Family Britain, 1951-1957 (58 page)

Lucky Jim
was a commercial success from the first (though Amis long afterwards pointed out that ‘it did not start to reach the public substantially for a year or so’), and such a perspective did much to explain its appeal, especially to younger readers, quite apart from the humour and sheer enjoyability. ‘I read
Lucky Jim
under the best possible circumstances, which is to say, surreptitiously,’ Brian Aldiss recalled:

At that time I was working in Parker’s bookshop in Oxford. Literacy was not encouraged on the staff, who were instructed to dust but not to read the store of volumes. So my illicit copy had to be carried inside my jacket and snatched at at intervals, while I pretended new-found interest in the Logic section or the Nicaean Fathers. I literally could not put the book down, or it would have been lost behind rows of eighteenth-century sermons.

To say the novel made me laugh is to claim too little. I laughed all right, and still do [in 1990]. I also identified strongly with Dixon. Like Dixon, I was in an undesirable situation (from which I hoped my writing would enable me to escape), like him I felt under-educated; and, like him, I had some interest in women and drink. I can’t think of any novel which ever spoke to me so directly. Many of my friends, in those ghastly postwar years, felt the same.

From the start, though, it stirred a strong counter-reaction – arguably already signalled by Victor Gollancz’s initial reluctance to publish on the grounds that it was ‘vulgar and anti-cultural’. Anthony Powell remembered how, after publication, it ‘seemed to some an unforgivable attack on civilised cultural values’, how indeed ‘in certain quarters
Lucky Jim
was looked on quite simply as a shower of brickbats hurled by a half-educated hooligan at the holiest and most fragile shrines of art and letters, not to mention music’. One phrase, in particular, stuck. ‘He heard the clinking of a plug-chain, then the swishing of tap-water. Welch, or his son, or Johns was about to take a bath. Which one it was was soon settled by the upsurge of a deep, untrained voice into song. The piece was recognizable to Dixon as some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart.’ Given that Amis himself had become in recent years a huge admirer of Mozart, the mandarin assumption of philistinism was unfortunate.
⁴

For Larkin, so long Amis’s literary mentor, but still himself little known as a poet and now working as a librarian in the ‘frightful hole’ of the Queen’s University, Belfast, this was a difficult time. He had been invaluable to his friend during the novel’s prolonged gestation, carefully going through at least one draft and sharpening its focus, and just before publication read a finished copy. ‘Of course
Lucky Jim
sends me into prolonged fits of howling laughter,’ he wrote on 23 January to his friend Patsy Strang. ‘It is miraculously and intensely funny, with a kind of spontaneity that doesn’t tire the reader at all.
Apart
from being funny, I think it is somewhat over-simple.’ On 3 February, having just read Powell’s encomium in
Punch
, Larkin wrote again to Strang. ‘I suppose I’d better mention
Lucky Jim
,’ was how he reluctantly, itch-scratchingly returned to the subject. ‘Well, well. Success, success. I must say, he is doing all he can to sound nice about it. And of course the Kingsley humour I think quite unrivalled, quite wonderful. It’s in the general thinness of imagination that he falls down . . .’

What Larkin did not mention in either letter was that he, following the birth of Amis’s daughter Sally on 17 January, had almost at once written a touching poem for her, ‘Born Yesterday’, dated the 20th – the last thirteen lines telling a rarely told truth:

May you be ordinary;

Have, like other women,

An average of talents:

Not ugly, not good-looking,

Nothing uncustomary

To pull you off your balance,

That, unworkable itself,

Stops all the rest from working.

In fact, may you be dull –

If that is what a skilled,

Vigilant, flexible,

Unemphasised, enthralled

Catching of happiness is called.
⁵

Ultimately, as neither man could yet know, it was the work of Larkin – unassuming laureate of the quotidian – that would last.
Ars longa, vita brevis
, as both assuredly did know.

