The Pursuit of Laughter (54 page)

Mr Henry Williamson’s saga, or series of novels describing, generation by generation, a suburban English family, has now reached the beginning of the First World War. So cleverly has he reconstructed the period that we feel as though we were living in the pages of the
Illustrated London News
of 1914. The first half of the book is about Philip Maddison as a junior clerk in an insurance office; the second, his experiences as a private in the ‘
contemptible
little army’ of territorials who went through such hard fighting alongside
regular
soldiers in the autumn of 1914. Not the least of the book’s merits is that the author pauses in his narrative from time to time to point out an historical truth; for instance, that the Kaiser never called the English army contemptible, (he may have called it little), but that the expression was invented by a zealot called General Maurice, who rightly imagined that it would whip up English hatred of Germany.

The war in Flanders is vividly and terribly described. Mud, blood, agony, terror,
brutality
and filth are dwelt upon by Mr Williamson, who has used his famous descriptive
powers to bring before the reader war in all its frightfulness, as it seemed to a young,
sensitive
, rather lonely and friendless man, who has found himself transplanted from his insurance office into the midst of an inferno with terrifying suddenness. Like Fabrice at Waterloo, he is in the battle of Ypres without realising it. But, unlike Fabrice, Philip is not a sympathetic character, and this is the weakness of a brave book (brave because it must have cost a great effort to write, to force the memory to search for details which time had nearly obliterated, to re-live so many dreadful hours from long ago).

Presumably Philip is meant to represent
l’homme moyen sensuel
; but in his anxiety to
portray
the little man Mr Williamson has made him so little that he can hardly be said to exist. He and his dull, rather disagreeable father and his even duller though pathetic mother are altogether too dim; we cannot mind very much what happens to them, or feel involved in any way with their fate.

This leaves what might be called the
Illustrated London News
side of the book, and very brilliant and evocative it is. Probably no other writer alive could have done it so well. The dying English soldiers crying Mother! or Water!, the dying German soldiers crying
Mutter!
or
Wasser!
—the mad wickedness of European war is emphasised, as well as its useless
stupidity
. When the scene changes to Philip’s suburban street, and the telegraph boy stopping at a gate can freeze every heart in terror; when the woman next door loses her three sons in as many days, it reminds us of the doomed generation, decimated, almost lost; and it seems unbelievable that Europeans should have been willing to start these miseries all over again in 1939. But this will, no doubt, be dealt with by Mr Williamson as his saga slowly progresses towards our own times.

How Dear is Life
, Williamson, H. (1954)

There are two sorts of children’s books: those they like to read themselves and those
written
about them for old people to recapture the past.

Great Meadow
belongs to the second category; it is supposed, throughout, to be by a
little
boy describing his life, but the reader knows quite well that Dirk Bogarde’s evocation is not the work of a child. For one thing, the repetitive slang of the style is unlike a boy’s way of writing. (More realistic is the way Daisy Ashford wrote
The Young Visiters
.) Books loved by people of all ages, by Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc, Lewis Carroll for example, never suffer from what Dirk Bogarde describes as his ‘deliberately restricted vocabulary’. Children want a story, or jokes.
Great Meadow
is for adults only.

It follows a pattern the author has used with great success before, and is an
autobiography
starting at an earlier age than his previous volumes of memoirs, supposedly written when he was a child, living with his sister and a nanny in a cottage in Sussex. His age at the
time is rather a puzzle. He appears from photographs to have been about 12 in 1934, yet he sounds like a child of six. He is not a country boy like Laurie Lee in
Cider with Rosie
; he is a London boy in a country cottage.

The nanny—to whom the book is dedicated—is not a countrywoman either; she is
terrified
of cows and indeed of all animals. She is rather unkind to her charges, not only
sarcastic
but rough, boxing their ears and cuffing them at the drop of a hat. She also gives them unsuitable tasks to perform, such as digging a deep hole and emptying into it the dread contents of the bucket in the earth closet, their only lavatory. This would hardly be possible for a six-year-old, yet if the boy is twelve he seems unusually backward. Would he put up with having his ears boxed by a nanny? To dig a deep hole once a week in the hard summer earth, or the frosty winter earth, takes some doing.

We can picture how much old people will enjoy hearing about the young Dirk Bogarde losing his white mice, or the tortoise, or the cat; he was unlucky with pets. Then there is fetching the milk in a can, or the water in a pail, or buying food in the village. His parents (a journalist and a former actress) sometimes appear for a day or two and then disappear back to London where they belong.

