“What do they know of England who only England know?” Rudyard Kipling’s famous question, a line from his poem The English Flag, was actually written in defense of Empire, but is still worth asking by Englishmen in these post-imperial times. Enoch Powell, however, found the phrase sadly outdated. In a speech given on St. George’s Day, 1961, to London’s Royal Society of St. George, Powell (then Minister of Health) said:
It is a saying which dates. It has a period aroma… That phase is ended, so plainly ended, that even the generation born at its zenith, for whom the realization is the hardest, no longer deceive themselves as to the fact.
Powell, a man so steeped in the classics that he took down his House of Commons notes in Ancient Greek, put the decline of the British Empire in the context of past, faded imperial glories, and compared England with ancient Athens. When he gave the speech, I was 44 days old, born and living in London. I’m 63 years old now and, although I now reside elsewhere, comparing England with Athens is hardly realistic, unless you mean Athens, Georgia.
But, by Kipling’s reasoning, and having spent the last decade in Central America, I should now know more of England. How does it compare with Costa Rica? Global crime rate statistics from 146 countries place Costa Rica 20 places higher than the UK, at 42 and 62 respectively, but that doesn’t seem a particularly wide global margin between a 3rd-world country and the nation that used to run that same globe.
The respective economies of the two countries are, of course, wholly different considerations. The UK has an official population of around 70 million and is a member of the G7, while Costa Rica, with a population of 5 million, has as its main economic claim to fame its nickname, “the Switzerland of Central America”. When you see that it is up against the likes of Guatemala and Honduras, however, this epithet is flattering. All that said, Costa Rica’s latest GDP figures show growth of 4.5%, far outstripping the UK’s at 0.6%. Curiously, although Britain’s fertility rate is well below replacement level at 1.56, Costa Rica’s is just 1.53.
There is one obvious comparison to be made, however, and it took me a while to realize that I had moved from a high-trust society to a low-trust one. But what is a high- or low-trust society? Definitions differ. Some concentrate on trust in authority, and John Locke saw trust as essential to constitutional government. This is trust in government, the police, medical staff, teachers, the judiciary and so on, which I suppose might be called vertical trust. Others give precedence to interpersonal trust, which by the same token might be termed horizontal trust. The latter is easier to assess. Put simply, and to adapt an old English joke about barmen, what do you get if you cross a Costa Rican with an alligator? An alligator that steals from you. The attitude towards theft here is casual, particularly if the party stolen from is a gringo. A couple of examples.
I spoke to a Canadian woman who hired a cleaner, a Tica (Ticos and Ticas are the names Costa Ricans give themselves). Like everyone else, she stacks coins in piles as spare change. She noticed that a pile of coins would go missing now and then, and she confronted the cleaner. The woman quite innocently said, yes, I did take them. I didn’t think you were using them. In terms of organized crime, I appreciate that this is minor, but indicative. Next, something more personal.
I lived in an apartment for five years and the owner, another Canadian, decided to sell. She gave me a generous three-month notice period, and I was offered a house to share by a local musician, a very talented guitarist. The rent was 40,000 colones a month each (around $80US), plus the same as a deposit. I didn’t even have to take his word for that as he showed me the contract. I moved in, and it was a strange and beautiful place, made entirely of wood and smack in the middle of a palm-oil plantation. Troupes of monkeys (of the Squirrel and Capuchin variety, plus the occasional Howler) would come through the palm trees every day. I paid my housemate my half of the rent every month and he paid the owner. One month, I was in town so I decided to call in and pay my half personally. The owner was very surprised that I wanted to pay 40,000, as the whole sum was only 60,000. I said, no, there must be some mistake, it’s 80,000. He showed me the contract, the actual contract, not the one my housemate had dummied up in order to con an extra 10,000 a month out of me. If you are gringo here, and you don’t check every transaction and agree a price before you make it, you will be ripped off in taxis, markets, stores and anywhere else you can spend money. And it’s not just money. An American woman told me she called a repair man to fix her fridge. He took it away, taking care to give her a false name and address, as well as a worthless receipt. She never saw him or her refrigerator again. So much for the locals.
