Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The version of England on show today is but a small, parochial and mean part of its heritage
Published: 23 April 2007
Van and cab drivers will blazon the cross of St George today; proud men and women will wear it on their beating chests and heaving breasts, symbol of their England, their pride, their land which is looking especially lovely this sunny spring. Since the turn of this century the patriotic brave knight has become markedly more popular. I do genuinely wish the merry crowds a happy day and I hope this column doesn't wreck their good humour.
The England they imagine and celebrate is prelapsarian, an innocent garden of Eden, only more neatly cultivated and ordered. Its pure-blooded natives are congenial unless provoked to Boadicean fury and care not for bloody foreigners, daring modern ideas or interfering governments.
Much of this is fantasy. Stanley Baldwin's dreamy place of country smithies and corncrakes on dewy mornings never even existed in the 1920s when crashingly loud machines had turned over life in the countryside and towns. And the English are in truth a blend, a mongrel tribe, unable ever to resist the lure of outside delights.
I should know. It took but 10 minutes to ensnare my good husband, son of old Sussex, with sturdy, ancestral roots deep in the South Downs. As Jeremy Paxman writes in his book The English: "Any sensible reading of history would have to conclude that for the English to talk of racial purity is whistling in the wind; there is scarcely a family in the land which has no Celtic blood in it, to say nothing of the Romans, Jutes, Normans, Huguenots and all the others who have added to the national bloodstock." But reality checks like these hardly matter on this day. Life would be unbearable without flights of fancy and all nations make up myths to soothe the soul. continue...
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