KEY POINTS:
Back in the dark ages, before fast food chains and traffic jams and adult entertainment, I attended a prep school in Christchurch where 11 and 12-year-old boys played cricket in grey flannel longs and, except on sports days, swam in the nude.
Every year the school staged a
Gilbert and Sullivan light opera. For years thereafter I could recite (although I chose not to) chunks of HMS Pinafore, including the lines, "He is an Englishman! For he himself has said it, and it's greatly to his credit, that he is an Englishman!"
If my family had stayed in Christchurch I'd probably have gone to Christ's College where the uniform was a dark suit, white shirt with stiff collar, and boater. King's College in Auckland was far less formal: we wore the three-piece suit and stiff collar only on Sundays.
While our private schools were probably the most obvious reflection of the English influence, they were by no means anomalies. New Zealanders ate off English plates, drove English cars, learned English history, read English books and produced lamb chops and butter for English tables. It wasn't until I went to university that I studied any New Zealand history or read a New Zealand novel.
To all intents and purposes we were still a colony. Just as Muslims bow to Mecca, we looked to the mother country or "home" as it was sometimes referred to. And we were comfortable being one of the last, loneliest outposts of a shrinking empire - the Falklands with geysers and added sheep.
Then in 1973, after much agonising over its diminishing, post-imperial role in the world, Britain half-heartedly joined the European Economic Community. Politicians in both countries engaged in all manner of sophistry to cloud the fact that after a century of selfless loyalty we'd been sold down the river.
But even those who swallowed the snake oil, or didn't understand the implications, or were untroubled by the spectacle of our trade ministers more or less begging their French counterparts to give us a break on the butter quota, got the message when Britain scrapped our special immigration status.
For generations New Zealanders arriving in Britain were granted free entry and right of residence; suddenly we were in the "others" queue, rubbing shoulders with the Taiwanese and the Uruguayans.
The times were a-changing here as well. The great Polynesian influx, which would literally change the face of the country, was under way.
Industrial relations were a battle-ground and Prime Minister Rob Muldoon frequently observed that many trade union firebrands called their members out in British accents. After a century of buying British, we baulked at importing their class warfare.
Since then it's been all downhill. London still calls young Kiwis on their OE but the ties that bound - blood, sacrifice, a common heritage - have long since frayed to breaking point. These days our general attitude towards the English is similar to that of our neighbours: a touchy contempt that's as quick to take offence as it is to give it.
This week All Black Anton Oliver invoked the Anzac spirit and the ghosts of Gallipoli when unleashing a broadside at English rugby fans and their media.
Their "blind ignorance and arrogance really gets up the noses of the Australians and New Zealanders," he said. "It harks back to the old antipodean attitude with the colonials. We're all basically a large penal colony down here."
The poor old Poms: the Scots hate them, the Irish (and Irish-Americans) hate them, the Welsh hate them, the Aussies hate them, and now it seems so do we. Et tu, Kiwi?
Leaving aside the dubious assertions (I lived in London for five years without coming across anyone who thought New Zealand was, or ever had been, a penal colony), isn't this just the sort of shoot-from-the-hip disparagement that we resent hearing from visitors to this country?
There will 80,000-odd people at Twickenham tomorrow night, most of them fervently wanting England to win. Some will get carried away and/or drunk and howl abuse at the visitors.
If the All Blacks lose or are even run close some English pundits, who all week have been suggesting they're from another, superior planet, will dismiss them as over-rated and mentally soft and talk up England's chances in the World Cup.
If that's all there is to it, then I fail to see how the English fans and media differ from those of every other country. I can assure Oliver that if he was to ask the Australian cricket team which country has the most hostile and yobbish spectators, many of them would nominate New Zealand.
Oliver's comments may be seen as a forthright expression of national identity (or speaking his mind, often a self-serving euphemism for being ungracious) but this New Zealander could do without All Blacks insulting their hosts before they've had a chance to be inhospitable or condescending.
Back in the days when I studied the English Civil War, the All Blacks would arrive in London, mutter a few inoffensive monosyllables, have afternoon tea with the Queen, stomp the bejesus out of the Poms and move on. No one called them colonials, at least not until they'd left town.
