In Pursuit of the English Read Free

set on something I don’t give up easily. Also to – but I must get back to why it took me so long to get started for England in the first place.
    I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to come to England. This was because, to use the word in an entirely different sense, I was English. In the colonies or Dominions, people are English when they are sorry they ever emigrated in the first place; when they are glad they emigrated but consider their roots are in England; when they are thoroughly assimilated into the local scene and would hate ever to set foot in England again; and even when they are born colonial but have an English grandparent. This definition is sentimental and touching. When used by people not English, it is accusatory. My parents were English because they yearned for England, but knew they could never live in it again because of its conservatism, narrowness and tradition. They hated Rhodesia because of its newness, lack of tradition, of culture. They were English, also, because they were middle-class in a community mostly working-class. This use of the word can be illustrated by the following incident. Scene: the local tennis club. The children are playing tennis, watched by their mothers. The hostess for the afternoon is a woman from the Cape, a member of an old Dutch family, newly married to a Scots farmer. She is shy, dignified, and on her guard. Mrs Mathews, a loquaciousScots farmer’s wife, attempts to engage her in conversation. She fails. She turns to my mother, and says: ‘That one’s got no small-talk to change with a neighbour. She’s too good for us. She’s real English and that’s a fact.’ Then she blushes and says: ‘Oh, but I didn’t mean …’ thus revealing how often she has made the same criticism of my mother.
    My parents were, now I come to think of it, grail-chasers of a very highly developed sort. I cannot even imagine a country in which they would have been definitively ready to settle down without criticism. The nearest I can get to it would be a combination of the best parts of Blackheath or Richmond, merged, or mingled with a really large ranch, let’s say about fifty thousand acres, in the Kenyan Highlands. This would have to be pervaded by a pre-1914 atmosphere, or ambience, like an Edwardian after-glow. Their Shangri-La would be populated thickly, for my mother, with nice professional people who were nevertheless interesting ; and sparsely, for my father, with scamps, drunkards, eccentrics and failed poets who were nevertheless and at bottom decent people.
    I would, of course, be the first to blame my parents for my own grail-seeking propensities.
    England was for me a grail. And in a very narrowly-defined way. Not long ago people set foot for the colonies – the right sort of people, that is – in a spirit of risking everything and damning the cost. These days, a reverse immigration is in progress. The horizon conquerors now set sail or take wing for England, which in this sense means London, determined to conquer it, but on their own terms.
    I have an anecdote to illustrate this. I had been in England for about five years, and was just beginning to understand that I had got the place whacked, when an old acquaintance telephoned to say that he had arrived in London to write a book. He had forever turned his back on his old life, which consisted of making enormous sums of money out of gold mines, drinking a lot, and marrying a succession of blonde and beautiful girls. I visited him in his flat. It was in Mayfair, furnished at immense expense in the most contemporary taste, with two refrigerators. He was very excited that at lasthe had had the strength of mind to cut all his profits and tackle England. I remember on the whole without regret, the strong, involuntary moral disapprobation that I radiated as he talked. Finally, and the remark welled up from the depths of my being, from the perfervid heart of the myth itself: ‘Do you mean to tell me that you are