ANOTHER VOICE
On returning from abroad: determined to look on the bright side
AUBER ON WAUGH
Southern France was baking hot while Britain has been experiencing what the Metereological Office insists on describing as an average summer. The moment of rejoining one's compatriots — in my own case, on the Sealink ferry from Cherbourg to Weymouth — is always the most testing. One begins to understand Sir Roger Hol- lis's behaviour, if indeed he was guilty of treason, although I prefer to believe the real culprit was considerably higher up. It was Lord Avon, rather than Lord Stock- ton, who appointed Hollis as Director- General of the Security Service in 1956, and I am reluctant to believe that Eden, sick as he then was, could have made such an elementary mistake as to appoint a Soviet agent head of MI5.
It was Macmillan who, in the pink of health, publicly exonerated Kim Philby in the House of Commons from any sugges- tion of having been a Soviet agent, for reasons best known to himself. Shortly after Philby's defection to the Soviet Un- ion, Macmillan resigned suddenly, just as Lord Wilson of Rievaulx was to resign suddenly 13 years later. In Macmillan's case the reason given for this sudden act was poor health — a minor prostate condition such as afflicts about 20 per cent of men over the age of 60. In Wilson's case no such explanation was offered for his sudden departure. One rejoices in the fact that both former prime ministers are so well, ten and 23 years later, although Wilson seems to have carried a strange grudge against the Security Service with him into his retirement.
One rejoices, too, that Mrs Thatcher seems to have survived her recent minor operation, just as President Reagan sur- vived his, without resigning. But my point is that when one is suddenly confro d with one's compatriots, the Ne .: k", as I was on the Therbourg-Weymout erry on Saturday, there is no need to fe surprised by the crimes of such as Phi , Burgess or Maclean — even thos- the dreadful art expert Blunt et alone the odd be- haviour of t s prime ministers and the postulated volvement of Sir Roger Hollis.
In fact believe Hollis to have been complete innocent and that Mr Chapman Pincher, s energies would be better spent investigating the motives of those anxious to incriminate Hollis as a Soviet agent, but my point on this occasion is a different one. It is that the New Britons are a peculiarly odious race, and it is hard to feel much patriotic involvement with them. In the past ten years I have travelled through the world, and although the Moroccans may be slightly dirtier — not much — and some Australian aborigines may eat slightly more disgusting food, it would be hard to find a more revolting collection of human beings than I found on the five o'clock Sealink ferry from Cherbourg to Weymouth last Saturday.
There were no football fans on board or at any rate none identified himself as such — and only a small sprinkling of drunken louts of the type we have come to accept as part of the price we must all pay for being allowed to drink at all. Children were the most obvious horror — whining, moaning, clinging to their unattractive, harassed parents and stuffing horrible food into their mouths, non-stop, throughout the four-hour crossing. Even worse, when one came to examine them, were the parents — all trying to look like teachers, and reading in special, patronising voices to their loathsome children out of whatever sanitised rubbish had been approved by the local library sub-committees on race rela- tions, on women, on heterosexism and on animal welfare — not to mention the local committee of Women against Violence against Women, union leaders and repre- sentatives of other minority groups — as suitable for reading to British kiddies.
But if the children were terrible — a new survey reveals that a quarter of British children between the ages of eight and fifteen are now given f20 a week or more in pocket money — and the parents were even worse, the worst of the lot were the Young People. By some extraordinarily malevolent arrangement between British Rail and the railways of Europe, our Young. People are allowed to travel non- stop around the continent for a month in exchange for a £120 Inter-Rail ticket, and this is precisely what they do. Every train in Europe is full of them, always asleep, more often than not in the corridors. Talking to a group of them, I realised that they practically never left the trains and when they did they never left the station. One group had been to Munich, where there were cockroaches in the station waiting room, to Venice, where the coffee in the buffet was overpriced, to Zagreb station, which scored highest for hot dogs, to Vienna, Barcelona and Paris, leaving the railway stations only at Venice, to visit a pizza bar, and Toulouse, to visit a steakhouse. For the rest, they just slept, or tried to sleep, making rail travel extremely disagreeable for everyone else.
This long complaint about my fellow- countrymen would be merely self- indulgent and otiose if there were not one more observation to add — that they seemed to feel the same about me and about themselves. We all stared at each other with disgust and loathing as we stuffed chips into our mouths and read our first English newspapers with their dismal news of Yorkshire TV's all-night pop programme attracting a million viewers; of a clamp-down by local authorities on Sun- day trading (in deference to idle shopkeep- ers and Sabbatarian fanatics); of a clamp- down by the Department of the Environ- ment on the sale of stuffed birds and tortoiseshell hairbrushes (in deference to animal fanatics); of SDP plans to increase taxes savagely for all earning more than £10,500 a year (a tribute to some greater imbecility which is thought to embrace a majority of the British intelligentsia).
Perhaps one little ray of hope can be gleaned from the rumbling, ancient fatuities of Mr Robert Hewison, writing in Monday's Times to complain about the `creeping paralysis of nostalgia in the arts'. There has been a revival of figurative painting, he moans, of narrative poetry, a re-emphasis on conventional, naturalistic fiction. I have not noticed them. Is it really possible that after 65 years the artistic establishment is going to come to its senses and stop arsing around with jokes which were stale 40 years ago? I don't think so. There are too many reputations and too much money tied up in the 'art' industry for anyone to be able to throw away all the rubbish which has been accumulating since the end of the Great War. Even if the desire to start again could be kindled, the skills have been lost.
No, the only glimmer of hope which I can see lies in our attitude to each other as revealed by the travellers on the Sealink ferry. It is not just that we are quite right to regard each other with indifference, or mild loathing, or disgust. The fact that we do so reveals that we have not yet quite lost the critical intelligence which once disting- uished us. That must be our talisman for the future.
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