Politeness hangs in the air these days even when there’s no one there to utter it. It’s not just switchboard operators who thank you for calling them – so do answering machines. Slot machines thank you for putting money into them. Tills send you courteous little bread-and-butter letters, as if you’d had them to stay for the weekend.
Towns and villages have been welcoming arriving motorists for many years – even at night, even in the rain, when there’s no one around, and all the petrol stations and cafés are shut. But now so do railway stations. Welcome to Wolverhampton (High Level)! they cry silently. Welcome to West Wittering! The grimy paintwork is attempting to smile, the empty fire-buckets seem to be offering flowers. As they get the technology of politeness better even small suburban stations, deserted in the freezing dusk, will bank up the fire in the waiting-room for us. Invite us to stay to dinner with the vending machine. They are but humble establishments, notices will explain, but we should be welcome to share their modest fare, if we don’t mind a simple bag of crisps, perhaps washed down with a cup of the local instant tea, or instant cocoa if we’d be kind enough to press the button on the right. They would account it an honour if we would spend the night on one of their broken benches, alongside any other derelicts who haven’t yet been moved on by the police.
They do mean it all, do they? They’re not just saying these things?
I’d be happier if they could offer us some reassurance about the spirit they were saying them in. ‘You are kindly welcomed,’ the notices on the stations might say. ‘You are eloquently thanked,’ the till receipts might cry. ‘And we say this with absolute sincerity and deep conviction! If we had eyes there would be real tears in them! If we had hearts they would be overflowing most painfully! How can mere stove-enamelled signs, mere scraps of printed paper, adequately bear witness to the turbulence of the emotions surging through our keyboards, raging through our public conveniences? You are kindly requested to look in the till and see for yourself how full its heart is! You are benevolently begged to listen to the wind howling through the broken windows of the ticket-office, and hear for yourself its genuine sense of pain!’
And, finally convinced, we should fold the receipts carefully away next to our hearts, and press our lips against Network SouthEast’s cold and rainswept logo.
(1994)
The normal fifth
The normal home contains a pet, and the normal pet is a cat or a budgerigar, according to the statistics in the Official Handbook published by the Central Office of Information. The normal man, it appears, spends the normal evening at home with his cat or his budgerigar in front of his television set.
The leader-writer in the Daily Mail is appalled by the piture the figures conjure up. ‘What a miserable collection of stick-in-the-muds we are!’ he writes. ‘Why don’t we go out and enjoy ourselves? Why don’t we throng the streets, talk to our neighbours, or sit about in cafés just looking at people?’
Sit about in cafés just looking at people? Sit about in which cafés, just looking at what people? In the Nell Gwynne Tea Shoppe in the High Street? Looking at old Mrs Poorly and her friend Ida Know eating buttered scones?
And throng which streets, pray? Throng Delamere Gardens, NW12? Throng Jubilee Road, Screwe? There are some streets which in my experience are really pretty well unthrongable.
Anyway, whatever the pleasures of street-thronging, it’s ‘splendidly normal people’ that the National Children Adoption Association are looking out for to become adoptive parents, according to the secretary in The Times. What seems splendidly normal to the NCAA turns out to be remarkably similar to what seems normal to the Central Office of Information, except that the NCAA’s standards of normality are so searching that only one in five of their applicants turns out to be splendidly normal enough to qualify. The ideal couple, says the secretary, probably live in the outer suburbs, and have a middle-sized detached or semi-detached house with a garden. ‘They are splendidly normal people, in good health and completely without neuroses now or in the past. He probably goes up to the City every day and she has no ambitions outside her home and her family. They usually have a pet – a cat or a budgerigar – and they don’t have a lot of outside interests. But this doesn’t mean to say they need to be exactly dull.’
Of course, when one hears about all the splendidly normal people like this, one cannot help worrying once again about the abnormal ones, and what can be done to help them. Because, let’s face it, there are abnormal people around; we can’t just shrug the problem off and pretend they don’t exist.
