England: I would die for it

The Paul Richards column

There’s scene in the Gathering Storm where Winston Churchill looks out over the Kent Weald from Chartwell and says to his wife Clemmie ‘I would die for it.’ There is little doubt that Churchill would have died fighting on a barricade on Whitehall had the Germans invaded. On 28th May 1940, he told the cabinet:

“If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

At around the same time, another English product of the public school system had joined the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), and was prepared, like Churchill, to die for his county. Eric Blair, known of course to the world as George Orwell, joined the LDV because he was unfit, after his service in Spain, for the army. The LDV (‘dad’s army’) was the brainchild of a communist Tom Wintringham, who had fought with the international brigades in the same war in which Orwell was shot through the throat. Wintringham founded the LDV as an insurgent guerrilla army, trained in assassination, sabotage and planting bombs. Another recruit was Michael Foot, whose first target was going to be the appeaser Lord Halifax. Socialists and communists in the LDV saw it as a proto-revolutionary citizen army, ready to defend the revolution. It’s about as far from Walmington-on-Sea as you can get.

Churchill would have died fighting for his King, his Empire, and his notion of a British ‘race’, superior to all others. Orwell and Foot would have died for an entirely different Britain, which Orwell describes in The Lion and the Unicorn:

“the heirs of Nelson and Cromwell are not in the House of Lords. They are in the fields and in the streets, in the factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden; and at present they are still kept under by a generation of ghosts. Compared to the task of bringing the real England to the surface, even the winning of the war, necessary through that it is, is secondary. By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.”

Orwell and Churchill are two sides of the same coin. Both patriots, but each with an ideal of Britishness at variance with the other. Orwell wanted to see ‘the real England’ – the England of the new model army, the co-op, and the chartists. For Churchill, it was the England of Blenheim Palace, Dundee cake, and Fox of St James. This dichotomy between the real and imagined, between different interpretations of the past, and different visions of the future has been played out in our politics and culture since the Second World War.

Growing up in the 1970s, just three decades since the end of the war, I was surrounded by WWII imagery and assumptions. The rich canon of post-war war movies – Bridge on the River Kwai, the Dambusters, the Battle of Britain, A Bridge Too Far – children’s comics such as Warlord and the Commando series, TV programmes – Colditz, Secret Army, Dad’s Army – this was the popular culture for a ten-year old in the 1970s. Most people alive then had lived through the war. It was perfectly normal to meet people who had served in it. Politicians of the day – Callaghan, Healey, Jenkins, Benn – had been in the armed forces. Despite punk rock, Happy Days and Saturday Night Fever the wartime culture hung heavy in the air. Even the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977 was a giant re-run of VE day.

It’s shaped our sense of Englishness. Last night commentators on the BBC world cup coverage complained about England fans singing ‘ten German bombers’, which was considered ‘offensive.’

Britain has changed since Churchill and Orwell. Orwell only saw the bleakness of post-war austerity, the setting for his dysoptic Nineteen Eighty-Four. Churchill lived to see, albeit through a haze of brandy and cigar smoke, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Orwell famously describes:

“the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?”

None of that England exists anymore. No more clogs, no more queues of unemployed (at least not yet; give it a year or two), no old maids. And the pubs of Soho have changed quite a bit too. Orwell would have been utterly incredulous at the state of our society. Pleased that the grinding poverty of the depression had been lifted, but disappointed that so many people still live shortened, debased, indecent lives because of their postcode and social status. As for Churchill, the old racist would have been huffing and puffing at the sight of so many ethnicities and races on the streets. He would enjoy catching up with Queen Elizabeth. He would be appalled by end of Empire, and as for the smoking ban!

Are there common threads of nationality which bind us? Labour, when in government, tried to encourage the idea of ‘shared values’. There’s something in this. We are attached to our creaking old system of democracy, like the owner of a beat-up old car. We love our British institutions, from the army and the BBC, to the NHS and the local pub. We tut when people cut to the front of a queue. We enjoy a curry on a Friday and a roast on a Sunday. We get behind whichever lamentable team is representing us in international sport. We share a literature, a language and a popular culture. We can cheer when the Prime Minister in Love Actually stands up for the England of William Shakespeare, Harry Potter, The Beatles and David Beckham’s right foot (and Beckham’s left foot, come to that.) It’s not the England of the Last Night of the Proms and Royal Ascot, although there’s room for that. It’s the England of Brick Lane and the Glastonbury festival, of Marks & Spencer and the FA Cup. It’s a national identity that shifts through time, but is built on elemental decencies and kindnesses. It’s about being kind to animals, and talking to strangers on the bus, anywhere but London, naturally.

Orwell put it like this:

“It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

What will the England of 2040, when my little boys will be grown-ups, have in common with the one of 1940? Nothing, except it will be the same place, with the same towns and cities, the same woods and hills, and the same sea lapping against the white cliffs.

I would die for it too.