A Writer's World (52 page)

Even the Swiss are beginning to have doubts about their army, which has been so long the badge of their confederate unity – more than a third of them said in a recent referendum that it ought to be abolished. But I still find something grand and moving in it, especially at the weekend when the citizen soldiery turns out in the mountains, polishing its saddles at
cavalry depots among the trees, clambering up hill tracks in pairs with walkie-talkies or reverberating the thunder of its artillery in impossibly inaccessible valleys. It has scarcely fired a shot in anger for 150 years, but then that is what is grand about it.

The Swiss flag is very stylish: clear, simple and distinctive – what a temptation to clutter it up with cantonal devices – and so, to outsiders at least, is the clarity of the Swiss identity. Like it or not, we all know what Swissness is. Although the Swiss speak four languages, their national idioms are far less blurred than most. Franglais, Breutsch and Ameritalian have made relatively few inroads here, Romansch, so far as I know, remains inviolate, and the Swiss postures, manners, apparent outlooks and evident hang-ups are unmistakable still.

Along the lake from Weggis, to be reached only by boat or by precipitous paths from the hills above, is the field of Rutli, the Swiss Runnymede, where (according to pious legend) in 1291 the mountain rebels met to defy the authority of the Habsburgs and bring into being the Swiss Republic. It is a place of pilgrimage still, and on the Sunday I walked there thousands of Swiss patriots were making their way to and from the hallowed site and swarming through the woods. I offered a cheerful good morning to everyone I met, and could not help admiring the utter lack of ingratiation, the courtesy tinged with distinctly suspended judgement, with which most of them responded. That’s style, too.

It was scarcely a generous or easy-going response. It was essentially a response
de
haut
en bas
, and for most of us the most annoying thing about the Swiss is perhaps their unspoken sense of superiority – all the more maddening, of course, to those who feel historically superior themselves. That
Third
Man
quip would have no effect on the Swiss at all: they would probably take it as a compliment, so attached do they seem to be to the cuckoo-clock ethos, as it were, and so confident that they are essentially, fundamentally, irrevocably in the right.

This strikes me as a peasant-like characteristic, and in many ways Switzerland is still like a nation of bucolics. I was repeatedly impressed, during my days on Lake Lucerne, by the number of twisted, stooped or withered old people I saw – people of a kind we seldom see nowadays in western Europe. They were one generation removed, I thought, from the goitre, that talismanic ailment of mountain peasantry: and although nowadays the Swiss have a longer life expectancy than any other people in Europe, and the remotest Alpine farm is likely to possess every domestic
convenience, still the faces of those crooked ancients, hard-hewn and gaunt, seem to speak of centuries of earthy hardship and isolation.

It is a truism, constantly reiterated by Britons, that Swissness is no recipe for tolerance. It is defensive and inward-looking, and makes for narrow judgements. The parochial is married here to the suburban, and clearly Switzerland is not an easy place for the oddball, the anarchist, the Asian or perhaps even the person who says good morning to strangers too freely. Even Swiss humour seems laboriously contrived, as though it has to force itself out of conformity. So conservative is Switzerland in matters of public liberty, I am told, and so intrusive is authority, that if the republic ever joined the European Community it would probably be in permanent dispute before the Court of Human Rights.

The Swiss know all this. Heaven knows they have been told often enough, and the city radicals are vociferous in their criticisms – one powerful group of intellectuals declined to take part in the anniversary celebrations at all, on the grounds that 700 years were more than enough. Experts say that the Swiss idea is getting out of date. But if you live richly and at peace in a beautifully maintained country, if you have progressed in a few generations from mule-sledge to Mercedes, if your children are extremely well educated and your pension is enough to afford you a spacious balconied hotel room overlooking the lake at Weggis, with a four-course dinner on half-board terms, you are likely to think that on the whole your system is on the right track.

