It is inevitable when thinking about World War One and the Battle of the Somme (where my Bellew grandfather was seriously wounded) to be confronted by a roll call of the dead. Memorials to the fallen are ubiquitous and rightly so.
The writer HH Munro, who wrote under the name Saki, was one amongst so many. In 1914 he was forty-three and officially too old to enlist. Nevertheless he refused a commission and joined up as a trooper. In 1916 at the Battle of Ancre he was killed by a German sniper. He has no known grave but his name is inscribed on the Thiepval Memorial in Picardy.
In one of his short stories the redoubtable Lady Carlotta allows herself to be mistaken for a governess and says to her employer that she teaches her charges history using the Schartz-Metterklume method. She explains that it makes children understand history by acting it out. Her Rape of the Sabine Women lesson does not go down well.
We are learning Economics by the Schartz-Metterklume method right now. Sterling has been devalued, and shares in banks, builders and property companies have fallen too. Companies who derive their earnings outside the UK have done rather well. This has been Lesson One. Subsequent lessons, using the S-M method, will feature import and export tariffs, tax rises and spending cuts and a contracting economy. It’s a jolly expensive way to learn Economics and some pupils may bunk off school and go and live abroad; especially if they’re chosen to act out paying higher tax.
Another top Saki story is The Unrest Cure and we are taking that too.
Even if you are right that our economy will vastly suffer, I think you may misunderstand or under-rate the psychology of one faction of the Brexit virtual-tribe, some of them intelligent optimists. They think a poorer, freer, sounder GB is a decent outcome. I slightly incline to agree: I love consumerism, but I would dent affluence in return for substantive gains in political culture.
These Brexit shocks may make the lazier and less-educated masses in this country realise that they face a globalised pool of energetic, talented competition.
And our elites may re-learn the need to be thoroughly adult as they aim to earn the respect of the frighteningly childish and idly dissident Twittersphere.
An optimist would say that the UK in about ten years time could emerge as a stronger, more confident and less fractured nation. I am not an optimist and even an optimist would have to admit that the intervening ten years will be a brutal experience not least for those who voted Brexit.
On a lighter note than Brexit, anyone visiting the Thiepval Monument who is interested in P.G.Wodehouse or cricket ought to look at Pier and Face 9A 9B and 10B where the name of Percy Jeeves appears. He was the Warwickshire cricketer immortalised by P.G. Wodehouse as Bertie’s personal manservant in the Wooster novels, sadly killed on the Somme on July 22nd, 1916.