Is this the end of Britishness?

A shared history of 300 years could be washed away if Scotland votes for independence. What was the
complex identity the United Kingdom created and should we mourn its loss?

The Kings Own Scottish Borderers parade in the grounds of Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA

Ian Jack
Tuesday 16 September 2014 06.00 BST

In 1951, a little-known Bengali journalist, already well into middle age and staring failure in
the face, published a book that has since become a classic of Indian literature. Nirad
Chaudhuris The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian told the story of the writers
progress from an obscure town in the Ganges delta to university in metropolitan Kolkata,
and from there into clerking and poorly rewarded work for newspapers and literary
magazines. But the larger journey it recounted was an intellectual one how he had been
brought into contact with European, especially British, civilisation, and how much its ideas
and art had come to matter to him. VS Naipaul said it was perhaps the one great book to
have come out of the Indo-British encounter, and though few other critics might go that
far, it remains an extraordinary achievement both for its insight into the British empire as
seen from below by one of its non-white subjects, and for its argument that all of Indias
problems could by no means be blamed on imperialism. As India had achieved
independence only four years before, after half-a-century of struggle, Chaudhuris views
were bound to cause him trouble. But even more inammatory was his books dedication:
To the memory of the British empire in India,
Which conferred subjecthood upon us,
But withheld citizenship.

To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:

Civis Britannicus sum
Because all that was good and living within us
Was made, shaped and quickened
By the same British rule.
Made, shaped and quickened all that was good and living within them! What self-respecting
Indian, then or now, could live with that idea? Of the hundreds of thousands of words
Chaudhuri published subsequently, none were so infamous as that dedication. Infamy, it
turned out, wasnt good for him. Craving more of it, he became a contrarian a mischiefmaker, as he liked to think of himself always tilting against the conventional wisdom on
any subject, from Gandhi to the Suez crisis. His love of Britain sometimes seemed one of
the few unconfected aspects of his persona, and though it came with its share of wilful
mannerisms and maxims (such as his belief that British food could only be truly enjoyed if
the eater wore British clothes), his appreciation of the countrys history, literature and
landscape was profound. The knowledge had been won from books: he rst visited Britain
in 1955, when he was 57, and didnt settle here until 1970, when he and his wife moved
from Delhi to a rented at in Oxford, where he lived until his death, aged 101, in 1999.
I knew Chaudhuri in the last dozen years of his life, when I would sometimes visit to hear
him perform performances rather than conversations were what he enjoyed, challenging
you to name, say, the Royal Navys battleships in 1939, which he would recite after you
failed to do so, or ticking you o for holding a hock glass by the bowl rather than the stem,
tut-tutting about the decline in British manners. His adopted country was in that sense a
disappointment to him; the spectre of decadence, he said, always trod at his heels like the
Foul Fiend. But he was always generous about its achievements. In his view, the empire
had been one of the greatest and most benecial economic and political phenomena the
world has ever known. That seemed an astonishing statement even for Chaudhuri, given
his condemnation of British rulers in India as so often brutal and ignorant. But he denied
any paradox. In 1940 I hated nazism, yet every day I was sustaining myself by listening to
Beethoven and Haydn, he said. I can separate cultures from personalities, and I grieve for
the empire as an institution. On another occasion, he told me, I am what I am on account
of British rule in India. And have I shown myself to be worthless?
This boastful, birdlike little man, dressed in his dhoti and surrounded by books in his
Oxford at, was an unlikely gure to recall in the middle of the second televised debate
between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling on Scottish independence. Nevertheless I
thought of him. Something was missing that he would have supplied: Civis Britannicus sum.
Youre
viewing
the Guardians
new website.
Wed
lovementioned
to hear what you
Darling,
defending
the union,
never
once
thethink.
British identity that it had created
and promoted, nor the many cultural, social, scientic and technical achievements of its
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300-year-history.
Perhaps television debates are no place for this kind of soft-edged
retrospection;
perhaps the Scottish National party had already defused the prospect of that
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historys end, by promising that the social union between peoples rather than states
would persist undamaged whatever governments did; perhaps focus groups had given
Britishness the thumbs down, as an idea that long ago lost traction in Scotland.

