England Revisited: Musings of a Danish Anglophile: Musings of

By Helle Libenholt

'This is not a memoir, exactly.' It is 'a declaration of love for a country.' So begins England Revisited. With exuberance, honesty and quick-witted charm, Helle Libenholt embarks on a personal and cultural exploration of Englishness from her Danish perspective. From pubs, Shakespeare, Freddy Mercury and P's and Q's to afternoon tea, Th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Helle Libenholt
• Release date: Apr 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914078736

Book preview

Preface

This book has arisen as a gentle outcry, a call to appreciate England, from across the North Sea. It is not a memoir, exactly. A memoir includes hundreds of miscellaneous elements: people, dates, events in a person’s life, many of which would be out-of-place here. Nor is it a true rendition of England, if such a thing can be said to exist. I hope it never sounds as if it pretends to be. I am an outsider, after all.

Yet, I’m reminded of Kipling’s quote: ‘They don’t know England who only England know.’ Referring to the potentially myopic perspective of stay-at-home Britons, Kipling advocated travelling – leaving your own country from time to time to experience other cultures – because only then can we see our own in a nuanced perspective. He didn’t mean the likes of me, I know. But sometimes we’re so deeply mired in our own culture that it may take an outsider for us to become defamiliarized with what we’re only too familiar. This is England revisited by a Dane and an invitation for you to visit or revisit it, as the case may be, with me.

The book is an exploration and a love letter of sorts. It is a declaration of affection for a country with which I’ve had a quiet but stable (if one-sided) love affair all my life. Just as I have declared my love for a man, I openly declare myself an Anglophile. Like the love of a person, it can sometimes be difficult to pinpoint exactly why you love it. I suppose we cannot put it down to chemistry the way we sometimes do when it’s love between two people. That is one reason why this book has come about in the first place: I have sought to explore, after all these years, what it is about England that has me so in its thrall; what is apparently unlike other countries, and what England means to me. My findings are not based in sociological research, statistics or any objective categories that can be proven but are, simply, a Dane’s musings on, or ramblings about, England and why she loves it. As such, they are based on memories, selectively retrieved of course because we cannot remember any other way. While some findings are probably purely idiosyncratic, I suspect others are, to a degree, universal. I am not so delusional as to believe I am the only person to have discovered that England, in many ways, is wonderful.

Why share these findings then, you may ask? I partly put it down to ‘mentionitis’, the very useful word that Helen Fielding introduced for the condition people suffer from when they are in love and cannot stop talking about the love-object, casually slipping into a conversation something like, ‘Oh, did you know that Daniel is blah blah blah?’ because it gives them (Bridget) a thrill simply to be saying the love-object’s name. Now, I don’t try to throw the word ‘English’ or ‘England’ into conversations at any given opportunity. Not because people in Denmark would disagree with me; I have yet to meet a Dane who doesn’t have a positive opinion about Britain. But apart from one or two friends of mine, Danes don’t enthuse about it like me (we generally don’t enthuse a lot, much like the British), and I don’t feel the need to exhibit my own enthusiasm to uncomprehending listeners. Nor do I feel a need to rave about it after all these years. We’re past the honeymoon stage, England and me. Yet, here I am, pouring it all out because if I don’t map it, it doesn’t quite exist.

Also: It gives me joy. To borrow a phrase from Zadie Smith which she borrowed from Henry James, it is ‘an act of enthusiasm.’¹

I began writing this years ago, when I had a spare moment between teaching jobs, raising children, life in general. Long before the Scandi wave hit British shores, certainly long before the word ‘hygge’ mysteriously (and, occasionally, erroneously) entered the English language. In ‘The Mark on the Wall’ Virginia Woolf’s narrator says that she desires melancholy, ‘like most English people’, which makes me wonder if that, more than ‘hygge’, is why Scandinavia has become popular in Britain in recent years. There may be dollops of something ‘hyggelig’ sprinkled here and there on these pages, but I’m afraid there will be only a smattering of melancholy and nothing remotely noir about it. No doubt, the Scandi wave will be have receded anyway by the time this comes out; I’m not a fast mover. While it is a joy, it is not easy. Things – people, books, experiences, memories – keep cropping up the longer I take, making me take even longer. And so it sprouts and swells; surely it must stop sometime.

