After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Such a bizarre phenomenon could hardly be expected to survive in the second half of the twentieth century, but strangely enough, in some respects, it did. Only in twenty-first-century Britain did the hereditary peers cease to sit, as of right, in the second parliamentary chamber.

  In spite of the state socialism of Attlee’s government, the House of Lords went on, the huge bulk of land in Britain continued to be owned by the old landed classes, and the hereditary principle remained intact. Some people suppose that the hereditary principle is limited to the upper class. This is not true, as a visit to any part of Britain would have shown you in the years immediately after the Second World War. The local factory, unless one of the huge conglomerates such as ICI, would almost certainly be called Someone or Another and Sons. Most of the manufacturing base of Britain, until the growth of corporate and conglomerate firms in the 1960s, consisted of family businesses – the brewers, the bakers, the potters, the shoemakers were X and Sons. Most farms were handed down from father to son through the generations, and this continued well into the 1950s and beyond. Even professional firms – banks, law firms, accountants, publishers – tended to be family-run, with one or another of the sons taking over the business when father grew too old or died. The vast majority of the clergy of the Church of England, until the 1950s, were sons of the clergy. Most doctors were doctors’ children. The same was true of almost all the shops in any British high street. The hereditary principle was the basic structure of British life, and it was much more fundamental, or durable, than any political system or set of ideologies. It was, in short, what Francis Crick called ‘the secret of life’.

  Life was austere in the years immediately following the war. Meat continued to be rationed until 1954. Sugar was rationed. There was not much variety in the diet. Housing was scarce. Few people, compared with today, owned a motor car. Television was rare. Foreign holidays were for the few, and severely limited by the amount of currency you were allowed to take out of the country. Luxuries were scarce. But there was a collective sense of relief in Britain that the country had come through the war, and that it had done so, whatever you may think of individual blots on the record such as the bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan, without fundamental moral disgrace. It had also done so with a quite astounding lack of disruption to the basic structure of life. All sorts of things had changed for ever, of course. There was no servant class any more – only the very rich or the very old-fashioned had butlers, and few in the middle class even had maids. Quite different attitudes to sex, marriage, class, politics either had been, or would be, adopted with the new postwar generation. Religion, in its organized forms, was on the verge of near-extinction. A vast change was preparing itself for British society which would only fully become clear in the 1960s.

  But politically no fundamental revolution had occurred. Fascism and communism had never been tried. State socialism of the Attlee/Stafford Cripps variety did not wish to intrude upon the basic structure of British life which was that privacy based on the family, and family life based upon privacy. The true monstrousness of the brigand states was that they had barged in upon the sacred hearth of the household gods. Children had been urged to spy upon parents. Casual remarks made at breakfast were repeated at school by zealous children. In the hateful and stupid doctrines of National Socialism the state even had the right to tell you whom you should and should not love or marry.

  For the Victorians, family became a nightmare. After the Victorians, it could be seen as a salvation. The rebellions against the family staged by such figures as Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, or as Sigmund Freud, had been daring, even liberating, when first proposed. After Hitler and Stalin, the family, however tyrannical, seemed a less unpleasant form of autocracy than the state.

  Porius, published in 1951, but begun ten years earlier, is the last great, though by no means the last, production of John Cowper Powys’s pen. It made something of a sensation when it was published, though there would be many to echo his remote cousin Rose Macaulay’s reaction: ‘I found it rather confused and confusing, to say the truth.’4 It is a huge book, well over 600 closely printed pages in its first published state (the publisher insisted upon heavy cuts) and nigh on 1,000 pages in its fuller version. It is subtitled ‘A Romance of the Dark Ages’ and it is the story of that transitional period of British history when the Roman Empire was unravelling, the Germanic tribes were preparing to take over not merely Europe, but Britain, and when King Arthur stands alone to hold the pass against their incursion. Even if one did not know that the book was begun at the time of Dunkirk, or thereabouts, the historical parallels between the time written and the time written about would be obvious. But the book is in no sense an allegory about the Second World War. It is, rather, a huge, albeit flawed, masterpiece about the British past, about the actual physical being of the island, its rocks, mountains, forests, animals; it is about its peoples – Pictish, Celtic, Romano-British and others. It is about religion and the part it plays both in the individual consciousness of people, and in their collective self-awareness. And it is, which makes it so timely a book, about what happens when civilizations go through huge changes; what survives, and what is disrupted, when empires fall and when whole peoples lose or change their faiths. In a period when Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity had failed to materialize – most people had simply become religionless, and the flourishing forms of Christianity seemed to be the fundamentalism of Billy Graham and of Pope Pius XII (who in 1950 declared infallibly that the Virgin Mary had ascended bodily into the sky like her Son) – these matters were timely; just as they were before, during and after the last tragic upsurge of Germanic tribal power; as they were when many in Britain felt their old ways of life being changed and threatened by the future. All these thoughts and preoccupations hover beneath the strange surface of Porius, which is also, like all Powys’s books, deeply concerned with the part played in human lives by sex.

