My first English journey was in 1962, to Humshaugh, in Northumberland, on a Boys' Brigade camp. We went in the back of a lorry up to Gateshead, over the Tyne bridge, through Newcastle, and out west. Passing the folks along the road, we waved and shouted. There were no seats, though someone had neatly folded coal sacks for our benefit.
This was not my first trip into the country. The brigade had camped at Alston the year before; a stormy week that saw us flooded out of our tents and driven to the shelter of a barn. Humshaugh, by contrast, was warm and sweet: my first English summer. I spent a lot of time lying in deep grass staring up at a clear blue sky. After a week I came home thinking how bricked-in South Shields felt. I was 13 years old and never gave any of it a second thought.
My second journey came the year after, a ten-minute walk from our front door to a Methodist chapel. For you had to go to evening worship if you wanted to go to Young People's Fellowship. Under the leadership of the minister, we met in the schoolroom to debate the issues of the day—Cuban missiles, death of God, teenage sex, that sort of thing. We did other things as well. We put on plays in winter, went rambling in summer, and sang carols and rattled tins at Christmas. Nearly everything we did was deflected into good causes. Some of us got engaged. Not me, but friends who had left school at 15 to live in the real world of work and wages. Apprentice fitters and town hall secretaries grew up faster than me, and their journeying stopped early with a diamond ring, some savings and a vision of family life on a new estate.
Along with scores of other associations for the doing of what made people happy and fulfilled—from trade unionism to ballroom dancing—Methodists ran their own affairs. It was as near as most of us got to practical democracy. The brass communion rail shone like gold and there was always the smell of polish in the pews, but I had my first political thoughts here (Stanley Evans's The Social Hope of the Christian Gospel) and learned to feel responsible for something people called "society."
I went through Sussex University feeling as if I had. Nothing felt quite right. For here were people who, when you asked where they came from, didn't know. Well, not really; not without making you wish you'd never asked. Born in Surrey, Mummy in Esher, Daddy in Dubai, stomach cramps at boarding school. Some of them never seemed to live in one place or do anything simple. I had a tutor who once bought an oil painting over the telephone in the middle of a tutorial. His long corduroy-trousered legs stretched out to a pair of desert boots planted on the desk. He tipped back in his chair and smoked Gauloises high in the air, not Embassies down to the ground like the rest of us. He was a pretty good teacher all the same.
As for Brighton, what did it do? Kemptown Labour party kept a worker in a box for student meetings. Not a real worker, but a Militant Marxist-talking one. I think he was called "Ted." He had a big head, a brown belt and a collarless shirt. Tip him up and he'd tell you who "Klaus Straggoul" was. Oh yes.
My fourth and final English journey was in 1970, to Wad Medani, Blue Nile province, in the Sudan. A brown plain so hot and dry you could smell it. A small shuttered room with three beds and a table. A walled yard. I was a volunteer teacher, working in a state boarding school which the British had built. Examination board was Oxford. School houses were named after the great Islamic schools of thought. The paths were laid out straight in little stones painted white. The boys were organised in dorms, marched in berets, played football, read John Buchan, banged their mugs, got caned and wanted to know what I thought of the Beatles. God knows what they thought of me. Allah kareem.
I celebrated Eid with a fellow teacher back in his village. Out in the cool early morning, spread across the vast plain of the Gezira, we faced Mecca, our shining white galabeyas flapping audibly in the breeze. The ranks of the faithful. But even as I knelt and prayed, even as I kept the fast, I knew what they knew. I was not one of them, but one of the old colonials. Knowing that could incite jealousies, skew friendships, make tongues stick. In order to thrive, I had to toughen up. For the first and only time in my life, I stiffened my upper lip—by which I mean that in order to control my surroundings, I tried to control my feelings. In the end it was a strength, I have to admit, though a battered and clichéd one. When I returned to London in the summer of 1971, I had forgotten how to be me. It seemed strange that brown wasn't the natural colour of human skin. It seemed odd that girls were wearing hot pants. Still, I was glad to be back.