Then there are the north Americans who go native. I played bass for a while for a blues band fronted by a guitarist from Austin, Texas. He had met Stevie Ray Vaughan. When I first got the gig, every other musician told me not to trust the guy on tips, tipping being big here. One night, I saw a guy fold a $20 bill into the tip jar. The guitarist told me that the guy who left the tip was a friend and couldn’t afford to leave $20. He was going to give it back. I watched him and, of course, he did no such thing, just joked with his friend. After the gig, when it came to dividing the tips, the twenty was gone. Now, this may seem trifling, but there is a code about money among musicians the context of which explains what a low trick that was.
Then there are utilities. My Canadian landlord told me that the electricity bill had spiked, and I would have to pay more. I told him that I used exactly the same amount of electricity (in that I used the same devices the same amount) as I had in my old apartment, where the bill was always around 10,000 colones a month, and I knew that electricity prices are not regionally different here from where I used to live. But if he wanted to bring over the bills to compare the periods before and after I moved in, I’d be happy to pay as long as I saw the proof of the increase. It was never mentioned again. It’s a poor country, but these expats aren’t poor, and I am far less well off than both. They have both been here in excess of 20 years, and have essentially become honorary Ticos.
These are just the more colorful examples from many, and interpersonal trust, what I called horizontal trust, is low. What about widening the horizon to the societal level? Litter is not a problem here, as Costa Ricans have an innate respect for their environment. But I was a little surprised to see that rural bus-stops do not feature litter-bins for what little trash there is. Bus-stops are a place where people congregate, and so if there will be trash anywhere, that’s where you’ll find it. Kids hang around the bus-stop here just as much as they do – or did – in England when I was a kid. So why no bins? Because, a friendly American who clears up our local bus stop once a week tells me, they would immediately be stolen. They make useful containers, you see, and this is a poor country. You can tell that by the taxi rank. Eight taxis sit there, engines off. When a fare takes the first, all the others move up one space, but they don’t start their engines to do so. They all open their doors and push the cars into place to save petrol. Margins are tight here for the working man, far tighter than for their equivalent in the UK. But back to trust, and it’s time to look at bicycles.
There are a lot of bikes here, often left outside shops while the owner goes inside. I have never, once, seen a bike locked or chained up. In London, if you leave a bicycle unlocked even for a couple of minutes, you’ve ridden it for the last time because it will be gone when you return. You might object that the value of the bike in London is likely to be far greater than the cow-horned rattlers some ride around on here – who wants to nick a cheap bike? – but that would be to miss the point entirely. The value isn’t primarily financial. It’s practical. When I owned a canal boat, I was given a bicycle, but left with the problem of how to get rid of the old one. I detest fly-tipping, and as I had no fixed address, I couldn’t have the local council take it away. Then the answer hit me. I leant it against a tree on the towpath and went for a drink. Sure enough, when I returned, it was gone. Sometimes low trust can work for you. Now, in London, even locking a bike with an expensive gadget may not help, as thieves use angle-grinders to cut them off.
An example of the Costa Rican judicial system, or rather one of its local branches, and how they deal with breach-of-trust laws. One morning, I left my apartment to visit the shop across the road, and saw a couple of the Ticos who worked there outside giving another guy what we English would call “a bit of a slap”. They weren’t really beating him up, just knocking him about and intimidating him. A bicycle was lying on the ground but, when the staff eventually let him go, he didn’t ride off on it. I asked one of the shop-girls what the trouble was about and she told me; “Estada intendando robar la bicicleta”. He was trying to steal the bike, until her male colleagues intervened. In a townful of unattended, unlocked bicycles, he had crossed a bright line. He had sinned, which takes us to the church.
It is a beautiful building whose roof is concave and made from highly-polished teak, one of Costa Rica’s main exports. It looks like an upside-down boat’s hull. Now, this church is full of very stealable items, some made of gold. The windows are high but they are not glassed and would be easily accessible with a ladder. Thieves could be in and out in minutes at night, and considerably richer. In England, a church like this would be robbed and gutted, and quite possibly burnt down. But nobody does that here. The local thieves are certainly not afraid of the police. Must be someone else that dissuades them. Now let’s leave church, watching the drivers cross themselves as they pass the statue of the Virgin, and go to the beach.
