The Pursuit of Laughter (25 page)

A little further up the street there are queues outside
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, a war film in which all the English are incredibly brave and idealistic gentlemen and the Japanese rude, brutal, stupid (about the siting of the bridge) and not even as tough as one might suppose. Outwitted by the incredibly brave and idealistic English colonel, the Japanese colonel, who has been torturing him in vain for some days, feels so annoyed by what has happened that he has a good cry by himself in his steaming jungle study. The film was photographed in Ceylon, which seems to be the most beautiful country on earth.
Although there are moments when the friend mentioned just now would have had to ‘cover up’—the whistling for example—excellent acting and the odd jokes make it worth seeing.

It is too late for the Society to save John Nash’s Gothic castle, Shanbally, a pale grey house like a child’s toy fort set in a park in County Tipperary with a view across to the Knockmealdown mountains. When I visited it lately on a cold afternoon the empty
knocking
of demolishers’ hammers filled the air.

The castle was surrounded by an impenetrable barbed wire entanglement, as if they were ashamed of what was going on. At least I thought so at first, but perhaps they are really afraid that lumps of battlement will fall on the heads of the curious—not that there can be many visitors to this desolate and melancholy spectacle.

On arrival in Dublin I saw a poster:
WHY NOT RE-BUILD TARA
?

Well, why not? ‘Tara’s halls, where the harp that once…’ No particular reason, I
suppose
, except that the reconstruction of a dark age monument might be frightfully ugly. It would be a puzzle to know what to do with it when it was finished (or what to do with
them
, if there were several halls). Harp recitals, of course, spring to mind.

Meanwhile it is not so much new building that should concern people in Ireland as the demolition of fine old houses. Just as in England, planners have only to see a well-
proportioned
, agreeable Georgian house, to hurry with their pickaxes; before you know where you are it has disappeared, leaving a gap which is quickly filled either by something hideous and ‘contemporary’ or else by a villa of the cosy cot variety.

The Irish Georgian Society has just been formed* with the object of preventing, where possible, this unnecessary vandalism, and preserving the eighteenth century character of Dublin and other towns.

In any case the Irish Georgian Society can hardly be expected to save country houses which have failed to find a buyer. Too many roofs to keep in repair… It occurred to me that television might be the answer to the problem. A homeless dog, shown on TV, attracts thousands of people to clamour for it, people who had never thought of keeping a dog before. If country houses, in danger of demolition for want of an owner, could be shown for a few moments each week, who knows what might happen? Some rich Surrey-dweller, who follows his local hounds through the rhododendrons of suburbia, might suddenly feel an irresistible desire. Even if every house did not find an owner (and I believe many would) such a weekly programme would surely arouse widespread interest in the beauties that are being thrown away in England and Ireland.

* By Diana’s son Desmond Guinness.

Mr Emrys Hughes says of his short life of Sir Winston Churchill: ‘This is not the sort of admiring biography of which we have had so many in recent years.’ He begins two
hundred
years before Sir Winston was born, pointing out that the great Duke of Marlborough was a great scoundrel, and going on to Lord Randolph, his American wife, and their son. ‘Had young Winston been sent to an elementary school it is probable that his academic education would have ended there, for he did not show the abilities that would have won him a scholarship,’ writes Mr Hughes. ‘He had been nursed, waited upon, pandered to, mollycoddled, tutored, dragged through examinations, and had become accustomed to the world of wealth, rank, privilege and snobbery.’ It is not at all clear whether Mr Hughes looks upon this upbringing as having conferred an unfair advantage on the young Churchill, or as an obstacle which he subsequently managed to surmount. But, in fact, nineteenth century public schoolboys were not waited upon, pandered to or
mollycoddled
; these early chapters should be omitted from an English edition of the book because they are rather misleading and wholly irrelevant. When it comes to Sir Winston’s political career, however, it is well documented and fair. Mr Hughes quotes at length from Churchill’s speeches, and shows how often in his life he changed not only his party but also his opinions.

