I went to Bath- we, my friend and I, did this, but though we
were together, I was no longer with her. The landscape was almost
as familiar as my own hand, but I had never been in this place be-
fore, so how could that be again? And the streets of Bath were fa-
miliar, too, but I had never walked on them before. It was all those
years of reading, starting with Roman Britain. Why did I have to
know about Roman Britain? It was of no real use to me, a person
living on a hot, drought-ridden island, and it is of no use to me
now, and yet my head is filled with this nonsense, Roman Britain.
In Bath, I drank tea in a room I had read about in a novel written
in the eighteenth century. In this very same room, young women
wearing those dresses that rustled and so on danced and flirted
and sometimes disgraced themselves with young men, soldiers,
sailors, who were on their way to Bristol or someplace like that, so
many places like that where so many adventures, the outcome of
which was not good for me, began. Bristol, England. A sentence
that began "That night the ship sailed from Bristol, England"
would end not so good for me. And then I was driving through the
countryside in an English motorcar, on narrow winding roads, and
they were so familiar, though I had never been on them before;
and through little villages the names of which I somehow knew so
well though I had never been there before. And the countryside
did have all those hedges and hedges, fields hedged in. I was mar-
veling at all the toil of it, the planting of the hedges to begin with
and then the care of it, all that clipping, year after year of clipping,
and I wondered at the lives of the people who would have to do
this, because wherever I see and feel the hands that hold up the
world, I see and feel myself and all the people who look like me.
And I said, "Those hedges" and my friend said that someone, a
woman named Mrs. Rothchild, worried that the hedges weren't
being taken care of properly; the farmers couldn't afford or find
the help to keep up the hedges, and often they replaced them with
wire fencing. I might have said to that, well if Mrs. Rothchild
doesn't like the wire fencing, why doesn't she take care of the
hedges herself, but I didn't. And then in those fields that were now
hemmed in by wire fencing that a privileged woman didn't like was
planted a vile yellow flowering bush that produced an oil, and my
friend said that Mrs. Rothchild didn't like this either; it ruined the
English countryside, it ruined the traditional look of the English
countryside.
It was not at that moment that I wished every sentence, every-
thing I knew, that began with England would end with "and then it
all died; we don?t know how, it just all died." At that moment, I was
thinking, who are these people who forced me to think of them all
the time, who forced me to think that the world I knew was incom-
plete, or without substance, or did not measure up because it was
not England; that I was incomplete, or without substance, and did
not measure up because I was not English. Who were these peo-
ple? The person sitting next to me couldn't give me a clue; no one
person could. In any case, if I had said to her, I find England ugly,
I hate England; the weather is like a jail sentence, the English are a
very ugly people, the food in England is like a jail sentence, the
hair of English people is so straight, so dead looking, the English
have an unbearable smell so different from the smell of people I
know, real people of course, she would have said that I was a per-
son full of prejudice. Apart from the fact that it is I - that is, the
people who look like me-who made her aware of the unpleas-
antness of such a thing, the idea of such a thing, prejudice, she
would have been only partly right, sort of right: I may be capable
of prejudice, but my prejudices have no weight to them, my preju-
dices have no force behind them, my prejudices remain opinions,
my prejudices remain my personal opinion. And a great feeling of
rage and disappointment came over me as I looked at England, my
head full of personal opinions that could not have public, my pub
lit, approval. The people I come from are powerless to do evil on
grand scale.
The moment I wished every sentence, everything I knew, that
began with England would end with "and then it all died, we don't
know how, it just all died" was when I saw the white cliffs of Dover.
I had sung hymns and recited poems that were about a longing to
see the white cliffs of Dover again. At the time I sang the hymns
and recited the poems, I could really long to see them agam be-
cause I had never seen them at all, nor had anyone around me at
the time. But there we were, groups of people longing for some-
thing we had never seen. And so there they were, the white cliffs,
but they were not that pearly majestic thing I used to sing about,
that thing that created such a feeling in these people that when
they died in the place where I lived they had themselves; buried
facing a direction that would allow them to see the white cliffs of
Dover when they were resurrected, as surely they would be. The
white cliffs of Dover, when finally I saw them, were cliffs, but they
were not white; you would only call them that if the word "white"
meant something special to you; they were dirty and they were
steep; they were so steep, the correct height from which all my
views of England, starting with the map before me in my class-
room and ending with the trip I had just taken, should jump and
die and disappear forever.
Link to complete essay is here; this is where I got it from. [http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache%3A0OFIBoa50SkJ%3Aresources.wwps.org%2Fwwhs%2Fenglishdept%2Fon%2520seeing%2520England.pdf+on+seeing+england+for+the+first+time&hl=en]
