I, too, remember the 'thirties

PERSONAL COLUMN

KENNETH ALLSOP

On that June day in 1936 I had spent an amus- ing hour at the International Surrealist Exhi- bition at the New Burlington Galleries, and afterward left with Sacha Sitwell and Lady Juliet Duff. I took them along to Rosa's where I had arranged to meet John Strachey, who had been at the House all morning and who was very distracted about the Abyssinia business. But apart from a murmured aside to me—`He's going to have to be dealt with, this Messina chap.' Mussolini,' I gently corrected him. He glanced sharply at me, puzzled for a moment, then chuckled—there was no opportunity for further talk. He had asked me there to meet the exciting new American dramatist, Clifford Odets, and the talk was about the New Deal and his latest play, Waiting For Lefty. As I walked out of Jermyn Street and into Green Park, I thought that the plane trees, so thinly leafed in that cold summer, seemed appropriate to the chilling times we were living through. Yet at Lady Ottoline's all was warmth and gaiety. Noel Coward was drawing laughter from even Victor Gollancz—engrossed in launching his Left Book Club—and George Orwell's wintry face was beaming at Noel's patter. How bizarre it now seems that, while we joked, the generals (most of whom I knew personally) were then plotting their revolt against the Spanish Repub- lican government (almost all old friends of mine), and the war that was to engulf our emotions was but a few weeks away. . . .

Everyone else alive then has written his memoirs of the 'thirties and I feel it is time I got mine into print. But these will be unique in that they will contain nothing of the above. What will make mine of singular historical in- terest is that I wasn't at Wellington with Giles Romilly, I appear nowhere in a snapshot taken at Sissinghurst with Vita Sackville-West, Buck de la Warr and Erika Mann, I served beside neither Roy Campbell nor Christopher Caud- well at Barcelona, no one sought my advice for those sauve appeasement plots at All Souls, I wasn't beaten up by blackshirt thugs at Olympia, and I didn't learn to fly Lysanders with Richard Hillary.

That, it must be admitted, is a pretty impres- sive record. Not unnaturally, I'm proud of it because there don't seem to be many around who could make the same claim. I have to con- cede that I was under age for such activities, although I suppose I could theoretically have romped with Augustus John's children or been patted on the head by Stephen Spender at a Hampstead party. But no, I never even glimpsed that dazzle of political and literary high life of thirty years ago, now, in the autobiographies, drenched with the scent of Cliveden lilac or the damp ink of anti-Fascist pamphlets hand-set in Gray's Inn Road.

It should not be thought, however, that I was shut away from life, like either the pubescent Bertrand Russell in aristocratic purdah or a No Mean City character crushed in some Gorbals ghetto. What the annals fail to make clear is that you didn't have to be a hunger marcher from South Wales or a negotiator of the Hoare-Laval pact to have been breathing in that period. In between was a thick wedge _of British citizenry living lives of impenetrable conventionality, the great suburban middle-

class mass, sealed off from the drama of head- lines and high tables, remote from international wars and literary feuds, behind their Maginot Line of privet hedge. That's where I was during -my teens.

It so happens that some Charles Letts's schoolboy diaries, bound in mud-coloured rexine, have survived among my junk. Unlike Harold Nicolson's diaries (in which, incident- ally, I don't get a mention) the pencilled entries display an arrogant disinterest in—unconscious- ness of, even—the great events and great figures of the day. There were other things that mat- tered more to me.

The entries are, of course, divided between school and home, term and hols. It is of some significance that, whereas the extra-classroom pages brim with incident, the school sections are scanty, reflecting accurately my memory of grey tundras of boredom trudged across in fatuously orchidaceous blazer. The only incon- gruity between memory and fact is that all these adult years I have been misrepresenting myself, giving false origin to my now total loathing for and ignorance of sport by describing my young self as an anti-athletic aesthete. These pages nail the lie. Here I am in the first eleven and being cheered off the cricket field after taking three brilliant wickets in a crucial over, a shame I had utterly erased from memory. Ah, well, as Havelock Ellis said, 'Every artist writes his own autobiography,' and I shall continue to be- lieve my own revised version of being a sensi- tive games-hating dreamer.

