Icons of England

I first came across Bill Bryson's work with his Notes from a Small Island, his impressions of England, warts and all, when he first visited us. I found his humorous style to my liking and read his following books with increasing disappointment. By the time I reached A Walk in the Woods I had just about had enough. He was, I felt, trying too hard and his humour was falling flat.

He is, of course, an American but has now made his home in our country. Indeed, he is almost an honorary Englishman and is President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. It is in that capacity that he has edited a volume of essays entitled Icons of England. Numerous celebrities have contributed short (sometimes very short) essays on what they see as an icon of England. The subjects range "from pub signs to seaside piers, from cattle grids to canal boats" (I copied that from the blurb). Having read the book, I was a little surprised, but gratified, that there had been no mention of those old clichés such as the white cliffs of Dover, policemen's helmets, London buses or Big Ben. But what, I wondered, would I have written about had I been asked to contribute?

My first thought was village war memorials. Most of the war memorials in this country are English in that they are understated, unlike to flamboyant memorials seen in so many French villages. That understatement makes them, to my mind, particularly English. What is more, they record both the great and the small without differentiation. Arthur Brown or John White might have been factory hands, farm workers, shop assistants or sons of the local squire with no need to earn a living: they are all recorded for posterity in exactly the same way.

But then I thought again. One of the icons in the book was the dawn chorus. Can an icon be aural, I wondered? Well, if it can, that makes my decision easy. My icon of England is Nimrod, from Elgar's Enigma Variations. This is quite possibly the most moving piece of music I have ever heard and, to me, is just so expressive of the rolling English countryside, especially the South Downs. I have listened to several versions on YouTube and selected what I consider to be a very good one with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Colin Davis.