Another voice
More travellers' tales
Auberon Waugh
C tuck in a first-class railway carriage for seven hours between Paddington and Taunton on Friday, I fell into conversation with my neighbour, as travellers are wont to do. She was a little old lady from Aberdeen who turned out to have a whole bottle of brandy in her suitcase.
She said she was the daughter of a fisher- man, drowned at sea. Her mother worked gutting herrings in a freezing factory until she was 65. Her husband, whom she plann- ed to join in Plymouth, was a fishing cap- tain. On his rare moments on shore — in Aberdeen — he was also captain of the local lifeboat. In their home was a buzzer: within three minutes of the buzzer being sounded, the lifeboat, fully manned, was charging down the ramps into the sea.
At least I think that is what she said. She was also president or chairman of the Scot- tish women's branch of the Lifeboat In- stitution, or something of the sort. And she was furious that the widows and orphans of the Penlee lifeboat were to receive such huge sums of money as a result of public hysteria. It would ruin their lives, she said with passion. Of course they should receive something — perhaps £50,000 held in trust for the children, with the income available to the widows. But when sums like £250,000 were being given out to each family, they simply would not know how to handle a bonanza on this scale.
Another member of our party — I think she owned and ran a hotel in Plymouth claimed that the Mousehole widows had acknowledged this and proposed to give some of their jackpot to build a social cen- tre for lifeboatmen or something of the sort. The lady from Aberdeen shook her head. In the blunt accents of the far north, she said that once they had got the money, they would not give a penny back. She knew these seafaring folk. They would spend it all, and be left more miserable than before. Many of the widows would re- marry, and who would have the money then? It was wrrong, wrrong, wrrong
Obviously she would have won any argu- ment on any subject, after the bit about her ten-shilling-a-week fish-gutting widowed mother. In most first-class carriages, I im- agine, she would have carried the day on the point of whether £250,000 was too much for a working-class family. People with aching social consciences do not usually travel first class. If they were discussing the matter in second class, it would have been to repeat, with little compassionate whining noises and much tongue-clicking, the opinion shouted from every single newspaper in the country, and echoed by our drivellingly inept Attorney-General, that the widows and orphans should receive every penny subscribed, without remission of income tax, capital transfer tax or any of the other diabolical inventions which politi- cians have contrived to torment the rich.
For my own part, I held no very strong view on the matter. As someone who has nearly always enjoyed good luck, I could scarcely grudge the widows and orphans of brave men a windfall of this sort. My first appearance on television was as a grinning urchin at the scene of the Lynmouth flood disaster. I was eating a banana. There, public sentiment ran so strong that any farmer who lost a chicken was able to claim about £60 for it. The government of some friendly country — I think it was Ghana sent a boatload of bananas to relieve their distress, and these were handed out to all on the scene, including sightseeing ghouls like myself. Bananas were still rather a luxury then — I don't suppose the sailors' orphans in Aberdeen saw many — but I got one. No wonder I was grinning.
It is true that Aberfan made me slightly queasy, as Welsh villagers squabbled over what grotesquely inflated sum they should receive in compensation for their lost kid- dies. but this was probably just hatred of the Welsh. They should have paid the Coal Board for saving them so much money. Princess Margaret gave them a good lead by sending them teddy bears instead of money, even if she was a little late. And I was nauseated by the thalidomide episode, but chiefly by the self-righteousness of the Sun- day Times, demanding ever more huge sums of other people's money to compen- sate for a misfortune which might have befallen any of us. This vulgar identifica- tion of human tragedy with huge sums of money was something one should resist, I felt — but obliquely, perhaps, rather as a lonely sniper will pick off random enemy targets without any clear idea of his con- tribution to the total war effort, or even any certainty that others are still waging it.
But nobody who lives in the modern world can grudge the football pool winner, even if some forms of winning the football pools may involve the death or mutilation of a loved one. There is simply too much money floating around. Tens of millions of pounds are spent on a road improvement scheme, or a new comprehensive school to replace better buildings in a better school already existing, or to change the name of half a dozen ministries after some govern- ment reshuffle. If some of this money did not occasionally fall off the back of the state juggernaut into the lap of an undeser- We apologise for the fact that, due to the rail strike, the delivery of the Spectator to some newsagents has been delayed this week, ving proletarian, public resistance to the society which politicians have created for themselves would be that much sharper. As Lord Hailsham might say (if he can still speak), our beloved national institutions would be at risk. The ordinary educated private citizen may not give a tinker's curse for any of Lord Hailsham's institutions the Houses of Parliament, the Inns of Court, the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City of London — but so long as they can keep the Hailshams of this world happy and occupied and out of our way, it would be a foolish man who urged their destruc- tion. The increasingly obtrusive activities of such would-be Hailshams as Michael Havers, Tony Benn and Erin Pizzey suggest that all is not well in the world of 'leader- ship' people.
But the chief lesson of Mousehole must surely be that there is still an enormous amount of spare money floating around in the private sector. All this talk of cash shor- tage is so much hot air, or at most applies only to a small part of the population. No doubt a few penniless old age pensioners were so taken up in the general hysteria that they sent a crumpled, Kit-e-Kat-stained £5 or £10 note from their pitifully inadequate pensions as a sincere token of some pro- found emotion. But the majority of the money must have come from the indulgence of a passing whim. Nobody can seriously have supposed that the widows and orphans were going to starve. Gifts were the emo- tional equivalent of buying a box of chocolates. A better and nobler way of spending money, of course, but in terms of instant satisfaction very much the same.
The full measure of this spare cash is something which neither the newspapers nor television will ever discover, unless we are prepared to look into our own private arrangements for survival. Another of mY companions on Saturday was an insurance broker, with an office in one of London's less favoured suburbs and another in Taun- ton. He had the jovial, impenitent air of a self-made man, and I hope he will.not take it amiss — since I see in him a new friend for life — if I suggest he was slightly plumper even than the average New Briton in the street. Hearing that I lived some miles from Taunton, he offered to drive me through the blizzards and the ten-foot snow- drifts to my home, saying he had a special 19-gear, four-wheel-drive automatic vehicle which he brought out only in snowstorms. Normally he drove a Rolls-Royce like everyone else. A guest at my house iden- tified it as a machine made by General Motors for use in the deserts of the Middle East, costing about £17,000 at the time. On the way, he asked his wife if his six-inch- thick rope was in the back. In some alarm, I asked him what he wanted it for. He replied that he always carried one in a snowstorm in case he met someone stuck who neededa tow. My conclusion was that Britain is still a rich, caring, sensible nation. But you have to be stuck for seven hours in a first-class railway carriage to discover this important fact.
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