Another voice
Roots, roots, roots
Auberon Waugh
In the year of the Jubilee it is only natural, I suppose, that some anniversaries should receive more attention than others. 1 January of this year marked the centenary of Queen Victoria's proclamation as Empress of India, but nobody cares to remember that in a year when the subcontinent is under the iron heel of the hell-cat Indira Gandhi. It is also, of course, the thirtieth anniversary of Indian independence, partition and the Mountbatten massacres, but again the time is not ripe to dwell on these things.
The Silver Jubilee of Her Majesty's accession has excited a certain amount of comment and a few people have even mentioned that this year also marks the diamond jubilee of the invention of the House of Windsor. Nobody, however, has noticed that it would also be the occasion for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's ruby wedding, if events had not tragically made any such celebration inappropriate. For myself, I can't help noticing that 1977 marks the 125th anniversary of the purchase of Balmoral by Prince Albert the Goodin its way, an even more significant event than those of 1917 or 1952, since it meant that the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Wettin), as the Royal Family was then known, plainly intended to stay. But my favourite anniversary of 1977 (discovered by chance while! was researching something quite different) is the golden jubilee of Barbara Cartland's loss of virginity commemorated by a somewhat rueful article in The Times by the veteran love expert herself, suggesting that virginity would soon be coming back into fashion.
Others may remember 1917 for the October Revolution in Russia, just as they may remember 1927 for Mr Baldwin's magnificent Trades Disputes and Trade Union Act, treacherously repealed in 1945. But for the domestic, home-loving Britain of the 1970s I should have thought that the diamond jubilee of the House of Windsor and the golden jubilee of Miss Cartland's supreme sacrifice were enough to be getting along with.
The idle mind may see no obvious connection between these two events beyond a fortuitous accident of timing, but I prefer to see them both as central to our national predicament. Royalism has never been much of an issue in Britain, although until recently it was fashionable to sneer at the Royal Family whenever people of superior intellect and modern outlook were assembled together. Many, of course, have set their faces against any other attitude, just as I suppose it is possible to find people at a Hampstead cocktail party who still intend to vote Labour at the next election. But one cannot, as a social commentator, trouble oneself with such people, who are the flotsam and jetsam of the earth's oceans, left behind by every storm. If one is to comment on the way the tide is moving, one must ignore those left behind in whatever frozen posture they choose to adopt. No doubt the Sunday colour supplements will pick them up at a later date, with their enormous libraries of old photographs and spiked articles to draw on. But so far as things are moving, they appear to be moving in a strongly pro-Windsor direction.
There are many possible reasons for this, of course, not least of them the personal qualities of the monarch herself and of her mysterious consort, over whom I have spent many happy hours in the search for a convincing patronym. But the monarchy's chief appeal is surely in its promise of continuity, of permanence and resistance to change. One feels for the Queen from time to time the same irrational love as one feels for the design on Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup tins, Worcester sauce labels and the few—pathetically few—other things that have not changed in one's own lifetime. I don't think the emotion she arouses should be confused with nostalgia, or even with the healthy and robust reactionary urges of the time. The Royal Family never played an important part in my fantasy life as a child ; I have no memory of our Imperial past beyond a few uncomfortable months in Cyprus trying to prolong it, and no great certainty that it ever occurred.
Like most Englishmen, I have never seen the monarch or Royal Family as part of any social fabric to which I belonged, or wished to belong. It has always been a slightly bizarre foreign importation, a snobbish in-joke shared between the intelligentsia and the autochthonous nobility against the nurserymaid and Barbara Cartland classes. Suddenly, however, the monarchy has become as precious as the design on Tate and Lyle Golden Syrup tins or the survival of the Rothschild collection at Mentmore, something to defend at dinner parties.
Large parts of London would lose their whole purpose without a monarchy. Vienna has always struck me as an object lesson in what happens to a Royal and Imperial Capital when it decides to do away with the monarchy for which it was designed. Others disagiee with me, but I find it a horribly pointless city, with its wide avenues and beatiful vistas leading to nothing but another crummy old museum. Life holds nothing for the Viennese but sweet cakes, sex and church music, while the whole city cries out for an annual garden party.
The only serious complaint against the British monarchy is surely the terrible effect it has on our politicians in office. It seems inconceivable that they could be so selfimportant or so preposterously pleased with themselves if they did not feel themselves protected by the majesty of the Crown, if they did not have the ludicrous alibi of being Her Majesty's Government, Her Majesty's Ministers and Secretaries of State to hide behind. But even if the trappings Of royalty protect them from an awareness of their pipsqueak status and the universal contempt in which they are held, there is no reason to suppose they would be less incompetent or less odious if they could persuade themselves that they were somehow the people's choice, the people s government and the people's ministers. If I am right when F say that the present explosion of sympathy for the Queen shows a yearning for permanence and an awareness of the rootlessness of our drifting society, what are we to make of Barbara Cartland's solemn prediction that virginnY will soon be back in fashion—by which I suppose she means that it will be more commonplace among unmarried females than it is at present? It is not just that Miss Cartland thinks it ought to be more corn" moriplace—she actually thinks it will. The mystery here is not that any septuagenarian lady should hold such a fatuous opinion,' but that The Times should choose to give it such prominence. No doubt it is all part of a middle-aged reaction against excessive sexual stimulation. Even I, at the difficult age of thirty-seven, find myself mildlY appalled to read of an actress ailed Susan George, twenty-five, peddling her little ass around Heathrow and annourlcing that she is window-shopping for new man.
Personally, I would not give virginity a cat in hell's chance of coming back fat°, fashion among young people, but I think! can understand the general desire that it should. The rootlessness of our degenerate, detribalised urban society has nothing to.do with the collapse of Empire, but everything to do with the collapse of family. The reason we all gasp to think of Miss Cartland, sacrificing her virginity on the altar oi matrimony fifty years ago is the same as the reason that Miss George wiggles her bottorn in front of the press cameras, the satne reason that so many Englishmen feel .an inexplicable lump in the throat at Trooping the Colour. We are all orphans, all exiles, and in an irreligious, rootless age that, earnest, conscientious little Hausfrau 0' Windsor emerges from time to time to be the Sister tous all. mheri,ss cFaiathrtflualn, i WdifesaunpdpoEseld,.e! the surrogate Grandmother and MISS _George the surrogate mistress. But corn; pared to these three, the Prime Minister ana Cabinet have no role to play at all, they are abstract ideas, crumbs of cheese, fragMents of underdone potato. The Queen is more useful than any of them, and a snip at the
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