Our assimilation Ian Buruma on how his family made a home in Britain
WHEN I think of my maternal grandparents, I think of Christmas. Since they lived into the 1980s, I can think of many other things. But Christmas at St Mary Woodlands House, the large vicarage in Berkshire where they lived next to Woodlands St Mary’s, a mid-Victorian Gothic church, now no longer in use, will always be my childhood idyll.
Age in these memories is rather indistinct. Anything between six and 14, I suppose. Roughly between 1958 and 1966. Between grey Marks and Spencer shorts and my powder - blue Beatles hat.
Nothing could match the thrill of arriving late, exhausted and a little sick from spending much of the day in our family car thick with my mother’s cigarette smoke, having started early that morning in The Hague, crossing the choppy North Sea on a Belgian ferryboat, crawling endlessly along one-lane country roads, taking in the familiar English winter odours of soot and bonfire smoke, and then finally pulling into the gravelled drive of St Mary Woodlands, to be greeted with the jovial laughter of my grandfather, “Grandpop,” wearing a green tweed jacket and smoking a pipe.
The two-storey house with its large windows and elephant-grey stucco walls was not grand, even though my memory has greatly expanded its size as though it were one of the great English country houses. It was not. But it was spacious. And it gave off a sense of solid Victorian comfort. A lawn, about the size of two football fields, at the rear of the house, flanked by broad flowerbeds tended by my grandmother, backed into a line of high oak trees, home to hundreds of cawing rooks, looking out to what is now the M4 motorway.
The lawn was used in summer for games of croquet and village fêtes. Ladies in hats inspected the wooden tables laden with prize fruits, vege- tables, and homemade cakes. There were coconut shies, a tombola, and lucky dips. The vicar of St Mary’s mingled with surgeons, retired colonels, assorted family members, and the odd local aristocrat. Sherry was served on the terrace. High tea came with cakes, scones, chocolate biscuits, and cucumber sandwiches. These domestic scenes were always bathed in sunshine, of course.
Just as, in my mind’s eye, the lawn never failed to be buried under a thick blanket of snow at Christmas.
From the main hall, a wide and elegant staircase climbed to the bedrooms on the first floor. From early December, the walls along the stairs were covered in Christmas cards, hundreds and hundreds of them, like leaves of ivy on a garden wall. Making sure to send Christmas cards to everyone she knew, or who might possibly be offended if they didn’t get one, was an annual source of neurotic obsession for my grandmother, or “Granny,” who would be mortified to receive a card from anyone she might possibly have overlooked.
It was not just the Christmas cards that spoke of a certain air of excess. Everything about Christmas seemed a trifle overdone, certainly more lavish than anything we were used to at home in Holland — the mistletoe, the ubiquitous holly, the candles, and especially, in the large drawing room looking out on to the garden, the Christmas tree, whose opulence, like so much else, might be slightly magnified by memory, but not much. Dripping with gold and silver baubles, festooned with streams of glittery trimmings, angels dangling from pretty little candlesticks, the tree was topped by a shining angel stretching her arms all the way to the high ceiling. This totem of pagan abundance, looking over a small mountain range of beautifully wrapped presents at its base, was not really vulgar — Granny had excellent taste. It was just very, very big.
Grandpop sat at the head of the table, an absurd paper hat from a Christmas cracker wrapped around his bald head and a pipe firmly lodged between his nicotine-stained teeth. He had the appearance of a friendly frog, his round face creased with laughter.
The family conversation might best be described as a kind of creative chaos. The main thing was to be heard in the cacophony of stories and inside jokes. You had to be quick if you were to be noticed. Sharp wit and the skill to tell a good story were essential, preferably at the top of your voice. The worst possible sin was to be a bore.
Faces under the coloured paper hats grew steadily ruddier as candles flickered in the silver candelabra and the contents of the Christmas crackers sprawled across the table amid the walnuts, the dried fruits, and the crystal glasses.
No wonder these occasions could strike an outsider as a trifle overpowering. It was hard to get a word in. We were a tight-knit clan. And yet the family was far from closed to outsiders. On the contrary, my grandparents had a quasi-Oriental concept of hospitality. They took pride in the number of guests they welcomed at St Mary Woodlands. It was a sign of their generosity. Rather like those Christmas cards in the hall, friends were proof of the family’s worth, even perhaps of its acceptance.
I cannot say I felt overpowered. But coming — as my sisters and I were — from a relatively provincial Dutch town, the glamour of family Christmas in England made our lives seem rather drab in comparison. If acceptance was an issue, it was about my place in the family, and the culture it represented.
This was not a straightforward matter. Even the tightest-knit clans consist of concentric circles. At the centre, holding it all together, were the grandparents, Granny and Grandpop, Bernard and Winifred (“Bun” and “Win”), around whom everything revolved. The following circles were made up of the next generations. But the family extended further, to circles of great-uncles and aunts, cousins, and nephews and nieces, and then there were even more distant relatives, some of them refugees from 20th-century catastrophes, and an adopted family of 12 Jewish children whom my grandparents had helped to escape from Hitler’s Berlin.
An idyll is usually associated with a pastoral scene, a childhood Garden of Eden, a place to which there can be no return. Mine was set in a very English countryside. And indeed, the superiority of Englishness, to my grandparents, was never in doubt. They were far too well travelled and cosmopolitan to look down on foreigners, let alone to exclude them. They were not like the guest at a local Sunday-morning drinks party, who replied to my mother’s casual remark, made in a flagging attempt at small talk, that our car in the drive was the only one with foreign number plates, that this was “nothing to be proud of.”
On the contrary, English superiority would more often be expressed by being especially polite to foreigners, while being careful not to seem patronising.
And yet my sisters and I were made aware from a very early age that there was something faintly amusing about our foreign background, about the way we spoke an incomprehensible guttural language, or “Double Dutch,” as the family would call it. And so, to live up to the idyll of St. Mary Woodlands, I became something far more laughable than being foreign; I became a little Anglophile, an aspiration my grandparents, perhaps feeling secretly flattered, were happy to indulge: cricket bats and checked Viyella shirts for Christmas, regimental ties and blue blazers for my birthdays. My pocket money was spent on comics, like Beano or Eagle, featuring English public schoolboy heroes winning football games, and blond, square-jawed RAF aces downing Messerschmitts.
And yet the Englishness of my grandparents was not as clear-cut
It was hard to get a word in. We were a tight clan but far from closed to outsiders