Don ' t Know Patterns of British Life. A study of certain
aspects of the British people at home, at work and at play, and a compilation of some THIS book contains a number of those now familiar charts that look like cross-sections of the New York sky-line, and another that resembles an enlargement of one of George Robey's eyebrows but turns out to be a graph indicating the "numbers and pro- portions of the ' adult ' population actually on holiday away from home at any particular time during the holiday months." There are also nearly seventy tables purporting to show which of us participates in football pools, smokes cigarettes and/or pipes, owns dogs, cage-birds or bicycles, drinks wine or spirits, cooks by gas or electricity, and so forth, nearly ad infinitum. If I were asked, in one of the inevitable "polls," whether I thought this sort of book was worth doing, I should probably be among those who answered "Don't know." But the information is, I suppose, in- structive, and some of it is quite entertaining for the general reader. It might, I daresay, afford effective material for a sociologist who knew how to write. Unfortunately, the anonymous text with ,which the Hulton Press has provided this volume is tiresome, smug and abounding in clichés. Indeed, if all the clichés in this book were placed head to tail, I fancy they might stretch from London to Bristol; perhaps even from London to Haverfordwest. The Hylton Press could probably express this in a neat table. There has grown up in recent years a class of "literature," of which this book is an example, that seeks to justify the ways of a planned economy to "the man in the corner seat." It has its echoes in Labour Party publications and in the speeches of Socialist politicians. Strube's "Little Man" is taken, as it were, by the arm and walked up his garden path and back again, while all his little foibles are examined with the most friendly and sympathetic understanding, until finally he is released with a resounding slap on the back that nearly knocks him over and the assurance that
he is a good fellow and that, as Tupper said, "All's for the Best! " There is sometimes a touch of the light leader about the style of books like this (not the good light leader, but the one that just scrapes into the paper, heavily mauled by the editorial pencil) ; but there is more often a suggestion of the advertising columns or of a popular travelogue At any moment the reader feels that he will be told that "the nation is in good heart" or assured that he can now read "the newspaper of his choice." Somewhere, in all this, he fears there must be a sentence about "showing the world to the world." "The local" is here, of course, and so is "the girl friend," " the wife," "his womenfolk," "a nation of gardeners," and "Pa, Ma and two children." A statement that in 1947 seaside holidays were "the most popular with adults of all classes and all ages" inspires the comment: " For a nation still with traces of the spirit of Drake and Grace Darling this is not surprising." But it would be painful to continue. One only misses those coloured photographs of "the English scene," with their bright red buses and the grass as green as life and twice as natural.
It would be ungrateful not to say that there are moments, as one browses among these seventy tables, when one is deeply touched. I was moved almost to tears by the thought that the average number of cats owned by each "cat-owning family" is—one cat and 0.27 of a cat. Never surely has the elusive charm of the Cheshire Cat been pinned down so scientifically ! But the whole factual conglomeration reminds me of nothing so much as one of those problems that used to confront me at school about guns A, B and C that started firing at the same time and then went on firing at different intervals, until at last came the plaintive cry : "When will they all fire together again ? " When indeed ! (And one was tempted to add "Who cares ? ") Yet, on reflection, am I not the head of a non-cage-bird-owning family, without a washing-machine, but with a gas, mark you (not an electric), refrigerator, who does not attend greyhound race meetings, and who sometimes smokes a pipe and drinks a glass of wine ? Then I am myself a "relevant statistic " ; I am a character in the book, and characters are expected to keep quiet however provocative their treatment. Nevertheless, speaking sotto voce. as one statistic to another—and despite the fear that I may appear in an analysis of the " readership " of this well- meaning volume as ,a rather vulgar fraction—may I venture to suggest that nowadays too many people are being asked too many questions, that the mass observer is too much with us, late and soon, and that, being fast quizzed out of our wits, we are all in grave
danger of a Galluping consumption ? DEREK HUDSON.
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