A hen party in Blackpool. Photograph: Dougie Wallace

Whatever the reason, Scottishness is the identity that speakers on the no side have been
most anxious to declare. Nobody could love Scotland more than I do has been a constant
sentiment. In the rst of the two Darling-Salmond debates, the rst minister fauxinnocently wondered why his opponent was proclaiming his loyalty to Scotland when he,
Salmond, had never challenged it. Darling never took up the point, though the reason is
clear enough. Facing opponents who literally wrap themselves in the Scottish ag,
unionists feel they need to prove that to be against independence is not to be anti-national
in the argot of the blogs, a self-hating Scotsman, a quisling, an Uncle Tom. Both sides,
therefore, turn to Scotland as the place that, in Chaudhuris construction, has made,
shaped and quickened them. Civis Scoticus sum.

***
I dont know if it applies to me. I suspect many people must love Scotland more than I do,
as an entity and as a destiny. I dont want to compete with them. My friend and former
colleague Neal Ascherson wrote eloquently in a recent issue of Prospect about his decision
to vote yes, and in his essay evoked a memorable image, worthy of Pixar. Put it like this,
he wrote:
In every Scottish brain, there has been a tiny blue-and-white cell which secretes an
awareness: My country was independent once. And every so often, the cell has
transmitted a minute, almost imperceptible pulse: Would it not be grand, if one day But
this stimulated other larger, higher-voltage cells around it to emit suppressor charges: Are
you daft? Get real; were too wee, too poor, that shites for Wembley or the movies. One
way of describing whats happening now is to say that the reaction of these inhibitor cells
has grown weak and erratic. Whereas the other pulse, the blue-white one, is transmitting
louder, faster, more insistently. This is why the real referendum question is no longer: Can
we become independent? It is: Yes, we know that we can but do we want to?
As I drove one evening last month on a road that follows the River Tweed, which for some
of its length marks the English-Scottish border, I wondered why I had never felt the pulse of
this blue-and-white cell. And I wondered why Neal, who has spent as much of his life in
England as I have, if not more, always seems to have felt it murmuring away like an old
song, though the institutions that shaped and opened up his life schools, universities,
regiments, publishers, broadcasters, employers were at the very least British, when not

downright English, in their atmospheres and inuences. But none of us is a rational actor in
these things, untainted by our upbringing.
In his essay, Neal remembers how he often heard the patriotic verse from Walter Scotts The
Lay of the Last Minstrel ringing round the kitchen in his mothers cut-glass English:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said
This is my own, my native l and!
Driving towards Scott country, I recalled my fathers way with the same lines:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said
When his toe has kicked the bottom o the bed
OH YA BUGGER!
He recited this version, sensationally, at his brother-in-laws silver wedding party, which
lled a room that was somehow part of Dunfermlines Regal Cinema. I guess he must have
had one or two bottles of beer he was never a big drinker and decided to let y. My
mother spent most of the bus journey home wondering what had come over him, to
which an honest answer might have been India Pale Ale.
That would be in the mid-1950s. Wed been back in Scotland four or ve years by then, after
what, for my parents, had been a 22-year stay in a Lancashire mill town where my father
had found work in 1930. He and my mother were both from Fife and it was to Fife that we
returned gladly, for the most part, though my mechanic father found that the textile
machinery he was paid to maintain was antique compared with that left behind in England.
His side of the family had been the stranger and more adventurous: my paternal
grandmother was born in India to an Irish sergeant in the Royal Artillery and a Scottish
midwife, who died respectively of alcohol poisoning and acute melancholy in late Victorian
Scotland, when their imperial service was done. British is the description that ts them
best: warfare, the Protestant faith, industry and the empire the four elements, according
to the historian Linda Colley, from which British identity was forged secured their
advancement, such as it was, and probably led to my great-grandfather discarding his
inconvenient Catholicism. Two world wars, the BBC, a reasonably popular monarchy,
mining and manufacturing communities that shared trade unions and political aims; by the
time I was born, in the closing months of the second world war, British identity had never
been stronger or thicker, accreting layer by layer since 1707. Soon after, the National Health
Service and the welfare state arrived: the cherry on the crumbling cake, the fairer Britain
the postwar settlement, now eroded, that many in Scotland believe independence can
secure and preserve, while the rest of the UK privatises and outsources whats left.

