Games with Shadows Read online

  Games With Shadows

  Neal Ascherson

  Contents

  I A Ruinous City: Being British

  Chords of Identity in a Minor Key

  The Nostalgia Game

  ‘Tell the Children…’

  The Lost World of Small-Town England

  Dead Houses

  Settlers and Natives

  Caring Colonists

  Intelligentsia Wanted

  The English Bourgeoisie

  The Spreading Slime

  Dracula in Britain

  Greater Privilege Hath No Man …

  The English Riot

  Enforcing ’Culture’

  ‘Don’t Be Afraid – and Don’t Steal!’

  Scottish Contradictions

  Stonehenge and its Power Struggles

  The Means of Grace, the Hope of Glory

  Secret Passions of the British

  II Druids: The Politics of Unreformed Britain

  A Spectator Sport

  Policing the Market-Place

  Druids

  Mr Gladstone the Land Raider

  Gladstone’s Defeat and Our Loss

  Telling Sid

  The Case for a Bill of Rights

  The No-Go Area

  A Dumb-Bell World

  Thatcher’s Dream

  Last Leader

  The Great Cash-In

  Capital

  The Land and the People

  A Scottish Temple

  Coals in the Bath, Sun on the Brain

  Journalists Behind the Wire

  Ancient Britons and the Republican Dream

  III Europe: A Barbaric Continent

  Tiring the Romans

  Axel’s Castles

  The Cost of Bitburg

  The ’Bildung’ of Barbie

  The Death Doctors

  The Shadows Over France’s Feast

  Greek Civil War – Rambo-Style

  The Strange Death of the Peasantry

  Apartheid in Europe

  Toads, Journalists, Cats and Policemen

  Frontiers

  IV Waltzing with Molotov: Eastern Europe

  Gorbachov’s Gift

  Changing Partners

  The Polish Ghosts

  Pilsudski, or How to Ignore Defeat

  1956: How Poland Got Away With It

  Requiem for an Old Piano Banger

  Invisible Men

  The Berlin Wall as Holy Monster

  Why Burning People Is Always Wrong

  ‘You Lose Freedom by Fighting for It’

  Suffering Writing

  The Unsung Heroes of Chernobyl

  Russian Mist

  Dream of Escape

  Bad Dreams

  V Consolations and Discontents

  Picts

  Brothers

  Nations on Parade

  F3080

  Exiles

  Terrorists

  Alive and Well

  Spies

  Traitors

  Witness

  Critics

  Diaries

  Media Heroes

  Tempers

  Sex

  Precision

  Pity, Love and the Accident of Birth

  The Good Soldier Schimek

  Remember Them in Song

  Sources

  I

  A Ruinous City

  Being British

  Chords of Identity in a Minor Key

  The way that words mutate reminds me of fashions in music. The word – the note – is a constant. But the setting and chord in which it occurs alters with the mood of a nation from major to minor, from the assertive to the mournful and foreboding.

  The very word ‘change’ has changed. When I was young -and not just because I was young – we looked forward with confident impatience to change. Planned, controlled, beneficent change would continue to clear slums, sweep up the remains of empire, raise living and educational standards, tidy away -firmly but kindly – the last aboriginals who still raved about martial glory or the pride of wealth. Now, as it seems to me, change is set almost exclusively in the minor key, change seen overwhelmingly as loss.

  I was reminded of this when I read ‘The National Question Again,’ a book of essays about Welsh identity edited by John Osmond. In one of these essays, there is a quotation from ‘the late Professor J. R. Jones.’ I know nothing of the Professor, but his words seized me.

  He mentions the pain of exile. But then he goes on: ‘I know of an experience equally agonising and more irreversible … and that is the experience of knowing, not that you are leaving your country, but that your country is leaving you, being sucked away from you, as it were by a consuming, swallowing wind into the hands and the possession of another country and civilisation.’

  ‘Your country is leaving you.’ Whose terrible awareness is this? At first, this would appear to be the private pain of minorities, of those who live in declining cultural margins. Professor Jones wrote those words in Welsh. The same thought has been expressed by Sorley Maclean, the greatest Gaelic poet in our century, stoically facing the wind which in 100 years will have carried away those who can read ‘Hallaig’ without grammars and dictionaries. The Czech poet Nezval wrote of ‘a burning leaf of paper on which a poem is disappearing,’ and his compatriot Milan Kundera now takes this for an image of Czech culture itself.

  But it may be that their country is not only leaving those who live in the lands of ‘small languages.’ In that same volume about Wales, Raymond Williams discusses ‘the visible weakening of England’ as the centralised nation-state weakens, as uncertainty sets in about whether there is still a definable ‘English way of life’ as opposed to a caste-ridden and anachronistic ‘way of ruling.’ Williams surveys this growing confusion and loss of identity, and remarks: ‘Many of the things that happened, over centuries, to the Welsh are now happening, in decades, to the English.’

  It was not unexpected to read, in a profile of Douglas Hurd, that the Home Secretary likes the work of the late Philip Larkin. He’s a clever, literate man. But I was struck that his favourite poem, known by heart, was the one which ends like this:

  … The statues will be standing in the same

  Tree-muffled squares and look nearly the same.

