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Auf Wiedersehen … Illustration: Oli Frape

EU and me: writers reminisce on their relationship with Europe

This article is more than 6 years old
Auf Wiedersehen … Illustration: Oli Frape

From cappuccinos to constitutional rights, Stieg Larsson to Smetana – writers reflect on what Europe means to them

Sarah Perry

I’m something of a thief, I’m afraid, and among my stolen possessions I have the score to “Vltava”, the river theme from the Czech composer Smetana’s symphonic poem Má Vlast (“my country”). This I took from school, having played the piano part in the orchestra – nobody, it seemed to me, could possibly love it as I loved it, or play it as I played it; therefore in spirit if not in law it belonged to me.

The Vltava, I knew, is the river that runs through Prague. But I’d never been deeper into Europe, or for any greater length, than a school day trip to Calais; so Prague was little more to me than a romantic abstraction in which dark-haired women drank coffee from thimble-sized cups at tables where smoke rose from green glass ashtrays, bickering elegantly over politics and men. I recall practising on the piano in the dining room at home, drifting on its minor triplets: it was the current on which I floated out of the Essex town where I was born, across the muddy Channel, into some network of rivers that in due course would wash me up on the banks of the Vltava itself.

In 2016 I saw the Vltava for the first time. It was January, and I’d pitched up in Prague for two months on a Unesco City of Literature residency. My flat overlooked the river through one broad window with a narrow ledge, and here I leaned out into air, which was cold in a sweet, sharp way, nothing like the wet chill of an East Anglian winter, watching swans fly downriver through a snowfall. I propped my laptop on the ledge and sent Smetana tinnily out into the city, tapping out the melody with my right hand.

The love I have for Prague is as unearned as it was immediate. I’ve no right to it: no family connection, no facility with the Czech language or any other, no understanding beyond the cursory of the history of its changing borders; but the kinship I felt when I flatly refused to return that piano score was there from the moment I first walked over Charles bridge. The stone apostles, the jackdaws, the violinist with his case open for coins; the beggar who corrected my pronunciation of Jak se máš (“good morning”) and let me give a biscuit to the dog wrapped in his coat; Master Jan Hus’s statue in the Old Town Square; and the good black coffee served with cakes very nearly like those I baked at home, but also nothing like at all: these seemed, in some obscure indefensible way, to belong to me. In cafes I drank coffee from cups small as thimbles; tapped my cigarette into green glass ashtrays; bickered, as elegantly as I could, about politics and men. I wondered if the teenage thief at the piano had known I would one day come.

It did not seem impossible: this was má vlast.

Current affairs … the Vltava river at dawn. Photograph: Getty Images/Westend61

Now I am forced out of my hazy, romantic European identity – of that abstract sense of fraternity I never needed to explain or to defend. My conversation turns like gossip to the single market, freedom of movement, the European court of human rights; I fret about the UK border with Ireland, the Erasmus programme, the customs union. But when I think of the night of 23 June 2016, and of what has come after, it is never in terms of legislation, or of white papers put before parliament. I think instead of a river that runs from where I stand to the Vltava being dammed up with fistfuls of British soil and scraps of whatever comes to hand; and they’re nothing, these fragments – you couldn’t build a hut on their foundations – and singly they amount to nothing, but taken together they’ll leave me on dry land.

This is a little foolish, of course. The jackdaws, the Vltava, Master Jan Hus: when flights depart Stansted they will be waiting, as they always were. But something has altered. They wait politely now, with good manners, as one waits for a house guest whose stay will be mercifully brief – not with that easeful, familiar welcome reserved for family. The Czech for “their country” is jejich vlast. I cannot pronounce it.

Bee Wilson

“English cream!” announced the waiter. I was on my first visit to Paris as a child, circa 1985, and we had ordered a dessert with crème anglaise. With infinite tact and hospitality, the waiter was suggesting that this silken sauce somehow belonged to our country and not his. This was obviously a lie, but a charming one. The pool of cold pale vanilla, which we consumed in sensuous spoonfuls, was utterly unlike the lumpen bowls of hot packet custard we knew from England.

