PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
St George's Day: myths, legends and sentimentality
GEORGE, Saint, died 303; honoured in England from 7th century; greatly popular as a result of Crusades, during which he emboldened Richard Coeur de Lion, among others, by timely apparitions when a battle was at its height.
The arrival of another St George’s Day (23 April) finds the English once again exhibiting the sort of polite indifference that they reserve for the best-known of their national institutions.
Scots, Welsh and Irish are soaked from birth in myths, legends and sentimentality. The English have an inner conviction, never actually voiced, that God created the universe from somewhere in Kent and on the seventh day reflected at Chequers.
Not surprisingly, foreigners see the English in curious ways. A French duke of the 17th century: “The English take their pleasures sadly after the fashion of their country.” George Bernard Shaw: “There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle.” Or lack of principle in many cases, I would have thought; but never mind.
The English are always in decline when they are being peaceful. They are at their best when they are at their worst – creating empires, filching lands from natives, sticking animals’ heads on walls, converting happy savages into unhappy Christians, or winning VCs before breakfast, my assumption being that after breakfast, they might do something more exciting.
History shows that they have been concerned with empires and umpires in fairly equal proportion, rules of war being scarcely separate from those of cricket.
I knew a major, typically English, who ate his pay-book when captured. That did not surprise his friends. He would have eaten Tobruk to save it from Rommel.
That is spirit. It occurs also in a German but without humour.
The English have lost a great deal of national spirit, but if set afloat in a sinking ship they would probably still sing Abide With Me instinctively, drawn up in neat ranks, whereas most foreigners would collapse, riot, or try to bribe the crew.
The English strength and weakness is that so many of them have died uncomplaining in strange and uncomfortable places. They have never had a theatrical sense of death. Only Orientals think less of it. Here again, it is probably the Englishman’s deep-seated belief that he is on nodding terms with the Creator that so subdues his emotions.
He imagines heaven to be some kind of enormous club where everyone is named either Jeremy or Judy and dressed – both sexes – in virginal white for the ritual drinking of fizzy lemonade on lawns like oceans. No brown shoes after 6pm and medals worn on suitable anniversaries.
The English divide naturally into two parts: Upper and Lower. The Middle classes do not exist except in their own imaginations. The great names of England have always looked down on the rest from a high horse, and, wherever possible, they still do. I spotted the difference when I saw my first Lord. The elbows of his sports jacket were frayed. I pondered this for a long time. No member of the middle or lower orders would wear such a jacket: they would be ashamed – why, then, did he? And the answer came from on high, though not from a horse: It is a gesture. And it says: “I will make you feel at home by coming down to your level so that you will appreciate that my level is so much higher than yours that I can wear well-worn jackets. And you can’t”
The Upper English of Elizabeth 1 created the most remarkable nation on earth: aggressive in deed, occasionally noble in thought, ignoble in action, majestic in language. Note, in their surviving portraits, the smallness of the eyes, the plainness of the faces, a combination producing the most haughty countenances the world has seen.
Now, one Thomas Nashe, who I assume to be upper class, writing (“In Prayse of the Red Herring”) of simple fisherfolk: “I… will only recall to you the vivacious tarpaulin faces of the fishwives as they sat over their baskets and called to us and spoke in their broad tongue…”
Osbert Sitwell (Upper), describing Lower Class faces attending a wedding in Newborough: “Flushed countenances, seemingly carved out of turnip and then coloured, stolid, listless and good, large red hands crammed into cramping gloves for the occasion, white favours and white flowers.” One of Osbert’s relatives, incidentally, used to be driven around in a chauffeur-driven car accompanied by a dead parrot which only she assumed was alive. We won’t go into it. It will confuse us, too.
The aristocracy has always assumed for itself a divine righteousness. The rule is that the act must be right because the perpetrators can not be wrong, hence the Crusades, and more important things, like destroying large numbers of birds and small animals by appointment, as it were, at ritualistic times of year. And hence the trifling distinction made between Church and Army in “good” families.
English stately homes are, together with draught beer, thatched roofs, gout, vapours, shepherds’ crooks, cricket bats, church clocks, honey and afternoon tea incontrovertible proof that this fair land is touched by grace, and this fair land alone.
That being so, how COULD the English have a proper regard for St George. Had he been born in Barnstable or Bath or Basingstoke (but not at any price in The North) there might have been some restrained form of jubilation in the streets.
But he was a foreigner, probably born in Lydda, Israel, nee Palestine. And all an Englishman could ever say to that is: “Poor sod.”
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007