WHAT ENGLAND MEANS TO ME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 121, 17 October 1941, Unnumbered Page

WHAT ENGLAND MEANS TO ME

By

VERA

BRITTAIN

in "England’s Hour’"’ (McMILLAN, LONDON)

HEN I walk through the woods, the changing colours of the Berkshire leaves smite my perception as emphatically as the colours of an American Octoberthe gold of the falling chestnuts, the burnt sienna and vermilion of oaks and brambles, the soft sepia and pale smokegrey of the fading bracken, the peacock green of firs and pines. Remembering the happiness of past American autumns,

I am overcome with nostalgia for the Catskill Mountains, the Mississippi Valley, the wooded Connecticut hills. But in the morning-though how temporarily in this sorrowful island!the yearning nostalgia goes. Instead, I fall newly in love with the dewdrops sparkling on the English gorse, the birds twittering in the rhododendrons, the faint autumn smell of far-off bonfires, the lacy pattern of ash-leaves across the grass. In the cloudless azure heaven, a British aeroplane is flying so high that its distant hum seems a lullaby, not a menace. The chimneys of little redroofed houses are smoking in the chill October air; over the wet stubbly fields, indigo shadows stretch westward from the roots of apple trees still golden in the orchards.

FOR me-and I suspect for most of us-it is this that the word "England" represents. When, as so‘often, I am abroad, and especially in the United States where I contemplate, overwhelmed, the harsh spectacular outline of its Western lands, England does not mean for me the government at Westminster, nor even London’s historic landmarks-West-minster Abbey, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathe-dral-now threatened with annihilation by a foreign power. It certainly does not signify Winston Churchill, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, David Lloyd George, or whoever may be the political Colossus of the moment; still less does it mean the Royal Family, now so conscientiously doing its best in circumstances always overwhelming for national figure-heads who serve the State by their continuous performance of expected duties, Least of all does. it stand for government officials, those worthy, 6ver-worked men and women whose nervous fear of outstepping public opinion has so often resulted in bureaucratic cruelty, and is displayed in the self-protective devotion to "Red Tape," "passing the buck," and every other conceivable form of the procrastination so peculiarly British. To a limited degree, England does mean for me the process of British jus- tice, which on two occasions-once at a provincial Assize Court, and once in the Police Court of a London. magis-trate-I have seen function in a fashion as close to the ideal of human decency as the present stage of our spiritual development can be expected to achieve. It means still more the tolerant endurance of British men and women; their patient amusement in Hyde Park or on Tower Hill when open-air orators proclaim’ opinions to whicl they are diametrically opposed; their brave, grumbling stoicism in danger and adversity; their staunch refusal even in maximum peril to become panicstricken refugees. * * * BUT more than all, England for me means the fields and lanes of its lovely countryside; the misty, softedged horizon which is the superb gift to the eyes of this fog-laden island; the clear candour of spring flowers; the flame of autumn leaves; the sharp cracking of fallen twigs on frosty paths in winter. These are the things which, no matter where I may travel, I can never forget; this is the England which will dwell with me until my life’s end. And it is an England which neither the pitiful challenging paranoia of Nazidom nor of any other invader can destroy. Those who call themselves our enemies may obliterate buildings, annihilate monuments, assassinate men and women; they cannot eliminate the flowers, the trees, the grass, the moist sunny air, the quiet inviolate spirit, of a whole countryside. Cities may vanish in a red fury of smoke and flame, but no conqueror by his bombs and aeroplanes can wholly remove the marks which immemorial centuries have laid upon our land. Whatever the future may bring of hope or despair, of sanity or suffering, of peace or war, the villages of this country will be England for ever.