[Another radio piece I wrote – for BBC Radio 4, I think – with minor adjustments]
I discovered England in the summer of 1963, which wasn’t really too late for me but actually quite good timing. I was 20 years of age and on night-shift in a pea-factory in Huntingdon. Every morning around six o’clock the night-shifters would be bussed out to the old army camp where we stayed, and I remember the surprise of the Cambridgeshire fields in the morning sun – so big and civilized, not a bit like the small, violent-green fields I’d known all my life in Ireland. Then I’d open my newspaper and read more details of the Profumo case – call girsl, birchings, naked men in masks, pimps, suicides – all sorts of depravity, festering away under the pale-green surface of English life.
In the 1970s, living for two years in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I had a similar epiphany. I had always followed English football and up until then got my weekly fix through Match of the Day; now I got to go to St James’s Park once a fortnight and see the real thing. The difference was amazing. Match of the Day had been all Jimmy Hill quips, good-humoured crowds and applause for skill. Here at St James’s Park, and I expect most football grounds throughout England, the air was ripe with obscene chants and racist abuse, and there was a viciousness to it all that was sort of frightening.
It seems to me the English are a people who wrestle with inner demons. That’s what makes them so keen on rules and rituals: anything that might be used to keep the wild side in check, or at least out of sight.
Which explains the British Empire. For a couple of centuries the English people told themselves the beast was out there, not within. So they searched the globe for wild places and people, and when they found them they clamped England’s civilizing rule onto them.
And for a time it seemed to work. The peoples of the Empire took to cricket and covered their loins and formed more or less orderly queues – becoming in fact as English as could be expected in the circumstances.
But oh dear, it couldn’t last. One morning, the people of the Empire woke up and threw off most of their English trappings, and said they wanted to organise the way they lived for themselves. Even if, to English eyes, it was odd and outrageous and, well, unnaturally un-English. (David Cameron is still working on the wild people in the north of Ireland, God help him.)
So now, finally without an Empire to distract them, the English people are forced to look at themselves again and the truth is, what they see is a bit scary. “This isn’t us!” you’ll hear them yell, as English football supporters turn ugly and British troops abuse Iraqui prisoners and yet another skeleton rattles out of yet another closet in Buck House. “We’re a decent people! We disown this carry-on – we don’t have an id!”
Face it, chaps. Your id is as big as ours – bigger, maybe. Admit as much and join the human race.
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