Why I Like England

I like living in England because everywhere else is foreign and strange. The only language I speak is English: I dropped French at school and took up hurdling with the athletic team instead. Even now, in later years, my instinctive reaction on hearing French is to jerk one leg in the air and propel myself towards low garden walls. But I wouldn’t like anyone to think that I don’t like Abroad. I do. Abroad means adventure and the possibility of danger and delicious food, but abroad is also tiring and confusing and full of foreigners who tell you that the bank is open when it’s not.

Being an atheist I am naturally interested in English churches, and being a town dweller I passionately love the English countryside. Though I will concede that it looks better on the telly than it does in real life, as a child new to the countryside said to me once on a Social Service outing.

I only fully appreciated the varied nature of the English countryside after driving for two days through a Swedish pine forest. By the morning of the second day, desperate for novelty, I started counting the dead reindeer that littered the verges. By the afternoon I’d stopped feeling sorry for the reindeer, and by late evening I’d also stopped feeling guilty about owning two pine dressers. In fact my first thought on seeing the oak dressers appearing in Habitat’s window was that Terence Conran must have been to Sweden on a motoring holiday, and on returning to England had issued a terse memo: Pine is out, oak is in!

I like English weather; like the countryside it’s constantly drawing attention to itself. I started this article in a room filled with piercing sunlight, but now a strong wind has materialised and the room is full of gloom.

I like the reserve of English people, because I don’t particularly want to talk to strangers in trains either, unless of course there is a crisis such as a cow on the line causing an hour’s delay. In which case my fellow passengers and I will happily spill out our life stories to anybody we can get to listen.

I like the way in which the English cope with disasters: cut our water off and we will cheerfully queue at a standpipe in the snow. Throw us into rat-infested foreign jails and we will emerge blinking in the daylight to claim that our brutal-looking jailers were decent sorts who treated us well. I bet somewhere, pinned onto a filthy prison wall, is a Christmas card: “To my friend and captor, Pedro, from Jim Wilkinson of cell 14.”

The England I love best is, of course, the England of childhood; when children could play in the street without the neighbours getting up a petition. When children lisp “Tell us about the olden days” I romanticise about the fields and hedgerows, and about the time when a car coming down the unadopted road brought us out of our prefabs to gawp and speculate. I’m happy to live in a country that produces important things: wonderful plays, books, literature, heart surgeons, gardeners and Private Eye. I asked a friend of mine where, given the choice and enough money, he would choose to live. He replied gloomily, “There isn’t anywhere else.” Another friend when asked if she’d ever go on a world cruise said, “No, I’d rather go somewhere else.”

Given the choice between death and exile I’d choose exile every time, but I’d be very, very unhappy at having to leave the club.

Sue Townsend, True Confessions of Susan Lilian Townsend (1989)