Europe

by Jan Morris

  94 In the country

  The French countryside of my youth often looked (at least in my memory now) like a slow ballet of horse-drawn ploughs – ploughs wherever you looked, some going one way, some another, serenaded by soaring songbirds and watched by rich fat cattle. France seemed to me then permanently old-fashioned. It was still a peasant country, I used to think. The Alpine village I settled in for a while in the 1950s was several generations behind the times. In the autumn it used to be visited by an itinerant steam distillery, and with much chuffing and hissing its apple crop was turned into a powerful kind of schnapps, to be tasted in back kitchens beside steaming cauldrons of soup more or less permanently simmering on the stove. I collected our mail each day from the village bar, for there in mid-morning I knew I would find the postman enjoying his cognac.

  I doubt if a single Percheron draws a single plough in France now. Most of the birds seem to be of the invisibly chirpy persuasion, twitching about in copses, and the cattle are mostly anaemic Charollais, which look as though they have been drained of their blood for the making of black puddings. Even in our village of Savoie the ski culture has fallen upon the old ways, the high cow-chalets have been turned into holiday homes, and I doubt if the postman has time for his mid-morning brandy. For me the lost innocence of Europe, itself no more than the product of a romantic imagination in its youth, will remain always a memory of long ago in France.

  95 An invitation

  Allow me to invite you to Sunday lunch at a French country restaurant of the old kind, circa 1955. Neither fast food nor gastronomic pretension has yet corrupted the establishment, which is in one of those ancient towns of central France where the streets wind upwards from the railway track, through scowling walls of medievalism, until they debouch in the square outside the cathedral door, surveyed by huge stone animals from the cathedral tower and prowled around on Sunday mornings by cats and desultory tourists. The restaurant displays its menu in a large flowery script in a brass frame, and in most respects remains more or less as it has been for several centuries. Madame the proprietress looks an epitome of everything false and narrow-minded. One waiter seems to be some sort of duke, the other is evidently the village idiot. At the table next to ours sits a prosperous local family out for its Sunday dinner, well-known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community – solemn, voluminously napkinned, serious and consistent eaten who eye us out of the corners of their piggy eyes as they chew their veal. The veal is, as a matter of fact, rather stringy. I do not doubt the bill will be erroneous. I am sure Madame despises us as much as we distrust her. But what a contrary delight it all is, is it not? How nourishing still the vegetables, fresh from Madame’s garden! How excellent the wine, from the vineyard down the hill! How stately that duke! How endearing the idiot! How mollifying the farewells of the family at the next table, when with bows and cautious smiles they fold their napkins and leave us! How persuasive, after all, even the steely charm of Madame herself! With real gratitude we wrap the old-fashioned Frenchness of that luncheon around us like a cloak, and return cherished to the world of the 1990s. Ah, où sont les déjeuners d’antan?

  96 All is not lost

  But all is not lost! More successfully than most countries, France has achieved an equilibrium between the old and the new. As the twentieth century draws towards its close the French are indeed a very modern people. I first really felt in touch with cyberspace in the 1980s when, calling at a French country inn somewhere, I found the chef punching up his day’s luncheon menu on a computer, from some central database of gastronomy. Today nothing seems to me quite so elegantly futuristic as the solar-powered telephones which gently revolve, like sunflowers, beside French autoroutes. No capital in Europe is more smoothly organized than Paris, and a true image of our fin de siècle is the spectacle of the great Paris–Lyon–Marseille Train à Grande Vitesse sweeping down the Rhône valley at 180 m.p.h.

  Yet by most standards life in the French countryside still seems amiably and enviably close to the soil. The songbirds may have gone, but the swallows still whirl around on summer evenings. Widowers shout greetings to each other as they wobble home on their bicycles, long loaves protruding from their saddle-bags. Gentlefolk stroll in the autumnal gardens of their villas. At the wood’s edge the logs are still chopped and Vergilianly piled. Aromatic smoke lingers. The buzz of the vélomoteur merges comfortably – well, fairly comfortably – with the buzz of the bees. Picnic parties spread their cloths beside dragonfly pools as in painters’ fancies long ago. More happily than anywhere else trees and rivers, cities and motorways, seem to coexist by mutual arrangement, a harmonious balance between the natural and the invented.