Half-way through my stay at Weggis I cracked my head open entering the lake for a swim, and had to have it stitched up. How glad I was of Swissness then! Calmly and steadily the Herr Doktor worked, assisted by Frau Doktor and by their son, the computer specialist, and delicate was his technique, and state-of-the-art his equipment, and whenever I opened my eyes I saw through the spotless windows of his surgery the glistening lake, streaked with leisurely waves and ringed with green hills, like a visual tranquillizer.

The more I pondered all this, the more I wondered what the British had to sneer about. Are they any freer than the Swiss? I doubt it. Are they any less racist? One wonders. Are their security services any less intrusive? Probably not. Is their power structure more open? Don’t make me laugh. Are their schools as good? Is their income as high? Is their unemployment less? Is their production greater? Are their streets as clean? Is their public morality any better? Is their crime rate lower? And are they any happier in
their lot? Well, polls seem to show a swing in opinion, but it is still quite likely that when the Swiss come to decide by referendum whether to join the European Community, and thus put an end to the neutral isolation which has made them what they are, the majority will say no – as they said no in 1986 to joining the United Nations. The pundits assure us that this will prove a mistake, and that before long Switzerland will find itself outmoded and dismayed. Want to take a bet?

Besides, as a Welsh republican, and a European federalist, I still find in Switzerland a model and a hope. Citizens of the European nation-states tend to dismiss its example now, but to those of us who see in the new Europe a fresh chance for the minority peoples – the Catalonians, the Corsicans, the Basques, the Bretons, the Scots and the Welsh and all the rest – the Swiss Confederation is by no means an obsolete ideal. Now and then, as I pottered around the lake, I noticed small and unobtrusive boundary markers. Four cantons surround Lake Lucerne, which is indeed called by the indigenes the Lake of the Four Cantons – Lucerne, Uri, Unterwalden and Schwyz (all the names of paddle-steamers, too). To a large degree each canton regulates its own affairs, yet only those modest stones, sometimes far from roads, mark their boundaries.

Switzerland may be backward on human rights, but it is certainly strong on political democracy; not only are the twenty-three cantons of the republic largely autonomous, but the affairs of the federal government, too, are constantly subject to national referendums, on the most profound and essential subjects. Imagine a referendum in Britain about whether to have an army or not! Here the will of the people counts, consulted as fundamentally as it can be, down to the last mountain valley; and it is the will of the Swiss people that has decreed all that we dislike, all that we admire, all that we deplore and envy, all that amuses or rubs us up the wrong way in Switzerland today.

Not for centuries has one of the cantons gone to war with another, or tried to impose itself upon a neighbour. Those simple stones of boundary represent a gentle apotheosis of the nationalist idea, in most other places anything but gentle. I would not at all mind a Europe similarly demarcated, so that only a block marked ‘France’ (perhaps with a concrete cock on top) will tell travellers that they have left Germany or Italy, and must swap dictionaries for another language. Hot patriot that I am, I would be perfectly content if the people of Wales, like the people of Unterwalden, governed their domestic affairs under the sovereignty of a multinational, multilingual confederation, with the views of the
Rhymney Valley or the Dwyfor District Council having their statutory if infinitesimal influence upon policies at the centre, and everybody having a direct say in the greatest decisions of state.

Marx wrongly thought communism would prove conclusive: after a week in Weggis I still half-cherish the hope that the end of history is Swissness.

No mode of transport is more unmistakably engineered for ultimate journeys. This is how we shall cross the Styx at last, with a swoosh of spray and a rattle of bulkhead doors, looming ungainly and amphibious through the night with Charon high in his pilot-house above us. Irrevocable seems the landing upon the soil of France, if one is deposited there by this momentous device, and irrevocable it very often is, for a slight chop in the sea out there, a gusty wind up the Narrows, and Charon is immobilized in the Port d’Aéroglisseur for hours at a time, and is to be seen morosely reminiscing on a high bar stool in the panoramic restaurant.

