Happy is England

Buying fish at Cambridge market on Sunday, I found myself chatting to the fishmonger about the prospects for England in the World Cup. Another customer, a middle-class woman, joined in. None of us, I think, was a habitual fan. But we found ourselves enjoying a few minutes of spontaneous shared pleasure. It was not mere satisfaction in winning, but shared pride in a team of nice young men, seemingly unassuming, modest, sporting, decent. English, we might have said (though we didn’t). But English as we would like to think it should be — perhaps the Englishness of another time. A once and future Englishness, let us hope.

It’s not every day that one has this un-sought sense of shared ‘identity’. For once that overworked word seems right: a feeling of belonging and wanting to belong to an imagined community stretching far beyond everyday experience. It’s not quite patriotism (for it has nothing really to do with the good of the nation) and certainly not nationalism (it has no political element). It’s a normal kind of feeling that one would no doubt encounter at market stalls in Croatia, Belgium and France. But in England it has often seemed illicit, rather shameful. The Cross of St George is often disdained as the badge of white-van men and other deplorables, as Emily Lady Nugee memorably reminded us. In Cambridge, one is likely to see more EU flags flying than those of England.

Yet ideas of Englishness run deep: they are among the oldest forms of national identity. The Venerable Bede wrote an influential history of the English people in the 8th century, before there was even an English kingdom. In the oldest surviving private letter in English, written some years before the Norman Conquest, ‘brother Edward’ is reproached for copying the Danish hair-style, short at the back and with a fringe over the eyes, a sign that ‘you despise your cynn’.