  For me one of the most comforting components of this arrangement is the continuing French attitude towards animals. French people seem to recognize what Montaigne, the patron saint of animal equality, called ‘a certain obligation and mixed commerce’ between man and beast. We may force-feed you for your liver, they seem to say to their fellow creatures, boil you alive, snare you on migrations or bottle you in brine, but at least we will deal with you man, so to speak, to man. I raised the matter once at a café beside whose door a very fat and surly Golden Labrador lay sluggishly where everyone would trip over it. It was a very old dog, said the proprietor, one did not care to disturb the animal: but when I mentioned Montaigne’s notion of commerce and obligation he seemed to think it mere sophistry. ‘I owe the dog nothing, it owes me nothing, one day it will die and then – pfft!’ The dog did not budge an inch as, precariously balancing my coffee-cup, I stepped across it to find a table on the patio outside: but, remembering where I was, I restrained myself from giving it a good kick as I passed, to hasten the pfft.

  97 A fling of France

  What I love to do is to drive on a bright sunny day, with the roof of the car open, at a scudding speed around the Périphérique, the ring road that surrounds the city of Paris. The scudding speed is advisable, or awful French drivers will more or less run you off the road. The sunny day is essential, because it turns an expedition that could be dismal, exhausting or even alarming into an exhilarating fling of France. The road snakes around the capital, rather than circling it, and offers jerky flashes of Frenchness as in an avant-garde silent movie: now a drab industrial quarter, now a pictorial row of poplars – a tedious white housing estate, barges chugging down a canal – a grand boulevard for an instant, a cluster of medieval houses, the sudden swoosh of a tunnel, a couple of vast juggernauts deafeningly overtaking you – and always present, brooding but radiant, just off-stage, the most magnificent capital in Europe.

  This is not only France encapsulated: to my mind it is 1990s France all over. For most of us by now, for most of the time, France is a sequence of flashes, a kaleidoscope repeatedly shaken as we hurry across its varied landscapes to the particular French spot that means most to us. When the milords travelled this way in their creaking high-wheeled carriages it must have been more of a continuum, and the slowly passing scenes had a classical clarity, shaped and ample despite the frightful bumps in the road. Now we are all surrealists, and as France hurtles through our windscreens and away through our rear-view mirrors its images are disjointed and contradictory. You want tragedy? It hangs to this day over the elegiac trench-landscapes of the north. You want hedonism? Napkinned tables beckon to us through the windows of snug and steamy restaurants as we rush by, wine awaits the tasting in a thousand hospitable caves. Wildness? Bleak bare places are around us now: granite places, moorland, heroic monasteries, uninviting hotels on mountain passes. Romance? Here is the sweet creeping in of violets, ochres and tawny browns that speak of the Mediterranean. Marsh country of the Gypsies, pale estuaries of oyster-men, windy grasslands where menhirs stand and Celtic names jump out at us from roadside signs in the rain – all this, all this grand fling of France, comes into my mind as I drive around the Paris ring road: and now that France itself is so relentlessly, so furiously on the go, I sometimes feel that the grand old nation itsel
f is pounding, head down, foot on the floor, radio blaring, around its own historical périphérique.

