DIARY
The sales are now upon us, causing sat- isfaction to bargain-hunters, and a certain amount of chagrin to those other shoppers who find the interior of their favourite store converted overnight into an over- crowded bazaar. And, to judge by the crowds in designer shops in Knightsbridge, the love of a bargain isn't confined to the impecunious. I early in life worked out the rules for successful buying in sales, which doesn't mean to say that I always follow them. Never buy anything unless (a) you really need it, (b) it fits in with your life- style and present wardrobe, (c) it doesn't require altering before you wear it and (d) you would be seriously tempted to buy it at the original price. But to follow these rules too slavishly takes all the fun out of what is essentially a game which combines ele- ments of a treasure hunt, a competition, an endurance test and serendipity. Prudently stocking up on towels and linen and resist- ing the temptation to buy a dramatic hat which would be ideal if I were ever invited to a smart wedding, provided I could find a suitable and expensive-looking outfit to go with it, I reflected that I was somehow missing the whole point of this six-monthly shopping bonanza, which is surely more about spending than saving money.
Like e most crime writers I dislike using coincidence in a book and feel aggrieved if I encounter it in the work of others, an unreasonable prejudice when one considers how frequently we encounter coincidence in real life. The writing of my last four nov- els has in each case been marked by an extraordinary coincidence. The new book, which I have just finished, is set in a pub- lishing house on the Thames and I visited Wapping police station to research the his- tory of the river. Browsing among the fasci- nating items of the station's museum, I saw some of the contemporary records of the greatest of all Thames tragedies when, in 1878, the paddle-steamer Princess Alice, returning loaded from a trip to Sheerness, was mowed down by a collier and 640 peo- ple drowned. Most, no doubt, were the poor of London, families who had set out to enjoy a day of pleasure. Apparently the watermen were paid twopence for landing the bodies on the north shore and only a penny on the south shore, which naturally led to an unequal division of labour. The police told me it was strongly suspected at the time that the tragedy afforded a fine opportunity to get rid of unwanted relatives and that a number of the bodies recovered had not in fact been on the Princess Alice. Next morning, I wrote a passage in which one of my characters, looking out from her
P . D .
JAMES
sitting-room over the dark river, is visited by thoughts of the tragedy, and imagines the bodies of the children torn from their mothers' arms floating past her on the tide. That evening I went for my weekly game of Scrabble with an 86-year-old friend who lives in Kensington, and she gave me a very battered leather-covered Victorian memo- randum book which she said had been found among her dead sister's effects. It had nothing to do with their family history and, knowing my interest in Victoriana, she thought I might like to have it. It is appar- ently the memorandum book of a sergeant of marines and later investigation showed it to be less interesting than I had hoped. He seems to have been an unemotional man, recording with equal brevity and without comment his children's births and deaths, the comings and goings of Her Majesty's ships, his petty domestic expenses, the loss- es of the battle of Alma compared with the battle of Waterloo and remedies for impure blood, for cholera and for what he describes as 'the ring worms'. But on first receiving it and opening it at random the following words in his brown, spidery, high- ly ornate handwriting met my eye: 'Tuesday 3rd September '78. My son James was drowned in the Princess Alice which sank. The poor fellow was found on the evening ■ -(-\ .--C., /7 (.1 "( (.00,,./...-.." `I'm demonstrating in support of the right to silence.' 7th September '78 and buried at St Thomas Church on the evening 9th September '78.
The BBC's campaign to ensure the renewal of its charter was fought with pas- sionate conviction, intelligence and consid- erable political skill, and public and media response to the Government's White Paper has seen it as something of a triumph for the Chairman and Director-General. It is, of course, legitimate to criticise John Birt's personal style, or his or any other strategy for reform. But the personal vilification he has received in recent years has been notable not only for its viciousness, but for the fact that none of his critics has put for- ward an argued and coherent alternative plan to ensure the BBC's future. The old BBC was, no doubt, an agreeable and com- fortable place in which to work, but no gov- ernment after all could tolerate the contin- uance unscathed of a publicly funded cor- poration which employed close on 30,000 people and which has been able to reduce its overheads by £200 million over three years. It would be a pity if concentration on the White Paper diverted interest from the recently published BBC Annual Report, which this year is particularly interesting. One paragraph in the Chairman's Report caught my eye:
No one disputes that the collapse of the com- munist empire was fuelled by access to west- ern television and radio, particularly the World Service. Mr Rupert Murdoch was right to say that 'advances in television tech- nology have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere. They can- not escape the eagle eye of BBC, ITV, CNN and Sky. It was therefore disappointing when he chose to remove BBC television news from China and replace it, not with Sky News, but American films.
This modestly worded regret has for me reverberations beyond the future of the BBC's World Service.
Listening a few days ago to Radio Four, I learnt that Social Service departments are responsible for visiting independent board- ing schools to check on the welfare of the pupils. Apparently it is now proposed that visits should take place every four years instead of annually, a suggestion which some Social Service departments are resist- ing. Considering the appalling scandals in recent years concerned with children in care, would it not be more appropriate if the heads of independent schools under- took regular inspection of local authority children's homes?
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