The audience, dressed in those peculiarly English variations of brown, looked exactly like a Labour audience; there were more women than men. The meeting began with a kindly prologue, in refined Cockney, by the chairman, a local Conservative businessman and big shot. He spoke respectfully of the incumbent Labour Member for Peckham and said it didn't matter who got elected as long as Peckham was well represented, which is odd election talk by the standards of any other country.
Then, true to a glorious English streak of dottiness, they presented a refugee Czech. The Czech spoke, with conviction, a heavy accent, and as if to himself, about the dreadful things happening in his country; he traced in detail, including unpronounceable names, the steps that had led to the Communist coup d'état in Prague. The tiny audience was restless. A rosy, husky old man stood up and announced he didn't come to hear about Czechoslovakia but about England, he didn't know nothing about Czechoslovakia nor nowhere else and he didn't want to; he thought they was coming here to be told what the Tories would do if they won and he was disgusted, that's what, and he was now leaving and he'd come back when they got talking about England. Enjoyable uproar. The Czech resumed. Another voice announced he was disgusted, he didn't come to hear about Czechoslovakia either. No one had, of course; it was quite incredible to find the poor Czech here on this occasion. Behind us sat a small, bright-eyed, unshaved, poorly-dressed man, who pulled back his raincoat to show a red enamel star pinned to his lapel. “Are you a Communist?” asked the Conservative lady next to me, as if asking about some new kind of dahlia. He nodded and smiled. We looked forward to a merry meeting with good noisy heckling. But the Communist listened to the Czech in silence, and then left; bored, obviously.
After this drab beginning, which cleared the room of the opposition, who went to a neighboring pub and never returned, Sir Beverley Baxter addressed the gathering. According to regular electioneering form, great party names, or as great as can be found, speak for lesser men; they steal the thunder and use the time; the candidate frequently finds himself obliged to repeat or say nothing.
Beverley Baxter, a famous journalist and long-time Conservative M.P., gave a classical English speech: rambling, disorganized, good-natured, cozy; and everyone felt happy. In the course of this talk and for no special reason, he told the finest joke of the week; it concerned Mr. Attlee. Sir Beverley had gone to report a Labour Party convention and was present at a meeting where one Bevanite after another, eight in all, was elected, with thunderous applause, to the party executive committee. While this fire raged around him, Attlee sat on the platform, doodling. At last, he had to speak. The Bevanite triumph was a grave blow to him and to his branch of the Labour Party; Baxter and others, filled with sympathy, could not imagine what the old leader would find to say. Attlee rose into the partisan clamor, and in his unvarying voice began his speech. “We live in a small island with scarcely any resources except coal and fish.”
Nothing else of any value happened at Peckham that night. We agreed that the Conservative candidate was a fellow who could talk you to death. Peckham was safe for Labour as of yore.
Then there were two meetings in one night, in Hammersmith, nearer the heart of London, but a working-class sector on the whole. The first, a Conservative meeting, took place in Hammer-smith town hall, a modern brick edifice, costly and grand. The speakers, Conservative Minister of Transport and the young pretender, spoke calmly and sensibly, giving many facts on the successful Conservative regime just ended; 300,000 houses a year, the end of rationing, peace in Korea and Indo-China and top level talks on the way, the sad and dangerous division within the Labour Party (Aneurin Bevan is the Tories’ best un-secret weapon), the proved value of Sir Anthony Eden as a leader. They droned pleasantly on in their educated voices, and everyone listened as if in church. The audience was modest-income Conservative, with surprises. In front of us sat a colored couple: African, West Indian? The backs of their heads were superbly un-English; they sat with their shoulders tightly touching and did not move a muscle for nearly two hours.
The second meeting that night was a great Labour Rally in a Hammersmith theatre. Whether it was news to everyone or only to your reporter, this meeting proved to be a reunion and chumming up, on one platform, of Aneurin Bevan and Mr. Attlee. There was a huge, active, jolly crowd. In the lobby, election posters showed Mr. Attlee, looking almost tipsy-sprightly, with the inscription, “You Can Trust Mr. Attlee.” Which is also a perfectly true statement and no one, certainly not the Tories, would dispute it. The vital question, in and out of the Labour Party, seems to be: do you trust Mr. Bevan too?
