Date: Fri 31-Jul-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: SUZANN

Quick Words:

Nyberg-Cockney-England

Full Text:

COMMENTARY: A Cockney In Conversation

BY SUZANNA NYBERG

Few things are as wonderful as a damp, drizzly afternoon in London, and when I

journey there and spend an afternoon with an elderly uncle, there are several

things I must do: take tea in Hampstead, far from the maddening tourists;

brave the crowds at Leicester Square to pay the annual visit to the stamp and

book shops on Cecil Street; and see what is playing in St.

Martin's-in-the-Fields. Meandering through market stalls, looking for

bargains, passes time before the evening performance.

When a man announces that "These 'ere are the tools that made the Empire," and

sweeps an arm across handsaws, side axes, and jack plains, I have to stop.

The man speaks in such persuasive, convincing terms, with just the right

amount of sugar coating, that I start to believe that his tools did indeed

build homes in India, create roads in Burma, and lay railway in Eastern

Africa. "These tools will never be made again," he said, and indeed he is

right. The great manufacturing centers of Sheffield, Birmingham, and

Manchester are gone, as in America, shipped overseas.

The man is dazzling when he talks about the tools. "These are British," he

says. "I love saying `They're British.' Not made in Taiwan. Not plastic. You

won't buy these at Harrod's." Convincing enough to entice one to spend œ35, he

appears as bidding farewell to things he loved. "Never sell them," he says.

"They've got God's love in them. Wood is a thing of God."

Cockneys have a gift for storytelling and the capacity to hold an audience

captive. I love to talk to them; in a class by themselves, they're wonderfully

easy to understand. It is difficult to know precisely where dramatization

begins with them; it could begin even in a name. "John Drinkwater," the man

says. "I'm a Cockney," he continues as though one wouldn't have known. "My mum

was from Gloucester and my daddy from County Cork."

Cockneys, usually of Irish descent, are on the lowest rung of the English

social ladder, and they know it. The class system, as entrenched in Britain as

in no other country in Europe, is, in fact, preserved by a duke operating a

bookshop, a few minority youths at Cambridge, and a prime minister from

Grantham. America has nothing like it.

America has classes, yes, but they're economic, not social; no American will

ever introduce himself as John did, and no American will ever begin a

conversation by saying, "My family's from the working class."

John's daughter will retain her booth round the corner from her father at St

Martin's, selling teapots and key chains, and her children, and her children's

children, unless they cultivate the proper accent and learn to hold a knife

and fork correctly will never go to university.

John has an enormous scar on his arm, one which must have been quite a trench

when first made, and a bump on his silvery head the size of a crab. He tells

each passerby that his tools built the part of the world from which they came.

In some sense, they probably did. And as I observe all these people, the

Cockney himself with Irish roots; a South African entitled to and applying for

British citizenship; an Asian couple, British nationals, entitled to Her

Majesty's protection, but not right of abode; an American gentleman with two

passports tucked in a briefcase; a New Zealander returning home after 20

years, I was struck that this mad jumble of people, with their different

experiences, hardships and pleasures, were yet born, and would die, under the

same flag.

One thing reminds John of another, his wooing and marriage a long 40 years

ago, his work as a spiral staircase man, the war. At 14, John left school, and

at 16, he was plunging into debris, extricating bodies, and rescuing those

still alive. "The bombs dropped like hell," he says.

Few Americans understand what the British endured during this century's world

wars. The 20th Century ruined Britain. In John's family, two sons, soldiers

with the British Expeditionary Force, were killed, one in Belgium, the other

five months later in France. When Americans think of the atrocities of the

Second World War, they think of the Holocaust and the systematic extermination

of ethnic groups, and rightly so. But England was terror-bombed, and that

stays forever with those who were there.

It must have been maddening to have lived in London during the Blitz. Night

after night thousands of German planes took off over the North Sea and the

Channel, and night after night hundreds were killed and thousands injured.

John's sister-in-law was killed outright, and his father was blinded during a

bombing raid. The street where he lived, Fox Court, no longer exists, replaced

by the spectacularly ugly architecture that Britain managed to erect so

quickly after the war. Most of his schoolchums died.

Few from the tight-lipped generation will speak openly about being bombed, and

that is why it was riveting to get a bit of honesty and hear how desperately

and recklessly one fought in defense of London. "Twelve hours, seven days a

week," he says, "I worked at bomb sites. When I was 18, I was in a man's

uniform."

John was near everywhere during the war, in London during the Blitz, with the

Americans when they landed on Omaha Beach, deep in Germany when he was badly

wounded. "I was flown back in a Dakota, the Rolls Royce of the American

planes, to the Cotswolds," he said. He had orders for the Pacific when the

bomb was dropped; those orders were revoked.

John doesn't look much towards the future and he doesn't think much about the

present, but he does reflect upon the past. For it is the past that Britain

offers today, and that is why Roman battlefields at Canterbury cannot be

disturbed to make way for a highway, why London streets cannot be widened to

accommodate cars, and why the royals must not be allowed to destroy

themselves.