I Saw Two Englands

This book – republished with dozens of gorgeous photographs by Tommy Cander who retraced Morton’s trips – is of two parts. A journey around his beloved England because Morton felt things would never be the same again after the looming Second World War, and a further circuit undertaken on behalf of a government already at war. This latter was a form of sponsored propaganda but, in any case, the people he met truly were full of ‘plucky grit’ and determination, as later events in the outcome of the war showed. Morton drifted through the beauty of that English countryside and narrates what he saw and felt poignantly, presupposing that nostalgia was appropriate. Tommy Cander’s trip, undertaken fifty years later uses her wonderful show more work to illustrate that much that Morton loved, and feared would be lost, was still extant in glorious views and charming villages.

Morton has been considered as rather arrogant, and, before his war service, almost fascist in his very non-PC views; but that is a perspective from our current time where we have the benefit of hindsight (always 20/20 of course) and a peer of Morton’s from his time suggests that there was a fairly commonly held view in the early days of fascism, before the horrors of the Holocaust that there was in general ”…an important yearning for government that actually worked - that ended unemployment, built big new roads, developed modern industries and, yes, made the trains run on time…” With his strong ideals and religious belief, his attitude that ‘his’ God only helped those who helped themselves and even, perhaps, his anti-feminism Morton would probably today feel at home quietly sitting, murmuring and supping at a “Tea Party”?

A flawed hero perhaps, but one who is very readable with a clear and almost poetic “voice” for his readers, and a strongly communicated love for his book’s subjects… usually countries and their peoples. None more beloved, of course, than his Englands. show less