Some of them have only mild abnormalities, such as living in large houses, or keeping dogs, which might disqualify them from adopting children, but which need not otherwise prevent them leading decent and useful lives.
But a few of them do suffer from gross abnormalities, like not working in the City. Progel, in ‘The Abnormal Englishman,’ identifies this condition as dysmetropolia, and attributes it to the absence or inadequacy of the patient’s uncle-figures during adolescence. He sees working in other parts of the country as a subconscious evasion of reality – a symptom of neurosis allied to, and often co-present with, neurotic manifestations such as dropping aitches, doing manual work and playing out masochistic guilt-fantasies by refusing to earn a normal middle-sized salary.
Hergstrom takes a more radical view. He believes that everyone, however disturbed, knows somewhere inside him that he works in the City and lives in a middle-sized suburban house with a budgerigar, and that delusions to the contrary are merely hysterical.
McStride and Leastways, in their classic study ‘Behaviour Patterns of Budgerigarlessness,’ put more emphasis on learned reflexes. One of their most grossly disturbed patients presented an extraordinary range of symptoms. He lived in a terraced house in Sheffield, worked in a factory, and confessed that he often went out in the evening.
McStride and Leastways achieved a partial cure by attaching electrodes to the patient, and administering painful electric shocks when he went to work, and when he came home, and when he went out again at night. After prolonged treatment the patient moved to Nottingham, which was at any rate 37 miles along the road to recovery from his dysmetropolia. (When last heard of he was undergoing further conditioning therapy to overcome his irrational dread of electricity.)
The abnormality symptoms presented by women can sometimes be even more serious. In his survey of married women arrested for reading in Beckenham Public Library, Didbold estimates that there may be as many as 200 or even 300 married women in this country suffering from ambitions outside the home and family.
According to Meany, outside ambitions in women are the result of emotional deprivation in infancy, possibly aggravated by over-intense educational experience. He wants the Government to launch a crash programme for the early detection of unnatural ambition, and warns that if nothing is done the country may in a year or two’s time face a full-scale epidemic.
In both men and women, ambitions and interests outside the home tend to be the most dangerous abnormalities, if allowed to go unchecked. Strabolgi, for instance, has demonstrated a definite correlation between extra-domiciliary interests and certain forms of criminal behaviour. In his sample of 317 men and women in the Barnet area, not one committed burglary, simony, or robbery with violence while sitting at home watching the television.
It’s true that 14 were later convicted of tax offences, six of wounding their wives, and one of strangling his budgerigar.
But that’s normal.
(1967)
Now then
My feeling that archaeology is not so much an exact science as a sort of high-class blind man’s buff has been considerably fortified by the Knossos affair. Professor L. R. Palmer has just proved that Knossos in Crete was not, as had been supposed, the cradle of European civilisation, but simply another offshoot of the Mycenaean Empire on the Greek mainland.
Apparently Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, grossly misreported what he found, and as a result dated
it all some two hunded years too early. Even leaving misreporting aside, the archaeological evidence from which the course of prehistory is deduced is dark, ambiguous stuff. One of the clues which put Professor Palmer on the trail in the Knossos case, for example, was a sentence in a Minoan Linear B script from another site which had previously been translated as ‘Aigeus the Cretan brought it’ but which he amended after further study of the handwriting to ‘of Cretan workmanship with goats’ head handles’.
You can see the difficulties facing archaeologists by imagining what they will conclude when, 2,000 years from now, they dig down through the hundred feet of soil which covered Britain after the Great Nuclear War in 1965, and excavate what turns out to be the remains of your house. Professor Snodgrass’s report runs (as closely as it will go in English):
The excavation was our first glimpse into that period of prehistory about which almost nothing is known, the Neoplastic Age. Although only a few fragments of the site were intact, we were fortunate enough to find several letter-containers (not unlike our modern envelopes) obviously addressed to the Neoplastic occupant of the site, which established his identity as a man called On Her Majesty’s Service.