A THICKER CUT

To my stepfather, Bill Hunt

PART ONE

1

Tolerably Pleasing

‘Problems which will arise if many coloured people settle here,’ was how Winston Churchill introduced (in the paraphrasing words of the Cabinet minutes) the Conservative government’s discussion of ‘Coloured Workers’ on Wednesday, 3 February 1954. ‘Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK?’ he asked. ‘Attracted by the Welfare State. Public opinion in UK won’t tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.’ The decisive contribution came from Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the Home Secretary. After explaining that the non-white population (predominantly from the West Indies) now stood at some 40,000 – sharply up from 7,000 before the war, but still only a few thousand newcomers each year – he weighed up controls: ‘We have to admit in Parliament the
purpose
of legislation was to control admission of coloureds. There is a case on merit for excluding riff-raff. But politically it would be represented and discussed on basis of a colour limitation. We should be reversing age-long tradition that British subjects have right of entry to mother-country of Empire. We should offend liberals, also sentimentalists.’ Accordingly, ‘on balance, scale of the problem is such that we shouldn’t take these risks today’. He finished with a shrewd, cynical thrust: ‘The coloured populations are resented in Liverpool, Paddington and other areas – by those who come into contact with them. But those who don’t are apt to take liberal view.’

Next day it was an entirely monocultural tragedy on which the Wigan Coroner conducted an inquest. Four brothers from Platt Bridge, aged between nine and thirteen, had the previous Saturday got three-quarters of the way across the frozen Perch Pond when the ice cracked – and all four boys drowned. Twelve-year-old Peter Gorton, also from Platt Bridge, had gone out sliding with them, initially on frozen puddles, but not on the ice. ‘I told Frank [the oldest brother] I was not going on as my dad had told me not to,’ he related. ‘They all told me I was soft.’ The Coroner, after sombrely recording verdicts of accidental death, observed: ‘It is a great pity these four boys did not follow the example of the more cautious child who had been warned by his parents not to go on the ice.’ Tellingly, though, he added: ‘It is impossible to remove all danger from our lives and it might not be a good thing if all danger could be removed.’

Friday saw the Minister of Housing in a favourite position, the spotlight. Queen’s Tower was the predictable name given to Birmingham’s first 12-storey block of flats, in Duddeston; performing the opening ceremony, Harold Macmillan took the opportunity to announce the gratifying housing figures for 1953 – a record 318,779 completions. ‘It is a good job, half done,’ he continued. ‘For can we honestly claim to be more than half-way when we haven’t been able to tackle slum clearance for 14 years?’ He then inspected the flats themselves, took tea with one of the tenants and was on his way. He left behind an optimistic mood, summed up by the Vicar of Duddeston in his parish magazine: ‘I have already visited many of the newcomers, and I am pleased to say that they are happy in their new homes and are finding the surroundings tolerably pleasing.’

They were also newcomers, but not quite such new newcomers, at Adeyfield, part of Hemel Hempstead New Town. ‘We must do something to wake the people up,’ an exasperated Mr S. Douglas declared on Monday the 8th at a poorly attended meeting of the Adeyfield Neighbourhood Council in the Adeyfield Hall. ‘There are people in this organisation and in others, about whom you get the nasty feeling that they are only in it for what they can get out of it. When they first join they are keen and helpful, but after a while they seem to become quite satisfied to sit at home, accept the decisions, and benefit from them.’ What, he asked, was the reason for this distressing state of affairs? ‘We are getting down to almost the only answer,’ he went on. ‘Television. People get home at night and just don’t seem to have any desire to join in with the social activities.’ Mr G. Brook Taylor, Public Relations Officer of the Development Corporation that ran the new town, then warned against becoming ‘too gloomy’ – ‘When people come into a new town, they have a strong spirit of adventure and are very lively,’ but ‘once they have made a few contacts and friends, it is only natural that they should withdraw into their family life’ – before a final, forthright contribution came from Mr D. Ritchie: ‘An artificially stimulated organisation sheerly for the sake of getting together is a complete waste of time.’
¹