On the stage, amongst a suitable platform crowd, was Mr. Bevan, with his striking grey head and strong red face. The Hammersmith candidate talked away, to an accompaniment of amiable heckling and encouragement, and no one seemed interested. Suddenly there was a straggling effort at “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow,” and scattered applause. Mr. Attlee, due to arrive and make his third election speech that night, was in the house. But where? It is hard to give a man an ovation if you know he's around somewhere but you can't see him. Anti-climax piled on anti-climax, until the whole meeting turned into a delicious disorganized joke. A plank had been laid from the stage box to the stage; the idea was, perhaps, that Mr. and Mrs. Attlee would walk this plank into the waiting and welcoming arms of Mr. Bevan. Apparently Mr. and Mrs. Attlee did not like the looks of that improvised plank; they tried to find their way backstage. Nothing happened. Each member of the party on the stage went in search of them, one by one; the rest stood waiting; the audience applauded, craned necks, laughed. Mr. Bevan looked at his watch, giving the clear impression of a man doing a foolish and irritating duty. At last Mr. and Mrs. Attlee were hauled on stage. This wonderful disarray must have lasted nearly 10 minutes.
Mr. Attlee began to speak in a most energetic manner; he was sure that Labour would win this election. Everyone felt cheered and bucked up. But he soon settled down; good and admirable generalities and a few facts about education or pensions; there was heckling, which he hardly noticed. The speech cannot have excited anyone, but no one expects to be excited by Mr. Attlee. He is less like a politician than any politician of his stature anywhere in the world; it remains one of the permanent English mysteries that this quiet, bourgeois, peaceloving, uninspiring man has for so long been the leader of the only English revolutionary party.
Mr. Attlee finished; you knew this had happened because he stopped talking. He hurried away, accompanied by Mrs. Attlee who looked pretty in black and white, not a bit stylish, and who wore an expression of loving and anxious pride. On his way out, Mr. Attlee shook hands with Mr. Bevan. The quickest and least dramatic handshake possible. Loud applause. The meeting broke up. No one ended it. A sense of theatre, in politics, is most un-English.
Those are typical meetings. Quiet everywhere. How can you work up excitement when there are no issues? A Tory peer remarked, the other day, that it was certainly a contrast to the fine bad days of 1945, when the unfortunate candidates started by saying “Ladies and Gentlemen” and that was the last thing you heard. Now, he went on, if Attlee and Morrison were taken into the new Conservative government which will (all agree) surely be elected, they would be unnoticeable, and probably a lot happier than in a government of their own.
This year, as an added attraction to the muted meetings, we have TV Mr. MacMillan, Mr. Attlee, Dr. Edith Summerskill (who started the one and only excitement, about bacon), Sir Anthony Eden and a panel of cabinet ministers being questioned by a panel of editors. The TV shows are deadly. The press never stops saying how deadly they are. The public hardly seems to notice, but perhaps they are not listening to what sounds like a sleepy affable mumble. (Except, of course, for food prices.) When sitting before their TV sets, they look, not listen. And, in a general spirit of good nature, they seem to like everyone. Mr. MacMillan is handsome and Etonian, as befits a Tory Foreign Minister; Mr. Attlee looks very nice with his pipe, and Mrs. Attlee very nice and wifely; Sir Anthony Eden looks wear
y but pleasant, and his ministers all smile a lot and look confident and like good family doctors; the editors are suitably unfashionable and wordy and look oddly like working reporters, not editors. It is doubtful whether a single vote has been won or lost by these docile TV shows.
In the end, in England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs. It was in the pubs, at the height of the blitz, that people were saying, “Little ole ‘Itler can't take much more of this.” There is always a quiet shapeless flow of talk in the pubs, slow talk over slow beers, and this talk may rightly be considered the pulse of the nation.
These people, in the working-class pubs, look as if they had been invented by Charles Dickens and Carol Reed, and they talk their own dialect with the tongues of angels.
