AND THAT WILL BE ENGLAND GONE

 

The poet Philip Larkin wrote a poem called ‘Going, going’ in which he lamented the disappearance of an England he knew and loved. He saw the threat as a growing urbanisation, and commercial greed that would, to use a modern phrase, ‘tarmac over the countryside.’

His vision was of an England where beautiful country lanes, quiet churches and our most revered monuments would only be visible as pictures in books. I have stolen a line from his poem, but have a different view of who the enemy is, and I will try to explain my fears — and anger in future posts.

Picture a street in a market town, somewhere in the east of England. The houses were built in Victorian times. They are small and probably rather unlovely, but over the decades were home to working families, English people who worked hard, tried to keep themselves healthy and nourished. The adults probably worked in local factories or in the richly fertile fields around the town. It would be backbreaking work and not well paid. Pleasures were few and far between. It was, undoubtedly a very hard life.

The cornerstones of this world were, perhaps, the chapel, the pub and, for the children, the street itself, where games would be played. This was no picture book, idyll, however. Until the post WWII years, medical care was haphazard, sometimes expensive, and their were many diseases, such as diphtheria, ricketts and tuberculosis which shortened lives.

Let us visit that street now. What do we find? Is England gone? The answer to the second question is an unequivocal ‘yes”. What we will find is something so alien to English values and culture as to make us wonder where on God’s earth we have ended up.

Where, not that long ago, certainly in living memory, were 'proper' shops, we have a sordid collection of dispiriting places providing 'services' of one kind or another. What is worse - much, much worse, are the groups of unkempt and unshaven men standing in shop doorways, smoking and spitting, spilling out into the road, and staring aggressively at passing cars. If you are unwise enough to go down the street on foot, you will not hear a word of English.

Just in case anyone is reaching for their dog-eared copy of The Race Card, there is another unpleasant aspect to this street, and it is purely (if that is the right word) English. You can expect to see groups of local teenage boys, hoods over their heads, on their bicycles, going about their distinctly unlawful business - carrying and selling drugs for their bosses - who may well be the characters loitering outside the cafes, nail bars and phone shops.