Did Britain cease to be an island at some debatable moment between the end of World War II and the construction of the Channel Tunnel? Until 1939 Britain had lavishly exported its boundaries in terms of Empire, and while much was made of the idea of this ‘tiny island nation’ ruling a good part of the globe, it did still retain certain characteristics of an island. Among these were the world’s largest maritime presence, a thriving fishing industry around its entire coastline and an attitude towards the rest of the world which can only be described as insular. (The putative headline Thick Fog – Continent Isolated puts it quite succinctly.)
The war provoked insular rhetoric, ranging from endless Shakespearean tags about ‘this precious stone set in the silver sea’ to re-emphasising the tininess of ‘this island nation’, although not now in comparison with the world it ruled but with the Hitlerian might threatening to crush it as it ‘stood alone in the dark days’. The white cliffs of Dover stopped being rather striking beds of calcareous plankton and took on the quality of Britain’s boundary, ramparts, bulwark, palisades. A few miles of cliffs came to stand for an entire spiritual seaboard which might not be violated. Had that portion of Britain’s coastline most adjacent to the rest of the world been as low and unremarkable as it is in parts of Essex, Suffolk or Lincolnshire, the rhetoricians and songwriters would have needed to come up with a different trope altogether.
After the war, Britain with its depleted spirit and collapsed economy became vulnerable to the very things which erode islands: links with foreigners and – as the economy improved – increasing travel abroad by the islanders themselves. Somewhere between 1945 and 1990 Britain lost consciousness of itself as an island. The sea which surrounds it (and which only poetic fancy could ever have described as ‘silver’) now plays virtually no role in its thinking or its economy. Its naval and merchant fleets are shadows; its fishing industry is ravaged; even its own people find the beaches of Spain and the Greek islands more congenial than those at home. So when the two pilot tunnels, one from England and one from France, met beneath the Channel in 1990 and Britain became technically joined to the rest of Europe by dry land, the event seemed to provoke remarkably little upheaval in the nation’s psyche. King Arthur, Drake and Churchill slumbered on, unmoved. The country was already part of the EC, with the free movement of member citizens guaranteed. Insular attitudes still abounded, but something had changed. A generation had grown up which knew and cared nothing of precious stones set in silver seas and would in any case think the description fitted Barbados or Mykonos far better.
It is probable that only a war which threatened Britain directly could ever resurrect the insular rhetoric. In his speech in Richard II John of Gaunt did mention infection, however. (‘This fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war …’). It so happens that Britain does still jealously guard the ghost of its island self by means of a last and potent symbol of foreign contamination: the fear of rabies. Ironically, it is mad dogs which give the Englishman his final solitary status.*
There is about the swimmer a sentimentality, or self-pity, which disgusts him even as he finds himself thinking that surely he ought to have earned a reprieve. All that close attentiveness to the sea over the years, to this ever-yielding, stony-hearted medium which has him in its embrace – it surely cannot have been wasted. There must be something he has learned from it, some subliminal message from his ancestral home, instructions for survival? The idea is fatuous but persistent.
He is beginning to tire. Not of staying afloat, since this is effortless, but of trudging the water to stand higher, of spinning to keep every horizon constantly in view. More and more he allows his face to hang in the water. Through the glass panel of his mask his vision lengthens past the rope’s end 20 feet below his ankle. He no longer sees the prismatic chips of phytoplankton, the blazing motes and jellies as they drift past his face. Now he believes he glimpses shapes far beneath, not predators but bulks of deeper purple as though. … Why not? This archipelago is full of hidden reefs, its contorted seabed thrusts up unexpected pinnacles to within feet of the surface in the middle of nowhere. There could easily be a coralline peak, a ledge, even a plateau over in that direction away from the sun where the water does seem to deepen its colour as if a little further down there lay a solidity. …
Away from the sun? The swimmer jerks his head up, gasping and squinting painfully at the blazing disc overhead. Is it not past its zenith now? Has it not begun to sink? May this illusion of a darker bulk be nothing but his own shadow, cast as he has so often seen it in late afternoon? No; ridiculous. It is not late afternoon, merely maybe a few minutes past midday. He looks downwards again and in a while his eyes adjust from the dazzle and once more he thinks he can pick out an area of deeper tone. So convinced is he that he begins swimming towards it, slowly, so as not to give the impression of having finally picked a direction or of expecting very much. Now and again he glances around to tell his invisible boat where he is going. It seems to him that all will be well if it turns out to be a lonely reef he is heading for. However small, it will convert the ocean at that point into a shallow sea. He would then, as if by magic, be in his depth in 20 feet of water. Or at least, hovering as if in air above the unknown but familiar city, he would be close enough to feel its dwellers might intercede for him, present his case for survival at some court of marine jurisprudence. … As an idea it is better than nothing; even a glimpse of a reef would sustain him. Besides, reefs were mysterious and deceptive places whose greater being remained hidden. If one kept one’s eyes on a reef under water and followed its avenues it had a habit of turning into a shore. The swimmer had experienced it a thousand times. Might not this one, despite an apparently yawning horizon, somehow work the same friendly trick?
* Since the UK government’s Pet Travel Scheme (PETS) was introduced in 2004, pet dogs and cats may enter Britain from qualifying countries without being quarantined provided they have been microchipped, vaccinated against rabies and have waited at least six months before a blood test reveals a suitably high level of antibodies. Although the possibility of mad dogs still underwrites his fear that contamination could arrive at any time from continental Europe, today’s Englishman is apparently more alarmed at the thought of unquarantined human immigration. Hence the UK’s opting-out of the Schengen Agreement.