SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
STRIX
I sympathise but 1 do not agree with people who demand the severance of all cultural rela- tions with the USSR. I do not believe that such a step would 'bring home' to the people of the USSR, let alone to their rulers, the contempt and detestation with which we view the latter's treatment of Czechoslovakia; the news that the British have cancelled the tour of a folk- dancing ensemble from Minsk or (if it was too late to do that) have boycotted or even booed its performances is not going to engender remorse in the Kremlin or hope in the Hradczany Palace. Gestures are only worth making if they produce an effect—and the right effect at that.
An individual who breaks off relations with another individual rarely finds himself under the necessity of reestablishing them. It is different with nations. However odious the conduct of state rs, state A remains in diplo- matic and Commercial relations with it, because self-interest—and indeed wisdom—demand that it should. If it puti an embargo on cultural contacts, for how long is that embargo to last, and what sort of circumstances will justify state A in lifting it? Although it is not strictly true that art knows no frontiers (you couldn't sell many copies of The Tale of Pigling Bland in Saudi Arabia) there is something contrary to nature in preventing the cross-fertilisation of one nation's creative genius by that of another, and attempts to erect this sort of bar- rier have never met with much success. As a punishment, cultural sanctions suffer from the same limitations that, in the nursery, being stood in the corner did. This form of penance not only did not hurt but one knew that it would not last long because either tea-time would come along or one would be amnestied in order to make up the numbers for a game.
Out of touch
The extent and the variety of unofficial ,con- tact; between this country and the USSR would ha‘c seemed unimaginable fifteen years ago. The first Russian crew to compete at Henley Regatta in 1954 might have been men from tars, arousing so much curiosity that their landlady became a sort of nine-day celebrity. loday tourists of all nationalities in cars and coaches and caravans bowl in droves along the unswerving Russian roads; but when in 1957 the first foreign motorists were allowed in (they
were, for some unfathomable reason, British) a mild sensation was caused, and reports of their uneventful progress through terra incognita, nightly telephoned to Printing House Square by that veteran newshawk Strix, were given great prominence in The Times.
The more reason one country has to fear and distrust another, the more valuable are all forms of contact with it. There are few valid analogies between a cold war and a hot one, but I remember well how forlorn and desorienM one felt in 1942 when the Japanese, having driven us out of Burma, sat down (or were thought to be sitting down) on the far side of the hills along the Indian frontier and left (or appeared to be leaving) the British- Indian forces to stew in their own juice. In the forward areas there was little contact with the enemy, and what there was we got the worst of. Air reconnaissance of the jungle revealed almost nothing. We had not taken a single prisoner of war. Such documents as had been captured were low-grade and unrevealing. Something like 90 per cent of the army in India had never seen a Japanese soldier. Officers and men—and this was especially true of the Indian and Gurkha regiments—had nothing at all, not even a popular fallacy or an old joke, on which to base their estimate of the omnisub- jugant enemy whom they were expected to out- fight. Afterwards it struck me that in those anxious days we should all have felt more secure, if the Japanese had followed the ex- ample of their senior ally and put an oriental version of Lord Haw Haw on the air; however ludicrous or horrific his utterances, everyone would have listened to him.
Heirloom
I have before me as I write an objet which if it hardly qualifies as an objet d'art or even de vertu has nevertheless, at this moment in the history of mass-communications, a certain sentimental value. It is a small leather box, a sort of mini-chest embossed with pewter or some similar metal; it used to adorn the massive escritoire on which, at weekends, my grand- mother conducted her correspondence. Its func- tion is still obvious. Framed in the pseudo- heraldic lid, and shielded by glass, are two postage stamps. It was from this tiny receptacle that my grandmother franked her letters and her postcards before committing them—via a domestic letter-box in the hall, which I suppose the butler emptied—to the care of His Majesty's Mails.
Today His Majesty (King Edward VII) is barely identifiable on the more expensive of
the two stamps, although the legend ors PENNY can be deciphered through a blur of pink ectoplasm; but he shows up almost as good as new, with HALF/ PENNY underneath him and POSTAGE & REVENUE round his crown, on the green stamp. Though generous in large matters, my grandmother was fanatic- ally mean in her dealings with the Po( Office; owing to her determination not to use two sheets of notepaper when one would do, her letters were palimpsests, and when she sent us a pound on our birthdays it always arrived in an unstamped envelope, she being reluctant to spend money on registering the letters and be- lieving, anyhow, that the postal authorities took particular care to ensure the delivery of un- stamped missives so as to be able to collect the excess postage. So I cannot suppose that she herself bought an accessory which offered a standing temptation to her family and guests to help themselves ad lib. to stamps. Someone must have given it to her.
It cannot have occurred either to its donor or to its designer that the little stamp-box would ever become obsolete, that the pink and green stamps on its lid would one day be mis- leading guides to a letter-writer's requirements. That day came on 3 June 1918 when, for the first time since 1840. the cost of posting a letter rose from Id to lid. During the subsequent fifty years we have come to accept the idea that the price of stamps will be increased at regular intervals, that their dimensions will be arbitrarily varied and the designs on them frequently altered, and that the delivery of the letters to which they are affixed will tend to become less reliable. Concerning the British postage-stamps of 2018 (if there are any) only one thing can be prophesied with certainty: they will be devilish expensive.
Money for nothing •
If a tractor or any other self-propelled agri- cultural vehicle is driven on the public highway for less than six miles in a week, its owner is absolved by the Ministry of Transport from licensing it. This is a fair arrangement; the licence-fee went up to £5 last March, and many tractors and even more combine-harvesters seldom or never use the roads. The Ministry of Agriculture, however, does not recognise the fairly obvious principle here involved. It offers a grant of 15 per cent, by way of an 'investment incentive,' to anyone who buys a new tractor or a new combine; but he doesn't get the grant until he has licensed the vehicle. I cannot see either sense or justice in this rule. A combine- harvester, in particular, is no more mobile than a grand piano for ten of the twelve months covered by the licence; and why a farmer in the middle (say) of Salisbury Plain should be obliged to pay £5 for something from which, as another Ministry recognises, he derives no benefit at all I fail to understand. This is the sort of bureaucratic anomaly which affects only a tiny minority, which brings in a revenue so derisory that the cost of collecting it is barely recouped and which elicits froni the farming community the fell comment 'Typical!' It isn't in the least typical, it is a small, exceptional mistake which in any other place than White- hall could be put right by a stroke of the pen. I bet it won't be, though.
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