Coasting (15 page)

“That is right,” admitted the member for Wycombe.

“The Foreign Office,” shouted the member for Southend East, “was not working for Britain!”

There were cheers from the back benches, mixed in with a very few and feeble cries of “Shame!”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give way again”—The member for Wycombe squealed over the din. “There are alternative ways—”

“No!”

“—in which the interests of the Falkland Islanders can be protected, and I feel that these can be achieved by negotiation!”

“Point of order, Mr. Speaker!”

The member for Epping Forest was on his feet. “Mr. Speaker! At a time of emergency like this, if defeatism of this kind—”

“Hear, hear!”

“—if defeatism of this kind is to be spoken, should it not be done in secret session? Would it be in order to spy strangers in the House?”

“I hope,” said Mr. Speaker, “that the honorable gentleman does not.”

The member for Wycombe pleaded for “realism,” for “careful thought,” for “diplomatic efforts,” and was duly squashed. But the House was kind to the member for Essex South East, who got the troops on the march again with the right kind of rousing tune. “The very thought that our people,” he said, “eighteen hundred people of British blood and bone, could be left in the hands of such criminals is enough to make any normal Englishman’s blood—
and
the blood of Scotsmen and Welshmen—boil too!”

“Hear, hear!”

I switched the wireless off, sick of the sound of grown men baying like a wolf pack. It wasn’t a debate, it was a verbal bloodletting, with words standing in for the guns and bayonets that would come later when the fleet reached the islands. Listening to it, I felt that I’d been eavesdropping on the nastier workings of the national subconscious; I’d overheard Britain talking in a dream, and what it was saying scared me stiff.

A weak shaft of filtered sunshine was lighting the cushions in the saloon and I went out into the open cockpit to bask in the lovely seclusion of the Yealm. It was not, I saw now, quite what it had seemed in the rain. The thick woods on the far shore concealed an irregular band of furtive picture windows. Like flashers lurking behind the trees in a park, the bungalows and chalets wore dark glasses which glinted in the sun.

Sometime between 1933 and now, the solitude of the river had turned into a real estate agent’s desirable view, and I was moored deep in a suburb where nature was a “feature” like a sauna or a fitted kitchen. Its silence was the silence not of seclusion but of retirement—of childlessness, of pottering about indoors, of watching golf on television in the afternoons and having all the time in the world to read the
Radio Times
.

Even so, it was a pleasant place in which to find oneself marooned. One just had to join the retirees and look exclusively to starboard, to the western bank of the estuary and the unspoiled budding tangle of the spring. It was a little inhibiting, though, to find that I was a part of someone else’s view. Lacking the captain’s hat, the Arran knit sweater and the primrose Wellington boots in which I might have passed myself off as a suitably picturesque figure, I hid in the saloon in my offensive city clothes.

It was dark when I rowed across to the landing stage below the hotel, and the river was icily still. Each paddle-stroke brought up a glittering scoop of phosphorescence—a million firefly plankton at a single dip. An owl was hooting in a wooded bungalow garden; from another hidden house there came a snatch of Mantovani in muffled stereo. I found the landing stage by flashlight and walked back into England on a scented carpet of pine needles.

There were two parrots in the bar of the Yealm Hotel. One was a macaw, anchored to its perch on a chain; the other was a florid man with fierce gray handlebar mustaches—ex-RAF, ex-assistant sales director, I decided, and probably called Wilcox.

“You can say what you like,” Wilcox was saying to no one in particular, “but the Hitler Youth did Germany a world of good.” He glared hopefully at me, fishing for a cozy bout of argy-bargy. “Of course, it’s unfashionable to say that nowadays, isn’t it?”

Pepe, the first parrot, said, “Bye-bye, shut up, hullo!”

Wilcox said, “Take your good self, for instance. Did you do National Service?”

Trapped. I said, “No, I missed it by a year. But National
Service and the Hitler Youth weren’t exactly the same thing, were they?”

