62
FRANK KERMODE
down the window, shouting brightly, "Of course you're voting Con–
servative?" "I couldn't think of any words," said my passenger, "so I
just yelled 'Arseholes!' and she put the window up quick." This is the
social level where it is not considered smart and self-improving to vote
Tory. A little higher up this notion lingers, as we often observed. Stock–
port is built in a hollow a few miles south of Manchester, and deep in
this hollow is a nook used for political meetings and called the Bearpit.
There, a few days before polling, Harold Wilson addressed, not very
well I'm afraid, an enormous crowd, about 9000 according to the police.
The man standing by me was a solid, amiable hatmaker. He must have
sized me up as a Tory, and said, with some difficulty, "I don't mind
admitting it, I vote Labour." My wife even found in the worst slums,
which are very bad in Stockport, a pathetic attempt to gain prestige by
voting Tory; and it must be that many millions of working-class people
vote against themselves in order to feel classy. Yet Orwell was not as
wrong as people say about the warmth and comfort of solid working–
class life, nor about its gaiety. The social ease and ready laughter which
one met again and again, and which is nonexistent in the English middle
classes with all their poses to hold, prevailed also in the efficient com–
mittee rooms. Optimism grew; we took our last voter to the polls and
went home to watch television with hope and fear.
Stockport, incredibly, had given both seats to the Conservatives
for nearly forty years; the swing needed for a Labour win throughout
the country was about 3.6 percent, and to achieve that swing both
Stockport seats had to be won. It happened that the first true indication
of a sufficient swing came with the Stockport results; both seats were
gained. The rest of the story is the long agony of Friday, with every–
thing depending upon a gain at Meriden (the geographical center of
England). The swing needed was small, but the prosperity of the Mid–
lands had throughout kept the Labour swing down, and in places–
Smethwick, notoriously-this, with the feeling against West Indian im–
migrants, actually lost Labour seats. But Meriden came through, and
Harold Wilson had his small majority. He went in at the front door
of 10 Downing Street and Sir Alec left by the back. It has been a
fantastic couple of days; it was as if our change of direction merely
mirrored a world alteration, for there occurred more or less together
the dismissal of Khrushchev, the Chinese bomb and the Jenkins revela–
tions. On a lesser scale Wilson, like Attlee in 1945, takes office at a
moment of national and world crisis. He will be like Attlee as Prime
Minister, precise, unforgiving, honest.
If
he is given the space
to
move
in he will probably make himself a more exciting cabinet before a year
