Europe

by Jan Morris

  During the next fifty years their prestige inexorably declined, and they showed themselves maddeningly uncertain whether they wanted to be Europeans or not: but it seems to me an odd truth that of all the European nations, well into the 1990s, they still cast their influence most potently upon the others. Their affairs seemed to be the most interesting to everyone else, so that the scandals and romances of British royalty dominated tabloid headlines throughout the continent. Their rock music set the pace. Their football clubs, though no longer the most successful, still attracted cult followings everywhere. Approximations of English pubs were popular all over Europe; ‘As long as the sun shines,’ said the official guide to Vilnius, in Lithuania, in 1996, ‘The Pub will be THE place to be’, and in the small city of Flensburg, on the border between Germany and Denmark, a saloon advertised itself as ‘the best English pub in town’. The ambivalent allure of London, its racy street life, its harsh social glitter, its incomparable theatre and its music still brought thousands of continentals across the Channel in curiosity and excitement.

  Odder still, there remained like an echo over Europe the reputation of the English as phlegmatic and self-controlled. There was still cachet to the old-school, upper-class English style. There were still men all over Europe who dressed in the supposed English manner, bore themselves in the allegedly English way, paid tribute to legendary English values (the stiff upper lip, for instance) which the English themselves had long mocked or abandoned. In 1996 one of the great French best-sellers of the year was a comic-strip compilation, L’Affaire Francis Blake, about a pair of pipe-smoking, gentlemanly English intelligence agents who saved the kingdom from ignominy in a setting rich in respectful butlers and old-school policemen – ‘Good Heavens!’ Englishmen still habitually exclaimed in this affectionate memorial, or ‘My word!’, or even ‘By Jove!’ An expensive English car still carried prestige in Europe, and, however despised were English football louts and drunken English soldiers, educated English families still found themselves, almost anywhere in Europe, greeted with respect.

  Their language helped. It had become Europe’s true lingua franca now, besides infiltrating many other languages with its idioms (Le Weekend, for instance, Il Weekend, der Weekend), but in many minds it also helped to confuse the English with the Americans – even worldly Frenchmen still talked about ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ as though the two people were more or less the same. In 1994 the most popular boys’ name in France and Belgium was Kevin; in the Netherlands the most popular names were Rob, Rick and Tom. Whatever the reasons – real or specious, hard-headed or nostalgic – everyone knew the English still, and from their offshore island they cast their influences unmistakably across the continent. As for the English themselves, they were willy-nilly beginning to lose their inherited contempt for almost everything on the other side of the Channel.

  67 From ‘Dover to Munich’, 1861, by C. S. Calverley

  Bed at Ostend at 5 A.M.

  Breakfast at 6, and train 6.30,

  Tickets to Königswinter (mem.

  The seats unutterably dirty).

  And onward thro’ those dreary flats

  We move, and scanty space to sit on,

  Flanked by stout girls with steeple hats,

  And waists that paralyse a Briton; –

  By many a tidy little town,

  Where tidy little Fraus sit knitting;

  (The men’s pursuits are, lying down,

  Smoking perennial pipes, and spitting).

  68 Imperial memories

  During many periods of history the English actually ruled parts of Europe beyond their own frontiers. They still rule, in a manner of speaking, Scotland, Wales, Gibraltar, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, but they once had imperial footholds in France, the Balearics, Heligoland, Malta, Cyprus and the Ionian Islands. In Corfu people still played cricket at the end of the twentieth century. In Valletta they still drank at the Britannia pub. Even in the Republic of Ireland, which the English had found much the most difficult of their overseas possessions in Europe, their ways were still sometimes honoured. The Germans and Scandinavians who by then owned big properties in Ireland eagerly conformed to Anglo-Irish patterns of behaviour, and the American Irish who stayed in country-house hotels, vociferously though they often claimed kinship to fiery patriots of the past, were evidently unashamed to be cosseted in the halls not of Tara but of the old evicting classes.

