A Spectator's Notebook

Partition is disagreeable to our easy-going and matey generation. There is an Afrikaans word for it, and neither the race nor the word is much loved. Yet the British are the most efficient people in the world at organising partition when it becomes necessary and inevitable, as events in Asia and Africa since the war clearly demonstrate. The Sunningdale formula for Northern Ireland' exactly reflects the uneasy conscience of our country in this decade. It has all the characteristics of the falling sickness, of the hole-in-heart operation, of bone and tissue patched up with surgery and drugs. The formula contains no immanent healing balm. It is a formula designed to appease the external world and to gain acceptance of the techniques involved. But it does so at the cost of crushing local complaint and — it more and more appears — crushing grass-roots living itself.

One of our most famous ambassadors, now retired, confided in me once that during his lifetime in the Foreign Service 'the electric telegraph' had got reversed. As an attache or 3rd Secretary he had watched the embassy solution for some local crisis being despatched to London in full knowledge that it would be adopted on the morrow as the official attitude of HMG. But as ambassador he was currently receiving Foreign Office directives emanating from the United Nations or other international policy forming centres requiring him to present a British case which he calculated would totally destroy the influence he was trying to build up.

So it appears to be with Northern Ireland. There is no 'electric telegraph' service between the people of Ulster and Downing Street. An a priori solution agreeable to a narrow band of politicians has been devised and proclaimed as having every chance of success. Yet the fight goes on. The violence mounts on both sides. This must mean that Sunningdale has been rejected by the people of Ulster. Life with bombs and bullets must seem preferable to them than life with Sunningdale. Otherwise the bombs and bullets would subside.

Another political crisis is approaching. It is essential that partition, even with its vast complexities in Belfast, Londonderry and elsewhere, and a referendum to establish it, should be considered, at any rate in broad principles, before the crisis is on top of us. Let people forget 'Apartheid' and think what cruelties have been dispensed with, what benefits have flowed from Separate Development. In the Empire of George III, for example.

Cornish rescue

I wrote a fortnight ago of the horrors of Essex. Rescue has come in the form of a visit to the most recondite, if not the most visited, of Cornish gardens. Si monumentum requiris, circumspiee! A great gardener's collection is embedded in greensand and leafmould yards deep. The family name is spawned in species of rhododendron and cultivars of camellia. The magnolias blaze forth the result of botanical exploits across the world a century ago. It was majestic and magical. There was a lesson for those of us of a more fragile generation who potter about in garden centres aiming at quick results. The architects of Caerhays, with an eye to the Cornish

weather, thought of shelter first and blossom afterwards. Great walls of laurel are erected to windward. Oak and beech are planted as protection from the sun. I wondered, too, whether protection had been devised from the cancer of civilisation. The sea is next door and The Great Wen is 300 miles away.

Unconfined

The proposals of certain university student unions that their funds should finance the free issue of contraceptives hits exactly the right note. In my day university was for brains or brawn, rarely both, and for one sex. Nowadays every youngster has to be an allrounded man, a perfected woman. Brains and athleticism are mere accessories. First, there must be the strongest possible and the most openly declared individuality. Secondly, there must be no inhibition, no restraint, and more important still, no consequences of no restraint. The joys of living must be unconfined. But the undergraduette herself must also be unconfined.

It is very satisfactory that the student unions, recognising that universities are power houses of free love, unselfishly propose to purchase the fuel themselves. Mrs Castles Ideas are way out. They saddle all taxpayers with these esoteric concepts.

Special relationship

What are the strands of the British-American connection? There is certainly no chemical link. America is a mixture of races and also a mixture of bodies constituent to the constitution. Britain is not a mixture of anything. It is a compound, with a unitary government and of a single Anglo-Saxon race. War against America and war at the side of America have affected both our countries adversely. We do not enjoy hitting each other. Neither do we enjoy the state of being allied. In the last war the Americans did us more lasting harm than Hitler, except in one vital regard — th,e memory of lost relatives and friends. Hitler s rubble in London disappeared in the 1950s; the American Liberal Ethic is with us still, busY removing all traces of our subordinated Commonwealth.

I once dared to remind Churchill of an Edmund Burke aphorism: "Every power which calls in the aid of an ally stronger than itself, p' es by the assistance it receives. Churchill took it that I was asking for nO favour from himself. I received none.

The strands of our connection with America are in no way national. They are private and personal. We like the American we know. The Americans like us for what we are, perhaps more for the service that we give them. If the QE2 had stalled in mid-Atlantic under anY foreign crew there would have been little laughter.

Victor Montagu

Next week another distinguished guest contributor, Mr Hurnphry Berkeley takes over the 'Notebook'

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