by Emily Hahn
Trust the people, crooned the Labour press. Trust the people but express your trust another way, said the Liberals crossly. It’s all a fake and an outrage, cried the Tories such as Clifton. “Hard work never hurt anybody, madam. It stands to reason people won’t work unless they have to.”
“Come in, Charley,” said the thin young man with the humorous face, standing at the door of his London flat. “Come in, Mrs. Boxer. Charley, you remember Mary’s aunt, and here’s Peggy. Now then, madeira or sherry?”
“We couldn’t get our gin ration,” said the thin young man’s young wife. “Isn’t it awful. They won’t let you have it until the news of the budget is out.”
“Well, what is the news?” I asked, settling into a corner of the sofa. The Major was telling people about the family, about Beryl’s farm in Canada, and how the Brigadier won’t be going back to India, and the Colonel in Germany; I heard a woman in pink talking about someone in her family in Ceylon. They had all known each other since childhood. “We can’t buy a newspaper anywhere,” I said. “They’re sold out. We’ll have to wait until we get back to Conygar for our papers, all piled up for the week.”
“Yes, just what is it?” the Major said from the fireplace. “What’s the verdict this time?”
“Duggie thinks he knows,” said Mary, “but nobody really does know yet; we’re all far too busy spreading rumors to listen to the wireless. All I know is that they won’t let us have our half bottle of gin for this month, until they know how much it is going to cost.”
“But that isn’t legal,” I said. “It isn’t fair, is it? Even if they slap another tax on, the old stock should cost the old price, like tobacco. That’s how I stay ahead of the game by smoking cigars. Nobody else ever buys cigars in Dorchester; I just keep on getting the old stock that hasn’t been taxed.”
“It’s different with gin. I don’t understand, but they keep it under bond or something.”
“I’ve heard it’s going to be a new tax on everything,” said the woman in pink. “Simply everything, and no more subsidies for food. That will send the prices—”
“I have the real lowdown,” said Duggie, “the last word. At any rate, that’s what it’s said to be, though mind you I don’t guarantee it.”
We all sat up at attention, holding our glasses.
“First, a higher tax on spirits,” said Duggie. “Wine and everything else.”
“That hits direct at us,” said the Major, nodding to me.
“Tobacco?” I asked.
“Oh yes, certainly tobacco. Cigarettes will be six shillings for twenty.”
“Well,” said the Major smugly, “that won’t affect me.”
“Books?” I demanded.
“Books? Well, I don’t know; I didn’t notice. Probably a purchase tax. Why should anybody escape, I should like to know? And they’re taking off the subsidy on food; there’s a much higher tax on clothing, and cosmetics will be about double.”
“But cosmetics were double already, weren’t they?”
“Double again,” he said cheerfully. “And a profits tax, which is aimed directly at us middle classes, of course. That’s about all.”
Everyone sighed and sat back.
“Mind you, I don’t absolutely guarantee this information,” added Duggie. He turned out to be wrong on almost everything, as a matter of fact; the budget when printed in the papers seemed comparatively mild, which made a nice surprise. But then we always do allow our imaginations to grow lurid on budgets, and the truth is always a nice surprise.
For the moment the subject was exhausted. We talked about the weather, the abolition of pleasure motoring, and then, in the natural course of events, about potatoes. Potatoes had just been rationed to three pounds a week per head.
“It shouldn’t worry you so much,” said Mary, “with that garden; you grow your own, don’t you?”
“We could get only a hundredweight of seed potatoes last time, so we’ll run short ultimately, I suppose. And it’s a queer thing,” I said, “but now they’ve rationed the damn things and tell me I can eat only three pounds a week, I want to eat them all the time. I never ate potatoes until they rationed them. What do you do about it?”
“Oh, we just sit here firmly on such potatoes as we can get. Isn’t it awful?”
Somehow, like everyone else in the country, we soon circled back to the subject of the budget. “I don’t see how they can reduce the food subsidy without raising wages; the T.U.C. won’t stand for it,” said the Major.