  98 The English

  Ambivalently unique, at the start of my half-century, used to stand the English. They were governed by aristocrats (or so their reputation said), but they were a nation of shopkeepers. They were law-abiding, but famously funny. They were reserved, but had thrown themselves across the world in an irresistible frenzy of greed, ambition and do-goodism. They had won the Second World War, as much by their notoriously cunning diplomacy as by their fire-power. And they were altogether unmistakable, whether they were haughty patricians, up-tight bourgeois or bawdy and good-humoured working people. Everyone knew, at least in theory, the Hertfordshire lord, the Oxford scholar-sportsman, the City gent, the Lancashire mill-owner, the Somerset yokel, the cockney Tommy. As late as the 1950s the clubmen of London still sauntered down St James’s in their uniform pinstripe suits, black bowlers tipped elegantly over the eyes, carrying their tightly rolled umbrellas like the leather-covered swagger sticks which, only a few years before, so many of them had carried as army officers. London taxi-drivers then were cockney almost to a man, often elderly and grumpy, very like hansom-cab drivers in old Punch cartoons. The English in fact were still themselves: so incorrigibly themselves that they generally talked about their whole State as being ‘England’, forgetting all about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Some of them still think that way. When they laugh at Scottish, Welsh and Irish objections, I try to be kind: for I know their laughter is only an inherited relic of their own glory days, when they were briefly the Power of Powers and could laugh at anyone with impunity.

  99 How they talked

  The divisions of class in England then were indexed almost precisely by the way people spoke, and we can still hear how the upper classes talked from the dialogue of old movies: with an accent almost unbelievably affected, in vowels amazingly distorted, and with a particular flatness of emphasis, as though not only emotions but actually vocabulary were clenched by the stiff upper lip of convention. This strange dialect was more pronounced among women than among men, and we hear even the best of actresses trying to express undying love or patriotic passion through its medium: Celia Johnson, for instance, on the railway platform in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a suburban Anna Karenina, her strained protestations of infatuation marvellously countered by the lush Slavic cadences of Rachmaninov. Queen Elizabeth II herself talked in it, until iconoclasts made fun of her delivery (the brave Lord Altrincham likened her to ‘a priggish schoolgirl with a voice that is frankly a pain in the neck’), and her mother was to be one of its very last exponents, speaking it almost into the twenty-first century.

  The language itself was full of nuances long since forgotten. Americanisms had been assaulting it at least since the 1930s (the upper classes were especially vulnerable to the appeal of jazz and Hollywood), but as late as 1956 Nancy Mitford was able to enter the best-seller lists with her analysis, borrowed from the philologist Alan Ross, of words and usages that were U or non-U – socially proper, that was, or unacceptable. The phrase ‘not very U’ went briefly into the language itself. I must confess that some of Mitford’s absurd prejudices I shared. God knows why, but I would never have dreamt of calling a mantelpiece a mantelshelf (and wouldn’t even now). The English language was as subtly and rigidly stratified as English society itself, and the wrong use of a noun or an unfortunate choice of idiom could indelibly brand its speaker.

  Since then the language has been transformed, semantically by the flood of Americanisms, socially in particular by changes in the way of speaking. Even the standard accent-less English which used to be the lingua franca of the educated is fast disappearing, to be replaced by a flat neo-cockney. Regional accents survive, against all predictions, but you can no longer place every Englishman in his social class, as Bernard Shaw once said you could, the moment he opens his mouth. In television commercials old-school educated English, only slightly exaggerated, is reserved for comic effect: and stand-up comedians slip into it for implications that are perfectly understood by everyone, except I suppose bemused foreigners.

  100 How they looked

  There used to be a specifically English look, too. I used to be able to recognize an Englishman anywhere in the world, not simply by his bearing or his manners, but actually by his face. Now I am never so confident. The English Gentleman, one of the most easily identifiable people on earth, is virtually extinct, and the rest of the nation has lost its distinctive appearances. This is partly biological. The English are no longer the homogeneous Caucasian islanders who stood so complacently in island isolation, and hundreds of thousands of Asians, Africans and Latins have contributed their genes to the stock during my half-century. Turn on London television in the 1990s and you would get the impression that half the population were immigrants. Although this is partly the distortion of positive discrimination, still there are not many parts of England that do not have their immigrant residents, some of them as English as anyone in everything but look.

