Rotting Hill

by Lewis, Wyndham

  “Murder, after all, is repellent to the Christian conscience, but through some natural or injected perversity it is too readily assumed that mass murder is justifiable and that any analysis of the causes of mass murder deeper than those of a hysterical press is indecent and irrelevant to the Church’s work. Yet Christian ethics are no more confined to the Seventh Commandment (against adultery) than the American Constitution is confined to the Eighteenth Amendment (against alcohol).

  “Here are some lines written in 1938 on ‘The Silence in Britain’. The author believed it would be the last Silence:

  ‘A million of our dead to make us free,

  Whose dying marked the path of usury.

  Eight thousand million pounds they cost to kill

  Eight thousand pounds per man each grave to fill…

  And on that scale full interest we’ve paid:

  Six thousand million pounds in twenty years,

  Cash value of the Nation’s blood and tears.

  As tribute from war’s wild and bloody reek

  Each corpse still yields them seven pounds a week.’

  “As the old fallacies are readily embraced by almost every politician, as the effort to stamp out small villages goes almost unchecked, as the ‘first fruit and flower’ who might put things right have been destroyed, the commonwealth defence system is liquidated from within and from without.” He concludes as follows:

  “The issue is put candidly by a well-known critic and reformer: ‘It is clear beyond question that the gates of hell are wide open, and the torrent of evil will sweep away anything not intrinsically stronger than evil.’ We need to search our own consciences to decide whether we are intrinsically stronger than evil and to turn our backs on tainted public ‘servants’ and tarnished principles that have bedevilled our land for so many, many years—the architects of ruin.” The passage continues: “You know that long-distance air-pilots mark on their course-charts the ‘point of non-return’—where you must go on, because you can’t return to your base. The devil has passed the point of non-return and we had better recognize it.”

  Now of course this extract consists mainly of quotations. It is perhaps a vocational trick, but it is a method to which the Reverend Matthew Laming, Vicar of Ketwood, frequently has recourse. He will conceal himself in a cloud of quotations, in the way a clergyman’s admonitions reach us in the form of a hail of judgements picked out of sacred texts. It is his voice, but the words are those of the saints and prophets, and of God Himself.

  But there is another thing. Laming has no desire to say, “This is what I think, this is what I say.” It is what IS that interests him, not what is Laming’s, what a multitude of elect witnesses from the past and in the present day recognized as real. Such is the nature of his speech, for he is quite a modest man, and not interested to set up a personal mind: he prefers a common currency. He is a priest, that is enough for him. And in his principal work so far (unpublished, for it is one of those books which publishers recoil from at the impact of the first sentence and upon first sighting the subject-matter in the Contents page), The English Church and Usury, it is as a priest he writes. He is sometimes an almost embarrassingly unassuming man. He is no Prince Hamlet, to use a phrase of a contemporary poet, just a quiet background gentleman, coming on the scene with a deeply courteous aloofness. Then from this secondary figure, destined for silence it would seem, proceed to issue words—many words. These words lay bare the roguery of practically all the leading characters. This is not a Thersites act at all: this anomalous background gentleman in a quiet undertone carries on a shocked soliloquy. None of the other characters pay any attention to him. So in his writing he most exactly talks to himself—and perhaps to posterity. For one day I expect, his history of Usury may be unearthed, in a world grown liberal once more; a faded text, in the by then almost invisible typescript. I am supposing that it will come into the possession of a historian. “History” will not, of course, to the men of that time signify a fairy-tale of the past, composed as a department of propaganda, but be a matter of impartial factual research, as disinterested and unbiased as an ethnological treatise. Let us go a step farther with this imaginary historian of the future, and say that he has just completed a massive work, the title of which is to be Causes for the Eclipse of the Christian Nations of the West. It might well be that after perusing Laming’s typewritten analytical account of the origin and development of Usury, this poor man would consign to the dustbin what he had written.

  Here we have been assuming among many other things that to our historian of a distant future none of the Social Credit material of the past forty years is available. I hope I shall not be seeming to tone down my estimate of Laming’s book if I say I am not claiming that it is a master-work. After all it is but an enlargement of a university “thesis”. It is the subject-matter which is of such overwhelming significance, that alone is what would attract the historian, more especially when, as in this case, it is handled with exceptional skill. Finally, this is not to be understood as saying that I subscribe to the social theories of the “Creditors”, or regard the solution they favour as valid, only that the condition to which they persistently call attention appears at least as blood-curdling to me as it does to them.

  The word “usury”, it must be realized, does not refer to that minor nuisance, the trade done beneath the familiar sign of a trinity of brass balls. The Banks and Insurance Companies, the coiners of false credit, the whole of the iniquitous Credit system, is what is involved—the chairman of your bank is an arch-usurer. And somewhere stands the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth. Obviously what Debt has done to ruin our civilization cannot possibly be exaggerated. A great War means a great Debt. And there is now so vast a mountain of Debt that we merely exist in order to pay it off, which, slave as we may, day and night, we can never do.

