Published in 2001 it is interesting to see some aspects which are of their time but actually Duffy has been successful in taking a long view as most of what she writes rings true now as well as it did then.
For those that worry that Brexit referendum campaign misled the British people there is little comfort here as the Myth of England that Duffy describes has Brexit weaved into its DNA, for example she notes on p103 that there is an “arrogance bred of this isolationist image… We would prefer to go it alone, even against all economic reason…” so if there were untruths used in the referendum they were ones the English mindset was preconditioned to want to believe.
We also find this in the reaction of many to the Scottish referendum within England, an attitude that I heard from many was essentially if Scotland wanted to be independent then good riddance to them – giving voice to a suppressed belief that England is burdened rather than enriched by the relationship, and the sense that expressing a desire for self-determination is essentially bad manners and ingratitude to the long suffering English parent.
Clearly she was writing just before “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters took other the world, as on p231 references the sentiment “Carrying on is itself a basic English stratagem, translated into wartime cliché as ‘pressing on regardless’...” without the biggest cliché of those particular posters – and fascinating window on the way they have being commercialised essentially as a simulacra.
The dogged carrying on is perhaps the appeal of Test match cricket as the batsman occupies the crease holding out for the draw.
The were some places where language felt a little dated, perhaps in retelling the racist tropes of our colonial past she would now make more explicit distance of her own views from them, and I felt that we ended up with a little too rosy a picture of Afro-Caribbean and Asian immigrant experiences in this country.
We also have a rather breathless conclusion, after millennium of history we get from the darkest days of WWII to the present in 20 pages – maybe it is the intervening 20 years that have put a significant additional distance, the War being 80 rather than 60 years behind us – increasingly it becomes the War Great-grandparents rather than Parents lived through, and so is remote from us. But the conclusion is also optimistic that we are about the break free of the Myth and become Europeans (newly connected by the Channel Tunnel which she mentions for more times that feels warranted) – whereas as things are turning out we have retrenched back into Myth.
And reading in the first days of our second COVID lockdown these words, on the penultimate page, felt weirdly prophetic… “will e-commerce catch on in a country where people are used to going out not merely to shop but to meet others, either by accident or design? Our perceived discontent will be greater if we become a nation of fearful stay-at-homes… Although we are the least touchy-feely of people, we still need social intercourse, we need to feel the village beyond our front door...”
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