The colossal sandstone statue of William Wallace near Dryburgh stands 21ft tall with another 10ft of plinth underneath.
Photograph: Patrick Dieudonne/Corbis

This late summer of British identity lasted roughly from 1948 to 1982, from the launch of
the NHS to victory in the Falklands war. Except for that war, and some earlier hoopla about
the new Elizabethan age that followed the coronation and the rst ascent of Everest,
patriotism tended to lie low. The Suez debacle and the quick dismantling of an empire
made it a problematic emotion, which began to be comically evoked in the 1950s by the
Goon Show even before its wholesale demolition by the satirists of the 1960s. In any case,
in a family like mine nobody had waved a ag since 1914. British nationalism British
identity, Britishness had become an unconscious reex rather than a deliberate political
posture. If wed thought about it, it was what we were in the modern world of nations,
though in far-o history and some aspects of our present life the way we spoke was the
most obvious we knew ourselves to be Scots.
The English, until relatively recently, seem to have imagined English and British to be
interchangeable, as if Britain was just a bigger England. Our dualism gave us a better
appreciation of the nation-state we lived in, though if Britain was a nation as well as a
state, where did that leave Scotland? As a region, a sub-nation, a culture, an
anachronism? In my childhood, country was the favoured solution. Countries could have

borders, it seemed, even when they werent nation-states. Evidence of ours famously
existed in a heraldic sign that the publicity-conscious London & North Eastern Railway
erected just north of Berwick in the prewar years of the great Anglo-Scottish expresses;
childrens books sometimes showed a train speeding past it, with a calm North Sea
stretching blue to the horizon. Otherwise, the border remained invisible. What struck you
as a sign of dierence was how, travelling south, the grey stone and pebble dash of
domestic architecture gave way to unfamiliar red brick when you reached the terraces of
Newcastle and Carlisle.
Now, motoring along minor roads in the Tweed valley, even the smallest change is hard to
detect. A brown-and-white sign in the most functional sans serif says Scotland welcomes
you, as if anxious to please. (The sign for the opposite direction simply reads England.)
On one side, university tuition costs 9,000 a year and on the other side nothing, but how
would ripening elds of barley recognise the dierence? Handsome but long-abandoned
railway viaducts can be glimpsed among the trees magnicent ruins from Britains
greatest age, waiting for the modern traveller to remember Ozymandias and the
impermanence of all regimes. But we are after other monuments, and drive on west.

***
It was early August. In the Borders, there were few signs yet of a campaign that could take
Scotland out of the United Kingdom. A large Y-E-S hung in separate letters from a tree on
the road from Coldstream to Kelso. There wasnt a N-O to match it, but Kelso town hall ew
both the saltire and the union jack. Then we came to the Tweeds most beautiful stretch,
where the hills and trees seem to have been handcrafted.
Just upstream of Dryburgh Abbey, a reproduction of a classical Greek temple stands at the
top of a wooded hillock on the rivers north bank. This is the Temple of the Muses, built in
1817 by the 11th Earl of Buchan as a memorial to the poet James Thomson, who was born,
in 1700, a few miles away in the village of Ednam. Few people other than river shers and
dog walkers come here the guidebooks barely mention the memorial but then even
fewer people read his work, which includes the words to a musical entertainment, Alfred: a
Masque, which, in glorifying the life of Alfred the Great (who burned the cakes) also paid
tribute to the patriotism of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was paying Thomson a pension
of 100 a year. The masque has also been forgotten except for its hummable, breastinating nale, where Thomsons lyrics were set to a tune by Thomas Arne. At the masques
premiere, in Prince Fredericks country retreat, Cliveden House, on 1 August, 1740, an
audience heard Rule, Britannia! for the rst time.

The climax of the Last Night of the Proms features a rendition of Rule, Britannia!, the lyrics to which were written by the Scottish
poet James Thomson. Photograph: Nicky J Sims/Getty Images