When British grownups spoke of European food in the 1980s, there could be a certain tetchiness, or so I remember. They complained that everything was too garlicky or else too oily. The steak was underdone, the cheeses were smelly, the sausage was probably donkey meat and the sauces, if you weren’t careful, would give you a tummy ache. As for getting a decent cup of tea made from properly boiled water, hopeless! These continentals were bohemian types who drank black coffee or red wine at strange times of day.

What the grownups meant, though they could not quite bring themselves to admit it, was that European food was delicious. It had suave flavours and textures that we with our packet soups and postwar meat and two veg could only dream of. A salad in France was not something plonked together from vinegary beetroot and cucumber with bottled salad cream, but a bowl of perfectly seasoned green leaves. A new potato, I discovered one lunchtime in Brittany, could be densely waxy and buttery and painstakingly “turned”, not some watery overboiled thing in its jacket.

Bit by bit, English stomachs got over some of their xenophobic prejudices and acclimatised to the foods of the continent. In just a few decades, we stopped thinking of olive oil as something sold in tiny quantities by chemists to treat earwax and started collecting whole litres of different green extra-virgins on our kitchen counters. We discovered that just because something was garlicky, that was no reason not to enjoy it. Red wine, coffee and rare steak ceased to be alien to us, whether because of cheap travel or the new chain restaurants that sold us fantasies of eating in Rome, even if we were really in a shopping centre in Milton Keynes. In UK supermarkets there is now often a whole chilled aisle devoted entirely to “Italian” and, in 2016, the British consumed a third of the entire annual production of prosecco. A product developer for British ready meals told me that one of the quickest ways to sell any new dish now is to add chorizo.

Our edible debt to Europe plays out in countless ways, large and small. Europeans may have joked about the awfulness of British cuisine, yet, curiously, it’s partly thanks to the EU that British regional foods regained a sense of pride in recent years. British food benefited from the PDO system (protected designated origin), giving protected status to special regional foods of Europe, from Treviso radicchio to Sorrento lemons. It took Europe to remind Britons of the specialness of Herdwick lamb, Cornish clotted cream and Melton Mowbray pork pies – among more than 60 British foods protected under European labelling.

Cafe culture … the Champs Élysées in Paris. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian

While critics of the EU grumbled about stupid laws on “wonky” bananas, European workers in Britain were jointing our chickens and picking our strawberries; they were swirling latte art on the top of our cappuccinos and manufacturing our ready meals. As of 2015, according to data from a briefing paper on food and Brexit by Tim Lang and Victoria Schoen, more than a quarter of those working in British food manufacturing are EU immigrants. Meanwhile, European imports are the source, as of 2015, of nearly a third of all the food eaten by value in the UK, especially the fresh produce we should be eating more of. Leaving the EU and its food laws would – or will? – be a task of labyrinthine complexity, from renegotiating farm subsidies to drawing up new environmental and labour laws. European food laws left us better fed, healthier and safer than we would otherwise have been.

Yet when I think of Brexit and food, my objections are less practical than emotional. It feels sad and wrong that we should be shunning European neighbours who taught us so much about how to eat. Is this how we repay all that hospitality? All those oceans of prosecco? The Brexit vote was – among other things – a sign of how secure the nation felt in its new European ways of eating. In or out of the EU, no one can steal away our mozzarella or lunchtime baguette. But something huge will be lost if we close ourselves off from this continent of pleasure. Food is a vast cultural exchange between peoples that plays out over dinner. We’ll have no one who cares enough to translate our custard into crème anglaise.

Hari Kunzru

Après la guerre fini
Soldat Anglais partée,
M’selle Frongsay boko pleury,
Après la guerre fini.

Here we are, teenage Tommies on the way home, throwing up Pernod over the side of the ferry, contraband flick knives and packets of Gauloises Blondes stuffed down our pants. We’re leaving Europe, coming home.

