Diary
MY daughter's in-laws live just outside Woking in a house overlooking the Surrey hills with a view as unspoilt as any to be seen in the wilds of Scotland or Wales. Every summer they give a musical soirée (black tie) in aid of the Muscular Dystrophy chanty ifY, attended by neighbours and other local worthies, and it is always a heart- warming occasion to which only the pen of the late Sir John Betjeman could do justice. Over supper in the garden conversation ranged from the controversial subject of whether the Women's Institute was right to want to modernise its jam-making image to the eel _ uany vexed question of whether Princess Margaret had or had not meant to insult the Girl Guides at some local do. Having listened to all this in silence, a , "uddle-aged man suddenly said: 'I cannot think of any more appropriate way of celebrating the 40th anniversary of the !IN, landings, since this kind of evening Is what those brave men died for.' To my surprise this somewhat bathetic remark had a most formidable impact. The whole corn- Pany fell completely silent, as if stunned by motion, remaining that way for several minutes as the sun sank behind the Surrey hills. For the others knew, as I did not, the depth of genuine feeling from which the reinark sprang, since the speaker had first arrived in the locality in 1945 as a Polish ;Jewish orphan, having lost both his parents !). a German concentration camp, and therefore had more reason than most to ap- preciate what lies underneath the deceptive- ly shallow Home Counties way of life.
George Weidenfeld gave an interesting , lunch last week for George Will whom eliiirst tome a few years ago when he was a ever young American post-graduate at oxford' Now he is President Reagan's favourite Washington columnist and a walne to conjure with throughout the _°rId. Unfortunately journalistic fame in the US, at any rate of the columnar variety, p`einds to transform even the jolliest of peo- tioe into pompous bores and the only excep- n to this rule nowadays is William Safire --fo a former Nixon protege. James Reston, b.! example, the so-called dean of ,w`rashington columnists, behaves as if he t_vr,e an elder statesman, and indeed expects th'ueue treated as such. In a sense, of course, ane figures are statesmen, since so open tiomh atchcaetssiible are American administra- Pnartsof the governing process. Walter Lipp' .mportant columnists do become Zrirl in his heyday used to be able to sum- presidents to him and I remember LBJ Minh to me once that Ho Chi Walter 8, enmity worried him far less than s. closen .1 one sense, of coursemakes
, this
ess to the great and powerful autimet
ve columns, since the writers
are in the know. But I am not at all certain that this helps a journalist to get at the truth. The only time I have ever been in the know was during the Kennedy administration, and nothing that I have written about from the outside has ever turned out to be so ill- judged as what I wrote then from the in- side. Proximity to government sources simply means that one cannot see the wood for the trees. What the advocates of open government here seem to overlook is the ex- tent to which understanding everything tends to result in making excuses for everything. Never have 1 been so dangerously gullible as when I thought I was best informed. As a young Oxford postgraduate, George Will used to have a lot of interesting things to say about the goings-on in Washington on the other side of the Atlantic. Twenty years later, as a world-famous American columnist at the very centre of these goings-on, his com- ments are incomparably less illuminating.
My Fulham street is experiencing a lot of refurbishing of one sort or another which proceeds during the week at a fairly leisurely pace, only reaching a crescendo of activity on the sabbath of all days. Last Sunday morning it was quite impossible even to eat breakfast — let alone read the Sunday papers — in my postage stamp back garden because of the neighbourhood hamering, grinding and sawing, all three of which activities, thanks to electrification, make far more inhuman noises than they ever did before. Nor did my study, at the front of the house, provide any quieter refuge, since road repairs were taking place involving pneumatic drills. As I say, this was Sunday, which increasingly gives the impression of having become the busiest day of the week, the only day when everybody is prepared to work, perhaps because of overtime. Manifestly there is not a chance in hell of ever going back to the sabbath as a compulsory day of rest but what about a campaign making it a com- pulsory day of quiet on which all noisy work is prohibited? Of all the great divides
— North and South, Employed and Unemployed, Smokers and Non-Smokers — setting one section of society against another at the present time, none goes deeper, or causes more hatred, than that between those who hate and those who love noise. Up the silence majority. Just as im- portant a human right as that to food, shelter etc, is a right to a little peace and quiet, at least on a Sunday. Unfortunately, although perhaps not surprisingly, only about that one is nobody prepared to shout.
Looking down on Fleet Street from my office window last Thursday I saw what looked like 10,000 Brendan Behans stagger- ing past. They were, of course, Arthur Scargill's pot-bellied bully boys and any sympathy one might have felt for the miners' cause — very considerable in my case — was instantly dissipated by the sight and sound of this roaring rabble, which made one long to smell the whiff of grapeshot. Since Mr Seargill is not a fool, it must be assumed that these marches are not intended to win sympathy for the miners' cause, so much as to arouse feelings of ter- ror, as the mobs of old used to do. For this purpose, however, they are not really frightening enough, particularly in a capital regularly inured nowadays to football hooligans; much, much less frightening than the army of Sikhs who massed at Aldwych the following day. Now that was a formidable body of genuinely angry men which one really would dread to have go berserk, compared with which the fury of the miners sounded like so much boozy bluster.
SceneScene: outside Notting Hill Gate Station recent afternoon. A lorry driver turns north, leans out of his cab and shouts `Good Old Tony, the boys are behind you'. Mr Benn, on the pavement opposite me, waves back at the driver and crosses the street. Two ladies accost him, tease him, he listens and laughs. There is no doubt of the great affection in which he is held locally. He goes down the stairs to the tube — his grey hair, blue jeans, and pale lawyer's sat- chel disappearing into the cavernous gloom, less a demon descending into Hades, than a friendly White Rabbit scampering into his burrow.
A lec McCowen's one man show about It-Kipling at the Mermaid theatre is the most moving piece of acting I have ever seen. Don't miss it.
Peregrine Worsthorne
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