“Shut up, hullo, bye-bye!”

“If we still had National Service in this country today, we wouldn’t be in the state we are now. Caught with our pants well and truly down, huh? Pants well and truly down!”

“Bye-bye, hullo, shut up!”

Pepe chewed happily under each armpit in turn, then crapped copiously on the pile of old copies of the
Western Morning News
stacked under his perch. To complete his toilette he settled to vigorously throwing up the feathers on the top of his head so that it looked as if he were wearing a blue-rinse fun-fur wig. Wilcox, less entertainingly, went on about football hooliganism, hard labor in prison, welfare scroungers and how Mussolini made trains run on time.

For fifty pence I bought myself a bath in a fine claw-footed tub upstairs in the hotel. When I stopped moving in the water, I could hear the parrots through the plumbing, going at it hammer and tongs.
Hullo! Louts! Shut up! Maggie! Bye-bye! Argentina! Hullo! Work-shy! Bye-bye! On their bikes! Shut up!
The macaw had all the best lines.

I would have liked to see more of Pepe, but since seeing Pepe meant seeing Wilcox too, I left in search of some other place to drink. At nine o’clock at night, all life in Newton Ferrers was conducted behind closed doors and thickly curtained windows. My footfalls crunched too loudly on the graveled lane, and I was frightened of rousing the local dogs. But no dog barked. I shined the torch on the plaques borne by the gates of the houses that I passed. Most of them were memorials to some former glory of the householder. Here was “Sumatra Cottage,” there “Alamein.” When I opted for the quiet life in a river-view bungalow on the Yealm, it would be difficult to choose a suitable name for the place. Neither “Aberystwyth” nor “Tomato, Arkansas” struck quite the right note. “Chuck’s Diner” and “Saloon Bar” would both cause problems. I supposed that I’d have to resign myself to “Aleppo,” which would fit nicely into Newton Ferrers society.

I walked, and walked—evidently in the wrong direction,
since no pub appeared. My pace quickened to that of a route march, and one of those irritating fragments of rhyme that come to plague one at moments like this got stuck in my skull. It went round and round in a loop:

Left, right, left, right—we don’t want to fight, but by Jingo, left and right … The torchlight raked the lane and scared the owls from the trees. I marched, singing softly, under my breath, in tune with the times.

The air was dead, and the water shone dully under a waxing gibbous moon, but the midnight-fifteen shipping forecast was bad. An Atlantic depression off the west coast of Ireland was moving quickly east. There were gale warnings out for half the British sea areas, including Plymouth. The gale arrived in time for breakfast, a warm, wet southwesterly blowing up from Biscay. Funneled by the hills on either side of the estuary, it came roaring through like a train. Within minutes, it had transmuted the water into frothy cappuccino. The boat thrummed and shivered on its moorings. Below, it felt as if one were squatting in the sound box of an out-of-tune harp, with every shroud vibrating on a slightly different note and the wooden frame answering the shrouds with a long, low sympathetic groan. Outside, the two thick ropes which held the boat at the bows were as rigid as if they’d been cast in steel.

It was all quite safe, but it meant a spell of enforced retirement from the world. There was no question of rowing ashore; the inflatable dinghy would have been blown straight upstream into the middle of Devonshire. So I gave myself up to a bungalonely life of pipe and slippers, pottering about the library, feeding the stove with charcoal, making a ritual to-do about having elevenses at eleven and lunch sharp at one. At intervals I went above to watch the wind
harrowing the water; yesterday’s birds, it seemed, had all been blown away.

In the library I found one trophy to copy into my notebook. In Charles Darwin’s
The Voyage of the Beagle
there was a disenchanted account of his short stopover in the Falklands:

It seemed to me that this passage alone was enough to prove that the “sovereignty,” of which the government was making so much, had not been so undisputed as our Prime Minister was now claiming. Indeed, as I learned a week or two later, sovereignty over the land—the physical geography of “these miserable islands”—had already been ceded,
in prospect and theory, by the British Foreign Office to the Argentine. What the Westminster government had been trying to retain was a much more limited kind of sovereignty, over the fortunes and futures of the eighteen hundred British-passport holders who were the islands’ tenants.

