Before the drive from California to North Carolina that I wrote about last month, I believed that American regionalism was alive and well. Now I damn well know it is. I’ll tell you what I am worried about, though, is England.

Not long ago my wife and I flew direct from Charlotte to London. That possibility didn’t exist until recently, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing for either Charlotte or London that it does now. At the least, it’s disconcerting to go direct from Billy Graham Boulevard to Victoria Station without depressurizing. Changing airports in New York really ought to be part of European travel, don’t you think?

Anyway, finding ourselves back in London for the first time in a dozen years (having missed the entire Thatcher era), we were struck by how much less English the place seems these days. We’d no sooner entered the Underground than we were looking at a big poster showing a couple of guys sitting on a front porch in what was said to be Benson, North Carolina, drinking Budweiser. Yeah, it’s nice that Benson is still exotic enough to have some cachet, but I find it sinister that Budweiser is available at all in the country that taught me to like bitter and brown ale.

The real problem, though, is less creeping Americanization, that perennial bugbear of the English left (and much of the old Tory right), than it is galloping cosmopolitanism in general. For instance, speaking of brew, the museum cafeteria at the Victoria and Albert doesn’t sell British beer at all, just the Dutch and German lagers that one of my English friends calls “Euro-fizz.”

Worse, when I went into a Knightsbridge delicatessen and asked for Wensleydale cheese, the pleasant young Pakistani behind the counter looked puzzled. “Wensleydale,” he said. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

Same with clothing. The Harris Tweed jackets I bought 12 years ago seem to, have shrunk around the middle, so I went back to the same Oxford Street shop to buy one or two more, but all I found were those double-breasted Italian numbers, with wide pointy lapels. When I asked the clerk if they had any clothes that don’t make you look like a gigolo, he suggested (sneering) that I try “someplace that caters more to the tourist trade.” (After smarting under that insult for a while, I did, and found what I was after.)

Even in matters of language some Brits seem determined to jettison their heritage. While we were there, an article in the Telegraph reported that BBC radio is going to read through the Bible, but despite the recommendation of the poetry department and listener mail that ran ten to one in favor of the King James Version, the religion department was holding out for a modern translation. At least one tradition persists, however: the bloody-mindedness of the English worker seems to have been unaffected by all the years of Thatcherism. Studying in the splendid old reading room of the British Museum one afternoon, for example, I was forcibly reminded that the ghost of Karl Marx haunts the place in more ways than one when the stillness was shattered by a great clearing of throat on a public address system I’d never realized was there, and a working-class voice announced that no more books would be delivered to readers that day because of “industrial action” by the library staff. (Scores of shabby scholars shuffled, grumbling, to the exits.)

Outside of London it was easier to believe that maybe, just maybe, there will always be an England. Where else, for instance, would people eat strawberries and Devonshire cream on the lawn of a grand country house (in our case, Cliveden, Lady Astor’s estate on the Thames), then sit in the rain to watch an amateur production of The Taming of the Shrew? And where else would there be a market for something called a “chip buddy”: french fries on white bread, with mayonnaise?

And, despite all the incursions of un-English ways, many English folk retain a strong, irreverent xenophobic streak that I rather admire—at least when it’s not surfacing as cruel and pointless Pakibashing. Consider the following unattributed verse, protesting the Channel Tunnel linking Great Britain to the Continent. (It was passed on by a friend who copied a copy of a copy, and it seems to be an example of modern, urban photocopy folklore, but if it has a known author I’d like to be corrected.)


Ode to the Chunnel

There’ll be carloads of Louises

From Parisian stripteases

Importing foul diseases

Into Kent.

There’ll be modern French Wells-Fargoes

Sending juggernauts with cargoes

Of froglegs and escargots

And men’s scent.

 

There’ll be Dutchmen, too, by jingo.

Who’ll refuse to speak the lingo.

Coming over for the bingo

And the dogs.

And through this umbilical.

Seeking knickers from St. Michael,

Girls from Rotterdam will cycle

In their clogs.

 

There’ll be Danes on every corner,

Faces pink after a sauna,

Trying hard to sell us porno-

Graphic books.

There’ll be men like Julius Caesar

Getting in without a visa,

Careless architects from Pisa,

Bloody crooks.

 

There’ll be wealthy German campers

With enormous picnic hampers

Full of sauerkraut and champers

And pork pies.

There’ll be Eyeties slick and smarmy.

Reared on pizza and salami.

Turning up at Veeraswamy

Without ties.

 

There’ll be Swedes of charmless candour

Coming over to philander.

Spreading left-wing propaganda

Against wealth.

Belgian girls of great proportions

Who have failed to take precautions

Will drive over for abortions

On the Health.

 

There’ll be Spanish señoritas

Jamming all our parking meters

With their miserable pesetas—

I don’t know!

And señors doing sambas.

Shouting “Vamos!” and “Caramba!”

And believing that the amber

Light means “go.”

 

There’ll be Austrians with poodles

Wanting membership of Boodles,

Then demanding apple strudels

With their tea.

There’ll be lecherous Kuwaitis

Driving lorryloads of Katies

From the Thames to the Euphrates,

C. O. D.

 

There’ll be men from Lithuania,

From Rumania and Albania,

Pennsylvania and Tasmania,

I’ve no doubt.

So, dear immigration panel,

Boys in sports jackets and flannel,

Please protect our English Channel—

Keep them out!

Now that’s the England I remember, and one thing I liked about it was that it wasn’t sure it liked me.