Making of Nations

What’s a nation? A group of people share a set of images and references, habits of mind to which they continually return, things which may or may not have happened to them, memories true and memories false; the only stable element in that nexus is the geology and weather of the place where they live, interacting with memory and experience. Such a group of people become a nation when they share a territory large enough to be a polity, and then the shared images and references become the means by which they debate and contest over what to do with their shared resources. That’s all a nation is. It has no stability, no coherent identity. The memories may not be true, the nexus of references has nothing that connects it except continuity. Just co-incidence.

Which is why I have an attachment to the idea of the Union and great scepticism about nationalism – quite apart from the clear havoc the idea of national identity wreaks around the world. I have Scottish friends who have been shocked and disgusted by their country’s failure to tear itself away from the Union, and sympathise with their usually left-wing aspirations which they dreamt of being fulfilled once Scotland was free of the Westminster settlement. But I do have an itch towards the truth, and if the referendum result revealed anything it was that the idea of a Scotland united in purpose and thinking, a Scotland whose population all wanted the same kind of things in the same kind of way, is a fantasy. That’s presumably why coming down from the mountain heights of the dream is so very hard. Nationalism is all about creating fantasies, about forgetting actual history and differences between people in favour of dreams and illusions. The Scots and the English, like everyone else, have essentially the same sorts of interests and needs which are pretty basic and easy to understand. The fact that the social and economic system they both belong to doesn’t really provide for those needs, or what they perceive to be their needs, is something obscured by blaming it either on the English (if you’re a Scot), or immigrants (if you’re English). Just to bring things tenuously back to religion, we once felt we were a Protestant nation, and in fact a Union of Protestant nations, something which now makes sense only vaguely in Ulster and in bits of Glasgow.

The nature of this was brought home to me years ago by a visit to the National Museum of Scotland when I was simultaneously impressed by the wonderful sandstone building and what was in it and perturbed by the tone of the captions. ‘We did this’, ‘we are such and such a people’, they told me – a race having a conversation with itself about itself, a conversation in which I was very definitely an outsider. Who are the ‘we’? Does it include Scottish people who can’t imagine an ancestry stretching back to the Picts? To synthesise the identity of a nation requires ignoring some questions.

This is the same with the English nation as with any other. I have been wondering since the referendum what Englishness may mean, and what sense it makes to be English. Our lay reader at Swanvale Halt, who has had an international career and regularly visits Spain where she has friends, said, ‘I’ve given up trying to answer that question. I think I’m a European.’ But I do feel English, and wonder what that is about.

Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton wrote England: an Elegy back in 2001. Is that helpful? The cover with its cricketer and teacup is almost a satire, and well it may be because there is much in this book to mock. At best it’s an attempt to try and identify what it is Roger Scruton values, rather than what England values: villages, hunting, aristocracy, Common Law. ‘This is not the work of an historian’, he admits, and you may think, well, fair enough, as dreams and illusions may have their own power when enough people believe them; but there’s a limit to the extent to which the trick can work when the illusion fails to match reality.

Roger Scruton’s father was Jack Scruton, the firmly Labour-supporting community activist who fought to defend High Wycombe’s green spaces against the encroaching developments of the 1960s, a fact which I think itself tells you a great deal. I used to work in the museum service in High Wycombe, and researching the history of the town remember being struck by the incredible sense of conflict and disturbance that characterised the time immediately before World War One, a period we often imagine as a sort of permanent Edwardian summer afternoon hung with bees and redolent with the scent of roses. That decade began with riots over the Education Act in 1904 which forced Nonconformists to contribute by their taxes to Church of England schools, and proceeded through footpath and land-access disturbances, attacks on an itinerant preacher which it seemed thousands of people turned up to watch, the Suffragette march through the town which resulted in violence, the 1910 Election Riot in which ten thousand people mobbed the Mayor and the crowds were charged by mounted police with about forty injured, and finally a long, violent strike in 1913 which paralysed the furniture industry. This was one modestly-sized town in a southern county across a mere ten years. This was England, the same England as Roger Scruton’s visionary land of lanes and cricket grounds.

What can it be, then, that my country is? I can’t help turning to Kate Bush:

Oh! England, my Lionheart,
I'm in your garden, fading fast in your arms.
The soldiers soften, the war is over.
The air raid shelters are blooming clover.
Flapping umbrellas fill the lanes--
My London Bridge in rain again.

Oh! England, my Lionheart!
Peter Pan steals the kids in Kensington Park.
You read me Shakespeare on the rolling Thames--
That old river poet that never, ever ends.
Our thumping hearts hold the ravens in,
And keep the tower from tumbling.

Oh! England, my Lionheart!
Dropped from my black Spitfire to my funeral barge.
Give me one kiss in apple-blossom.
Give me one wish, and I'd be wassailing
In the orchard, my English rose,
Or with my shepherd, who'll bring me home.

Oh! England, my Lionheart,
Oh! England, my Lionheart,
Oh! England, my Lionheart,
I don't want to go.

‘An insane madrigal’, I remember one writer calling this. Imagining a country as a lover, and a male lover who is the object of female romantic desire, is remarkable enough; then you have the cascade of colliding images, Peter Pan, Shakespeare, rain and orchards, Spitfires and funeral barges (from World War Two to Sutton Hoo). There’s nothing coherent here except, perhaps, a sort of lyric melancholia, a vision of something which is caught just on the brink of vanishing, like a dream as you begin to wake up: a sense of squinting back into a past you can only just glimpse, and might vanish completely without the ravens to stop the Tower falling.

And then, inevitably, there is Polly Harvey:

Goddamn Europeans!
Take me back to beautiful England
And the grey, damp filthiness of ages,
And battered books and
Fog rolling down behind the mountains,
On the graveyards, and dead sea-captains.

Let me walk through the stinking alleys
To the music of drunken beatings,
Past the Thames River, glistening like gold
Hastily sold for nothing.

Let me watch night fall on the river,
The moon rise up and turn to silver,
The sky move,
The ocean shimmer,
The hedge shake,
The last living rose, quiver.

Imagined through the eyes of (perhaps, given the context of the album Let England Shake) a soldier thinking of home, this is a far darker and more ambiguous vision, something bitter and satiric – which acknowledges that a nation can incorporate violence, filth and loss, and yet can still be the object of love, as much love as Kate Bush’s phantasmagoria of wassailing and clover. But Harvey’s version of England still finishes with that image of the Rosa Conclusa, the Last Living Rose, the end of an experience, the sense of something passing and disappearing. Is that what Englishness is? A glimpse of ruins through the rain, an everlasting grasping at something eternally being lost? Is that all?