DIARY
MAX HASTINGS
ntil last week, I had not visited Spain since a childhood beach holiday 30 years ago. On that occasion, the Hastings family found itself sharing a hotel with the ill- assorted company of Selwyn Lloyd, lain Macleod and Elizabeth Taylor. The politi- cians were very jolly — yes, even Selwyn Lloyd proved a keen hand in the bowling alley, and uncommonly patient with me as a tiresome schoolboy — but spent most of their time gazing from the middle distance upon Miss Taylor, then accompanied by Mr Eddie Fisher. The only cultural ele- ment of the trip was that the Hastings- Lloyd-Macleod axis passed many hours engrossed in the works of Mr Ian Fleming, then at the height of their notoriety. Today, many of our friends seem to commute to Spain, and wax hugely enthu- siastic about the place. After a few days in Madrid and in the wonderful wilderness further south, I can see why. Most of the tourists confine themselves to the coastal ghettoes, leaving the interior unscathed. The Prado was far less crowded than the Uffizi or, for that matter, the National Gallery. Although the country is certainly not cheap, it does not yet fill a British visitor with the same sense of economic inferiority as Germany or Austria. There is a comforting sense of cheerful inefficiency. We saw two promising little car smashes within half an hour of landing in Madrid, and enjoyed an intermittent diet of chaos thereafter. Homeward bound, the Iberia check-in girl at the airport sought to dismiss our party, on the grounds that we were a day early for our flight. Only after we had given way to panic for some minutes did she discover with a giggle that she had set the calendar on her own watch wrong. Well-informed friends say that impressions of bungling are misleading, since the Spanish economy may yet over- take our own before the century is out. Land prices, even in the most unpromising areas, are far higher than in the Highlands of Scotland. But the Spanish seem less relentlessly selfish than the French, and much less alarming than the Germans. Unlike the Dutch, they do not make one feel inferior by speaking English terribly well, indeed not many of them speak it at all.
Having written a book some years ago on the strategic bomber offensive in the second world war, I felt a special interest in David Puttnam's new film Memphis Belle. Puttnam tried, and failed, to get the finance to make a film about an RAF Lancaster crew. For predictable commer- cial reasons, he ended up telling the story of a USAF Flying Fortress crew, carrying out the last mission of their tour of operations in 1943. The critics have greeted the film as a well-made piece of Boys' Own adventure, and that is exactly what it is. The dialogue is almost unbear- ably trite, the story line a procession of noisy clichés. But I have some sympathy with Puttnam and his scriptwriters. The behaviour and conversation of most of the very ordinary young men who did extraordinary things in aircraft over Ger- many was, I think, just so. When I was writing Bomber Command, I asked the former 5 Group commander, Sir Ralph Cochrane, about the legendary dambusting VC, Guy Gibson. Cochrane paused for a moment, then said, 'He was the sort of boy who would have been head prefect in any school.' This seemed a perfect and just appreciation, which could have applied to so many wartime heroes. Several former aircrew told me that when they went on leave they had no idea how to chase girls, and spent their evenings getting cheerfully drunk with the rest of their crew, ending up at the YMCA. The letters they wrote to their families reflected a deeply moving compound of fear, resignation to duty and probable death, enthusiasm for simple pleasures, and determination to 'see it through'. They were of an age, background and make-up still to find it the greatest joke in the world to pull somebody's trousers off after dinner. A survivor of an aircraft whose 20-year-old pilot won a posthumous VC, for staying at the controls of his stricken Lancaster to enable his crew to bale out, told me they had been teasing the pilot in the pub the night before their last trip, because he suddenly admitted that he had never kissed a girl in his life. All these things are commonplace to those `Seeing oil prices go up and down is more exciting than Dallas.' with personal memories of the war, and of the uniquely bloody bomber offensive in which the odds were heavily stacked against a crew completing a tour of oper- ations.But they remain a source of wonder- ment to those of us who were fortunate enough to be yet unborn, and of chronic embarrassment to producers who want to make realistic films about brave, callow airmen. I recollect a frigate captain in the South Atlantic in 1982 telling his crew over the broadcast system before an Argentine air attack, 'Remember, chaps, when they come — give 'em hell!' Any imaginative scriptwriter must shudder at the pedes- trianism of the line. Yet war almost invari- ably lapses into clichés. It is the books and films which imbue warriors with conversa- tional profundity which so often feel all wrong.
The so-called 'impartiality clause' which the Government has introduced into the Broadcasting Bill seems one of its most foolish, pernicious and ill-considered in- itiatives for some time. I am struck by the fact that its most visible advocates or apologists appear to be Lords Wyatt and Chalfont, and Mr Paul Johnson. All three are men who discovered in late-middle age a belated enthusiasm for the Conservatism others among us have supported since childhood. Their zealotry obviously com- mends itself to the Prime Minister. But it seems pretty rum, to put it charitably, to those with older loyalties.
Peter Ackroyd's Dickens is on course to become one of the major bestsellers of the Christmas season. I suspect that it will be far more bought and given than read. This is intended as no slight upon Ackroyd's gifts as a researcher and biographer, but as a reflection of the absurd difficulties in- volved in handling and reading a book of 1200 pages. Had it been in two volumes, it might have been a pleasure. As it is, it becomes a chore, the great tome too inconvenient to carry on journeys, or prop on tables at meals. I believe publishers have drawn the wrong conclusion from the steep decline in sales of the second volume of Holroyd's Shaw biography. This re- flected not a flaw in the multi-volume concept, but the fact that most people of our generation who read the first volume felt that they had learned quite as much as they wanted about the deeply unattractive Shaw. Consider, instead, Richard Hol- mes's Coleridge. The first volume was a delight, a model of a superb yet economic- al biography. I fear that I may still be struggling in the trenches with the huge Ackroyd, when the second irresistible in- stalment of Holmes arrives.
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