I like this utterness of landfall, for I am everybody’s patriot, responding with almost equal sympathy to lachrymose Welshmen at rugby matches, Americans with hats on their hearts as parades pass by, inexplicable ceremonials of Swaziland or those sad silent sentries who stand, heads bowed and rifles reversed, so still upon the steps of the Vittorio Emanuele memorial in Rome. And most of all, since one associates the emotion of patriotism most expressly with the fact of France, do I respond to the proud Frenchness of the French. I do not wish them to be nice to me. Nor do I want them to adapt in any way to the influences of the world outside, however reasonable or enlightened. I want only to feel, now as always, that when I drive away from the port into those melancholy landscapes of
Pas-de-Calais, I am entering a world not merely separate and different from my own, but perfectly convinced of its superiority to all others, inviting one simply to take or leave it.

These are archaic preferences. Cosmopolitanism, I know, is the contemporary orthodoxy, and while few people nowadays wish to remould foreign countries in their own image, fewer still, it seems to me, wish nations to remain absolutely themselves. To my mind this makes for dullness, and excited though I sporadically am by the prospect of a Europe without frontiers, still I am saddened by the process of bumps smoothed, quirks normalized, anomalies rationalized, contrasts homogenized, which they tell me is sure to be a pan-European concomitant.

So it was with an inner foreboding that I left the hoverport in Boulogne the other day and drove thoughtfully away towards Paris. I had a nagging feeling that France itself might be compromising its style at last; and I did not like the look of things, when at the motorway café they offered me a
Choc
-
Bar
and
Poulet
Far
West
, and forbade me wine for safety’s sake.

At first, though, I found much to reassure me. People were still walking that special French walk, less loose-limbed than ours, more precise and deliberate, rather as though their legs do not bend at the knee. Traffic cops were still riding their motor-bikes in that particular French posture, hunched far forward over their petrol tanks like so many White Knights and looking as though they too, when discreetly out of sight, might tumble to the ground in a tangle of microphones and report books. Truck drivers, meeting me on the wrong side of the highway with a klaxon cacophony, still melted upon my protestations of self-amused innocence into that cynic half-toss of the head, accompanied by inaudible mutterings, which is an early symptom of French gallantry.

There are still, I found, no mornings like French town mornings, when the bread hangs fragrant upon the awakening air, when the priests converge blackly upon the cathedral for early mass, and the whine of the mopeds about the Place de la Gare incites the first tourist to throw open her shutters and sip her orange juice in the sunshine. There is still nowhere in the world remotely like your French bourgeois country restaurant, at Sunday lunchtime preferably, when the little town outside is echoing and listless, and the Auberge des Gourmets, or Chez Boudin, or Au Relais de la Chanson, is like an island of warmth and gluttony in a sea of empty cobbles.

I went to one such restaurant, on such an apathetic Sunday, in – well, in one of those ancient towns of central France where the streets wind
upwards from the railway track, through scowling walls of medievalism, until they debouch in the square outside the cathedral door, surveyed by huge stone animals through the stone latticework of the cathedral tower, and prowled about on Sunday mornings by cats and desultory visitors. Nothing had changed, I discovered, in the corner restaurant, the one with the awnings and the menu in the polished brass frame. It remained quintessential France, as we islanders have loved and loathed it for several centuries. Madame remained the epitome of everything false, narrow-minded and unreliable. One waiter seemed, as ever, to be some sort of a duke, the other was evidently the village idiot. At the table next to mine sat a prosperous local family out for Sunday dinner, well known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community – unsmiling, voluminously napkinned, serious and consistent eaters who sometimes, eyeing me out of the corners of their piggy eyes, exchanged in undertones what were doubtless scurrilous sly Anglophobics, before returning sluggishly to their veal.

I do not doubt the bill was wrong. I am sure Madame disliked me as much as I detested her. The veal was, as a matter of fact, rather stringy. But what a contrary delight it all was still! How excellent still the vegetables! How much better the wine in France! How stately that duke! How endearing the idiot! With what real gratitude, evading the final scrutiny of the prefectorial table, and sweetly returning Madame’s shifty glittering smile, did I wrap the Frenchness of that café around me like a cloak, and return cherished to the motorway!