by Jan Morris
By the late 1980s, the Empire having long collapsed, things were very different. By then everything Maltese appeared to be in flux – economics, the law, manners, values, Malta’s place in the world at large. Who would ever have guessed that the arrival of Beaujolais Nouveau would be advertised in Sliema – like greeting a Pope in Cardiff? Or that Der Spiegel would be on sale at the Valletta news-stands? Cappuccino was fast replacing the dreadful instant coffee of the British past, and there were several indecorous Italian TV channels for every one in English. I visited a law court when I was last there. The case concerned heroin-trafficking, and, the small court being rather full, I sat in the front row, occupied otherwise only by a single man. All was remarkably informal, but I was puzzled to see no sign of the accused. When I left the court and asked a policeman where the prisoner’s dock was, he told me I had been sitting in it, together with the day’s villain (who got five years, I saw in The Times of Malta next day).
The essence of fin-de-siècle Malta, it seemed to me, was that fluidity. Almost everything seemed flexible, and innumerable joints and junctions, social, economic, financial, historical, articulated the nature of society. Long ago it occurred to me that a pleasant kind of nation would be provided by a confederation of all the circumpolar peoples – the Lapps and the Inuits and the nomadic Siberians: and sitting over my coffee in Malta’s Republic Square one morning, beneath the statue of Queen Victoria still given magnanimous hospitality there, I wondered if there could not be a parallel alliance of Europe’s misfit nations: the ones that do not conform, the raffish ones, the sinuous ones, which would compete only in their individuality. Malta might well qualify for the presidency of such a maverick alliance, adding a louche lustre to its heritage of knights and admirals.
43 A paradox of the sands
A strange sight to see is the causeway that leads to the island of Sylt. Sylt is a sandy, heathy, eroding, elongated island of the Friesian group, off the North Sea coast of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. For centuries it was a community of fishermen and sailors, extremely simple, extremely pious, isolated, and little visited by strangers. Then in 1927 they made a railway causeway to connect the mainland with its solitary town, Westerland, and it has never looked back. You still cannot drive a car to Sylt, but you can load one on a train, and this is what makes the Hindenburg Damm such a curious spectacle. It crosses a lagoon-like stretch of sea, polders and sandbanks, half sea, half land, mysteriously opaque on a misty morning, frequented only by seals and seabirds – the waterscape of Erskine Childers’s thriller The Riddle of the Sands. But all day long, every half hour or so, a long double-decker transporter train chugs over that desolate expanse, pouring hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of cars into the little island – so many cars you would think it might sink beneath the weight of them. Scores of other trains come in too, local trains from the mainland towns, inter-city trains from the heart of Germany, not to mention frequent flights to Sylt Airport, because by now this tiny place is one of the most popular of all German seaside resorts. Walkers and windsurfers flock to its magnificent beaches. Coveys of city children are chivvied into outdoor pursuits. Knockabout holiday-makers by the million eat ice-creams in the streets of Westerland, which reminds me very much of that favourite Australian sand-and-hamburger retreat Manly, New South Wales. And yet only a few miles away on the same island there basks in the sun of privilege one of the exclusive enclaves of Europe, the holiday hamlet of Kampen.
Every reader of the German tabloids and gossip journals knows about Kampen. Kampen is where all the celebrities go: the film and television people, the magazine publishers, the trendier industrialists, the millionaire authors. All the glitz is there. It is the Hamptons of Europe. Rigid planning has meant that it remains a very pretty little place. Nearly all its houses are thatched, each is surrounded by a statutory amount of heathy land, there are a town pond and a lighthouse above the beach, and at first sight it all seems modest and demure. Don’t you believe it. Kampen is rolling in money, and if you look a little harder you will see the unmistakable signs of it: expensive boutiques, a branch of Cartier the jewellers, three or four posh hotels, a golf club, discreet antique stores, a nightclub, a couple of discos, and a plethora of limousines. At the end of the long weekend all those big cars roll down to the station at Westerland, and when the transporter trains cross the causeway you may see their owners sitting in the front seats of their cars, high on the upper deck, smoking cigars and gossiping still on their way home to Hamburg and the Ruhr.
