England, Their England

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All of these are stereotypes but utterly identifiable as English in a specific time-and-place; this book is now, almost, a Sociological treatise. If the purpose of this book is to escape and live in a world that does not exist anymore, the goal is achieved.

He experiences a few of the essential traits of being English as he progresses from Fox hunts, to weekend parties, to gatherings in pubs and other typical English ritualistic behavior ; all done with good humor and jolly spirit. There is a sarcastic aside of the Great War definitely being the last one (I paraphrase) so it appears to be quite astute as well. There are chapters that focus on a single aspect of English life including The Dinner Party, The Cricket Match, The Golf Club, Parliament, Theatre, The Hunt, The Pub for example. There are some marvelous characters, too: the English landowner who, after agreeing with his wife that they won't collect the full rent (or, in some cases, any rent) from tenants who are having a hard time of it, insists vehemently that he's a good businessman; the Yorkshire engineer who has been all over the world delivering machines and teaching the recipients to use them, sometimes for years at a time; the varied literary eccentrics; the secretly virtuous film star, true to the precepts of her father, the vicar; the noncommittal trio of young men who work at the League of Nations, and whose answer to any question is "yes and no"; the young man and woman, siblings, who have no topics of conversation and only one adjective at any given time (currently the adjective is "grim").Gentle, tongue-in-cheek humour about England and Englishness from the perspective of a Scot back in the 1920s. Written in the mid-30s, we are given a view of an older, more bucolic, more assured England; a country that knows its place at the head of a huge Empire and yet whose own history as an agricultural land is just beneath the surface. As a device to examine his subjects it worked, but the best books combine the observational humour with a good narrative too and tend not to end so abruptly.

Mind you, sir, in 1914 the nation and all its honour was giving me twenty two shillings a week and I was working seventy four hours a week for it. I went to a school founded 5 years before I started there, so by the time I left I had witnessed half its history to that point, and the country I was born in was only founded in 1840, so it's hard to imagine what it would be like to go to a school with such a depth of history. He also glances disapprovingly at colonialism, both internal and external, as he berates a nation that has lost its sense of diplomatic purpose.

At 7 o'clock the sky over Lambeth was all pigeon-blue and mother-of-pearl and jade-green and citron and topaz" - gorgeous. The book is written as if a travel memoir by a young Scotsman who had been invalided away from the Western Front, “Donald Cameron”, whose father’s will forces him to reside in England. Thence it leapt up into the air a foot or so, cannoned on to Boone's head, and then trickled slowly down the colossal expanse of the wicket-keeper's back, bouncing slightly as it reached the massive lower portions.