Letters from London (44 page)

Even though the main risk of rabies will continue to be (as it is now) from the smuggled family pet, the chihuahua in the hatbox, Eurotunnel was quite right to treat this question gravely. A survey by the Automobile Association’s magazine of those who found the Tunnel “a bad or very bad idea” showed that, while 32 percent objected because they “liked being an island” or didn’t want to “lose the security of being an island,” 40 percent disapproved because the Tunnel would make it “easy to bring rabies into this country.” Quite why a rabid beast might find the cuttings at Coquelles particularly inviting is another matter: as Tony Stevens, of the British Veterinary Association, put it, “There’s no incentive for any animal to enter the tunnel, let alone traverse its thirty-five miles.” A psychiatric interpretation of this British obsession with rabies (which strangely seems to bite so few British tourists as they travel through Europe on their holidays) might see it as a transference: no longer permitted by social and political norms openly to hate and fear the foreigner, the frustrated islanders turn their feelings instead against the Continental animal.

The Channel Tunnel is being declared open in a year that ought to lead the British and French to celebrate the warmer, more constructive side of their relationship: 1994. after all, marks both the ninetieth anniversary of the Entente Cordiale and the fiftieth anniversary of D day. But few remember what the former was—something to do with Edward VII and Parisian actresses?—while no one quite knows what to do about the latter. At first, the British government wanted to ignore it, preferring to wait for the anniversary of the war’s
end in 1995; then they rushed off in the opposite direction and miscalculated the public mood by scheduling street parties and “light-hearted” civilian events such as Spam-fritter-cooking competitions. Not only did they offend veterans by emphasizing “celebration” rather than “commemoration;” they offended Dame Vera Lynn, the wartime warbler who is as much a national monument as Rodin’s
Burghers of Calais
. Dame Vera, whose mere name sets off the words “There’ll be bluebirds over/The white cliffs of Dover” in the skull of anyone over the age of about twelve, even threatened to boycott the main jamboree in Hyde Park unless and until the government sorted its act out.

As for the wider matter of Franco-British relations, it can’t be said that they are noticeably in better shape now than at any other point since D day. Churchill used to quip that the heaviest cross he had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine; later, de Gaulle took his revenge with a policy of committed Anglophobia. Since then, British Prime Ministers have repeatedly disappointed the French by being such lukewarm Europeans, while French Presidents have in return always seemed keener on smooching with their German counterparts than with their British ones. When François Mitterrand arrived in Canterbury for the official signing with Mrs. Thatcher of the Channel Tunnel deal in 1986, his Rolls-Royce was hit by an egg and the crowd chanted, “Froggy! Froggy! Froggy! Out! Out! Out!” For her part, Mrs. Thatcher became the first British Prime Minister to be booed on the streets of Paris in modern times.

The bickering legacy of history is exacerbated on the British side by the poverty of geography. Britain has only France as its obvious neighbor, while France may divert itself with three other major cultures—Spain, Italy, and Germany. Beyond France’s southern shore lies Africa; beyond Britain’s northern shore lie the Faeroe Islands and many seals. France is what we first mean by Abroad; it is our primary exotic. Small wonder, then, that we think about the French much more than they think about us (they can even get their Anglo-Saxon culture elsewhere—from across the Atlantic if they prefer). The British are obsessed by the French, whereas the French are only intrigued by
the British. When we love them, they accept it as their due; when we hate them, they are puzzled and irritated but regard it rightly as our problem not theirs.

For instance, they can make some sense of our unfraternal posturing in matters of high politics, but not in matters of low journalism. As an English Francophile. I find myself frequently asked to explain the chauvinism, aggression, and contempt of our popular press. This Rottweiler tendency found its most complete recent expression on
The Sun’s
front page of November 1, 1990, exactly a month before the Tunnel breakthrough. Under the headline
UP YOURS DELORS
and the subhead “At midday tomorrow
Sun
readers are urged to tell the French fool where to stuf his ECU,” the lead news story was a sort of atavistic fart:
“The Sun
today calls on its patriotic family of readers to tell the feelthy French to FROG off! They INSULT us, BURN our lambs, FLOOD our country with dodgy food and PLOT to abolish the dear old pound. Now it’s your turn to kick them in the GAULS.” This crisp political analysis, under the amusing byline of the
“Sun
Diplomatic Staff,” was backed by a special collection of xenophobic jokes—“What do you call a Frenchman with an I.Q. of 150? A village;” “What do you call a Frenchman with twenty girlfriends? A shepherd”—all of which could be safely reapplied to any other hated nation.
The Sun
urged its readers to assemble the next day in public squares up and down the country and, as twelve o’clock struck, to turn toward Paris and shout “Up Yours Delors!” in order “to make sure the French feel the full blast of your anti-Frog feelings.”

