Anglomania Read Free

something more than a provincial capital. This lends to parts of The Hague a peculiar staginess: the perfect setting for people who like official decorations, protocol, and the subtleties of placement at diplomatic dinner parties.
    There were still remnants of the grand manner when I grew up in The Hague. Upper-middle-class matrons would insist on pronouncing certain Dutch words à la française . Old colonials from the Dutch East Indies—most of whom settled in The Hague—would dress up in tropical suits and order rijsttafels at old-fashioned restaurants as though they were still at the club in Batavia. And gossip was still exchanged in drawing rooms around the Lange Voorhout, or an area known as Benoordehout, literally “North of the Woods,” about this ambassador or that. But the predominant style among “Our Kind of People” ( Ons Soort Mensen , or O.S.M.) had become English instead of French.
    North America was respected for its wealth and power, but Britain held a singular fascination for the snobs, that is to say, much of The Hague’s elite. Churchill’s Britain had fought off a Continental tyranny to preserve its liberal institutions. But something else had survived in Britain, or perhaps I should say England, something Shakespeare called degree and we call class. Class distinctions exist everywhere in Europe, but after World War II there were few traces left of an ancien régime, even in the Continental monarchies, no aristocratic upper houses, no great landowning dynasties. Some of the names had survived, but they played no significant part in public life. What was unique, and therefore so fascinating about England, was not the mere survival of aristocracy but the survival of an aristocratic style aspired to and imitated by the upper middle class.
    Elements of the Dutch bourgeoisie, perhaps more than was later admitted, were attracted before the war to the German idea of a Nordic Herrenvolk , as indeed were some English aristocrats. North of the Woods Anglophilia might be superficially related to this. But I don’t think so. What the Anglophiles admired was not so much aristocracy, let alone a racial elite, but something both more liberal and more bourgeois than that: the gentleman, whom André Malraux once called England’s grande création de l’homme . A bourgeois man with aristocratic manners, a tolerant elitist who believes in fair play: the image of the English gentleman, bred rather than born, appeals to snobbery andliberalism in equal measure. North of the Woods bristled with would-be English gentlemen.
    North of the Woods is not a grand place. There are no particularly grand houses. It is much like those English suburbs mocked in Bateman cartoons. I associate the summers of my childhood with the monotonous swish-swish of garden sprinklers and the smell of freshly cut grass. Winter or summer, the streets always looked immaculate and dull. But there, mowing those lawns and working those sprinklers, were the doctors, dentists, lawyers, and bankers in their blue blazers, English brogues, and club ties: the Anglophiles. Grown men would sit in the wooden pavilion of The Hague Cricket Club with transistor radios pressed to their ears, following the latest Test Match results in England. “Cowdrey’s out!” one would shout, or “Trueman’s got a wicket!” All this exclaimed in Dutch, but with the drawl of North of the Woods gentility. It is a sound easier to imitate than to describe on paper: something between a goose’s honk and a duck’s quack.
    The Anglophiles took the badges of their peculiar identity seriously. They were almost fetishistic about them. It is possible to write a study on the significance of the club tie alone. The yellow and black cotton HCC tie was readily available at designated sports shops. But there was more prestige in wearing the yellow and black tie of Clare College, Cambridge, which was made of silk and had to be bought in England. Anyone traveling to England would get