Читать книгу These are the British онлайн

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Inside the factory John pointed to one of the workers. "That's the bard," he said. "Won a prize at the annual competition this year."

The bard, clad in rubber boots, old trousers, and a fisherman's jersey, had little of the "Scots Wha Ha'e" about him. But he was the real thing. He had journeyed to the competition on foot and there recited in Gaelic his own composition, a description of his life in Germany as a soldier in the British Army of the Rhine. "I sung of those queer foreign sights and people," he said.

I asked him if he had liked the Germans.

"I did not," he said. He was not a particularly loquacious bard. But he was intensely and unostentatiously devoted to customs and a culture well established before there were white men in America.

The bard was proud of his association with an old and famous race. But, then, all over the British Isles there are groups rejoicing in the same fierce local pride. In Devon you will be told that it was "Devon men" who slashed the Armada to ruins in the Channel. That battle was fought nearly four hundred years ago. In a future century the visitor to London will be told, quite correctly, that it was the near-sighted, snaggle-toothed, weak-chested youngsters from the back streets who held the Germans at Calais until preparation could be made for the evacuation at Dunkirk.