Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  ‘Bwavo!’ cries loyal Freddie, ‘and here’s a telegwam to say that thwee of the customers you were wesponsible for have died of lung cancer. Blooded at last, Simon – now you’re weally one of us!’

  (1962)

  A farewell to arms

  I’m glad the Pope’s against war. Because so am I, and so is Horace Morris, and so are quite a number of other people I know.

  The Pope and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I’m bound to admit that on this one I think he’s got hold of the right end of the stick. ‘No more war, war never again …’ as he told the assembled delegates at the UN. ‘If you wish to be brothers, let the arms fall from your hands.’ It touched a chord. In fact, judging by the headlines and the discussions on television, it seems to have evoked widespread acknowledgement and admiration, and no disagreement at all.

  All the same, I think it is only fair to point out that the Pope was not the first to declare himself in favour of peace. The previous week very similar views were expressed by Mr Patrick McGoohan, described as Britain’s highest-paid television actor, in an interview in TV Times.

  Mr McGoohan was being interviewed by Iain Sproat (who, the TV Times was careful to point out, was educated at Winchester and Oxford, so you can be pretty sure he got it down right). ‘We were once talking,’ writes Mr Sproat, ‘about the totally hypothetical question of what he would do were he Prime Minister. I remember he said nothing for a moment, and then:

  ‘“I would be overwhelmed with fear, but if I were, I would try to get everyone to cease combat just for one minute. Just peace on earth for one minute! It’s a fairy tale but you never know. It would feel so good that they might not start again.”’

  Harold Wilson must be kicking himself. Not once does it seem to have occurred to him to arrange a trial run of peace on earth! That’s why they pay Mr McGoohan so much as an actor – to keep him out of politics.

  Now I’m not for a moment accusing the Pope of lifting Mr McGoohan’s ideas. I don’t suppose he even set eyes on a copy of last week’s TV Times. By some fluke Mr McGoohan missed the headlines – ‘MCGOOHAN CALLS FOR PEACE ON EARTH,’ ‘CEASE COMBAT, URGES HIGHEST-PAID TV ACTOR’ – and the Pope collected all the glory for much the same idea. Like Darwin and Wallace discovering evolution. Just one of those coincidences.

  ‘Hasn’t this peace business been around before?’ asked my friend Horace Morris, as we sat discussing the history of ideas, in the way we often do. ‘Weren’t there some rather scruffy people you and I knocked around with in our youth who used to walk about the roads every Easter saying roughly, in effect, let the arms fall from your hands?’

  ‘You mean the Aldermaston marchers?’

  ‘That’s right. Very statesmanlike of them, one realises now. Tremendous sense of moral leadership they were showing.’

  ‘Good heavens, Horace, that was a different matter altogether! They were just a bunch of vague, muddleheaded idealists!’

  ‘Not statesmanlike at all?’

  ‘Certainly not. They weren’t making a broad appeal to the hearts and minds of mankind – they were trying to get our own Government to disarm! That’s politics, Horace. We’d have weakened our strategic posture against Communist intimidation.’

  ‘But haven’t the Communists been coming out for peace themselves recently, in a rather broad, statesmanlike way?’

  ‘Broadish, I suppose, Horace. But what the Communists mean by peace is peace in circumstances favourable to the spread of Communist ideas and influence.’

  ‘Whereas the Pope means peace in circumstances favourable to the spread of anti-Communist ideas and influence?’

  ‘I should think that’s what he means, Horace. He doesn’t specify, of course – he’s had the sense not to get bogged down in particularities and details. But I don’t suppose he means “Let the arms fall from your hands, and let the Communists peacefully take over South-East Asia.” There’s peace and peace, as I’m sure the Pope would be the first to recognise.’

  ‘What he’s telling us is “Let the arms fall from your hands, but go on defending freedom against tyranny and the rule of law against lawlessness”?’

  ‘As it were.’

  ‘By virtue as it were of the tyrants and outlaws responding to this broad supranational appeal too?’

