To Stay or Not to Stay

 Westminster Bridge and Houses of Parliament

Is England's air unlike that in any other land?  Is its land more green, more pleasant?  The distinction is not uncommonly made.

In 1937, Welshman Ivor Novello wrote these lines:

Rose of England breathing England’s air

Flower of liberty beyond compare

While hand and heart endure to cherish thy prime

Thou shalt blossom to the end of time

Rupert Brooke's famous poem of 1914, "The Soldier" describes a soldier pondering what should happen if he fell in a foreign war:

                                                              There shall be

          In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
          A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
          Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
          A body of England's, breathing English air,
          Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

William Blake, decrying the "dark Satanic Mills" of the industrial revolution, contrasted a local steam-powered flour mill (the Albion Mill near his home) with the "Green and pleasant land" of England, and he asserts (does not ask!),

          And did those feet in ancient time

          Walk upon England's mountains green:

          And was the holy Lamb of God

          On England's pleasant pastures seen!

 Blake's Artistry

The poem was cast as a hymn by Sir Hubert Parry [Link] and became a mainstay in English culture.  It featured in the movie Chariots of Fire -- the movie's title drawn from the poem.

And the distinction is not made merely of England but of London itself.  Samuel Johnson's observation is well known:

          When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.

One severe punishment used in English history was banishment (an offender often being sent to Australia or America).  Ahem.  There's a point.

It is common to idealize a place, and plenty of people see England (to go back to Conrad once more) as anything from "one of the dark places of the earth," to the "English heaven" Rupert Brooke mentions.  However that may be in actuality, from my students I continue to hear this: "I want to stay here."

I understand this feeling and what lies behind it: responsibilities are greatly diminished and fun is more pronounced: no jobs to sit at, no traffic to unduly complicate life (although Dr. G. has led students in any number of odd directions as if he were, to quote Monty Python, "deliberately wasting [our] time").  There are no taxes to pay, no business dealings, no government forms to fill out.  Here we are largely removed from the complications of normal life.

What's not to like in that?

The culture, as the dialects, are rich in tones here (just listen to an American say "haff-passt fo-wer" instead of the resonant "hahf pahst foh" of British English); the history of England has more to intrigue us than the "history," say, of someplace like Des Moines, where, if you want an active culture, you must buy some yogurt.  And what's more?  Think of the most beautiful aircraft ever made, the Spitfire:

The Curves of an English Swallow

Right: much of this is opinion and idealization, and the reality is that much of the England I grew to love is increasingly missing or already gone -- the little things as well as the big: wood floors in the Tube trains, pubs with snugs (replaced by loathsome corporate pubbing, one franchise calling their pubs a "collection," with each pub having the same menu as the others).

Capitalist Commercialization has probably been the single most destructive force in replacing English culture, from uglifying the skyline to plasticizing punts.

Everything changes, yes.  And the question more centrally is just how much of England (or France, or America or Germany or...) is still its own traditional culture, what with the influx of diverse peoples and the rise of the "world citizens" who have no home and, so plenty of post-colonial writers tell us, feel as if they belong nowhere?

Monica Ali writes about an England that Bangladeshis enter, struggle to remain in, or long to leave for "home" -- where ever home may come to exist.  In her novel, Brick Lane, the protagonist is Nanzeen, a woman married by arrangement to a man 20 years her senior and with whom she has at best only what Dickens described in David Copperfield, a statement believed to be directly related to his own marriage:

"There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose."

It reveals the obvious: it is not where, not when, one exists that is the sum of life.  It's the connection, the being at "home" that makes it.  Ali's protagonist stays in England to make a life for herself and her two daughters while her husband goes back to the Bangladesh he has idealized.  And Dickens?  In the novel, Dora dies, so David Copperfield gets to marry the woman with whom he shares a deep parity.

I?  I will go back, of course, to my "home" because of what makes it thus: my love.  I'd rather we be in England together, but circumstances do not allow it.

Unlike what people say about vacation spots, my England is a great place to visit and (in part) to grow up in as a student -- and, feeling most at home there, I've always wanted to remain here.  Idealized or no.