In Highgate, a woman of 65, out on a birthday party with a lady friend of hers, also 65 (three gins to celebrate), declared that no one could afford these new Council houses the Tories had built; they cost 21 and 24 and 28 shillings a week, no working-class person could, anyhow. They'd put her in one, not a new one, and it cost 14 shillings a week. “What's it like?” I asked, expecting a blast. “Quoite noice,” she said, “Reelly very noice. Two rooms and a scullery. I can't complain.” Still, she was a Labour woman. Still, “we wouldn't loike to lose Anthony Eden, would we? He's a fine peaceful-living man.” Her friend said they had more money now than they'd ever had, and it didn't mean a thing; but she seemed neither surprised nor upset by this gloomy conclusion.
In another pub a subway conductor, soft-spoken, gentle, remarked, “There's no difference between the parties now, that's why no one's interested.” “How about Irish Partition?” asked a happy drunk Irishman who had been offering all of us beers. No one accepted his offer, since he would miss the money in the sober morning. “It's not an issue this time,” the subway man said. “I fought in the English army and the American army,” the Irishman said, “and I can prove it. What did I fight for? The freedom of small nations, that's what. Why the hell can't they start near home with the freedom of small nations? That's what I'm asking you.” This seemed good stuff, like elections, but it could not go far, considering that no party had mentioned the subject, except the Communists who favor a free Ireland, and since the Irish are all Roman Catholics they are not going to vote Communist, so that is that.
The pub keeper, a man who owns a car, said, “It don't matter who gets in, dear, they cawn't do much.” He went on to say that no one was talking about the elections, “We English don't like a fuss and arguments,” and besides “everything is pretty good now, very good, you can say. There'll always be grumblers but with the wages people are getting, what is there to talk about?” What they have been talking about steadily, before, during and after is the Cockell-Marciano fight, apparently the one subject of great international interest. A sturdy housewife, clutching a paper parcel of fish and chips, departed, saying, “Well, God bless, boys. Don't get excited.” As if they would, not about politics this year anyhow. An old man, with the kind of good serene face you so often see bent over a half pint, said, “There's going to be a slump, if the Tories or the Socialists get in. Unless something happens, there's a bumb going to drop here and a war starts or somepin.” No one was a bit worried, either by the thought of a slump or a bumb, but all had another round of that remarkable flat beer.
Partner down in Camden Town, at another pub, a picturesque and shabby character announced, “The English are a very slow class of people,” and went on to say that “We English, we believe in every man making up his own mind, like. We want to buy our paper and have a bit of a read and think about it and then we want to go and put in our vote. In my bit of a house, my wife's Liberal and my niece what lives with us is Conservative and I'm Labour and we got a biggish window so we got all three of them posters up.” A dock worker from East Ham also spoke of freedom. “You'll never find the English going Communist,” he said. “We don't like it. It's not true Communism, it's dictatorial. We want to say what we think. I'm a republican myself and I don't like the Royal Family. They all look as if a good day's work would kill them. But most of the people like them, so we got them; but I can say what I think about it. You ever been to the Channel Islands? I'm going there for me holidays, I go every year. It's paradise.” “How do they vote there?” I asked. “Oh vote,” he said, “It's a feudal system, like; you wouldn't understand it.”
We moved to a scruffy little coffee bar, after pub closing time, and sat at a smeared table and tried to drink the nastiest coffee on earth, and talked about the election, and the calm of it, and whether the pub chaps were right in thinking that the Tories would win a bigger majority if election day was sunny, because Labour doesn't mind getting wet when it votes but Tories do. Beside us a small man with an illuminated smile and ill-fitting spectacles and a foul-looking meat pie, listened and then remarked, “I believe that everything that happens to us is meant to happen to us, so we can learn from it. There's a reason; all we have to do is find out the reason. And I think that everyone in the world has intelligence and some kind of gift.” We stared at him with admiration and pleasure, and, wanting his opinion, I asked, “Are you interested in the election?” “Not particularly,” he said. “I'm interested in learning.”
