SEASCAPE WITH FIGURES
SIR,—No holidaymakers of the sort castigated by Simon Raven ever speak. or even think, in the way depicted by him in his article 'Seascape with Figures.' I feel certain that any member of such Li group as he dramatises, or anyone who has ever had any genuine human contact with people different from themselves, would agree. I doubt, in fact, if it is possible at the best for us to do more than ten- tatively imagine what such families think. Certainly it is impossible to do so by the typical intellectual method of thinking about them from the standpoint of one's own feelings. For example, I don t believe that the kind of family he is trying to depict would have two children who longed to go for a picnic away from houses and people. Children's tastes begin by being almost slavishly imitative, with a strong tendency to espouse on sight the depravities of mechanised and com- mercialised civilisation. They prefer eating sweets and ice-creams in amusement parks to eating apples in the fields.
But what 1 cannot forgive Mr. Raven for is his singling out of the 'artisan couples and their neatly blazered' children for his scorn. Money and all acquaintance, through home or education, with dif- ferent kinds of pleasures do not produce a basically different behaviour pattern., People gathered at Ascot, or the Royal Academy, or at St. Moritz, are just as likely to be there because 'they must be where: others are' or to 'show off their careful acquisitions as are the visitors to a pebbly, respectable Kentish resort. There is a similar resentment in both Mr. Raven and his boatman. Typically, the boatman has sold his service (a fishing trip) and then complains when his customers do what they wish with what they have bought (keep all the fish).
Mr. Raven and all of us at times who have secs reasonable wages, opportunities and leisure given to everyone, now complain at the lack of tastc• values and wisdom which we believe, with a mixture of conceit and guilt at our conceit, to be ours alone. He should consider being glad that different people have different tastes, so that the 'many open beaches of sand' and the 'countryside (which is exquisite) are left uncrowded for people like himself, and my' self, to enjoy.
PAMELA M. Motga
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