  Our children will not know that it is a different country.

  All we can hope to leave them now is money.

  Well, precisely. The children of England stand by their statues, but their country is leaving them. All looks ‘nearly the same.’ There isn’t some public barometer of change announcing the numerical decline of those who speak English or eat Yorkshire pudding or are kind to dogs. (Unless the unemployment totals displayed on Labour town halls fulfil that purpose.) And yet the loss of inner identity and certainty is taking place, as invisible as that ‘consuming, swallowing wind.’ The worst kind of nightmare is when you seem to enter your home, see again all the furniture that always was there, and do not recognise it.

  The outer signs of change are not so important. There are inner-city riots but, as I have argued before, rioting is a recurrent English activity with a long history. There is a large immigrant population, but only idiots panic about cultural and ethnic ‘dilution’ or ‘alienation’; England’s blacks become restive in direct proportion to their absorption of English values.

  The real loss is in what one might call ‘social trust.’ The English have always regarded their State, seen as the totality of Ministers, generals, judges, quill-pushing bureaucrats and snoopers, with mild contempt. ‘They’ sent left-footed boots to the Crimea then, and ‘they’ screw up the rating system now. What else is new? But in the sense that the State embodies and executes the collective ethics of the English – ensuring fairness in the wides
t sense, taking away from the unreasonably rich and selfish and giving some of the proceeds to the poor – it has been taken very seriously indeed. The State may have made a poor job of it. But its moral potential, in the hands of democratic masters, has never been much doubted until now.

  Today, there is a very real doubt. This Government long ago declared its intention to do away with the ‘nanny’ State. The results of this intention have included mass unemployment, a glaring increase in inequality and a sense of corrupted moral standards which are most gangrenous at the very top – in the most august City institutions and their connections with the political establishment.

  At a deeper level, our present rulers have not merely persuaded the people that the State can no longer be a universal provider. They have – without meaning to go so far – raised the question of whether the power apparatus in London can ever again be relied upon to express in action the collective English values. The English have never bothered to define their national identity. Instead, there are phrases: the tautologous ‘we know who we are,’ or the comfortable ‘we govern ourselves pretty decently.’ Now the consuming, swallowing wind is carrying away the second assumption in fragments which are larger year by year. And the first assumption, which leaned against it, begins to sway and tilt. Do the English, after all, really know what they are like, if they cannot ‘govern themselves decently’?

  Now we are closer to the sources of this sense of ‘change as loss,’ this failure of social trust, which seems to affect persons of all political faiths. The Home Secretary murmurs Larkin’s lament to himself, although a member of a government which seems to believe that money is the only thing worth leaving to our children. Glenys Kinnock, in Marxism Today, looks back to the post-war welfare state: ‘Ours was a hopeful generation … my brother and I were taught to appreciate the orange juice and dinners and milk.’ Ken Livingstone belongs to a Left generation which, whatever it says, is post-Marxist in its pessimism; he believes that the human race lost its way when it took up ‘selfish, acquisitive’ agriculture as a short cut to progress, and is likely to choke itself in filth and radiation.

  If England is leaving the English, where will they be? In a limbo. In a condition where, while they see that they have become bad-tempered and unsociable and mistrustful, they also remember older times when they worked together and helped one another in bitter adversity and found a lot to laugh about. That wind which is carrying away ‘England’ is also removing petrified institutions which in the end discouraged those virtues, although supposed to foster them. It’s time, without Scottish or Welsh help, to build a new country.

  [1985

  The Nostalgia Game

  ‘Nostalgia for the Fifties’: of all invitations to a party, this is the queerest of all. But we are all invited now. The film of ‘Absolute Beginners’ opens, Roger Mayne shows his famous photographs of Notting Dale at the Victoria & Albert, ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ has been running in Fifties sets and costumes for a year. The ‘certain substance’ now found in young mens’ flats is Brylcreem. Shall we go, and will it be fun?

  It wasn’t much fun then. Those poor old Fifties, in which I was very young, didn’t even think of themselves as a decade. That decennial game seemed to be over, like most games. The Twenties were said to have been roaring and naughty; the Thirties had been declared unsafe and were fenced off against our curiosity. Anyone suggesting that there had been anything chic about the Forties, years of war and rationing, would have been thought soft in the head. As for our own times, nobody -we knew – would want to remember them.

  And yet, in one way, those were infinitely conceited times. When I finished my National Service and went to Cambridge, the voices around and above me were saying something like this: ‘History is over. After a million years, the human race has arrived at its destination. We have finally discovered how to run things. There will be no more revolutions, no more slumps and booms, no more inflation, certainly no more unemployment. We have cracked it. All that’s left for you to do is to tidy up a few things.’

  They went on: ‘You may find this dull. You may hanker after romantic periods, and perhaps we will reminisce about the Spanish Civil War for you after dinner. But all that is over. There is Keynes, there is the National Health Service, there is Bretton Woods which has stabilised the world economy for ever. If you want excitement, concentrate on your personal relationships. Stick to the facts, don’t generalise, and eschew personal ambition.’

