St George was 30 feet high and, aside from the long, red tunic, grey helmet and furry red plume, he looked like a Byzantine Jesus. He rolled on wheels along the high street and at his feet – at his casters – was a square of drummers dressed in the same, beating tambourines, skins and claves in one mighty, rallying rhythm. Trailing behind them were nymphs, dignitaries, fairies and worthies.
There was Miss Ramsgate, proudly sashed, followed by a trio of rival Ramsgate “princesses”. There was an impressive green dragon, held up by three strong lads with backpack harnesses. The sun was high; the sky clear.
As we passed, men in barbershop chairs swivelled to stare. Even the seagulls turned a beady eye from the chimney pots. But the rear of the parade was less sure of itself.
At the back was another 30ft figure of broadly Cappadocian origin, but dressed in white, with a flowery headdress. His identity was harder to clarify. “I think it’s meant to be Jesus,” a little man in a peasant costume had squeakily told me.
It’s something to do with a spring festival, another woman said. “It’s the Ukrainian St George!” one man, dressed as a tree, laughed at me. “It’s not St George,” said Nadia, a refugee from Ukraine.
It’s a Sunday afternoon in Ramsgate, one of several towns that cluster on that breezy blister of land on England’s south-eastern heel. And I am in the middle of a textbook St George’s Day parade, mingling commitment and confusion. I counted only two St George’s Crosses (better known as England flags), which was odd, because in other parts of the country I’ve passed through in recent months (Bexley, Romford), I’ve seen a great deal of them, painted across mini-roundabouts.
Just three years ago, the Economist declared English nationalism “a conspiracy of male writers, desperate to combine their love of football with a degree in English literature”. Where were the calls for an English parliament, the paper merrily asked. Well, these days, YouTubers police the ethnicity of Rishi Sunak, and housing estates are robed with red crosses.
An Englishness with very different demands has come to fill the void – and here is an Englishness of a sanctioned, semi-official sort marching forth to meet it. The day had begun peacefully. The town was still when I arrived, with no one yet taking advantage of the offers advertised in several pubs for “continental lager” at £3 a pint.
One man wafted a metal detector on the uncrowded beach and a flock of wind turbines circled silently on the blue horizon. Only the 90 most dedicated filed in to the church – a church named for St George, the Martyr – for the 11am St George’s Day service. In true Church of England spirit, St George’s was doing its utmost to keep pace with the contemporary, and half succeeding.
Reverend Paul Worledge was miked up, and backed by a PowerPoint presentation, while the nave was hung with prints from a local artist, including a fearsome Viking knight who appeared to be modelled on one of the Hemsworth siblings. And while we roared out “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven”, some of the hymns were of disconcertingly recent composition, with consequently sloppy lyricism: “My Lord is faster than a rocket/Can see more than a telescope/Is bigger than the universe as well”. But Rev Worledge was kindly and authentically tonsured and knew the names of his congregants.
I was impressed by the pointedness of his sermon. First, he told us the story of the Roman St George, his efforts to protect Christians and his execution by Diocletian. Then, summoning the St George’s Cross on his PowerPoint, he discussed how in the past year the English flag had become a threatening symbol, used by the far right to intimidate outsiders.
Nevertheless, he said, it is the flag of our country. We should find our national virtues within it. Under Worledge’s direction, a small boy, one of the younger worshippers, filled in each of the flag’s blank quadrants with four values both “English” and “Christian”: courage, grace, service and “spirit-filled”.
Later, on A5 printouts of the flag, we wrote our own prayer into each box. After the service, on the church steps, we were confronted by a troupe of mummers, here to give us the other, dragon-slaying St George. The group looked credibly medieval, and the script, written in pointless couplets, was hilarious. (Dragon: “Marrow from your bones I’ll squeeze, I’ll suck your blood up by degrees!”) But everything proceeded cheerfully enough.
To medieval piping and the slap of a tambourine, George (a woman in an England rugby shirt with a colander on her head) boxed the dragon with a pair of oven gloves. When the dragon fell, we all cheered, and the locals loved the joke about a rival knight being revived with “Kentish ale”. To the sound of hollow coconuts, George rode off into the sunset.
I wanted to know how the people who were watching felt about St George and England. I chatted to Willow and Lucy, two of Worledge’s congregants. They were conscious of how E