CLANCY SIGAL
133
In a way, I love it. "Thatcherism" - really, Wilson/Callaghanism
with a blue rinse - exploded long-unused energies in me. I'm one of the
few socialists I know who had an excellent business-school training and
survived in a cut-throat commercial game. I actually enjoy corporate life
... up to a point, Lord Copper. But not when it radicalizes British life
to where there doesn't seem to be a truly significant difference between
what I left in America and what I came here for.
Don't mistake me. I'm not one of those American tourists who
wearisomely insist Britain is more "civilized" than the U. S. A. I've met
more lphysical violence here - from police, strangers and even friends -
than in America. Right from the start, when I got off the boat at
Southampton to an unofficial TGWU dockers' strike ("Carry yer own,
mate - wotcha think, we're yer coolies?") to my first demo at Trafalgar
Square, a head kicking from a winklepickered Mosleyite, I knew that the
boxer 'Enry Cooper more than Winnie the Pooh was likely to be a
household god. This is an unarmed, not a nonviolent, country.
So what kept me here? During my first crisis winter of no central
heating and caff bangers that should have been left buried at Stonehenge,
I fell in love with the thing we most despise today - seediness, the war–
wounded shabbiness, the unhurried, undramatic sense of getting-on-with–
it despite. Britain in the late 1950s looked pretty worn down but was
surprisingly efficient.
Work got done, things got mended, with an unself-conscious dis–
patch that now seems quaint. It didn't look "modern," God knows I
hated the inconveniences, but buses and trains moved, 999 calls were an–
swered, shopkeepers fumbled and mumbled in their musty backrooms but
found the item you wanted. I'm no antiquarian. I don't like England
because it's an historical museum. Dirt and squalor masquerading as
"tradition" repel me. But I'm hopelessly addicted to things that work -
and Britain's streets once were swept.
I value Little England. For some, this means gin and tonic on the
verandah at sunset, Lord Kitchener's accusing finger and Liverpool F.
C.
supporters having a murderous go at the wogs at Heyse!. It's that, all
right. But small-country patriotism doesn't have to be a right-wing
monopoly.
It
can be provincial, even insular, suspicious of outsiders and
belligerent toward intellectuals like me. But there's something else to it.
Call
it resistance or stroppiness: what makes life here positive, regenera–
tive, alive. I wish I could say it was simple love of country except that
that's pretty complicated nowadays. I happen to feel idiotically patriotic
about both the U . S. A. and Britain. Remembrance Sunday has become
as important to me as my own Memorial Day. I felt bloody foolish the
other day being the only person in Regents Park to pause in silence
when, suddenly, from the direction of the Zoo, "Last Post" was sounded
