Visions of England

MICHAEL WOOD enjoys a thought-provoking exploration of English identity from the postwar period to the present day and the myths that have been told about England

- MICHAEL WOOD

My parents’ generation were all shaped by the Second World War. They came back from the adrenaline rush of Dunkirk, D-Day, ‘the Med’, Haslar Naval Hospital and the Manchester Blitz to become accountants, work in corner shops, to be mums and school assistants. The war moulded society in the 1950s, and hence, in the way of history, it moulded my own life too.

When I was a child I had a jigsaw of the kind David Matless illustrates in About England, the ‘Victory Plywood Jigsaw Puzzle of Industrial Life in England and Wales’. Every county was its own cut-out, even tiny Rutland. I loved the detail: shipbuilding on the Tyne; Northampton boots and shoes; Lancashire cotton; Liverpool docks; battleships of gun-metal grey off Portland. Then there were the Ladybird books on Alfred the Great and Elizabeth I, and those on the English landscape and nature. Of course, I didn’t understand back then that the England portrayed in the jigsaw or the Ladybird books was already a memory. The empire had gone with dramatic speed after the war; at home, blitzed cities were still rationed eight years on; industry was contracting overnight.

But images have a greater power than mere facts. I still carry with me the Ladybird vision of the English countryside, illustrated by the great Charles Tunnicliffe, even though I know that England is one of the least wooded countries in Europe, that small farmers have long been in a tiny minority, and that the real countryside and its wildlife have been massively depleted. As the literary and cultural critic George Steiner once observed, it isn’t the