  ‘Exactly, as it were.’

  ‘He sees both sides of the question?’

  ‘I think seeing both sides of the question is his strong point, Horace. For instance, you remember he said he was against birth control?’

  ‘I was a little worried by that, I must admit.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but at the same time, Horace, he came out very strongly against people going hungry.’

  ‘I see what you mean. The broad view? The bipartisan approach?’

  ‘Quite. In fact, he advised people to make new efforts to increase the world’s food supply. Rather a bright idea, don’t you think?’

  ‘I see what you mean. Really, short of doing anything it lies in his power to do, like changing his mind about birth control, he’s doing everything he can.’

  (1965)

  51 to Blangy

  Another kilometre stone coming up … 51 to Blangy-le-Duc. Superb views on either side of the road, any of which we could stop and look at if we chose. Delightful sensation of being captain of one’s own destiny. Muse on therapeutic effect car has on human ego. One’s choice potential is extended, and … Become conscious of wife asking question. Stop musing. Listen.

  ‘… Just thinking why don’t we stop along here somewhere and look at the view?’

  Stop? Of course. Could easily, anywhere. With so many superb views, only difficulty to know where. Not there, obviously – right next to electric pylon. And not there, clearly – two cars there already. Now a very narrow bit with nowhere to pull off the road. Just get this stretch over and look again.

  Now, slow. That spot would have been all right anywhere else, but not quite as good as some of the places we passed a mile or two back. What’s that hooting behind? Good God, lorry I overtook five minutes ago trying to overtake me! Damned liberty! If I go back to my normal speed, like this, you’ll realise what a big mistake you’re making, my friend.

  ‘That looked quite a good place.’

  ‘What? Oh, I didn’t see it. Not worth going back, is it?’

  Rather dull stretch here. Kilometre post coming up. Still 48 kilometres to Blangy-le-Duc. Hm. Now 11.30, so must have been averaging scarcely 60 kilometres an hour since St-Sévère. If it’s the same sort of road ahead, that means we shan’t be at Blangy until about 12.15. Then it’s about, say, 70 kilometres from Blangy to Le Hoquet – say, 1.30. Then, say, half an hour for …

  ‘Aren’t you going to stop, then?’

  ‘Um? Stop?’

  … half an hour for lunch. Say two o’clock. Then round about 100 kilometres from Le Hoquet to Pisaller. Say …

  ‘To look at the view.’

  ‘What view? Rather seedy bit here.’

  … say four o ‘clock, allowing a bit of time in hand, which will give us about two hours to get down to Uze …

  ‘Perhaps we ought to stop in Blangy instead, then.’

  ‘Is there something we ought to see there?’

  ‘Fifteenth-century castle, Romanesque cathedral, musée gastronomique, and traditional slipper-weaving industry.’

  Just a moment, what does that kilometre stone say? Blangy 45. Must stop looking at kilometre stones. Tedious obsession. Still, done those three kilometres in just under three minutes. If we kept that up we’d make Blangy at say 12.05, and Le Hoquet at …

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. Yes.’

  … Le Hoquet at, say, 1.15. Though not if we’re stopping at Blangy, of course. Forgotten that. Throws the whole calculation right out.

  ‘We don’t want to stop very long at Blangy, do we?’

  ‘We ought to look at it for a bit, oughtn’t we?’

  Let’s see. Say 10 minutes for the Romanesque cathedr
al, 10 minutes for the museum, five minutes for the castle -oh, say about 30 minutes altogether. Here’s another kilometre stone coming up. Won’t look this time. Well, perhaps just this once. Forty-three! Two kilometres in two and a half minutes! That means we shan’t he at Blangy until about 12.20, and. if we stop for half an hour, that means 2.10, no, 2.20 at Le Hoquet and … Must explain all this carefully to wife.