The world these diaries reveal is of a coun- tryside twenty miles west of London being showered like Pompeii with a lava of steaming new villas—to my towering anger because the 'estates' were eroding my bird-nesting territory and I inscribed with misery the felling of a wood where sparrowhawks bred. It was a world of a newly motorised well-off population whizzing down the two-lane Great West Road in their Rileys and Hudsons and Fraser-Nashes to the Ace of Spades roadhouse, and Skindles and the Café de Paris at Maidenhead. Of enter- tainment divided glamorously between variety on Bac wireless and gargantuan programmes at the Dominion and Empire: double features, innumerable shorts, a Giant Wurlitzer recital, and an hour of stage turns, all for sixpence. (I remember seeing a newspaper bill emblazoned with the Civil War item `ALCAZAR FALLS' and naturally assuming that a local Spanish-type cinema of that name had collapsed.) Of summer leisure in bands of British WandervOgel in Aertex shirts and long khaki shorts ('I'm happy when I'm hiking') or in bands of wasp-stock- inged cyclists on machines gaudily candy-striped like First World War Fokkers.

It was a world without zip-fasteners, Kleenex, refrigerators, mopeds, dial telephones, Tv, elec- tric razors, plastics, London Airport, t_Ps, frozen foods, sodium lamps and the pill. But we got by in our antediluvian fashion. It was a world, when pre-Carnaby Street sartorial sharpness was evinced by brown-and-white shoes, plus- fours, chalk-stripe suits with pleated pockets and puckered backs, and Hitler-style brown rain- coats with epaulettes, conker-like buttons and metal rings in the belt.

What we did—what I did—was this. On the day that the Oxford Union resolved that it would 'in no circumstances fight for King and CoUntry,' 1, according to my jottings for that evening, had listened to the Western Brothers on a Pye receiver and had also heard Cab Cal- loway, 'with his scat-de-da which is just becom- ing the craze.' Where was I when the protest meetings were denouncing the bombing of Guernica? I had spent the day trespassing in the Earl of Jersey's Osterley Park, swimming out to the nests of reed-warblers and great crested grebes.

On the day that Glyndebourne was opened with a Mozart concert I had bought a record by Harry Roy's Tiger-Ragamuffins of 'Heebie Jeebie.' How did I react to the- rape of Czechoslovakia by the Nazi troops? I didn't apparently. My reactions were engaged full throttle on a girl named Poppy, met at a tennis club dance and attached to whom there are some cryptic exclamatory symbols.

The names of King Carol of Rumania and Madame Lupescu, Stanley Baldwin, Mrs Simp- son, Oswald Mosley, Christopher Isherwood, Lord Beaverbrook and Stalin are, every one, noi'•among my memorabilia. Others are: Bing Crosby, Don Bradman, Jim Mollison, Lew Stone, Eddie Cantor, Kaye Don, the Mills Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Marie Dressler, and a surprising number of girls who have left not a smudge on my recollection although it seems they then seared me like a branding iron. On the day Canon Dick Sheppard called upon all who cared for peace to send a postcard say- ing 'I renounce war and I will never support or sanction another,' and so founded the Peace Pledge Union, I was remarking upon 'a jolly good story' in that week's Gem. There wasn't room for me to note that the Daladier govern- ment had fallen in France as I bad to get down: 'Dad got a new car today, a Hillman Straight- Eight, 20 hp, 8 cylinders.'

I am not for a second suggesting that my diaries will leap to the centre of the stage and oust the egotistical maunderings of statesmen and civil servants and 'editors. But they will manifestly be invaluable source-books for his- torians determined to assimilate the nuances, the meaningful minor melodies under the boom- ing of the big drums. Lessons may be learned of the insouciance of Young England of that time, of the rising generation's coolness and poise amid looming menace of war and eco- nomic catastrophe.

With all modesty, I simply don't know any- where else where the pungent flavour of the whole epoch is distilled with such economy, richness and epigrammatic edge as, for example, in these staccato observations in my journal for 1934: 'Ford V8 went into back of Green- line near school gates . . Oh, scissors, it's the exams tomorrow . . . Lilian Tashman's dead . Forbes says I'm the best back in the school . . . Came second in exams . . . Read Passing Show . .. Flew in Gipsy Moth at air show ... - Saw Mae West in Fm No Angel. She's extra- ordinarily fat . . . Been sent shirt that buttons all down front like the Americans' .. . Lost is because Manchester City beat Portsmouth 2-1 for the Cup . . . "Miss Otis Regrets" is a good tune . . . Ate five ice-creams.'

If the financial offers aren't attractive enough I shall deposit the collection in some university archives, perhaps Texas, for there is still a .ilamentable ignorance over there about British life and what has made us what we are today. Then they really will know what we were doing ,ashen the gun-caissons were beginning to roll across Europe.