A PLACE IN MY MIND
Brighton A Study in Limbo
By SIMON RAVEN
r‘NCE upon a time there was a famous transit kf camp in India, and it was called Deolali. It was comfortably ordered and there were many amenities. There were cinemas, swimming pools, amusement parks, restaurants and bars; little discipline was enforced among those in transit; the Field Cashier dished out substantial advances on the spot and without asking em- barrassing questions. Yet nobody liked it. Everyone was drunk, querulous, hysterical and melancholic by turns; and it was said that if you stayed there more than a few weeks (which could easily happen if the posting orders were mixed up) you went raving mad with a complaint known as `Deolali Tap.' So strong was this supposition, indeed, that old soldiers to this very day are apt to designate any form of eccentricity, from Minor insolence to suicide, as 'going Deolali'; and to anyone who, like myself, spent as much as seven days there the image is for ever meaning- ful. This dismal circumstance I now recall because I have always felt very much the same Mistrust for Brighton as I did, eighteen years ago, for Deolali--a mistrust which the com- parison, although at first sight it may appear fanciful, will help me to describe and explain.
There has been a conspiracy, and not least among writers, to disguise the real nature of Brighton. 'Kind, cheerful, merry Doctor Brigh- ton,' wrote Thackeray somewhere in The New- °wiles; and, of course, one also remembers the brisk and frolicsome scenes there early in Vanity Fair: Cap pain Crawley booming over the billiard table, Becky giving George Osborne the !ye, and even that simpering little Amelia show- ing a bit of life as a result of the sea air. Dickens 'miles nearer the truth, striking a sombre note With Blimber's Academy and little Paul; Graham Greene comes nearer still, with the corrosive scabbiness and misery of the Catholic Pinkie; and yet neither Dickens nor Greene really got the place right, any more than Thackeray did, if Only because both little Paul and Pinkie, in their heroic and ghastly fashions, have something neroic or at least significant about them, whereas the whole point about Brighton is the rule which it imposes on its victims of mediocrity, of futility, of sloth.
For Brighton (like the transit camp at ueolali) is where people go if they do not know what else to do next, We'll go down for the day, my dears, and when we get there we'll see: after all, in Brighton one always knows some- 14%, and there are facilities (my dears) for :11Ything you can name. And here we have it : the „.°InehodY one knows in Brighton is always a ;:rsort whom one does not in the least wish to "e and would not dream df seeking out now it': ever were it not for the ennui, the utter aim- lessness which sent one to Brighton in the first them and as for the 'facilities,' they are all of ruaetill there, it is true, but all of them second- „„e. In Brighton you can do everything easily; 0"in can do nothing properly. You have a choice waY pitch-and-putt courses, but must go a long of for even moderate golf; you have the run IOSt new London films--except for the two e'nr. three really adult ones; you have a beach, yelY adequate, but indistinguishable from a utL it!tured more. The racecourse is (or was) unin- ing; the whores, unsure whether they have er°,._se. to relax or do business, are expensive and
, the restaurants, even the best of them, treat you like your own bill in the adding machine —in, thump, clank, whirr, and out. Those hotels which look aristocratic contain salesmen and garage owners; those which look opulent house small turf-accountants on the spree. The gambling has the efficiency it has on the Riviera, but none of the elegance and charm; the university looks (from the road at least) like a motel; and the famous air smells of waffles, vinegar, petrol fumes and piss.•
• But of course the poor quality of these arrangements (in Brighton as in Deolali) is pre- cisely calculated to fit the uneasy and unprivileged status of the transient, to one or another class of which I myself, like everyone else visiting Brighton, have always belonged. I have been the undergraduate looking for what he took to be `life,' the young man on the make driven out of SW5 by Sabbath accidie, and, more lately, the peevish parent- taking out a child at half- terms. In all these capacities, after.a few hours I have longed only to leave the place before the inevitable onset of—yes—`Deolali Tap'; yet always some accident of transition has sooner or later brought me back. In a spasmodic way, then, I have become quite an old hand at Brighton and am now just beginning to be less jittery, to survey it all with a certain gloomy relish, to ponder the essence of the place. And here again I am helped by comparing it with Deolali: for the- fundamental point to grasp about both
Deolali and Brighton is that, although con- tinuous in their functions, they neither of them have, of their very nature, a future or a past. For all the elaborate canteens and messes of the one, for all the trim gardens and fine squares of the other, they have no roots, no monuments, no knowledge of history and no respect for it, and no anticipation or joy in a future which can only repeat what has already been endlessly re- peated—the intake, processing and ejection of faceless hordes. Deolali was a limbo designed for the dispossessed soldier, the man who existed only as one of a list (or, worse still, had been unaccountably omitted even from that), the man who had lost his unit and with it his purpose and his home; Brighton is the limbo reserved for the dispossessed of our modern age, the philis- tines, the compulsive know-nothings, the coupon- fillers, the weekend lotus-eaters of the road- houses, and the prim yet terrified status-seekers of suburbia, who are denying themselves rational pleasures for the 'prestige' of keeping a scruffy child at 'a scruffy preparatory school on the South Coast. There are theatres in Brighton but no drama, museums but no art, churches of every denomination but no god; for drama, art, god require a responsive audience, and those in transit, obsessed with their own listless discon- tent, can respond to nothing. Even vice in Brighton means no more than the reflex grizzling for another lollipop of a bored and greedy child.
All in all, then, I find it appropriate that a Conservative party, which will propose as our only possible salvation a newer, slicker and nastier image of modernity, should be assembling in annual conference at Brighton . . . at Gol- gotha-on-Sea.
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