  In Dublin only a year or two ago I happened to find myself in St Patrick’s Cathedral when they were holding a memorial service for Battle of Britain Day. Above us the helms and banners of long-gone Knights of St Patrick gleamed; around us coolly stirred all the rituals of Anglicanism, the surpliced clerks, the bowing vergers, the sweet music of the anthem; and here and there in the congregation stood the last veterans of the King’s Irishmen, medals heaving when they bravely belted out the hymns, shoulders back as they turned to the East for the Nicene Creed – for all the world as though they were declaring their belief not just in the Almighty but in the loyal and heroic past. I could not help remembering that when Hitler committed suicide the President of the Irish Republic sent his condolences to the German Embassy in Dublin: but when I told my hotel porter about the service at St Patrick’s, he said tolerantly, ‘Oh, they have all manner of things in there – they’re very ecumenical.’ Even Guinness, after all, that glorious black-and-cream icon of the Irish legend, was created by a family of impeccably monarchist and Anglican credential, rich in peerages.

  69 The Hill of Victory

  By now most people in Europe have probably forgotten that the English ever had European possessions, and remember only the part that English arms have played in the history of the continent – the long roster of wars which has brought English soldiers across the Channel, English sailors around all the seas of Europe, English airmen in all its skies, to fight in battles disastrous and victorious – Salamanca to Narvik, Crete to Walcheren, North Cape to Cape Trafalgar. The last and most honourable of the victories was sealed on a sandy patch of heathland, in the lee of a low pine-forested hill, within sight of the ancient towers of Lüneburg in Germany, on 4 May 1945: the first great surrender of Hitler’s armies, when Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery accepted the capitulation of all German forces in northern Germany, Denmark and Holland. Not many people seem to go there now, few guidebooks identify the spot, and all that marks it is a big boulder inscribed in German with the words ‘Nicht Wieder Krieg’ – ‘No More War’.

  It was more than half a century before I myself got to Tiemeloberg, Montgomery’s Hill of Victory, and there was not a soul around. The silence was absolute, but for the birds and the wind. All the easier was it to imagine the scene there when the blackly leather-coated German emissaries arrived at Montgomery’s field headquarters to submit to their conquerors. I could see the battered British trucks parked this way and that around the rutted heathland – tanks, perhaps, littered about the laager – dust and sand everywhere, and those throaty coughs of tank engines – dispatch riders skidding and revving as they came and went along the sand tracks – not very smart British troopers watching the arrival of the enemy in his beflagged Mercedes as they might watch the arrival of the devil himself – and in the heart of it all, beneath a Union Jack, Montgomery’s shabby caravan with the Field Marshal himself, in his old black beret, waiting at its steps with a clipboard in his hand. He had pursued these people, slowly, carefully and inexorably, seldom taking a risk, during three long years of war, from the borders of Egypt, through Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands to this stern Baltic heathland of Germany. He was not in the mood for niceties. A brisk exchange of salutes; a short presentation of conditions inside the caravan; a session with the photographers in a hastily prepared tent; Montgomery finds his reading-glasses and the surrender is signed.

  Was it like that? Perhaps not. I have imagined it all. The face I remember best from the pictures of the surrender is the face of Montgomery’s chief intelligence officer
, and he was not at all a victorious-looking figure in his spectacles and unbecoming khaki beret, looking less like a soldier than a university don – which, as it happens, he was. Tiemeloberg is not a very glorious kind of place. It is no Waterloo or Blenheim, and no grand obelisk remembers what happened there. The soldiers assembled there that day were hardly a heroic army, the crumpled troopers only anxious to get home, the plain teetotal Field Marshal in his rough battledress. None of them much wanted to be on Lüneburg Heath: but there, all the same, the homely British consummated the long and bitter duty by which, at the end of their epic insular history, they saved Europe by their example.

  70 How Montgomery greeted the German envoys when they first arrived at Lüneburg Heath (from Martin Gilbert’s Second World War, 1989)

  ‘Who are these men?’ Montgomery asked. ‘What do they want?’

