Letters From London

  The Channel Tunnel is being declared open in a year that ought to lead the British and French to celebrate the warmer, more constructive side of their relationship: 1994. after all, marks both the ninetieth anniversary of the Entente Cordiale and the fiftieth anniversary of D day. But few remember what the former was—something to do with Edward VII and Parisian actresses?—while no one quite knows what to do about the latter. At first, the British government wanted to ignore it, preferring to wait for the anniversary of the war’s end in 1995; then they rushed off in the opposite direction and miscalculated the public mood by scheduling street parties and “light-hearted” civilian events such as Spam-fritter-cooking competitions. Not only did they offend veterans by emphasizing “celebration” rather than “commemoration;” they offended Dame Vera Lynn, the wartime warbler who is as much a national monument as Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Dame Vera, whose mere name sets off the words “There’ll be bluebirds over/The white cliffs of Dover” in the skull of anyone over the age of about twelve, even threatened to boycott the main jamboree in Hyde Park unless and until the government sorted its act out.

  As for the wider matter of Franco-British relations, it can’t be said that they are noticeably in better shape now than at any other point since D day. Churchill used to quip that the heaviest cross he had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine; later, de Gaulle took his revenge with a policy of committed Anglophobia. Since then, British Prime Ministers have repeatedly disappointed the French by being such lukewarm Europeans, while French Presidents have in return always seemed keener on smooching with their German counterparts than with their British ones. When François Mitterrand arrived in Canterbury for the official signing with Mrs. Thatcher of the Channel Tunnel deal in 1986, his Rolls-Royce was hit by an egg and the crowd chanted, “Froggy! Froggy! Froggy! Out! Out! Out!” For her part, Mrs. Thatcher became the first British Prime Minister to be booed on the streets of Paris in modern times.

  The bickering legacy of history is exacerbated on the British side by the poverty of geography. Britain has only France as its obvious neighbor, while France may divert itself with three other major cultures—Spain, Italy, and Germany. Beyond France’s southern shore lies Africa; beyond Britain’s northern shore lie the Faeroe Islands and many seals. France is what we first mean by Abroad; it is our primary exotic. Small wonder, then, that we think about the French much more than they think about us (they can even get their Anglo-Saxon culture elsewhere—from across the Atlantic if they prefer). The British are obsessed by the French, whereas the French are only intrigued by the British. When we love them, they accept it as their due; when we hate them, they are puzzled and irritated but regard it rightly as our problem not theirs.

  For instance, they can make some sense of our unfraternal posturing in matters of high politics, but not in matters of low journalism. As an English Francophile. I find myself frequently asked to explain the chauvinism, aggression, and contempt of our popular press. This Rottweiler tendency found its most complete recent expression on The Sun’s front page of November 1, 1990, exactly a month before the Tunnel breakthrough. Under the headline UP YOURS DELORS and the subhead “At midday tomorrow Sun readers are urged to tell the French fool where to stuf his ECU,” the lead news story was a sort of atavistic fart: “The Sun today calls on its patriotic family of readers to tell the feelthy French to FROG off! They INSULT us, BURN our lambs, FLOOD our country with dodgy food and PLOT to abolish the dear old pound. Now it’s your turn to kick them in the GAULS.” This crisp political analysis, under the amusing byline of the “Sun Diplomatic Staff,” was backed by a special collection of xenophobic jokes—“What do you call a Frenchman with an I.Q. of 150? A village;” “What do you call a Frenchman with twenty girlfriends? A shepherd”—all of which could be safely reapplied to any other hated nation. The Sun urged its readers to assemble the next day in public squares up and down the country and, as twelve o’clock struck, to turn toward Paris and shout “Up Yours Delors!” in order “to make sure the French feel the full blast of your anti-Frog feelings.”

