Hello to England

Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, Alice in Wonderland. Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Merlin, King Arthur, Robin Hood, St. George and the Dragon, the whole of Mother Goose. I may have grown up in New Jersey, but I roamed through England in my imagination long before I ever stepped foot on its soil. 

 

So having arrived in London, I begin again my ritual invocation of the ways I was prepared to love this place. Whereas art and music were quite present in my coming to France version, literature takes top spot here. 

 

From the childhood authors came the considerable adult literature. Charles Dickens at the pinnacle, in great company with Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes an enormous part of my vision of London and surroundings), Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Graham Greene, the flowering of women authors—Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Wolff, D.H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie. Oh yeah, and what was the other fellow’s name? Ah, William Shakespeare! And also Chaucer!

 

Then the poets. William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and of course, Shakespeare again. I’ve memorized poems by many of the above and they have proven good company indeed. 

 

When it comes to music, all that comes to mind is Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, neither of who’s music I particularly know well or love. Ah, but now am remembering Henry Purcell, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis from earlier times. A quick cheat on Google reminds me of Frederick Delius, Gustav Holst and Edward Elgar who have written some things I’ve enjoyed. Then of course, there’s George Frederick Handel, German by birth, but went to London at the age of 27 and died there 47 years later as a British citizen. So I guess he counts! 

 

As for jazz, two jazz pianists come to mind—Marian McPartland and George Shearing. Not much. But then there’s the “British invasion” in the world of rock that informed so much of my adolescence. The Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, Chad and Jeremy, Peter and Gordon, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Manfred Mann, The Kinks, the Hollies, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, the Moody Blues, the Yardbirds, Petula Clark, Tom Jones, Donovan, Led Zeppelin, the Who. And what was the name of that other band? Oh yeah, the Beatles. 

And yes, there is a second wave in the late 70's and beyond—Pink Floyd, the Police, Elton John, Queen, Duran Duran, David Bowie, Sting, Boy George, The Spice Girls and more. But I pretty much stopped listening to current rock and pop after 1973 or so, so personally have no connection to any of them (though I do love Elton John's Love Song from 1970).

 

And the influence of the arts continued in the explosion of recent TV Series that has filled so much of my life, especially since the pandemic. Starting with Downton Abbey, the Crown and Foyle’s War and then into all the detective/ murder mysteries—Broadchurch, Shetland, Endeavor, Inspector Morse, Unforgotten, Vera, Grantchester, the Mayflower Murders, Scott and Bailey and on and on. 

 

So in the world of art and imagination, England was everywhere in my life. Happily so. But then there was that other British Invasion, the extraordinary havoc and genocide and slavery that reached into just about every corner of the world— Australia, India, Hong Kong, China, much of Africa, the Caribbean, Canada and the U.S.. Yes, France had its hand in it all—much of West Africa, Vietnam, Haiti, Louisiana, French Canada and beyond and Spain dominated just about all of South America (except for the Portuguese in Brazil), Central America, Mexico, Cuba and beyond. But the reach of the British Empire was simply extraordinary, even more so that it all came from this tiny island in Europe.

 

So it is. Every country has its particular mix of light and shadow and coming from the U.S.A., who am I to judge? Here we all are, trying to clean up the mess our ancestors made while also uplifted by all those other ancestors who shed light on our compassionate and life-loving selves. 

 

So two days ahead to roam around this ancient city, a spot of sun out the window inviting us to do so after a breakfast hopefully better than the eggs and beans traditional fare!