ANOTHER VOICE
A nation still haunted by the spectre of the English country house
AUBERON WAUGH
Many years ago I made a pilgrimage to Cornwall to visit Dr A.L. Rowse, the poet and historian, at his pretty manor house above St Austell's bay, where he lived — and continues to live, so far as I know — with a housekeeper. It seemed rather a large house and a curious choice for a bachelor. But the lawns were well tended, the countryside purred as only the English countryside can, and Dr Rowse seemed at peace with the world in the house, which is a memorial, like so many English country houses, to a different and less equal social system.
`The whole history of human civilisation never reached a higher point than the life of the English country house between the wars,' he observed to me, in explaining his choice. Rowse has always been proud of the fact that his family came from the Cor- nish working class. It was from the state elementary school in St Austell and St Austell Grammar School that he pro- gressed to a scholarship at Christ Church and a lifelong fellowship of All Souls.
The chief contemporary obstacle to Dr Rowse's vision is not money — many peo- ple have plenty of it — nor even the disap- pearance of the English servant class. Aus- tralians make surprisingly good servants. The real problem is the disappearance of the leisured, cultivated class which once filled these country houses. There are plen- ty of leisured people around — all the unemployed youth of Liverpool and New- castle would qualify for that description. Attempts were made in the Sixties and Sev- enties to turn various country houses into squats for dope-heads, or 'communes'. Peo- ple lay around in dirty blankets, smoking and saying silly things in affected voices.
This is not the sort of culture to which Dr Rowse was referring. Although I am too young to remember country-house life between the wars (let alone in the period 1900-14 when, I would maintain, it was at its height), enough of it survived into my own lifetime for me to recognise its salient points: good, solid meals were served punc- tually, four times a day; gardens and houses were kept clean and tidy, in a state to delight the senses; conversation was intelli- gent, well-informed, indiscreet, often witty, often bantering, seldom entirely serious, always well-mannered. The reference more often than not was to an enormous shared acquaintance of absent friends and rela- tives; a variety of sporting and recreational options was available, from hunting, shoot- ing and fishing to croquet and bridge or backgammon. If the houses were cold in winter, so was everywhere else. Favoured guests had fires lit in their bedrooms.
We who live on in the same, or slightly smaller, houses are aware that our exis- tence is a pale shadow of what has gone before. But our houses are warmer, our wine and food often better and it still seems the best form of life available on earth preferable to the beaches of California or Florida, infinitely preferable to penthouse existence in London, New York or Los Angeles. For my own part, I am happy and proud to have been afforded a glimpse of human civilisation at its highest point.
Its surviving influence would appear to be entirely negative, in the frenzies of jeal- ous hatred it continues to arouse in a hand- ful of English literary academics and jour- nalists. They have seldom had a glimpse of the world from which they feel they have been excluded and which they affect to despise. Once or twice they have heard the drawling or braying voices of the pseudo- upper class in some assembly of business- men, and cringed away, vowing terrible revenge. What cannot fail to surprise are the persistence and virulence of this antipa- thy long after its cause has been removed. Andrew Neil, as I pointed out last year CA temporary bad smell on the media scene', Another voice, 31 July), continues to con- gratulate himself on his refusal to join the Establishment's 'country weekends in cold, inhospitable piles, with indifferent food, second-rate minds and the killing of defenceless animals for fun'.
Yet is is this sad, crippled, squashed worm's-eye view of social history which informs his entire newspaper, from its relentless attacks on the Prince of Wales, Prince Philip and the monarchy to its dis- mal vendetta against anyone in public life who knows how to hold a knife and fork. Encouraged by hoarse colonial cheers from Los Angeles, Neil has created his own little court of lower-class intellectual inade- quates, like Professor John Carey, who see everything through the prism of class ran- `I'm small and furry, with big eyes. Why aren't I attractive?' cour. 'Young Royals put accent on slang,' wrote the Sunday Times's education corre- spondent, Charles Hymas, as his contribu- tion to education for this week:
A new study has revealed that they have shunned the clipped conservative pronuncia- tion of the Queen ... . and are more likely to adopt traits of speech commonly associated with the classless southern accent known as estuary English or 'high cockney'. Like mil- lions in the towns and counties of the Thames estuary who have popularised the new accent, royals such as the Princess of Wales and Prince Edward are prone to swal- low their Is' in sentences such as 'There's a lo' of i' abou'.'
Classless my foot. The epiglottal 't' reveals an uneducated, lazy and often dis- honest mind, as it always did. But the inter- esting thing about this twaddle is not that Murdoch and Neil should propagate it, but that so many educated persons should accept it, and should suppose that what Professor Carey has to say is original, intel- ligent and true. A less august academic called David Cannadine has appointed himself English literature's 'expert' on the upper-class English culture which was once the glory of the world.
Although himself an Englishman, describing himself as a 'lower middle-class product of the welfare state, educated at grammar school', Cannadine chooses to live in New York, where he pontificates on the English class system to university audi- ences. His ignorance of what he writes about, derived from half-understood liter- ary sources, would be more heart-rending than laughable without the assurance that it is lapped up by those poor, uncomprehend- ing young Americans. What is truly amaz- ing is how it is lapped up in Britain. At the conclusion of his latest book, Aspects of Aristocracy (following after The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy), he expresses the hope that he has established there is more to life than the English country house. Everybody hails him 'a a scholar and profound thinker. I wonder if this social loathing tinges every single aspect of our lives, from acceptance of James Kel- man's foul-mouthed rubbish as serious lit- erature to Gordon Brown's promise to squeeze the rich, despite the rest of the world's discovery that lower rates produce more revenue. Whether we know anything about it or not, the spectre of the English country house continues to haunt us all.
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