  In the editorial I have quoted we saw the gates of Hell wide open, and out of them streaming the legions of the Fiend. “We need to search our conscience,” he says, “to decide whether we are intrinsically stronger than evil.” Evil is admittedly strong: have we in our moral nature enough of evil’s opposite to overcome this enormous onslaught rushing at us out of the gates of Hell? That is the question. Up to a point, only, is “evil” for Laming what it is for Dick Bartleton. And I am sure the latter would be apt to welcome as a Saviour what in Laming’s eyes would be the Fiend. Their resemblances and differences are equally striking, the simple—not to say simpliste—contrast of the rich man and the poor man—the Haves and the Have-nots would hardly suffice as a complete picture of the ills of the world for Laming: though (in the above quotation) the instigators of the coal wars, the copper wars, and the umbrella wars are the same as they would be for Bartleton. There, their villains would be the same villains. Laming is interested in many more things than the other and he worries about many more things. In the end, his economics do become hostile to any cut-and-dried “working-class-in-power” theorists. That is not because the working-class is not in his heart: but talking about that exclusively is a way of banishing so many other questions.

  I stayed at “The Maid’s Head” at Meldrum that night, having arranged for a car to call at ten, for the five-or six-mile drive to Ketwood. During breakfast a man at a neighbouring table addressed some remarks to me, and after a little he said he was a farmer. His farm was in Northampton. He had just returned from a holiday at Bournemouth. And now he had somehow got to Meldrum—perhaps sightseeing, hoping to see the famous Caves. It transpired that he was fond of music. We are all of course devoted to it—except when someone in the next flat turns on a radio—which is mostly off and on all day—and music is certainly the noisiest of the arts. But this man played himself.

  His instrument was the violin which he practised from two to six hours daily. I asked him if he had any stock. No, he had no stock. “Not a horse?” At the word horse this musical farmer’s big red shiny face (oval in shape with a small dark moustache) acquired an expression at once surprised an
d disgusted. “No, I would not have a horse on the place,” he told me. When I asked why, the main reason seemed to be because it was an animal. Horses had to be fed and cleaned, at awkward hours—in the early morning for instance. A hired man had to get to the farm before anyone else was up if one had a horse (while one was still dreaming in a Heal bed of Beethoven Quartets) and the hired man didn’t like it either.

  It was a new experience for me encountering prosperous middle-aged farmers, with oiled hair but tight and ungainly clothes—far from their farms, drifting around the countryside en touriste with a favourite pet hound and (doubtless) a violin-case.

  As to the driver of the car who took me to Ketwood after breakfast—a man of robust intelligence—his views on the modern farmer were extreme in character and communicated with great readiness. There was nothing he could find too bad to say about the modern farmer. When I enquired if there was much stock in these parts he exclaimed derisively: “Stock?” No, he said, no young farmer would have anything to do with stock. They did everything, the farmers of today, on their backsides on a machine. Sowing, reaping, hoeing, harrowing, ploughing, was all done with a machine. As to the combine harvester, there is no more criticised implement, and he had plenty to say about that. Only signing a cheque couldn’t be done with a machine—and that was all the work a young farmer ever did, and it was as much as he could manage.

  Rymer had insisted that the farms must be run as factories. Since the poetry of farming has vanished, or is vanishing, anyway, it does not seem to matter very much if collective farming is introduced at once. It would, of course, be more economic. I would never sacrifice poetry to economics. But since there is no poetry! To this, however, Laming would not agree, though he confirmed that the young farmers were very averse to having stock. Those large work-making quadrupeds, horses and cattle, were universally unpopular in this neighbourhood. But my driver was an almost Ruskinian “reactionary”: of the new-fangled schools the Government were introducing he disapproved as much as did Laming, though no doubt for different reasons.

  Ketwood Vicarage is not screened from the road. The front door was open and the sound of the car’s arrival brought to the door a small shirt-sleeved reddish man—with the general working-class appearance imposed on a class whose stipend amounts to the earnings of a not very lucky railway porter. How much better, this, than the well-heeled patronising cleric of the past, who treated his villagers as if they were villeins and he a medieval abbot.

  This shirt-sleeved man, standing just inside his door, looked at me as I came up with some severity, indeed with suspicion and animosity. (I had not announced my arrival.) He stood there, his small head thrust forward in displeased enquiry. “Yes?” he said. “Mr. Laming?” said I. “That is my name,” said he, and stood frowning at me. And this is where I reach the part this young clergyman was playing in the civil war between the old order and the new order. He was in the midst of an encounter with the Socialist Government: the issue that of the continued existence of the Village School. In respect to that he stood for the old order: for the Family against the State, and he mistook me, at first, for an emissary of the Socialists. Such persons were often despatched from the offices of the local education Czar, and even from London itself, to harry, to intimidate or to cajole. How he received these officers might be judged from his bellicose attitude as in the present instance he stood on guard just inside his front door.