  Neanderthal? Despicable? Pathetic? Certainly. And the fact that this rabble-rousing didn’t translate into street action—when the posh papers sent their journalists down to Trafalgar Square the next day they found only half a dozen Sun-inspired protesters—doesn’t make this sort of story “just a bit of harmless fun” or whatever. Such peddlings of coarse national myth and beery racial demonizing are base and self-damaging stuff They are also culturally baffling to the French. Their own tabloid press has traditionally had quite different preoccupations. The last time I took the Dover-Calais ferry, in mid-April, I picked up in Péronne the roughest equivalents to The Sun-Infos du Monde, Spéciale Dernière, and France Dimanche, Their lead stories were, respectively, about an eighty-four-year-old female Canadian bodybuilder who had just been elected Miss Muscle 1994, the supposedly “tragic” close to Mitterrand’s rule, and the news that Princess Caroline of Monaco had ordered her wedding dress. Other matters of top concern were a group of American schoolchildren with hair sprouting from their tongues, an Italian woman who eats spaghetti through her nose, the “tragic” life of actress Martine Carol, the newly discovered Camus novel, the haunting of Robert Wagner by the shade of Natalie Wood, the alleged pregnancy of Claudia Schiffer, and the possible remarriage of the singer Johnny Hallyday to one of his various previous wives. Each paper had one important item about Britain: a write-it-in-your-sleep rerun of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, a tale about the annual dinner of the Her Royal Majesty Dog Society (pooches dress up to eat a candlelit supper: menu attached, of course), and a bit of Kitty Kelley about the Duke of Edinburgh’s whispered mistresses. This latter story, needless to say, concentrated on the Duke’s erotic powers and the Queen’s silent heartbreak rather than on, say, any cultural or institutional hypocrisy. Gossip, snobbery, and sentimentality continue to rule this journalistic domain as ever before.

  Moreover, when the French do attempt to answer atavistic fart and lunkhead gibe with its equivalent, things never quite work out. Earlier this year, a French professor writing under the nationalistic pseudonym Chanteclair published a satirical English grammar called Pour en Finir avec l’Anglais. Its robust jocosity is well displayed in the list of Useful Phrases you might require in a British hotel (“Is the chambermaid included?” “There is a rat under the sheets. Is it normal?”) or at the grocer’s (“Your eggs are rotten,” “Your bananas are too green,” “Stick them up your ass,” “Look, my dog doesn’t want it”). But it is the sections on our national character which hold the attention and seek to justify the publisher’s wraparound claim for “The Book Which Is Scandalizing England!” We are, according to Chanteclair, “the most dirty, hypocritical and bestial of races,” a “brutal and drunken people” ruled by “puritan inhibitions.” We are taciturn to the point of mutism; our celebrated love of animals exists only because we “feel ourselves to be on the same level as them;” while our schooling gives us an enthusiasm for corporal punishment and sodomy. This is pretty much the usual charge sheet (former French Prime Minister Édith Cresson also publicly accused us of not sufficiently endorsing heterosexuality), though Chanteclair fails to add the popular French complaint that the British are shabbily dressed and have miserable underwear. Nor is stinginess mentioned. (This is a universal objection. Australians have joined our mythic avarice and unwashedness into a cute double insult: the British, they say, “keep their money under the soap.”)

  But the professor, while doing his best at mockery, lacks any real taste for trans-Channel eye gouging. Look, for instance, at the way his book begins: “I have always been an Anglophile and an Americanophile, to the point where those around me have often reproached me for it. But he who loves well also chastises well.” Hopeless: absolutely no viciousness in the fellow at all. Furthermore, he is constantly let down by a very French preference for the elaborate and elegant tease over the gross insult. Faced with the mystery of how the English manage to reproduce, the professo
r comes up with the following logical—indeed, Cartesian—solution. Yes, they are puritanical, and, yes, they are sodomites; however, they are also drunkards. Therefore, the answer must be as follows: drink helps them get over their puritanism about sex; yet drink also makes them woozy about aiming at the correct target, with the result that fecundation mistakenly ensues and the race continues to stagger on. QED. How could a sensible English person possibly take offense at this?

