TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS

In 1968 I found myself having lunch in the Roma Restaurant in São Paulo Brazil. It's still there and if you want one of the best Italian meals of your life they'll be happy to serve you. At the time I was a bachelor earning a decent salary and had just had a wonderful lunch on a beautiful sunny day. Just as I was thinking that life could not be better a rather unprepossessing chap came to sit at the next table, flanked by two beautiful women who were clearly not his daughters.

Moral of the story: however good you think you have it, there's always someone who's got more. This came back to me recently on the wonderful holiday Rejane and I have just had touring in England and Scotland. Last year I bought a second-hand camper van which has turned out to be the ideal vehicle for two people to travel around and live in.

We visited Winston Churchill's home at Chartwell in Kent on a beautiful summer's day and enjoyed the magnificent view over the Weald of Kent (a geographical term I had read in books but never actually seen) and drifted back to Wales through the Cotswolds, pausing to enjoy some of the impossibly beautiful small towns in that region. Then we set off to the North.

On the way of course we had to visit Stratford-upon-Avon and for the first time I did the tourist thing I have always avoided: visiting Anne Hathaway's cottage. I liked the way they have kept the garden in something like the way it would have been in the 16th and 17th centuries. And so onward to the Lake District, where again we did the tourist thing and visited Wordsworth's home at Grasmere. Once again, you can see why the place is popular with tourists: the house and gardens seem to be almost exactly as Wordsworth left them.

Then on up the road to Scotland, drawing a veil over Carlisle, a drab and windy place where they have built a castle out of the most unattractive red stone. Nevertheless, we were having a marvellous time, either eating in the van or finding good food in restaurants while still, after 16 years of companionship, finding new things to talk and to laugh about on the way, including competing to see who could spot the greatest number of Eddie Stobart lorries rather like a couple of pre-adolescents told by their parents to amuse themselves for long trip.

Finally we arrived at the Scottish border. The weather was beautiful. The camper was running well and providing for our needs. Rejane was her beautiful, brilliant and witty self and all was well with my world. Then came that Roma moment.

It growled quietly into place alongside us. It remained there, long slim and totally beautiful. Voted by one British newspaper as the most beautiful sports car of all time (a comment repeated by Enzo Ferrari no less) and celebrating its 50th anniversary, yes it was a perfectly restored and maintained E-type Jaguar. The owner was about my age but with a bit more weight around his middle. His wife was a pleasant-looking lady but hardly as beautiful as Rejane. The vehicle could not be slept in or cooked in as we can do in our camper and in comparison to the most modest domestic saloon today, its mechanics are rather primitive. Nevertheless I found myself standing next to one of the most perfect pieces of design that has ever been produced.

One of the criteria of good design is that the object should do precisely what it is intended to do and the E-type does exactly that: it transports a man and his female companion (created in pre-politically correct times, it can only be driven by heterosexual males) from A to B with the maximum possible style. That style was its secondary purpose, one so typical of the 1960s and for those who were not around at the time, it is difficult to realise what a unique vehicle this was. The revolutionary motoring icon we usually associate with the 1960s is the Mini and with its transverse engine and front-wheel drive it is technically more advanced than the Jaguar, but its boxy body was not too far removed from other boxy cars of the time. The E-type looked like nothing else on the road and unlike most vehicles on the racetrack. Looming silkily out of that drab era that was only a teenager's lifespan away from World War II, rationing and bombsites, this beast blew your socks off – and still does.

At the time of its appearance a lot of nonsense was talked and written about its so-called Freudian significance – the phallic symbol of that elongated bonnet. Piffle.  The bonnet was long and low and curved because it had to perform two functions: contain a bloody great engine with its attendant pipes and wires and ancillary structures, and also because its designer Malcolm Sayer sought the best aerodynamic shape for it.