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We’ve had enough. There’s only so much paella you can stomach. What we want is beans on toast and a decent cup of tea. We want to watch our own programmes and know the words for things. Tell Mum what we got up to, then early to bed. But we did Europe, came, saw and conquered. Lads on tour.

Prague, Marbella, Amsterdam. Drunk in the old town. Drunk at the station, at a sex show in the red light district. In the cafe, they come and go, the descendants of Charlemagne with their little 33cl bottles of beer and their social security. We’ve had enough of them and their espadrilles, enough of the trattoria, the mountain hut, the little pension that’s not mentioned in any of the guides. We’ve walked through the forum, through the dunes, past the mahogany men looking like a colony of seals in tiny red Speedos.

We did the paseo and the Macarena. We got paranoid in the coffee shop. We bought duff pills outside the espuma party and tasted in the caves of the chateau. Peering through the doors of restaurants that we weren’t dressed for, we settled on a place with a wall-mounted TV and set menu. After lunch we found the church with the black madonna and the Nigerians selling postcards and sunglasses. We wore long sleeves and pretended to know what the guide was saying about the Counter-Reformation. One by one we fell into the canal.

When we set out it was romantic. Boys on Vespas in holiday towns. Girls by the rides at the funfair. We drank in village bars with pinball machines. We never had enough to pay for a sandwich. Sleeping on our camping mats at the railway station, walking by the main road looking for a place to hitch. We took selfies at the Holocaust memorial and fixed up on the steps of the former Stasi HQ. They gave us suntan lotion and retsina and an invitation to a swingers’ party. We partook of all the old corruptions, read the labels by all the degenerate art. So you have to understand that we did Europe. Now we’re ready for something new.

We’ve had enough of them coming round here, that’s another thing. Apple picking, changing the bedpan, telling us about the new season’s fashion trends. They can fuck off with their metric system, their Code Napoléon. Boney in his tricorn hat, snatching the cook’s leg of mutton, creeping about in the dead of night. We’ve had experience. Dear Professor Wittgenstein, you are a person with no leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom. You have not given any reason why you should be granted leave to remain. Therefore you are liable to removal. If you do not leave as required, you will be liable to enforced removal to your country of origin …

‘One by one we fell into the canal’ … Amsterdam. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Now it’s Dunkirk time, small boats taking us back over, a plucky flotilla, each and every one flying the cross of Saint George. Jerry’s bombing the beaches, but we’re keeping our chin up, whistling “The Final Countdown”, brave boys limping home to rationing and bitterness, just how we like it. Three channels of Saturday night variety and crying into a knotted hanky at the Proms. Beefy bouncy bloody bake-off and we’ll fucking kill you if you say a word against.

So now we’re all going to live together on our island. We’re going to paddle our own canoe. What larks! We’ll be new Elizabethans, buccaneers. Commander Ted and his crew of Swallows. Mucking about in boats all summer long. Yes we have no straight bananas, just warehouse conversions and the ghost of Cool Britannia. Our business model is based on cappuccino froth, and we know that when the banks call time the whole place will be a wasteland. What of it? Cannons to the left of us, sovereign wealth funds to the right. You can see our pimply arses, we’re that exposed. But it’s the will of the people, which makes it final. Henceforth we’ll be pulling on our Yorkshire puds all on our ownsome, thank you very much. You’ll be sorry, you Euros. You’ll miss us. M’selle Frongsay boko pleury. Because the war’s over and we’re going home for tea.

Simon Garfield

A muddy green folder on the desk in front of me contains the story of my family, and the story is familiar and sad. The folder holds about 30 items. I pull them all out at once, a spillage of small photographs and documents with rusting paper clips, but the place to begin is clearly with my dad’s typed CV. I’m not sure when it was composed or why, but I wonder if it wasn’t just for moments like this.

Herbert Sidney Garfunkel was born in Hamburg on 3 November 1919, two months after Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers’ party. He attended primary and secondary schools in Hamburg, but in December 1933 his parents decided that the country was no longer a safe place for a 14-year-old Jewish boy, and so he was put on a boat to England. He attended the Perse School in Cambridge, and in 1936 was articled as a solicitor to a prominent firm in London.

