Modica, Italy
13th December
2019
Dearest Britain,
 |
| A park in Norwich, Norfolk |
I don't live in you now
and, though I left you 15 years ago for another country that had
captured my heart, that doesn't mean I no longer love you, for it was
you that bore me, nurtured me, educated and made me and there will
always be a British girl inside the continental me. I write now
because what happened to you yesterday was shocking, devastating,
frightening and deeply upsetting; its consequences cannot be foreseen
at this juncture, but 24 hours on they seem bleak. I may still love
you – I always will – but I no longer recognise you.
The country I left was far
from perfect and our imperialist past was not something that most of
us boasted about. Of course there was racism, as there is everywhere
and I witnessed it myself, but it also seemed to me that it was
generally understood that democracy means that you cannot impinge
upon the freedom of others. When exactly
did that change? When did people begin to believe that they
could make whatever anti-foreigner, anti-gay, anti-woman,
anti-elderly, anti-you-name-it comment they liked with impunity – in
one of the most diverse and tolerant countries in the world? I am too
far away to know and I doubt you know yourself but it has happened.
Tolerance, it seems, has gone and soon it could be followed off our
little group of islands by accountability in the “Mother of
Parliaments”, the independence of the judiciary and perhaps even
the constitutional monarchy.
When you see your own
country from afar, you are unable to balance your pessimism regarding
events there with a healthy dose of observation of your countrymen and
women just getting on with their normal lives, but I would guess that
what happened is simply that democracy is fragile and, having enjoyed
it for so long, we took our eye off the ball. Then the 2008 recession
gave the charlatans the opportunity they had been waiting for to
exploit discontent. And you fell for it, my country. Not having known
an occupation within living memory, you failed to see the danger when
it came and you are failing to understand it now. This tide will
turn, of course, whether peacefully or not I cannot say, and I
certainly would not hazard a guess as to how long it will take.
So let us think back for a
moment to a generation, that of my parents, who did recognise a serious threat to their freedom, for what I really want to talk about tonight
are memories. Whenever I fly back to you, Britain, as the plane
comes in over the Channel and Kent, I think first of Folkestone, a
town of which I have no memory but to which I was sent at the age of
eight weeks – to an orphanage there, because my natural mother
couldn't afford to keep me. (Do you really want to go back to that,
Britain? A narrow, judgemental state in which single mothers are
forced to give up their children? It seems that you do, judging from
remarks made by the now re-elected Prime Minister.) Seven months
later, in the cold November of 1950, two kind, loving people who
longed for a baby – a Bristol newsagent and his wife, both of Welsh
origin – visited that orphanage in Folkestone and they drove back
to Bristol with an extra passenger - me. My bond with the man who had
just become my father was instant and I miss him to this day. I was
told that I also went willingly into my mother's arms but took longer
about it!
As the plane nears London,
I look down and try to get my geographical bearings of that enormous
city and its outskirts and I remember that somewhere down there I
went to school, accompanied my big-hearted, generous but flawed dad to both
casinos and Gamblers Anonymous meetings (somewhere near Buckingham Palace), became part-Londoner and
grew up. Also down there his ashes mingled with my mum's, in the Ruislip Garden of Remembrance named after the only English Pope, Nicholas Breakspear. I only went back there once after their respective funerals (twenty years apart), on the 25th anniversary of my dad's death and I learnt that they were not there, for they
are where I am. If I hadn't known that, I would have been unable to leave.
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| Westminster Abbey |
They sat in their North
London Garden, the girl and her dad, and he spoke to her sometimes in
Latin, sometimes in French and he bequeathed to her his love and
knowledge of books. Without him, she would not have become a
linguist. He also bequeathed to her his humour, his quintessentially
British irony and his gift for repartee. They served her well as a
teacher and they serve her well now, when humour is all there is, she thinks, to help her deal with the situation.
