On Being English

I used to call him 'Winston'. It amused my girlfriend at the time, which was no doubt partly why I did it. The other reason was because it helped me to express my disdain for my employer.

It was only a part-time little job while I was studying, but in the summer it involved up to 12 or 15 hours a week, when Winston's garden needed the most attention. I cut the grass, pruned trees, cut the hedges, weeded and planted the borders. It was a beautiful location; the lovely curvaceous fields of the South Downs were the other side of the hedges. I witnessed the rituals and seasons of rural life, and then returned to my home in cosmopolitan Brighton. I visited London regularly, departing either from Brighton or the clean platform and hanging baskets of Lewes station - winner of an award, I seem to recall, for a best-kept station.

Many years later, I remember those summers with nostalgic fondness. This is not the English summer of childhoods, which seem irretrievably hot, and to last forever. I was not a child but a young adult, yet those long hours are tinged with sensuous pleasure, as I was in sweat, grass and dust, working in shorts and with no shirt, sometimes until sunset.

Initially my employer and his wife would offer me lunch with them, which was convenient. I cannot clearly remember the transition from this, to providing my own lunch. It was announced by some kind of evasive mumbling, avoiding what the real issue was: the strain felt by all three of us, sitting at that table. From that time onwards, I brought my own sandwiches.
At the bottom of the lane was the Chancellor of Sussex University. Winston was occasionally invited to functions like lawn parties, where there might be visiting overseas diplomats, politicians or academic management. It was a huge house, which, according to Winston, was appropriate for his position. Literally at the other end of the lane was a more rambling house with a group of students, at least one of whom was obviously and publicly recognised as homosexual. He looked like Tintin which was, I realise now, probably deliberate.
Between these two houses there was a retired military man, who painted white the stones bordering his front garden, as if it were parade ground. On one side of him was a council house - surprisingly - which probably housed normal people. On the other side was a house of three elderly women, supporting each other with respective roles. I did some gardening for both the Major and the elderly ladies, but not as regularly as I did for Winston.
The ladies' house was like Winston's - made of old Sussex stone, dark inside and surrounded by classic English garden. I think one or two hundred years ago, they were accommodation for farm workers. One of the ladies had been a professional gardener in her working life, and it was she that I assisted. I forget their names. Something like 'Millie', 'Elsie' and 'Rose', and that is what I shall call them now. Rose was the gardener, Elsie baked the biscuits and cakes every afternoon (delicious, old-fashioned recipes), and Millie was partially disabled and had to be looked after by the others. Once or twice, I was asked to assist with moving her out of her wheelchair, perhaps into the stair-lift. They were financially comfortable, widowed or never married, and I think two of them were sisters and the other a cousin or close friend. They involved themselves in various civic and charitable enterprises and, while I would not have used the same language, agreed with Winston that they were 'grand old ladies'.
Hostility with the students at the end of the lane was more overt. I cannot recall what the particular issues were; possibly there was once something to do with an untaxed or abandoned car. But it was less about issues than attitude, outlook, and youth: the students had it, and Winston did not. For someone who had lived his life in a sanctioned dictatorial fashion, it must have been difficult for him to accept this inequality where he was the inferior. He surprised me once by suggesting that an ideal living arrangement would be some kind of grouped housing incorporating the young and the elderly together. But what he was thinking of was the former assisting the latter. Winston had his own family; I met one of his sons once, and was not impressed. He was a pious and sanctimonious vicar, totally meek and submissive in the presence of his father

He could not have articulated it himself since he was also part of that generation - but the ladies embodied an old fashioned, community-minded Englishness that is now almost extinct. Most of those people have probably died as have others of their generation, formerly scattered around the country in pockets of genteel domesticity.

So, we were no longer having lunch together. But Winston (Churchill) evidently took some pleasure in my company in small doses, as an audience for his reminiscences and various ramblings. I was mostly passive, without strong opinion. I objected to his views on Tianneman Square, that the protesters deserved to be disciplined and shot, but I said nothing. I recognised the truth in his imperious pronouncement that military decisions sometimes involve calculated loss to save a greater number, but thought he lacked humanity and relished the imperious power that could underlie such decisions.

I was baffled and intrigued why he confided in me that a Foreign Office minister with heavy responsibility and considerable power wanted and needed, at the end of the day, "sexual relief". The cultural and generation gap between he and I was immense, but for some reason he was comfortable telling me this, when it was obviously a kind of nostalgic justification for his previous years, spent for the most apart from his wife. I was also uncomfortable with the remarks, because I could imagine what kind of liaison he was dreaming about. Undoubtedly, the relationship would have been similar to his inspections of the native people of Malaysia and Singapore, over whom he presided with officious gravity. He told me about his inspections as well, and I could see the 'sexual relief' he was referring to would have involved an exploitative abuse of power in a distant corner of the fortunately defunct, so-called British Empire.

Winston knew he was elderly, with declining powers. He tried to keep his mind active with games and puzzles, and professed an interest in moving in to the centre of Lewes rather than living on the edge of the Downs. It would, he said, give easier access to shops and the station, as he grew increasingly infirm. He had interests in London; I never knew or enquired what they were, but undoubtedly they were something to do with an old-boys Foreign Office network. I could imagine his cronies sitting around in a dark and leather chaired establishment, all reluctant to concede their former power and glory to the decline of old age and modernity.

Winston had a strained relationship to the other old folk in the lane. There was sometimes an underlying hostility, as when he told me about a former conversation when he had snubbed someone on an educational issue. Her husband had gone to Cambridge (and his grandfather was Joseph Rowntree - suggesting enormous inherited wealth), and Winston had gone to Birmingham University, I think it was. Winston remarked "I only went to a red-brick university", suggesting the full stuffy weight of class-based, hierarchical arrogance that hangs over this country like its characteristic grey clouds. Winston resented his apparent lack of early privilege, forgetting his later lifestyle.
The end of this little story came with a holiday. I was going to Greece; Winston resented this and more or less demanded that I should stay and do his gardening. I am not naturally argumentative or resistant, but this was clearly and unacceptably outrageous. For the first and last time, I expressed anger towards this unpopular little man, the anachronism who enjoyed referring to John Major as "our Prime Minister" as if he were a distant colleague he had not yet met. Winston began by attacking me; when I retorted and expressed my own anger he instantly switched into pious gentility, from which stance he must have thought himself morally superior and in control.
I doubt if Winston is alive now. I wonder who is living in those dark but lovely old houses in the Downs, just 45 minutes from London. He may be buried in the quiet Lewes graveyard, or perhaps in a London plot alongside some of his former cronies. His headstone will probably say the usual things, loved father etc., possibly with some reference to his former glory: not Winston, but Bill.