“They can’t make tobacco more expensive or people will have to cut it out, and then they’ll notice the scanty diet,” I said. “When you eat less you smoke more, or you get cross.”
Everyone was saying those things. “They say they’ll reduce the food rations again, after cutting sugar next month. But what more can they cut? Fats? But how can they?”
“Oho! They can do it, all right. You watch.”
Then, off the subject of food again, we swung over to the royal wedding. Mary and Duggie’s guest room, like every guest room in London, was crowded during wedding week. “Are you coming up for it?” asked Mary.
“Not me; I’ll stay as far away from London as I can. Charles will be here, of course. I wouldn’t bring Carola into these crowds for a million dollars—well, maybe I would for a million, but no less. Charles! Charles, what’s supertax on a million dollars?”
“Don’t take another drink,” said the Major. “Finish that up and come along; we’ve got to meet people.”
“I’m going to the House of Lords tomorrow,” I said to our hosts.
They looked startled, the way I always do in New York when someone from out of town wants to go up to the top of the Empire State Building. I felt I ought to apologize for being like a tourist, but there wasn’t much I could say about it; I was being like a tourist.
“It was like this,” I explained. “We met a lord the other day, and so we thought we might as well use him.”
“Oh, I do think you’re so right,” said Mary.
“Especially,” added Duggie, “as the House of Lords probably won’t be there much longer. I’ve often thought I ought to go and see it myself while there’s time. But one never does.”
“No,” echoed his wife with a pretty melancholy, “one never does.”
“Well, I’m going to, so there. It’ll be awfully dull, but I feel I ought to, somehow. I mean, considering the times we live in. I’ll tell you about it afterward.”
“Come on, Mickey,” said the Major.
I remembered after I got there that someone had taken me to see the House of Lords long ago, about fifteen years ago. Until I stood within those paneled walls again, though, I had thought I’d only seen it in pictures like Disraeli. But now it is not the same, since the war; the House sits temporarily in the Robing Room, having given its own chamber to the House of Commons, whose regular room was blitzed. I saw the new Commons building, all in the girder stage; it will take another three years to finish.
The Robing Room has been fixed up in miniature like the House, but the benches edge up close to the Woolsack, and we visitors, though we were behind a railing, were nearer everything than one is near the priest in most churches. It seemed to make the proceedings much matier. All the Lords were so close, Labour to Conservative, that it was hard to realize they were really doing public business. I have a fixed idea that business of state must be carried on in a room larger than life, with great echoing spaces to accommodate the oratory. There wasn’t any oratory that day in the present House of Lords; just talking.
That afternoon it seemed evident from the printed list of subjects for discussion that nothing very interesting would happen.
After I had been seated and watched the men come in, and recognized some from the pictures and some from having seen them at receptions, Viscount Elibank began to speak. It was a long, involved question about decentralizing nationalized industry in Scotland, I think; the Lords seemed to know what he was talking about, like lawyers in co
urt, but I didn’t. I was glad to agree with my host that ten minutes of listening was enough. Then, feeling rather guilty and rude about it—for I was only a few steps from the speaker and I thought it might put him off, someone’s walking out like that in the middle of the performance—I escaped with my mentor. We walked through the halls, out on the terrace in the early dusk, and then in again to their commons room to have tea. The slice of cake was thin, but good. My special peer was grateful for my sugar, which I don’t take in tea.
“It’s too bad there wasn’t an exciting debate,” he said, “but one can’t always arrange it for visitors, much as one would like to.”
“I don’t suppose there’ll be any more discussion about this new bill curtailing the Lords’ powers?”
“Oh, that hasn’t come up yet. Yes, that will be interesting. But it’s not due for debate for some days yet, and I don’t think there will be anything else, much, before that.”
Between the tables in the cafeteria-looking room an occasional peer made his way, drank his tea, and ambled out. It was about four-thirty, and quite dark outside. We commented on the budget. We looked at our watches.
