In the summer of 1986, when radioactive particles from the
recent Chernobyl disaster were reputed to be sweeping across the mainland of
Europe, I attended an international workshop on computational lexicography in
the pleasant Italian resort of Grosseto. There were probably about fifty of us:
Italians (of course), Americans, British, French, Germans, and so on, many of
whom knew each other from past conferences and symposiums in what was then a
new and burgeoning field of research.
It was a memorable few days for several reasons. The
organizers had chartered the whole hotel where the workshop was held, so we had
it to ourselves. The weather was sunny and swelteringly hot, and each day we
sweated our way through presentations (OHPs—no PowerPoint back then) and
discussions.
Mealtimes were exciting, as there was no menu—course after
course arrived, but you never knew, if you skipped one, whether you had missed
the main course and would be faced by dessert after having had only soup. But
as the week wore on, there were fewer courses, so you had to adopt a less risky
approach.
One of the delegates was a former Soviet citizen, who
regaled us with stories of how he’d been trained in the Army of the USSR to
invade specific targets in western Europe. As an émigré settled in the US, he
painted the grimmest picture. Somehow, what with Chernobyl, this had us quite
scared. We had no idea that the end of the USSR would come within a few years.
Anyway, towards the end of the workshop there was a dinner
and a party with various entertainments, and everyone relaxed and had fun. Then came a suggestion. Let’s have each
national group sing a song from their own country. This was greeted
enthusiastically by the majority. Most groups set to with alacrity, if with
varying degrees of musical proficiency. Some performers produced instruments to
accompany themselves with. We had Italian folk songs, Spanish folk songs,
probably even Russian folk songs. The Americans came up with something, maybe Stars
and Stripes Forever (I can’t remember). A
Frenchman, or perhaps it was a French Canadian, got us all to join in Alouette,
gentille Alouette, which, as you may know,
is one of those incremental songs where you add a bit on each time round. A
very plucky Scotsman, with great verve and confidence, sang a heart-rending
Scots ballad solo.
At last the British, or rather, the English (since Tom the
Mac had done his bit), were called upon. We were one of the largest
contingents, a dozen or more. I looked round and saw a row of my compatriots,
nervously swigging from their wine glasses and shrinking into their shoes at
the very back of the room. They looked white and trembly. They couldn’t think
of an English song. Or not one everybody knew. They didn’t think they could sing
anything. Could they perhaps be excused?
I’m not a natural leader but I must say I was ashamed at my
countrymen’s pusillanimity. For heaven’s sake, I said, surely we can do
something? I thought of the last night of the Proms. Come on, we can manage a verse
of Jerusalem! So, in a wavery, And-did-the-something-something-someth-upon
England’s-something-someth sort of way, we
performed it. To an incredulous crowd of foreigners who couldn’t imagine that
English folk songs could sound like this.
I’m telling this story because just possibly—and I may be
quite wrong—it says something about the English character, or perhaps English
culture. As a group, we’re sometimes not very keen on joining in. We feel
self-conscious about dropping our reserve and surrendering our autonomy to a
bigger community. We’re afraid that we might lose our fragile identity in the
crowd. We’re not sure we’d like it. Or, we have tried it but we didn’t really
enjoy it.
And I wonder if, in the last analysis, this—not,
ideological, political, or even economic factors, and not xenophobia or
racism—is what underlies the draw of Brexit.