The union was only 33 years old. The Britons who never, never, never would be slaves
had already faced one Jacobite rebellion in 1715, and would face another in 1745, both
supported by France. Men and women decide who they are by reference to who and what
they are not, Linda Colley writes in Britons, her history of the making of British identity.
Throughout most of the 18th century, they dened themselves as Protestants struggling
for survival against the worlds foremost Catholic power. Later, when they began to build
an empire, they dened themselves against the people they conquered. Britishness was
superimposed over an array of internal dierences in response to contact with the Other,
and above all in response to conict with the Other, Colley writes. It didnt emerge by
blending the dierent regional or older national cultures inside its boundaries: it wasnt a
melting pot, but neither could it be explained as an English hegemony England imposing
its culture and politics on a helpless and defrauded Celtic periphery. British culture, in
other words, refused to become homogenous impossible to break into three simple
components, English, Scottish and Welsh.
In Colleys words, Great Britain in 1707 was much less a trinity of three self-contained and
self-conscious nations than a patchwork in which uncertain areas of Welshness,
Scottishness and Englishness were cut across by strong regional attachments, and scored
over again by loyalties to village, town, family and landscape. Apart from Francophobia,
what bound them together was what Colley calls the substantial prots of being British.
All kinds of interest groups traders, manufacturers, plantation managers, ship owners
came to see the new nation as a focus of loyalty which would also cater to their own needs
and ambitions from patriotism, men and women were able to anticipate prots of some
kind. It would be a mistake, however, to conceive the strength of the union purely in terms
of fear and greed. Almost from the beginning it produced social and intellectual fusions of
all kinds: from the partnership between the steam technologists James Watt and Matthew
Boulton, which changed the course of industrial history, to Reiths invention of the BBC. In
decades past, when the idea of a golden age mattered more to political nationalisms as a
period to inspire and emulate, campaigners for Scottish independence found it awkward to
admit that Scotland had made its biggest impact on the world in the years between 1750
and 1900. It had been a largely unionist achievement.
***

By 1992, when Colley published Britons, much of this achievement either lay in ruins, like
the shipyards of the lower Clyde, or had vanished entirely, like car-making and linenweaving. The decline had been slow and probably inevitable, but a little burst of hostile
Thatcherism hurried things along at the end. Colley, therefore, did more than examine the
origins of British identity. She also questioned, given the collapse of empire, industry and
the Protestant faith, how long such an identity could survive. Other writers had been here
before, particularly the Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn, but Colleys scholarship and
clarity gave the question a wider audience. God has ceased to be British, and Providence
no longer smiles, she wrote, undeniably, though to someone of my generation and
background it also seemed that she underestimated the strength of an identity that had
taken nearly three centuries to accumulate: Coronation Street as well the British Museum,
Penguin Books, free orange juice, the Queen Mary, Big Ben, the Beano as well as the
Somme.
Why would this shared history be so easily washed away? In her introduction, Colley
directed us away from the notion that nations were characterised by cultural and ethnic
homogeneity of blood and soil and towards Benedict Andersons denition of a nation
as an imagined community: ethnically and culturally diverse, but articial and
problematic. Most nations were in this sense invented, but some, or so she seemed to
imply, were more invented than others. Great Britain was essentially invented, while
Scotland was one of the much older alignments and loyalties that lay underneath. The
distinction suggested that the identity-seeker needed to tunnel through 300 years of the
temporary and ersatz to get to the eternal and true Neal Aschersons tiny blue and white
cell. Ive never been able to do it; to prioritise the 13th and 14th centuries over the 19th and
20th as constituents in my historic sense of selood is beyond me.

A man hangs a Falklands ag in Stanley to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1982 Falklands war. Photograph: Enrique
Marcarian/Reuters

In any case, Scotland has been no slouch at national invention. The Greek temple to
commemorate James Thomson wasnt the only monument raised by the 11th Earl of
Buchan, who was a friend and neighbour of Walter Scott, and as great a romancer in his
obsession with ruins, battlements and fancy dress. Three years earlier, in 1814, the earl had
erected a colossal statue to William Wallace on a much higher hill than the one allotted to
Thomson half-a-mile away. It, too, stands among trees, but the eect is much more
dramatic. The visitor walks through a wood noisy with woodpeckers until he reaches the
escarpment, and suddenly nds a commanding gure carved from red sandstone staring
south towards the English border. Wallace stands more than 21ft tall and has at least
another 10ft of plinth under him with his winged helmet, his beard, his shield and his
broadsword he might be a centurion. But theres something of the gargoyle in his face;
something of Neptune, too; and not least a erce touch of Maurice Sendak. Wallace, says
the inscription, great patriot hero! Ill requited chief!
Beyond his victory at Stirling Bridge in 1297, and his execution in London eight years later,
little for certain is known about Wallace; the rst account of his life, by the minstrel Blind
Harry, was composed 170 years after his death. This epic poem has all the reliability of the