  But the changed appearance is not merely ethnic. Even the purest English face is different now. It is more blurred, less northern-looking. Diet has contributed, and wider education, and the changing manner of speaking, and central heating (considered sissy fifty years ago, and still a bit wimpish to me), but I think it is chiefly a matter of history. Fifty years ago the English were enormously proud of themselves. They had won a fearful war in epic style, led by a statesman of charismatic genius, under the aegis of a royal house which was universally admired and believed by 40 per cent of the population, so surveys showed, to be divinely chosen. The English knew themselves to be special. When I went to London in the 1940s I felt I was visiting the heart of an immense historical organism, spread around the globe, to which hundreds of millions of people of every faith and colour looked in something approaching reverence. When I was abroad the grave sound of Big Ben on the BBC World Service, and the resonant, almost ecclesiastical way in which the announcer declaimed ‘This is London’ over the often crackling and fluctuating air-waves, made me feel that England was somewhere permanently unique on the planet. London might be battered and impoverished, but it was still in most British minds the centre of all things, the best, the biggest, the oldest, the eternal.

  No wonder the English face was so distinctive, and no wonder that in the half-century since then it has lost its edge. It was the face of confidence, whatever its class. One can imagine a citizen looking at it in a mirror in those days, when people still knew their Gilbert and Sullivan, and thinking with horror that it might have been the face of a Rooshian, a Frenchman or a Prooshian. Thank God he had resisted all temptations/To look like other nations! It remained unmistakably the face of an Englishman.

  101 From ‘A Stranger in Venice’, 1906, by Max Beerbohm

  Often, passing through the streets of London, I have wondered what on earth the inhabitants would look like if they had no longer the thought of their pre-eminence to sustain them.

  102 The Wakeman and Harry’s Challenge

  Here, nevertheless, are two glimpses, from as late as the 1990s, of an England that was still England. The first concerns that favourite English abstraction Immemorial Tradition. I arrived one evening at the little cathedral city of Ripon just in time to hear the Wakeman blow his horn. Around the façade of the City Hall, in Market Square, is written in large letters ‘EXCEPT THE LORD KEEP YE CITTIE YE WAKEMAN WATCHETH IN VAIN’, and below it, at nine o’clock on every night of the year, wearing a tricorn hat, the official Wakeman of Ripon blows an admonitory blast upon his African ox-horn at each corner of the town obelisk. He has been doing so, it is said, since the eighth century. Many cities of Europe observe the custom of the watchman’s call, but few if any can boast such an uninterrupted record. I thought it might be an embarrassing affair, an Old Tradition succumbing, as Old Traditions so often do, into tinsel pastiche, but it turned out that evening to seem perfectly organic. The stalwart horn-blower did his job in a sta
tely but untheatrical way, while the cars came and went around him, citizens walked impassively by, and Yorkshire conviviality sounded from neighbouring pubs. I asked the Wakeman if impertinent adolescents ever mocked him as he blew his ox-horn in his antique hat, but he said not. He was bigger than they were, he said.

  My second resilient survivor of the English identity I also found in Yorkshire. By now there are Harry Ramsden Fish and Chip Shops all over the world, but the original shop still thrives, at Guiseley, and as a reminder of what used to be, has become a kind of pilgrim shrine. At the back of it is preserved Mr Ramsden’s first shack-shop, from the 1930s, and this reminds me of St Francis’s woodland chapel preserved within the mighty basilica of Assisi; nearby a souvenir shop sells bottled sweets and comic plaques as substitutes for votive candles and pictures of the Virgin; the restaurant itself is all carpets, chandeliers and stained-glass windows, with many icons of the late Harry Ramsden (died 1963) and a menu dominated by the grand sacrament of Harry’s Challenge – a fish-and-chips dish so gigantic that if you get through it you are given a free pudding and a signed certificate as absolution.