How to Be English (19 page)

Of course, there have always been games like tennis. The aristocracy would play real tennis, and you can still see the venue at Hampton Court, though it is more akin to archaic squash. If any one nation invented tennis scoring it was probably the French; Charles VIII died from a bang to the head at Amboise Castle in 1498 after watching a medieval tennis match, and the tennis scoring system borrows partly from the French and partly, it seems, from the ancient Sumerians.

The Sumerian civilisation, in ancient Babylon about 3,300
BC
– even before Stonehenge – was ruled day to day by a caste of accountant-priests, a fearsome combination of roles that included blessing and counting. For them, the key magical number – the equivalent to our hundred – was sixty. Everything counted up to sixty, came in bundles of sixty or in fractions of sixty, which appears to be the basis of the strange tennis scoring system: the score implies that sixty is the score after forty. Chivalric slang used the word ‘egg' – or ‘
l'oeuf'
in French – to mean ‘nothing'. That's why the word ‘love', which sounds just like it – a chivalric joke – is used to mean ‘no points'. The French don't appreciate the joke. They use the word ‘zero' in tennis.

By the 1870s the All England Croquet Club was up and running in Worple Road in Wimbledon. It subsequently changed its name and purpose to include tennis, and passed the motion to launch the first lawn tennis championship. Wimbledon was born in July 1877 and 200 spectators came to see the first ever Wimbledon champion, rackets player Spencer Gore, thrash his opponent W. C. Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4. They paid a shilling each for the privilege.

The club moved to its present site in 1922, and the television cameras arrived in 1937. Centre Court remains the focus, especially after they built the retractable roof which takes twenty minutes to shut, ending the dodgy relationship with the weather – at least for the main matches. But it is No. 2 Court where the unexpected happens, and where John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova have all found themselves unexpectedly knocked out.

At the north end of the grounds, there is now a huge television screen, visible from a grass mound which was originally christened Henman Hill. It is now known as Murray Mound, but Andy Murray – as everyone knows – is actually Scottish.

Thanks to Wimbledon, lawn tennis has been given to the world. It remains recognisably English perhaps only in the Wimbledon tradition and in the strange atmosphere of relaxed carnival frivolity that comes over the English when Wimbledon is on our screens.

They act like they've got the biggest tournament in the world, and they're right, they do.

Pete Sampras on the All England Club

THERE IS SOMETHING
wonderfully redolent of the English middle classes about
The Wind in the Willows
, and in A. A. Milne's stage version of it,
Toad of Toad Hall
. Toad is vain, delusory and obsessive, but he is apparently preferable to the yobs in the Wild Wood who take over his house for drinking and carousing. Toad, Badger, Rat and Mole cut and slash their way back and society is saved. We breathe a big sigh of relief.

Kenneth Grahame, one of the great children's writers of the twentieth century (though he was actually born in Edinburgh), wrote the story for his son Alastair, for whom he invented the characters in a series of letters. The book was published in 1908 and was an immediate success. Grahame had left his job as Secretary of the Bank of England and went to live in Cookham in Berkshire, next to the Thames, where he had been brought up. (There are various stories about why he left the bank, which may have had something to do with a shooting incident there.)

Alastair was never well, was blind in one eye and threw himself in front of a train around his twentieth birthday. A kind of sadness, at least mild nostalgia, pervades the whole business. But there is a kind of happier sense of memory as well. When Ratty describes messing around in boats, that was pretty much what Grahame did most of the time.

Perhaps that was why he was never recorded as having met Cookham's other great creative product at the time, the artist Stanley Spencer, whose religious fantasies also bring the river and the Thames Valley to life. Kenneth Grahame was a deeply conservative man and Stanley Spencer was in a peculiar class of his own, and a generation younger. Even so, it is a pity we know nothing about them meeting on the banks of the great river. What they have in common is this strong mystical sense of the Thames.

Christopher Robin Milne, child hero of
Winnie-the-Pooh
, describes how both his parents loved the book and it is clear how much Pooh and Piglet owe to Toad and Mole. We all owe something too because
The Wind in the Willows
is a modern fairy tale, interspersed with morality tale – plus a little bit of English nostalgic snobbery. It is a heady mix.

‘Hold hard a minute, then!' said the Rat. He looped the painter through a ring in his landing-stage, climbed up into his hole above, and after a short interval reappeared staggering under a fat, wicker luncheon-basket.

