GLIMPSES - IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND A CHILDHOOD THERE FROM 1944 TO 1962 OR THEREABOUTS
England is windy nights and weird whistlings from ancient trees I grew up in that soundscape
The same winds scudding across lonely duney shores
Streets littered with fish and chip newspaper
Castaway chants of football Saturdays
Ten thousand miles of iron railings
To define and guard property
Chain suffragettes to
Melt down to sundry weapons of war
Nondescript brick sheds to build Spitfires in
Redundant country houses to decipher fiendish codes in
Stable yards with clock towers where the hands have stopped for ninety years
England is the endless green seen from train windows a countryside deceptively empty rained on more than any land deserves spared extremes of heat and cold except rarely I remember in 1976 the river Thames disappeared into the ground the way rivers do in foreign parts not here Sweet Thames run sweetly and it never rains but it pours and many other trite sayings trite because they are bloody well true
I also remember but only just the pathways around our house through deep snow in 1947 when we had the kind of winter I am used to now in New England but of course in our fair land we were unprepared for typical yes typical we seem never to be prepared for what is coming is this typical English behaviour or a more general trait of our species but this one was a real humdinger the kind that buried a train in a cutting up north and was I believe dug out by hand by farmers and soldiers doing what one does in the land I later grew to love with felled hills treeless and immaculately cropped by sheep so the drifting was spectacular and the winds could play from coast to coast
England was giant gasometers mysteriously going up and down responding to the needs of cold days and roast dinners and the daily routines of the great city
England was hundreds of thousands of miles of privet hedges laid end to end and thousands of acres of net curtains how much still there I wonder and fiercely guarded roses and leeks to kill and die for in competition yes people have killed and died for leek sabotage and winners' prestige and allotments for those without estates and gardeners and pocket handkerchiefs of lawns most still there and millions of bricks left over from house building used to make the low walls so important to property and sense of self in the world and woe betide the trespasser
England is what is left of the world of Charles Dickens you get the gist read the books if you don't
England is the echoes of Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes and the great maw of London with excursions to the country of the Hound of the Baskervilles and Thomas Hardy and the Brontes and Jane Austen and they are all true too and you get the gist and in my imaginative world only the Brontes lived in an alien world as I grew up I travelled south and west in childhood and saw a few of the darker streets and alleys of the East End of London an extensive world much more than an End seen from the posh West End
England is hedgerows matrixing the world narrow corridors of life a species of tree per hundred years one I knew had massive treetrunk branches dwarfed down towards the earth by generations of patient hedgers
England is picturesque villages where the rich and privileged retire their Sunday afternoons to daydream away their teatime nostalgias
England is grim industrial towns and villages with the touch of death and dissolution on them as the twentieth century finally put paid to the workshop of the world that briefly transformed itself into a giant machine making the tools of mass extermination and unremitting war and then lapsed back into slow decay no more iron and steel driven by brute force and coal as heavy serious industry turned to light industry which morphed into industry light and the rest of the world passed us by laughing at our petty squabbles and self-deluding pretensions to continuing world power when I was 12 Suez put an end to all that all it took was a snap of a US Secretary of State's fingers
England was/is miners with whippets and homing pigeons to free them from horribly distorted lives made a little more tolerable by solidarity and clubs and sports and fierce class and community loyalty who were eventually ground down by a changing economy the bosses could adapt to but they had no power to and Mrs. Thatcher's doctrinaire stubborn inhumanity and nineteeth century polarized politics did for them as a force in British life and left a wasteland we are still coming to terms with
England is the smell ah what smell you may well ask so here I advance the impossible idea that there is an English smell that in my admittedly limited travels I have never met anywhere else I cannot describe it it is damp of course and there is a faint odor of coal and gas smoke but beyond that it can barely be to do with orthodox chemistry and physics it is unfathomable and I cannot speculate further it is a distant memory of sweat and tears and layers of history too deep for reason or mere passion and if it could be bottled fools like me would pay good money to uncork it in the wilds as death approached on velvet paws.