  Though often associated with Nietzsche (Powys went to Germany to meet the philosopher’s villainous sister), John Cowper Powys was really most influenced, philosophically, by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Max Stirner (pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt). Stirner asserted that in a world of power struggles between classes and nations, the only true reality was the self, the individual ego with all its mysterious consciousness and ‘take’ on the world. The logical conclusion to be drawn from his work is that of anarchism. Powys is never more Stirnerish than when in Porius, he makes Merlin (Myrddin Wylt) have the following conversation with the strange little bisexual pageboy, Neb.

  ‘Listen, child. Do you think obedience is a good thing?’

  ‘Am I to say the truth?’

  ‘Of course’.

  And Neb, the son of Digon, boldly shook his impish head. ‘No master, I don’t. It’s what cruel people do to children and animals’.

  Neb goes on to ask Merlin what it is which turns a god into a devil. He receives the answer which is really Powys’s Credo:

  ‘Power, my son. Nobody in the world, nobody beyond the world, can be trusted with power, unless perhaps it be our mother the earth: but I doubt whether even she can. The Golden Age can never come again till governments and rulers and kings and emperors and priests and druids and gods and devils learn to un-make themselves as I did, and leave men and women to themselves! And don’t you be deceived, little one, by this new religion [i.e. Christianity’s] talk of “love”. I tell you wherever there is what they call love there is hatred too and a lust for obedience! What the world wants is more common-sense, more kindness, more indulgence, more leaving people alone. But let them talk! This new Three-in-One with its prisons and its love and its lies will only last two thousand years.’5

  An Anglophile such as Simone Weil (1909–1943), who died of tuberculosis and starvation in Ashford, Kent, during the war, believed that England had been exceptional among European powers in maintaining ‘a centuries-old tradition of liberty guaranteed by the authorities’.6 When sh
e came to London to work for the Free French she was struck by the fact that in the British constitution the chief power is vested in one who is all but powerless, the monarch. She found connections between this and the fact that Britain maintained traditions of liberty while Germany, Russia, France and other countries who had lost their monarchs had also lost freedom.

  If there was any truth in this very spiritual view of the constitutional monarchy, King George VI was a good representative of it. He was slight in figure. He could barely speak without a debilitating stammer. The film footage of him addressing the Fleet and being hardly able to get the words out was thought so damaging that it was not shown to the British public for four decades after his death. He was an edgy, bad-tempered and in many ways weak man, though passionately dutiful, a kind husband and father, and a devout Christian. He was also like so many of his subjects at this date a heavy cigarette-smoker, and it was obvious to his doctors that he was not to have a long life. The 2nd Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, a devoted courtier, revealed very touchingly the habit of mind which sees everything done by royal personages as heroic when he told his son: ‘As a result of the stress he was under the King used to stay up too late and smoked too many cigarettes – he literally died for England.’7 No one else who developed lung cancer as a result of smoking too much could be described as doing so ‘for England’, but there probably was a sense in which for the King it was true. Everything he did was for England; everything his daughter and heir, Princess Elizabeth, did, and has done, has been ‘for England’, or as we should say now for Britain and the Commonwealth. The peculiar emblematic existence of the royal family, the iconic role to which their political impotence has assigned them, makes the rhetoric true, for them, and it was certainly true in the 1950s for the huge majority of their subjects. In the reign of George VI this was especially true, since nationalistic feelings, and fear about the possibility of defeat at the hands of the Nazis, had been focused with the scorch of sunbeam through magnified glass on the little family – the King, with his haggard, perpetually worried expression, his unflappable round-faced wife, and the two little girls, one serious, pensive and dutiful, the other sometimes suppressing, sometimes not, the giggles.

  The little family alone against the world was a potent image for many Britons who had survived the war, and who now came together to share the austerity years, sometimes in a prefab, sometimes in a not very adequate flat, with rations still making diet meagre, and with all provisions scarce. One of the most brilliant evocations of those times is in Mary Norton’s novel for children The Borrowers, published in 1952. The Borrowers are little people who survive behind the wainscoting in a large old house. If you have ever wondered why you lose gloves, safety-pins, old corks, handkerchiefs, the answer could be that they have been ‘borrowed’ by these strange beings, who are the same shape as human beings, and indeed have all the human characteristics except size. The house in the story used to be heavily populated with these Little People – the Harpsichords, who gave themselves airs, the Overmantels, the Sinks, the Rainpipes and the Broom-Cupboard Boys. But that was in the old days. Then, the Human Beans upstairs got a cat. Cousin Eggletina was seen no more. And little by little, the other Borrowers departed for other domiciles, leaving only the Clocks, the very limited Pod and Homily, and their daughter Arrietty. There is even the hint that the Borrowers used to be much bigger, but that by living so limited an existence they have shrunk, and that they might even now have reached the end of the line. Eventually Arrietty has an outburst – Oh, I know papa is a wonderful Borrower. I know we’ve managed to stay when all the others have gone. But what has it done for us in the end? I don’t think it’s so clever to live alone, for ever and ever, in a great big, half-empty house; under the floor with no one to talk to, no one to play with, nothing to see but dust and passages …’8