  The Channel Tunnel contains the world’s longest subaqueous stretch (twenty-four miles) and is an astounding piece of engineering. The rail link will spare us the harassments and mayhem of the airport and offer an attractively seamless transfer from London to the center of Paris or Brussels. And if we are in our car, Le Shuttle will gain us thirty or forty minutes in time over the Pride of Calais. But both will, I think, finally lose us something much more important: a sense of crossing the Channel. Since the day thirty-five years ago when the family Triumph Mayflower was hoisted from the Newhaven dockside into the depths of the Dieppe ferry, I have done this trip scores of times, but I still remember the sense of quiet awe instilled by that first occasion. After the laborious business of loading came the wide-eyed scamper around the deck, the anxious examination of lifeboat cradles whose key joints seemed encrusted with fifty-four layers of paint, the bass saxophone growls as the boat pulled out, the cross-shock as you eased beyond the protection of the breakwater, the opening whoosh of spray in the face, the discovery of those extra handles in the lavatories to stop you falling over or in, the silhouette of honking gulls against the receding Sussex coast. Next came the middle passage, when land was out of sight and the sea more serious, when the light began to change (looking north from the French side is more dramatic than looking south from the English), and when you waved at the rare passing ships as violently as if you were on the Raft of the Medusa. Finally came the slow approach of the French coast, a twist of apprehension in the stomach, a strip of unpopulated sand, a cliff-top church no doubt dedicated to the trawlerman’s protectress, anglers on the breakwater looking up as your swell annoyingly disturbed their floats, then the creak of damp ropes pulling tight, and the sudden anticipation of your first French smell—which turned out to be a mixture of coffee and floor disinfectant.

  This sense of transition, of a psychological gear change, a necessary pause, survived until quite recently, when a new generation of ferries actively undermined the experience. They were much larger for a start, yet paradoxically, the more passengers they carried, the smaller the deck space became: just a couple of thin strips as a walkway for claustrophobes. So your sense of the sea now came double-glazed. Second, these big boats were much more stable, which reduced the amount of vomiting. No doubt this helped ticket sales, but vomiting (and the sight of others doing it) was an important endorser of transition. Third, the ferries became entertainment centers and emporia: things nowadays are not so much shipshape as shop-shape. The modern cross-Channel passenger no more voyages to enjoy the sea than the illegal gambler goes to an offshore casino to admire coral growth. Ferry companies routinely offer one-pound return tickets to standby foot passengers, and as Hoverspeed spokesman Nick Stevens put it, “The crossing of the Channel becomes immaterial. It is an alternative to the High Street.” The boats have turned into thrumming bazaars crammed with bustling, whooping discount seekers: put the concept of the bargain next to the concept of booze and the British (as Chanteclair would understand) become overexcited.

  So the experience of transition has deteriorated in recent years. You do not have to be anti-European or xenophobic to like the idea of the frontier. On the contrary: it seems to me that the more Europe becomes integrated commercially and politically, the more each nation should confirm its cultural separateness. (The French were quite right in the recent GATT negotiations to hold out for the “cultural exception” in the matter of government subsidies: that is why they have a film industry, and we have only a collection of cinematic individuals.) Frontiers are therefore useful. It is good to be reminded that over here is the place you are leaving, where you come from, while over there is the place you are going to, where you don’t come from, and where things are done differently. It’s one thing to know this, another to be made to feel it. There wasn’t much to be enjoyed about border crossing in the old Eastern Europe, but one thing they always did well was make you feel alien. You do not come from here, the men in strange uniforms implied, and because of that we view you with suspicion: you are guilty until proved innocent, and here you will not find that variety of warm beer you like to drink at home. I remember crossing from Poland into Russia with a vanload of fellow students in the midsixties, and being compelled by the Russian border guards to destroy the tiny quantity of fresh fruit and vegetables that we had with us: in other words, our dinner. It seemed pointless and bullying at the time, but in retrospect had a grim usefulness: no, it said, this is no longer Poland, the rules are different here. At about this time, a friend of mine took a holiday in Albania. Puritanical by nature and not unsympathetic to the Tiranë regime, he deliberately had his hair cut before departure so that he would not be judged a decadent hippie. I had never seen his hair so short; but at the entry point from Yugoslavia they took my friend off the coach, sat him in a wooden chair by the customs post, shaved off what crinal remnants they could find, and charged him a few farthings for the put-down.

