ANOTHER VOICE
A bleeding Sergeant looks ahead with foreboding
AUBERON WA UGH
There can be few more agreeable ways of hearing election results than on a crackly wireless miles up the Alto Douro valley in northern Portugal, alternating into the small hours between Dow's 1966 vintage port and a most interesting and unusual Warre's Late Bottled 1974, about which I shall be writing at great length elsewhere. Dow's 20-year-old tawny was also available for light refreshment. Portugal, which ex- perienced practically no inflation at all for 35 years under the benign but strict gui- dance of Dr Salazar, prime minister from 1932 to 1968, is still enjoying its honey- moon period with democracy. Inflation has been atrocious, but it has brought enor- mous benefit, in terms of improved living standards, to all but the very rich; even the very rich do not seem to be doing too badly, having discovered new and inge- nious ways of making themselves yet richer. Perhaps, like the Brits ever since I was born, the Portuguese are simply cashing in their accumulated savings from thriftier years. But they seem quite happy with it.
And the eternal verities survive in Por- tugal's countryside, if a little precariously and in patches. The week before I arrived as a guest of Dow's at Quinta do Bomfim, the parish priest warned his congregation against the growing fashion for disbelief in miracles. Miracles continued to happen, he said, even if they were not widely reported. He had just heard that last year the Soviet Union had been planning a gigantic inva- sion of Western Europe: the tanks were lined up on the Polish border, waiting for the order to advance, when the Virgin Mary heard of these plans and quite simply destroyed all the Soviet tanks. Scientists had been unable to produce an explanation for it, he said.
However, one can see signs of dilapida- tion and collapse even in the institutional wisdom of the Portuguese church. A few weeks earlier, the same priest told the same congregation he had just heard that if everyone in the world stopped drinking alcohol, and if the money were spent on food for the hungry, then there would be no more hunger in the world. Should they not all think long and hard about giving up alcohol? he asked.
This was Worlocko-Runcieism at its most deliriously fatuous. There is only one industry in the Douro valley and only one source of employment, although it has three products: port, which is the most important table wine, and bagaceira, the abominably strong slop brandy made from pips and skins of grapes after pressing. If people stopped drinking alcohol, everyone in the Douro valley would starve to death long before any Worlocko-Runciean food vouchers could arrive. Even in rural Portu- guese Catholicism there are omens of the great spirit of fatuousness which gave us Jimmy Carter and the Dreamers.
Only one such omen disturbed my tran- quillity in Portugal. On the night after the election, some sort of celebration seemed to be called for: we drank Dow's 1963 and 30-year-old tawny for light refreshment. Musicians came up from the village with concertinas, fiddles, drums and banjo-like instruments. Guests decided to enter the spirit of skiffle, one with a pair of fire- tongs, another with some pepper mills. For myself, I found the two bottles from which the 1963 Dow had been decanted, and set up a merry three-toned clink in counter- point. As the music rose to a crescendo at the end of the evening, both bottles broke simultaneously, leaving me covered all over in 24-year-old red slime, like the bleeding Sergeant in Macbeth.
Is this how the Thatcher years will end? Brooding over everything that has been written since the Prime Minister's triumph, I have come to the conclusion that the one thing which might eventually cook her goose, along with the price of housing in the South-east which I have already discus- sed, is the issue of violence (call it law-and- order, inner cities, race relations or what you will) and above all the fear of violence. By this I do not mean riot or the fear of riot. Riots are quite fun for all but the small minority living in the tiny areas involved. I mean the presence of muggers, burglars and, to a lesser extent, rapists throughout most of Britain and the terror of mugging, burglary and rape which is inspired by contemplating a fairly substan- tial proportion of the post-Shirley Williams younger generation of Brits, wherever three or more of them are gathered together. To date, my suggestions on this point have seldom been entirely helpful. At a time when the popular press was giving us to understand that most victims of mugging were old age pensioners (in fact the most frequent victims are males of under 22, and a very fair proportion of victims is black), suggested that old age pensioners would be less open to such attacks if they were given less money. Every week I see them moan: ing softly as they queue up in the post office for their piles of £10 notes which they often take away in wheelbarrows. Last week, we learned of a new twist to this sad story. A Hackney pensioner, Mt Robbie Jarvis, 66, has suffered five burg- laries and muggings in the past two years' the most recent being in the West End. He received a £5,000 award from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board for that one, and in an understandably exuberant mood went down to his local pub and boasted about his success, although the landlord warned him not to flash his £50 notes around. The end of the story is predictable enough. No sooner had he returned to his flat than the retired actor was the victim of a sixth horrific attack. This time the young people who left him tied up and close to death for several days were after his Criminal Injuries Compensation money. Which goes to prove my often-repeated point that the Government cannot solve problems simply by throwing other Pen" ple's money — my money — at them. But the chief problem, according to the Metro' politan Police, comes from knives. I. Lambeth, for instance, there are 22 knif- ings every week. Penalties for carrying a knife are small — a £30 fine is the average — partly because the young people con- cerned invariably claim that they are car- rying them for defensive purposes. The gutter press has started baying for heavier sentences, and for once I think, it has point, but the problem of keeping all these Shirley Williams victims in prison is too expensive. In future weeks I shall describe my plans for unsupervised prison colonies on islands off the Scottish coast, where the younger generation of Brits can learn what they have manifestly failed to learn at school or in their parental homes, that unpleasantness defeats itself. For the pre- sent, I am faint. My gashes cry for help.
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