  Of course, it is not intended as a piece of political allegory, though the ingenious way in which Pod and Homily ‘make do’ with the cast-offs of the Human Beans surely does reflect the resourcefulness of British families during the austerity years, and the terrible moment at the end when Mrs Driver, the cook, rips up the floor and gets the rat-catcher to smoke the Borrowers out owes much to the British experience of losing houses and possessions through aerial bombardment. Many readers in 1952, however, the year of the book’s publication and of King George VI’s death, must have seen some parallel between Arrietty, last of her strange race and guardian of the Borrowers’ future, and the figure of Princess Elizabeth. George VI and Queen Elizabeth, partly at the government’s insistence, had kept their daughters as virtual prisoners in Windsor Castle during the war. Much of the time the princesses were underground, like the Borrowers, for fear of kidnap or death by enemy bombs, though later in the war Princess Elizabeth served in the ATS. Pod had even disapproved of a female taking over his role as chief Borrower. ‘The way I look at it,’ said Homily, ‘and it’s only now it’s come to me: if you had a son, you’d take him borrowing, now wouldn’t you? Well, you haven’t got no son – only Arrietty.’ Then Pod accedes to his wife’s demands. ‘As she followed her father down the passage Arrietty’s heart began to beat faster. Now the moment had come at last when she found it almost too much to bear. She felt light and trembly, and hollow with excitement.’9

  By the closing months of 1951, the king was visibly weakening. Princess Elizabeth, aged twenty-five, was taking on more and more public roles. In October she and her husband Prince Philip went to Washington and stayed in the White House as the guests of President Truman. While they were there, the Labour government was defeated back home in a general election, so Truman was able to break the glad tidings to the princess: ‘Honey, your father’s been re-elected.’ He meant Churchill.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ Truman said later, ‘I read about a fairy princess, and there she is.’10

  They returned to an England with the first Conservative government since 1929. Elizabeth and Philip agreed to go to Kenya after Christmas, to stay at a farm which had been given to the couple by the colonial government as a wedding present – Sagana Lodge. There was a royal family Christmas at Sandringham. Though the king, aged fifty-six, had recently been operated upon, he did not know what his doctors knew. He spoke of reorganizing the estate, and there was some shooting. At the end of January he came back to London with Philip and Elizabeth, and the family went together to see South Pacific, the new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The next day, looking like death, he went to the airport to wave his daughter goodbye, and returned to Sandringham.

  The pheasant shooting season was now over, so that the last day of his life was spent shooting hare. It was 5 February, a ‘Keepers’ Day’, the sort of occasion which he preferred to grand shooting parties. The twenty guns included policemen, estate tenants and gamekeepers. The King caught a hare at top speed, killing it instantly and painlessly. Before going back to the house he stared at the row of furry corpses which he and his friends had dispatched. He went to bed at 10.30 that night, and was still awake at midnight, for a watchman in the garden saw him fiddling with the window catch in his room. When his valet, James MacDonald, carried in his morning cup of tea at 7.30 am, he found him dead.11

  His daughter Elizabeth had, at the moment he died, climbed a tree near Sagana Lodge to reach a lookout point over the jungle. The sun was rising, as they looked down at the baboons. Over their heads, an eagle soared, as if from nowhere, and hovered for a while before flapping off into the sky.12

  Those close to the Queen have suggested that beneath the stiffness and reserve there lurks a well of humour. She is, we are told, a brilliant mimic. ‘After all the guests had left, the door would shut. Then the eyes would brighten and the face light up – flashing with feline humour at the expense of those who had just paid her court.’13 If this is true, it is hard to find it a very attractive combination. If extreme reserve and quietness are combined with ebullient humour in a public figure, one would surely hope that the smiles and japes,
at least occasionally, might come out in public.

  The truth is that the Queen is, was, and probably always ever shall be a completely mysterious character. The closest and most vivid portrait of her is contained in The Little Princesses by Marion Crawford. ‘Crawfie’, as she was known to the children, was engaged as the governess to Elizabeth and Margaret just before the elder child’s seventh birthday. She remained with them fourteen years, until 1947, just before Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten, a remote cousin. In 1950, Crawfie asked her former charges’ permission to publish an account of their childhood. Queen Elizabeth – that is, the wife of King George VI – was even sent proofs of The Little Princesses, and no objection appears to have been raised. But when serialization of the book began in the American Ladies’ Home Journal, the reaction from the royal household was intense. Stronger expressions of disapproval could hardly have been expressed at some serious breach of state security, or at a piece of deliberate blasphemy. Perhaps in the eyes of the royal family The Little Princesses was both. It is written in an extraordinarily mawkish style, saturated with reverence and love for the king and queen and for both their daughters. Yet, like the artful blabbing of a child to strangers about the strange home life of its parents, it is much more revealing than many of the later treatments by grown-ups of the life and personality of Queen Elizabeth II.