ANOTHER VOICE
It is high time for a new Great Trek, from the English countryside to southern Russia
AUBERON WAUGH
One of the happiest aspects of the film Four Weddings and a Funeral was that it seemed to hark back to the days when the upper classes could almost ignore the class war. People laughed good-naturedly at the characters and scenes shown; the charac- ters laughed back and laughed with them. It was possible to feel a certain pride in England once again. We were one nation, tied together by a certain sense of humour, a certain sense of our own absurdity . . . For the last 40 years, with very few excep- tions, no member of the upper classes could be shown on film or television except in terms of extreme stupidity, usually accompanied by extreme avarice, often by cruelty, even sadism. Suddenly, in one bound, we were back in the world of William Douglas-Home's The Chiltern Hundreds (1947) and Reluctant Debutante (1955).
There are aspects of English life in which we can reasonably take pride, and hospital- ity is surely one of them. Last week I went to a private lunch party to welcome the new American ambassador. Ninety pleasant, well-mannered people, for the most part only slightly known to each other, sat down to enjoy themselves over an excellent meal, some beautiful white Burgundy and Château Talbot 1970 with the meat course. On Saturday I went to a country wedding where the part of Hugh Grant was played by a young cousin of my wife. One does not expect a wedding to be a gastronomic event, but on this occasion 450 people sat down to a first course of lobster (Saint- Romain 1982 from Clerget), followed by tournedos of beef, beautifully pink, on croutons (Château Gruard Larose 1983) and summer fruits — strawberries, raspber- ries, wild strawberries, redcurrants — with Cuvee William Deutz 1988.
In all this lavishness there was not the faintest touch of vulgarity, nor condescen- sion, nor even self-consciousness. Some friendly, pleasant people, completely unknown to half the guests, had decided to push the boat out in celebration of a daughter's wedding which pleased them. On a summer's afternoon, in an English garden, in front of a handsome stone house of the late-17th or early-18th century, this was England at its glorious best, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for every aspiring bicyclist who comes south from Newcastle, Paisley or the Gorbals to seek his fortune. Of course the guests who disported themselves in their cutaway coats and top hats and pretty summer frocks and crazy bonnets would be making a great mistake if they supposed they might be part of the same show as the people arriving from Newcastle, Paisley and the Gorbals to take their places. Any privileged person in Britain who is not aware of all the hatred and resentment he attracts is living in a fool's paradise. At least on this occasion there were no members of the royal family present. I dread to think what the Arm- strong-Jones-Chatto wedding on Thursday was like. There is nothing like the presence of royalty to spoil a party, spreading little pools of boredom, resentment and self-con- sciousness all over the place.
But the royal family has its role to play in the Englishness of England. My point is that the scene in a country garden which I have described is not only the envy of the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh, but also the envy of the whole world, or at any rate that part of the world which knows about it. It is not just the pot of gold waiting for underprivileged Britons who have the patience and the wit to go for it, it is also the high point of world civilisation. In the same way the royal family, for all that sophisticated Britons tend to regard them with irritation and resentment, are the envy of the world.
It may seem strange that there seems to be a determination among up-and-coming Britons — the Neils and Littlejohns, for an obvious example, but also among the bur- glars, car thieves, unemployed railway porters, dole scroungers, welfare fiddlers, Essex garagistes and Midlands software dealers who make up the readership of the Sun and the Sunday Times respectively — to destroy the monarchy and the garden party, the only two things which make this country the envy of the world. Nobody is much impressed by anything else we do or make.
It would be easy to blame the malign spectre of the absent Murdoch for all this, but it seems to me that Britain would be ripe for murdochisation even if Murdoch did not exist. America is going its own way and more than half of Britain wants to fol- low it. The irony is that there are huge tracts of the modern world — the develop- ing economies of the Pacific rim and the emerging countries of the former Iron Cur- tain and Soviet Union, for example — who might be just as happy to follow the English example, towards tail coats and top hats in a country garden, as to follow the Ameri- can example, towards a choice of 200 tele- vision channels, a limitless supply of ham- burgers and Coca-Cola in front of the television set.
When the Queen visits St Petersburg in October, she will be visiting a Tsarist stronghold. Yeltsin has adopted the imperi- al eagles of the Romanov dynasty. Nowhere in the world is there a greater desire to forget the last 75 years of mod- ernism and socialism, and return to the great simplicities of life. Yet even as our Queen goes to show them the way, it emerges as the settled opinion of Britain's intelligentsia, following the Murdoch lead, that our monarchy has more or less had it.
It may emerge as one of the great tragedies of British history that Murdoch did not accept a dukedom (as I urged he should be offered) after his victory at Wap- ping saved the newspaper industry. Then he could have bought himself a stately home and spent his time bashing pheasant, foxes and deer, well known to be the most agreeable amusement on earth, or simply playing croquet or tennis in the world's pleasantest surroundings. But I am afraid the battle has been lost. Mr Blair says he will destroy the House of Lords and crimi- nalise hunting, but the real class animosity nowadays comes from the Conservative Party and its new recruits. They may hate the poor, the disadvantaged, the uncompet- itive, but they hate the rich, the fortunate, those of superior intelligence and educa- tion much more. The only solution, as I see it, is a Great Trek of all the aristocracy of England, the landed gentry, moneyed and conservative classes who wish to join them, from this country to southern Russia and the Crimea. There land is plentiful and cheap. There are foxes, boar and deer to be hunted; peasants who can be taught to keep game and wait at table by any employ- ers who are not shy of the knout. Britain, I feel, would be a happier country if it was allowed to settle in its own standard of mediocrity and incompetence, without any distinguishing characteristics at all.
Previous page