The bitter cold and primitive discomfort of the cottage are part of a golden memory, and now turned to good account. Although the slang is rather improbable, and the
deliberately
restricted vocabulary a little sad,
Great Meadow
is restful, undemanding and a nice change. No four-letter words, no sex, a minimum of violence.

Great Meadow: An Evocation
, Bogarde, D.
Evening Standard
(1992)

In the beginning was the Coal and Steel Community. The merging of French and German heavy industry made the new Europe possible. It is the post-war miracle, and the well-
publicised
embraces of de Gaulle and Adenauer were symbolic of a reality. Invited to join, Britain declined. Jean Monnet said: ‘There is one thing you British will never understand: an idea. And there is one thing you are supremely good at grasping: a hard fact. We will have to build Europe without you; but then you will come in and join us.’ Prophetic words.

How Britain Joined the Common Market
is one of those books like
The Making of the President
, where everyone knows the dénouement and yet the suspense and drama of
political
struggle keep the interest up to fever pitch until the very last page. In other words, it is skilfully written; Uwe Kitzinger says it will be a quarry for future historians, and it is that and more besides.

The question in the mind of the reader remains—how DID Britain succeed in joining Europe? English enthusiasm for the idea cooled through the 60s as veto followed veto from France. By the time serious negotiations began, opinion polls showed that it had
dwindled to between 30 and 40 per cent in favour. Quite a lot of space is devoted to
opinion
polls, although the author admits they defy analysis and it is not easy to read in the tealeaves. There are one or two constants; women, for example, have throughout been more hostile to joining Europe than men. This is predictable; women are conservative guardians of the hearth and against radical adventure. It is hard to imagine a boat-load of Pilgrim Mothers.

The negotiations in Brussels were a nightmare. With so many people present it was hopeless to expect secrecy; hovering journalists discovered within minutes what had gone on in the conference room. The unfortunate Mr Rippon* had the dilemma that if he
started
with a low bid and gradually came up to a level acceptable to the Six he was jibed in England for having been outwitted by them, while if he put in a realistic bid from the start he was said to have given everything away without even trying. But the crucial battle was in Parliament itself. It swung to and fro, and in spite of the famous victory of October 28, 1971, when there was a majority of 112 for entry, there were anxious times throughout the passing of the consequential legislation. At Westminster, as in Brussels, there were
all-night
sittings and frayed nerves. There was a notable amount of arm-twisting used by both parties on their ‘rebels’—Labour members who had remained faithful to the European idea after Wilson’s about-turn, and Conservative diehards. Extremes met, the rigid right joining forces with the old-fashioned left (Enoch Powell and Michael Foot), while outside the House both blimps and communists were virulent in their anti-European attitudes.

The Press was mostly in favour of entry, including all the ‘serious’ papers:
Financial Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph
and
Times
, as well as the multi-million circulation
Daily Mirror
and the
Sun
. Against were the huge
Daily Express
and the tiny
Morning Star
. Television coverage was vast, and tried to be fair to both sides, and with all this
bombardment
the campaign never came alive, the man in the street seemed bored with the whole subject; he looked with a jaundiced eye at the promised thrills, great opportunities, exciting challenges and so forth. The Trade Unions seemed to mutter, like the Sphinxes in Goethe’s
Faust: ‘im heiligen Sitz, lassen wir uns nicht stören
’ [we won’t be disturbed].

All in all, Mr Kitzinger demonstrates that it was a few men at the summit of affairs who brought this great event to pass. One only has to think of de Gaulle and Anthony Eden, and compare them with Pompidou and Heath, to see what might have been. Eden ‘felt in his bones’ that we should not join a united Europe. Heath felt with his whole being that we should, and must, and could. Mr Kitzinger emphasises that the English Europeans have only won the first round—there are many powerful wreckers waiting to pounce. The UK economy, with its poor industrial relations, flourishing inflation and distressing
unemployment
, is in a bad way. From now on the Labour Party will see to it that every failure, every deficiency, is attributed to Heath’s European policy. Mr Callaghan made the position clear when he said his object was ‘to make sure they (the Tories) would have to carry the can all the way.’ To what extent the lukewarm public will accept this myth remains to be seen; probably it will reject it, since it is what the French call sewn with white thread. The
vital thing is that England should ‘grasp the hard fact’, as Jean Monnet said.

* The government minister who negotiated Britain’s entry into the Common Market.
Diplomacy and Persuasion: How Britain Joined the Common Market
, Kitzinger, U.
Books and Bookmen
(1973)