by Jan Morris
As the United Kingdom seems to slither towards ignominy, and the lost British Empire is remembered chiefly with shame, to my mind it is only the symbolic idea of England that retains some sense of the grace, age and fascination of this ancient homeland. I don’t count, of course, the unfading allures of Wales and Scotland, I recognize the arcane fascination of the crown, and for myself, a shameless romantic, I am also still susceptible to the grandeur and bravado of imperial power; but what, I ask you, could be less inspiring than the very name UK?
But ‘England’! Even in its sad decline, there is to the idea of England something wonderful, something graceful and generous and green that is ethereally translated into its name. Mimi in La Bohème catches it when she sings of simple things that speak to her of love and spring, of dreams and visions – ‘things that are called poetry’, and perhaps it is indeed the poetry of Shakespeare’s England, subsumed through all its reputation, whose symbolic influence down the centuries has been at the centre of the English idea, and can still catch at the susceptible heart.
I suspect it reached the climax of its power during the First World War, when a generation of English poets spoke for the nation in its sorrows and reproaches. When the Welshman Ivor Novello wrote one of the most popular ballads of the time, he chose as a soldier’s homesick war aim the simple, the allegorical pleasure of walking with his lover ‘down an English lane’.
An English lane, mark you, not a British lane, and it is that one word in the piece that still gives me a frisson today, a century on. When in 1958 Julie Andrews recorded a version in which an English lane became just a ‘shady lane’, all Mimi’s gentle totemic magic left the song …
DAY 161
The Special Relationship is a once-familiar political phrase that is now moribund or discarded, but I believe in it still. Churchill first used it, I think, in the euphoric post-war years of victory, and he certainly exemplified it – his mother was American and his most ambitious work of scholarship was his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. And in my opinion that particular relationship still exists, like it or not, and still defines the particular affinity, instinctive, intellectual, that survives between the kingdom of Great Britain and its former colony, the United States of America.
You may scoff, whether you are American or British, and especially if you are young. You will probably tell me that America now lives in another sphere from Britain – the sphere of the contemporary great Powers, America and Russia and China and India, together with thrusting, modern newcomers around the world to whom Great Britain must seem almost pitifully passé.
But still, for the moment anyway, that particular link remains, and so like thousands of other Britons and Americans I represent in myself that Special Relationship. I have lived and worked in countries all over the world, but it is in America that I have made the most lasting friendships, shared the same moments of joy, pride or disillusionment. My very first book, sixty-odd years ago, was dedicated to the proposition that Americans were half-brothers of mine, and so I have felt it ever since. Come Roosevelt, come Trump, come a new world order, come the four corners in opinion against us, I shall always know, for what it’s worth, that a few million Americans will be thinking just as I am, in special relationship …
DAY 162
Fame is the spur, Milton assured us, that elevates the spirit, but in my opinion Shame is a more powerful engine. I write with feeling, because I have just done something I am ashamed of. For years my dear old Honda Civic Type R, 2006 vintage, has been tended for me by an obliging Scot, a famous rally navigator who owns a garage along the road. The scrapes he has unscraped for me, the dents he has undented, the wings he has replaced, the engines he has rejuvenated, until by now the dear old vehicle is far more than the sum of its parts, but a sort of living resurrection of itself, feisty as ever and rejuvenating to drive!
Well, it went into Rob’s garage last week for some attention to its innards, I forget what, and he lent me a very nice courtesy car to use during its absence. Sentimentally, it was not, of course, in the same class as my own old friend, but as a matter of fact it was more powerful, much newer and doubtless worth a great deal more money. Hardly had I taken it over than I got it tangled up in scrubbery beside our gate and tore the front end off it.
Shame knocked me askew and inflamed my spirit all the more vividly when the dear man (stifling a curse, I would guess) assured me I was forgiven …
DAY 163
A friend asked me yesterday to suggest a quotation that best expressed the spirit of our age, and before I had time to think offered me his own lovely but despondent choice, from Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’: ‘And we are here as on a darkling plain … where ignorant armies clash by night.’
Well, I fear I agreed with him – ours is certainly an age of disillusionment, of abandoned faiths and hopes and even loves, and he is right, I’m sure, in believing that the sense of zeitgeist can best be expressed not in political, economic or even historic terms, but through the celestial medium of art. However, I’m damned if I’m going to let any old zeitgeist get me down, so I have searched through my jumbled poetic resources to find a proper retort, and stumbled upon these reminders that good humour, too, has its noble part to play in the passage of the ages:
Try I will; no harm in trying;
Wonder ’tis how little mirth
Keeps the bones of man from lying
On the bed of earth.
’Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
But better late than never
I shall have lived a little while
Before I die for ever.
From A. E. Housman, lad – who else?
DAY 164
I am not the only republican, I am sure, to feel some pleasure from the news that the man who is fifth in succession to the throne of Britain is to marry an American divorcée actress of mixed race who is three years older than he is and a dedicated feminist. For one thing, I have generally rather liked the sound of the ginger-haired Prince Harry, who really does seem a bit Shakespearean; and for another, well, of course I know nothing at all about Meghan Markle, never having heard of her before, but she looks all right and sounds interesting.