Among the members of the Labour government in 1945, first as Minister for Fuel and Power and subsequently as Minister of Defence, was Mr Emanuel Shinwell, whose
autobiography
is called
Conflict without Malice
. Mr Shinwell is the son of a poor Jewish tailor who had come to England from Poland as a little child in 1868. His account of his own
childhood
and early life is the best part of the book; his father singing ‘As I walk down the street each friend I do meet, says, there goes Muldoon, he’s a solid man’; he himself
buying
a dish of hot peas for a farthing; collecting a library of books from junk barrows;
marrying
at 19 a girl with a wonderful feathered hat.

In 1919 he was sent to gaol for incitement to riot in Glasgow; he vividly describes prison conditions and food: the latter was unchanged twenty years later and is probably much the same to this day. Mr Shinwell could not and did not eat it; nor could he eat the food cooked in rancid oil given him by the Spanish reds when he visited their civil war. In the first case he lived on bread, in the second on oranges.

Perhaps the rest of the book suffers from too little malice; but it is interesting for its account of the early days of Labour, when those who came to break up their meetings were chucked out in a very rough way, and also for a chapter on Ramsay MacDonald.

Mr Shinwell refused to join the Churchill government in 1940; he was often critical of it in Parliament where he and Lord Winterton, another critic, were called Arsenic and Old Lace. Once Brigadier Harvie Watt, Churchill’s PPS, reproached him for attacking his chief
during a difficult moment of the war, and added: ‘You mustn’t forget the P.M. has great military gifts. His ancestor was the Duke of Marlborough’, to which Mr Shinwell replied: ‘My ancestor was Moses’.

Women this spring have achieved a really new look, especially about the head. Neat and tidy hair has had a long innings of just forty years, ever since the birds’ nest bun coiffure was superseded by the shingle soon after the first war. Now the fashion seems to be for a large purple or orange chrysanthemum with a slender stalk, set on a tall thin body and spindly legs. These shaggy heads are not easily come by; it is no use thinking that to drag the hair through a hedge backwards will get the proper effect—only a hairdresser can
artfully
arrange the artless disarray. A bell-shaped hat would add to the horticultural effect: a huge flower under a cloche.

The 42nd Salon de l’Automobile at the Grand Palais has drawn more than a million
visitors
. The most expensive motor was a very glamorous Rolls Royce, the prettiest, a Cadillac which looked like a brilliant, poisonous flying insect. The new Citroen is very cleverly made, you can go to bed in it, and put twelve suitcases in the boot—both very useful
innovations
, as anyone knows who has tried to get a room in a French hotel on one of the roads to the South in August will know.

On a newspaper placard in Dublin I saw the following:

BALENCIAGA

ARD RI FAISIUN

which made me wish I understood Irish. Has M. Balenciaga given an Irish periodical what he has, it seems, denied to
Vogue
—news of his spring collection?

English parents continue to be greatly harassed by the 11-plus exam, which, they feel, divides the children unfairly and prematurely into sheep and goats. It is, no doubt, admirable that they should set such store by education. But the fact is, once a child has learnt to read he can learn two-thirds of the subjects taught in grammar schools by
himself
. Who wants to be ‘taught’ history, for example, by some prejudiced school master, when he can read all the great historians, and any number of memorialists and biographers
as well, in a school library or a public library? Latin and Greek, mathematics and science—they must be taught if they are to be learnt; but not English literature, history, geography, and so on.

I have been reading the autobiography of an Eton master, M.D. Hill, published thirty years ago. His subject was biology.

‘With a few exceptions,’ he writes, ‘only the duller boys are allowed to specialize in science… the truth is that many masters in the year AD 1927 believe that there is something a little “odd” or ungentlemanly in the pursuit of science, though it is better than nothing for a dull boy…. There is no shadow of doubt that valuable recruits have been lost thereby. I have known several cases of boys who would gladly have taken up science
con amore
if their tutors had allowed them. More than once boys have said to me: “My tutor hates science, he always laughs at it in Pupil Room.”’