  If they did not agree [to his terms], Montgomery told them, ‘I shall go on with the war, and will be delighted to do so, and am ready,’ and he went on to warn: ‘All your soldiers will be killed.’

  71 Expatriates

  I was walking one day along a path near Deya, on the west coast of the Spanish island of Majorca, when suddenly there appeared out of a tributary track an unmistakable figure – Robert Graves the English poet, who was the best-known resident of the place, and who smiled at me a brief Gorgonzola smile before striding off in the opposite direction (in case, I dare say, I was going to ask him for his autograph). A familiar phenomenon of Europe since the Second World War has been the settlement of English expatriates, escaping their native conditions in Tuscany, Normandy, the Dordogne, southern Spain and the Balearics, Ireland and even Wales. But there used to be even more of them, all over Europe, including hard-working communities of businesspeople in some unlikely places. The present Danish Embassy in Riga, for example, used to be the English Club there, and so many English lived in the city that Napoleon sneered at it as a suburb of London. The Genoese Association Football and Cricket Club was founded by the local English community; the city’s famous soccer club still spells itself in the English way – ‘Genoa’ rather than ‘Genova’. Any old Baedeker will tell you where in Lausanne or Copenhagen the English had their church, which English doctor was available in Funchal, where to buy the London newspapers in Cannes, or which was the most fashionably frequented English teashop – thus covering, in small italic print, all the principal requirements of the British abroad. For me the archetypal expatriate was dear old Max Beerbohm, ‘The Incomparable Max’, that urbane and elegant epitome of the old-school Englishman, who lived for years at Rapallo on the west coast of Italy; and in 1993 I set out to pursue his memory there.

  On the wrong day Rapallo offers a recognizable likeness of hell, especially when you have driven there by the most loveless road in Europe – the autostrada from the French frontier, down which a million juggernauts monotonously lumber through ill-lit rough-hewn tunnels, swarmed about by ill-tempered Fiats and idiot Porsches from Milan. All the more poignant it was to find on one of the noisiest edges of the place the villa in which Max lived and died. It was a large, oblong, yellowish, not very inviting building, hemmed about in a suburban way by others of the same kind, with traffic going past all day. Nothing could have been much further from the tranquil idyll, vine-trellised, peasant-soothed, olive-shaded, cicada-serenaded, that is generally supposed to be the expatriate destiny. Max Beerbohm had few Italian friends, and never did learn to speak good Italian. First to last, he remained the quintessential Edwardian Englishman, and as such his passage through Rapallo, though it lasted for nearly fifty years, has left few traces. A prophet soon loses honour, in a country not his own, and the sight of the Villino Chiaro, the commemorative plaque upon its wall to be read only at peril of Fiat-annihilation, seemed to me a very parable of exile.

  In Max’s time a ceaseless flow of English people passed through Rapallo, but when did a wandering Briton, I wondered, last knock on the door of the Villino Chiaro, confidently expecting a welcome? The house looked well-kept still, but there was nothing about it to speak of English connections. If there had been but a Penguin book on a chaise longue, or the merest suggestion of Earl Grey on the afternoon air, I might have knocked on the door myself; but as it was I skulked away, vainly hoping that some elderly Oxbridge voice, thin and silvery, would pursue me up the alley – ‘I say, you look a little lost, can I offer you a cup of tea or anything?’

  72 The regime of Richard Burton, the explorer, as a resident of Trieste, from The World magazine, London, 1878

  We have formed a little ‘mess’, with fifteen friends at the table d’hôte of the Hôtel de la Ville, where we get a good dinner and a pint of country wine made on the hillock for a florin and a half. By this plan we escape the bore of housekeeping, and are relieved from the curse of domesticity … At dinner we hear the news, if any, take our coffee, cigarettes, and kirsch outside the hotel, then go homewards to read ourselves to sleep, and tomorrow da capo.