Four English journeys: Humshaugh green, chapel gold, Brighton pink, old colonial brown. When JB Priestley took his English Journey in 1933, he too found more than one Englishness and, like him, I never doubted that each was part of the whole, or that the other nations of Britain constituted matching layers of wholeness. As children we saw the Highland regiments swaggering at the Edinburgh Tattoo. Who'd dare say they weren't on our side? We read The Broons in the Sunday Post. Didn't Pa Broon work in a shipyard? Wasn't Maggie a hairdresser? Didn't they all live in flats? Well then.
You either had wholeness or you didn't, and the English not only had it, they were famous for having it in abundance, great ancient mounds of the stuff mulching its way through their history. When, in the early 1980s, Philip Dodd and I tried to sell publishers the idea of a book on "Englishness," this sense of wholeness still prevailed. Publishers did not know what we could mean. Philip would try to explain. You want to do what? "Deconstruct" England? What do you want to go and do that for? There were many Englands, but the very notion of deconstructing the essential one seemed indecent, un-English in itself.
A lot has changed since then. Since the 1980s, the countryside has on two occasions been exposed as a site of scabrous animal disease. The last foot and mouth outbreak was thought to have its origins not far from where the Brigade camped back in 1962. In 2001, we walked high above the river and looked down. All the field gates had been left hanging open, like slack mouths, ready for the bullet.
In the 1960s, English farmers produced food for a home market. We trusted their methods and traditions to look after the animals and take care of the land. This may have been naive and undoubtedly farm labourers had other tales to tell. Even so, at that time the countryside was more or less free from pollution and rich in wildlife; and as countrymen, the labourers too had their place. Now food comes from anywhere the supermarkets can "source" it, and, after years of being subsidised to produce food in the most intensive manner, English farmers are paid now not to produce it at all. Since the time of my first English summer, we seem confused about what the countryside is for.
At the same time, old Shields lost a few million bricks. The planners put grid pattern housing in their sites and mowed down every other row. In a working-class town that lived close, the damage has yet to be assessed—if it can be assessed. Because the way of life that places like South Shields knew has not been recorded, it's hard to know what has been lost. It will die with the last generation who lived it, which is mine. It was a remarkable way of life nevertheless, because it did what the 19th-century political class thought was impossible: it made degraded environments and hostile economic relationships not only habitable but hospitable. Intensely communitarian, but not liberal, it does not figure in contemporary considerations of political philosophy. Yet until very recently, it reflected Labour's core principles and was a way of life for millions of people. It's a different sort of urbanity now: less communitarian, more indifferent, thinned out, no longer so self-surveying and still not green whatever names adorn the business parks. As the editor of the Cambridge Urban History commented in 1999: in little over 30 years of "redevelopment," English towns lost that which "for so long had given a sense of place, of physical evidence, and individual community identity."
From the 1880s to the 1960s, so much writing about England was suffused with a love of the countryside: from Morris and Blatchford's Merrie England to Massingham and Blythe's more solitary landscapes. But as novelist Gordon Burn has shown in The North of England Home Service (2003), this is a form of writing in trouble. Cultural links with the land have withered; economic links have become less important; we have almost nothing to do with farm animals except to look at them. No one knows their way through the woods any more, so to speak. Tracers of the old ways still hang in the sky, of course, but down in the village, feelings have changed. As for the town, if there never was much love for its brickwork, at least there used to be respect for its modernity. Not any more. In Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), the street was described as a place of belonging. Now you are on "The Street," not in it, and it has capital letters, inverted commas, and spells danger. As Tony Blair said when announcing the inauguration of 40 new "Respect" zones in areas of threat and intimidation, what happens outside people's front doors is "vitally important." Once it used to be kids and neighbours. Now, for these people at least, it's a nightmare waiting to pitch up.
In her book Britons (1992), Linda Colley showed how Protestantism was the hallmark of British national identity as it developed from 1707. This is a chapter in the national story that appears to be over. Just as Sunday is no longer associated with God, so the British are no longer associated with church. Nor do they start work soon after school, and get engaged to be married soon after that. In other words, that version of the Protestant ethic which connected work with age and gender and both with social expectations has all but broken down. Methodism and youth club first taught me about "society." Nowadays this is a route that seems hopelessly childish, because, in the struggle for what is cool, the footballers' wives have overwhelmed the public moralists. It's true that hedonism has been around for a long time, but rarely has it been given such a clear field. I have learnt, rather against my will, to break the habit of thinking socially. Yet it's clear to most people that the consumption of private pleasures and the pursuit of private interests will not sustain civil society. Even in the sexy 1960s (whatever Philip Larkin thought), in the language of church youth club and Tamla Motown alike, if we spoke of love it was never just a private affair.
