In Europe by Geert Mak Read Free Book Online Page A

background against which I could place myself. My father put it this way: “I detested the rich, but I was wild about learning, science, intellect, the mind. I have always taken the side of the underdog, but I have also adhered to the principal of the aristocracy.”’
    The next day, at a café. We snow is falling outside the window. A couple of tired-looking men are drinking coffee. One of them is picking languidly at a steak and kidney pie. Between the mirrors on the walls are colourful pictures of blossoming balconies in summer, and of a pavement café in a warm, sunny village.
    The tabloid paper the
Sun
has been busy for days demolishing the reputation of an adulterous cabinet minister. The facts have long been known to all and thoroughly hashed over, and now the man is being slowly, bone by bone, broken on the wheel. Finally, it's off with his head. ‘ WOULD YOU SLEEP WITH THIS MAN ?’ yesterday's headline read; below it an unflattering portrait of the victim and two phone numbers, one for ‘ YES ’, the other for ‘ NO ’. ‘Some call him a dwarf, others compare him to a shrimp, yet still he continues to attract women. Why?’
    The next day the tabloid opens with: ‘966 BRITONS WANT TO SLEEP WITH ROBIN COOK, BUT WE'RE NOT GIVING THE MINISTER THEIR PHONE NUMBERS .’ A ‘leading’ psychologist is called in to explain the phenomenon. The inside page contains a cut-out mask of the unfortunate minister's face.
    Today
Sun
journalists donned Robin Cook masks and went into town to note the public's reaction. ‘In Soho, a café emptied out in a panic.’
    Nowhere but in England are the papers so full of fascinating misbehaviour. There is always a scandal brewing, there is always a politician, village vicar or bank manager being pilloried, yet at the same time the country breathes a remarkable sense of order. When I first travelled to England – I was around twenty at the time – I was looking only for the castles, boarding schools, neat lawns, red double-decker buses and businessmen in black bowlers. Clichés, I thought. But from the train between Harwich and London, I actually saw castles in the evening light, and lawns and schoolboys playing cricket, and London was full of bowler hats. The country seemed so predictable, so neat, that during those first few daysI had the feeling nothing could ever go wrong here, that even the most minor of traffic accidents was simply out of the question.
    That orderliness and those newspapers have everything to do with each other. There is no order without tar and feathers. In part, that civic duty is the product of something else: the remarkable discipline to which the lion's share of the populace has subjected itself since the late nineteenth century.
    The worst of the poverty gradually dwindled after 1870, and from 1900 one could speak of something like a state of general welfare. The clothing worn by young workers, especially the women among them, began to look more and more like that of the staid classes: unthinkable only a generation earlier. Around the same time, British political thinking, from left to right, began extracting itself, to a certain extent, from the straightjacket of the class system. London, of course, was still subject to crippling strikes and demonstrations – the entire dockside was paralysed in the summer of 1911 by a strike involving 20,000 workers, until at last the army was called in. But meanwhile the ideal of the ‘organic’ society, the shared citizenry of workers, the middle class and perhaps even the aristocracy was gradually catching on with broad sections of the public.
    Did everyone, though, believe in that ‘shared citizenry’? A brief section of newsreel has been preserved of the Derby held in June 1913. We see the horses hurtling around the bend at high speed, neck and neck. In the background we catch a glimpse of the crowd, men in straw hats, here and there a woman. Then something happens, so quickly as to be almost imperceptible: a