Gospels, but it ensured that his name persisted. Then, in the rst decades of the 19th
century, when Scotland was saying farewell to its pre-industrial, pre-union history, Wallace
became a devotional cult. This was his rst monument. More followed Scotland has 20,
mainly erected in the mid-19th century by a middle class anxious to preserve Scottish
dierence when it looked as though British identity would wipe it out. The climax of the
movement, at least until Mel Gibsons lm, was the opening in 1869 of the National Wallace
Monument on Abbey Craig outside Stirling, a massive 220ft tower in the Scots Baronial
style, funded, in the words of one critic, by enthusiasts for Scotch nationality, who
included European nationalists such as Kossuth and Garibaldi. (Or at least they wrote
letters of support; their donations came in fact from a Glaswegian well-wisher who saw the
publicity value of their names.)
It was a popular triumph. Nowhere else in the world was a national hero celebrated so
vastly. Every year thousands of people made the journey to Stirling and climbed the 246
narrow stone steps that wound up past the Hall of Arms, the Hall of Heroes and the
chamber that contained Wallaces sword (or one very like it), until nally they stared
breathless from the parapet across the plains of central Scotland, to the foundries and
collieries in the smoky east and the mountains outlined on the western horizon: a
panoramic summary of Scottish beauty and industry. Of course, there was a paradox. Here
was a magnicent tribute to the national hero, but where was the nation? It existed
sentimentally, culturally and socially, but it had no political form. Its patriotism and
colourful, often-invented traditions complemented rather than threatened British
nationalism, which represented prosperity, enterprise and progress. In this relationship, it
was Britain that in every sense wore the trousers.
One day, more than 60 years ago, we went as a family to the National Wallace Monument.
My father took a binary, black-and-white approach to people and things: in toothpaste,
Colgate was bad and Euthymol good; in bicycles, Raleigh was preferred to BSA; in Polar
explorers, Captain Scott didnt stand a dogs chance against Amundsen. When it came to
Scotlands medieval history, the contest lay between Wallace and Robert the Bruce, in
which Wallace emerged as a kind of proto-socialist compared with his aristocratic and
treacherous successor nothing but a French baron, as my father always said.
Of the trip to the monument, I can recall almost nothing. A bus journey, a stone spiral
staircase, a gloomy room lled with marble heads. Last month, when I went back for the
rst time, it was clear that the gloomy room of my memory must have been the Hall of
Heroes, where the visitor is presented with the marble busts of 16 eminent Scots a
number that includes William Ewart Gladstone, on account of his father being born in
Leith. Six were writers: Burns and Scott, naturally, but also Carlyle. Two were theologians
and two were inventors. One, Adam Smith, was an economist. There are no women. Of
course, this is a Victorian collection and nicely preserved as such but absorbing the
gravity of it, I remembered the liberation that was implicit in British as a self-description,
how it enlarged the sense of yourself and allowed you to feel part of something grander and
more various. By the 1960s, the bombast of Britishness had drained away. It seemed loose
and confused, and therefore spacious and accommodating. EM Forster, Joan Littlewood,
Dickens, Orwell, CND, Play for Today, Beyond the Fringe, the Beatles: the list is random. In

Chaudhuris word, they quickened me, just as men and women of my parents generation
had been quickened by Shaw, Wells and night school. I felt close to these sensibilities and
institutions I felt wed emerged from the same national history. The thought of separation
never occurred.
***
Is it, as VS Naipaul once remarked of British culture, all over?
During the past dozen years, the Scottish National party has worked an astonishing
transformation, turning the tables so that unionism now looks sentimental the home of
exhausted tradition while independence stands for energetic progress. Over that time, the
death of Britishness has been predicted as often as the death of the novel, but it has
managed to survive and even to grow. When the ndings of the annual Scottish Social
Attitudes survey were published last month, they showed that since 2011 the number of
people living in Scotland who picked British as their national identity had risen from 15%
to 23%, while those choosing Scottish had fallen from 75% to 65%. Time and again, the
leaders of the yes campaign have stressed that the social union will endure and that antiEnglishness is over and done with. I have heard Salmonds deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, talk
about her English granny, and watched Mike Russell, the MSP for Argyll and Bute, tell an
audience in a village hall about his English mother, whose father or grandfather once cleanbowled WG Grace. Theres even an oddly named group, English Scots for Independence.
Nevertheless, in most political conversation, British has become a missing word.

