Flying Free (2 page)

Above all, however, this was the year when I became self-aware and England failed to recover the Ashes, even though John Edrich, Geoff Boycott, Colin Cowdrey, Tom Graveney, John Snow, Alan Knott, Derek Underwood et al., plainly the greatest cricketers EVER, all performed prodigies.

1968 was also the year in which I discovered Europe.

We went to Portugal, which was obviously the best country EVER.

My father had decided that what we really needed to make everything better again was a couple of weeks on the Algarve.

I had not flown before – nor even visited Heathrow before, nor knowingly visited London – so even the airport was an exotic foreign country. There were girls with architecturally unstable cairns of hair and black eyes that looked like Dennis the Menace's dog Gnasher. They wobbled about the terminal on smoked-glass egg-timer legs.

‘Lady Madonna' and Gary Puckett's ‘Young Girl' were bouncing out of the PA system, Viscounts and Stratocasters whining on the tarmac outside. It was all so…
modern
. I ate my first Wimpy hamburger and chips washed down with Coke. I vomited for the first time in – well, really quite near – a public convenience.

This was living.

In Portugal, there were old women dressed all in black, stray dogs on the streets, goats on the hillsides and young women dressed in almost nothing on the beaches.

I was four. Food still had precedence over young women. There was lots of garlic – still then a culture shock inspiring jokes about bad breath and kissing and displays of gastronomic machismo. A steak proved to be fish – fresh tuna, which was alarming but good – and they had vicious trick sausages which pretended to be the bland, soft things provided by Messrs Walls but turned out to be chewy and to bite back.

There were also ingenious sardines which had somehow escaped their tins. The correct masculine thing here was to crunch them, bones, burned skins and all, whilst females and infants grimaced and said ooh.

I already knew my role. Because my dad, my glamorous, beautifully dressed, funny, generous, adventurous dad – well, what else could all those prolonged absences mean save adventure? – was my model, I crunched the
skin and bones and said that it was good, and was rewarded for being like him with some strange lemony biscuits which seemed to be called lavatories.

I said that they were good too. In the shiny black-and-white picture, my mother is vaguely smiling amidst all the laughter as she sees another potential ally going over to the other side.

I was not only talking by now, I was talking volubly. In fact, I considered a moment not filled with piping Farageisms wasted – unless Brian Johnston or John Arlott were doing the soundtrack, in which case a respectful silence was required.

The retired Indian Army neighbours, therefore, the gardeners at Down House, the village idiot (yes, every village had one back then and provided casual employment for him or her before the state tidied them into its solicitous bins) and every kind old lady foolish enough to ask me how I was, all heard at length my views on ‘abroad', on which I was now an expert.

Abroad (except for sausages which were just mean) was good.

I have never changed my views on that. I have spent a huge part of my life – working and leisure – on the mainland of Europe, enjoying the food, the company and the diverse cultures and exploring the churches, the battlefields and the people.

It would be many years before I began to explore Britain with the same enthusiasm and so came to marvel at the astounding diversity of culture, landscape and language contained within our own shores.

And that, of course, has been another major factor in my battle against the growth of the European soviet – the love for Europe's astoundingly rich diversity and the respect for each cultural phenomenon, each custom, rite, dialect, foodstuff and cultural or genetic characteristic which has grown naturally from its very special and very peculiar environment. Each, it seemed to me, deserves to be protected no less than each local species of flora and fauna.

They are already threatened by globalisation of course – my Lisbon airport now boasts a McDonald's and a Pizza Hut and offers Lacoste,
Swatch, Tie Rack and all the other usual brand-names which render it indistinguishable from any other airport in the world. That, until a major upheaval, is an unfortunate and inexorable fact of life.

But as every other man-made union of nations in the world fragments agonisingly back into its constituent parts – the USSR, the states of the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia (even Italy's union now hangs in the balance and I am none too sanguine about the United States); as our own home nations (Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Cornwall…) assert their autonomy and demand self-determination; as even the smallest regions promote the integrity of their home-grown foodstuffs and identities amidst the homogenising tide – now a strange group of bureaucrats and outdated idealists seek to smear them all into one featureless landscape.

They call it a ‘level playing-field'.

Just think of that.

Mountains, hills, moors, pastures, deserts, coastlines, fishing-grounds – all levelled (and marked with ‘No Dogs', ‘No Smoking' and probably ‘No Heavy Petting' signs) so that orderly men in cities can play a silly game according to man-made rules.

I knew even then that I wanted diversity to thrive.

I did not know – I would not have believed – that anyone would try to take it away from me.

I should have known better.

In 1971, a whimsical little ditty called ‘Imagine' appeared. It preached the hateful message of globalisation by imperialistic homogenisation. ‘If we can get everyone to believe the same things and feel no loyalties, wouldn't life be sweet?' was its Victorian missionary's message.

No matter that, if someone had penned a song called ‘Let's get rid of all species except rabbits', or ‘Who needs any food but McDonalds or any language but English?' it would have been quite properly derided, this song was to become an almost universal mission-statement to a war-weary world.

You know the one. It begins quite promisingly. The piano goes ‘gurdle gurdle gurdle gurdle dum'. Then the dirge-like singing starts and the
sugar-coated
imperialism kicks in.

Get rid of all your diverse human ambitions and passions (and so, presumably, art and personal loves and standards). Get rid of all your nations, possessions, faiths and loyalties (and so, presumably, families, languages and diversity in habitat, custom and culture), get rid, in short, of your identities and of everything that makes you human, and everything will suddenly be oh, so simple and lovely.

The man might just as well have said, ‘Why not kill yourselves while you're at it? That way you can be sure of peace.'

