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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
way any more. All that remains is a dim, dumb, almost soldierly sense
that, back there somewhere, I left behind some remarkable people. And a
culture of poverty that bred strength as well as misery, broad sympathies
inseparable from mindless cruelties - and a sophistication about gut reali–
ties completely alien to my present N.W.1 neighbors.
Don't tell me about the ugly side. I covered the trial of the Moors
Murderers, Brady and Hindley. They're as authentic to the northern
working class as Coronation Street or Richard Hoggart. And so is
Bradford's Jack the Ripper. I know what mean bastards the proles
can be . One foggy night in Islington the No. 38 bus I was riding ran
over a drunk, breaking his leg. A decent middle class woman spread her
expensive-looking coat over the shivering man in the street. "Wouldn't
do that if I was you, miss," advised the bus driver enjoying a fag while
waiting for someone else to ring 999 for an ambulance. "He might piss
on it."
No English middle-class person would have dealt with a victim as my
No. 38 bus driver did. Give them the right kind of crisis - Dunkirk, a
motor accident, a train or air crash - and they're magnificent. Once I
recovered from a spinal operation by taking a Swan Hellenic cruise
through the Aegean. My fellow passengers - Eton/Rodean-bred or
nearly so - were super to me because I was acceptably disabled. But they
were the same people who coldly, cruelly, snubbed another passenger
who had the wrong accent and drank too much. Funny, that. 'Joe" was
an ex-RAF Spitfire pilot. He was more tolerant of the snobs than
I.
"Ease up, lad," Joe told me one boozy night under a Corinth moon. "I
understand that lot. They want me to be like one of the Few. Instead, I
behave like all of The Many." He roared with vodka-and-tonic laughter.
"If I was a railwayman like my Dad they'd forgive me, you see."
Joe wasn't my idea of a proper Battle of Britain hero. They wore
white scarves and said "Tallyho!" as they flew into the Messerschmitt–
darkened sun. Somehow, I confused Richard Hilary, burning alive in his
Spitfire, with my idol, Roger Bannister, who broke the four-minute
mile ( I was a mere 440 runner), with Leslie Howard in
The Scarlet
Pimpernel
with Richard Hannay in
The
39
Steps:
brave toffs, on my side.
I'm probably as much a product of John Buchan and Gainsborough
Studios as Marx and Freud. My saints may be proletarian, but my heroes
certainly are bourgeois.
And now I'm going back to a country where men are called Sparky,
Smoky and Spunky . . . where not a soul will know what I mean by
Clause 4, devolution, Arthur Scargill, and elevenses ... where
I'll
have
to be polite to everybody not because "it's done" but because of my fear
they'll shoot me over a parking space . . . where a Bill of Rights
guarantees
I'll
never again have one of my books banned ... where sane
