In Pursuit of the English

indeed, from my mother, thus; ‘Your governess is not suited to this life here, she is going back to England.’ Pause. ‘I suppose she is going back to the smart set she came from.’ Pause. ‘The sooner she gets married the better.’

Later, from a neighbour who had been confidante to the governess. ‘That poor girl who was so unhappy with your mother and had to go back to England in disgrace.’

Later, from my father: ‘… that time I had to take that swine Baxter to task for making free with Bridget’s name in the bar.’

What happened was this. My mother, for various reasons unwell, and mostly bedridden, had answered en advertisement from ‘Young woman, educated finishing school, prepared to teach young children in return for travel.’ The Lord knows what she, or my mother, expected. It was the mid-twenties. Bridget was twenty-five, and had ‘done’ several London seasons. Presumably she wanted to see a bit of the world before she married, or thought of some smart Maugham-ish colonial plantation society. Later she married an Honourable something or other, but in the meantime she got a lonely maize farm, a sick woman, two spoiled children, and my father, who considered that any woman who wore lipstick or shorts was no better than she ought to be. On the other hand, the district was full of young farmers looking for wives, or at least entertainment. They were not, she considered, of her class, but it seemed she was prepared to have a good time. She had one, and danced and gymkhana’d whenever my parents would let her. This was not nearly as often as she would have liked. She was being courted by a farmer called Baxter, a tough ex-policeman from Liverpool. My father did not like him. He didn’t like any of her suitors. One evening, he went into the bar at the village and Baxter came over and said: ‘How’s Bridget?’ My father instantly knocked him down. When the bewildered man stood up and said: ‘What the f-ing hell’s that for?’ my father said: ‘You will kindly refer, in my presence at least, to an innocent young girl many thousands of miles from her parents and to whom I am acting as guardian, as Miss Fox.’

Afterwards, he said: ‘I must not allow myself to lose my temper so easily. Quite obviously, I don’t know my own strength.’

When stunned by The Times or the Telegraph; when — yes, I think the word is interested, by the Manchester Guardian; when unable to discover the motive behind some dazzlingly stupid stroke of foreign policy; when succumbing to that mood which all of us foreigners are subject to, that we shall ever be aliens in an alien land. I recover myself by reflecting, in depth, on the implications of incidents such as these.

Admittedly at a tangent, but in clear analogy, I propose to admit, and voluntarily at that, that I have been thinking for some time of writing a piece called: In Pursuit of the Working-Class. My life has been spent in pursuit. So has everyone’s, of course. I chase love and fame all the time. I have chased, off and on, and with much greater deviousness of approach, the working-class and the English. The pursuit of the working-class is shared by everyone with the faintest tint of social responsibility: some of the most indefatigable pursuers are working-class people. That is because the phrase does not mean, simply, those people who can be found by walking out of one’s front door and turning down a side-street. Not at all. Like love and fame it is a platonic image, a grail, a quintessence, and by definition, unattainable. It took me a long time to understand this. When I lived in Africa and was learning how to write, that group of mentors who always voluntarily constitute themselves as a sort of watch committee of disapprobation around every apprentice writer, used to say that I could never write a word that made sense until I had become pervaded by the cultural values of the working-class. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, these mentors claimed that not one truthful word could ever be written until it was first baptized, so to speak, by the working-class. I remember even now the timidity with which, just as I was about to leave Africa, I suggested that having spent twenty-five years of my life in the closest contact with the black people, who are workers if nothing else, some knowledge, or intimation, or initiation by osmosis must surely have been granted me. And I remember even now the indignant tone of the reply: ‘The Africans in this country are not working-class in the true sense. They are semi-urbanized peasants.’ I should have understood by the tone, which was essentially that of a defender of a faith, that I must stick by my guns. But it always did take me a long time to learn anything.