And we do have to give credit to the boss of Jaguar, Sir William Lyons, who approved the project. This is one of the few advantages of the limited size of most British motor car companies at the time – that one individual could come up with a design and another give his approval – the disadvantage was that these firms were too small to invest in research and were swallowed up by larger conglomerates. It is difficult to see the ranks of bean counters in a large company like Ford, for example, giving the go-ahead to this futuristic vehicle. Paradoxically, of course, it did turn out to be an exceptionally good business venture for Jaguar as its combination of appearance, performance and reasonable price found a market among young men who were beginning to make money in the false dawn the British economy enjoyed at that time.

And so there I stood in the sun and wind at a parking place on the border between England and Scotland being given a choice of values: the homely, practical camper with its abundance of domestic happiness, or the seductive charms of the most beautiful car of all time. Well, reader, I married my choice and I'm happy with it (but there was a moment there).

Violence in London

Everyone and his brother has contributed to the debate on the recent riots in London and various other parts of Britain, so what can I add?  Perhaps after spending three weeks in London, I might have some objective observations to make, as a stranger to the town.

The first thing is to register the fact that 99% of my interactions with people dealing with the public (shop assistants, restaurant staff and receptionists of various kinds) involve people whose accents indicate they were not born in Britain.  Before the Guardianistas and Independentes give their knee-jerk accusation of racism on reading that remark, let me point out that it is simply a fact.  Is it also going to be considered racist to examine the implications of this fact?

The obvious first implication is that any of the rioters and looters who are unemployed and living on benefits could be doing the jobs of these people, and in my innocence I cannot understand why the situation has arisen where they are not doing them. 

The two conventional arguments brought out on these occasions are (a) foreign workers are prepared to accept lower wages and for many British-born people it is more advantageous to live on benefits than to work, and (b) the native population is not educationally qualified for work.

Both of these arguments are nonsense.  The virtually uncontrolled immigration Britain has experienced since the 1950s is the result of an alliance between employers (who wanted low-paid labour to compensate for the inefficiency of their manufacturing processes) and successive labour governments who saw potential voters in the immigrant population.  The result has been to create a kind of 'sandwich' society consisting of the well-off sitting on top of a large layer of the unemployed/unemployable who are in turn sitting on top of a low-paid temporary or permanent workforce from overseas.

If we paid decent wages for a decent day's work and controlled access to unemployment benefit we would diminish the numbers of the lower two levels and this would have two results: those in work would begin to feel they are participating in society and not that they have a justification for looting it, and those who are bringing their skills from overseas would find that they have to stay home and dedicate their skills to improving the countries they feel the need to move out of.

The educational argument makes me, as an educator, actually angry and not many things do that these days.  In a long career of teaching and teacher-training I have watched standards being eroded and intellectual rigour being corrupted by political correctness.  All of this has been accompanied by ‘grade inflation’ in our school and university examination systems, and the more the educational authorities deny this, the truer it becomes.  If our young people were given an honest education and thorough training they would have no problem in holding down jobs.

All of this brings me to the question that has been of obsessing me during these days of incredible and vicious violence in London and other British cities – why?  We might be able to understand mass robbery from shops if, perhaps, a large section of society were suffering poverty but that is not the case, despite the wailing of NGOs who owe their jobs to creating an image of poverty that only they are capable of alleviating.  What has accompanied the present violence is the deliberate destruction of property, the invasion of private houses and attacks on individuals in the streets.  This is unprecedented; in previous disturbances there has been a racial element but the faces of those being brought to justice after these events show the one area in British society in which multiculturalism seems to have worked.  Also included in this rabble are people who cannot possibly, under any floppy-minded liberal thinking, be considered to be poor.

It will take a long time to find an answer to this question but the automatic responses from the press, following their predictable political lines, are inadequate.  The political right says the situation is the result of the castration of the police force after the report of the Holy Fool Lord Scarman, and the left blames ‘the cuts’ imposed by the new government, conveniently forgetting that these cuts were made necessary by a long period of left-wing government that led the country into extreme levels of debt.

Both are right in their ways, but perhaps not for the reasons they think.  The recent revelations concerning News International have lifted a blanket on various areas of inefficiency and corruption in the Metropolitan Police and anyone who has reported a property theft in Britain during the last 30 years or so will recognise that even outside London conventional policing has disappeared.  Obviously, if a section of society begins to feel the need to disrupt social order the perceived ineffectiveness of the police will only encourage it.  During the recent disturbances they were proved right as we read in the press many reports of groups of police standing watching buildings being burned and doing nothing because of orders they had received.