The behind-the-scenes story of these negotiations was preposterously comic. The men from the Foreign Office had shuttled between London, Buenos Aires and Port Stanley on an impossible mission. They had been instructed to dream up ways of making the Falklanders learn to love Argentina, so that when the new lease was drawn up the tenants wouldn’t protest too loudly against their incoming landlord. The diplomats themselves got on fine with the Argentinians and enjoyed their trips to Buenos Aires; they found the Falklanders intractable, stick-in-the-mud and woodenly provincial.

The British diplomats and the Argentinians got together and set up a sort of carrot factory to produce tempting morsels to dangle in front of disdainful Falkland Island noses. They tried cheap package holidays in Argentina, and got no takers. They set up football scholarships, so that the children of the islanders could learn to pass and dribble at the feet of Argentina’s international stars. The parents refused to let their boys travel abroad. The diplomats played their ace—a Scout and Guide exchange scheme, with singsongs in English and Spanish around campfires. The camp in the Falklands was rained out, and the one in Argentina never materialized.

Nothing worked. It was a pity that the Foreign Office men hadn’t read the poems of T. E. Brown, hadn’t reckoned with the mixture of smugness, stubbornness and ferocity with which an insular people will defend its identity. The Falklanders were just as proud and cussed as the Manx. They sat tight on their foggy islands and saw themselves as occupying the center of the world. They despised the people from Across, with their foreign language and foreign politics. They loathed the British diplomats with their superior voices and hoity-toity manners, and saw them as traitors, bent on selling the islands over the sea.

It was at this absurd impasse that General Galtieri, Admiral Anaya and Brigadier Dozo had launched their invasion. Having wined and dined so happily with the Foreign Office men, they had expected only irritable noises from Britain. After all, the British Government had spent years trying to quietly rid itself of the Falklands, and Mrs. Thatcher might even be secretly grateful to Galtieri for taking the initiative and relieving her of this unwanted piece of British baggage.

Galtieri could not have been more wrong—and there was another clue in Charles Darwin’s description as to why the Argentine dictator had made a tragic miscalculation. The very bareness and monotony of the islands themselves, together with their tiny population, gave them the lucid purity of a symbol. Their blankness was their point: you could make them mean nothing or everything. And England had run out of symbols. Over this windy weekend, it was busy writing meaning into the Falklands, making that undulating, desolate land
signify
. Between Friday morning and Sunday afternoon the Falkland Islands accumulated a huge bundle of significations. They meant Tradition, Honor, Loyalty, Community, Principle—they meant the whole web and texture of being British.

I couldn’t get much of a picture out of the TV in the saloon, but it was enough to show that in General Galtieri we had found a worthy enemy, a monster that every clean-living Englishman could love to hate. Galtieri was an odiously pretty man. His soft and petulant Valentino lips betrayed the distorted sensualism of power. It was uncannily easy to imagine that face creased with pleasure in the exercise of the rack and screw. Those misplaced feminine features, that braided stewardess’ uniform—to the English, who dislike and fear male beauty for reasons safest left in the closet for the moment, Galtieri was a gift. The cruel, sexually ambiguous cast of his face seemed enough in itself to justify our unbridled distaste. His televised image was infinitely, luxuriously more hateable than that of Hitler, who had always been dangerously disadvantaged by his strutting, cowlicked, little man’s air of being on the verge of turning into a music-hall figure of fun. We used to jeeringly
call Hitler “Adolf”; no one would dream of
tutoyer
-ing Galtieri as “Leopoldo.” In the new kind of warfare, where television cameras are used as offensive weapons, a suitably loathsome face is a very useful adjunct to an improper foreign policy.