This whole thing looks deceptively systematic, structured, controlled. There are chapters. As if such a patchwork of reminiscences, celebrations and imaginings have any sort of inner logic to them or can be sorted into separate, little boxes. They cannot. But one must have chapters.

Things have changed since I began this undertaking – in England, in Europe, in the world. It seems self-indulgent, even naïve, in these uncertain, post-factual times, to plough ahead and put into words something as innocuous as one’s enthusiasms about things English. I offer them up, then, as a kind of benign distraction from the angst and existential despair of our times. My hope is that if you find yourself provoked in some parts, you may nod along elsewhere and think, Yes, I believe that to be true, too. In an article in The Guardian on 17 February, 2019, Jeanette Winterson suggests spending a little more money on a little less wine because it increases the good things in life, summing up: ‘We are not on this Earth for long. Enjoyment and happiness matter. Sharing with friends is important.’

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an Anglophile as ‘a person who is fond of or greatly admires England or Britain.’ According to The Cambridge Dictionary it is ‘a person who is not English but is interested in, likes, or supports England or the UK’ while the urban online dictionary² claims it is ‘a person with an unhealthy admiration for English culture’ (‘more often than not an American,’ it claims) ‘who holds an extremely romanticised view of England and the English’ and who ‘believes England has a superior or the best culture when compared to their own.’

The word ‘romanticised’ is clearly derogatory and denotes an element of ignorance, which I hope I’m not (too) guilty of. As to the English culture being superior to my own or other cultures, I don’t think of it in such competitive terms. I will compare to Danish culture now and then – something to measure against – but not in the sense that one will come out a winner, the other a loser. I do not, I think, suffer from Anglomania.

As much as I would like to spend months in England every year if it were possible, I do not, like Henry James, have a desire for British citizenship – and probably wouldn’t be able to get it now anyway. I am content, mostly, to appreciate England from across the North Sea. One might even insist that that is the only way to sustain any –philia: by remaining ever the tourist³. The flaws tend to disappear from view at a distance. Despite having been to England many times and having lived there for a brief spell once, I have never tried to deal with, say, the tax system, or day care facilities or nursing homes. But that is the nature of something like Anglophilia: it doesn’t insist on being based in fact or statistics but on something purely irrational, though no less truthful, in much the same way that fiction isn’t real but does tell truths.

The novelist David Mitchell has said, in the Paris Review, that when it comes to describing a country of which one isn’t a native, one’s observations are made with an ‘outsider’s immunity to the camouflage of familiarity.’⁴ I approach this with humility and honesty but hopefully also with impunity.

I first proceed along the line of time, as the accretion of my Anglophile sensibilities unfolded like that – gradually, over time – but also in leaps and bounds. The awareness of these sensibilities often developed after the fact, occasionally years later. At a certain point, I therefore abandon any idea of chronology and try to order it all more thematically, insofar as anything so disorderly can be organised at all. I apologize for any repetitions, zigzagging, overlapping; it can be hard to reign in enthusiastic ramblings. Apropos enthusiasm: If you feel little enjoyment for oohing and aahing about things English, I suggest you read this small bits at a time, or not at all. There will be fawning. There will be pathos. Jane Austen will be mentioned, as will Monty Python and Stephen Fry. You have been warned, as they say.

I’m constantly in doubt as to what term to employ when I talk about England, or Great Britain, or the UK. I’m aware of the geographical and historical-political differences, the sensitive feelings triggered when foreigners get it wrong and ask a Scot, for instance, whereabouts in England he’s from. Sometimes I mean England, sometimes Britain, sometimes I’m not sure. I want to exclude and offend no one, yet I also want to be accurate. There is no word for the ‘love of all things British’, which seems unfair. It also indicates that the notion of Anglophilia does not go hand-in-hand with the notion of Britannia,⁵⁶ or perhaps it’s an unfortunate aspect of linguistic-colonial encroachment.

