THE three posh Sundays—oh, all right, buyers stretch a point
for the Sunday Tele- graph—the three posh Sundays all made front, page news of ythe official obliteration of the names of Molotov,'Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Malenkov from the maps, railway lines and Army List of the Soviet Union. It was perhaps more than the story was worth, for although I agree that it's a bit wholesale to change the names of eighty-four towns, villages, rural districts, factories, schools, universities, regiments and railway stations all at one go, there's nothing new about changing place-names for political reasons, even on this side of the iron curtain. It's rare in this country, I'm happy to say—fancy not knowing what Piccadilly Circus was going to be next: Selwyn Lloyd Square or Harold Wilson Place—but what was that Paris Metro station called before it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and how long before Stalingrad is once again Villette, and at the re- quest of the nearby Renault workers?
No, the real, frightening, 1984 sort of thing used to be when the names were taken out of the histories and the reference books, so that a generation grew up that didn't know that this or that historical figure had ever existed at all, not even as a Soviet King John or Benedict Arnold. Not that I think that Mr. Khrushchev would be able these days, for a variety of reasons, to do to Stalin and his satellites what Stalin did to Trotsky, whose name was simply expunged from the folk-memory of two hundred million people—and even from a foreign corre- spondent's messages to his paper abroad. I know, for I once thought to try out the censorship by referring (in a lighthearted, non-political piece from Moscow about the difficulties of learning Russian) to 'the language of Lenin and Lermon- tov, of Tolstoy and Trotsky,' and, sure enough, the word 'Trotsky' was deleted, leaving the sub- editors in London to wonder what on earth I meant by 'Tolstoy and full stop.' (The censor was too meticulous to cut out the 'and': there was nothing in his book of rules to say that that was a dirty word.) It couldn't happen here. Though I was in- terested to notice that Mr. Jon Kimche, in the Sunday Telegraph, almost managed to write a whole column-length review of Mr. Erskine Childers's new book . about Suez without men- tioning Anthony Eden: one very oblique and incidental reference in 700 words was pretty skilful.
Birmingham is hardly one of those sleepy backwaters, inhabited by half-timbered yokels, beloved of the copywriters for the British Travel and Holidays Association advertisements, but it can display a pretty thatched-house sort of atti- tude to time. Or so it seemed at the weekend, when I asked the porter of one of its most con- siderable hotels to let me consult his copy of Who's Who. He produced the 1949 edition, and my face fell, for it seemed unlikely that it would include the name I wanted to check. 'Bit out-of- date, isn't it?' I said. 'Oh, I don't know,' said the porter. 'Doesn't come out every year, you know.' " Perhaps it's the Irish influence, for he went on to ask whether it was any particular name I was looking for, as there were a lot of names in the Birmingham Post's local directory. That evening I was taken to dinner at a much- restored medieval pub in the outskirts, now run by a big firm of brewers, with a lot of flamber work going on at the tables, and much scoffing of scampi. Although the wine list was short, it had a couple of distinguished names under each heading, but, not a single wine in the list—not even the Yquem—was given a date. Our choice be- tween the two cots classes clarets, a Talbot and a Rausan-Gassies, depended, of course, on their years, but, when we appealed to the wine- waiter, he said, 'Oh, I think all our wines are round about 1957: A theatre-going friend of mine tells me that last Sunday the Royal Court staged the first play he has ever seen in which the phrase, 'Silly old bitch,' is in fact addressed to an unintelligent, elderly, female dog.
A girl I know, just back from New York, tells me that there is a model fall-out shelter in the lower reaches of Grand Central Station (which I prefer to remember as the site of an uncommonly good oyster bar) and brought with her the packet of leaflets and brochures handed by a pretty hostess to every visitor. They advertise electric torches, a family radiation-measurement kit, a portable tank holding five gallons of drinking water guaranteed to keep fresh for fifteen years, pre- fabricated panelling ('give your home real wood beauty'), metal basement doors, portable re- frigerators, air-conditioners, rubber and asbestos floorings, thunder-boxes, concentrated foods, Heinz soups, booklets on how to build a shelter, and convertible beds made by a firm called Castro. I.shouldn't have thought that 'Another Unique Castro Creation' was a slogan to make a mass appeal in New York these days, but I sup- pose the ad-men know best, and these New York ad-men seem to have been blown quite a bit of good by even the threat of an ill wind.
I have always thought of punch as a drink that was ladled out of bowls and imbibed deeply throughout a longish evening. Recently, though, I have come across Swedish Punch, which isn't that sort of thing at all, but an after-dinner liqueur, and rather pleasant as a change from the other sweet post-prandial drinks. It has the same sort of sweetness and consistency as Dram- buie, say, or Cointreau, but with a flavour of rum, and much lower in alcohol—forty-five de- grees proof as against their seventy and, at 33s. 9d., quite a bit cheaper. That's the English price of the brand I know, anyway—Carlsharrins Flagg: there may be others imported here, too. Flagg, as you might suppose, means flag (there are , crossed Swedish flags on the label) and Carlshamn is the town in South Sweden where it was first made. The history of drinking in Sweden clearly has long roots: when I wrote for information about this interesting drink, I was told, 'It is comparatively new to the Swedish public. It was first introduced in the eighteenth century, when Sweden began to trade with the East Indies. . .
CYRIL RAY
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