His training was interrupted by the war, and he served first as an officer in the Durham Light Infantry, and then with an intelligence department of the Allied Expeditionary Force. He had translation duties: his fluent German, which once must have been treated with such suspicion at school, was now used to assist bombing raids against his birthplace. My file contains a handsome certificate of merit with his full title: Lance Corporal Garfield. That was his anglicised name. Without the change I would have been Simon Garfunkel; how terribly difficult in the playground that would have been.

His parents got out too, but only just. The file contains a shipping document for my grandparents’ property, four vans’ worth, from a London firm of “wharfingers” specialising in international shipping, with a date of May 1939. I still have an item from that shipment, a small round Biedermeier dining table that must have once hosted nervous tea parties and now displays Cornish ceramics.

My mother suffered a similar dislocation. She was born in the northern German port of Bremerhaven, and in April 1934 she emigrated with her parents to Jerusalem, then under the British mandate in Palestine. She met my father on a trip to London for a wedding in the early 1950s, and they were soon wed themselves, and had my brother Jonathan in 1955 and me five years later. There are some celebratory family photographs from our life in Hampstead Garden Suburb, my father a successful solicitor, my mother an assistant in a nursing home, Germany a long way in the past. One of my earliest memories I can date precisely: my mother screaming at our television as England won the World Cup. That was it for her: utter joy, the final vindication. We bought the commemorative stamps and sent them all over the world.

Simon Garfield’s mother, Hella, and father, Herbert, at their wedding reception in 1952.

But the next set of documents are condolence letters – for my father’s heart attack when he was 55, my brother’s sudden death from a virus he contracted as a doctor when he was 23, and my mother with breast cancer the following year, when she was 54. I was 13, 18 and 19. “Words cannot express …”; “How shocked we both were to hear …” One letter advised me not to consider myself jinxed. Another noted how hard my family had worked to create a new life in a new country, and it was up to me now.

And now I want to add my own document to the file. I want to go back. The day after Brexit I talked to my eldest son, Ben. We were both in shock of course, but he had already found a way forward. We would become Germans again, a personal reunification. We would not be saying goodbye to Europe at all, but becoming greater Europeans; with dual citizenship, the country that my parents came to fear and loathe we would embrace once more.

Many years before, the German government had offered a scheme whereby the descendants of those who fled the Third Reich could reverse the move – a very personal reparation. You needed as much proof as you could muster – parental birth certificates ideally, but failing that something that placed them in Germany before the Nazis and anywhere else after. I had my father’s school reports from Hamburg and Cambridge, I had shipping papers, I had the whole tragic trail. Copies are now lodged with the German embassy in London, and we’re waiting on news. I’ve been told it could take a year, such is the sudden popularity of the scheme.

What would my parents have thought? (They wouldn’t drive in a Mercedes or smile for a Leica if they could avoid it, and they would never again holiday in the Schwarzwald.) I think they would have approved, just as I think they would have approved of our recent trips to Berlin to visit the galleries and art squats and Holocaust memorials. They would certainly have cheered Angela Merkel’s instinctive welcome towards so many migrants. They would have realised how the world has changed for the worse and for the better, and how even the greatest ruptures may heal with time. They were always for giving.

Afua Hirsch

I remember the first time I heard an American talking about “Europe”. It was 1999, and I was a fresher, at a university trying to ramp up its income by stuffing the undergraduate ranks with American visiting students. These earnest overseas teenagers had the privilege of sitting on the same long benches, or sometimes cross-legged on the floor, and eating the same mushy carrots, for which we paid far, far less. They weren’t fazed though, they were so excited to be “in Europe”. What a strange thing to say, I thought. Concerned as I was with the perennial puzzle of being both black and, officially at least, British, it had never occurred to me to feel European as well.

