A National Eulogy

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On the eve of Armistice Day, one is made mindful of the material comforts and existential protections which we take for granted — and for which many lives were sacrificed to maintain. However, many of those lives were lost needlessly; as cannon-fodder in the game of waning empires between the related elites of early twentieth-century European powers. Likewise, the cultural erasure inflicted on modern Britain by profiteering politicians is just as avoidable. It is worsened by the knowledge that the shiremen sent to play the Great Game in the trenches of France and Belgium would abhor their nation incapable of defending its children in Telford, Rochdale, and Rotherham. Their memory is disgraced by what we have degenerated into.

The way in which Britain has changed for the worse after the Second World War makes the magnitude of those memorialised losses all the more tragic. It doesn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t, within living memory. My grandfather’s life, in the waning twilight of the England that his father defended, provides us a vision and motivation for a remoralised nation. 

Today also marks the seventy-third birthday of my grandfather. He was delivered by the nuns depicted in Call The Midwife, and grew up surrounded by the restaurants and opium dens in the original Chinatown, in Poplar and Limehouse, London. The neighborhood was peppered with Jews, Chinese, and the Vietnamese and Loatian "Boat People" — back when immigration was lower, parochial, and more integrated. 

His grandfather and father lived at No. 1 Jennette Street on the Isle of Dogs — beside The Tooke Arms, which has since moved and been renamed The New Tooke. They shared a surname with the first British convict exiled to Australia. At sixty-eight, he discovered he has a half-brother, fathered by his Dad stationed abroad in the Royal Navy, living in Maine. This was shortly after his wife of fifty-five years, my grandmother, discovered she too had a secret older half-sister living in Canada. 

My grandfather grew up on the road where the 2012 Olympic Stadium now sits. He shared a thin-blanketed bed with his brother, in a room with hole in the roof. At the end of his row of terraced Georgian houses, with no indoor toilets, was a Second World War bombsite where the children played. He lived in these conditions through the head-high snowstorm of 1963.

Kids lived latchkey. Doors were left unlocked. He often tells me, "Nobody had anything to steal. If anyone would've broken in, they would have left us a tenner.” His summers were spent bunking into the local lido, fuelled by nothing but a bowl of cornflakes at breakfast, and your stomach left empty all night. If you were lucky, you'd be given thrupence for a Tizer, or a bowl of mash and parsley liquor, by the elderly women who asked you to recycle bottles and jam jars at a pie shop on their behalf.

Aged fifteen, a teacher encouraged him to attend art school — but he was told to enter a trade instead. Almost sixty unbroken years later, arthritis involuntarily retired him from bricklaying and paving in early 2022. On an afternoon’s drive, he could point to a home on a hundred streets in a south-east London borough and say “I did that a decade ago, and it’s still standing.” His hard work has its monuments across Kent and the capitol. 

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why he found it impossible to extricate himself from England. In 1982, he flew ahead of my grandmother, mother, and uncle to relocate to Australia. They and their belongings were set to join him soon after. But, in Singapore, he cancelled the plans, and spent days awake and playing cards with strangers in the departure lounge, awaiting a return flight home. 

This sense of identity — of enduring hardship because belonging is in your bones — is why he, and we, lament the unrecognisable state of the country today. We are glutted by choice and commodities, and technologically assisted in our endless pursuit of a life of convenience. But, as my grandfather repeats, "When we grew up, we were poor, but we were free." 

The little England defended by the men that preceded both my grandfather and myself has been eradicated. I cannot word it better than Beau Dade, in his “Red Pill Testimony”. But both my grandfather and I feel like an inhabitant of someone else’s country, without having moved. Like a cultural concussion, I cannot remember the precise moment I lost my memory of an authentic Britain — but I know I hardly recognise the place I’ve woken up in. It is not the place his father, or millions of others, fought for.

Nowadays, we pay extra for their relational economy. The artisanal quaintness of a local butcher, baker, and grocer have become a middle-class luxury. Even then, they are targets for eradication by the graph-maximising technocrats, who wish to algorithmically drone-deliver our subscription-service portions of GMO-edited lab-meat to our rented pod doorsteps everyday. In the meantime, our shortage-prone supermarkets are convenient, but impersonal. The same commercial social fabric our less-well-off grandparents had is inaccessible to many.

London — in appearance and culture — is unrecognisable to the expats of my grandad’s southeast-end. The improving material conditions in Essex and Eltham enticed many out of Dagenham and Debden during the postwar period. They were bribed and barged out of Becontree and Bow, into Basildon and Bexley, never to return. The token Pearly King and Queen at a Jubilee cannot make up for the loss of authentic London life. The freedom found in its bombsites is absent from its multicultural markets and gentrified gilded-cage highrises.

We are now seeing living standards subside. International institutions have set the agenda for the confiscation of our property, privacy, and prosperity by 2030. Our appointed elites are dutifully conducting a controlled demolition of our energy security, means of uncensored communication, and ability to procreate to actualise their vision. With this regressive stewardship to a state of feudal dependence, the Boomers are witnessing their grandkids having it worse than any time in their living memory. Soon, we will experience their poverty, without their childhood liberty.

It is our obligation to keep a covenant with history; to revitalise the communitarian spirit defended by those we remember on Armistice Day. I not only hope to have children soon enough that they may meet my grandfather, but also act to ensure that I do not lament a loss of freedom in the same way to my own grandchildren.

Happy birthday, Pops. And God bless the glorious dead. We will not only remember you: we will honour you by revitalising the England you protected.