Hands Up For Wayne Hennessey

'Pob lwc, Wayne'
'Diolch yn fawr iawn…scheisse!'

Why am I mistranslating a famous scene from The Great Escape? In honour of Wayne Hennessey, the Wales and Crystal Palace goalkeeper who was recently found not guilty by the football authorities of deliberately making a Roman salute during a dinner. After initially claiming he was signalling the photographer, he later claimed total ignorance of the gesture's historic symbolism.

'…stressing from the outset that he was unaware of what a Nazi salute actually was.
“Improbable as that may seem to those of us of an older generation, we do not reject that assertion as untrue,” noted the panel. “In fact, when cross-examined about this, Mr Hennessey displayed a very considerable – one might even say lamentable – degree of ignorance about anything to do with Hitler, fascism and the Nazi regime.
“Regrettable though it may be that anyone should be unaware of so important a part of our own and world history, we do not feel we should therefore find he was not telling the truth about this. All we would say (at the risk of sounding patronising) is that Mr Hennessey would be well advised to familiarise himself with events which continue to have great significance to those who live in a free country'. 

Rather than cynically doubt such a claim, let's applaud Mr Hennessey. Alone of all British people, he has managed to avoid every single history lesson (the curriculum has long been derided for being Tudors'n'Nazis), every single war film, entire TV channels dedicated to Nazi Murder Mysteries, Nazi Collaborators, Nazis: A Warning From History, Nazi Exiles, The Last Nazis, Nazi UFO, Nazi Hunters, Shot Down: Escaping Nazi Territory, Weird Nazi Obsessions (ironic, that one), The Nazi Hunt for Atlantis and Nazi Underpants (I only made up one of these) and much more besides. Perhaps Hennessey has been a member of the first team for so many years that he's never seen a television on a Saturday afternoon, traditionally the spot reserved for The Guns of Navarone or some naval adventure. Clearly he only ever played football in the playground, and never noticed his schoolmates' games, unless of course, growing up in North Wales, the enemy was always the Saes. Though if he wants to read novels about Nazi-occupied Wales, he can choose between Jan Morris's slyly ironic Our First Leader and Owen Sheers's Resistance.

Well done, Wayne. In a culture saturated with the single war Britain was on the right side of, one which fuels the bigotry of armchair generals like Nigel Farage, Mark François, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, he's managed to escape the entire cultural weight of this malignant obsession with a period which only ever gets presented more simplistically as time moves on, particularly with regard to British motivations and achievements. If only we'd all been so lucky.