Naturally, though, much depends upon the royal wedding, which, as day follows night, will burst upon us in the spring, and which will either be as crassly ostentatious as its recent predecessors or may, by the example of Hal and Meg, conceivably persuade us cynics that family monarchy as a device of government is irrationally worth preserving.
DAY 165
My background music this morning, as I answered my mail, included one of Chopin’s particularly exquisite preludes, which as usual tugged at my heart; and when my son Twm looked in I put to him a question that has often perturbed me: could a man who created such heavenly music be nasty? ‘What about Wagner?’ he instantly replied, and of course he had a point.
But only just. Hitler’s maestro Wagner certainly gave us some profoundly beautiful melodies, but not in my view music instinct with the inspired simplicity and goodness that I long for, and which Chopin can provide.
On the other hand, was Chopin a good and simple man, any more than Wagner was, or should we never try to collate beauty with virtue? I don’t know. Perhaps the truth is that Art is sui generis, beyond critical or intellectual judgement, and certainly beyond the crude values of the auction room or the pretensions of experts. ‘I know what I like,’ ordinary people say, to the scoffings of professionals, but I suspect their instincts, as against their opinions, are sometimes sounder.
I ornament my modest theme today, but why not? Bach often did.
DAY 166
I seem to remember that when I was a child, it was the practice to end a squabble with the incongruously classical cry, ‘Pax!’ It seems to have worked, and I wish it did now. In a world of apparently endless and almost universal bickering, how refreshing it would be to be able to tell everybody, with a single imperative, just to shut up and leave us alone.
I felt the need especially when the mail came this morning, because it included a weekly magazine I subscribe to, and when with extreme difficulty I managed to tear its maddening packaging open, there fell out of it not just the publication itself, but, believe me, a positive welter of extraneous matter – advertisements, appeals, political propaganda, unwanted invitations, reminders about licences or debts, gushing suggestions concerning charities and even an instruction about how best to make my will.
‘Pax!’ I felt like crying. ‘MYOB!’ (as we also used to say) – ‘Mind your own business!’ But I have an unorthodox remedy for these moments of exasperation. Some sufferers, I know, rely upon Buddhist-style contemplation for their relief. I rely upon a ship. On one of our windowsills there stands a wooden model of an elderly paddle steamer which I brought home from Poland years ago. It flies the flag of the Free City of Danzig, which for forty years had its own constitution, national anthem, parliament, government, postage stamps, currency and all – until on 1 September 1939 it was bombarded, invaded, seized and obliterated by the forces of Nazi Germany in the very first engagement of the Second World War.
You may well think such an aged souvenir of our times should be a reminder of aggressive interference, the awful spark that set the world alight; but no, for me it represents the opposite. There she lies in the sunlight, steamship Leopold, eighty years old but still fairly resplendent in her green, gold and faded crimson, with Neptune holding the trident of independence at her bows and the twin lions of the Free City on her paddle boxes. There is no stridency to her, no remorse either. She is emblematic of some of the very worst years in the history of the modern world, but she has sailed unflustered through it all, and so for me she represents, the dear old thing, the calm beyond the miseries, and a rebuff in my mind to all those damned meddlers …
DAY 167
I bumped into an acquaintance I admire during my morning walk today, walking briskly like me, and with the same intent. He is a retired physician, and he knows the physical, moral and intellectual value of exercise. This morning, however, he was not at his most invigorated, and I gathered it was because he did not quite know what was happening to people like him.
People like him? The sort of people, that is, who used to think of themselves as liberal-minded, free-thinking citizens of their society, and who now feel somehow exiled, trapped between prejudice and political incorrectness. As a doctor who had matured in the post-war society of Great Britain, I suppose his lodestar, as it were, had been the British National Health Service, a grand pioneering achievement of the time which exemplified what he was most proud of – generous, universal, high-minded public service, universally distributed. I asked him what he thought of the NHS now. He said it ought to be abolished, and I somehow had the sense that he had lost his way.
I suppose most of us these days, whatever our circumstances, wherever we live, are searching in some manner for a Way (The Way, gentle Buddhists say, but if we are to judge by recent events in Myanmar, even they seem to be losing it). I don’t mean a political way, or an intellectual way, or even exactly a religious way, but something mistier and more nebulous, and there is an allusive kind of guide to it at the end of Kipling’s strange masterpiece Kim. We seek the Road, the Lama tells his disciple Kim in its last pages, but we wondering readers never quite learn what the Road is, or where it will lead us. To the River of the Arrow? To the Justice of the Wheel? To the Presence of the Great Soul?
Wherever, the holy man concludes. The Search is ended anyway. He has wrenched his own soul back from the Threshold of Freedom and cries, to Kim as to us, ‘Certain is our Deliverance!’
Got it, doc?
DAY 168
I can’t help feeling sorry for those thousands of ageing gents, apparently half the world over, whose lives have been ruined by making improper suggestions, or touching women’s private parts, or even reading sexy matter long, long years before.