Right-wing protests against cutting the police force are therefore irrelevant: reducing the numbers of an ineffective organisation will actually be advantageous because it will save money.  Policing in Britain will only become effective after a root-and-branch reform aimed at transforming the police from its present role as an extension of social services to becoming an effective body the main aim of which is enforcing the law and maintaining order.  One step in this direction might be to reform the absurd situation of 52 separate police forces on a tiny island.  If we are looking for savings to be made, the administrative economies resulting from merging the majority of these institutions would be a good place to start.

Left-wing whining about the recent riots (initially called ‘protests’ by the BBC - protests against what?) being a legitimate protest by the underprivileged against a greed-based society is equally ridiculous.  The last Labour government had over a decade to work on the situation of the underprivileged and threw immense amounts of money at social problems and education, to little effect.  One of the reasons that government was ejected from power was that voters realised that this policy was ineffectual, that the greed of bankers was being tolerated as the blackmail price paid for having them stay in London and providing the mainstay of an economy from which industrial production has been largely removed, and that ineffectiveness of border controls meant that large numbers of recent arrivals were putting unsupportable pressure on various social services.

And yet none of this can tell me why, having robbed a shop, young thugs should feel the need to burn it down.  Why they should feel the need to smash down the doors of people in much the same situation as themselves to steal their belongings, nor why they should wish to beat almost to death someone who is arguing against their actions. 

And this really is serious.  If we read the history of civil unrest in Britain, it always has a political or social reason behind it - the events of this weekend do not.

Do I dare to offer an answer?  It may be that the laudable spread of equality of opportunity and of democracy in Britain since World War II has become confused with feelings of equality of possession.  In other words, advertising campaigns tell us that the new Audi sports car is on sale and, by implication, is available to us whoever we are.  If, however, we are an incompetent numbskull working in a low-paid job, or have no job at all, the inconvenient fact of not having the money to pay for the Audi sports car is interpreted as an affront to our equality of possession.  In the often drink-muddled reasoning of our friendly neighbourhood numbskull this is seen as unfair treatment by ‘the system’, a situation which can only be put right by breaking the system’s laws.

Films and television have also created what we might call an ‘equality of violence’ and we are now so saturated with violent images from childhood that violence is seen as a justifiable means of resolving any problem.  Whenever this question arises, the masters of media dismiss it as unprovable, a restriction on the holy right of free speech, etc, etc.  Well, if messages brought to us on the television and cinema screen do not have an effect on the public, why is so much money spent on advertising in those media?  The same executives who say that the hundreds and thousands of violent actions a child will observe on-screen have no effect on his or her attitudes in real life give a very different pitch when they are talking to those they wish to persuade to advertise on those same screens.

As a footnote, I must say that last Friday my Brazilian wife and I were having dinner with friends and she was having to listen to my usual diatribe against violence in Brazil.  By Saturday night I was being sweetly asked about my views on violence in my own country.  Answer have I none.

CHURCHILL AND HITLER: A Tale of Two Bunkers

 

My Brazilian wife Rejane has become interested in Winston Churchill after reading his autobiography and I am encouraging this in order to wean her away from the traditional Brazilian admiration for Napoleon and his nefarious works, so we recently went to see the War Rooms and Churchill Museum in London.  (We also visited Churchill's home at Chartwell in the Kent countryside on a beautiful summer's day and I thoroughly recommend this excursion.)

The Cabinet War Rooms are a classic example of the way Britain went into World War II, with their inadequate space, inadequate protection, improvised facilities and evidence of the dedication of the staff who worked there.  When the bombing of London started, it was decided that the rooms were not sufficiently protected from bombs, so extra cement was inserted above these vital nerve centres of the global war effort.  Except that this protection was only above the rooms and as a recorded statement from one of the structural engineers states, if a bomb had fallen in the nearby park and travelled diagonally it would have destroyed the rooms from the side.