Growing up with mixed heritage, I had an acute sense of the connectedness of different cultures and races, but didn’t belong easily to any. My father’s father came to the UK in 1939, a few months too old for Kindertransport but still only a teenager, following the same route as his fellow Jewish-German child refugees but travelling alone. But I am neither Jewish nor German. My mother’s family came to the UK in 1961 from Ghana, amid the postimperial fallout from the first African ex-British colony. But I had never lived in Ghana, and cannot speak my mother’s mother tongue. I grew up in Wimbledon, a place that bestowed on me a privileged start in life and a middle-class English accent, as well as a physical and psychological distance from any of London’s vibrant black communities, the closest of which were a few miles away. Not “a proper black person”, I was often told, not Jewish, not German. Not British either, if Britishness – as was so often implied – meant white.

If my British identity was informed by a sense of belonging in the human rights community, then it was a fragile identity indeed. The anti-human rights act sentiment that existed when I was studying at the bar in the mid-2000s is a direct antecedent of the anti-European sentiment that exists today. The newspapers of the day railed against “European judges”, angered that such diverse villains as prisoners, Muslim clerics and asylum seekers were all entitled to basic levels of humane treatment. The enemies of these rights were not interested in the fact that they originated in the need to prevent a repeat of Nazi atrocities. The EU – which is separate from the human rights organisation the Council of Europe – has a similar genesis. “There is no hope for the safety and freedom of western Europe except by the laying aside for ever of the ancient feud between the Teuton and the Gaul,” Churchill had said in 1953. Otherwise forgiving of Churchill’s problematic past – which includes enthusiastic white supremacism and a hatred of Indians – on this, the patriotic enemies of Europe were content to dismiss the old war leader. And on 23 June 2016, they won the day.

You don’t have to be a human rights lawyer to instinctively feel what is being lost. “They are talking about going back to 1973, I remember 1973,” one man I interviewed in the run-up to the referendum told me, incredulous. “As a black man, it was not unusual to have teddy boys chasing you down the street, calling you names. We were not safe. The EU has given us more protection – not just from racists, but from rightwing British governments as well. What black person in their right mind,” he continued, “wants to go back to 1973?”

Brexit claims to offer a new vision of the future, but it really is about competing views of the past. One person’s “turning to the Commonwealth” is for people like me, whose family is still recovering from the legacy of empire, a celebration of imperial-era exploitation.

Val McDermid

When I first began publishing crime fiction 30 years ago, the place we looked to for challenging approaches to the genre was the US. Writers such as Sara Paretsky and James Ellroy were breaking new ground, challenging us to consider fresh narrative possibilities. But crucially, there wasn’t much option if we wanted to explore beyond the relatively narrow confines of British detective stories. Whatever was going on in the non-anglophone world was a different kind of mystery. Back then, the UK publishing industry seemed almost allergic to translated fiction.

Windows on the world … Gabriel Byrne and Julia Ormond in the film adaptation of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

There were a few isolated exceptions. Some of Georges Simenon’s Maigret stories were in print, and the innovative police procedurals of the Swedish partnership of Sjöwall and Wahlöö had been published in hardback. But our worldview was shaped by an English-speaking culture, and not just in the crime genre.

Thankfully that’s one aspect of publishing in general, and crime fiction in particular, that has changed dramatically in those intervening years. There’s no doubt that the single market has made publishing across borders much easier. But far more important, I believe, is the cultural impact. As we grew closer to our fellow European citizens, so did our appetite for understanding what we’d embarked on. Publishers – ever quick to spot a business opportunity – realised that our increasing curiosity might provoke us into widening the compass of our reading.

For years, we writers had been insisting that, really, it made more sense to publish a cracking Swedish or French novel rather than another mediocre English one. Like water dripping on stone, it eventually had an impact. It started with a handful of Nordic writers and gathered momentum. Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow was a hit, creating an appetite for more windows into that world. Karin Fossum, Henning Mankell and Arnaldur Indriðason became regulars in our bookshops and libraries.

