Small Boats.
Longing, belonging, leaving and grieving.
The sense of belonging to a place is hard to explain. After my parents’ death I shared the ownership our family home. It belonged to me and I had legal documents to prove it. Yet long before that and long after, my bones knew that I belonged there. The house had no paperwork to prove it, there was no contract between me and the woods near by, the view across the field to the train into town was free for anyone who stood by the bridge but still I knew I was owned, like a happy dog.
The word itself is almost painfully transparent. Belonging. It’s like the onomatopoeic form of nostalgia, which grows from the Greek words algos, “pain” and nostos, “return”. Belonging expresses something of the emotion coiled within nationalism. Except, stemming from the Latin nasci, “to be born”, nationalism remains technical, legal, robbed of poetry. You surely belong to a country long before you are legally its national, in the way you belong to a beloved long before you marry. Belonging shares more with patriotism, though this always carries some sense of coercion through its familial, paternal, patriarchal root. A patriot is always paying a debt to some imagined father whereas when you belong somewhere, in a landscape, in a job, in your lovers arms, the obligations this brings are desired not demanded. It is not sweet or proper to die for your country but sometimes it is the heart’s deepest wish.
Poor in the oppression that gives identity its weight, the teenage longing to belong can sit uneasily on the English middle-classes. It’s not a problem deserving sympathy but it does explain why so many men like me have part of their being that belongs somewhere else. The exhaustive knowledge of hip hop, the devoted study of meditation, the wholesale absorption of football, folk music or food culture. Our contemporary obsession with authenticity makes this sounds like a sneer but it’s not a crime to love things you weren’t born to. Loving the new is part of what love is best at.
For my part, I tried all those. Privately though I probably fell hardest for a form of nostalgia, of nationalism, that sought to hold tight all that was eccentric. Unexpectedly this found its most resonant expression one morning in a Guardian column by Stephen Moss writing about the BBC’s forced retirement of a pair of beloved sports broadcasters.
…as I listened to coverage from Australia, I used to look forward to the forecast at 1am - I wanted to know what the weather was like in Finisterre, I cared about Channel Light Vessel Automatic. Pretend it is war - only cricket and the fate of small boats matter.
Only cricket and the fate of small boats matter. As a lifelong listener to both the Shipping Forecast and Test Match Special this struck a nerve. To be English, or at least, to be me, meant both oddity and empathy.
Of course the small boats Stephen Moss conjured back in 1999 when Fred Truman and Trevor Bailey left TMS, were not the ones that led to Gary Lineker’s brief absence from Match Of The Day. Back in 1999 small boats meant only the urgent vessels of rescue who had risked their lives to save three hundred thousand British and French soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. I realise my nostalgia contains no more truth than anyone else’s, but when did small boats become a thing to stop?
It’s not Christopher Nolan’s fault, though his Dunkirk, released in 2017, is a remarkable refashioning of national myth. I can’t criticise a war movie for screaming “war is hell” but of all the moments to illustrate this idea with, choosing Operation Dynamo seems perverse.
Nolan’s true genius is his command of narrative structure. Dunkirk remains his best expression of how to create both tension and meaning not through the events of plot but through the order in which those events are given to the audience. The known facts of the evacuation are given new meaning by the unexpected sequence in which he presents them. The little ships are there but if you thought Dunkirk was a triumph of community, of empathy, of brave mad souls crossing the channel in pleasure boats and ferries to save soldiers, Nolan needs you instead to see it as the first failure of many to come. He depicts a humbling moment where individuals lost in chaos taste how alone they are in this cruel dark world.
Both sides of our political divide choose to frame the facts of migration as a problem for the working class to endure. Don’t call them racists, they have live next door to these people. As if the reason we must stop the small boats is because once here their passengers home could only be within the communities we have already done our best to abandon. Truly, how can we look after the strangers when we can’t look after our own? But this is an act of editing, of presentation. In the sixth largest economy in the world, once again with full sovereignty over its actions, governed by a cabinet of millionaires, why is it that we can’t look after our own? Put aside those in genuine danger, where should the poor of the world go if not to where the money is? Isn’t that what the market wants us to do? Aren’t those boats propelled towards us by the invisible hand?
The real inheritance of the English is more complicated than the war, the little ships, cricket and Sailing By. If you are to be a patriot then you have to look squarely at everything your fathers did in the world. Crucially though we can make amends. Identities are not fixed, neither is a sense of belonging.
I wrote before about my regular dreams of the childhood home I sold seven years, two children and one pandemic ago. Last month I went back for the first time. Not to the house, I’m legally not allowed to do that, but to the street I grew up on, to make a short film recreating a phone call I made after my Dad’s death, attempting to take responsibility for some of his actions. I was terrified of returning, like going to see an ex (to be fair the last time I did that, I ended up marrying her, my record with change is not great). However this was different. It wasn’t that I had become an alien but neither had I come home. There was no algos to my nostos. I was free. Free as in truth we all are to decide to whom, to what, to where we belong.
Writing about the shipping forecast reminded me of the time I convinced iconic Radio 4 continuity announcer Corrie Caulfield to deliver a spoken word section in a song I wrote about despair and marmalade.
There hasn’t been a midpoint for a few weeks because Chris and I marked the shortest month of the year by shooting two short films and I can’t wait to share them both with you later in the year.
Lastly I’m delighted to say that my half day seminar How To Have An Idea returns on April 29th. This acts as a taster for my full screenwriting course but also works as a standalone kick-up the arse if your feeling blocked, want to write but don’t know where to start, or have too many ideas but no way of trusting which one to focus on. Full details and booking here.