Neanderthal? Despicable? Pathetic? Certainly. And the fact that this rabble-rousing didn’t translate into street action—when the posh papers sent their journalists down to Trafalgar Square the next day they found only half a dozen
Sun
-inspired protesters—doesn’t make this sort of story “just a bit of harmless fun” or whatever. Such peddlings of coarse national myth and beery racial demonizing are base and self-damaging stuff They are also culturally baffling to the French. Their own tabloid press has traditionally had quite different preoccupations. The last time I took the Dover-Calais ferry, in mid-April, I picked up in Péronne the roughest equivalents to
The Sun-Infos
du Monde, Spéciale Dernière
, and
France Dimanche
, Their lead stories were, respectively, about an eighty-four-year-old female Canadian bodybuilder who had just been elected Miss Muscle 1994, the supposedly “tragic” close to Mitterrand’s rule, and the news that Princess Caroline of Monaco had ordered her wedding dress. Other matters of top concern were a group of American schoolchildren with hair sprouting from their tongues, an Italian woman who eats spaghetti through her nose, the “tragic” life of actress Martine Carol, the newly discovered Camus novel, the haunting of Robert Wagner by the shade of Natalie Wood, the alleged pregnancy of Claudia Schiffer, and the possible remarriage of the singer Johnny Hallyday to one of his various previous wives. Each paper had one important item about Britain: a write-it-in-your-sleep rerun of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, a tale about the annual dinner of the Her Royal Majesty Dog Society (pooches dress up to eat a candlelit supper: menu attached, of course), and a bit of Kitty Kelley about the Duke of Edinburgh’s whispered mistresses. This latter story, needless to say, concentrated on the Duke’s erotic powers and the Queen’s silent heartbreak rather than on, say, any cultural or institutional hypocrisy. Gossip, snobbery, and sentimentality continue to rule this journalistic domain as ever before.

Moreover, when the French do attempt to answer atavistic fart and lunkhead gibe with its equivalent, things never quite work out. Earlier this year, a French professor writing under the nationalistic pseudonym Chanteclair published a satirical English grammar called
Pour en Finir avec l’Anglais
. Its robust jocosity is well displayed in the list of Useful Phrases you might require in a British hotel (“Is the chambermaid included?” “There is a rat under the sheets. Is it normal?”) or at the grocer’s (“Your eggs are rotten,” “Your bananas are too green,” “Stick them up your ass,” “Look, my dog doesn’t want it”). But it is the sections on our national character which hold the attention and seek to justify the publisher’s wraparound claim for “The Book Which Is Scandalizing England!” We are, according to Chanteclair, “the most dirty, hypocritical and bestial of races,” a “brutal and drunken people” ruled by “puritan inhibitions.” We are taciturn to the
point of mutism; our celebrated love of animals exists only because we “feel ourselves to be on the same level as them;” while our schooling gives us an enthusiasm for corporal punishment and sodomy. This is pretty much the usual charge sheet (former French Prime Minister Édith Cresson also publicly accused us of not sufficiently endorsing heterosexuality), though Chanteclair fails to add the popular French complaint that the British are shabbily dressed and have miserable underwear. Nor is stinginess mentioned. (This is a universal objection. Australians have joined our mythic avarice and unwashedness into a cute double insult: the British, they say, “keep their money under the soap.”)

But the professor, while doing his best at mockery, lacks any real taste for trans-Channel eye gouging. Look, for instance, at the way his book begins: “I have always been an Anglophile and an Americanophile, to the point where those around me have often reproached me for it. But he who loves well also chastises well.” Hopeless: absolutely no viciousness in the fellow at all. Furthermore, he is constantly let down by a very French preference for the elaborate and elegant tease over the gross insult. Faced with the mystery of how the English manage to reproduce, the professor comes up with the following logical—indeed, Cartesian—solution. Yes, they are puritanical, and, yes, they are sodomites; however, they are also drunkards. Therefore, the answer must be as follows: drink helps them get over their puritanism about sex; yet drink also makes them woozy about aiming at the correct target, with the result that fecundation mistakenly ensues and the race continues to stagger on. QED. How could a sensible English person possibly take offense at this?