Another point that strikes the visitor is the small size of the rooms compared to the scope of the operations run from them.  In a room about the size of my kitchen a map of the Atlantic Ocean covers one complete wall and has thousands of pinholes in it, showing where once convoys were tracked.  And as we look at those pinholes, we recognise that a good proportion represent points where ships were sunk and people died.

The sound recordings and video interviews in later life of those involved bring alive the precarious and rather sordid conditions in which they lived.  As the rooms had been improvised, there were no proper toilet facilities other than the notorious Elsan chemical toilets.  The well brought-up female secretaries had to traverse the corridor system in their nightdresses, confronting on their way marine guards, government officials and the most senior officers of the armed forces.  In another room, not much bigger than a suburban dining room, up to 11 typists would have to work.  At a time when probably the majority of the adult population (including Churchill with his cigars) smoked, the air-conditioning system must have had a difficult task.

One small detail stood out for me as giving a special insight into the conditions: a small, slotted noticeboard showing a removable sheet of card that said "Warm and Sunny" to inform the underground workers what the weather was like in the outside world.  There was not, however, a notice to tell them if their houses and families had been destroyed by the bombing and this was a constant source of worry to them.

We spent longer in this complex than I have spent in a museum for a long time because it is extremely interesting, at a time when Britain seems to have thrown away any advantage that might have accrued from supposedly ‘winning’ World War II, to get a sense of the conditions and the people that made the world safe for economic decline, the destruction of industry, overpopulation, politicians' expenses scandals, MRSA, a culture of incompetence in the Civil Service, the collapse of public education and reality shows and Top Gear on television.  As we left, however, my thoughts also spread to remembering the German film reconstructing the last days of Hitler in his bunker.  Although that particular bunker no longer exists, historical records imply that it was purpose-built from the start, with no chance of bombs accidentally penetrating and was far bigger than its equivalent in London.

Despite this impressive display of German architecture and technology, however, the difference of course lies in the people occupying the respective buildings.  Churchill's generals complained that he goaded them and came up with impractical suggestions, but he never overrode their final opinions.  Corporal Hitler's initial successes in the war led him to believe that he was a competent strategist and the terror-based regime he created, together with traditional German respect for authority (even illegitimate authority in this case) meant that his decision to commit military suicide by invading Russia was not seriously questioned.  Neither were his increasingly irrational decisions following the Russian disaster and the D-Day invasion.

The Churchill Museum has an example of the Enigma encoding machine developed by German technology but British intellectuals had cracked its codes so that every ‘secure’ order coming out of Hitler's physically secure bunker came to be read in Churchill's improvised equivalent.  One of the major figures involved in breaking the codes was Alan Turing who allegedly felt pressurised into committing suicide after the war by British society's intolerance of his homosexuality.  Be that as it may, in Nazi Germany those proclivities would have put him into a concentration camp before he had had time to contribute to the war effort in either coding or decoding.

Someone once said that World War II had one winner, America, one villain, Germany, and one hero, Britain.  Examining this exhibition and walking around Churchill's home at Chartwell is both uplifting and depressing.  Uplifting because you are brought close to the personality of this incredible human being Winston Churchill as well as the heroic spirit of the millions of ordinary, unremarkable people who were forced to become extraordinary and remarkable during his period of war leadership, and depressing as we pick our way through the litter-strewn detritus of the world we have made from their sacrifice. 

Two stories, one old, one new, summarise this situation for me: in 1946 a British Royal Engineers officer was running the factory that produced Hitler's Volkswagen ‘people’s car’ and production had reached 1,000 cars a month.  When the factory was offered to the British, American and French automobile industries they scornfully turned it down, claiming that this vehicle would never sell to a wider public.  Today the Volkswagen Company builds Rolls-Royces.  More recently, a British naval veteran travelling on one of the ghastly low-cost airlines was refused permission to carry his unit’s military standard as hand baggage because it did not meet some petty health and safety regulation.  As the veteran pointed out with some asperity: "If it wasn't for people like me, you would be telling me this in German".