#50 — Looking for a Scapegoat?
Look no further than the wicked English
My mother was an Irish woman from Belfast who made the mistake of marrying an English man and was thus condemned to spend her adult life living in south London.
As well as being Irish, her forebears were Scots, so she possessed a double whammy of loathing towards the English. How she ended up with my father is a mystery rivaling the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa.
Nothing was beyond the pale of the wicked English. They were responsible for every ill ever to inflict planet earth. If there were wars or famines (got a point) or earthquakes, they were due to the English being in the vicinity.
If the electric bill was steep, it was the fault of the eejit English. If the Co-op ran out of baked beans, it was due to that Sassenach supermarket.
When Argentina invaded the Falklands, we were the only house to put out bunting. No one dared challenge my mother because no matter what she said, people only heard her Belfast voice saying, ‘I’ve got a bomb.’
She worshipped Elvis and had a thing for Charlie Pride and Johnny Cash. Beyond that she despised most everyone, but always the English were top of the pile. Someone once suggested that Cliff Richard was England’s Elvis. To put an English crooner in the same sentence as Elvis was unforgivable. And let me say now, it’s a lie that flames only come out of the mouth of a dragon.
So determined was she to assert the superiority of Ireland, she trailed my brother and sister and me to Belfast every summer, there to dwell for six weeks among the bombs and bullets of that small, festering city.
But she would become dissatisfied with Belfast, its smallness, its claustrophobia, its tight-lipped reticence and prejudice, so aptly rendered by Seamus Heaney, ‘Whatever you say, say nothing.’
She indeed wouldn’t say it, but she longed to be back in England. Besides, being children, my siblings and I quickly imbibed and regurgitated the Belfast accent. This alarmed my mother. She was perverse in that way. Deep down, she wanted us to keep our smooth English accents. So she would rush us back to London.
She often professed things she didn’t believe, which made for confusion and doubt. It was like walking on a frozen pond, a pond that assures you it is secure and true all the while it cracks and growls and sends terrifying messages up the soles of your feet to your mind that indeed the pond is dangerous and not to be trusted.
Fortunately, I was a bright child and realised it was not in my interests to tell the other children in the playground, as well as my teacher, that they were all lying cheats and bastards.
She had a particular gripe against that pinnacle of The Establishment, the royal family, specifically The Queen Mother who she insisted on calling Old Bowes Lyons. My mother maintained that if she had courtiers and flunkeys and footmen to fulfil her every whim, as well as a wardrobe full of matching hats and handbags, she too could be a dear old woman. Privately, I thought all the hats and handbags of England would not induce the adjective dear to go anywhere near my mother.
We had a postman who shared a passing resemblance to Old Bowes Lyons — I mean the Queen Mother—and my mother trained the cat to hiss at him.
I learned that there was nothing, no woe that could not be laid at the door of the English. As I grew older I learned to temper that belief and develop a more balanced and sane view of England and the English. I saw that they were like any other nation, a mixture of the good and not so good and occasionally bad.
But implacable resentment does come in handy. Only this morning I stubbed my toe. I jumped around and hollered and clutched my poor foot. Then I had a brainwave, some distant tug of ages. I decided it was the fault of the English, the wicked English. I felt so much better and my toe hardly hurt at all.
So next time you have a gripe, large or small — mortgage payments rising, haunches falling, sternum collapsing, you know who to blame. In these days, it’s especially comforting to know you can vent on an entire nation, its history and its people, those who have died and those still alive. Go ahead.
Thank my mum. God rest her Irish soul.
Disclaimer: Sorry to all my English friends. But someone has to carry the can and history has decided it’s you. I’m clinging to my Irish side. Anyway, that’s why God gave you all stiff upper lips.