I have only been once to Northern Ireland, once to Wales, four times to Scotland. While I hope to up these numbers in the future, there is an English slant to this simply because I have been to England many more times. Incidentally, the confusion, though no doubt it is logical to some, is reflected in British sports: Sometimes a national team represents England and Wales (cricket), sometimes there is a national team for each nation of the United Kingdom (football), and sometimes they all compete as one nation (the Olympics). Since this is not only allowed but entirely official, I hope that my occasional waywardness may be excused.

There is no separate headline in this book devoted to the Britons. That would indicate that they are a separate topic – separate from their gardens, their literature, their sense of humour – when of course they are part of every topic I dwell on. Whether living or dead, they are the ones who have written some of my favourite books, speak the language I love best, display the best sense of humour. But I am jumping the gun here. Let us move on from the preface and straight into the thick of things.

Nascent Anglophilia

I suppose it all began when I was 12, and my parents took my brother and me to England for the first time. We took the ferry from Esbjerg in Denmark to Harwich in England. My father told me that Harwich was not pronounced ‘har-witch’ but ‘harritch’, which I’d like to think sparked my later interest in and love of the English language. The English language didn’t play a huge role in Denmark at the time, unlike today, so I hadn’t had the massive exposure to the language that children do today. A word like ‘Harwich’ was rather exotic and wonderful.

I don’t have a detailed recollection of where we went, and my geographical knowledge of England at the time was sparse, but I do remember going to the seaside on the southern coast somewhere. My brother got sunburned, with blisters the size of small seashells. He suffered a case of sunstroke because he refused to take off the plastic Bobby helmet that he’d gotten the day before. We hadn’t expected England to be that sunny. The sand was dark and grainy, so unlike the fine-grained, almost white sand on Danish beaches. A trip to the beach became a novel sensory experience.

My parents hadn’t booked ahead on our way from Harwich to the first day’s destination. As we drove into a village looking for a place to stay, my father stopped the car, rolled down the window and asked a man in the street if he knew of a place where we might stay the night. The man gave us directions to a small hotel. ‘But if it’s fully booked, come to my house,’ he said and gave my father his address. ‘Then you can stay with me.’ Even at 12, I knew that was extremely kind and generous. Surely it’s a special nation whose citizens will invite complete strangers into their homes. I realise this might never happen today, but a child’s memories are a child’s memories.

Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘The impressions of childhood are those that last longest and cut deepest.’ The way was paved for me to view England in a positive light.

Our final destination was a seaside town in which the holiday home we’d rented was at the top of a hill with a view of the sea on one side and of the grey houses of the town on the other. I loved going into town, or rushing headlong, rather, down the alarmingly precipitous streets. Walking back up to the holiday house, our torsos were practically horizontal. We had to shove my brother’s pushchair with some momentum because the streets seemed all but vertical. Denmark being a mainly flat country, this, too, was exotic but also quaint, cosy. When we opted to drive through the town, my father would tell us to make sure we didn’t suddenly open one of the car doors as there were stone buildings or rock walls right at the edge of the streets, like some medieval toy town where cars weren’t supposed to exist.

It was the first time I saw milk bottles deposited outside the doors of houses, the empty bottles having been placed by the house owners for the milkman to take away. What strange custom was this? My mother told me you had to shake the bottles to make the creamy bit on top mix with the rest, the whole process of which efficient dairies and supermarkets in Denmark had long since rendered redundant. How brilliant, I thought, and how disappointing to have been robbed of this experience when I grew up.

Two English sisters were staying at the holiday house next door. Despite my utterly limited use of the English language I must have managed to say something because they ended up becoming my first pen pals ever. I still remember their names and address (though I mispronounced the third line for years):

Jill and Sharon Sabin

34 Moor Park Avenue

Beaumont Park

Huddersfield

Yorkshire

HD4 7AL

England

We wrote to each other for a few years, even after I later moved abroad with my family. It was always a thrill to receive these letters, to read about these dark-haired, English girls’ lives and see what colour the Queen’s profile on the envelope would be this time. Jill and Sharon’s address was another thing that set England apart from Denmark: There were so many more lines than in my Danish address, and the number of the house came before the name of the street. Their envelopes addressed to me at the time contained only this:

Helle Libenholt

Sivhøjen 4

8800 Viborg

Denmark

At some point, inevitably, their letters stopped coming, or I stopped writing them, I forget which. By that time, I had British stamps in most colours inserted into delicate pockets in a green stamp book which held little else.