44 Talking rhymes in Klaksvík
The most exhilarating moment I ever enjoyed in Europe happened on a high windy hillside in the Faroe Islands, flying a kite. I was standing then all at sea in the North Atlantic, halfway between Denmark and Iceland, some 200 miles north of Scotland, and all around me were the symptoms of this situation – foam-surfed cliffs, gusting winds, screeching seabirds, the smell of salt, the sting of spray. The lower moorlands were flecked with flowers – blue, yellow, pink and white. A myriad birds squawked, trilled, squeaked, piped, chuckled, gasped or throatily gurgled, and occasionally warned me off their nesting-grounds by hurling themselves melodramatically at my head. Far below me, beside a gully, there was a huddle of bright-painted houses, and a small white church. Fishing-boats laboured through the winds. In the distance along the coast I could see a few cars crawling along a precipitous mountain road to disappear into a tunnel, but I felt entirely separate up there in the pale northern sunshine, detached from time itself, flying my fine red kite in the ocean wind.
There’s islandness for you! Like the Ålanders, the Faroese more or less govern themselves, though slightly and profitably subject to the sovereignty of Denmark. Their little capital, Tórshavn, culminates in a spit called Tinganes, no more than a couple of hundred yards long, and so narrow that you can often see the water on either side – a toy-like labyrinth of wooden buildings, mostly black. Some are roofed in turf, some in corrugated iron, and between them a narrow ancient alley wanders. On the rocks at the end of the promontory are carved some antique initials and designs, like doodles: these are homely reminders that as late as the sixteenth century the Ting, the parliament of the Faroe Islands, met alfresco on the rocks at the end of Tinganes. Now it meets indoors, but not far away, and not with much pretension, for it occupies a building rather like an English village hall. I stood on tiptoe one day to spy through the windows of this modest power-centre, and there inside were the rows of desks, for all the world like schoolroom desks, from which the parliamentarians governed the destinies of the 47,000 islanders – together with epic paintings of Faroese history hanging inspirationally on the walls, and a big handbell for the disciplinary use, I presumed, of the Prime Minister.
The badge of Faroese nationality is the island language, which is akin to Icelandic with Gaelic touches, but behind the language there survives a host of old traditions. The Faroese build their small boats recognizably in the Viking kind, with high prows and gracefully curving hulls. They roast puffins, very deliciously I have to say. They net fulmars and snare guillemots and take their children along to slaughter pilot whales on beaches. They shear their sheep with knives. Sometimes, if they are old and male, they wear woollen hats like goblin caps. I never actually saw them chain-dancing or poem-declaiming, both hoary local pastimes, but I did repeatedly bump into groups of traditionally dressed folk-persons, buckled and aproned, on their way to or from festivals of one sort or another. ‘We have been telling rhymes in Klaksvík,’ one practitioner told me as we sat together on the deck of a ferry, a celestial scene of mountain and fjord streaming by. ‘Long rhymes?’ I ventured to ask, thinking I might be fortunate to have missed them. ‘Extremely long,’ he said with pride.
45 We neurotics
Then there are the minority nations – not just enclavists, or ethnic segmentarians, or members of compulsory federations, or islanders, but peoples who, though clamped within the frontiers of greater States, still consider themselves complete nations in themselves, inha
biting their native territories. They have all been mucked about by history in one way or another. Often they were long ago deprived of their native ruling class, and so reduced to subordinate impotence, probably sustained as nations only by their languages, their landscapes and their ancient monuments. It is a long time since any of these unfortunates have grabbed complete independence for themselves, and they have not been a threat to the peace of Europe in my time, but down the generations their resentments stir and grumble, sometimes bursting into activism, sometimes dormant for decades. I know the sensations well, because the very archetype of the half-suppressed nation is my own paternal people, the Welsh, and in some ways nobody is more characteristic of their anxieties, resentments and neuroses than I am myself.
One of the ancient Celtic peoples of Europe, the Welsh have been subject to English rule since 1284, but although their country has been persistently and relentlessly Anglicized, and flooded with English settlers, still it remains a recognizably separate place. The Welsh language may be spoken by only a fifth of the people, but it is full of pith and enterprise, expressing itself in everything from the traditional strict metres of the most ancient Welsh poetry to rock lyrics and avant-garde novels; and those Welsh who do not speak the language, having been deprived of it by the forces of history, politics and economics, are still almost to a citizen proud of being Welsh.