  ‘I was just thinking, we don’t really want to look round, a museum in this heat, do we? What do you think?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Cut the museum, then. After all, we’ve got 170 solid kilometres to do between Blangy and Pisaller. What’s that in miles? Multiply by eight and divide by five: 270 miles. 270 miles! God, it can’t be! Can it?

  ‘I was thinking, perhaps we ought to give the traditional bedsock factory a miss. After all, we did spend at least half an hour looking round Cahiers yesterday. No one could accuse us of -well, I don’t know, whatever anyone might start accusing us of. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

  Cut the bedsock works, then. That saves us, what, 15 minutes? So we should reach Le Hoquet at … Did I say 270 miles? I must have meant 170 miles, or 270 kilometres. Mustn’t I? Still, either way …

  ‘We saw a Romanesque cathedral yesterday at Cahiers, didn’t we?’

  ‘Did we? I thought it was a Gothic bell-tower we saw at Cahiers.’

  Gothic bell-tower …? Watch out, another kilometre stone coming up. No, no! Must stop looking at the damn things!

  ‘Perhaps you’d rather not stop at Blangy at all?’

  ‘Of course we must stop there. We don’t want to go charging across the country without ever seeing anything, do we? We’re not in a charabanc. It’s just that I don’t want to spend the whole damned holiday looking at Romanesque cathedrals, that’s all …’

  ‘Two in ten days is scarcely …’

  ‘Two? What was that thing we drove past in the rain at Grince? Wasn’t that a Romanesque cathedral?’

  Have to stop at Blangy for petrol, anyway. Will it see us through the 270 kilometres to Pisaller if we get 20 litres, plus the gallon and a half in the tank now, less the 40 kilometres from here to Blangy at 38 miles per gallon? Let’s see, 20 divided by about 42.5, plus or minus 40 times 5 divided by 8 multiplied by 38. No, no …

  ‘Look out!’

  ‘All right, all right. I could see him perfectly well, I assure you.’

  I suppose if it’s a fifteenth-century castle … Perhaps we could just find a petrol station where we could see the castle without getting out of the car. Now, say we stopped for 10 minutes. In English minutes, that’s 10 times 5 over 8, say 61 minutes. Or do I mean 16 kilominutes? If I could just work that out in cathedrals per litre …

  (1962)

  57 types of ambiguity

  To the Pope and his advisers, the subject of contraception seems to be what power politics were to Shakespeare, or Nature was to the Romantics – an inexhaustible inspiration to the most profound and astonishing literary utterance.

  Again and again, reading the works of the Papal school on the subject, one is struck by their universality, their fertile ambiguity, their articulation of feelings and experiences for which one has never before found words.

  Take just for a start the minority report of the Pope’s advisory commission. The Church’s traditional position on contraception must be right, the four dissenting members are said to have argued, ‘because the Catholic Church … could not have so wrongly erred during all these centuries of its history.’

  Heavens, but that touches a chord! I feel they’ve seen into my soul! In one sentence those good and holy men have captured the inmost logic of my attitude to politics, religion – indeed, contraception itself. They’ve cut through all the specious tangle of particular argument I might have used, and located the unacknowledged real one – that I’ve thought what I’ve thought about these subjects since the age of 16 or 17, and I just can’t have been wrong for all those years.

  Of course, a process does sometimes occur which, seen from the outside, might be described as changing one’s mind. But somehow it doesn’t feel like that inside. Indeed, what it does feel like was beyond the range of language until the Vatican Press officer got to work on it.

  He was asked, according to George Armstrong, the Rome correspondent of the Guardian, to elucidate the Pope’s statement last October – that while he needed more time to study the question of contraception, this didn’t mean that the Church’s teachings on the subject were in a state of doubt.

  ‘The teaching of the Church,’ explained the Press officer, ‘is now in a state of certainty. After the Pope completes his study of the matter, the Church will move from one state of certainty to another state of certainty.’

  Yes! That’s how it is – that’s exactly how it is! You’re going along in a complete state of certainty about something – the ludicrousness of Victorian architecture, say, or the moral inferiority of television – and everyone you know thinks the same.

