Returning home, England seemed moist and green even after its fabulously parched Summer: there had been a few showers of rain, and in the Autumn the grass burst into a new Spring.
I also looked forward to a fresh appreciation of over-familiar things — the beauty of semi-detached suburban houses with hedged gardens and red, sloping roofs; of neat shops and public houses; of everything that is expressed by that notion of quaintness exploited by bur Tourist Board. Even the wet, black mill towns of my native Lancashire and Yorkshire are quaint, compared with the factory estates along the Ethniki Odos.
London is, in a word, pretty. Athens (apart from what is pre-modern or what is non-human, the obstinate rocks that magnificently refuse to cooperate with town planners) is scandalously ugly. I am surprised at how pretty were the creations of those heavy-minded Victorians whose buildings still cover most of London. Roofs and porchways spiral and tower fantastically into the air; tons of masonry are carved like lace. St. Pancras Station has the prettiness of a small girl’s fantasy, erected to immense proportions.
Or rather, the streets would be pretty, if they were not so shabby. Though Athens is ugly, it is not more shabby than other large cities of Europe. England, London in particular, is conspicuously shabby. I looked around a motorway cafe halfway on the road between London and Scotland — as representatively classless and non-regional a place as one could find — and tried to guess how many of my fellow countrymen might be wearing dirty underwear. Most of them showed a scruffiness in their visible appearance which suggested that what was invisible might be even worse. It must signify something that I was not provoked to such reflections in Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, France or Holland.
England also seems to be cranky. I do not mean to say that the streets are full of eccentrics (although we have always cultivated them, as a matter of fact). I refer to a more general attitude of English people. One might describe as ‘cranky’ our attitude to our national crisis. The ‘crisis’ is something that we are more determined to endure than to solve — the very word ‘crisis’ suggests an unrealistic belief that our present troubles are a passing phase, rather than a rapid downward career.
Our national services are deteriorating and we expect them to collapse from time to time. We used to have the best postal service in the world and now we have one of the worst; rudeness and unhelpfulness in official places grow like cancer; and the most commonplace goods periodically fail to reach the shops. We have over a million unemployed, many of them around London, and yet the city’s bus and underground services are breaking down for lack of manpower. To restrain unemployment, the government subsidizes ‘uneconomic’ industries; this is cheaper than paying ‘unemployment benefits’. ‘Uneconomic industries’ are small ones and also the great industries, such as steel and textiles and shipbuilding. Taxation of the remaining workers does not produce enough revenue for these colossal subsidies, so we borrow money from international sources who contentedly encourage our policies. Each loan brings us more under the power of something not freely elected by the British people. England at the moment fills me with the same panic that I feel when I myself have a large overdraft at the bank and no foreseeable means of coping with it: I have a Protestant apprehension of inevitable retribution.
I summarize the lamentable facts briefly because they are such a commonplace moan. And perhaps some of them, such as the general impoverishment and the increase of crime and the probability of being beaten up in the streets, are little more than a return to the normal, raw condition of life, as it existed before the rich and exuberant days of the fifties and sixties. What is more worth remarking is our attitude to this decline. We merely try to survive, adapting ourselves more and more severely as things worsen. The amount of money that Arabs spend in England is no consolation to our flagging trade. When we read, for instance, of their purchase of rural castles (one of the new Arabic lords of Scotland recently offended the natives by mowing down the birds with a machine gun) and of their effect on the prices of houses and flats in London (where flats are frequently advertised as costing up to £400 per week) it seems more like a takeover than beneficial trading. Nor does it console us to know that the French find it worthwhile to sail the Channel on weekend shopping trips to Dover supermarkets and that large numbers of foreigners visit what to us are the most expensive shopping districts of London (they visit them for their cheapness), when we ourselves can hardly afford the price of bread. We keep, or pretend to keep, our spirits up with fantasies. One fantastical panacea promised by the government is to come from North Sea oil — although the terms we have arranged with the international development companies leave very little of the profit for Britain. (The government has in any case put most of its British Petroleum shares up for sale.) Another is our unsalable Concorde, the money spent on which might have solved a few of our social problems. It is expected that we will be consoled by these fantasies; the truth is muffled by the repetition of euphemistic cliches offensive to a poet’s ear. (For instance, ‘cash injection’ is the term, repeated so often as to muffle the senses, which means the spending of further millions of borrowed pounds to support collapsing industries.) We, the people, do without, as our contribution to saving the nation. The chatty Sunday newspapers have begun to carry sweet and exemplary articles about the things that people from the various financial walks of life are prepared to do without in order to help Britain.
Or we do it ourselves. Do It Yourself has been part of English life for a long time, its ancestry possibly lying in that optimistic movement begun by the Victorian author Samuel Smiles and called ‘Self Help’. During a crisis, your indomitable suburban Englishman uproots his roses and grows vegetables. It was one of the ways in which he fought the Germans thirty-five years ago: at that time it was called Digging for Victory. We are encouraged to do the same now: I have seen newspaper articles which advise the reader how to grow peas and beans in wooden boxes in city flats. Every shopping street has a store named D.I.Y. and cluttered with ladders and bags of plasters.