On Her Majesty’s Service, or On as he was probably called for short, was clearly a priest, and the building he occupied a temple. Several things point to this – particularly the steel box found in one of the chambers which contained the mummified remains of offerings to the gods – the severed leg of a sheep and the carcase of a chicken, both of which seemed to have been subjected to some ritual treatment by fire. The box also contained an exquisitely worked glass container, presumably for holding holy oil, inscribed in raised letters with the magical rubric ‘United Dairies’.
In one of the chambers we found a letter that On had kept in its original envelope, which suggests he placed some considerable value on it. Professor Grabowski, our philologist, has been unable so far to translate it exactly, but the address at the top is clearly a town called Income Tax in the province of Demand Note.
Our most valuable find was perhaps that of the holy texts used in the temple – four enormous, closely printed volumes of verse in head-rhyme. They are as yet imperfectly understood, but Professor Grabowski believes he has isolated a primitive creation legend in one of them. The first few lines are reproduced below. (The expressions in the righthand column are probably responsions to be made by the congregation as the priest read aloud):
A1 Adhesives Ltd, Arlington Avenue Wks,
Arlington Av., N1 CANonbry 7126
A1 Bureau, 66 Peckham Rd, SE5 RODney 4581
A1 Café, 299 Borough High St, SE1 HOP 3294
There is no doubt about where the rites were performed – a small chamber set apart as a holy of holies, big enough for only the priest to enter. The central object in the chamber is a hollowed-out altar, about waist-high, and made of white porcelain. To it are affixed a pair of metal figurines representing seated gods, one inscribed with the name ‘Hot’, the other ‘Cold’.
It was perhaps fanciful, but as we stood in that holy place it required but little imagination to see before us On Her Majesty’s Service, one of the last Neoplastic men, offering up a sheep’s leg to the implacable Hot and Cold, chanting the endless litany of the Post Office Telephone Directory (London Postal Area), as the congregation in the outer chamber roared forth ‘CANonbry 7126 … RODney 4581 … HOP 3294 …’ It is of such moments of insight as these that the stuff of archaeology is woven.
(1960)
Oh, un peu, vous savez, un peu
Considering how much at home middle-class intellectuals like you and me feel in the presence of the middle-class intellectuals from the rest of Europe we meet on holiday, it’s astonishing how little we can actually communicate. Or, to put in another way, considering the ratio of effort to information in those long holiday sessions of laboured English or paraplegic French, it’s amazing we can go on seeing ourselves as having that broad understanding of the world we feel so comfortably in the abstract.
It’s different for the spying classes, of course. If the novels do not lie, any plain English spy having difficulties in Bulgaria, say, finds that the smattering of Bulgarian he picked up from collecting stamps as a boy is quite adequate for passing himself off as a used horse dealer from Plovdiv. And when in Chapter 16 he finds himself in the clutches of the notorious Bulgarian police chief, Colonel Khaskovo, communication doesn’t falter for an instant.
‘So, my friend,’ says Khaskovo in beautifully starched English, ‘your foolish inquisitiveness has necessitated our taking certain precautions. It grieves me deeply, believe me, that you will unfortunately not be in a position to appreciate the full fiendish ingenuity with which your so clumsy blunderings will be brought to an end.’
How different it all is when the kindly-looking lady at the next table in the pensione, whom one for some reason takes to be a German, tries to establish some elementary communication by showing a polite interest in one’s child. Taking one to be French, she remarks:
‘Quel âge?’
In any other circumstances the phrase would be transparently comprehensible. But somehow, spoken in an Italian pensione by a woman one takes to be German, a curious obscurity hangs over it. Kellarzh? Kellarzh? Ah, I see – ‘Qu’elle large!’ – obviously Teutonic pidgin French for ‘How wide she is!’