I came to England. I lived, for the best of reasons, namely, I was short of money, in a household crammed to the roof with people who worked with their hands. After a year of this. I said with naive pride to a member of the local watch committee that now, at last, I must be considered to have served my apprenticeship. The reply was pitying, but not without human sympathy: ‘These are not the real working-class. They are the lumpen proletariat, tainted by petty bourgeois ideology.’ I rallied. I said that, having spent a lot of my time with Communists, either here or in Africa, a certain proportion of whom, even though a minority, are working-class, surely some of the magic must have rubbed off on me? The reply came: ‘The Communist Party is the vanguard of the working-class and obviously not typical.’ Even then I didn’t despair. I went to a mining village, and returned with a wealth of observation. It was no good. ‘Miners, like dockworkers, are members of a very specialized, traditionalized trade; mining is already (if you take the long view) obsolete. The modes of being, mores and manners of a mining community have nothing whatsoever to do with the working-class as a whole.’ Finally. I put in some time in a housing estate in a New Town, and everyone I met was a trade unionist, a member of the Labour Party, or held other evidence of authenticity. It was then that I realized I was defeated. ‘The entire working-class of Britain has become tainted by capitalism or has lost its teeth. It is petit bourgeois to a man. If you really want to understand the militant working-class, you have to live in a community in France, let’s say near the Renault works, or better still, why don’t you take a trip to Africa where the black masses are not yet corrupted by industrialism.’

The purpose of this digression, which is not nearly so casual as it might appear, is to make it plain that when set on something I don’t give up easily. Also to — but I must get back to why it took me so long to get started for England in the first place.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to come to England. This was because, to use the word in an entirely different sense, I was English. In the colonies or Dominions, people are English when they are sorry they ever emigrated in the first place; when they are glad they emigrated but consider their roots are in England; when they are thoroughly assimilated into the local scene and would hate ever to set foot in England again; and even when they are born colonial but have an English grandparent. This definition is sentimental and touching. When used by people not English, it is accusatory. My parents were English because they yearned for England, but knew they could never live in it again because of its conservatism, narrowness and tradition. They hated Rhodesia because of its newness, lack of tradition, of culture. They were English, also, because they were middle-class in a community mostly working-class. This use of the word can be illustrated by the following incident. Scene: the local tennis club. The children are playing tennis, watched by their mothers. The hostess for the afternoon is a woman from the Cape, a member of an old Dutch family, newly married to a Scots farmer. She is shy, dignified, and on her guard. Mrs Mathews, a loquacious Scots farmer’s wife, attempts to engage her in conversation. She fails. She turns to my mother, and says: ‘That one’s got no small-talk to change with a neighbour. She’s too good for us. She’s real English and that’s a fact.’ Then she blushes and says: ‘Oh, but I didn’t mean …’ thus revealing how often she has made the same criticism of my mother.

My parents were, now I come to think of it, grail-chasers of a very highly developed sort. I cannot even imagine a country in which they would have been definitively ready to settle down without criticism. The nearest I can get to it would be a combination of the best parts of Blackheath or Richmond, merged, or mingled with a really large ranch, let’s say about fifty thousand acres, in the Kenyan Highlands. This would have to be pervaded by a pre-1914 atmosphere, or ambience, like an Edwardian after-glow. Their Shangri-La would be populated thickly, for my mother, with nice professional people who were nevertheless interesting; and sparsely, for my father, with scamps, drunkards, eccentrics and failed poets who were nevertheless and at bottom decent people.

I would, of course, be the first to blame my parents for my own grail-seeking propensities.

England was for me a grail. And in a very narrowly-defined way. Not long ago people set foot for the colonies — the right sort of people, that is — in a spirit of risking everything and damning the cost. These days, a reverse immigration is in progress. The horizon conquerors now set sail or take wing for England, which in this sense means London, determined to conquer it, but on their own terms.

I have an anecdote to illustrate this. I had been in England for about five years, and was just beginning to understand that I had got the place whacked, when an old acquaintance telephoned to say that he had arrived in London to write a book. He had forever turned his back on his old life, which consisted of making enormous sums of money out of gold mines, drinking a lot, and marrying a succession of blonde and beautiful girls. I visited him in his