Essays in Idleness

“There will always be an England,” my mommy and her friends used to sing, with tears in their eyes, and some may sing today, eighty years after the Victory Europe celebrations. Too, there will always be a France, &c — or the “Franks,” or “Franj,” as the Saracens used to call them, when, as Crusaders, they were trying to recover the most Holy Christian lands, between the XIth and XVth centuries. England, being afloat on an irremovable island, will not be overrun except by the ice, when the northern glaciation reasserts itself — whenupon France and England will once again be joined together, as the seas recede around Europe. But this is to look too far ahead. On present demographic trends they will much sooner be conquered by Islam.

Then, we may sing, perhaps, “There will always be an Anti-America,” even as the opposition to America from Europe dies away, to be replaced by something more forceful from the Ummah.

But it was seeing off the Nazis that we were toasting on the 8th of May, 1945.

My mommy, an unmarried nurse in Halifax at the time, had to be rescued from our allied drunken louts when she came off shift. (Our great Atlantic port was crawling with sailors from everywhere.) Without time to explain what they were up to, chivalrous Canadian military toughs threw my mother in the back of a truck, with other ladies, and drove her several miles out of town. Thanks to this precaution, she was not raped.

The Haligonian licker stores had been, as a further precaution, locked down tight. But they were all trashed and looted by the sailors and soldiers, in a memorable show of international solidarity.

Yes, there will always be an England, and a Canada too, and we will always win, unless we don’t.