Ian Jack on tense and cherries

Posted on | March 3, 2010 | No Comments

I have just had porridge for breakfast. I mixed it with a banana (Dominican Republic), a Clementine (Spain), some organic raisins (Kenya) and some almonds (also Spain). I sprinkled on some linseed (Canada) and some cinnamon (unspecified within the EU). I have no way of knowing where the oats came from, but as the bag claims it was packed in the UK I am assuming some guilt by omission. The water was from a British tap – but rain is from the global commons, and after being drawn through my Brita water filter (Poland), who knows what nationality it could claim.

It is then the absence of English cherries from the seasonal shopping basket that strikes me as the worst of the losses catalogued in Ian Jack’s collection of writings, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. Much of his work begins with contemporary issues and from there turns through his preoccupation with the question “What was it like before?” into a study of things lost. The Kent cherry is just one of those things that has given Jack the task of, “always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.”

So, the cherry. (There is in fact a charity, or campaign, CherryAid, to save the British cherry. Anita Pati wrote about the cherry campaign back in 2008 for the Guardian. There is even a national cherry day, on Saturday July 17th this year.)

This may be something to do with my preoccupations this morning. On another day I could easily consider the key deficit in the modern British lifestyle to be addressed elsewhere in this wide-ranging collection that spans the last two decades. It is almost remiss to think about cherries when there is Jack’s detailed and forceful investigation into the Hatfield train crash and the 1993 Railways Act, essential reading for anyone voting in the next general election.

Why should I here lament the disappearance of the English Black variety when I should be scouring the Internet for a recording of the 1940s contralto Kathleen Ferrier, who I had known nothing about before reading Jack, but who was (perhaps—Jack is never dogmatic) Britain’s greatest ever voice, who came from a coal-town near Blackburn to sing Orpheus in Covent Garden, and who died of cancer at the age of 41? I feel less unsure of myself for wanting nothing more than to loosen the stone from a mottled white cherry (a Nap – ‘Napoleon’) and spit it out, rather than turn to Jack’s shorter and wittier pass de deux on The Little Book of Chavs, for example, or the index of his father’s bookshelf, in which it feels that Jack is less writing an essay than talking you through the family china.

And more: not least his history of The Titanic. This morning, however, it is about Kentish cherries explored through the question, emphasized by the touching stories of fun-had and decisions-made with his children, of “what did I feel that you will not?” What did it feel like, as Jack says, to buy “a pound of them in a brown paper bag, smudged purple with juice at the bottom” and to “eat and eat, and at around lunchtime feel foreboding”?

I have written a little untruthfully here. Jack wrote the above in the past tense: bought, ate, felt. And yet all I have (un)done is Jack’s own sleight: “I write this in the past tense, slightly untruthfully because you can still buy English cherries if you look hard enough, but truthfully enough in the sense that they are rarely available in the places where people buy most food: supermarkets.”

I do not think Jack would be pleased. “The worst tense used in print journalism, in my view, is the present.” He should know, having worked as the most precise of journalists—the sub-editor—on the Sunday Times, and from there a reporter filing copy from India and Sri Lanka (many of the essays are based in the Indian sub-continent, and written with both affection and awe) to editorships at the Independent on Sunday and Granta magazine. Jack’s prose is always truthful, and has the proper journalist’s obsession with observation and accuracy. As he says in an essay on the way his daughter talks in this vivid present: “The past tense is simply the more truthful tense, and in this way it conveys a precision and conviction that the present tense lacks.”

And so this is it, for me, on this morning when we finally see some Spring sun. Of the essays in Jack’s collection, for his discipline in his part-historical study, part-journalistic investigation, part-memoir: of British cinema and his dead brother (‘The Best Picture He Ever Saw’); of the cotton mills and the working class (‘See, the Workers Move!’); or the July 7^th bombings (‘Blitz Spirit’); it is in the essay on the Van, Colney, Sunburst and Lapin (‘Cherries’) where Jack – a Stoic reporter of the contemporary history of Britain – becomes impatient, and changes the present into the past (“the worst tense in journalism”) because that I am putting a world’s food on my porridge instead of eating it plain and waiting for the summer is the best evidence we have of our “troubled nationhood”. Or, to misappropriate Jack’s question about the demise of Kent’s cherry orchards: “What happened?”

What happened, perhaps, is that we British became after the Hatfield crash, like the train under Cary Grant as he kissed Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, a little “unsteady”. The results of Thatcherism were “uneven” leaving many parts of Britain “an unsound country.” The impact of the ‘War on Terror’ when it felled London on July 7^th left Jack and others “unhinged”. And we have become, like the billion feet of film in the British Film Institute’s archive, “inherently unstable.” It, and we, decompose.

I do not want the unstable. I want the solid: the cherry. If I am off to the supermarket farm-store, what should I look for? “The best, not too ripe, had what is now known in the food industry as ‘mouth feel’; a skin firm enough to offer a slight resistance to the bite, then a spurt of juice from the flesh.” A slight resistance, then a spurt of juice from the flesh. None of that in my porridge this morning, but perhaps a good way to think about what it means to be today, after Thatcher, British.

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