I can remember the days when a playful pat of a lady’s bottom was no more than friendly bonhomie. Reading smutty magazines under the bedclothes, whistling at susceptible passers-by or even making naughty suggestions were just adolescent goings-on, to be laughed at. Now a career can be ended, a reputation wrecked, if an elderly man is found to have indulged himself in this way in his youth. Of course, thank goodness, lots of odiously true sex pests and villains have been uncovered and properly punished, and in general sexual attitudes have become mercifully more civilized. But it seems to me that in many of the cases we read about the offence has been chiefly against good taste.
The offenders evidently were, if not actually villainous, not very gentlemanly youths, and could it perhaps be that they are now, however innocent and distinguished, not very fastidious elders? Are we being governed and dazzled by elderly vulgarians, however distinguished? Or can we generally assume that such politicians and celebrities have, as parents used to say in those olden times, ‘grown out of it’?
I do hope so. ‘Say you’re sorry,’ the parental watchword used to be, and I hope it was usually enough.
DAY 169
Advent Sunday, and it began magnificently when I got out of bed and turned on the BBC to hear their morning Christian service from some English cathedral or other. The agnostic liberty allows me to take my satisfactions, like my doubts, from any source of faith, and I love the old Anglican choral traditions and the antique words of the Authorized Version of the Bible.
Well, as I say, it started splendidly, with a fine choir and an apparently enthusiastic congregation singing one of Charles Wesley’s magnificent hymns, joyous and thunderous. ‘Wonderful,’ I said to myself as I conducted it in my pyjamas, ‘sometimes they really do get things right!’ As they sang to the last long chord of the hymn, fortissimo, I imagined to myself the black-cassocked preacher opening an antique prayer book, behind the gilded eagle of his lectern, for the first prayer of the morning; and sure enough, when the music faded, there sounded the opening words of the supreme Christian prayer:
‘Our Father, who are in Heaven …’
‘WHICH ART IN HEAVEN …’ I screamed, as I slammed the radio off and got back into bed for a further snooze after all. Dear God, they were using that dreadful modern translation of the divine appeal, instead of the majestic King James translation of 1611. There and then I apologized to the Almighty on their behalf, crossing my fingers pedantically.
DAY 170
Thinking again about The Way, that nebulous religio-philosophic-poetic-politic-mystical conception of fulfilment, I watched on TV one of David Attenborough’s virtuoso programmes about the seas, and marvelled at the skills, imagination and sheer chutzpah of the project. Miles beneath the surface of some tropical ocean a team of human scientists and cameramen crawled about in their vehicle in the darkness, reliant for their survival entirely upon their own instruments, mechanisms, knowledge, skills and courage. And all around them, on my screen that evening, extended a vast dark wilderness, as far as my eye could see, inhabited by millions and millions of strange creatures, all busily pursuing their own ends in an apparently endless pitch-dark cavern.
Did those swarming sub-aquatic creatures conceive some ethereal Way of their own fulfilment, their own Destination? I really cannot think so, and I am tempted to conclude today, as I watch that sunless, heaving mass of beings, that Attenborough’s revelatory projects really only confirm Macbeth’s verdict: the whole vast phenomenon of life itself, human to fish, skylark to hippopotamus to sea slug, really signifies nothing in particular, however fascinating the TV …
DAY 171
I am pleased to see that this year’s Stirling Prize for architecture has gone to the reconstructed pier at Hastings in East Sussex, because I have a weakness for British pleasure piers and all that they long represented in the character of the nation. I spent part of my childhood in the company, as it were, of a famous example: the pier built in 1869 at Clevedon, on the north Somerset coast of the Bristol Channel, looking across to Wales. It was built essentially as a sort of ext
ension to the burgeoning railways, providing a connecting steamship service to the Welsh ports, but it presently became a place of pleasure too. It was there, when I was perhaps five years old, that I was introduced to my very first members of the theatrical profession, from a concert party performing a season at the pier; and it was from that same venerable jetty that my mother used to take the White Funnel lines paddle steamer to Cardiff to broadcast her piano recitals.
Those are decorous memories, though, from a decorous little place (John Betjeman loved Clevedon Pier, which flourishes still), but anything but decorous is the aura that to this day attends the general reputation of the British seaside pier. On the contrary, the memory is bawdy, bold, a little risqué, frankly vulgar and fun. It goes with not very naughty picture postcards that have become a collectors’ genre of their own, often featuring a fat jolly holiday-maker looking through a slot machine to see What the Butler Saw. There are still scores of pleasure piers around the British coasts, but their heyday ended when so many of the British of all classes threw themselves into foreign tourism and began spending their summer holidays at places like Biarritz or Benidorm instead of places like Blackpool.
I miss the seaside crowds of the old days, the days of my innocent youth, when they seemed to me like a nation of their own. How fundamentally decent they all appeared to be, how agreeable, how proud and fond of their families. They and their dads and mums had been through wars, depressions, strikes, deprivations and disillusionments. Yet I still think of them in my mind, in the abstract as it were, as part of a grand, cheerful and wholesome unity.