It reminds me of the blandishments of the ‘peaceful' people possessed by alien seed-pods in the classic
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
:

Many UKIP members see the EU as a SPECTRE-style conspiracy to attain global domination. I seriously believe that, no matter how devious and power-hungry they have become in pursuit of it (just look at the ‘idealism' of Soviet Communism!), a good 70 per cent of Europhiles are actually motivated by adolescent infection with this ecologically wicked, fuzzy vision.

The gurdledum song does not represent a philosophy. It is about imagining.

It is so easy to imagine things. In fact, if imagining, not working the raw, gritty clay of this earth into beautiful and practical forms, were anything more than a diversion, philosophers, artists, musicians, chefs, couturiers, architects and the like could all retire and do something useful instead. Instead, they must devote their lives to wrestling with intractable, resistant materials – like human beings – to give them life and beauty.

After all, people have imagined horses, carpets, broomsticks and even
buildings which fly, and very nice too, but, whilst you might invest in an airline or an earthbound thoroughbred stallion, I don't think you'd be placing your hard-earned cash in a company selling intercontinental flights on Axminster rugs, or giving your beloved daughter a broom and a packed lunch and waving her goodbye from the top of a high building as she sets off for her gap-year in Australia.

Even back then, I despised the gurdledum song and the insipid, universal niceness which it implies.

I loved – love – the world in all its manifest diversity and believed – believe still – that ideas and cultures, like species, must compete untrammelled with others for their survival, that evolution cannot and must not be arrested by the imaginings of one self-appointed class in one generation.

Such overweaning arrogance based on ideal visions – whether by initially well-meaning Christianity, Islam or Communism or by the great
empire-builders
– has caused infinitely more suffering than just muddling through and evolving at our own natural pace.

Nations, cultures, clubs and languages all exist for a reason. If you attempt to destroy them before their time, their suckers will merely sprout more vigorously and often twistedly than ever. Supranationalism is a sweet idea. It is also a silly one. No imposed alliance has ever held, just as no one has yet been able to command happy marriages.

But the gurdledum message went almost unchallenged and unconsidered back then, and a whole generation was to grow up unprepared to try ideas on the testing-ground of argument and intent on destroying precious cultural constructs, habitats and identities in pursuit of a childish fantasy.

I was already enough of an ecologist to shudder when I heard this ecological wickedness

I shudder from it still.

The arguments were as muffled as no doubt the sex had once been. The grief and anger were manifest only in the stutter of the salt cellar on the tabletop, the occasional pan banged that little bit too hard, the light laugh
swallowed that little bit too quickly, the honed knife-edge momentarily ringing beneath the velvet in answer to a child's daft question.

We sensed it, of course, Andrew and I, and like all herd animals exposed to frailty in their leaders, no doubt asked more daft questions than were needed and punished my mother for her inattention by dangerous and downright stupid behaviour.

The word ‘divorce' was still terrifying, the concept louche, American, all but unthinkable. Divorce happened to Zsa Zsa Gabor and Burton and Taylor, but not to respectable English boys like us, and yet…

No. It was impossible.

But we were gently but suddenly told that dad would no longer live with us. Considering that he had been absent more often than not, this information was strangely distressing.

I assume on reflection that the decision was a mutual one and equally painful for both of them. Mum, however, quite properly played blithe and careless in front of us, so I concluded that, with gross
lèse-majesté
and want of concern for her offspring, she had kicked him out and did not care.

At a time, then, when she most needed support, I was as aloof, distant and disapproving as a strutting little five-year-old can be.

I was the man of the house now, and, like my father, my place was not at the hearth but out there delving in ditches, dung-heaps and dust-heaps for treasure. I was busy.

I was not big enough to be much help, perhaps, but my mum had some preposterous idea that I might at least run errands, lay tables and empty bins, for example, or hold the trug as she gathered fruit or flowers.

She clearly did not understand that I had far, far more important things to do.

You see what I mean? Normal family, normal problems, normal silliness, normal failures. Nothing much happened. Everything was normal, almost by law. That's how things were back then before ‘it' was all allowed to hang out and each upheaval was promoted to a trauma.

God knows whether such a culture of denial was healthier than today's, in which people post their period pains and hangovers as headline news on Facebook and consider the death of a soap-opera star or a disturbed princess grounds for prolonged mourning and therapy.

In truth, I have much admiration for my parents and their stoicism. I believe that their insistence on seeing only surmountable molehills probably really reduced the mountains in their way, and that their view of themselves and of their emotions as transient and peripheral rather than central to existence was beneficial to them no less than to others.

On the other hand, I bitterly resented the censorship which had kept me in the dark until the sudden announcement of the
fait accompli
. God knows what I thought I might have done had I known, but at least I would have understood more and not taken sides on a facile ‘doer' and ‘done to' basis as I then did.

Whether in consequence of the censorship to which I was then subjected or no, the whole of my life since then has been ruled by the conviction that there is nothing which should not be discussed and, where possible, tempered in the furnace of debate.

This was about to become an unfashionable principle.

In my early childhood, every playground rang to the dictum ‘It's a free country!'

‘You can't do that!'

‘It's a free country.'

‘You'll get in trouble…'

‘It's a free country.'

The words ring hollow today.

Even children do not believe them any more.

Back then, we chanted or sullenly mumbled them because they were the distillation in everyday terms of everything our parents and grandparents had fought to preserve. They were our consolation for the costs of war.

In other cultures, we knew, censorship had been imposed by main force and dissent punished so soon as expressed. This was still the case in the Soviet Bloc. We in Britain, however, could say what we would, however contentious or absurd, so the suffering had been worthwhile.