want me to tell you my story? You want me to start with whatever first comes into my mind?
All right then, I will. The first thing that comes into my head is green palm fronds, grey sky, bicycle rickshaws, beggars, intense heat. It’s England, the High Street in Oxford, between Magdalen College and the Botanic Gardens. The day I lost my job at the college. It was only a few weeks ago, would you believe? I remember bustling crowds, a smell of decay, a chronic, gnawing sense of impending threat. (It’s a hard thing to depend for your livelihood on a society which hates you. You have no idea.) I remember a solitary old white man, an Old Brit like you, standing on a box with the crowds pushing and shoving around him, singing in a thin quavery voice:
“I will not cease from mortal strife
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land”
I’d heard it before, that strange English patriotic song with its peculiar words. (What are ‘arrows of desire’? What are ‘dark satanic mills’?) I suppose you must know it yourself, Dr Brennan? We often heard that song on the BBC, which we listened to in order to keep a track on the government and its war on the immigrants like me who made up most of the country’s population. But though I knew that the song was about England, it never made me think of England at all. I always thought of Greenland, with its meadows and hills and streams, where Suzanne and I planned to make our home.
Now, looking back, I can see that England itself was in its way a green place. There were green banana trees and green rice fields and green mangroves and green rushes and green waterweed up and down the swampy greenish Thames. In fact that was one of the first things I noticed about England, crawling out of the hold of the barge by the Town Dock at five o’clock in the morning: it was green . Back in Spain, where I came from, everything was red red red.
The very first thing I noticed about England, though, was the smell : the muddy murky stink of vegetable and animal waste rotting in warm brackish water.
I have a degree in engineering. I speak fluent English and passable French. I am an educated man. But when you leave your own country as a refugee – when your own country, in fact, has actually ceased to exist – and you find yourself in another country that resents you and feels no obligation to you at all, you can’t pick and choose what you do. I was never one of those immigrants who waste time complaining about their fate. I took whatever work was going, just as I’d done in the last famine-ridden days of crumbling Spain, grateful to have a means of earning a living, grateful to have anything at all. I filled sandbags round the offices of the Provisional Government, I killed rats, I sprayed stagnant pools with insecticide. Once I even had a job pulling corpses out of the Thames Marshes. (I didn’t stick at it for long, but that was before Suzanne and Maria and at a time when the population of England was twenty or thirty million less than it is now, so I could still afford to take the gamble of finding other work.)
New people were coming in all the time, people from the Mediterranean, people from Africa and China and from what was left of the Indian subcontinent. They kept coming in their thousands every day. Never mind that the Old Brits fired on their boats off shore. Never mind that the Old Brits booby-trapped the beaches and machine-gunned new arrivals as they waded out of the sea. The migrants kept coming anyway, wave after wave, dodging mines and bullets, crawling under barbed wire, to slip inland and disappear into the crowded chaos of the cities. Then they hired themselves out, offering their labour for so little that those same Old Brits who’d been willing to kill to keep them out just couldn’t resist employing them now they were here. And each new wave was cheaper and more irresistible. However little pay I
All right then, I will. The first thing that comes into my head is green palm fronds, grey sky, bicycle rickshaws, beggars, intense heat. It’s England, the High Street in Oxford, between Magdalen College and the Botanic Gardens. The day I lost my job at the college. It was only a few weeks ago, would you believe? I remember bustling crowds, a smell of decay, a chronic, gnawing sense of impending threat. (It’s a hard thing to depend for your livelihood on a society which hates you. You have no idea.) I remember a solitary old white man, an Old Brit like you, standing on a box with the crowds pushing and shoving around him, singing in a thin quavery voice:
“I will not cease from mortal strife
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land”
I’d heard it before, that strange English patriotic song with its peculiar words. (What are ‘arrows of desire’? What are ‘dark satanic mills’?) I suppose you must know it yourself, Dr Brennan? We often heard that song on the BBC, which we listened to in order to keep a track on the government and its war on the immigrants like me who made up most of the country’s population. But though I knew that the song was about England, it never made me think of England at all. I always thought of Greenland, with its meadows and hills and streams, where Suzanne and I planned to make our home.
Now, looking back, I can see that England itself was in its way a green place. There were green banana trees and green rice fields and green mangroves and green rushes and green waterweed up and down the swampy greenish Thames. In fact that was one of the first things I noticed about England, crawling out of the hold of the barge by the Town Dock at five o’clock in the morning: it was green . Back in Spain, where I came from, everything was red red red.
The very first thing I noticed about England, though, was the smell : the muddy murky stink of vegetable and animal waste rotting in warm brackish water.
I have a degree in engineering. I speak fluent English and passable French. I am an educated man. But when you leave your own country as a refugee – when your own country, in fact, has actually ceased to exist – and you find yourself in another country that resents you and feels no obligation to you at all, you can’t pick and choose what you do. I was never one of those immigrants who waste time complaining about their fate. I took whatever work was going, just as I’d done in the last famine-ridden days of crumbling Spain, grateful to have a means of earning a living, grateful to have anything at all. I filled sandbags round the offices of the Provisional Government, I killed rats, I sprayed stagnant pools with insecticide. Once I even had a job pulling corpses out of the Thames Marshes. (I didn’t stick at it for long, but that was before Suzanne and Maria and at a time when the population of England was twenty or thirty million less than it is now, so I could still afford to take the gamble of finding other work.)
New people were coming in all the time, people from the Mediterranean, people from Africa and China and from what was left of the Indian subcontinent. They kept coming in their thousands every day. Never mind that the Old Brits fired on their boats off shore. Never mind that the Old Brits booby-trapped the beaches and machine-gunned new arrivals as they waded out of the sea. The migrants kept coming anyway, wave after wave, dodging mines and bullets, crawling under barbed wire, to slip inland and disappear into the crowded chaos of the cities. Then they hired themselves out, offering their labour for so little that those same Old Brits who’d been willing to kill to keep them out just couldn’t resist employing them now they were here. And each new wave was cheaper and more irresistible. However little pay I
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