Rubbing together, as they have for centuries, in their small island, sustained by coal and fish, the English have become inextricably united, although totally un-uniform. No party can rule for one class of the population. The rulers have less and less choice, it would seem: each party is forever saddled with the others’ successful reforms, each must rescue the others’ mistakes. And any government must provide what all England wants: peace, not an ideal peace, but a possible workable peace in an un-ideal world, and prosperity, nothing flashy, no sudden riches, but this gradual betterment which gives everyone a bit of his own kind of ease, and time and chance for a reasonable joy in life.
Spies and Starlings
THE NEW REPUBLIC, November 1955
The House of Commons loves to laugh. The Members’ jokes are debaters’ quips and have a special flavor, like all jokes made between intimates. The Times’ reports of the Commons’ proceedings are studded with parentheses, saying: Ministerial Laughter, Ministerial Cheers and Laughter, Laughter. Perched in the press gallery, the most usual community sound one hears, rising from the chamber, is a brisk bark or a merry bellow. Men laughing with or at each other are guaranteed sane chaps. In less fortunate countries, politicians on occasion throw benches and fight; they have been known to take pot shots at each other. In even less fortunate countries, politicians orate interminably in the very accents of pompous falsehood. In the House of Commons no politician talks for long without begging patience, and a very good excuse for “imposing on the time of the House.” And he can expect to be rewarded or punished with mirth at any minute. The effect of this is a welcome and immediate sense of reality. Actual people are talking about actual things, in first-rate conversational English. No one is sacred and no one can swell to undue, unhuman size, for there is always the bark, the bellow, the roar, the giggle of laughter, and the Speaker's splendid Scotch voice booming over the gaiety, saying, “Orrrder, Orrrder, Orrrder.”
Since the Commons returned from the summer recess, and began its autumn session on October 25th, there has been much laughter and one day which was outstanding because no one laughed at all. On the opening day, vast merriment attended an event which was so funny as to seem impossible: two Members had been elected from Ulster, Northern Ireland, but were unable to take their places in the House of Commons owing to the fact that they were in jail. They were in jail for helping in a hold-up of a British arms depot in order to get weapons for the Irish Republican Army. A second election was held; the two, in jail, were re-elected. This raised a fascinating dilemma: whereas, you may not vote, in jail, you may, evidently, stand for Parliament. The winners were however still in jail, and the Courts decided that the two runners-up, in the second election, were the rightful members of Parliament. The runn
ers-up were both Tories; Labour had a lovely time trying to argue them out of their seats. The two new members arrived at the bar of the House; one was a very small Irishman with reddish hair who looked terrified; the other was a more obviously cool and Parliamentary type. The argument went on, with bursts of audience laughter, largely between Mr. Sidney Silverman, a Labour member, and Mr. Speaker. Mr. Silverman, like many M.P.’s, cannot say r: the Speaker's r's are a treat. The r's had it.
On the second day of the Budget debate, the laughter was rather fierce, like tigers laughing over a nice fresh carcass. Mr. Gaitskell, the former Labor Chancellor of the Exchequer, rose to eat alive Mr. Butler, the incumbent of that office, and to tear to shreds his new and unexpected budget. The two men faced each other across the great table, where the Mace of Parliament lies, and gusts of Labour laughter blew Mr. Gaitskell on as he mocked his opponent's use of metaphor and accused him of having made an electioneering budget last summer, and of having to buy it back now. Mr. Butler was obliged, by the conventions of this place, to sit where he was and smile as best he could while the spiked points were driven against him. There were very harsh words too. “An addict to half truths,” said Mr. Gaitskell of Mr. Butler. (“They aren't allowed to call each other liars, you see,” said the press gallery attendant, a man in a dress suit wearing a large gold plaque on his shirt front.) “He began in folly, continued in deceit and ended in reaction,” said Mr. Gaitskell of Mr. Butler. This went down quite well at the time with the more blood-thirsty Labour members, but created a certain unease; people suggeted that Mr. Gaitskell had gone too far, this is not the usual tone of the House, there seemed to be personal venom in Mr. Gaitskell's remarks, almost hate; in the end, it may not prove a successful speech at all.
The View from the Ground Page 14
