Crows gather on an antenna and overlook the squat brick houses, their tiles slick with the damp that permeates through this little corner of the earth, this squat island with its long fields and high hills, brown with bushy grasses and green with neat rectangles of pine, cordoned off from their natural homes by dry stone walls and a sense of just progress.
Squares are well liked by the English. Their proclivity for the shape is well known throughout the world that they have tramped their muddy boots all over. And what shall we do with this patch of land? So says a man about a quarter of a continent. Why, dear sir, we shall partition it of course. In what shape, sire? A square, naturally. No heed for the natural borders of the mountain and the river. No regard for the customs and cultures of the conquered, why would there be? Just order it so and pray to God that these barbarians can reconcile with each other. Ever are they given to the delusion that they, the English, are the parent, while all others are the children. And it is the solemn duty of the parent to box up everything to stop the little horrors from squabbling.
Ironic, then, that England’s roads are a mess of curves, beholden to the rise and fall of the land, following every bluff and chasm, no matter how ridiculous. Their cities are laid out as if a box of wooden blocks have been dropped from a great height then roughly kicked into a pile. Their rails lead this way then that and lose themselves around lakes and hedgerows. Ironic, further, that their sense of parental duty ends rather abruptly at their own hearths. Why ask an Englishman to hold himself to account, when they cannot even decide what is for dinner? If there is no fish available, then it is doubtlessly the fault of some foreign schemer, Machiavellian and yet also somehow dullard who cannot conduct himself. You can’t ask a country to move on when they’re still stuck with Queens and Princes and Knights. When they stomp about in houses of Commons and Lords. In some dusty cupboard in Whitehall, some poor wretch is scrambling about for the Magna Carta to see what we should do next. And yet their contempt for the lands beyond their little sea is only overshadowed by the contempt they hold for one another.
A paradox soon forms. Certainty when it comes to the lives of the foreigners and their worth, doubt when it comes to their own. So what happens when those neat little squares dissolve with the decades? When the borders so carelessly established inevitably blur? At some point ‘those people’ and ‘our people’ start to become just ‘people,’ so who do we scapegoat then? And how do we decide who is parent and who is child? Who is civilised and who is barbaric? We are dangerously close to perceiving all people as equal.
So, for now, the best recourse is to further entrench the ancient and hallowed belief in the nation. The green and pleasant land is just so, a place for the English and none other. All that is good is English, from the clothes to the fish. Let us away with these interlopers, for they bring with them a history not easily forgotten and a reconciliation that we refuse to swallow. For to do so, and see our own evil, is to destroy England, the very idea of it. Cut a line around our island and say, farewell. This is England. Go away. No, we don’t want to hear it anymore. Someone put the little square of tea in the pot. English tea, grown on English soils. English sugar, grown on English farms.
But the crows do not fade back into the grey sky, no matter how long we ignore them.
Paddy Dobson
18th January 2021