Notebook
Whatever the rights and wrongs of test-tube babies, one cannot but squirm when a child is used as a promotion stunt by the Daily Mail. The same newspaper in 1975 promoted an 'orphan airlift' of babies from Saigon a few weeks before the Communist victory. It was a squalid operation since most of the babies were not orphans at all: most of them were not, as announced, in need of special medical attention; one of the charities involved withdrew from the operation in disgust; a second charity involved, the Ockendon Venture, had as its chairman David Ennals, then a minister in the Foreign Office, who apparently used his position to make the British Embassy in Saigon help the 'orphan airlift'; it was never made clear whether the British couples who adopted an orphan had to pay a donation to the charity concerned, and if so, how much; the Daily Mail did not publish a proper account of money received for the fund; the executive in charge of the fund has disappeared. All of which goes to show that the lives and happiness of small children, whether test-tube born or foreign 'orphans', should not be entrusted to newspaper promotion departments.
'Lord Soper retires' I read , but cannot believe. The Reverend Donald Soper, as he was once called, will never lose his life-time habit of talking. Even when he wrote a religious column for Tribune, the left-wing weekly (has that retired too?), Soper appeared in a photograph talking down a telephone, presumably to the Great Socialist in the Sky.
As we got on the Irish boat train at Euston, a loudspeaker announced that 'owing to staff shortages' there would be no buffet, meaning that those who believed the British Rail advertising would spend from ten in the morning till three in the afternoon without any possibility of getting food or drink. Fortunately we had "come provided. Regular passengers on this route say that the buffet attendants normally do not turn up during the holiday season, especially if the weather is fine. At least those of us who came by train were able to get on the boat at Holyhead. The car and lorry passengers were refused permission to board by the Transport and General Workers clerical staff who were in dispute over their pay for operating the ramps. On arriving at Dun Laoghaire we heard that some of the car and lorry passengers at Holyhead had assaulted strike pickets. Things were just as bad at Dun Laoghaire, where it turned out that the Irish TGWU had come out on strike to support their brothers across the water and would not let vehicles on to the boat going back to Holyhead. A picket of six Irish TGWU men were walking round and round in a small circle near the dock but prudently far away from the queue of cars and lorries which had formed about eight hours previously. I was standing close to the picketers when suddenly they were charged, at the run, by some eighty enraged motorists who smashed their banners and threatened them with violence: 'We're going to lynch you . .. string them up . . . lazy fat arses . . . where's your mates?. . . where's your pickets gone? . . .' This was a reference to the fact that five of the picketers had disappeared, leaving but one brave man to defend the strike: 'We've got a hundred per cent support. This company made £.24 million profit last year. . .',but he was .soon shouted down by the fat, furious spokesman of the motorists: 'Don't forget there's Transport and General workers in this group here. I tell you if you don't agree to go back to work within an hour we'll burn the bloody place down.' The threat apparently worked, for the strike was called off that evening. There is a lesson here to be learnt, that picketing should be not only legal but compulsory, so that for instance air traffic controllers, the next time they strike, should be made to picket in the departure halls and explain their case to the waiting passengers. As for the railway buffet cars, I have always thought that these and station buffets ought to be hived off to the private sector, by which I do not, emphatically, mean some huge catering company such as Trust Houses Forte, but to individual café or restaurant managers. An Italian family, say, running a restaurant car on a long-distance route could not only enrich itself but provide better, cheaper food and service.
What would Andrew Marvell, the poet and former MP for Hull, have thought of the present 'Humberside', the monstrous cora' bination of Hull and Grimsby produced bY the infamous Heathian and Walkerian lea government reforms? This occurred to Me on seeing the British Museum exhibition marking the three hundredth anniversarY of Marvell's death. I suspect that the grammar school he attended gave a better education than do contemporary Hull schools, judged by the account of them in a recent memoable article in the Spectator by Shiva Naipaul, who had been lecturing in Ran' berside for the Arts Council. Would Mar" yell have taken an Arts Council grant? I fear so, for he enjoyed patronage first from the Royalists, then from the Cromwellites and once again from the Royalists. And Marvell might have approved of the grossly expel?' sive Humber Bridge which was opened this , year to replace the ferry. His own father v.4s drowned on the crossing.
I hope that the new Coliseum production of Mozart's Magic Flute will keep going the great debate on what the opera means. The other day Bernard Levin wrote an enjoyable article on this subject, although I cannot remember precisely what his conclusion was, except that the music is sublime. Tir Spectator's resident philosopher, Christopher Booker, tells me that the oPera describes how men and women come t° maturity by freeing themselves from rhef influence, first of the Mother (the Queen the Night) and then the Father (Sarastro). put the same question to Jonathan Miller soon to produce the Coliseum's Marriage of Figaro who had been asking me, In 3 rather accusing fashion, the identity of P.ric vate Eye's famous opera critic 'Sparafucile (it's not me, honestly). He understood the Flute as a political parable of Reason (Joseph II/Sarastro) conquering Super' stition (Maria Theresa/Queen of the Night) in eighteenth-century Austria. Incidentally, Jonathan Miller said he hated Bergman s film of the Magic Flute. I had expected to do so but enjoyed it so much that I went tw.° days running, in Salisbury, Rhodesia this June. I thought that the erotic imagery, of 3 kind which is so tiresome in films by Ken Russell, was absolutely appropriate to the Magic Flute. In particular, the ordeals or Tamino and Pamina, so often boring in till theatre, became comprehensible as sex' fantasy and temptation. The Queen of the Night's Ladies are rightly shown as set on seducing Tamino; although Pamina fears the licentious Moor Monostatos, she is a"' physically roused by him. Incidentally, the revolt of the black slaves led by Monostarois. and put down by Sarastro, caused nnr.c" laughter and comment in the Rhodesian audience. Whatever the Magic Flute means it does not advocate black majority rule.
Richard West
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