It was blessedly cool inside the Romanesque nave, its massive arches resisting the heat as they had done everything else that history had thrown at them in the past thousand years. Through the great west doors, which had been left open for ventilation, I could glimpse the ruins of the adjacent Norman castle, bleached white by the intense sunshine. In front of me were the serried ranks of prep school pupils at their speech day and I was presenting the prizes. The boys were in blazers; the girls in boaters and the staff were gowned. The head opined sensibly and the dean prayed. The organ thundered; the choir sang exquisitely and the soloist soared with that fragile, plangent beauty of the boy treble. It was quintessential England. And yet at least a third of the pupils were immigrant: black, yellow and every shade of brown.
As usual, I was speaking extempore and I would have liked to have referred to the composition of the school body in my short address. But it is an awkward topic and the right form of words did not come. But I think I have now found them. The presence of so many different races, in such numbers in such an English institution, is a sign of something I hoped for but never expected to see: namely a redefinition of English nationhood in cultural terms. In other words, English traditions and the English way of life, as exemplified in the kind of school and place where I stood, are proving to be sufficiently powerful, with their idiosyncrasy, their quiet, seductive beauty and their sense of order and history, to produce a sublime version of the melting-pot effect. It is entirely voluntary and operates by attraction, not compulsion or indoctrination.
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