A 15-minute bus ride from the town is a beach rated by TripAdvisor as the 12th-best in the world. It’s a tourist attraction, as you might imagine. One day, there was a crew of Nicaraguans stealing people’s belongings. Nicaraguans seem to be natural thieves, and the Costa Ricans even have a saying about the country to the north. The are three seasons in Costa Rica. The rainy season, the dry season, and the season when we have a problem with Nicaragua. Anyway, a group of locals saw this going on, cornered the gang, and started beating them up. They know that tourism is the lifeblood of the country, and robbing tourists will hardly improve figures in an industry still trying to recover from Covid. When the police arrived to help, they did just that. They helped the locals beat up the gang. Trust. Back to England.
In the UK, there has been a rise in the use of machetes in incidents of violent crime. The Government did what they always do, which was to introduce a ban, in the apparent belief that the sort of human being who would take a machete to another human being will suddenly respect the rule of law and drop his blade in at the local amnesty bin. There is no need for a machete even to exist in Britain. I suppose a farmer might have a use for one, but there is no jungle or rain-forest there, as there is in profusion here, where machetes are freely available. In my local town, there is a hardware store. In a large plastic bin by the door to the street, there is a selection of machetes. It is legal to carry one in public as long as it is sheathed. Anyone, should they so wish, could scoop up half a dozen of these blades and be away before a shop assistant had even noticed. But no one does. They are trusted not to.
At the time of writing, today is September 15, La día de la independencia. I wrote about Costa Rican Independence Day at Counter Currents here in 2021 and again last year, and these pieces give the background to Central American independence from Spain in 1821, as well as some local color, should you be interested. The first fireworks went off at 4am, even before the first roosters were awake, to signal Costa Rica’s happiest day of the year. I am almost certainly the only person in the town who is unhappy.
To see the marching bands of smiling, proud children in the local town, to see the streets awash in, ironically, red, white, and blue (the colors of both the Costa Rican and British national flags), to feel nationalistically lonely amid the camaraderie of people whose nation ranks 12th in the World Happiness Index, tells me much about England. In my country, displays of nationalism such as today’s have been frowned on for some time, and are edging closer to being criminalized. This is only the case in England, and does not apply to the other countries in the union. While traditional Costa Rican dancing, with its ribbons and swirling dresses making it a cousin to flamenco, is being enjoyed by Costa Ricans, English schoolchildren are taught that the history of their country is one of which they should be ashamed. While Pakistanis and Indians throng the streets of English cities for their national independence day, St. George’s Day celebrations are becomingly increasingly rare, and something of which the State disapproves. England is being steadily erased, first from the world stage, and then from the consciousness of the children who form what there is of its future. The last lines of Powell’s 1961 St. George’s Day speech show his prescience every bit as much as his more famous speech in 1968:
The danger is not always violence and force, them we have withstood before and can again. The peril can also be indifference and humbug, which might squander the accumulated wealth of tradition and devalue our sacred symbolism to achieve some cheap compromise or some evanescent purpose.
The last couplet of Kipling’s poem is as follows:
What is the flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare,
Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!
England once ruled the waves and was unconquerable, where now she is being invaded by undocumented conquerors across the once-impregnable English Channel. Hitler couldn’t do it. Caesar and Claudius managed it, but didn’t stay long. William the Conqueror also invaded – the clue’s in the name – but he and his men chose to do what today’s Muslim hordes have no intention of doing. They integrated.
But, sadder still for a self-imposed exile such as myself, is that I can never go home. Another English poem from an attractive canon of poems about the old country is Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad, which begins:
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!
A shame I can’t see all that anywhere now except in my mind’s eye, but sometimes you can’t go home again. England Made Me was the title of a Graham Green novel, but its alternative title was The Shipwrecked. Well, England made me too, but I’m shipwrecked and I can’t even go back to thank her. There are people there I no longer trust.