‘Er, ja,’ one says, tactfully helping the poor soul back into her native language.
‘Jahr? Ein Jahr?’
‘Ja. Er, ja.’
‘Ein Jahr! Fantastisch!’
‘Oh, Jahr. Er, nein Jahr. I mean …’
‘Nine Jahr? Neun year?’
‘Oh, nein, nein!’
‘Neun Monat? Neuf mois?’
‘Nein nine! I mean, nein neun. Nicht nein – er, neun. Er, excuse me – ich muss à la plage, er, gehen.’
Of course, one gets beyond this stage, because the woman and her husband (who are in fact Psychomanian) turn out to speak quite good English. But the further one gets beyond, the heavier the going becomes. For one curious thing, they admire and wish to discuss a whole Pantheon of famous Englishmen of whom one has never oneself heard.
What do we think of Spencer Philips, the philosopher? Oh, really? In their country he is very widely read. How privileged we are to belong to the nation that has produced Gordon Roberts, the great modern dramatist, and Philip Gordons, the celebrated novelist. No? In their country even the children read translations of them. We shall be saying next that we have never heard of Gordon Spencer, the sociologist, or the world-famous Spencer Roberts, whose political writings have had such an influence on modern Psychomanian thinking!
One tries to return the national compliment, by expressing one’s admiration for that grand old man of Psychomanian letters, Sigismund Cortex. Or does one mean Siegfried Catalept? Either way they haven’t heard of him.
Worse, whatever level a conversation starts on, it soon comes sprawling down among an unavoidable undergrowth of explanation and counter-explanation. One may start by talking about the ethical well-springs of government, say, but within minutes one is down with one’s face in this sort of mud:
‘Ah, I must explain. In our country, in each small part of land we have committee governing. What is this called in English?’
‘Rural district councils, perhaps?’
‘Rura distry council. Yes. In each divided part of land is rura distry council. But in the towns also is rura distry council.’
‘No, in the towns we call them urban district councils. Or do I mean borough councils?’
‘Yes. Of course, the urban distry councils are the underdogs – idiomatic word I learned – the underdogs of the rura distry councils.’
‘Oh, no.’
‘In our country oh yes. In our country in the country – can I say that? – is also what you call country councils. But I think our country councils are not just the same as your country councils. I must explain …’
I sometimes wonder if Colonel Khaskovo and his f
riend were correctly reported. What the dreaded Bulgarian police chief really said, I suspect, in the confusion of at last confronting the British master-spy in the secret atomic pile was:
‘Mein Gott! Wer ist dies?’
‘Wer?’ repeats the British master of espionage stupidly, his grasp of German interrogative pronouns slipping somewhat in the stress of the moment. ‘Dies ist die Pile.’
‘D. Pile?’ repeats the Colonel, momentarily taken aback. ‘Nicht J. Standish, of British Intelligence?’
‘Oh, who, ich?’
‘O. Whuish or J. Standish is no matter. Lay down your arms and put up your arms. Can I say that?’
‘Hands.’
‘Ah, hands, yes. I must explain. I have a firehand here, and if you are not putting up your arms I will pull the – what is in English the little thing hereunder which when one is pulling it makes bang bang …?’
Yes, as our wonderful English poet Markson Spencer said: North is north and south is south/ They can only talk with their foot in their mouth.
(1962)
On the receiving end
I see … I see … Yes, yes … I see …
Oh, really …? Is that so …?
I see … I see …! Good Lord …! Good God …!
No …! Heavens …! Really …? No …!
You didn’t …! Did you …? How fantastic …!
Of course … Oh, naturally …
Fantastic … No …! Incredible …!
An albatross …! Blow me …!
This is an extract from my long poem: ‘The Rime of the Wedding-Guest’. My intention is that it should be recited, or rather murmured, simultaneously with the recitation of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ as a sort of accompanying ostinato.
Collected Columns Page 25