“I’ll have to go,” he said, “but you might like to see St. Stephen’s Crypt; I’ll arrange that if you like.” We said good-by in the gloomy half-repaired hall, and I went down to the crypt with an attendant, looked at it, and then took a taxi home, reflecting that there is still some privilege attached to a government job, as one gets a taxi immediately. A policeman simply rings a bell outside the door, and after a minute or so the taxi rolls up. Most impressive.
Back in our rooms, I switched on the electric heater and sat down with a Penguin book to wait for the Major. It had been just as uneventful, I said to myself, as Mary and Duggie had warned me. Perhaps I should have stayed longer in the House, listening to Viscount Elibank. It’s not polite to walk out when someone is speaking, and I still felt guilty about that. Besides, in the movies and in books by Disraeli and such, all sorts of thrilling things happen every minute in the House. Giving the Lords only ten minutes had been rather rash of me, but this was real life, not fiction, and my host had been so sure.… I yawned. I reminded myself that I am a middle-aged woman now, and that it behooves me to be blasé.
Not having a radio in London, I didn’t know until I saw a newspaper over the shoulder of a spectacled man in the tube train next morning that Dalton, master of the budget, had resigned. He had given details of the budget to a newspaperman, it seems, on his way in to deliver his speech to the House of Commons, and Chancellors of the Exchequer are not supposed to do that. When the paper jumped the gun and the full enormity of his action dawned upon his friends, he realized he had to quit. “Damme,” as one of the Tories said, “they’ve shot our fox!” Just about when I walked out on that Scotland speech, the thing was breaking next door. It had caused a flurry on the Lords’ side, after a few minutes; that would be just as I was finishing my tea. An interesting moment in the history of the Labour Government, it was. I knew I shouldn’t have gone away until that nice old man stopped talking.
“It’s perfectly typical,” I said to the Major. “Other people always happen to be on the spot at just the right time; as for me, I invariably just miss. I shall write a saga about it someday. I have the title already: ‘I Wasn’t There.’ ”
The Major made comforting absent-minded noises; he was reading, paying no attention whatever to me, as usual. I brooded darkly.
“How do you suppose it happened?” I asked. “No, do listen, Charles; how could even one of these ministers forget a rule like that one? One would expect me to be indiscreet, or even you, but really, a chancellor!”
“Rattled,” said the Major. “His big moment, I suppose, and everyone in England hanging on his slightest word; we were, ourselves. It isn’t as if he’s the first to bugger something up.”
“It’s too bad in a way. I’m sort of sorry for him, even though he did tax my drinks. Cutting off his career like that, all in a minute.”
“Oh, he’ll be back. He’ll be back in the racket before you know it. It’ll all blow over. And now please, darling, stop yattering.”
“Well, I still wish I’d waited.” The Major, once more immersed in the seventeenth century, made a falsely sympathetic noise and turned a page.
Until I saw the House of Commons, however, I didn’t realize with what good-natured acceptance of their secondary role the Lords have allowed themselves to be moved out of the Big Chamber in favor of the people who really do the work. On second thought, I don’t know really if they were good-natured about it or not. Perhaps not. I shouldn’t have been, in their places.
Comparatively speaking, the Chamber of Commons as of this year, and until their own chamber is ready again, is an enormous place. Actually it is not large enough. It has often been computed by hot, angry, hitherto unsuccessful reformers that if all the M.P.’s were to turn up one day, if such a day can be imagined, there wouldn’t be places for them even standing, let alone bench room. There was a brisk debate about it when the machinery for rebuilding the blitzed part of the House was first set in motion, but the traditionalists won by pointing out that there simply isn’t room for a bigger chamber, and that even if there were, the ventilation system would be inadequate.