I am talking, as well, about a consensus on public decency. Deeply unfashionable today, and mistakenly associated with an older, mustier, middle-class snobbery that was private not public, decency nevertheless was George Orwell's definitive English virtue. He saw the idea of decency as a first check on all that was politically intolerable, and a powerful counterbalance to greed and grotesquery in public life. He also saw it as the condition of civil liberty. Orwell was part of a tradition of native writing that liked to compare English civil liberty with continental strife and extremism. To write nowadays about the English as more civil than their European counterparts would seem absurd. Ask any hotelier.
My third English journey was down the old LNER line from Newcastle to King's Cross, across to Victoria, and on to the "Brighton Belle." At the time it seemed like falling from Mars into the lap of Venus. But from the 1980s, north and south began moving into each other's orbit. At first, the divide between them opened alarmingly as northern manufacturing took the brunt of cheap imports. However, as the consequences of de-industrialisation took hold in the north, and a new fast-money economy followed through in the south, some strange juxtapositions began to emerge.
There had been a time when, compared to where I came from, what Brighton did for a living seemed invisible. Now all economies aspire to the Brighton condition. Scottish coal, Welsh steel and Belfast shipbuilding all went the way of their north English counterparts. Celts, too, have learned how to be invisible. At the same time—now that "Celtic" has been written off by historians and archaeologists as a modern invention—with or without devolution, these countries want to know what makes them different.
My fourth and final English journey, you will remember, was from a white country to a black one. In recent years, for me, this journey has turned from a sub-Saharan expedition into a trip around the corner. Leicester, where I live now, is ready to become the first majority Asian city in Europe. It will not be the last. Immigration into English cities has reached record levels and continues unabated. In the last three or four years, Leicester has taken more than 10,000 Somalis, and Poles are the latest wave. For a long time, you were not supposed to notice this. Or talk about it. But now demographers refer to the "third demographic transition," where, if current trends continue, national ancestry will be "radically and permanently altered by high levels of immigration… in combination with sub-replacement fertility and accelerated levels of emigration of the domestic population"—the quote is from the Population and Development Review in September 2006. I am not a demographer, but if this is true, in the long run this is what historians will remember New Labour for. Not achievements at the treasury, nor the NHS, nor even in Northern Ireland, but presiding over a fundamental and irrevocable shift in the physical and historical constitution of the English people.
Once upon a time, being English was easy, if simplistic. England was the best country with the biggest empire and the most honourable history. For hundreds of years, English national identity was tied to British imperial identity. Then, in little more than a generation, what had once been a source of national pride became, for the metropolitan cultural leadership at any rate, a source of indifference or nuanced disgust. This class is on the brink of becoming the first political class in the world to swap its national identity for "diversity." After a century of commitment to a "common culture," in a matter of months Labour turned its core belief on its head. After a lifetime on the left, the mayor of London seems to have ascended beyond category, believing neither in nation nor state when it comes to his own post-historical high-financial city (see Prospect, April 2007). Ethnicity is Ken Livingstone's new politics and he likes it so long as he can ride it.
As for the indigenous working class, it is worth referring to Keith Ajegbo's 2007 report on diversity in the schools curriculum. There was no advantage, said Ajegbo, "in creating confidence in minority ethnic pupils if it leaves white pupils feeling disenfranchised and resentful… Many indigenous white pupils have negative perceptions of their own identity… White children in areas where the ethnic composition is mixed often suffer labelling and discrimination. They can feel beleaguered…"
Then there were those Yorkshiremen who felt so unhappy in England that they strapped bombs to their backs, humped them on to the London Underground and a bus, and let fire. You have to wonder how much such all the way down hatred and alienation exists in our country. On the other hand, there is the Muslim Songbook of the British Isles, published for schools, words by Abdullah Quilliam, tunes "British traditional."
