Free How to Be English by David Boyle Page B

writing in the great age of Puffin Books in the 1960s, but have rather slipped from view.
    Masefield was never the staid conservative he seemed. One of his poems (‘The Everlasting Mercy’) was condemned from the pulpit, he was a supporter of women’s suffrage, and he ran the amphibious ambulance during the Gallipoli campaign. Still, he managed to beat Rudyard Kipling to the post of Poet Laureate, twenty-eight years after the publication of ‘Sea Fever’, and held the post until his death from gangrene in 1967.
    He was a great survivor of the age of Georgian poetry, a friend of W. B. Yeats who lived long enough to see flower power, and he managed to hold the post of Laureate longer than anyone apart from Tennyson. He also managed to be the first English writer to release an LP reading of his own poems (just as Tennyson was the first to be recorded).
    There is something about ‘Sea Fever’ which speaks to a certain mood of English ennui, and the poem prefigures death rather as Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’ does. Masefield did after all experience the vagrant gypsy life himself, and he clearly looked forward as a young man when he wrote the poem to ‘quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over’.
    I must down to theseas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
    And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
    And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
    And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

THERE IS SOMETHING very English about suburban semi-detached homes, and especially those built between the wars, with their generous gardens, their little garden gates and garages and their twee stained-glass front doors. There is nothing like them anywhere else in the world, the product of the desire for family homes in limited spaces.
    For some reason, they have been execrated in England, and have become deeply unfashionable, despite being one of the most popular and humane types of housing built anywhere.
    The English invented commuter suburbs, when the railways allowed the middle classes to live on the outskirts of towns, in suburbs which centred on the railway station and the high street.
    Perhaps the apotheosis of the English style of place-making was in Ebenezer Howard’s pioneering garden cities, in Letchworth and Welwyn, the pioneers of the rather less English new towns. Letchworth also developed a style all of its own, thanks to Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker and their Arts and Crafts cottage styles. It provided the English contribution to town planning, just as Howard intended.
    His other scheme, which was to make sure that the land values were vested in the community, has attracted the disapproval of successive governments. English governments have always been a little suspicious of making people economically independent, in case they never work again. They are not that keen on everyone having their own garden either, yet the semi-detached was designed on precisely that basis.
    Howard was a shorthand writer from the House of Commons and, when the great and the good adopted his first garden-city plan, they rather looked down their noses at him as they set up their committees to urge the government to build it. Instead, Howard set off on his bicycle, found the site for Letchworth and set to work. If you wait for the government to do it, he said, ‘you will be as old as Methuselah’. That is as good a statement of English political philosophy as anyone ever made.
    Gaily into Ruislip Gardens
    Runs the red electric train,
    With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s
    Daintily alights Elaine;
    Hurries down the concrete station
    With a frown of concentration,
    Out into the outskirt’s edges
    Where a few surviving hedges
    Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again.
    John Betjeman, ‘Middlesex’

THERE WE ARE in the middle of the north Atlantic, surrounded by