LONDON LETTER
497
for scrap iron. As
a
rule these have gone from the gardens in the
squares as well, but in places the rich and powerful manage to cling
to their railings and keep the populace out. Generally speaking, where
there is money, there are railings.
One periodical reminder that things
have changed
in England since
the war is the arrival of American magazines, with their enormous hulk,
sleek paper and riot of brilliantly-coloured adverts urging you to spend
your money on trash. English adverts of before the war were no doubt
less colourful and enterprising than the American ones, but their mental
atmosphere was similar, and the sight of a full-page ad on shiny paper
gives one the sensation of steRping back into 1939. Periodicals probably
give up to advertisements as great a proportion of their dwindled bulk
as before, but the total amount of advertisement is far smaller and the
government ads constantly gain on the commercial ones. Everywhere
there are enormous hoardings standing empty_ In the Tube stations you
can see an interesting evolutionary process at work, the commercial ads
growing smaller and smaller (some of them only about l ft. by 2 ft.)
and the official ones steadily replacing them. This, however, only reflects
the dwindling of internal trade and does not point to any deep change
of outlook. An extraordinary feature of the time is advertisements for
products which no longer exist. To give just one example: the. word
IRON in . large letters, with underneath it an impressive picture of a
tank, and underneath that a little essay on the importance of collecting
scrap iron for salvage; at the bottom, in tiny print, a reminder that after
the war Iron Jelloids will be on sale as before. This throws a sort of
sidelight on the strange fact, recently reported by the Mass Observers
and confirmed by my own limited experience, that many factory workers
are actually
afraid
of the war ending, because they foresee a prompt
return to the old conditions, with three million unemployed, etc. The
idea that
wlwiever happens
old-style capitalism is doomed and we are in
much more danger of forced labour than of unemployment, hasn't reached
the masses except as a vague notion that "things will be different." The
advertisements that .seem to have been least changed by the war are those
for theatres and patent medicines. Certain drugs are unobtainable, but
the British have lost none of their old enthusiasm for medicine-taking,
and the consumption of aspirin, phenacetin, etc., has no doubt increased.
All pubs without exception sell aspirins, and various new proprietary
drugs have appeared. One is named Blitz, the lightning pick-me-up.
Once again I ·may have seemed to talk to you about very trivial
things, hut these minor changes in our habits, all tending towards a more
equal way of life and a lessened reliance on imported luxuries, could
have their importance in the difficult transition period which must occur
if Britain becomes a Socialist country. We are growing gradually used
to conditions that would once have seemed intolerable and getting to
have less of the consumer mentality which both Socialists and capitalists
did their best to inculcate in times of peace. Since the introduction of
