The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  The book is heavy, all art paper with coloured illustrations, excellently done. Probably ‘history’ suffers most from thumbnail treatment, though biography runs it close. The brevity makes them tendentious, how could it not? The reader is constantly reminded of how much Britain loved interfering in the affairs of Europe and indeed the world, and how completely it has now lost the will or the power to interfere. The decline, and the speed of the decline, are surprising.

  The encyclopedia is politically correct, warning that many popular hymns and nursery rhymes have become unacceptable: ‘All things bright and beautiful’, ‘eeny meeny miny mo’ and part of the National Anthem among them. Librarians in public libraries ban Noddy, but he remains a best seller; since he cannot be borrowed he is bought, which must have made a fortune for Enid Blyton.

  The Bisto Kids, 1919 version, are here, a tragic picture of ragged and undernourished children longing for what looks like typically nasty British food. It induces many questions. Why were people so poor, in the ‘richest country in the world’?

  Why do the British put up with British Railways, is a question often pondered on the line between Dover and London by incoming tourists. Why so squeamish about a nursery rhyme but so tolerant of the filthy London underground? The encyclopedia tells us the underground dates from 1890, it has accumulated grime for more than a century, and nobody seems to mind. St Paul’s Cathedral being hidden by office blocks? Not enough to do something. Is British tolerance a virtue or a vice?

  Yeats is excluded for being Irish. Terry Wogan is in, described as an Irish broadcaster. This is probably just as it should be, although Britain’s greatest gift to the world is the English language, used by Yeats with such admirable virtuosity.

  A final question: what would Sir Francis Bacon think of this book? Rather insular perhaps. But that is the object of the enterprise.

  The Encyclopedia of Britain, Gascoigne, B. Evening Standard (1993)

  In a Groove

  ‘All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Caitlin Thomas together again.’ These words, the last in the book, are doubtless true. The only person who conceivably could pull her together would be Mrs Thomas herself, and she may very likely consider that the heavy task is not worth the trouble. That she is capable of doing it is proved by the fact that she was capable of the sustained effort and concentration required to produce the piercing, high-pitched, long-drawn-out wail which is Leftover Life to Kill.

  A few months after she brought her husband’s body back to Wales from America Mrs Thomas went with her youngest child to a Mediterranean island, where she spent a wretched, cold winter in a cheap hotel. She describes various sad little adventures, and even managed to fall in love in a rather mild way with an Italian miner aged eighteen. The inhabitants, according to her account, were relieved when she finally left their shores, although they did not, like her Welsh neighbours, go so far as to wish to tar and feather her and put her on a bonfire. She has a good many complaints to make about them, chief of these their drinking habits. She says they never wanted to drink with her at what they considered the wrong times, and she was never able to find out when was the right time. Unlike Wales, where, of course, the right time was opening time. The island and the island loves, hates and quarrels are really padding, however; for the point of the book is that it tells once again the story of Dylan Thomas the poet, whose death has left his wife at the bottom of a pit of despair in which she attempts to kill time; until life, which has become for her a useless misery, shall finally come to an end.

  Here is one of her descriptions of her husband: ‘He was never his proper self until there was something wrong with him; and, if ever there was a danger of him becoming “whole”, which was very remote, he would crack another of his chicken bones, without delay, and wander happily round in his sling, piling up plates with cucumber, pickled onions, tins of cod’s roe, boiled sweets; to push into his mouth with an unseeing hand, as they came, while he went on solidly reading his trash. His passion for lies was congenital: more a practice in invention than a lie. He would tell quite unnecessary ones, which did not in any way improve his situation: such as, when he had been to one cinema, saying it was another, and the obvious ones, that only his mother pretended not to see through, like being carted off the bus into his home, and saying he had been having coffee, in a café, with a friend.’ He and Mrs Thomas fought and nagged and annoyed one another, but she misses him ‘and pines, as keenly as a sick cow for its calf just removed.’