But if Wales has always been a nation, it has decidedly not been a State. Politically unsure of themselves, conditioned by centuries of scorn and subjection, the Welsh still seem to doubt their ability to run their own affairs. Years ago I defined the Four Torments of Wales, like the curses of a Celtic fairy tale, and the older I got the more I realized that I was myself a victim of them all. There was the Torment of the Confused Identity – when was a Welshman not a Welshman; were some more Welsh than others? There was the Torment of the Torn Tongue – the anxieties of a society ripped apart by love, contempt, longing for or rejection of its native language and culture. There was the torment of the Two Peoples – the ambivalence of the Anglo-Welsh relationship, bittersweet, love-hate, never altogether frank. And behind these conscious malaises there was the more elemental angst which was the Torment of Dispossession – the yearning, profound and ineradicable, for a nation’s own inviolable place in the world. These are neuroses, every one, but I suspect that mutatis mutandis they are common to patriots in all the minority nations of Europe.
46 We happy few
They are more understandable, perhaps, in Wales than elsewhere, because the 2.8 million Welsh live beneath the immediate blast of the most powerful and corrosive cultural influence on earth – Anglo-Americanism, backed by the language, preferences, talents, techniques and hard cash of several hundred million people. It is hard to keep the flame of simple patriotism alive in the face of such a mighty onslaught. ‘Where are our castles?’ asked the Slovak patriot Vladimir Mináč, complaining that without their own emblems of power and authority his people were seen as a peasantry without a history. In Wales we do have some castles of our own, strongholds of our long-lost native princes, but they are far outmatched in foreigners’ minds by the immense fortresses erected by the English as badges of their supremacy. When in 1981 the titular Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of England, was married to almost universal sycophancy in Westminster Abbey in London, I decided as a republican, and as a Welsh separatist too, to join a demonstration of disloyalty on a mountain called Mynydd Carn in the Preseli hills of the Welsh south-west. Rather than engage in the royalist brouhaha, we were to celebrate there the anniversary of a battle fought in 1081 between Trahaearn ap Caradog, on the one side, Gruffydd ap Cynan and Rhys ap Tewdwr on the other. It may seem an obscure alternative, but it was probably the best that anyone could find.
Rain fell persistently in Wales that day, and the few of us, we happy few, crouched in the damp lee of a rocky outcrop near the summit of the mountain to exchange mildly subversive and self-congratulatory small talk, probably noted by an infiltrator or two from the police. When we felt we had made our point we hastened down to our cars again, but I admit that as I drove away I did feel a certain sense of wasted effort: that the handful of us should have been up there on the bare and drizzly mountain, observed by nobody but ourselves, while the rest of Wales had joined the entire world around the television set, oohing and aahing at its monarchical glories. But then we were celebrating a passion, they were merely watching a soap opera – soon (as it turned out) to be sadly discredited. While there have certainly been moments when I have despaired for Wales, assumed that after 800 years of fitful resistance all was lost at last, and half-resolved to run away to Trieste, so far the nation has always come back to shame me. Sometimes I feel that we are condemned for ever to live in a political limbo, fighting always, sometimes surging forward, sometimes in dispirited retreat; but often again I feel that little by little Wales is refinding itself after all, redefining itself perhaps, and that before my children die it will be fulfilled in independence: that is to say, in the liberty to be itself.
47 North Britons
The Scots in the mid-1990s were in some ways more, in some ways less subject to the domination of the English, and, except for the relative weakness of the Scots Gaelic language, were just as Scottish as the Welsh are Welsh. One day in 1993 I was in Huntingdon, in southern England, and was shown the house of John Major, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It was the perfect picture of your pretty English bourgeois villa, surveying a landscape as flat and ordered as a suburban back lawn. Almost immediately afterwards I drove to Scotland, and looking around me then at that spectacularly different country, so distinctive of tradition, so unmistakable of style, I marvelled at the aberration of history that allowed the kind of people who lived up there to be governed, generation after generation, by the kind of people who lived in Huntingdon. Unlike Wales, Scotland stood within the United Kingdom of its own free will, theoretically an equal member, not a subject nation, and as I travelled through the country one ineffably Scottish sight and experience after another brought home to me the anomaly of it all.
