24th March 2025
Donald Cameron is a 20 year-old artillery subaltern when he meets the older Evan Davies in a captured German pillbox on the Western Front in October 1917. The pair – a Scotsman and a Welshman – strike up a conversation about the English, whom they both like and respect, but also find difficult to understand. Donald refers to an eyeglass-wearing colonel who “had the wind up all the time except once, and that time he walked up to a Bosche machine-gun emplacement with a walking stick and fifty-eight Bosche came out and surrendered to him”. Another colonel was “a neat dapper little man who ate sparingly in order to keep his weight down for post-war polo”. Evan, an aspirant publisher, proposes that Donald contact him after the war so that he can commission him to write a book about the English.
Subsequently, after a high-explosive shell pitches near him in the Passchendaele mud, Donald spends 18 months in a “monster hydropathic” in Scotland recovering from shell-shock before going back to work on his father’s farm in Aberdeenshire. After his father’s death, Donald travels to London hoping to take up a career as a journalist as “there seemed to be no other profession which required neither ability nor training”. He is making little headway when a chance lunchtime meeting with Evan Davies in a Fleet Street public house sets him on his proper course.
England Their England describes Donald’s journey as he undertakes the post-war research for his book. The novel of AG Macdonell (1895-1941) is (mainly) one of affection and gentleness with an underlying wry humour. At the same time, we are in no doubt – from the opening chapter – that the author recognises that England’s recent history also has its darker side. His portrayal of the conduct of the war – the condition of the trenches, the gathering and use of intelligence, the decision-making of the High Command, the allocation of medals – whilst presented with a knowing sarcasm, also does not hide an underlying bitterness about the circumstances in which Donald and Evan found themselves. (In the First World War, Macdonell served for two years in the Royal Field Artillery before himself being invalided out of the army).
Although he is a naturally shy individual, Donald has an unerring – albeit also haphazard and fortuitous – ability to make a series of random contacts within the English middle classes, beginning with an invitation to a weekend house-party hosted by the wealthy (and formidable) Lady Adelaide Ormerode MP. Before “the company sat down seventeen to dinner”, he has somewhat bewildering conversations with a former President of the Trades Union Congress (who thinks Donald possesses some dark political secret), a glamorous film star (who thinks he is a major producer) and a servant (who thinks he is the centre-forward with Chelsea FC). Donald returns to London on the Monday morning “with a note-book full of notes”.
The following weekend, Donald finds himself in an XI raised by a newly acquired friend – Mr William Hodge, the editor of an Arts periodical – for a cricket match on a Kent village green. This episode is probably the most well-known in the book as it includes the description of home side’s ferocious fast bowler – “the blacksmith… tightening his snake-buckled belt for the fray and loosening his braces to enable his terrific bowling-arm to swing freely in its socket” – which invariably features in any anthology of cricket-related literature. The match swings one way and then the other in a highly unpredictable manner before reaching a satisfactory conclusion. At the end of play – and indeed well before that – much alcohol is consumed by Mr Hodge and his team and the day is an enjoyable one for all concerned. However, Donald has less success in drawing conclusions for his research. Notwithstanding the varied and idiosyncratic nature of the match’s various participants, “Donald got home at 1 o’clock in the morning feeling that he had not learnt much about the English from his experience of their national game”.
And so on through other adventures: a day spent as a guest at an upmarket Home Counties golf club, an assignment as the assistant of a British delegate to a League of Nations conference in Geneva, a temporary role as a London theatre critic…
It has to be said that some of Macdonell’s observations do not sit well with the modern reader. At the Geneva conference, a satirical description of some of the delegates’ responses to a report on “the barbarous conduct of the Hungarian Army in Yugo-Slavia during the Great War” is simply distasteful. Likewise, when asked by Donald about the British policy at the conference’s Committee for the Abolition of Social Abuses, an Old Etonian civil servant responds” My dear sir, we don’t have policies about things. We leave all that to the dagoes. It keeps them out of mischief”.
The latter is not the only incidence of casual racism – the background on a Major-General at the weekend house-party provides an even more explicit example – that obliges the reader to form a view about its presence in the narrative. Is it part of a straightforward descriptive context, reflecting the social mores of the 1930s, to which Macdonell is not applying any value judgement? Or is the author deliberately emphasising – and damning – the warped perspectives of some of the caricatured individuals in his cast-list?
The reader would no doubt advise Donald that the sporting world provides many insights into the nature of the English. When he sees the newspaper placards “England overwhelmed with disaster”, “Is England doomed?” and “Collapse of England”, Donald joins a lengthy queue to buy his morning paper fearing that some national calamity had occurred. It had, of course: England’s batting had collapsed in a Test Match in Melbourne.
Macdonell’s wry presentation of the winter sports is also revealing. Donald joins the crowd of 65,000– “thirty thousand young men, thirty thousand young women and five thousand parsons” – to watch the Oxford/Cambridge Varsity rugby match at Twickenham. The afternoon is one of heavy rain and winter gloom, the pitch turns into a quagmire and a dull 3-3 draw is played out. Two days later, at the Stamford Bridge ground of Chelsea FC, the Varsity Association Football game “began in bright sunshine at 2pm and was played throughout in bright sunshine. A brilliantly open and fast match, resulting in a draw of three goals each”. The crowd was four thousand.
Apart from the visit to Geneva and a return ferry trip from Kingston-upon-Hull across the North Sea to Danzig, Donald’s perceptions of England and the English are drawn entirely from his experiences in London and the South East. His judgement on Hull is that it is a “gloomy city…[a] dismal spread of squalor”, its sole redeeming feature being that “the town of Goole, seen from the train, looked even bloodier”. This assessment is no surprise to us as, earlier, travelling by char-a-banc to the cricket match, “Donald had been “enchanted by his first sight of rural England. And rural England is the real England, unspoilt by factories and financiers and tourists and hustle”.
Not that everything in the countryside meets with his approval. He is appalled – as are we – by the crass and obnoxious behaviour of the followers of the North Bucks Hunt, not least by their almost-comical hypocrisy towards animal welfare.
But we do not need to worry. The unpleasant encounter with the Hunt is heavily outweighed, on the other side of the balance sheet, by Donald’s experiences – revealing, poignant, uplifting – in the (random) contacts that he makes with other individuals on his travels: the entrepreneurial Yorkshire engineer, the elderly patrons of a village pub, a young schoolboy in Winchester (Macdonnell’s alma mater)… In their turn, each add to Donald’s knowledge of the English and provide him with confirmation of the admiration and respect that he had discussed with Evan Davies inside the Passchendaele pill-box.
JR Alexander 