Keeping the Home Fires Burning
by Stephen Kearney
Stephen Kearney discovers some strange variations on the meaning and practice of cultural integration – or lack of it…………
I never truly appreciated the sheer size of London until I once flew in by night back in 1974. Still at some altitude, it seemed that I’d arrived on a carpet of light – light that stretched north, south east and west. It just went on and on. This was one huge place – and it’s got a lot bigger since.
Cities are not just about size, they’re about people. Actually, they’re all about people and London has them in abundance. Like the carpet of light, they’re from north, south, east and west – of the planet. You meet people from the four corners in this great metropolis – and they’ve been here since the dawn of time, or the dawn of Londinium, at any rate. “London is not and never has been an English city” opens one history of the great city. It was founded by foreigners, after all. And of course, people bring with them their own cultures and languages, over 200 of them, which they practice daily on the streets, making the place more exotic by the day and by the street. But some people don’t – or won’t – do exotic. Nigel Farage, that very untravelled antithesis of exoticism, complained back in 2014, that taking a train from central London, he did not hear English spoken until Grove Park, way out in Zone 4, out there on the periphery and I don’t mean the Boulevard Périphérique either.
Mind you poor old Nige is not exactly alone in his aversion to integration but he could well be the standard bearer. Perhaps he was inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan’s lines from HMS Pinafore – he might have been a Roosian, a French, a Turk or Proosian – but our Nige just knew that he had won first prize in the lottery of life, like Cecil Rhodes had told him.
For in spite of all temptation
To belong to other nations
He remains an Englishman
He remains an Englishman and he just won’t be tempted into foreign ways. Even 21 years in Brussels failed to tempt him into properly learning another language. In this great city’s sea of multicultural and multi-ethnic melting – London now, not Brussels – there have always been clusters from all corners who keep themselves to themselves, disdaining meaningful contact with anyone different, less they be diluted. Now, here’s a strange aspect to identity, division and nationality: while these clusters usually occur among immigrants from other lands, they can also occur among immigrants within the same land. Take the case of Miss Lynch, for instance. My parents bought their one and only house, a 1949 new build in a Dublin suburban cul-de-sac. Miss Lynch, a fellow forty-niner moved in two doors down along with her sister and two bad tempered terriers. The real Miss Lynch, the centre-forward of the clan, was a schoolteacher with “an angle grinder voice” as my brother put it. She drove a bottle green Morris Minor while the heavily overshadowed quiet sister, a civil servant, remained in the PBI (poor bloody infantry). Together, the Misses Lynch and terriers, immigrants from west Cork, formed a bastion against integration, standing firm against the contamination of change, making a stand worthy of UKIP’s best endeavours. Half a century later she still was still there, her sister having died some years earlier, still holding the fort, still flying the flag. As my brother put it, “she never left west Cork”.
In 1973, I moved to London and in the best Irish tradition, I started digging its roads on behalf of the now long disappeared “Grey Murphy” – the green one is still going. All of my fellow diggers, and I mean all, were Irish. The whole firm was 100% Irish. And, apart from being members of the same species, that was all we had in common. One of the first things that struck me about my fellow diggers was they sounded and felt like they had come out of the west of Ireland the day before, despite some of them having been in the place twenty years or more. They had no English friends and knew nothing of the city in which they lived. They had been on quite good money for a long time and had nothing to show for it, apart from beer bellies – and most of them could not drive. And they couldn’t do conversation either. These were men simply untouched by their surroundings – a whole company full of Miss Lynchs. I used to say in response to the suggestion that I must have a lot in common with these fellow countrymen, that they might as well have come from Kathmandu for all we had in common, presuming myself safe in this extreme comparison, until I actually met some people from the capital of Nepal – and I’m still looking for extreme absolute.
One of the nearest things to a dialogue I ever had with one of these guys was when he asked “Do you go to the Galtymore?” “What” I queried, “is the Galtymore?” “A dancehall” he announced. I assured him I didn’t. About 15 years later, driving through Cricklewood on the north-west side of town, I stopped briefly for some reason. I glanced across the road to see, yes, you got it, The Galtymore – Miss Lynch in concrete.
Time marched on and so did my many careers (er, jobs, actually), friendships and interests after road-digging. I was now a post road digging kinda guy. In 1983 an American friend got a job as a barmaid in Stockwell, south of the mighty river Thames. The Irish didn’t just congregate in Cricklewood. The Silver Swan pub, I knew, hosted the south London branch of the Miss Lynch School of Culture – or one of them at any rate – and was colour coded to match. Kimberly, for it was she, hadn’t been barmaiding there for very long when she encouraged me to pay a visit. “You must be bloody joking”, I said with my usual understatement. I like dive bars but this was a dive too far – you’d never resurface. “No” she protested “this place is so bad, it’s good; you have to see it.” I was all for maintaining total refusal – I mean I might have found myself back on the Grey Murphy chain gang, Shanghaied after a few pints. But she persisted and eventually I gave in.
It was with some trepidation that I arrived at this fairly large establishment, dreading re-acquaintance with why I’d emigrated in the first place. I walked in the joint for the very first time. A large, open plan area formed the ground floor centrepiece of the establishment. I asked the bartender, yeah, Kimberly, for a half because I was pretty sure I’d be staying not longer than that – and I needed to stay sober. With my prop in hand, I turned to survey the scene.
The sight that greeted me was something else. Taking centre stage, right in the middle of the open plan area, stood two long tables, exactly parallel, approximately two metres apart. These were not just any tables but actually a collection of smaller ones pushed together to make two long ones, seating perhaps, ten per side with a further four across each end. Each ‘flat pack’ table therefore seated perhaps the best part of thirty people. One was crammed to the limit with pints of Guinness and I mean crammed as though it it were bad form to have any area of the table surface actually visible. It was coast to coast pints of Guinness, heavily outnumbering the seats. The adjacent table was similarly crammed with Guinness, but this one with half pints – or “glasses” as they might say in Ireland. The pint table was attended exclusively by men in drab attire untouched by fashion, style or even colour, and the half pint one by women, matching the parallel menfolk in sartorial elegance. This was serious segregation by gender and by pint. And everyone knew the rules. Miss Lynch rides again.
Over the course of my slowly consumed half, I stared at this surreal scene of non-integration max, barely able to take in what I was seeing. From time to time someone from one table might flit across the great divide for a brief chat before scurrying back to their socially ordained position and the protection of their own sex and Guinness ration.
I never finished my half. I’d seen enough. But Kimberly had been right – it was so bad it was good. I left the School of Culture and its committed members. Nigel Farage would have been proud of them.
Keeping the Home Fires Burning.r3 © Stephen Kearney June 2021
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