Europe is still a mystery to many of us

Ian Jack The Guardian

There were coasters butting into the gale in the Channel, very much as John Masefield promised there would be, and we flew low enough to see all the paraphernalia on deck – lifeboats, hatches, ropes – and the shimmer of heat just above the funnel. Strong winds had delayed our take-off for hours, and we'd sat anxiously in the Lloyd Loom chairs at the airfield on the Surrey heathland, too nervous to eat breakfast after our night on the train from Scotland. A school trip: none of us had flown before, apart from our French teacher, who had served in the western desert with the RAF, and now sat beside me, drawing on his pipe and explaining that we were flying in a variant of the wartime Dakota. "A bit bumpy – I expect we'll fly under the cloud all the way," he said, as all around us boys retched into their sick bags and, a thousand feet beneath, steep waves collapsed and foamed up the beaches of France. Fields appeared, and then railway lines so near that you could make out their wooden sleepers. I swear, though I may owe the thought to Biggles, that we followed them all the way to Basel.

This was my first glimpse of Europe. Neil Kinnock said that he was the first in "a thousand generations of Kinnocks" to attend university, and a similar thing could be said of the schoolchildren on the plane that day – that we were the first in our families to have travelled to Europe while not dressed in military uniform. It wasn't that our forefathers had stayed at home. My mother had distant cousins in New Zealand, and my father an uncle in South Africa, while his mother and several other uncles had been born in India, and his sister lived for a time in Hong Kong. Imperial (and sometimes American) opportunity meant that envelopes with collectable stamps came through the letterboxes of many ordinary homes. But Europe? My grandfather had seen it as a trench in Flanders, and my father (if he'd seen it at all) as a view of Gibraltar from the deck of a cargo steamer on the way to Australia. My older brother had spent some months in Germany, but only because national service had posted him there. Mine was my family's first civilian experience of the place they still called "the continent", and that would have been true for most other holidaymakers who crossed the Channel in the 30 years after the war.

Think of us little Britons in the summer of 1957. Landing at Basel, we went to the airport restaurant for our first European meal. The soup had mysterious discs of what could have been machine lubricant floating on the surface. Fat? Probably olive oil, a teacher said: general dismay, whatever the case. Then we boarded a train to our village in the Bernese Oberland, sitting on hard wooden seats and taking turns to visit the excitements of the lavatory, where you could stand over a vertical pipe and peer (and pee) straight down to the tracks. Compared to Heinz cream of tomato and the moquette benches and U-bends of the British railway carriage, these initial experiences implied an inferior way of life. That changed over the next week, when we ate fresh peaches and for the first time smelled the mixture of freshly ground coffee, scented tobacco and chocolate that, for a certain generation, will always suggest luxury (even though a dilute version, too milky and minus the tobacco, can now be had at the door of any Starbucks).

We came home with souvenirs, in my case a spiked walking stick for Alpine scrambles and a musical box that played O Sole Mio, bought on a day excursion to Lake Maggiore. We were impressed but not discomfited. Switzerland and Italy were beautiful – mental images of the ice-blue lakes stayed with us always – but neither country was as important as the one we came from. As 12-year-olds we shared some of the attitudes of 18th-century gents on the Grand Tour, though of course our labouring ancestors had never been counted among these people. We admired the landscape and felt wary of the natives. In an Italian town, some local youths had surrounded the only boy in our party to wear a kilt, and jeered him for being a girl; an especially enraging insult given which country had "won the war", and which country of ice-cream makers had so quickly surrendered, or so we believed.

The war, as it turned out, had given us a misleading idea of ourselves, but no British schoolboy could have known that in 1957. Even on later trips to Europe in the 1960s it was still the custom to boggle at the primitive sanitary arrangements in Paris, to avoid tap water and bidets (hadn't they heard of toilet paper?), and frown at the garlic whiff on the Metro. Slowly, the balance changed. Germany's "economic miracle" showed up Britain's rickety industrial base; prosperity spread across the rest of western Europe to yield an enviable lifestyle, easily caricatured as open-air cafes and high-speed trains, that middle-class Britain struggled to emulate. By the early 1980s, Britain could justifiably be seen as the sick man of Europe, only for that reputation to be abolished, perhaps temporarily, by a combination of mineral wealth and ideology in the shape of North Sea oil, pliant labour laws, easy credit and City deregulation. This was the age we "discovered" Europe as never before: cheap flights to stag parties in Barcelona and Cracow, holiday homes in deepest France.

Beyond those things, I am not sure. The mainland certainly seems closer than it did in 1957, but our ignorance of its social structures and governance still remains profound. I, for one, feel I know much more about India or the US than countries less than 100 miles from the Thames estuary – our ancestral inheritance has proved difficult to undo. The Guardian's New Europe series, which has run for the past four weeks, may have had an unfashionable purpose (its slogan "Get to know your neighbours a bit better" would once have been "Nation shall speak peace unto nation"), but by simply describing questions of everyday life it revealed how much I ought to have known and didn't, and I'm sure my ignorance is common.

An interesting feature was a poll that showed how five European nations thought of each other – how well, compared with the others, they imagined they drove, cooked or held their drink. Relative to Germany, France, Spain and Poland, Britain emerged as a place of low self-esteem, with a population more inclined to agree with the propositions that we have the worst national cuisine and the least attractive people. There are two ways of seeing this. "The English are actually contented with their deteriorating lot," wrote the historian Tony Judt despairingly in 2001. "They are the only people who can experience schadenfreude at their own misfortunes." That's the gloomy way. The more comforting option is to remember the English as they were once cartooned – insular, boastful and proud of their terrible food – and see these qualities blazing instead out of Madrid, Paris and Berlin. Humility is the first step to progress.

We were Scottish rather than English schoolboys on the plane in 1957, though British wasn't then a problematic identity. In any case, Heinz tomato ruled the roost from the Scillies to Shetland. It was a badge of our superior civilisation.

The Guardian