These four journeys involved me in identities fundamental to how the English used to see themselves. That they are no longer possible, or at any rate obvious, is illustrative of our current predicament. Only 40 years ago, if you wanted to reference Orwell's people, then it would still be roughly in these terms: town and country, decent and indecent, north and south, home and away. And they, in turn, signified other points of reference. All modernism, for instance, in this country at least, stemmed from reactions to the city, and every city was different, especially London, now pretty much disconnected from the rest of the country. As for civil society, nonconformity was immensely important. So was the Labour movement. So was the drink trade. So was the anti-drink trade. My father let his loyalties be known. He never left a pub without declaring "Upstanding Worthy Brothers." The British empire, of course, spun long red ribbons of military and caste loyalty. And from the industrial revolution, no end of north-south identities streamed molten into the national culture, including hard & soft, plain & fancy, League & Union, them & uz and dialects—for we were a nation that chewed up Tony Harrison's "Littererchewer and spat the bones /…[and] ended sentences with by, with, from / and spoke the language that [we] spoke at home." Identities never die, they only enfold into the landscape. Yorkshire Grit, Southern Charm, Mardy Arse, Oxford Blue, Garden Heart, British Raj, Island Race, Cockney Sparra, Welsh Chapel, Union of Hearts, Multicultural and so on—they're still there, only folding now.
English journeying is a tale with no simple moral. The fading of identities brings a sense of loss for those who knew them well, of course, but it can also mean a second chance for others to get them right. The old working-class streets were warm-hearted, it is true, but that they could be warmly intolerant is something strangers, immigrants or the slightly unorthodox might remember more. Big families could bring big rewards, but smaller families can bring more choice, particularly in the lives of women. Yet these are never straightforward exchanges. Communities might thrive in one place, but at the expense of other places. Streets might be more tolerant, but less safe. Private lives might yield more money, but fewer pleasures. At the level of personal identity, who can say which is better and which is worse? At the level of national identity, however, there is only one calculation that counts: nation states either go on or they do not go on and, in the long run, only those that go on tell us who we are. So far, the English go on: the BBC is still on its throne, the Queen is still worth her licence fee, and the £ is still worth a £ (€1.45).
It is often stated that national identity is based on common values. This is wrong. National identity is based on a common view of historical relationships. It doesn't always happen of course: such things are never guaranteed, because not all states, or nations, are able to come to a common view. History is against them, and the world is too full of failed or failing nation states to think otherwise. When, however, national identity does happen, it happens as a great event that suffuses and rewires those relationships. For the 18th-century English, the great event was the glorious revolution, 1688-89. For the 19th-century English, it was the battle of Trafalgar, 1805. In the 20th century, it was the battle of Britain, 1940. We can argue about the dates, but the need to go with the grain of the past is indisputable. A nation state that does not do that, or control its borders, will not remain a nation state for long. Not that I come to praise British imperialism or English nationalism; only to redress the balance of goodwill in favour of our ancestors.
Can we take our history, therefore, and use it to see an English identity on the horizon? Can we turn on the jets of history, as it were, and take off, and rise above, and see the way forward? No. History has no forward way to show. Life is lived as a predicament, not as movement towards a goal—and in politics especially there is no forward direction, even though politicians always say there is. There are only lesser or more intelligent trade-offs between what are often incommensurable values and unknowable outcomes.
Nevertheless, looking ahead, the study of history does prepare us for other cultures in a century that is going to be mesmerised by other cultures. Looking back, it takes us on journeys and weaves connections. Over long runs and short runs, and with no barriers to its thinking and no hang-ups about its "method" (how it chooses to look for the truth), historical scholarship is flexible enough to shape its investigations to the subject in hand. It can't predict the future, but it can help us see what is out there.
As for our Englishness, we do not even know the relationship between the sort of identity historians write about and the sort of identity that goes on in people's heads. Generations live the past differently. The same place is never the same place twice. The past looms up on every corner, but not the same for you as for me. On my first journey out, in July 1962, where there had once been trams and bustling streets, the people of Scotswood Road in Newcastle's west end saw only demolition, dirt, high-rise blocks and the back end of a coal wagon. On that wagon looking forward and waving, however, I saw only New York skyscrapers, the coming summer, and the road to indescribable happiness.
