Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park is a funny institution. The characters standing on their chairs, soapboxes, ladders, smattered around that little corner of the park, were eccentric enough, and so were the hecklers. The strangest thing, however, was that they were there every week, the same speakers, the same hecklers, and sometimes heckler became speaker, and speaker heckler. They knew each other, showed animosity in opposition and amiability, in some cases, when the speaker had stepped down. The arguments and the positions: some were lucid, others eccentric, most were coherent, many were personal and still others were just plain silly. Occasionally they were expositions of a group’s credo, the elders sitting to the side listening, monitoring the proceedings in silence.
Nell had a rather confrontational style. She divided her time between lecturing and fearsomely fielding heckles. She had her hackles up by default, she bristled and scowled as she surveyed the crowd, and then she smiled a knowing smile, one that said she knew she was right, that she was alone in that, and that she was content in that knowledge. Her right hand now pointing, now clenched, she never raised her voice: it was not a purring that came from her, it was a deliberate burr of punctuated assurance.
Her basic point, as I recall, was quite simple. Loyalty to your land and country and the conventions and way of life of where you were born is an important measure of virtue. When people start moving around, she seemed to be reasoning, social ties were broken, mores were questioned, loyalties strained, social cohesion challenged. Her approach was reminiscent of the Taoist ideal of people living their entire life in one village, able to hear dogs barking in the neighbouring settlement but never being moved to make the trip.
I listened to Nell on several occasions. As far as I could make out, she was not racist as such. Her distaste for foreigners, while palpable, was not so much for who they were but for what they had done. It was not so much for the fact that they were over here in her country, it was for the fact that they had abandoned their own.
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