Anglomania Read Free Page A

so many requests to purchase this item at a special club tie shop in Margaret Street, London W1, that he would come back laden with neckwear, like a traveling salesman.
    Brogues were another sartorial fetish. Many shoe manufacturers made these shoes with ornamental holes, originally designed to let water drain out when one went sloshing through Scottish peat bogs in the rain. But not every kind of brogue would do. Only the classic English brogue was acceptable. Oddly, other types of English shoes, more popular in England, were not. The elastic-sided Chelsea boot, for example, was considered too eccentric. A young HCC cricketer once came back from England with a pair of suede Chelsea boots. No matter how he tried to convince his friends that these were absolutely fine in England, in their eyes they still looked ludicrous.
    The English style was never adopted wholesale. Authenticity was not the point. I was an oddity as a boy in The Hague because my mother liked to dress me up in long flannel shorts and knee socks, likean English schoolboy. Authenticity, divorced from its context, is absurd. To my peers, my Marks and Spencer outfits made me look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. When I was at secondary school, in the middle 1960s, the fashion in North of the Woods was to wear imported British college scarves with colored stripes. I had one of those, with black and yellow Clare College colors, worn wrapped around my neck with studied nonchalance. But then my grandmother bought me a double-breasted overcoat at a school outfitters in London. This was a step too far. It was the sort of coat only elderly bankers might have worn in Holland, before the war.
    Anglophilia is of course a fantasy, like all forms of “philia,” which can easily degenerate into a form of pretending to be something you are not. My view of England was no less fantastic than that of my friends at the HCC, but it was fed by knowledge they didn’t have, by Boy’s Own annuals and comics about British schoolboys winning football matches and British heroes winning the war, killing cartoon Germans who were all named Fritz. I consumed British fantasies about Britain, without being British. This caused a certain amount of confusion, more to do with nationality than with class. In my case, the fetishism of the club tie was infinitely expanded: I made a fetish of nationhood itself. To be more English I would spend hours imitating my mother’s handwriting, as though something of the effortless English superiority, something of my grandfather’s Berkshire landscape, some vital if undefinable essence of Englishness would rub off.
    But what was my grandfather’s landscape, this English way of life glimpsed during school holidays, which seemed so much more glamorous and desirable to me than our perfectly good life in The Hague? My grandparents’ house: I still go there sometimes to look at what is left of it. I park my car furtively in the drive and gaze at the old Victorian vicarage, so white, so large, so warm in my memory, and so remote now. It has had several different owners since my grandparents sold it, and several coats of paint. The color changed from white to gray, and back to white again. It seems to have shrunk since I was there as a boy. Details have been fixed. The gardener’s cottage is now a weekend house with glazed windows. The chicken coops, where I used to collect eggs, are gone. And the garden that seemed to stretch for miles up to “the fields,” where cows grazed beyond a row of beech trees, looks smaller, more fenced in, than the way I remember it. TheM4 cuts through the fields now. You can hear and see the traffic rushing past a petrol station and “service center” built on the old runway of a wartime aerodrome, which, when I first saw it, was already overgrown with weeds.
    Impressions come flooding back, which, when I think about them, seem too quaint, too stereotypical, too Merchant Ivory, to have been true: people drinking sherry on the