Today, whenever I hear the cries of seagulls, I’m reminded of that seaside town. I’ve since wondered if it was perhaps Torquay. Was it because I’d always lived far from the sea in Denmark that I’d never heard seagulls before, Viborg being in the very centre of Jutland? I don’t know, but in my mind’s eye I can see the sun glinting in the water of the English Channel when I hear seagulls. I’m not hugely fond of the birds themselves, but their sound belongs to my childhood memories of England.

I’ve since learned that Fawlty Towers was supposed to take place in Torquay and that Agatha Christie came from those parts, and so I’ve decided that it was Torquay I visited back then. In a box in my house there is a picture of my family and me picnicking in a field of ferns somewhere not far from Dartmoor prison. The scene itself demonstrates how the sinister and the quaint co-existed, how opposites still co-exist, in England: the tall, ugly, grey prison building rising out of the surrounding village, set in a spectacular countryside that is at once green and lush, wild and windy. Like something out of a Daphne du Maurier novel, it evokes beauty and rawness, life and loneliness.

Code Switching

These were the vague contours of England as seen through my childish eyes. Only gradually were they filled in, nuanced. The elements floating around inside the contours were as disparate as they were one-dimensional: B&B’s and terraced houses, English liquorice and Quality Street (my tin - for marbles – from approximately 1972, survived two trips across the Atlantic and now sits in my daughter’s room), Slade and Sweet, Upstairs and Downstairs, dark-haired children with pale, freckled skin who miraculously spoke perfect English, the Last Night of the Proms, broadcast on Danish television as far back as I can remember, enabling me to sing along to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ by the time I was 12.

Back in Denmark, with this exotic other language fresh in my mind, I would look in the mirror in my parents’ bathroom and speak English to myself. This brought back an even earlier memory of speaking ‘English’ to myself in the bathroom mirror when I was barely tall enough to see myself in it. I knew it wasn’t exactly the Queen’s English. But I practiced it anyway based on what I’d picked up from songs and from the many international visitors my parents had had over the years. I would swish random English sounding words around in my mouth, letting them swirl and hit my palate, my tongue, my cheeks, as if they were a fine vintage wine and I an adult. I relished the sound and feel of them, clearly so different from the more guttural Danish language, which no one, as far as I know, has ever considered beautiful. The trip to Britain had given me my first hands-on experience with the language.

It was during this pre-YouTube period that I began indulging in English television series. The Thames Television picture of a condensed London skyline and triumphant little horn tune became a fixture of this watching and would remain so for years. The television programme in Denmark in the late 1970s would make any teenager today regard us as utter Neanderthals. This was the age in Denmark when we had one TV channel, and programmes would not begin until late afternoon. I recall especially one series which took place at an English manor house called something like Lambard and Christina, the orphaned heroine, who often went riding with one of the two brothers who lived at the manor, in a green and lush English countryside. It awoke something in 12-year-old me. A sense of longing for a fictional place that would never be mine, a dreamscape of green, misty landscapes, with a lonely outsider at the centre of things, who was trying to find her place in this cold but enticing world of an English country seat. I still remember the signature theme tune that began and ended each episode.

It was during this period, too, it began to dawn on me that English people weren’t quite like Danish people. For some reason this obvious fact hadn’t struck me very forcibly in England perhaps because the English, on their home ground, rather tended to blend in. This changed when an English family moved into an old farmhouse behind our street in Denmark. They asked me to babysit their small children. Apart from the different smells, different toys, different furniture, different names, these people apparently only had a cup of tea for dinner. I was baffled, not to say horrified, that I was only supposed to give these small, growing children ‘tea’ for their evening meal, but I dutifully complied⁷. Every time I was there, I gave them a cup of tea for dinner. Only years later did I realise my mistake. I don’t recall any outcries or other reasonable reactions on the part of those poor children, or their parents, to my hopeless ministrations. I can only hope that they at some point complained to their parents and were given compensatory snacks and fatty meals. It still leaves me wondering why a meal is called ‘tea’ when tea (surely) is a hot drink.

