My generation will feel slapped, and sad at ourselves for being so blind
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Version 0 of 1. For most of her 94 years, my grandmother lived in Ramsgate: 30 miles from France, triple that to London. She never once went abroad, but made sandwiches for my mother and I when we’d go for a day trip to Boulogne, where we would have fish soup and eclairs before rolling home on the ferry. When my grandfather was alive (a Huguenot descendant who sang La Marseillaise in the kitchen), she’d do the same for him and my mother, once racing to the port and delaying the ship because they had left their packed lunch on the sideboard. In this strict emphasis on the necessity of egg sarnies, this unshakable worship of the Thermos – as well as in countless other lovely aspects – my grandmother was extremely English. She was also absolutely happy to be part of Europe, even if she didn’t ever venture to the rest of it. She was by default interested and inclusive, without that ugly ire that suddenly seems everywhere. Being raised by people who were casually curious and charitable, in a climate that was likewise, has spoiled a swath of today’s population. For someone now in their mid-30s – halfway through life, a bit old for a big shock – easy exploration of the continent of which we were a part felt like a birthright. We spent school days making models of the Channel tunnel out of Plasticine and dried pasta. We spent some of our student summers, if we could afford it, backpacking in Spain. It was a doddle: all that history, all that culture, all that grub, not just on your doorstep, but apparently on a platter. Increasing integration never seemed anything but inevitable. For the past 15 years or so, I have gone to France a lot, without blinking. It’s not always edifying: covering the Cannes film festival for a fortnight provokes nothing so much as rabid xenophobia, what with the endless press conference questions asking Sean Penn if he has a message for the people of Portugal, or Jane Fonda whether she has plans to visit Finland. But then report from the Toronto equivalent in the autumn and what strikes this Brit, at least, is that it is those across the Channel, not the pond, with whom we most share a sensibility. Such a simpatico is tricky to pinpoint in part because it seems so enormous, so deep-seated, so unspoken. Now, the relationship is done. An abrupt bit of dumping like a third-tier Shakespeare twist: lovers parted by distant, meddling elders you never guessed felt so strongly. Those new voters half my age will feel angry and disenfranchised. My generation will feel absolutely slapped – and sad at ourselves for being so blind. We’d had it so easy, so long. We endured neither war, nor rationing, nor even 1970s austerity. We instinctively associated continental community with much of modern multiculturalism. I live in what turns out to be the third most europhilic constituency in the UK (Haringey, 76% remain) – and I like it in part because it feels like being on holiday, all the time. The last time I was actually on holiday in France, I went to an area near that in which my father had served as a GI in the second world war, when his main task was to translate the testimonies of dying German soldiers. His family were Lithuanian Jews who moved to America 100 years ago; I have inherited from them something of a Steppes-legacy nose. At the local market, a nice old chap got chatting to my boyfriend and – gesturing at me – asked, quite benignly: “Elle est pur sang? Ou non?” For some people, all over Europe, the past isn’t such a foreign country. Today, for those of us too young to remember even the fallout, its unhappy history seems even closer. Forty years of sanity hacked out, consigned to the encyclopedia. |