Theoretically, any citizen of England can get tickets to the House by writing to his M.P. One of the duties of a Member is to get you these tickets if you live in his constituency and ask for them. In practice it is not quite so simple for the M.P. as all that. These troubled days, the Strangers’ Gallery is usually full of other interested spectators who got to their M.P.’s first. It’s not a capacious gallery. One must pick one’s day well in advance in making the request, and even then if word has got around that the debate will be especially good you may not get in.
As I understand it from my one experience, you sit on the side, Government or Opposition, to which your Member belongs, and for which he has taken your tickets. Mine were on the Conservative side, not because my politics are Conservative, but because my county is. They say that Dorset is probably the most stoutly Conservative county in England, though Shropshire also clamors for the title. There’s another shire, though, which perhaps ought to win in a contest. An acquaintance of ours who was running there on the Liberal ticket and who lost by eight votes swears it really happened: a housemaid asked a policeman where the polling booth was, and he pointed out the building where she would find it. “Thank you,” said the housemaid, but still she lingered. “Can you direct me,” she said politely, “to the servants’ entrance?”
The round lobby place between the two chambers was full of queues of people waiting to get into the public gallery, which is closed as soon as all the seats are taken. Other queues were of people waiting to see their M.P.’s about questions to be asked in the House. The M.P.’s question is one of the most interesting side lights on this government system and the way it really works out. There were so many people around that the police constables, three of them, had to open a passageway periodically so that Members could get through, but at two-thirty all the milling about came to an end. Someone called out, the constables stood us still in our places, and an odd little procession of solemn-faced blokes led by a man in black knickerbockers and carrying a mace marched into the lobby, turned sharply at the exact center, and went on into the chamber. They were portentously serious, so were the constables, so were we the public, though it happens every day. Well, after all, any army drill is just the same. Then we were allowed to climb a staircase and were shown our seats. In the lobby the whole crowd of people melted away, some to their seats, and the others, I suppose, out of doors again.
I was with a young man, a friend of ours who is an Englishman and so naturally had never in his life thought of going to see the House in session until I offered to take him in with my other ticket. We found ourselves well back in the gallery, about the fourth row, in a position only a little out of center, facing the long walk down the room between serried rows of benc
hes, just above the Treasury Bench where everyone stands when making a formal speech. We occupied a position in the gallery similar to the speakers on the floor. We were nicely placed, in fact, so as not to see anyone in action. By craning our necks we got a glimpse of Sir Stafford Cripps once, because he stood rather far down toward the middle of the House. But anyway we could hear everything, and we had a printed list of the questions which were slated to be asked during the question period.
This lasts from two-thirty to four, when the formal business begins, and for my money, or indeed I should think for anyone’s, it is usually the best part of the session. Each Member who is down for a question, as his number is called gets to his feet and recites the question again just as it is printed in the list, and then the proper minister or his deputy replies. He has already looked up his reply in preparation for this moment, so everything goes quickly, though there is a certain amount of impromptu discussion sometimes, and that is where the fun comes in. The original questions are inspired by the public, who have elected these M.P.’s as their mouthpieces and are using them as such. But the comments and arguments which follow are the M.P.’s on their own, as individuals.
Now, with the list, which I kept, lying before me on the desk, I’m impressed afresh with the number of questions they asked about German prisoners of war. There they are, dozens of questions, sandwiched between other subjects such as strikes, man power in agriculture, and artificial limbs for veterans. There again is that terrible English conscience which is always surprising me with its homogeneity, its simple acceptance of a settled morality, which we in other nations are so apt to brush aside as we brush aside what we learned in kindergarten. Listening to this voice of a national conscience, I entertain the uneasy thought that though it is certainly desirable to add to that kindergarten knowledge, we ought not to be so ready to forget the foundations of our education. International diplomacy seems to confuse the issue until we not only forget, but contradict things we used to know as truth. Of course that, too, happens in England as much as anywhere else; more, perhaps. Yet the voice of the people at question time in the House can be heard every day, and in spite of its strict, simple acceptance that right is right and wrong is wrong, it somehow does not sound naïve or foolishly weak. It sounds strong.