Study in the tower where Montaigne wrote.Wikicommons/Codex. Some rights reserved.I wonder if I’m alone in feeling that the Brexit isn’t really about the pros and cons of EU membership. I argue about these with Brexiters, but it seems to me that their songsheet is a different one. Whatever they say, they’d rather not be Europeans.
I feel I should know what it means to be a European. My parents met when my father was an officer in the British army, in 1944, and my mother was a young widow marooned with two small children in a Normandy village. When we all lived in London during the 1950s, my half-sisters went to French school.
I need to recall what a tight and insular and un-European place 1950s Britain was. Fog really did hide the other side of the Channel if you didn’t brave the vomit-strewn ferries pitching between charmless Dover and ugly Boulogne. There was something stunted and foreshortened about a country that had recently won its greatest war.
