England: the making of the myth
Maureen Duffy Fourth Estate, 274pp, £13.99
ISBN 1841151661
A comedy sketch once poked fun at a cherished national myth by depicting Admiral Nelson preparing for battle. Swaying on the deck of some mighty ship, he raised his telescope to his blind eye, squinted in disbelief, and said: "God Almighty! Look at all those bloody ships!" It's a classic comic formula: replace a frozen attitude of haughty composure with a more earthy and knockabout realism. But in acting out a caricature of incompetent cowardice, it only drew attention to the enduring quality of the story itself and its firm place in the iconography of English heroism. It stands - along with the stories of Dunkirk, the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, the fabled sang-froid of the Duke of Wellington or the jauntiness of Robin Hood - as a striking emblem of a virtue often held to be distinctively English: coolness under fire.
Where such myths come from, how they are orchestrated and why they endure: these are good and important questions - especially now, as the United Kingdom tussles with the idea that it is neither united nor a kingdom. Maureen Duffy's new book explores the gap - as they used to say in school essays about Shakespeare - between appearance and reality. Our much-vaunted steadfastness in the face of superior odds is only one among many such myths. We have the idea of England as the home of fair play (a notion descended from King Arthur's knightly rectitude) and as a "green and pleasant land" (a poetic fantasy at odds with the reality that ours is notoriously overcrowded). There are myths of femininity (the English rose - another pastoral whim) and masculinity (the bulldog spirit); myths of sporting supremacy (1966 - enough said) and myths of class continuity (Upstairs, Downstairs).
Perhaps the most powerful of all these folksy notions, however, is that which emphasises the racial continuity of the English. Duffy begins shrewdly, pointing out that the whole tub-thumping idea behind "There'll always be an England" suggests that there always was. Not so. The English came as invaders, pushing the incumbent Britons to Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. Duffy refers to this as "the Celtic fringe", so often that we can't help wishing it would get itself a damned good short back and sides, but the point is a good one. Far from being brave, beleaguered islanders, happy to stand alone in a crisis, we are, at our roots, conquerors and interlopers.
These roots are also tangled. Duffy reminds us that the myth of English racial coherence springs from Bede's oft-told story about Pope Gregory, who looked on the fair-skinned Angles for sale in a Kent market place and said: "Not Angles but angels." The sense of ourselves as pale little cherubs has endured ever since. Duffy undercuts it by appreciating that had it not been for Bede's authoritative version of events, England might easily have been called Saxland; and she can't resist mentioning that Norman Tebbit, a prominent Little Englander, is of French-Danish ancestry (not called Norman for nothing, in other words).
It all makes for an impressive start. But as the book proceeds, Duffy seems to lose confidence in her original idea, and settles instead for a swift run-through of famous historical episodes. This is handy and interesting, but feels a bit like 1066 and All That without the jokes. Where Sellar and Yeatman quipped that Charles I's cavaliers were "Wrong but Wromantic", Duffy feels it necessary to make irrelevant comparisons across the ages, referring to the "explosion" of the Sixties (a 24-carat myth, if ever there was one) "when even the flowing hairstyles were Cavalier".
Increasingly, she begins not to analyse the progress of national myth-making, but merely to cite it. Of the Blitz, she simply repeats the cliche: "We believed we were all in it together." And she opposes the pastoral fantasies that have created a nation of fervent gardeners with nothing more than the idea that they fail to chime with "the reality of the 'dark satanic mills' that by Constable's and Keats's day already sprawled across the North and Midlands". The mythology of dark satanic mills, we might well think, is at least as well entrenched and lovingly tended as the utopia of twittering chaffinches that she is, rightly, keen to debunk.
It is almost as if Duffy's original intention began to unravel as she moved on through the stories. There is very little discussion of the ways in which such myths are created and endure, just a passing reference to how it depends on the fabrication of effective literature (and more recently, cinema and TV). In truth, there is nothing new about soundbites. Nelson's words on the eve of Trafalgar - "England expects that every man shall do his duty" - were as resonant and effective as any tart one-liner contrived at No 10.
As a consequence, Duffy does not really consider the purposeful agenda behind the English history syllabus: the sense of vested interests working to maintain the whole glamorous Boadicea-Alfred-Good Queen Bess-Drake-Nelson-Wellington-Churchill expression of national composure and valour. She doesn't even mention 1066 and All That, which long ago amusingly mocked the vanity of these myths. And one has to wonder about the breadth of research that allows her to give four citations from a routine French view of England published in Eurostar Magazine.
Duffy does plead for a wider acknowledgement of the alternative myths, the ones that show the English to be rebellious free-thinkers, quick to overturn the status quo. John Ball and Wat Tyler, the authors of the peasants' revolt and architects of grand socialist principles to do with "honest toil" and the "dignity of labour", have historically been edged aside by the kings-and-queens school of English history. Duffy tries to give them a leg-up, but doesn't follow through by dwelling much on their descendants: the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the trade unionists (though she does spare a thought for the Jarrow marchers).
Maybe it is simply the sheer scale of the panorama unrolling before her pen that undoes her. As she proceeds, the film seems to speed up, passing hastily over increasingly distant ground. By the end, it is flapping. The subject remains admirable. But a myth, sometimes, is as good as a mile.
Robert Winder is writing a book on the story of immigration, to be published by Little, Brown
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