Feature
The unbearable lightness of being English
by Kapka Kassabova
This year, a record 191,000 people migrated from Britain - many to live in New Zealand, where they now form the biggest immigrant group; 25% of our incoming migrants. So, is it the "English disease" that they are escaping from?
Across from my flat, a homeless man called Steve sits on the steps of a bank, drawing tattoo designs. A few coins get thrown in his direction, and by the end of the day he has eaten at least once. We are, after all, in the Garden of England, as the county of Kent is known in this green and pleasant land.
In the daytime, Rochester High St sells its antiques and vegetables. But come Friday night, it turns into what’s known as the “Rochester mile” – a string of 12 pubs that the natives take it upon themselves to visit serially, in the time-honoured English tradition of binge drinking. When the pubs shut at 11.00pm, the drinking tribes charge out like wounded bulls, piss in the alleyways, wrestle with the rubbish bags, smash bottles on the pavement, break the occasional shop window, and do a lot of braying. A few weeks ago, Steve was attacked by a drinking pack. They broke his jaw and left.
This puts Kiwi drinking behaviour into perspective. We are heavy drinkers, true, but not generally given to violence and vandalism. Looking at England’s apocalyptic drinking scene and the social malaise it represents, it is edifying to trace back the roots of Pakeha culture and think not only about what we are as New Zealanders today, but also what we might have been had our ancestors stayed put in England.
It is said that Europeans drink to enhance consciousness, while the English drink to annihilate it. Alcoholic aggression is one of the most distinctive and deplored features of English social life. The Economist called it “grotesque behaviour” and newspaper columns lament “the English disease”. And yet it is treated as something foul but permanent, like the weather: something you can’t do much about except avoid. When a drunk, carbuncular teenager in my street pissed in the doorway of a charity shop one evening, his mates cheering, I challenged them and nearly got a bloody nose. By an unwritten law they own the street. Somehow, over time, English streets have been usurped by half-formed bullies whose boredom mates with self-hate to become destructive anger.
Treating the English disease, however, is as difficult as avoiding it. One suggested treatment, which is part of the Labour government’s campaign to eradicate “yob culture”, is to remove the early closing time of pubs and have them open late into the night, the European way. This, the argument goes, will ease the pressure of last orders and limit bingeing. Nonsense, the counter-argument goes: it will only prolong the misery. Look at Ireland and Scotland and their liberal liquor laws – drunks rage all night. Still, although the Scots, Irish and Welsh aren’t exactly teetotallers, alcoholic aggression thrives among English males more than in any other nation of the United Kingdom. In Dublin and small-town Ireland, for instance, the night streets are alive with buskers and bands play in the pubs. It’s loud, but non-threatening.
So the problem runs deeper than pub regulations. In fact it runs into a sea of particularly English woes, including the post-colonial variety. There is tacit tolerance in England for laddishness and anti-social behaviour, rooted in the working-class tradition of loutish males moving in packs and literally pissing on all things “clever” and foreign (hence the “Krauts”, “Frogs” and other delightful references to neighbours). As an English friend in New Zealand put it, “The working class have always prided themselves on their savagery and ignorance – they think it’s charming.” He comes from a working-class background, by the way.
The ugly face of English hooliganism was most recently displayed at the Euro 2004 football championship in Portugal. English streets were festooned with the red and white flag of St George. Pasty youths wrapped in the flag walked up and down the streets, yelling “Eng-er-land, Eng-er-land”, and forcing elderly men to kick giant inflated footballs “for England”. Meanwhile, their brothers in Portugal bellowed on TV, “If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be Krauts” – a statement both pathetic and historically inaccurate.
Here, we come back to the woes. The English soccer team is the only one unattached to a nation state. It is, however, attached to a desperation to hold onto something worthwhile. The culture of hooliganism abroad and yobbishness at home is the last refuge for the culturally dispossessed, the downsized, the in-secure. A very small guy driving a very large car comes to mind. England is today less than the sum of its parts – in fact, it is just a part of what it has created, almost lost within its expansionist achievement. It is a neat postcolonial irony that the nation that created the greatest Empire since Rome by exporting Englishness has been, for decades, in the throes of an identity crisis, or postcolonial cringe. Having a great past is not easy – how do you live up to it? As an English teacher I know put it, “We have the curse of superiority.”
New Zealand-Aotearoa might have two names, but at least they refer to the same thing. The English live in a country with five accepted, but not interchangeable names: England, Britain, Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the more geographic British Isles. Each of these is problematic for different sets of its inhabitants, with the exception of Britain, which omits the cringing “Great” and remains almost all-inclusive.
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