Q ne of the best pieces of journalism ever written about
D-Day was by the late Colin Welch. It appeared in these pages for the 40th anniversary in 1984. Colin, aged 20, had served with the Lincolns in Normandy. He brought out how the 'fantastic fecundity' of the place, with its deep lanes, thick hedges and plentiful livestock, made everything worse: '... let loose a full-blast war in it, and the result is a gigantic abattoir, bodies everywhere, human, animal, theirs, ours, French, no chance to bury them, all stiff and hideously swollen, covered with white dust or mud, faces blown away or dreadfully distorted, crawling with flies, rotting, giving off that terrible sweet-sour stench which, once smelt, is not forgotten. Add to it the reek of explosives and burning, of cider and calvados (which the soldiers drank too young, with results sometimes fatal) pouring from shattered vats and stills. Add, in the tormented cities, in Caen, Rouen, and others we saw later, the mephitic stink of sewers blown open to the sky. Memory unbidden still brings back these smells, and we shiver.' For Colin Welch, the experience Imbued in us a great love of Europe.... It hurt us personally and deeply, as if our own mother were lying there in pain and woe.' Colin and those who thought like him resolved 'that Europe must be given institutions which would prevent another civil war and guard her against enemies without'. He admitted the idiocy of the CAP. resented 'Brussels's swarming bureaucrats', but clung on to 'the idea of Europe'. As a member of the first generation who benefited from what Colin's generation achieved without having to do a damn thing ourselves, I feel bound to share that idea too. And it is this which makes me hesitant about Britain getting out of the EU, a course which instinctively I prefer. I cannot see any benefit whatever in losing our national independence, but I do see — and am impressed by the fact — that 90 per cent of decent people on the Continent think the European idea means the European Union. This keeps me eurosceptic, prevents me from being europhobic.
Afriend asked me to a lunch recently at which George Bush Senior spoke. The occasion was 'off the record', but it was not, in any case, the content of what Mr Bush said that struck me so much as the style. There was the gentlemanly selfdeprecation, the faint suggestion of bumbling, and the general benevolence of
an old man with a long family experience of wealth, education and public service. Not for the first time, an American was reminding me of qualities for which the British used to be famous. He was almost like Mr Brownlow in Oliver Twist. Nowadays it is the British who are brash, greedy and crude. It is the Americans who set such store by courtesy, philanthropy and duty to country. As in the presidential election of 2000, the candidates this time are both the sons of more or less upper-class families (both Yale this time, Yale and Harvard in 2000). Both are by origin East Coast (though Mr Bush Junior is passionately Texan by adoption); and one of them is the son of a former president. I ask Americans why they still select their presidents from such a tiny gene-pool in a country so various. Their answer is that every other ethnicity and, to a much lesser extent, every other class sets up greater antagonisms in voters' minds. So would a woman, they say.
Just after all that Britart went up in flames, I happened to be in Grantham, chasing my biographical subject's earliest years. As I walked down Castlegate, looking towards the astonishing spire of St Wulfram's. the parish church, I heard a humming from a tree. Looking up, I saw a beehive, about ten feet above the ground, with bees buzzing in and out, and, next to it, the Beehive pub. A 19th-century notice explains (spelling, grammar, and repetition in third line as printed):
'Stop traveller this wonderous sign explore, And say when thou hast view'd it o'er and o'er, Now Grantham now two rarities are thine, A lofty steeple and a living sign.' It struck me that the Beehive sign is really a bit of Britart before its time, the only difference being its amiability. Damien Hirst prefers insects that feed off the dead to these keen, well organised Thatcherites harmoniously producing honey.
Qne of Tony Blair's first acts as Prime Minister was to give up the twiceweekly Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons and replace them with a single, longer one on Wednesdays. This was rightly criticised at the time as a downgrading of Parliament, but I wonder if it hasn't harmed Mr Blair as well. Margaret Thatcher spent a phenomenal amount of time on preparing for these ordeals (roughly ten hours a week), but it meant that she knew everything important that was going on in her administration. This knowledge was the key to her power: it allowed her to upstage and upbraid departmental ministers. Without this discipline. Mr Blair doesn't really know what is being done in his name. And what he does not know, he cannot really control.
Near our flat in London is a delicatessen called Mange. This is a rare instance in which the proprietor assumes that customers will be more familiar with a French word than an English one. You would not find a shop called Mange in any country district.
The poet Peter Levi, visiting my school when I was a pupil, said that he first became interested in Yevtushenko because he could not believe that his poetry was as bad as it appeared in translation. In due course, he translated it himself. (There are those who would say that Levi's first view of Yevtushenko was the right one, but let that pass.) I thought of this recently when reading the Penguin translation of Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Perez Galdos. The idiomatic dialogue is so unlike anything spoken by anybody ever that I feel sure that the translator has made a mess of something interesting. A Spanish friend confirms this, saying that GaldOs had a unique knowledge of how the people of Madrid lived and talked. What one perceives, even through Penguin's dark glass, is that this is a tremendous novel — as good as Dickens or Balzac about cities and characters, as good as Flaubert or Maupassant about regret and desire, better than any of them about women's longing for children. The man wrote 46 novels between 1873 and 1912, including one called Trafalgar, but only about three of them exist in translation. What are we missing?
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