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 The Riddle of the British EnglishIn June 1949, my mother the former singer Miss Ann Watt becameMrs Ann Halling through her marriage to my father Patrick ClancyHalling, thereby substituting a Scottish surname for a Danish one.In Ireland, the Watt surname is exclusive to Ulster, home provinceof my grandfather James Watt, having been carried there by theScottish and English planters of the late 1600s. It's common in theScottish Lowlands, especially in the counties of Aberdeenshire andBanffshire. Lowlanders are altogether distinct from their Highlandcounterparts, being widely considered to be of Anglo-Saxon ratherthan Celtic ancestry, although how accurate such a perception is I'munable to say. What is certain is that many of those descended fromthe original British colonial settlers in the American south are of Ulster and Lowland Scottish ancestry.As might be expected the Watt surname is affiliated with that of Watson, and both are what is known as
septs
of the Forbes andBuchanan Clans, a sept being a family that followed a certain chief or Clan leader, either through being related by marriage or residenton his land, thereby making up a larger clan or family. Kindred septsinclude those of MacQuat, MacQuattie, MacQuhat, MacQwat,MacRowatt, MacWalter, MacWater, MacWatson, MacWatt,MacWatters, MacWattie, Vatsoun, Vod, Vode, Void, Voud, Voude,Vould, Walter, Walterson, Wasson, Waters, Waterson, Watson,Watsone, Watsoun, Wattie, Wattson, Wod, Wode, Wodde, Woid,Woide, Wood, Woyd and Wyatt and Watt.I came into the world a little over six years later as Carl RobertHalling, Carl being the name of my paternal grandfather, and Robertthat of my mother's brother Bob, and very much as a Briton asopposed to an Englishman...which is to not to say that I don'tconsider myself English, because I do. But my origins are British asopposed to strictly English...which is to say Scots-Irish, Scottish andEnglish Canadian through my mother, and Danish Australian andEnglish Australian through my dad, with a possibleCornish admixture coming through my paternal grandmother. Hermaiden name had been Pinnock, a common one in England'spoorest county, and therefore of possible Brythonic Celtic origin.Like the Welsh and Manx of Britain, and the Bretons of France, theCornish are of the Brythonic family of Celtic peoples, while theScottish and the Irish are of the Gaelic. It could be therefore that Ipartake of both Gaelic and Brythonic Celtic ancestry.Whatever the truth, I'm proud of my roots in Ulster and Glasgow,both of which possess - I think it's fair to say - long-establishedworking class traditions. The same applies to Wales and the north
 
and midlands of England, while the
south
and especially the southeast of England are widely seen as affluent, middle class regions,although needless to say, variations exist within all regions of thecountry. For example, the aforesaid Cornwall in the south west is, asI've already stated, England's poorest county, and the greatmetropolis of London, which is Europe's financial centre and still oneof the most powerful cities in the world, contains no less thanfourteen of the nation's most deprived twenty boroughs.What's more, while Glasgow is home to a massive working classwith clearly defined Catholic and Protestant communities, Scotland'scapital Edinburgh, known as
the Athens of the North
, has areputation for great gentility. Yet, in common with otheraffluent cities throughout a nation of striking extremes of wealthand poverty, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and so on,Edinburgh contains areas of considerable deprivation...WesterHailes, Broomhouse, Clermiston, Muirhouse, Pilton, Granton, Leith,Niddrie and Craigmillar being especially affected in this respect.I'm also proud of a more bourgeois English ancestry which comesthrough my father, who although born in the Tasmanian hinterlandin Rowella and raised by a Danish father, is English through hismother Mary, a brilliant woman who once ran her own school inSydney and wrote for the Sydney Telegraph. Her own father wasapparently what is known as a
gentleman
, which means he wasindependently wealthy, and therefore arguably part of the lowergentry. Yet, by leaving her first husband - an army officer by thename of Peter Robinson - for a Dane with no steady profession fromwhat I can gather, she effectively cut herself off from her class andcountry, act which ultimately forced her out to work to support heryoung family, and with Carl desperately sick with the MultipleSclerosis that would ultimately kill him. Yet, while I'm proud to be British, England is the country of my birthand the one I identify with in spirit despite the fact that I'm moreBritish than English as such...indeed if anyone incarnates the riddleof what it is to be British, a citizen of a nation consisting of fournations and yet existing as one, it's me. For all that though, in thewords of the famous hymn...there's
another country 
, in which alldistinctions of ethnicity and class will be a thing of the past, andwhose citizens will be of one race alone, the human race, the onlyone created by God.  The Playing Fields of Pangbourne My first school was a kind of nursery school held on a daily basis atthe home of one Miss Pierce in Bedford Park, in the Southfields wardof South Acton, then as now one of the poorest areas of WestLondon with its vast South Acton Estate, although Bedford Park wasdemographically mixed and relatively affluent. It's now one of thecapital's most exclusive suburbs.
 
My brother was born in Bethnal Green, East London on the 2cndMay 1958, and as he's the only member of my immediatefamily who's never been professionally involved with the arts orentertainment, I shan't be mentioning him by name in order tomaintain his privacy.Aged 4 years old, I joined the exclusive
Lycée Francais Charles deGaulle
, situated in the fabulously opulent West London area of SouthKensington, where I was to become bilingual by the age of four orthereabouts. My father was far from wealthy, but he wasdetermined that my brother and I enjoy the best and richesteducation imaginable, and we were dressed in lederhosen as smallboys with our heads shorn like convicts so that we be distinguishedfrom the common run of British boys, with their short back andsides, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly in the toughLondon session world to ensure that we did. He himself favouredradically bohemian items of clothing such as faded canvas trouserscovered in multi-coloured patches, and could therefore cut a strikingfigure among certain other
Lycée
dads. Almost every race andnationality under the sun was to be found in the
Lycée
in thosedays... and among those who went on to be good pals of mine werekids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and MiddleEastern origin.I left the
Lycée
in what must have been the summer of 1968 - orperhaps earlier - before spending a few months at a
crammer 
calledDavies Preparatory School so as to become sufficiently up to scratchacademically to pass what is known as the Common EntranceExamination. Taking the CE is a necessity for all British boys and girls seekingentrance into private fee-paying schools, including those known as
 public schools
, which are the traditional secondary places of learning for the British governing and professional classes...theruling elite in other words. The vast majority of those who go on topublic schools begin their academic careers in preparatory or prepschools, and so for the most part leave home at around eight yearsold.The school my father hoped I'd manage to get into was the NauticalCollege, Pangbourne, although I think his first choice had beeneither HMS Conway or Worcester, also known as the Incorporated Thames Nautical Training College. However, naval colleges andtraining schools were fading fast in the late 1960s, Conway being onits last legs as a so-called
stone frigate
on the south coast of Anglesey, and Worcester having recently been incorporated into theMerchant Navy College at Greenhithe, Kent.Somehow though, I managed to pass the CE, and so at still onlytwelve years old became Cadet Carl Robert Halling 173, who was fora few months the youngest in the college, and an official servingofficer in Britain's Royal Naval Reserve. Pangbourne's regime wastough in '68, even by the standards of British public schools whichhad historically trained boys for service on behalf of the Empire, and
of 00

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