  Then various public crackpots start saying the opposite. Victorian architecture ought to be preserved, they bleat; television culture involves the whole man in a way that the print culture does not. You enjoy a good laugh at their antics. Then some of the people you know start falling for the same nonsense themselves! It doesn’t bring one’s own views into any state of doubt, of course. But then one day one hears oneself talking about the subject – and one realises that somehow, quite unconsciously, one has completed one’s study of the matter and moved without a break to another and indeed opposite state of certainty!

  So multi-levelled and many-faceted does the Pope himself wax on the subject that no one can tell whether he is still in the first state of certainty, or whether he has already moved on to the second. All that’s certain is that something is certain – ‘It is certain that,’ he wrote in his encyclical ‘On the development of peoples.’ But what? ‘It is certain the public authorities can intervene, within the limit of their competence, by favouring the availability of appropriate information and by adopting suitable measures …

  Many people, including apparently the director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, believe this means that the Governments of the overpopulated countries should start actually handing out the suitable means (though whether in this case the suitable means are the sort which are digested through the proper channels, or the sort which are inserted in the appropriate place, is another rich field for speculation).

  But according to an unsigned article in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, described by the paper as ‘authoritative,’ this understanding of the encyclical is entirely wrong. When the Pope talks of ‘suitable measures,’ the article argues, he means growing more food; when he says that the authorities should ‘favour the availability of appropriate information,’ he means that they ‘must inform the country of its population problem.’

  My personal interpretation – and here I follow Sprout and Trouncer – is that the encyclical is so rich in meaning that it means both these things. And yet … neither. Only somehow … more, much more.

  For isn’t what the Pope is stating here really the general and unalterable moral rules governing suitable measures of every sort, and the availability of appropriate information whatever its subject? However many states of certainty we move through, two great moral beacons will guide us: if ever the question arises of what one should do about the availability of appropriate information, the answer is plain – favour it! And if ever a suitable measure crosses one’s path – adopt it!

  If only the gentlemen who wrote the Bible had been able to rise to this level of universality, how much less open to carping criticism it would be today! Really, it would be worth re-writing it from page one:

  ‘In the beginning the Competent Authority took certain steps.

  ‘And the resultant state of affairs was without form, and void; and an unavailability of the appropriate inform
ation was upon the face of the steps. And the Competent Authority studied the question.

  ‘And the Competent Authority said, Let further measures be adopted: and further measures were adopted.

  ‘And the Competent Authority saw the further measures, that they were suitable: and the Competent Authority divided the measures from the steps.

  ‘And the Competent Authority called the measures one thing, and the steps he called another. And what with one thing and another it was the first move in the right direction …’

  (1967)

  Firm friends of ours

  We’ve just had another of our regular visits from Christopher and Lavinia Crumble, our private consumer research, marriage guidance, home heating, and child welfare advisory service.

  They come in about once a month and straighten us out. What I admire about them is their tremendous firmness in dealing with us. It’s no good just offering vague suggestions to feckless problem families like us. You’ve got to tell us exactly what to do, and then you’ve to damn well stand over us and make sure we do it.

  With their great sense of social responsibility and their unbounded moral energy, the Crumbles usually set to work even before they are through the front door.

  ‘I see you’ve still got one of these old-fashioned locks,’ says Christopher. ‘You realise that any half-wit burglar could pick this with a bent pin and a nail-file in about five seconds flat? Couldn’t he, darling?’

  ‘Christopher will give you the addsess of the firm that imports those new draught-proof Swiss micro-precision locks,’ says Lavinia. ‘Won’t you, darling?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll give their local office a ring tomorrow and get them to send you a fitter round right away. No, no – no trouble at all. Is it, darling?’

  Christopher has scarcely had time to make a note in his diary before Lavinia has stepped back in amazement. Oh God, the doormat! We’ve forgotten about the doormat!