Alistair Darling, the leader of the no campaign, and Scotlands rst minister Alex Salmond beg to dier about Scottish
independence in their second televised debate. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA

Scotland is not wholly surrounded by the sea unfortunately, the nationalist poet Hugh
MacDiarmid wrote in 1934, and yet to many people south of the border it might well have
been. (I dont always mean metaphorically: my father remembered a Lancashire workmate
asking him which port he caught the boat from when he went home to Fife.) English
ignorance of Scotland has always been considerably larger than Scottish ignorance of
England. Some of the imbalance is understandable: as the political, administrative and
cultural capital, London made its presence felt everywhere. But it must also be said that
what a variegated country such as India would know as a programme of national

integration has never been seriously attempted in Britain. My Scottish state school
introduced me to the works of Keats and made me rote-learn the causes of the English civil
war, but I doubt that a sixth-former at an English state school got to know much about
Burns or the Covenanters. The year 1707 should matter as much in England as Scotland, as
one of the United Kingdoms foundational dates, but until recently, in my experience, few
people in England could identify its signicance. For these and a hundred other reasons, its
hard to avoid the conclusion that Scotland took the British project more seriously than
England did, and that Londons careless stewardship of a pan-British identity and a panBritish economy fostered the growth of Scottish grievance and alienation.
Over the course of the referendum campaign, the yes side has insisted that independence
isnt about identity. This may be only half-true identity comes to the fore with the
persistent idea that Scotland is inherently more egalitarian than England but Alex
Salmond made a remarkable statement two years ago, in the referendums consultation
document, where he wrote, Scotland is not oppressed and we have no need to be
liberated. Independence matters because we do not have the powers to reach our
potential. Without words like oppression and liberation, the vocabulary of nationalism is
weakened, but in Scotland, their absence has enormously broadened its appeal. In the
SNPs big-change but no-change version of independence, nobodys identity is at risk. If
people want to think of themselves as British as well as Scottish, then they can keep calm
and carry on. As Salmond wrote, soothingly, in the same document: Much of what
Scotland will be like the day after independence will be similar to the day before: people
will go to work, pensions and benets will be collected, children will go out to play and life
will be as normal.

British identity will wither gradually. If it survives at all, it will

become narrow, eccentric, strident and romantic
And of course it will. But gradually British identity will wither. If it survives at all, it will
become narrow, eccentric, strident and romantic, like so many other national identities that
have been deprived of their states and institutions. I value it too much to want that. Gordon
Brown erred when, as prime minister, he attempted to enunciate his list of British values
which turned out to be the values of most civilised nations. He would have been wiser to
have written, as Orwell did, about its characteristics rather than what he imagined to be its
longstanding moral beliefs. The markers of Britishness for me include empiricism, irony,
the ad hoc approach, pluralism, and a critical awareness of its own rich and sometimes
appalling history. Its sceptical, too: it has seen a thing or two and knows nothing lasts. But
perhaps what recommends it most is the frail senescence that makes it an undemanding
kind of belonging, and unexpectedly ts it for the modern world. The untangling of the
institutions military, administrative, academic, ambassadorial, commercial, cultural that
have sustained this identity cant but be painfully destructive. The past 300 years have not
been about nothing.

***
I write in a room that has a view of the Firth of Clyde. Trident submarines pass this way,
though I rarely see them. The sun is out, the water is blue and the Cowal hills are turning
brown here and there with dying bracken. Nirad Chaudhuri grew up beside rivers as broad
as this, and they formed a bright part of his memory. In the second volume of his
autobiography, he writes of a journey up the Padma by paddle steamer (built, as it happens,
on the river outside my window), where the dry season had exposed many sandbanks and
made the river a mass of serpentine streams, like the background of Mona Lisa, of course
with the dierence that there were no rocks. It was this scene, observed as a 15-year-old in
1913, which taught him that beauty wasnt conned to the Britain of his schoolbooks that
it was also present in Bengal. And yet after the age of 30 he never saw those great rivers of
the delta again. First, he was preoccupied by his new life in Kolkata and Delhi, and then,
when India was partitioned, his ancestral district found itself in the new nation of Pakistan.
Millions of people in India were similarly displaced or, if they stayed in their homes,
found themselves living in a new state.
Not for a moment do I make a comparison with the possible break-up of the UK that
would be absurd except in one regard. To nd that the country one grew up in is now a
foreign state will be an odd feeling. True, the bracken will still turn brown at every
summers end, the train will still take us from Glasgow to Euston, and, as Alex Salmond
says, children will still go out to play, and pensions, we hope, will still be collected. But the
United Kingdom that made so many of us will no longer exist. If it happens, I shall grieve.

This article was amended on 18 September 2014 to correct Civis Scotis sum to Civis
Scoticus sum.