There was the sculpted Callant of Hawick, an obviously delinquent youth sitting loose-limbed on his horse, like a cowboy, and brandishing in the very spirit of reckless adventurism the flag he captured from the English in 1514. There was the terrific nineteenth-century memorial to the dead of the Black Watch regiment, in the half-ruined medieval cathedral of Dunkeld: such a furious tangle of recumbent corpses and shattered equipment, carved with such tragic passion, that it seemed to me like a Scottish Guernica. There was the elderly man with sparse gingery hair strolling hands in pocket towards a pub on an Edinburgh corner, followed forty or fifty yards behind by his extremely aged collie dog; sometimes the man looked round with an encouraging smile, and the dog smiled gamely back, and so they progressed in perfect rapport, like figures in a Burns poem, until the pair of them disappeared into the malty shadows of the pub. And I called on Hugh McDiarmid the great poet, Marxist and nationalist, who led me into his sweet Lanarkshire cottage over the most famous of all his lyrics, inscribed upon its threshold:
The rose of all the world is not for me,
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet – and breaks the heart.
How perfectly extraordinary, I thought then, that any citizen of this singular country would not wish it to control its own destinies! In population Scotland was about the same size as Denmark and Finland, and bigger than Ireland or Norway. In history it was proud and fascinating. In terrain it was self-contained and majestic. It contained two of the great cities of Europe, and some of the most glorious landscapes. It was a highly educated society, full of able economists, technicians, industrialists and administrators. How could it fail? ‘We have lost the fire in our bellies,’ somebody told me in reply, and it was true that however patriotic the average Scot was for most of the time, when it came to national destinies he felt caution to be canny. Perhaps he
distrusted the devil he did not know, even if it was his own: or perhaps he was just happy enough as he was, plodding down to the corner pub with his old dog following.
48 South Britons
Over the water in France the Breton patriots look with envy upon the Welsh and the Scots. They are fellow Celts, and fellow Britons too, descended from tribespeople who came from Cornwall in the sixth century. Their language is akin to Welsh, and there are always Breton scholars and artists working and wandering in Wales, and vice versa. One of the leading Welsh rock groups of the 1990s has sung many of its songs in Breton. Tourists might suppose that on the whole the South Britons were lucky, like the Serbs of Szentendre, when they emigrated across the Bay of Biscay to eat magnificent seafood on splendid unspoiled beaches, but Breton nationalists do not always agree. The French Government in Paris makes few concessions to them. The Breton language is given little encouragement, and as every year passes it retreats further and further into the enclave of the aged – even they are reluctant to talk it to strangers. It is a happy triumph for any Breton-speaking singer or actress when a contract invites her to perform, whether on stage or on the television screen, not in French but in Breton.
When I first went to Breizh – Brittany – soon after the Second World War, a murky cloud hung over the reputation of the Bretons. Like the Irish, some of their patriots had assumed that the enemy of the enemy was their friend, and that collaboration with the Nazis might be the best route to self-determination. It was a tragic delusion. Some were imprisoned after the war, some were shot, some went into exile in Wales and Ireland. Even now lingering suspicions and resentments haunt the Breton cause, and give the centralists in Paris sufficient excuse to keep the clamps on Breton nationalism. Yet the Bretons remain more recognizably themselves than any of the other Celtic minorities. High-speed trains streak from Paris to Rennes (Roazhon in the Breton language), motorways link the once remote Breton coast to the French centres of power, but powerful strains of custom and heredity still distinguish the Bretons from the French. Memories of Celtic holy men are honoured, if only by the elderly, in elaborately fretted medieval churches. Pardons, festivals, of local saints, are celebrated enthusiastically with processions, displays of holy relics, music and dancing. Hundreds of old women in Breton towns still wear, as everyday costumes, the high white coif of their tradition, often above long braided hair.
