Asunder

Come the Devolution, I shall probably be manning at least four different barricades. Although English, I was born in Northern Ireland, brought up in Wales and educated mostly in Scotland. In fact, I learn from my cheap pocket calculator (1pencil, 6p, 1piece of paper, free) that out of my first twenty years I spent two in Ireland, three and a half in Scotland, four and a half in England and the remaining ten in Wales. Bit confusing for a chap to have a four-way identity crisis. I remember the only time we ever bought a dog at home, I was bitterly disappointed to find my mother had chosen a poodle. What I wanted more than anything else was a mongrel. At the time, I rationalised this with the thought that my favourite animal in fiction (William’s dog, Jumble) was a mongrel. Looking back, I think it was the deeper suspicion that I was one too.

It would have been all right if only I could have behaved in a totally English way throughout, striding through these foreign lands like an Imperial administrator among the natives, more English than anyone left at home. But I belong to that class of humanity which, after it has been to a Paul Newman film, is convinced for about two hours that it is Paul Newman. After a Woody Allen film, it takes me the rest of the evening to shake off a Brooklyn accent and an attack of bad paradoxes. I still retain a habit of mumbling inherited partly from Marlon Brando. So, given a few years in a Celtic country, it was inevitable I was going to end up pro-Celtic, pro-Welsh mostly. Wrexham may be only five miles from the English border, but if every time you head down from the hills of home to the fields and streams of Cheshire you pass signs saying WELCOME TO ENGLAND and the pubs suddenly spring open on Sunday and people can’t pronounce Llangollen, you begin to feel that you are different. You begin to feel Welsh. I felt so Welsh I didn’t just support the Welsh Rugby XV, which anyone can do; I supported the Welsh football team as well. That takes a bit of doing.

What made it harder was that I was the only person in Wales who thought I was Welsh. To a real Welshman I had the accent, the upbringing and the background of an Englishman. Not that he would have thought that much about it. The Welsh don’t bother that much about being Welsh, except when they get out of their country. They manage to be Welsh without even trying, whereas I tried damned hard – I read up Welsh history, toured with George Borrow through wild Wales, even tried to teach myself Welsh. You wouldn’t catch many Welshman doing that and not one was taken in, any more than they were taken in when Prince Charles had a similar crash course. Still, at least I felt Welsh deep inside.

Until I was sent to school in Scotland. Then I began to feel Scottish. A new role, a new script, but a slightly larger stage. A much more varied cast, too. Growing up in North Wales I had imagined there was only one kind of Welshman (I didn’t realise till later that the North and South Walians are deeply divided or that one Welshman will scheme and plot harder against another Welshman than any Englishman) but the Scots at school came from all over the place. Bill Emslie, for instance, came from Kirkwall in the Orkneys. His father was a strict Plymouth Brother and Bill used to organise private Bible-reading sessions at school. Sometimes he would fall from grace and would return from holidays with such instruments of sin as pipe and tobacco, or copies of Playboy. Regularly and inevitably he would undergo dramatic repentance and call an audience to witness the ceremonial burning of Playboy or even, on one occasion, the ritual breaking of the pipe into small pieces which were then hurled with Old Testament vigour into the River Almond, to the applause of his flock.

He loathed, and was loathed by, Sandy Robinson, a farmer’s son from near Dundee and a relation of the DC Thomson family. Sandy had one leg in irons from a childhood go of polio, but asked and gave no quarter on account of it, never minding in the least being called “Peg Leg”. He was a hard-bitten, hard-swearing lapsed Calvinist (would have been hard-drinking and hard-smoking if school rules had permitted) and used to tell Emslie: "When religious wailing Willies like you come round to our farm, my father drives them off with a shot-gun, ah’m telling you!” Emslie forgave him, with difficulty. Me, Sandy dismissed as a toffee-nosed English creep, till one day we goaded each other beyond endurance and decided to punch each other to death. Any hesitation I might have had about hitting a boy in leg-irons disappeared when I found he had the harder punch. Thanks to superior footwork on my part, we fought a bruising draw and emerged the best of friends.

So, if I wanted to be Scottish, what kind of Scot did I want to be? Urban Glaswegian? Cultured Edinburgh type? Highlander? Strictly Wee Free? There were all those types to choose from, and more. Luckily the decision was taken from me when I discovered after two or three years that one of the new boys was a distant cousin of mine. Real Scottish blood, by God! Never mind that the tenuous link between the Kingtons and Oliphants had been forged in 1840 and not strengthened since. Never mind that cousin Laurence was chagrined to find my name was Kington, not King Kong, his favourite screen actor. Never mind that, being vaguely landed himself, he thought of me as a poor English relation. At last I had a role to play as a surrogate sprig of the Perthshire gentry. Or, in other words, the kind of Scotsman that most Scots dismiss as a pseudo-Englishmen.

Very confusing. Not much helped by the faint echoes of my Northern Ireland birth and my 2-year babyhood, brought about by the presence of my father in wartime County Down as a member of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Thus I entered adult life as a proletarian Welshman, a landed Scots gent, a military occupier of Ulster and a full-blooded Englishman. (So of course I went to University to study French, despite the fact that I knew by then that my mother’s father, whom I had previously thought of as an American called Sanders, had actually started life as a German called Saurberg.)

Which brings me, ladies and gentlemen of the “Maybe to Devolution“ movement, to the big question that faces us this week: Yes or No? Speaking personally, the answer is, of course, a massive It All Depends. My left leg is voting No. My right leg says Yes. Some of me is all for direct rule. Bits of me say, Troops Out Now. But my head says that it really doesn’t matter much either way. Whatever happens, the Welsh will continue to be argumentative, passionate, small-minded, conniving and much given to despoiling the landscape with corrugated iron; the Scots will go on being repressed moralists, romantically defeatist, nostalgically expatriate, proud as nails, great bakers, terrible drinkers; the Northern Irish will remain bitter, warm-hearted, hospitable, depressed and hopeful.

And I, being English from the ballot box up, won’t have a say in any of it,

PUNCH February 28 1979