‘Shove that under your feet,' he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls again.

‘What's inside it?' asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.

‘There's cold chicken inside it,' replied the Rat briefly; ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssand wichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater—'

Ratty explains the picnic to Mole

IN 1310, KING
Edward's II's favourite Piers Gaveston was murdered by jealous barons. When they went through his belongings, they discovered a fork. The fact that we know this is some evidence of their rage, and just how much they believed the discovery of anything quite so continental, fashionable and downright camp as a fork seemed to justify his dispatch.

This is, of course, a strangely English idea, and there has always been a boneheaded element in the English character that believes itself to be a bastion of sanity and a check on encroaching effeminacy. That is what did for Piers Gaveston.

The story is also a reminder that, before the trend caught on in the early fourteenth century, most people had no forks. They brought their knives to the table with them and bundled stuff into their mouths with their hands. That is at least one reason that explains the favourite and traditional Anglo-Saxon concept of pies. You could hold them and put them in your mouth, and without the use of anything suspect like a fork.

But how did the great medieval savoury pie become the sweet Bakewell tart? That has very little to do with Bakewell in Derbyshire, lovely though it is, and a great deal to do with the same fashionable foreign-food trends that brought us the fork. One of the upshots of the crusades to Palestine in the 1090s was that the returning crusaders brought with them fancy eastern, originally Persian, ideas about cooking. They began adding dried fruit and spices to their pies. The pies got bigger and, once there were knives and forks, they got bigger still. They got sweeter, and soon they had merged with that great Anglo-Saxon favourite, the custard tart. And lo and behold, there was the Bakewell tart, English with extra almonds from Persia and beyond, all rolled together.

Bakewell claims to be the home of the authentic Bakewell pudding and many believe it to come originally from the Rushbottom Lane district in that town. It is said that the recipe was originally something of an accidental invention of the 1860s, the result of a misunderstanding between Mrs Graves, landlady of the White Horse Inn, and her kitchen assistant. A nobleman visiting the inn (now called the Rutland Arms) ordered a strawberry tart. Mrs Graves asked an inexperienced kitchen assistant to make one, but the assistant made a savoury pastry. The result was so successful with the guest that the recipe became recognised as a Bakewell pudding.

Mrs Wilson, wife of a tallow chandler who lived in the cottage now known as the Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop, saw the possibility of selling the puddings commercially, managed to get hold of the recipe, and opened a business of her own. Bakewell tarts and Bakewell puddings have existed side by side ever since.

Cover a wide shallow dish with thin puff paste. Put in it a layer of jam, preferably raspberry, but any kind will do. It should be half an inch thick. Take the yolks of eight eggs and beat the whites of two. Add half a pound of melted butter and half a pound each of sugar and ground bitter almonds. Mix all well together, and pour into the pastry case over the jam. Bake for half an hour and serve nearly cold.

Recipe for Bakewell pudding by Alison Uttley, local writer, from
Recipes from an Old Farmhouse
(1966)

FOR GENERATIONS, THE
schoolchildren of England learned their history starting with the Battle of Hastings which – as almost everyone knows – was in 1066 (14 October), some six centuries before the Great Fire of London (2–5 September 1666) and some nine centuries before the English victory in the World Cup final (30 July 1966). There we are: English history at a glance.

There was Harold II, successfully obliterating one of the twin, linked invasions which threatened his rule, and marching south to deal with the second one. He tried and failed to take William's makeshift wooden castle near Hastings by surprise, and William kept his army awake all night, afraid of a night attack. He marched out at dawn the next morning to find the English drawn up on Senlac Hill near the modern town of Battle (the exact spot is still disputed).

Neither army was much more than 8,000 men and Harold's force was made up almost entirely of infantry. They are popularly supposed to have been beaten after William's knights pretended to run away and then turned on the pursuing foot soldiers. There does seem to have been a genuine panic among the Bretons, led by Alan the Red, on William's left flank and a rumour went round his army that William had been killed. But in the ensuing melee, Harold was killed – popularly by a combination of an arrow in the eye and a blow from one of William's knights. His brothers Gyrth and Leofwine died with him. All their bodies were found after the battle near the top of the hill, though there is a persistent legend that Harold survived the battle and became a monk.