St George’s Day

There is a country I carry inside me. It is not quite the country on the maps.

It lies somewhere between the chalk downs and the memory of chalk downs, between the actual Blackmore Vale, that deep, secretive bowl of England where Thomas Hardy pressed his ear to the ground and heard the heartbeat of something very old, and the Blackmore Vale of the mind, where William Barnes dreamed of Maidens, which is greener, somehow, and always at that particular angle of late afternoon light that makes the hedgerows glow like stained glass. Between the real Cranborne Chase, with its ancient silence and its deer moving like rumours through the barrows, and the Chase one first encountered in a book, or in a half-remembered drive as a child when someone said look and you looked and something lodged itself in you, permanently, like a splinter of beauty.

Today is St George’s Day, and I find myself, as I do each year, trying to say something honest about England. The difficulty is that England resists honest speech. She is shy about herself, always has been. Other nations wear their hearts on their flags; England tucks hers away somewhere inside, in the second drawer down, beneath the tea towels, next to the tin of biscuits you’ve been meaning to open since Christmas.

And yet.

I think of a chapel, morning prayers, the kind of chapel that smells of floor polish and rain-damp coats, and a organ, slightly out of tune, always slightly out of tune, and a choir of children who don’t quite know what they’re singing yet, not really, not in the way they will understand it later, decades later, when the hairs rise on the back of the neck and something catches in the throat. There’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago, and there it is, the second verse, the one that does the damage, the one that speaks not of trumpets and standards but of something quieter and older, love that asks no questions and makes no boasts, love that is simply and stubbornly there. I have never got through it without my eyes pricking as an adult, and I have stopped being embarrassed about this.

The melody is the golden thread. Follow it back and it takes you somewhere, not to a date in a history book, not to a battle or a treaty, but to a feeling, a disposition, a way of standing in relation to the world that is harder to name than it is to recognise. Liberty, for want of a better word, though the English version of liberty is not a grand abstraction to be theorised about in cafés. It is local, specific, awkward, inconvenient, expressed less in declarations than in the quietly mutinous refusal to be entirely told what to do. It is Magna Carta negotiated in a field in Surrey because everyone was thoroughly fed up. It is habeas corpus. It is the jury of twelve ordinary people sitting in judgement on the state and occasionally, gloriously, finding it wanting.

The golden thread runs through the churches too, and today of all days that seems worth saying. Through the towers and spires that punch up through the morning mist in every county of England, not triumphantly, not aggressively, but persistently, like a question that refuses to be withdrawn. I have stood in Dorset churchyards in November and in June and the effect is the same: a silencing, a reminder of proportion, a sense of being located in something much larger than oneself. The Norman tower, the medieval glass, the flagstones worn smooth by the feet of people whose names are now only legible on the walls inside if you squint, all of it saying, quietly: you are not the first, you will not be the last, do try to be adequate to the moment.

The bells. The bells are the thing. There is no sound in the English soundscape quite like church bells carried on a wind across fields, and when you hear them they are doing what they have always done: summoning. Not commanding, the English do not respond well to commands, as various kings have discovered at considerable personal cost, but inviting. Come. Gather. Remember what you are. Remember what this place is, what it has contrived, over a very long time, to be.

What it has contrived to be is this: a place of extraordinary, almost accidental richness. The common law, grown from below like something organic, from precedent and custom and the quiet accumulation of ordinary cases, the idea that law is not handed down from above by sovereign will but earned, argued, tested, revised. Parliamentary democracy, which we invented and then spent several centuries apologising for exporting. This language, this mongrel, scavenging, irresistible language that has borrowed from everyone and been diminished by no one, that can be the King James Bible in one register and the Shipping Forecast in another, and both are beautiful, and both are unmistakeably themselves. The music. The painting. The literature. Turner’s light, Elgar’s longing, the particular English melancholy that is not quite despair because it knows, somewhere, that the lark will rise again above the hill.

I am not blind to England’s failures. No honest lover is blind to the failures of the beloved. The capacity for cruelty at distance. The historical preference for not examining too directly the uncomfortable aspects of one’s past. The class system, which we have been abolishing continuously for approximately two hundred years without quite finishing the job. I know all of this. Love that is worth anything is not deluded. It is clear-eyed and still chooses.

Which is, I think, what the bells are asking of us. Not to be vainglorious. Not to be complacent. Not to confuse the inheritance with the achievement, the inheritance is the gift, yes, but the achievement is what we do with it, here, now, in what is by any measure a difficult and disorienting moment. The summons is to be adequate stewards of something that took a very long time to make and could be unmade, as all things can be unmade, by insufficient attention.

Dorset on an April morning. The chalk is white beneath the grass. The lanes are so narrow that the hedges brush both windows, and the cow parsley is already high, and somewhere above the hill a lark is doing the thing larks do, that improbable, sustained rising note, as if the bird has decided that the sky is not quite tall enough and is in the process of extending it. Something in the chest lifts with it. Across the vale from Hambledon, just audible, the bells of a church I cannot see are carrying on the wind, doing their ancient, necessary work.

The choir is still singing. Follow the thread.

I have been given, through no merit of my own, the extraordinary luck of being from this place, this reticent, complicated, self-deprecating, quietly magnificent place. I am grateful for it with the same inarticulate gratitude with which I am grateful for the people I love: not because they are perfect, but because they are mine, and I am theirs, and the belonging is not something I can fully explain, only honour.

Happy St George’s Day.