Book 8 - H V Morton, In Search of England

I chose this book because I thought it would tell me about England between the wars and be a link with the descriptions of the Dorest countryside in ‘Rogue Male’.  It might have been written a decade earlier but there would still be similarities. That was the idea and it seemed good at the time. But I picked it up, read a few pages, put it down and thought I would have to write a post on why I couldn’t finish it.

There is nothing wrong with not finishing a book. It is a strange sense of duty that tells you to struggle on, when you are getting nether enjoyment or edification. It does you no good and it certainly doesn’t accumulate you any celestial points. (Tim Parks dealt with this eloquently in ‘Where I’m Reading From’  where he recounts a letter of appreciation from a fellow author who finished by saying that it hadn’t read the last fifty pages because at that point the novel seemed satisfactorily over). But this book was not satisfactorily over, it had not satisfactorily begun. I didn’t want to continue because I had taken against the narrator. I didn’t like the blustering, breezy tone, the patronising way he described others, his attitude to women and the alarm bells that rang in my head when a sentence in the introduction talked of an average city family disappearing into ‘racial anaemia’. A travel book is a trip and if you need to like, or at least trust your companion. So I put it down.

But it seemed a bit week to give up so easily, I thought I ought to try again, just to be sure. and the second time, for whatever reason, I found it more amusing than irritating and was happy to continue. Instead of thinking of the author as some golf club boor, I saw him as a mixture of Mr Pooter and Mr Cholmondley-Warner - in other words a comic creation.

I took out the binoculars and saw a gallows standing up there, a mark for several counties, firm and unmistakable, as if ready for a hanging.
A gibbet!
Before climbing up the steep road I thought that I would ask a few questions. I stopped a labourer on a bicycle.
‘What is that on the hill?’
‘Gallows’ he said suspiciously.
‘Who was hanged there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘When was it last used?’
‘Dunno.’
Have you ever heard any story about it?’
‘No.’

Before I had thought this a piece of nonsense. Now I found it funny. And the breeziness of the prose which before seemed bluff I now saw as narrative drive. Now I am half convinced that some of the humour is intentional:

[another casual conversation, this time on Plymouth Hoe about Drake and the Armada]
‘I would rather have lived in that age than any other,’ said my companion. He was a frill-looking man, as frail looking almost as Nelson.
‘The world must have seemed such a big place then. If one could have gone with Drake in 1577 in the Golden Hind!’
‘Ah! Now the Mauritania is due tomorrow!’
‘Yes’ he sighed.
‘How,’ I said ‘would you like to have burnt up Vera Cruz, to have sacked the churches, and driven the natives below the hatches, and the held a church parade?’
‘Splendid!’ He whispered ‘That was the spirit of the time … Well, I must be going home.’
He said good night and I watched his lank, dyspeptic, blood-thirsty figure fade into the distance.

As I read on I became more aware of other virtues. There are interesting anecdotes from the past and myths associated with some of the ancient buildings. Morton also has a good eye and can write fine descriptive prose:

A curious characteristic of English scenery is its ability to change itself in a distance of a few miles. Towards Devon the rugged Cornish rocks give way to a smoother, more comfortable countryside, a holier, less disturbing vista of green and red fields.
‘In England once again!’ I whispered as I saw a real Devon man ploughing a field, the colour of red ochre where the earth was newly turned and of cocoa where the sun had dried it. A different country.

I like that detail of the colour of the soil.

But the book is not a report of the nation in 1927. Instead it is a romance - a longing for the tales of the past, of King Arthur and Saxons. It is infused with a particular myth of rural Englishness that has all but died out now (except in the collective imagination of UKIP). Perhaps the myths have a particular potency because of the time the book was written,  only a decade after the end of the Great War. After all the destruction, keeping hold of a picture of what was worth fighting for would have been a pressing concern.

So in the end the book was worth reading but I know that whatever the ironical distance I maintained I still found the underlying attitudes of the author uncongenial. It cannot be shrugged off by saying he was a product of his time and our attitudes have moved on and he must be cut some slack. There is still something a bit off, especially when he talks about women. Nevertheless it shouldn’t obscure the fact that there is still quite a lot of fun to be had

Date of first publication
1927

Link to last book

Rogue Male contained good descriptions of the English countryside between the wars. This follows on.