December 2009
I travel abroad under a single passport but am probably entitled to a second, my mother having been born in the British Isles from which she and her family emigrated in 1931 to New York, where my grandfather Philpotts worked for a time on Wall Street. On the paternal side, my family traces its ancestry in America from the founding of the Plymouth colony in 1620. I have thus often felt, if not like a man without a country, then at least like a man with two countries: Great Britain and the United States. During the War of Independence, many of our American ancestors were Tories, some of whom moved to Canada either during the war or after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown (which may or may not go to show that a tendency to support lost causes is an inherited one). Growing up, I developed a keen sense of the United States as the direct racial and cultural extension of Britain. My mother emphasized to her children our partially British identity; her influence was compounded by a stay of almost a year in England when my sister and I were in our early adolescence. Even so, I have always thought of myself as being quintessentially American--until the past couple of decades, as the United States grew increasingly less British and I became more conscious once again of my own British roots and inheritance.
For decades, busy with my explorations in the American West where I moved in 1979, I never visited a foreign country, excepting Mexico. But ten years ago I discovered the Continent and began traveling every year to France and Italy, always aware of the misty green presence of England across the Channel. Last month I finally returned there, after an absence of 47 years. I’m glad I did that, and I expect to visit Britain again soon. I cannot deny, however, that the experience was a profound shock: a brutal introduction to the contemporary reality of the land of my ancestors, a reality that seems only to confirm the present condition, and future, of my native country as well.
In our first twenty-four hours in London I heard hardly a word of English spoken, on the streets or anywhere else. Partly this had to do with a miscalculation. My wife and I had planned originally to stay at the Hotel Rembrandt in Knightsbridge. But when we learned that hotel policy demanded advance payment in full for seven nights, non-reimbursable in the event of our being unable to make the trip by rail from Paris to London, we booked a room in the Shaftesbury International on Inverness Terrace, north of Bayswater Road.
Inverness Terrace is a 10- or 15-minute walk from Portsea Place, where I lived with my family in 1962. Then, Bayswater was still an upper-middle class address. Today, vast swaths of the 19th-century row houses have been turned into inexpensive hotels and flophouses for immigrants, largely Turks, Poles, and Central Asians. The neighborhood restaurants were, nearly all of them, bad ethnic restaurants—Italian, Chinese, Indian—crowded with foreign tourists and a scattering of unaware British culinary naifs. In a cocktail lounge in the hotel across the street from the Shaftesbury, the Polish barmaid had no notion what the purpose of the bottle of Beefeater gin on her backbar was. Here, in the birthplace of the fabled dry martini, this girl was at a total loss as to how to concoct one! She’d lived in England four months already, she admitted, and could hardly wait to get home. I thought of her later, while reading a story in the Telegraph stating that Britain sends 24 million pounds sterling annually to Poland for the support of Polish children who have a parent working in the United Kingdom. (Poland offers child support also, but the UK is more generous.) The Shaftesbury staff were friendly for the most part, but all of them were linguistically challenged in English, and the porter was unable to speak the language at all.
On the afternoon of our arrival from Paris on the Eurostar we walked over to Portsea Place, expecting the worst. Connaught Square was trim and elegant; I saluted a pair of bobbies standing guard in front of the row house recently purchased by Tony Blair. Directly around the corner Portsea row, formerly so handsome, is now shabby and wan looking. But none of the reports I’d had in past years had prepared me for the new Edgeware Road, running northwest from the Marble Arch: the crowds of women in burquas and headscarves, the three-foot-tall hookahs on the tables in the outdoor cafes, the Levantine grocery shops, sweets shops, and butcher shops—with here and there a fugitive English person ducking through the human press, looking as if he’d been dropped on an alien planet. It seems an open secret in Britain that this is the result of a deliberate scheme on the part of Prime Ministers Blair and Gordon Brown, concocted for reasons best known to themselves.
Rome and Paris—for all the attention paid to riotous Moors in the faubourgs and banlieues of the French capital--are urbane cities still, cities where well-dressed Frenchmen and chic women remain commonplace. Modern London, by contrast, has largely succeeded in taking the urbane out of the urban, except in the very best neighborhoods—Belgravia, Mayfair, Westminster, West End, the City. There you may still find the English: the women in tweeds walking their pedigreed dogs, the men in tailored suits carrying their briefcases and rolled umbrellas; the pubs selling steak-and-ale pies around the corner from the elegant restaurants and hotel lounges; the barking but crisply intelligible sound of the King’s English, English as English is meant to be spoken. Everywhere else there are the immigrants and, away from the immigrant ghettos, the foreign tourists, drawn by a favorable exchange rate and delivered by the machinery of industrial tourism: clotted masses of Poles and East Europeans, some Italians, a good many French, and, above all, Asians, Asians, Asians, jostling one another on the narrow London sidewalks and crowding into the department stores, as if Harrod’s on the Brompton Road and Hamley’s Toy Store on Regent Street were historic tourist attractions, like the Tower of London or Buckingham Palace. As for the Palace iself, as with London as a whole, I only wonder how the Royal Family can bear it. An unforgettable image was the sight of a Pakistani boy being photographed by his father waving the Pakistani flag outside the Palace gate, with the armed sentry marching toward his sentry box in the immediate background. By the time Prince Charles becomes King—if indeed he ever does become King—he may be left with no country to reign over. That, or he will wake up one morning to find himself King of the Land of Oz.
Westminster and the Houses of Parliament were no improvement. Only in the Visitors’ Gallery, where we watched David Cameron, the Tory leader, debate the Prime Minister on the floor of the House of Commons, did we enjoy something of a respite from the foreign throng, for whom the Mother of Parliaments is of far less interest than Marks & Spencer and the huge ferris wheel that presently despoils the view of the Thames across the river from Big Ben.
It would seem a fair trade that, once the British gave up their Empire, the Empire should have given up Great Britain. That, of course, is not how the world works. When the United States is forced at last, by political corruption and the economic devastation it has brought upon itself, to relinquish its own empire, does anyone believe the Arabs, the Mexicans, the Ghanians, the Somalis, the Lebanese, the Chinese, and the Koreans will relinquish America?
I suppose London would not have come quite as such a blow had I only visited Washington, D.C. more recently. ###
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