In the early days of courtship, an ex-boyfriend of mine, years ago, had seemed perfect. The only problem was that he was a republican. So over BBQs in his garden on warm Cambridge nights, I did battle with him on the virtues of the British monarchy, expounding on its stabilising effects, its emotionally unifying capacity, its layered, anchoring tradition, its encapsulation of the strange and exceptional qualities of Britain. I reeled out the classic argument: compared to a political appointment, the monarch was a transcendently superior head of state.
In the context of the reign of Elizabeth II, his republicanism was even harder to understand. I, like most people, not only admired but greatly liked the Queen. Her qualities were so clearly excellent, her demeanour so winning. Who, I asked, could he think of who would improve on her total commitment to service on a grand scale, bolstered by a fine form of godliness, and an apparent disinterest in power, image or the trappings of wealth? It was one of the few arguments I ever won: in the end, he came round.
But for all my monarchism, for all my rational appreciation of the Queen and now of the momentousness of her death, throughout the last week or so I have never felt more cut off from the nation. It seems to me that at 96, the monarch’s passing was hardly a surprise, nor a tragedy. A life more purposefully lived, or more peacefully ended, seems hard to imagine. I simply cannot throw myself into a ceremonially morbid state of mind.
Don’t get me wrong. I have watched the key ceremonies with great interest, feeling chills up my spine at the ancient and intricate majesty of the British throne, the intimacy of its connections to church and state. But as events great and small got cancelled for mourning, I felt myself getting irritated. Perhaps it is the enormity of disruption wrought by Covid that has made me tired of public cataclysms interfering in the carefully-planned details of daily life. At any rate, I found myself wondering why a friend’s son can’t watch the football, or a colleague can’t go to the opera, or my neighbour to the Last Night of the Proms, or a much-looked forward to philosophy festival laboriously planned months in advance at great disruption to my schedule (as a speaker, not an organiser, thankfully), can’t go ahead.
When I have voiced this impatience to my fellow Britons, they have chided me. Many of them are atheist types who would never dream of taking religion seriously. But dig a little deeper and they’ll all say they are Anglican or Catholic, their families have been here since time immemorial, and their connection to the monarchy is notably emotional in a way that mine isn’t. A poll says that more than half of adult women and a third of adult men have cried because of the Queen’s death. I was not one of them.
I find myself stuck on a limb, left with a sense of coldness at a time when sentiment is running hot and sweet and everywhere. The truth is that — while I wish she could have gone on forever — I see the Queen’s death as more fascinating than miserable; more an intellectual than emotional event.
Reflecting on this I am brought back to the question of Jews and national belonging. My ancestors in Germany felt passionate belonging; some committed suicide when they realised that they would be forced to flee or die. Perhaps an epigenetic lesson was learned: never again.
And then, in Britain for those that did get here, there was inescapable otherness. My grandparents, who arrived as teens disordered and disoriented by the war, were never going to feel properly English; they never even lost their German accents. My parents, one born in London, one in Bombay, left for America aged 30, when I was a toddler. I returned to Britain at 16, but only on a whim of curiosity. My decision to stay on rather than return to America was more a matter of inertia, a lazy choice than a sense of homecoming.
Still, I have always defended Britain and its institutions, and insisted that it is an exceptional nation, perhaps the most important the world has ever seen. But when it comes to that more visceral, defensive sense of Britishness enjoyed by my indigenous compadres, I draw a blank. To me, Britishness means just familiarity with the culture, the people, the landscape.
I cannot speak for other non-belongers. Belonging, after all, needn’t be a strict matter of religion or duration of settlement in a given place. But for me, the Jewishness at the core of my identity acts as a distancing device, keeping me, I surmise, at a remove from collective national consciousness. The old antisemitic question about Jewish loyalties is a red herring and a stupid one at that. I owe Britain what any citizen does. To obey the law.
As someone who appreciates and supports it, I go well beyond that minimum. But my surplus offering to the nation does not extend to the simpler kind of attachment experienced by others, or, it seems, an automatic connection to the passing of its most magisterial enshrinement.
I am truly sorry that we have lost our world-historically wonderful Queen and, while I can appreciate the national mood of mourning, as a rootless “citizen of the world”, as Theresa May put it disparagingly and rather uncomfortably in 2016, I cannot participate in it entirely authentically.