  It is amusing to compare the weight of the respective parties to this battle. On the one side is the terrible colossus of socialism: on the other this frail, impecunious, clerc. It is extraordinary how this small animal, without I expect any serious backing, can defy the omnipotent State—even if it is only as yet omnipotent-in-the-making. But he is possessed of a great deal of will and his entire being has been hardened into a resistant human particle in the social body by the agency of an economic creed both aggressive and unorthodox. It is, of course, the Christian ethic, as interpreted by this professional of religion, which has produced an unbreakable belief, at once mystical and practical. He believes—in as radical a sense as that of physical apprehension—that it is an evil impulse on the part of the Government to break up the villages and to turn all of England into a factory—to break up the home of the peasant—to work for the destruction of the Family. Two creeds combine to assure him of the malignity of this action.

  Laming is much younger than the other clergyman of whom I have written, much more the modern intellectual. His wife is a very handsome young woman, with the brave and simple carriage of the head, the fresh fair skin, of a pre-Raphaelite creation. So he is not, after all, alone in his village-school battle. And he has a perfect army of chickens, geese, ducks, and goats. This host is visible the moment you step out of the road into the Vicarage precinct. A background as reassuring as a private army. His wife rather weakened this impression for me, however, by complaining that he would never allow any of the birds to be killed!

  The London papers had most of them carried accounts of the struggle going on in the villages—for the vicar of Ketwood was not the only resister—against the closing of the village schools and setting up in their place of the “Central Rural Primary Schools”. Press photographs had made me familiar with the “dauntless breast” of this village champion. I had read how when the village school had been closed in accordance with the decree of the central authorities, the vicar, acting for the parents of the children, had set up a village school of his own in the Church House. That was about all I knew concerning my host (for as soon as we had reached his living-room he asked me if I would have lunch, and I most gratefully agreed to do so). My sociological curiosity had been aroused by this showdown between Family and State, one of the major issues in the present collectivization of our society, if it is not the greatest of all. Laming’s own words may be quoted in this connection. “In this small matter of the Parents’ School,” he writes, “we can see huge issues at stake.” And this is certainly no exaggeration.

  Later I shall be making use of his circumstantial report more fully, but at this point I will quote from the opening pages. It will provide what is needed by way of background to this storm in a tea-cup. Here are his words:

  “During the war, the village schoolmistress and her assistant were reinforced by a third teacher to deal with the evacuees. They had a hard struggle with the uncultivated city children. There is no one rich in the place, and the local people had known many years of acutest depression, but they retained a culture of the fields which had no trace of servility, or of city slickness. After the war, the headmistress was specially commended for her notable work. When we came to the village, the evacuees were leaving and the third teacher soon took another post. A scullery had been added and a sand-pit.

  “It would have been in 1946 that the children over eleven were suddenly told that they were to attend a central school, at Blatchover, to which they would be driven by car. This event caused little stir in the village, and mothers felt that their children would have better opportunities at a larger school. As it turned out, we should probably have been wise to have made a strong protest at the time: this would have been, I suppose, good politics.

  “This left about thirty children at the village school, and they were divided into two classes, the upper of which held children between seven and ten. The children left when they reached eleven. Several of the older children have told me, without being asked, that they would much rather have continued their education at Ketwood. I believe the head-master of Blatchover at the time, a man of great experience and ability, thought that they would have been as well in their own village. But working teachers have little say in educational policy. Some of the parents complained about their children having to wait for the car in bad weather. But parents have even less say in their children’s education than the teachers. The whole organization is in the hands of a few experts, assisted by an army of clerks. We were to learn what ‘Stateism’ could mean, and to hear a great deal about the ‘expert’ whose wor
d was law.

  “But on the whole no one was very worried about the more distant education of the children over eleven. We still had our headmistress and her assistant, and the school was in excellent repair. When school time was over, the children had the freedom of many acres for their playground, and rarely abused it.

  “Early in 1947 we read in a local newspaper that Ketwood Council School was scheduled for closure in the Ladbrokeshire Educational Committee’s Development plan. This was the first warning, and the village reacted sharply.

  “It might make matters clearer to explain briefly the educational set-up of this county. The County Council has many committees, and one of the most important is the Education Committee. The Education Committee has power to co-opt, and divides the county into three for educational administration. The committee appoints an Education Officer for the County, whom we will call Mr. Ladbrokeshire, and officers in charge of each division. Ketwood falls into the mid-Ladbrokeshire division, and the immediate supervisor for education is the Mid-Ladbrokeshire Education Officer. These officers, needless to say, have a tidy salary, and the mid-Ladbrokeshire officer alone—Mr. Mid, we can call him—has thirty-two secretaries, housed in a Georgian mansion.

  “The teachers have no effective organization that deals with educational policy, nor do the parents. In other words, the children’s education is in the hands of a few ‘experts’ with a nominal check that the committee can apply. Committees usually back their paid officials, we found. The teachers have, if not a fear, at least a great respect for these officials, in whose appointment they have no voice and over whose policy they have no control. This, of course, robs the teaching profession of its integrity, and the officials doubtless know how to indicate the big stick of finance in their cupboard. All of the committee might be, or have been, practising teachers, but this does not prevent the profoundest cleavage between ‘expert-teacher’ and ‘working-teacher’. The expert is, in fact, master of the situation instead of servant, while the parents who might be allowed some ‘representation’ have no voice whatsoever.