Anglomania Read Free Page B

terrace; village fêtes on the lawn; my grandmother, in brown gardening shoes caked with fresh mud, carrying hampers filled with vegetables; cooked breakfasts kept warm under silver covers; The News of the World and the smell of stale sweat and cigarettes in the cook’s tiny backstairs room; cavernous linen cupboards; a larder smelling of cheese and butter; picture books of Lancaster bombers, left behind by uncles who were children during the war; the crunching sound of cars rolling up the drive. When the sun wasn’t shining, it was snowing. It was never simply dreary. For it was a childhood idyll that memory has turned into a vision of Arcadia, like a sentimental Christmas card.
    And it was there, in that Arcadian house, that I first realized that foreigners were funny. Our name was funny, our accents were funny. Amongst ourselves, my sisters and I spoke Dutch, which was particularly funny. I also concluded another thing, not entirely unrelated to the funniness of foreigners, something that was never openly stated, at least not by my own family, or at least not until my grandfather’s mind started wandering and his opinions coarsened. It was something I could not but conclude from the huge lawns, three-course breakfasts, four-course lunches, daily high teas, and stacks of presents at Christmas: the absolute superiority of life in England.
    There was, however, something unusual about this childhood Arcadia. My grandparents were both children of German immigrants. Their parents had once been foreigners too. The very English life I observed at the house in Berkshire had been the result of conscious decisions, considerable effort, and a kind of stoicism. My great-grandparents decided to give their children the most English education available. My grandparents had broken out of a narrow Jewish émigré community in North London. And they had been stoical when others chose to see them as being less British than they did themselves. My own Arcadian view of England was linked to these decisions and these efforts, for I learned to look at England largely through my grandparents’ eyes.
    This was not something my fellow North of the Woods Anglophiles could share. Their concern was, as I said, class snobbery, to which I myself was by no means immune. I sat up on the balcony of the cricket club pavilion with the other boys, calling out “rug merchant,” before withdrawing our heads like turtles, whenever Mr. W. walked by in his cavalry twill trousers and his Clare College tie, with a copy of The Daily Telegraph rolled up in the pocket of his immaculate blue blazer. Mr. W. was a handsome man with dark shimmering hair. He was perhaps a little overgroomed, a little louche even, with a fondness for hair oil and tinted glasses. His older wife was a large and overdressed woman who had inherited several grand hotels. The rumor got around, even to us younger boys, that Mrs. W. had married her husband for his looks, and that before his turn of fortune Mr. W. had been in charge of laying the carpets in one of her hotels. We sniggered at the rolled-up English newspaper, which he never appeared to read. We sneered at his lounge lizard hairdo. We mimicked his accent, which, to our exacting ears, was a touch off. The sin of Mr. W. was not that he lacked Englishness, despite all the trappings, so painstakingly assembled. His sin was that he lacked class.
    We were much more forgiving toward real Englishmen. Members of visiting English cricket teams rarely lived up to the idealized image of the English gentleman. They were Rotarians from the Midlands, car dealers from Kent, or policemen from the outer suburbs of London. Few, if any, matched their hosts in the blazer and brogues department. There might have been the odd club tie, but that was it. And if they didn’t look like David Niven, they didn’t speak like him either. But this did not really matter. British guests were not expected to live up to the semiotics of Dutch class divisions.
    T HEN