  73 Cultural colonists

  Sometimes the expatriate English have created genuine cultural colonies in Europe. One such is the Portuguese island of Madeira, nearer Africa than Europe but unquestionably a European island. The English connection was originally economic, entrepreneurs having settled there, as they had settled in Portugal itself and in the sherry country of Spain, to gain control of the wine trade. Several English families remained important in the Madeira wine business at the end of the twentieth century, but they had long before extended their activities to be more general merchants and traders, and in particular they had come to dominate the tourist business. They gave the island an English veneer, very comforting to well-heeled English holiday-makers, and although millions of tourists of other nationalities now come to the island, the English influence is still potent. Whether you take a ride in a sightseeing bus, buy a bottle of Madeira, or even spend a morning at the island’s magnificent botanical gardens, you are in some way paying tribute to Madeira’s English connections. Above all Reid’s, the island’s most famous hotel, is English-owned, and remains assiduous in its Englishness. Afternoon tea there is an archetypically decorous affair, served to piano music on the veranda above the sea, and those un-English tourists who are brave enough to experience it may often be seen trying hard to comport to English convention, in their manner of crossing their legs, calling for the waitress, spreading the cream on their scones, or deciding which ought to go into the cup first, the milk or the tea.

  74 All the rage

  In my grandfather’s time, before the First World War, Germanity was all the rage in many parts of Europe, because of the distinction of German scholarship, the genius of German musicianship, the energy of German science and industry, the professionalism of German arms. What could be more proper than the statue of Baron von Eschwege, architect of the crazy Pena Castle at Sintra outside Lisbon, which portrays him standing on a commanding ridge beside his masterpiece dressed in the full Teutonic armour of a knight-errant? Only recently united in nationhood, Germany was the emblem of European modernity, and the young Kaiser Wilhelm II was widely admired. In Corfu there is a hill still called the Kaiser’s Throne, because he loved the view from its summit, and one of the island’s great tourist attractions is the Akhillion, his holiday villa there, rich in Wilhelmine statuary and decor, and equipped with one of the saddles he preferred to sit on when he was writing letters or doodling designs for battleships. When he paid a visit to Budapest in 1897 he expressed his admiration for the burgeoning city, but wished there were a few more public statues: in the next ten years thirty-seven went up, most of them still lording it there. Kaiser Bill left a pleasant memorial too in the little city of Ålesund on the Norwegian coast. Like many Germans he loved Norway, which he believed to be a natural German sphere of influence, frequented as it was by properly Nordic gods. In 1904, while he was cruising its waters in his white steam-yacht Hohenzollern, the centre of Ålesund was almost entirely destroyed by fire. The young Emperor sprang into action. He gave large sums of money
for the civic reconstruction, and he recruited an army of young architects, most of them German, to rebuild the town and rehouse its ten thousand homeless people. They did the job in three years, and the permanent result is a delightfully incongruous city of the fjords decorated in lavish Jugendstil, Germany’s own version of art nouveau. Turrets and gables ornament fish warehouses, dragons and water-chimeras enliven burghers’ quayside houses, and although nowadays local guidebooks ungratefully fail to mention the sponsor of these happy surprises, at the time it was all thought to be a characteristically German gesture of enlightened generosity.

  75 Valhalla

  In those days many a foreigner made the pilgrimage to Germany’s own Valhalla, a temple of pride in the Doric mode built on a high bluff above the Danube near Regensburg. It is still there, sparkling white and lordly above the great river, and approached by 358 steps of gleaming marble. It is a paean in stone and statuary to all the great figures of German art, scholarship, statesmanship and war – all sorts, all conditions, so long as they had contributed to the German tradition: for its builder, Ludwig II of Bavaria, believed that the German civilization, like the Greek, was something universal, to which anyone worthy could be admitted. Erasmus is here, for instance (born in Amsterdam). The Empress Maria Theresa is here (born in Vienna). There are Swiss holy men, and a couple of Dutch admirals, and several generals of the Russian armies, and the Venerable Bede. Whether or not they all thought of themselves as German, they are consecrated German for ever in this hall of the heroes (its floor lavishly tiled in marble, its sky-blue ceiling upheld by caryatids, its oak doors plated with bronze).