  Jung says that perhaps we owe everything to our neuroses. We probably owe Dylan Thomas’s saga to his neurotic desire to escape from the stifling petty-bourgeois Welsh atmosphere in which he had been brought up. ‘No blue-blooded gentleman was a quarter as gentlemanly as Dylan’s father. And, though Dylan imagined himself to be completely emancipated from his family background, there was a very strong puritanical streak in him, that his friends never suspected; but of which I got the disapproving benefit.’ (He made Mrs Thomas wear gloves to go to Carmarthen market.)

  This book confirms the horrible accounts already published of the poet’s sordid life and death. To what do we owe its appearance? Did Mrs Thomas feel that if she unburdened herself, told all, held back no private details, she could be cured of her bitterness (which she describes as ‘solid as a Christmas cake’), put away the past, start life anew? Apparently not. ‘They say confession is a great relief, as liberating and loosening as a flood of tears, to the confessor. I don’t agree—I find it unmitigatedly painful,’ she says. Possibly she wrote the book to earn money. Thomas had an enormous success in America, and perhaps on the whole Mrs Thomas, who loathes such unalike places in Europe as Wales and Italy with an equal loathing, would be better off in, say, Greenwich Village, where she would presumably find plenty of hard liquor at all hours of the day and night and where the cracked Dylan Thomas gramophone record might be put on over and over again for a delighted audience of fans.

  Leftover Life to Kill, Thomas, C. (1957)

  How Dear Is Life

  Mr Henry Williamson’s saga, or series of novels describing, generation by generation, a suburban English family, has now reached the beginning of the First World War. So cleverly has he reconstructed the period that we feel as though we were living in the pages of the Illustrated London News of 1914. The first half of the book is about Philip Maddison as a junior clerk in an insurance office; the second, his experiences as a private in the ‘contemptible little army’ of territorials who went through such hard fighting alongside regular soldiers in the autumn of 1914. Not the least of the book’s merits is that the author pauses in his narrative from time to time to point out an historical truth; for instance, that the Kaiser never called the English army contemptible, (he may have called it little), but that the expression was invented by a zealot called General Maurice, who rightly imagined that it would whip up English hatred of Germany.

  The war in Flanders is vividly and terribly described. Mud, blood, agony, terror, brutality and filth are dwelt upon by Mr Williamson, who has used his famous descriptive powers to bring before the reader war in all its frightfulness, as it seemed to a young, sensitive, rather lonely and friendless man, who has found himself transplanted from his insurance office into the midst of an inferno with terrifying suddenness. Like Fabrice at Waterloo, he is in the battle of Ypres without realising it. But, unlike Fabrice, Philip is not a sympathetic character, and this is the weakness of a brave book (brave because it must have cost a great effort to write, to force the memory to search for details which time had nearly obliterated, to re-live so many dreadful hours from long ago).

  Presumably Philip is meant to represent l’homme moyen sensuel; but in his anxiety to portray the little man Mr Williamson has made him so little that he can hardly be said to exist. He and his dull, rather disagreeable father and his even duller though pathetic mother are altogether too dim; we cannot mind very much what happens to them, or feel involved in any way with their fate.

 
This leaves what might be called the Illustrated London News side of the book, and very brilliant and evocative it is. Probably no other writer alive could have done it so well. The dying English soldiers crying Mother! or Water!, the dying German soldiers crying Mutter! or Wasser!—the mad wickedness of European war is emphasised, as well as its useless stupidity. When the scene changes to Philip’s suburban street, and the telegraph boy stopping at a gate can freeze every heart in terror; when the woman next door loses her three sons in as many days, it reminds us of the doomed generation, decimated, almost lost; and it seems unbelievable that Europeans should have been willing to start these miseries all over again in 1939. But this will, no doubt, be dealt with by Mr Williamson as his saga slowly progresses towards our own times.