  Sobered, we surveyed the cool, grey plateau on which mankind was to spend the rest of time. There were indeed a few unsightly relics. Poverty was not a word in general use any more, but the process of bringing about equality evidently required more work before it was completed. Slum clearance would probably do the trick, combined with plenty of education. A few rich people could be spied, but they were spivvish, marginal figures, soon to die out. The British Empire had to be cleared away too, a matter of leading the natives to the altar for their wedding with self-government and then – happy ever after.

  So we resigned ourselves; I joined a debating society, and we talked about personal relationships and the importance of not generalising. Then, one day, a young economist who had been abroad came back to Cambridge, and appalled us. What he said was so shocking, even hateful, that all my efforts to forget it were unsuccessful.

  We were doomed, he said. A new period was about to open – he could already recognise the signs – in which attitudes like ours would be useless and even dangerous. Within a year or so, this level crust would begin to break up. A huge increase in earnings and then in purchasing power would take place. There would be a stampede for wealth, great opportunities for ambition, a return of inequality. This period – he was speaking a few years before Harold Macmillan was even imaginable as Prime Minister – would have no use for prim egalitarians, for self-denying intellectual élites. It wanted vigorous, selfish, acquisitive people – and it would find them.

  Looking back, I know that this was real prophecy: the rare kind based not on second sight but on intellect used without mercy. At the time, I thought the man was just wicked. In Manchester during the Fifties, where I started work, there was certainly no sign of an end to the grey plateau.

  In that city, where one could still use Engels’s ‘Condition of the Working Class’ as a street guide, people were resigned to waiting for what they were entitled to, but assumed that they would get it in the end. It rained softly, ceaselessly; after the cinemas shut, there was nowhere to go but home or to one of the couple of Indian restaurants which had begun to appear. The huge old prostitute who stood under her umbrella by Queen Victoria’s statues (‘Let me but bear your Love, I’ll bear your Cares’) would shriek: ‘C’meer! C’meer!’ as I sloshed towards my bus.

  Once I read an article by a man born and brought up in one of the countless brick terraces of south Manchester. He wrote that the supreme moment of his life had come when, as a little boy, he had gone out into the street during an air raid and looked at the sky. Suddenly he realised that somebody, at least, knew that he existed; somebody cared enough to be trying to kill him.

  That was the Fifties. Everything dangerous or vivid lay in the past. Long ago, middle-class people had stopped saying, as they used to say in the Forties with a shrug and an experienced smile: ‘Well, I expect we’ll all be living in some sort of Communism in the future, stands to reason….’ Now, speculation was out of fashion. Few people travelled, except as conscripts sent to colonial wars or Korea. Insularity was back; lurid events in Central Europe were studied only by the highly-educated. Everyone hated ‘the Germans,’ but everyone loved ‘our’ German – Bert Trautmann, the prisoner-of-war who became City’s goalie.

  The years on the grey plateau passed, but somehow those relics of the bad old days did not get tidied away. The stone tenements of Glasgow stood on like outcrops of geology, as they had stood when I was a child. The two cultural nations -those with ‘accents’ and those even more absurdly styled as ‘without accents�
� – showed no signs of merging. The pound, prices and wages were stable, everyone had a job, and yet many of those who had jobs continued to live like beasts. The British went on waiting patiently for their entitlement, but sometimes the head of the queue seemed to be getting no nearer. And those who ran the Empire were, for unfathomable reasons, still reluctant to give it up.

  Was there a ‘Fifties culture’? Chairs and tables with spindly legs came in, coffee-bars with glass cups and bowls of brown sugar, and sounds from America which grew louder until they became Bill Haley and then Elvis. The London journals went on with their Francophilia, even while France bulged with the colonial fascism that exploded in 1958. But all this was on the surface. The British remained instinctively obedient, as they always are when governed by caste rather than by money.

  For many of us, the Fifties ended in 1956, with Suez. Not for all. In Manchester, there was real shock at the ‘Law, Not War’ protest. A friend said: ‘Dad went in 1914, and I went in 1940, and now the lad has to do his bit. Anything wrong with that?’ The real end of the Fifties came with the prosperity and boom at the end of the decade.

  Suez didn’t reveal Britain’s weakness in a flash. That was only seen afterwards. What it revealed was that a British government, even one led by Churchill’s heir, could lie, bully and be criminal. And with that discovery, the old faith that history had come to rest, that all our problems were minor ones, dissolved. We were absolute beginners no longer.

  [1986

  ‘Tell the Children …’

  Mr Kenneth Baker, as Secretary of State for Education, is deciding what our children should know. Dozens of worthies are being gathered into ‘working parties’ to plan ‘core curricula’: centrally-decided minima of fact which all English schools will be obliged to pack into their pupils’ heads. Among these, there will be a working party on history.

  Writing in the Independent last week, Sir William Rees-Mogg, the celebrated Whig, let his imagination run over what this history core curriculum should be: ‘the central understanding of his world that every English child should be given.’ (Sir William uses ‘England’ to denote ‘Scotland’ as well, although – luckily – Mr Baker’s writ doesn’t run north of the Border.)