To see Londoners chipping rust from their cars and building bathrooms is one of the more cheerful sights during the impending disaster. The rest is, mostly, apathy. This apathy is, I think, an instinctive reaction to what people feel but cannot admit: that power is no longer in the hands of our elected government. We cannot quite get at the facts, but feel beneath our consciousness that power actually lies with the Common Market, or in West Germany, or in America, or with ‘the Arabs’ — no one is sure of their convictions.
But more of paranoia later. There is something in our society which is a good deal more forceful and positive. Behind the familiar comedy there is a sinister political background: a creeping fascism, which is spreading amongst people more because of their mental and emotional lassitude than because of their beliefs. In the ordinary conversations of the street one hears the most atrocious opinions. They are agreed to or unopposed, perhaps because one hardly bothers to think what such things imply. One day, when I had been lamenting the times in which we live (a conversational opening that has replaced talk about the weather), a shop keeper answered me, ‘We shouldn’t have won the War. We’d have been far better off if we’d lost. Look how the Germans are today!’ The man was over fifty, but the Nazis and the concentration camps had ceased to menace him. Another day, whilst I was part of the crowd pouring down the steps to the Oxford Circus underground station during the rush hour, a drunken man leant over the railings and shouted ‘Vote National Front! They’re the boys to solve our problems.’ The National Front is our own fascist party, but no one responded; we were too quickly compelled downwards in a sheepish crowd.
The National Front, at least, is a growing force within our society. On December 29 the Times reported that the Home Secretary had been asked to enquire into the political affiliations of prison officers at Strangeways Prison, Manchester, where it is alleged that ‘seventy of the three hundred staff are members of the National Front and some harass and humiliate coloured and Jewish prisoners’. The Home Secretary replied that as the National Front is not a proscribed organization there are no grounds for not employing prison staff who are members of it, or for placing restrictions on them. The National Front itself claims that it has strong membership in three other Northern prisons.
One wonders about the strength of that organization in other powerful sections of our society. A friend of mine joined the staff of a junior school and found that, one by one, three quarters of the teachers admitted to their sympathy with, or membership of, the National Front. Once day close to Christmas, I went with a party of friends to a bourgeois and respectable pub and discussed the state of Britain and the National Front. Although it was an hour before closing time, the service in our room became desultory, the lights were turned out and the toilets locked. Perhaps one can become paranoid about such things; perhaps one can always overhear brutal conversations; nonetheless, there must be some reason for the lack of welcome in a place where previously my company had been wanted. And one would like to know how strong the National Front is, for example, in the police force and the army. The Home Secretary said that ‘he would be concerned if there was evidence of political views [of prison officers] affecting attitudes towards prisoners’. But how can a politician, of all people, pretend to believe that one’s political views do not affect everything that one does?
The British Army, whatever its political views, has clearly changed its idea of itself. Having admitted that it can no longer conduct foreign campaigns of conquest, its theorists, beginning with Brigadier Kitson, have convinced it that it should specialize in riot control. To this end, it has begun to work closely with the police, mounting exercises such as the recent huge blockade of Heathrow Airport. Army exercises in tear-gassing and controlling ‘terrorist groups’ have been televised; I have also seen on television young mothers who have been photographed by the police and entered into irretrievable Whitehall files — because they complained about conditions in their children’s school! It’s all exercise, I suppose. I cannot guess at all the many purposes of an exercise in blockading Heathrow Airport, although it immediately comes to mind how useful its lessons would be in the event of a coup. Northern Ireland has also been a very useful exercise for the Army’s new role; let us hope that parallels between that and the value of the Spanish Civil War as a training ground for Hitler are as wild and paranoid as fears of a military coup in England.
Only a few years ago, to speak of the interference of the C.I.A. in British life and politics, even to speak of the presence of C.I.A. agents here at all, was also to talk of ghosts, of paranoias, of demonology. As it has turned out, such paranoid demonologists were correct and now we learn from the Times itself that the C.I. A. had (has?) a scheme to seize-up the London underground system should a political demonstration, say, warrant such a measure. During the protests against the unexplained expulsion from England of Philip Agee, the ex-C.I.A. man who revealed the dirty doings of the Agency, marchers through Mayfair carried placards declaring the addresses of C.I.A. agents to their neighbours.
It all seems very un-English. But I have been reading Richard Holmes’s biography of Shelley recently, and am struck by how similar England was in the first decades of the nineteenth century. A trade blockade in Europe that prevented the sale of English goods; a perplexing social and technological revolution that unsettled the population, who were impoverished by a high rate of inflation; soldiers garrisoned to keep restless crowds in order; police spies and agents-provocateurs who appeared at cottages belonging to radical poets, such as Blake and Shelley; and portmanteau Acts of Parliament, the laws of Seditious and Blasphemous Libel, evoked by government agents to justify the persecution of anyone questioning their authority. Let us hope that our present ‘crisis’ is, after all, merely a crisis, and something that ‘we have seen before’.