  How Dear is Life, Williamson, H. (1954)

  Terrifying Cows

  There are two sorts of children’s books: those they like to read themselves and those written about them for old people to recapture the past.

  Great Meadow belongs to the second category; it is supposed, throughout, to be by a little boy describing his life, but the reader knows quite well that Dirk Bogarde’s evocation is not the work of a child. For one thing, the repetitive slang of the style is unlike a boy’s way of writing. (More realistic is the way Daisy Ashford wrote The Young Visiters.) Books loved by people of all ages, by Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc, Lewis Carroll for example, never suffer from what Dirk Bogarde describes as his ‘deliberately restricted vocabulary’. Children want a story, or jokes. Great Meadow is for adults only.

  It follows a pattern the author has used with great success before, and is an autobiography starting at an earlier age than his previous volumes of memoirs, supposedly written when he was a child, living with his sister and a nanny in a cottage in Sussex. His age at the time is rather a puzzle. He appears from photographs to have been about 12 in 1934, yet he sounds like a child of six. He is not a country boy like Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie; he is a London boy in a country cottage.

  The nanny—to whom the book is dedicated—is not a countrywoman either; she is terrified of cows and indeed of all animals. She is rather unkind to her charges, not only sarcastic but rough, boxing their ears and cuffing them at the drop of a hat. She also gives them unsuitable tasks to perform, such as digging a deep hole and emptying into it the dread contents of the bucket in the earth closet, their only lavatory. This would hardly be possible for a six-year-old, yet if the boy is twelve he seems unusually backward. Would he put up with having his ears boxed by a nanny? To dig a deep hole once a week in the hard summer earth, or the frosty winter earth, takes some doing.

  We can picture how much old people will enjoy hearing about the young Dirk Bogarde losing his white mice, or the tortoise, or the cat; he was unlucky with pets. Then there is fetching the milk in a can, or the water in a pail, or buying food in the village. His parents (a journalist and a former actress) sometimes appear for a day or two and then disappear back to London where they belong.

  The bitter cold and primitive discomfort of the cottage are part of a golden memory, and now turned to good account. Although the slang is rather improbable, and the deliberately restricted vocabulary a little sad, Great Meadow is restful, undemanding and a nice change. No four-letter words, no sex, a minimum of violence.

  Great Meadow: An Evocation, Bogarde, D. Evening Standard (1992)

  How Britain Went to Market

  In the beginning was the Coal and Steel Community. The merging of French and German heavy industry made the new Europe possible. It is the post-war miracle, and the well-publicised embraces of de Gaulle and Adenauer were symbolic of a reality. Invited to join, Britain declined. Jean Monnet said: ‘There is one thing you British will never understand: an idea. And there is one thing you are supremely good at grasping: a hard fact. We will have to build Europe without you; but then you will come in and join us.’ Prophetic words.

  How Britain Joined the Common Market is one of those books like The Making of the President, where everyone knows the dénouement and yet the suspense and drama of political struggle keep the interest up to fever pitch until the very last page. In other words, it is skilfully written; Uwe Kitzinger says it will be a quarry for future historians, and it is that and more besides.

  The question in the mind of the reader remains—how DID Britain succeed in joining Europe? English enthusiasm for the idea cooled through the 60s as veto followed veto from France. By the time serious negotiations began, opinion polls showed that it had dwindled to between 30 and 40 per cent in favour. Quite a lot of space is devoted to opinion polls, although the author admits they defy analysis and it is not easy to read in the tealeaves. There are one or two constants; women, for example, have throughout been more hostile to joining Europe than men. This is predictable; women are conservative guardians of the hearth and against radical adventure. It is hard to imagine a boat-load of Pilgrim Mothers.