As to the title of this chapter, you will have picked up on the fact that this is written in English despite the fact that I am Danish. (This may need an apology to any miffed Danes who consider me pretentious. They will presume I am trying to show off, something which is culturally unacceptable in Denmark). For this topic, I humbly borrow the language that opens on to England, no matter how archaic or ill-suited to my more American accent (an inconsistency which, I hope, is heard more than read).

For years, words did not drip from my pen, or keyboard, in Danish but came out in uneven splotches and at great pains, probably because most of the books I read were in English, and doubtless also because of my stint abroad in my teenage years, to be broached below. Although it sounds unfair to my mother tongue, Danish has sometimes felt like a blunt instrument to me, something I have to twist and turn forcibly to get a decent sound out of, whereas English, to my subjective ears, has more resonance, a greater number of cadences, more possibility of nuance, without even trying very hard.

As I am Danish, however, it often leaves me feeling linguistically schizoid, or at least with dual, linguistic affiliations. I find myself translating back and forth between the two languages almost daily, in speech and in writing. I also feel different when I speak or write English, as I know most children who have grown up with two languages do when they alternate between them.

In her essay collection Changing my mind, Zadie Smith talks about ‘Speaking in tongues’, and how she first felt it was ‘like being alive twice’⁸ when she moved from her Willesden/childhood (working-class; colourful) language to a Cambridge/adult (educated, middleclass; posh) language. Later, this turned, inevitably, into one voice, and she regrets this; sees it as a loss. If you change back and forth, she says, you are guilty of duplicity in Britain. That is because of the ever-present question of class.

In my case, leaving one language for the other likewise felt like a loss, at first. It sometimes still does. You cannot speak Danish and English simultaneously. Languages don’t work like that. But you can speak them both, or write them, I later saw, if you continually insist on doing so or find situations in which it is necessary. Like travelling to England. Or writing a small treatise on your Anglophilia. More than ‘solely a burden’, it can become a gift, as Smith later says Barack Obama views the notion of ‘having more than one voice in your ear.’ It is about being true to one’s own selves, plural.⁹

If I love England so much, why an American accent? This will be dealt with in the next chapter. Let me at this stage apologize for any Americanisms, outdated or otherwise, antiquated ‘Britishisms’, stabs at same which don’t work, unorthodox uses of prepositions, mixing up of spellings, non-standard idioms and the like. This is the era of globalisation, and English is the lingua franca of the world. There are more speakers of English as a second or third language than as a first. If the British didn’t want the English language to catch on, they shouldn’t have had Shakespeare, or colonized the world, or given rise to the United States as a nation and its subsequent spread of the English language even further. Simply put, English seems the only possible medium for this small tribute.

Exile – Crossing the Atlantic

When I was 13, my father had had enough of Danish winters and enough of paying taxes ‘through the roof’. He sold everything: our house, our car, his furniture company, and we moved to southern California. The year was 1981, and the differences between Denmark and the United States, especially southern California, were immense. The phrase ‘culture shock’ is too inadequate to describe that first year. Thankfully, the following three years improved things greatly. I gradually acclimatized to the people, the culture, the language. I ended up living in California for four formative years. A sense of cultural dislocation has been with me since. Many things happened during those years which helped shape the way I view the world and myself even now. But a few things stand out when it comes to what I know now was a sort of quest for identity and which added to what later, perhaps somewhat illogically, morphed into a sense of Anglophilia.

There’s nothing that helps people realise who they are as much as having them realise who they are not. Being in a foreign territory is therefore an excellent way of fanning the flames of patriotism, and I was no different. As much as I was becoming more of an American teenager than a Danish one every day, there was always a part of me that longed for ‘the old country’, and for Europe (and here I include Britain¹⁰). Though there were about 2500 students at my high school, and though I had plenty of American friends, I would always find the foreign exchange students from Europe, and we would invariably become friends. It was a bond based on feeling similar on this vast and multifaceted continent, and it was precisely the European bond that mattered - not necessarily a Danish one. On some subconscious level, we knew we came from a part of the world where buildings were old if they were, say, 300 years old, and not 50; where you could drive through several countries, hear several languages, in a day.

Going to school every day in California and being immersed in the English language, I automatically, if subconsciously, put my native language in second place. We still spoke mostly Danish at home, but since