That was Eton in the 20s. It was just the same in the 40s. Of the 50s I cannot speak.

Mr Hill was before his time in many ways. He thought the birch and cane would soon be as out of date as the rack and thumb screw. I believe at Gordonstoun the boys are punished by having to run for a mile; something that many people do for pleasure. The latter objection, however, also applies to being beaten; so perhaps one punishment is as good as another—who knows?

Eton may not shine when it comes to the teaching of hard subjects such as physics, but in what a scientist friend of mine calls the BBC subjects it excels, and the masters also excel in writing wonderful end of term reports which keep the parents quite amused and happy. Not for them the humdrum ‘fails to concentrate sufficiently on his work,’ or ‘has made a real effort this term’ type of report, which, they no doubt realize, is unreadably dull. One of my sons got this from an Eton master: ‘He is an incorrigible oddity, and is fast becoming a museum piece here.’

Mr Hill relates some of the sallies of another master: ‘His courage in tackling questions of which he does not know the meaning, much less the answer, is worthy of the highest praise.’ And: ‘His self-esteem is commendable, for while he believes that he has learnt something up to me this Half, I am quite sure he has not.’

The strangest event (it happened in December 1954, but has only just been published) was the Pope’s second vision. This time, Christ visited the sick-bed of his Vicar on earth, which
is perhaps less wonderful than that the sun should turn round in the sky, which the Pope saw after a three-day fast as he walked in the Vatican gardens four years ago.

Perhaps the reason why the newspapers give the Pope’s visions so much less
prominence
than they give to a railway smash or a royal romance is that unbelievers do not believe in them and believers find them perfectly natural. Nevertheless, when a man of Pius XII’s intellect and experience sees visions it is more interesting than when children guarding their flocks on the hillside, or nuns, or hermits, see them; from whatever point of view one considers it, it is news of the very first importance.

The case against the gamblers has failed. It turns out that what the policeman saw (when he climbed a fire escape and peeped into a London drawing-room) was not forbidden by law. Grown-up men and women who amuse themselves by transferring their own money from one to another in a private house, are not committing an offence. How farcical the English gambling laws must be if it could ever have been imagined that they were!

The prettiest town I have seen for ages is Alençon. Towns which have given their name to lace should be attractive, but a visit to Valenciennes soon demonstrates that they are not always so. Alençon had the good fortune to be rich in the eighteenth century and less rich subsequently; for this reason it has remained lovely, with hundreds of charming houses and many old streets and squares.

Climbing some stone steps in order the better to see the fine seventeenth century palais de Guise, I found myself at the door of a chapel dedicated to St Theresa, the Little Flower. Apparently she was born in the next-door house.

In the chapel there is a grille through which one can see St Theresa’s parents’ nuptial bed, a Second Empire mahogany bed hung with red curtains; and behind these curtains, a printed notice relates, the saint as a child used to hide when she wanted to think about God.

Round the top of the chapel walls are some delightful frescoes, depicting scenes from her life. In one of them she is shown, as a little girl, ‘
courant seule vers l’église malgré la pluie
’ [rushing to church despite the rain]—an act of courage which could, I daresay, be
paralleled
in many an Irish village on almost any Sunday. It probably rains more in Ireland than it does at Alençon.

A museum of costumes is being arranged in Paris. French royal personages were
surprisingly
short; Louis XIV measured 5 ft 2½ inches, but made himself several inches taller by wearing very high heels and a very high wig. And not only royalties were small; the robes Josephine wore when she was crowned are so tiny that in all Paris, it appears, there is not a mannequin who can fit into them. So these historic dresses will be displayed on
dummies
used nowadays for the clothes of boys and girls of fourteen.