The following week, Tuesday the 16th, was honours time at Buckingham Palace. Among those knighted by the Queen Mother, with her daughter still away on a lengthy tour of the Commonwealth, were Jacob Epstein, the Football Association’s A. Brook Hirst (so unshaken and unstirred about the recent humbling by the Hungarians), and ‘the Prime Minister of Mirth’ – aka George Robey, octogenarian veteran of the Edwardian music hall, but now wheelchair-bound and clutching his trademark small brown cane. Elsewhere in London that day, at the West Kensington headquarters of the catering firm J. Lyons and Co, there was unveiled what the
Evening News
called ‘Britain’s new electronic brain’. This was an early computer (though the report did not actually use that word) called LEO which ‘works out a complicated wages statement involving numerous details for nearly 2,000 people employed at a bakery’. J.R.M. Simmons, largely responsible for its development, claimed that LEO was ‘the only one of his kind on commercial work in the world’ and would ‘revolutionise the keeping of industrial accounts and records’, being able to do the work of nearly 400 clerks. What did LEO look like? Disappointingly, the report merely noted that there was ‘nothing at all to satisfy the romantic conception of a robot as a “mechanical man” ’, and generally the emphasis was on reassurance: ‘It cannot do anything except in response to instructions fed into it on punched cards. And the human hand and eye are needed to guide the controlling “nerve centre”.’ In short, LEO was ‘not one of those machines which imaginative writers like to think may one day get out of hand and dominate the world’.

Instead, the more potentially disturbing news that Tuesday came from Birmingham. This was the announcement by Harry Watton, chairman of Birmingham Corporation’s transport committee, that a ballot would be held of the city’s bus workers (many of them Irish), asking the question, ‘Have you any objection to the department employing coloured workers?’ Watton himself, as controversy mounted over the next few days, was unapologetic. ‘Our first task is to keep buses running,’ he insisted. ‘Although it is regrettable there should be objections among some bus crews to employing coloured workers it is a fact.’ So too the workers’ representative. ‘The union has no objection to coloured people, a number of whom are already working in garages [about 28 of them, as mechanics or cleaners],’ stated Harry Green, the Transport and General Workers’ Union’s district secretary. ‘But we have been told that many of the 1,400 clippies would walk out if non-Europeans were introduced on platform staffs.’ Eventually, on the 24th, the ballot was called off, though Green continued to get up to 300 letters a day, mainly anonymous and about evenly divided about the prospect of black conductors. As it turned out, Birmingham had already had a black bus driver, let alone conductor, for almost 20 years – Edward Irons, currently working the number 8 Inner Circle route. ‘He is kindness itself, always has a smile for everyone, and is respected by everyone,’ vouched a regular passenger, but the T&G’s Green was still sceptical: ‘How the 1,400 conductresses will react to working with coloured folk remains to be seen.’
²

It also remained to be seen what was going to be done about the increasingly hot potato of homosexuality. On Friday the 19th, the maverick Tory backbencher Sir Robert Boothby made a widely reported speech in which he gave publicly the reasons he had given privately to Maxwell Fyfe for a royal commission to review the relevant laws. Describing homosexuality as ‘a biological and pathological condition for which the victim is only to a small degree responsible’, Boothby claimed that ‘the existing laws dealing with homosexuality are medieval’ and that ‘what consenting adults do in privacy may be an issue between them and their Maker, but it is certainly not an issue between them and their Government’. Five days later, when the Cabinet discussed the twin subjects of homosexuality and prostitution, Maxwell Fyfe suggested that in both cases the time had perhaps indeed come for an inquiry, though without yet committing himself. ‘Remember that we can’t expect to put the whole world right with a majority of 18,’ warned Churchill, and Maxwell Fyfe himself was no natural reformer. ‘I am not going down in history,’ he bluntly told Boothby, ‘as the man who made sodomy legal.’
³

The same day as Boothby’s speech, there was domestic drama in Chingford. ‘Reported leakage of gas in kitchen to North Thames Gas Board,’ noted Judy Haines:

They came along almost at once. Leakage behind tiles! At tea-time, another representative called and estimated that cost of yanking up floor boards between hall and kitchen and replacing pipe would be approximately £5.10.0! I gasped. He asked that we telephone instructions tomorrow. Girls lost no time in informing Daddy Gas Man had been. His immediate reaction was, ‘We’ll have an electric cooker.’ I knew he’d have an answer. I’m quite willing.

Next day, Saturday the 20th, was even more satisfactory: ‘Abbé [her husband] and I went out to the Electric Showrooms & chose an Eastern Electric White Cooker. It looks lovely! Brought girls home a choc-ice each.’