The Channel Tunnel contains the world’s longest subaqueous stretch (twenty-four miles) and is an astounding piece of engineering. The rail link will spare us the harassments and mayhem of the airport and offer an attractively seamless transfer from London to the center of Paris or Brussels. And if we are in our car, Le Shuttle will gain us thirty or forty minutes in time over the Pride of Calais. But both will, I think, finally lose us something much more important: a sense of crossing the Channel. Since the day thirty-five years ago when the
family Triumph Mayflower was hoisted from the Newhaven dockside into the depths of the Dieppe ferry, I have done this trip scores of times, but I still remember the sense of quiet awe instilled by that first occasion. After the laborious business of loading came the wide-eyed scamper around the deck, the anxious examination of lifeboat cradles whose key joints seemed encrusted with fifty-four layers of paint, the bass saxophone growls as the boat pulled out, the cross-shock as you eased beyond the protection of the breakwater, the opening whoosh of spray in the face, the discovery of those extra handles in the lavatories to stop you falling over or in, the silhouette of honking gulls against the receding Sussex coast. Next came the middle passage, when land was out of sight and the sea more serious, when the light began to change (looking north from the French side is more dramatic than looking south from the English), and when you waved at the rare passing ships as violently as if you were on the Raft of the Medusa. Finally came the slow approach of the French coast, a twist of apprehension in the stomach, a strip of unpopulated sand, a cliff-top church no doubt dedicated to the trawlerman’s protectress, anglers on the breakwater looking up as your swell annoyingly disturbed their floats, then the creak of damp ropes pulling tight, and the sudden anticipation of your first French smell—which turned out to be a mixture of coffee and floor disinfectant.

This sense of transition, of a psychological gear change, a necessary pause, survived until quite recently, when a new generation of ferries actively undermined the experience. They were much larger for a start, yet paradoxically, the more passengers they carried, the smaller the deck space became: just a couple of thin strips as a walkway for claustrophobes. So your sense of the sea now came double-glazed. Second, these big boats were much more stable, which reduced the amount of vomiting. No doubt this helped ticket sales, but vomiting (and the sight of others doing it) was an important endorser of transition. Third, the ferries became entertainment centers and emporia: things nowadays are not so much shipshape as shop-shape. The modern cross-Channel passenger no more voyages to enjoy the sea than the illegal gambler goes to an offshore casino to
admire coral growth. Ferry companies routinely offer one-pound return tickets to standby foot passengers, and as Hoverspeed spokesman Nick Stevens put it, “The crossing of the Channel becomes immaterial. It is an alternative to the High Street.” The boats have turned into thrumming bazaars crammed with bustling, whooping discount seekers: put the concept of the bargain next to the concept of booze and the British (as Chanteclair would understand) become overexcited.

So the experience of transition has deteriorated in recent years. You do not have to be anti-European or xenophobic to like the idea of the frontier. On the contrary: it seems to me that the more Europe becomes integrated commercially and politically, the more each nation should confirm its cultural separateness. (The French were quite right in the recent GATT negotiations to hold out for the “cultural exception” in the matter of government subsidies: that is why they have a film industry, and we have only a collection of cinematic individuals.) Frontiers are therefore useful. It is good to be reminded that over here is the place you are leaving, where you come from, while over there is the place you are going to, where you don’t come from, and where things are done differently. It’s one thing to know this, another to be made to feel it. There wasn’t much to be enjoyed about border crossing in the old Eastern Europe, but one thing they always did well was make you feel alien. You do not come from here, the men in strange uniforms implied, and because of that we view you with suspicion: you are guilty until proved innocent, and here you will not find that variety of warm beer you like to drink at home. I remember crossing from Poland into Russia with a vanload of fellow students in the midsixties, and being compelled by the Russian border guards to destroy the tiny quantity of fresh fruit and vegetables that we had with us: in other words, our dinner. It seemed pointless and bullying at the time, but in retrospect had a grim usefulness: no, it said, this is no longer Poland, the rules are different here. At about this time, a friend of mine took a holiday in Albania. Puritanical by nature and not unsympathetic to the Tiranë regime, he deliberately had his hair cut before departure so that he would not be judged a
decadent hippie. I had never seen his hair so short; but at the entry point from Yugoslavia they took my friend off the coach, sat him in a wooden chair by the customs post, shaved off what crinal remnants they could find, and charged him a few farthings for the put-down.