radars, rangefinders and such on the mainmast of a warship, so I have nicknamed it The Japanese Battleship.
DAY 104
I suppose it’s crossed most of our minds, now and then, that perhaps Democracy is not such a good idea after all, especially now that the system seems unable to cope with the myriad miseries and political confusions of our times. I can well understand why Russians who grew up under the disciplines of Stalinist communism, Germans in the days of Hitler’s National Socialism or even fascists in Italy felt somehow deprived when those arrogant systems fell, and their subjects were left groping for certainties with the rest of us. God knows, millions of them had suffered appallingly in the thrall of those regimes, but many more had undoubtedly felt secure and proud within the discipline of their despotisms. ‘Ah,’ I remember an Italian of my own age replying in 1946, when I remarked upon the vigorous splendours of Milan, ‘ah, but you should have known it when Mussolini was here!’
If I do occasionally feel that a benevolent, cultivated, clever, artistic sort of dictator – a Churchill, for instance – might be a more welcome head of State than one of our run-of-the-mill prime ministers, I have only to remind myself of Winston’s own dictum: that democracy is the worst form of human government except for all the others.
Nevertheless, not all the citizens who were loyal to those despotisms did so under ideological pressures. Many more of them, I feel sure, were not Nazis, or fascists, or communists. They were simply patriots.
I understand them, too. Believe me, I do not subscribe to that despicable credo ‘my country right or wrong’, but like most Britons of my age I generally assumed, in my youth, that Great Britain was usually right. Except for dauntless conscientious objectors, public opinion firmly supported Churchill when he promised the people, in the patriotic cause, only blood, toil and tears, and in that cause they generally accepted, if not autocracy, at least severe restrictions on their liberties. It was not a political ideology that sustained them, it was patriotism, and although that primitive, illogical emotion is half discredited today in Britain, nevertheless, right or wrong, in inspiration or in irony, it still has power.
When I came downstairs this morning I happened to notice a row of five elderly books on the bottom row of a bookcase. They were all entitled simply The Royal Navy, and it occurred to me that when they were published there was no need to say whose navy that was. It was the Navy, it was our navy, it was the British Navy, and like nearly everyone else I was proud of it.
Later in the day, I saw on the news an aerial picture of a squadron of the US Navy on its way to some miscreant destination – a carrier and half a dozen destroyers, ensigns fluttering, bow spray flying, in perfect formation in that distant sea.
I don’t know what its mission was, just or squalid, but atavist that I am, I envied its ownership anyway.
DAY 105
Thinking still about democracy and such, I have been wondering why it is that the English, at least in our times, seem to have no hankering for a charismatic leader. Showy right-wing aspirants have fizzled out (think of Mosley), leftist heroes have not lasted long, Churchill himself they booted out of office once he had won the war. Heroes are not required, it appears, saints are not welcomed, and I cannot imagine a Trump winning an election here. Black and w
hite is evidently too abrupt for the English public; pastels preferred.
So it is, it seems, that this exceptionally experienced democratic electorate prefers, as its national ikon, a totally irrational figure: a nobody in particular, untested and unexamined, from a not very gifted family, picked more or less at historical random out of a not especially successful pedigree. Sometimes the system works remarkably well; sometimes it is a dead loss. Either way, it apparently gives the English public satisfaction. It does not depend upon competition, rivalry or even aspiration. It is based upon the lottery of inheritance, and so far its philosophy, if one can call it that, has outstayed the ideologues.
I am an old republican, and I stand for a right little, tight little Wales without the absurdity of a hereditary monarch. But if the choice for England might be a Putin, a Kim Jong-un or even a Trump, let that old nation be singular, let it be quixotic, let it be entertaining, let it be fallibly human and stick to its well-tried nonsense.
DAY 106
Believe it or not, agnostic that I am, on Sunday I was quoted in a Calvinist Methodist service in the Capel y Traeth in Porthmadog, and these are the words attributed to me:
To my mind the fundamental engine of the Christian faith, as it is of most of the world’s great religions, is the quality of kindness. It requires no exact definition. It is an essential aspect of all the great humanist qualities – mercy, forgiveness, generosity, unselfishness, even, at a pinch, humour. We need no theologian to expound it for us, no particular shining saint to exemplify it, because since childhood we have all experienced just what kindness is.