Postscript • • • `HAVE you anything to say?' said
the magistrate.
Only thing was, this wasn't a nuclear disarmer but a barrow boy, found guilty of obstruction in the West End, one of the mixed bag of drunks, lodgers-in-the-open-air. loiterers-with-intent, wil- ful-damagers, and makers of water in the street, that Mr. Reece was disposing of individually at Bow Street on Tuesday before taking his last con- signment of nuclear disarmers—in batches. 'First ten ban-the-bombers!' cried the constable, and into the dock they trooped, to be dealt with in wholesale lots and at bargain prices: 'You must pay twenty shillings, thank you,' being Mr. Reece's murmured and invariable response to each defen- dant's statement from the dock—none of them, not even Miss Helen Cherry's, in a voice as well- produced as the Soho barrow boy's, though some were a little less cryptic.
Whatever the Home Office's tactical error (from authority's point of view) in making much of the Committee of 100, Mr. Reece was obvi- ously intending to make the defendants before him look small or, at any rate, unimportant. In any case, Tuesday's customers seemed unromantic figures indeed after Monday's John Osborne and Vanessa Redgrave, Shelagh Delaney and Patricia Burke, and the man who claimed to have been in Trafalgar Square, armed with a sheath knife, only because he was camping, and whose Chris- tian names were said to be Wolfe Ruddigore. There wasn't a single ban-the-bomber to compare for loftiness of countenance and purity of profile with the ageing man who pleaded guilty of loiter- ing with intent to steal from parked cars, who looked like.a rather ill-shaven Roman emperor, or for impudence, ingenuity and sheer force of personality with the picture-postcard seller who had been picked up in Piccadilly for obstruction, along with his stock-in-trade, and who had made the police spend two hours (one of them com- plained in the witness box) cataloguing his col- lection.
And Mr. Reece, for his part, didn't say any- thing from his bench quite so profound as the homily his colleague at Marlborough Street addressed to the Misses Redgrave and Delaney: `Nobody likes the bomb, and you know it. Bring- ing pre5sure to bear and making things unpleasant for others, is going too far.'
*.
I made two odd and unrelated discoveries at Bow Street. Outside the police station is still posted the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police's order prohibiting 'any public procession organised by the body of persons known as the "Committee of 100."' It is a single sentence, from capital letter to first and only full stop, of 246 words. It ought to have been a defence to a charge of having disobeyed the order, that one hadn't been able to get to the end of it.
The other, oddity is that inside the court build- ing there is a 'Women's Lavatory,' but a `Men's Toilet.'
* Unlike the New Yorker, this organ does not have a department headed 'Letters We Never Finished Reading,' owing to the fact that the staff of the Spectator is so consumed with insatiable curiosity that it cannot leave any letter unread. All the same, what nearly qualified for our first such entry began :
Promotions (London) Ltd.
57 Sloane Street, London, SWI.
and at Boston, Mass., USA. 175 Tremont Street.
Dear Mr. Ray,
1 am writing to tell you of an event which 1 think will provide extremely good stories for your column. . .
There is something of a slump in sweet wines. and some of. the growers of the greatest Sauternes are trying their hands at dry ones, by gathering their grapes earlier—not, I am sure, instead of, but as well as, their luscious dessert wines. The first to come my way is from Château Filhot, which produces a very fine second-growth Sauternes, and is owned by a kinswoman of the Marquis de Lur-Saluces, who owns Château d'Yquem. The new, dry Filhot is full-bodied and deep in colour, looking and smelling as though it were going to taste sweet, but it doesn't—it has an almost bitter finish. I'm not sure that it's to my own taste in white wines, but we drank it with a dish of pork chops braised with tomatoes .and onions, and a more delicate wine would not have stood up to the savoury food as this one did. Even if I don't really like it, a lot of people will. and I certainly respect it, for it is a serious wine, and very cheap for its character at only ten shillings a bottle—at Fortnums, which isn't as dear for wines as you might suppose. They tell me there that two famous first-growth châteaux of Sauternes are soon going to show their dry wines: Lafaurie-Peraguey and (who'd have thought it?) Yquetn itself. CYRIL RAY
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