Then the global phenomenon of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy galvanised readers and publishers both. It was like Schengen for books. The walls came down and we could finally go where we wanted: Sicily with Andrea Camilleri; Barcelona with Manuel Vázquez Montalbán; Paris with Fred Vargas; Stockholm with Arne Dahl; Berlin with Jakob Arjouni.

The more I’ve read about European elsewheres, the more European I’ve come to feel. And conversely, as the US has grown more fractured, insular and sectarian, the less I’ve felt comfortable there. Now, when I visit America, it just makes me feel more determinedly European. I’m not just Scottish, not just British, but European. I feel kinship with Italians, with Germans, with Greeks. And I like that feeling. Their countries have inspired my work. I’ve set bits of books all over Europe – Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Croatia, Greece, Italy.

And now that’s going to be irredeemably fragmented. But as the first shock at the Brexit vote has passed, my rage has metamorphosed into grief. After the Scottish independence referendum, when I was on the losing side, I was moved to tears. But I didn’t feel anger and contempt for those who voted no. It didn’t fracture friendships, it didn’t stop me respecting their informed choice. I don’t feel like that about Brexit. Part of my grief is the burn of blame. I want to shout, “How could you? How could you be so short-sighted? How could you do this to us?”

Call me simplistic, but I wish they’d all been force-fed a diet of continental crime fiction. If they’d understood nothing else, they might have grasped the underlying concept – bad things happen to people who do bad things.

Robert Macfarlane

This is a map, a map of birds, a map of the movement of the birds that bind us beyond borders, a map that unfolds in time each year.

January. Hard frosts in the fields of France, so lapwings have come to the Vale of Aylesbury; come in number, turning in flocks. Short days, milder air, snow thawing to bones on the fields. High piping peewit cries, and in the sunlight their spoony wings and fine crests are lustrous as oil, their chests ice white. When spring comes some of these birds will move east and north-east, crossing the North Sea to the dwindling peat bogs of Jutland, or to southern Norway where they will find their breeding grounds among red-boarded farmhouses, on low-lying fields, by glacier-smoothed backs of rock.

Storm-seeker … the swift. Photograph: Alamy

May. Swifts, swifts, the swifts are here at last! Screaming in and round on banking turns, boy racers burning up the circuit, shrieking crowds of crossbows, above school playgrounds and church spires and beer gardens, some of the last migrants back and some of the first to leave. They sleep on the wing, ascend to 600 metres or more at dusk, heading out over the North Sea on the glide, out beyond Stansted, avoiding the planes that are flying for Munich, for Paris, for Prague. Swifts are storm-seekers, moving ahead of thunderclouds where the updrafts drive insects to swift height. Swifts are airscape readers, flying round the southern edge of depressions to reach warmth where the insects will mass. When rain comes to the east of the country, the swifts make huge outwards loops across Europe in search of food: 2,000-kilometre insect quests over Calais supermarket car parks, hot Belgian plains, the roof canopy of Paris …

September. Apples are falling in the orchards of Sussex, Dorset and Hampshire. Apples are rotting and wasping in the long grass under the trees – and the reed beds of the south coast are loud with the last of the sedge warblers, bobbing on the feathery heads of the phragmites reeds, filling the air with their rambling song, as they ready for their vast journeys to the swamps of France, to the grasses of Spain, and on to their winter quarters south of the Sahara. The cold is coming and these little birds know it.

December. Long nights, short days, hard frosts. Up on the Cairngorm plateau: wind-sculpted dunes of hard snow, cold- shattered rocks and little sign of life except for the ptarmigan in their white winter plumage and the climbers in their bright-coloured jackets. A scatter of high cries on the northerly wind and suddenly in blows a blizzard of snow buntings – from Greenland, from Alaska, from Canada, from Finland, from Sweden – 60 birds, a hundred, moving as a single whirling turning flock in which it is impossible to distinguish origin from future, cause from consequence or individual from group.

We are related by birds.

Goodbye Europe: Writers and Artists Say Farewell is published by W&N. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20), go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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