Chronic illness had
prevented dad from fighting (much to his frustration), so back in
Bridgend, Wales, he had worked in the Arsenal, then in Bristol hosted
American soldiers and joined the Home Guard. He and mum had been
horrified by fascism and, like many of his era, he had, before what
was always referred to as “The War”, been a member of the
Communist Party because it was thought to be the only way to stop
Hitler. Later, disillusioned, he left it and received threats for
doing so. During the war and during our Bristol years he worshipped
Churchill. That was a different kind of Conservatism, though – a
party of the rich for the rich, yes, but there was a sense of decency
and of responsibility for the fate of their fellow-Britons. In
London during the Heath premiership, dad switched his allegiance to
the Labour Party because, he said, they cared for the ordinary
worker.
My journey from the airport usually continues by coach and down we go, towards the South-West. I still have a sense of childish excitement when I see the motorway signs to “The South-West and Wales”. It's best before evening, when you can still see the green on either side, and as we near Bristol I muse that in some of these fields, cut through by the very road I am travelling on, the little girl and her dad used to go mushroom-hunting. Then she became a teenager and suddenly she was hurtling along the nearby country lanes in her boyfriend's car. She wept and wept when they left for London in the spring of 1965.
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| Dad (second from left) in the Bridgend Arsenal |
My journey from the airport usually continues by coach and down we go, towards the South-West. I still have a sense of childish excitement when I see the motorway signs to “The South-West and Wales”. It's best before evening, when you can still see the green on either side, and as we near Bristol I muse that in some of these fields, cut through by the very road I am travelling on, the little girl and her dad used to go mushroom-hunting. Then she became a teenager and suddenly she was hurtling along the nearby country lanes in her boyfriend's car. She wept and wept when they left for London in the spring of 1965.
And now we come to the
Bridge - the span across the River Severn which takes you into
Wales. And Wales it is which gives me my real British identity. I
grew up among its gentle accents, heard and sang its music every day,
assimilated its culture and regarded it always as “home”. As you
cross the Bridge you can still see the loading point for the old Aust
ferry, which (if you were lucky) took you across before the miracle
of the First Severn Bridge. (If you are unfamiliar with that part of Britain, you may be interested to know that the Severn has the third highest tidal range in the world. Hence the two bridges across it that
now exist are true feats of engineering.) Sometimes you queued for hours,
only to be told that they could take no more cars across that
evening, either because of the current or because of the time, and
then you had to get into Wales by driving “all around bloody
Gloucestershire” as dad would bad-temperedly put it. Once in Wales,
we were home and we stayed with my uncle and aunt or in the Cardiff Central Hotel owned by
dad's cousin Frank. Years later, as a university student, I spent
many drunken nights in its bar – Frank, the hotel guests and its
staff had long gone – and later still it was all destroyed by fire.
Wales was, and is, the sound of kindly, sing-songy voices, the land
of the cwtch (cuddle - and believe me, there's nothing like
a Welsh one), the aroma of Welshcakes cooking on a bakestone, a carpet of daffodils in March and April and the
land of childhood warmth.
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| In Wales you'll find daffodils even when there aren't any! Here, daffodil ornaments are on sale at Cardiff Christmas Market |
But now I make another
journey on these rare trips home: from Cardiff to Norwich, or
sometimes straight from London to Norwich, another town of which I
have no childhood memory, and yet it is where it all began. For that
is where I was born and spent such a short time with my natural
mother, who already had a three-year-old daughter called Jill, my
sister. How we met after 64 years is a story I have told elsewhere
but it is in Norwich that my British life comes full circle and yes,
I do have a strange sense there, too, of coming home, of having been
there before. Sadly I can only visit my natural mother at her
graveside and I take her Welsh daffodils or, at this time of year, a
little Christmas tree, and I hope she knows that Jill and I are there
together. I have come to love Norwich in its own right, too – its
lanes, the glory of its Cathedral, which I have found to be
welcoming, and the peace of the nearby Broads.
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| A peaceful morning in Norwich |
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| A Christmas tree for my natural mother |
To borrow from Rupert
Brooke, all these things I have loved in you, Britain and, even
though I do not recognise you now in your national life, they endure,
for no politician can take my memories, though age may do so.
Therefore I set them down now, for I want you to know that I have
loved you, and I hope that you will come through this dark period as
you have come through others – stronger, more determined to
preserve what is good and, hopefully, kinder – and that if I do not
live to see it, others will.