  There is not much chance of getting a cheap haircut out of Eurotunnel. Indeed, from now on your passage from England to France will be sweetly unpunctuated unless, say, you are a Rastafarian smoking a joint the size of a baguette and driving a car with Colombian number plates. Otherwise, your journey will go like this: you turn up at the Cheriton terminal whenever you like, buy a ticket at the toll booth, pass through British and French customs with a couple of flaps of your passport, and drive onto one of the double-decker shuttle carriages. Your thirty-five-minute translation to France will be an austere experience: no smoking, no bar, no shops, no duty-free, though you will be allowed to leave your car and visit one of the lavatories, which are placed in every third carriage. It will also be an austere experience spiritually: first reports indicate that your ears may not even pop to remind you of where you are. You will not see the White Cliffs of Dover as you leave or the Bassin du Paradis in Calais Harbor as you arrive; indeed, you will not spot water at any time. Then you will emerge into a French marshaling yard and roar off, unhindered by any authority, toward the autoroute and that rented holiday cottage.

  In 1981, when the Humber Bridge was opened, a cantata was performed with words by the poet Philip Larkin. In his closing stanza he described the bridge as

  Reaching for the world, as our lives do,

  As all lives do, reaching that we may give

  The best of what we are and hold as true:

  Always it is by bridges that we live.

  This is what most people feel, or would like to feel. A grand projet should inspire, should stun us into reassessing our place and purpose in the world. But perhaps the Channel Tunnel has come too late to do this. Imagine if it had been built a century or more ago, before Blériot flew the Channel, before radio and television. Then it would have been a marvel: it might even have changed history, instead of merely adjusting it. What we have now, though, is the ultimate nineteenth-century project completed just before we enter the twenty-first century. So it is a convenience, something to be thankful for, as impressive as a fine new sweep of motorway. And it will still be there on that distant, perhaps apocryphal, day when the British finally get over their complicated and self-destructive feelings about the French, when they decide that difference does not logically entail inferiority, and when Little Englanders, tabloid journalists, and John-of-Gaunters line up at Folkestone with a chanson in their hearts to bellow invitingly down the Tunnel’s mouth, “Froggy! Froggy! Froggy! In! In! In!”

  June 1994

  15

  Left, Right, Left, Right: The Arrival of Tony Blair

  On July 14, the country
’s public elite gathered at Westminster Abbey for the memorial service of the Labour leader John Smith. Foreign ambassadors, church leaders, an ex-Prime Minister or two, and the nomenklatura of all major parties: an IRA wet dream. It was a sweltering day: paramedics and the British Red Cross were deployed in force, on red alert for the toppling of elderly pols. But the Abbey was cool inside, and made somehow cooler by the playing of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. There is something about an English brass band, when not in jolly-oompah mode, that induces a powerful and rather stately melancholy. It is the sonic equivalent of damp hillsides, mill chimneys, and the smell of soot. As Mrs. Smith and her three daughters were led beneath the crossing to their seats, the band was playing “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations. There was an added political poignancy about the music: the Conservatives, during their pit-closure program, finished off the Grimethorpe Colliery, and all that remains of it now is the after-echo of its band.

  Smith’s death, at fifty-five, had been signaled by a heart attack five years earlier, but even so it took people by surprise. Party leaders, like orchestra conductors, tend to live a long time, the proximity to power seeming to act like royal jelly. When Smith died last May, no fewer than four previous Labour leaders, including two Prime Ministers from the Jurassic sixties and seventies, were still alive. The active mourning even extended to the Tory press, whose praise for a man it had greedily reviled at the last election was quite extravagant. This wasn’t just hypocrisy, or good manners, or political canniness (raise up your dead opponent the better to diminish your living ones). The death of a politician before he can come into his expected power has a particular emotional effect. The leader-in-waiting who never becomes leader is the man who never disabuses us of our expectations, as all the others did; his death gives us a permit for idealism, which we transfer back onto him.