  The negotiations in Brussels were a nightmare. With so many people present it was hopeless to expect secrecy; hovering journalists discovered within minutes what had gone on in the conference room. The unfortunate Mr Rippon* had the dilemma that if he started with a low bid and gradually came up to a level acceptable to the Six he was jibed in England for having been outwitted by them, while if he put in a realistic bid from the start he was said to have given everything away without even trying. But the crucial battle was in Parliament itself. It swung to and fro, and in spite of the famous victory of October 28, 1971, when there was a majority of 112 for entry, there were anxious times throughout the passing of the consequential legislation. At Westminster, as in Brussels, there were all-night sittings and frayed nerves. There was a notable amount of arm-twisting used by both parties on their ‘rebels’—Labour members who had remained faithful to the European idea after Wilson’s about-turn, and Conservative diehards. Extremes met, the rigid right joining forces with the old-fashioned left (Enoch Powell and Michael Foot), while outside the House both blimps and communists were virulent in their anti-European attitudes.

  The Press was mostly in favour of entry, including all the ‘serious’ papers: Financial Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Times, as well as the multi-million circulation Daily Mirror and the Sun. Against were the huge Daily Express and the tiny Morning Star. Television coverage was vast, and tried to be fair to both sides, and with all this bombardment the campaign never came alive, the man in the street seemed bored with the whole subject; he looked with a jaundiced eye at the promised thrills, great opportunities, exciting challenges and so forth. The Trade Unions seemed to mutter, like the Sphinxes in Goethe’s Faust: ‘im heiligen Sitz, lassen wir uns nicht stören’ [we won’t be disturbed].

  All in all, Mr Kitzinger demonstrates that it was a few men at the summit of affairs who brought this great event to pass. One only has to think of de Gaulle and Anthony Eden, and compare them with Pompidou and Heath, to see what might have been. Eden ‘felt in his bones’ that we should not join a united Europe. Heath felt with his whole being that we should, and must, and could. Mr Kitzinger emphasises that the English Europeans have only won the first round—there are many powerful wreckers waiting to pounce. The UK economy, with its poor industrial relations, flourishing inflation and distressing unemployment, is in a bad way. From now on the Labour Party will see to it that every failure, every deficiency, is attributed to Heath’s European policy. Mr Callaghan made the position clear when he said his object was ‘to make sure they (the Tories) would have to carry the can all the way.’ To what extent the lukewarm public will accept this myth remains to be seen; probably it will reject it, since it is what the French call sewn with white thread. The vital thing is that England should ‘grasp the hard fact’, as Jean Monnet said.

  * The government minister who negotiated Britain’s entry into the Common Market. Diplomacy and Persuasion: How Britain Joined the Common Market, Kitzinger, U. Books and Bookmen (1973)

  Violet Markham

  This autobiography is a dull book ab
out a dull life. It was reviewed in one of the left-wing weeklies under the title ‘A Great Lady.’ Opinions may differ as to what exactly constitutes a great lady, but one thing is clear: Miss Violet Markham has been a considerable busy-body. Hardly a day of her long life seems to have passed which did not find her sitting on some committee, interfering more or less with the lives of other people, or presiding as a large frog in some very small puddle. The description of her varied activities does not make exhilarating reading. Sometimes she is sweeping crippled and defective children into a class at Chesterfield Settlement; sometimes at work in the Anti-Suffrage League; between the wars serving on the hated Unemployment Assistance Board; during the last war running a canteen which (get ready to laugh) she called Topsy because it just ‘growed.’ She is an almost professional good works enthusiast (almost, because her independent income preserves her amateur status) and others of the breed are her chosen friends. Study the index—hardly one of the dreary crew of self-appointed goody-goodies is missing. No wonder she eyes with misgiving the replacement of well-meaning and more or less charitable individuals by the Welfare State. Perhaps if one were a ‘defective,’ or an immoral A.S. girl, or the unemployed father of a family being questioned by her with a view to application of the Means Test, one might feel that, sad though it may be to force the Miss Markhams of life into the ranks of the workless, yet it is for the greatest good of the greatest number.