MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT has been remarked that the opinion of a person visiting a place for the first time is often of more value than that of the oldest inhabitant. The latter may be irritated by the pretension of those who, after but a fortnight spent in a country, will on their return write improbous articles in the Press. But it remains true, none the less, that the ingenuous eye often notices things that escape the observation of those who possess too much experience ; and that the oldest inhabitant has lived so long in the country, has become so barnacled by prejudices or affeciions, that he has ceased to attach importance to what may, in fact, be the salient feature of the situation. I am all, therefore, in favour of the fresh, the superficial and the startled eye. It was with an eye innocent of all expectancy that last Friday I visited the South Bank. I had, of course, during the previous weeks caught distant glimpses of polygonal screens and blue and red balls strung like the emblems of a counting-board upon high poles: I had noticed with approval the whirligigs and the balloons. But I had expected to see just an ordinary exhibi- tion, just a repetition of the displays visited in distant years in Brussels or Paris, at Wembley or Earls Court. The impression of innocence, that Alice feeling, were increased by the fact that no catalogues, on that initial morning, were available to the ordinary visitor, and that many of the labels that hereafter will explain and identify the exhibits had not been yet affixed. It was thus my utter inability to identify many of the objects that enabled me to float in a delicious sea of ignorance: to lie back and absorb without need of precision the atmosphere of the exhibition—an atmosphere, let me say at once, infinitely more delightful than that of any of the many exhibitions of the past.
* * * * It was a most English morning. A foreigner, unversed in the subtleties of our climate, might have said that there was a fog. It was not a fog: it was one of those low sea-mists that drift up the Thames Estuary, anchor themselves for a day or two a few yards above the dome of St. Paul's, and distribute over the roofs and pavements of London a soft sprinkling of fine rain. It was one of those mornings when the spirit of London turns to melancholy, and seems to absorb into ochre apathy all light and colour, even as it were all sound ; it was a morning calculated to exclude gaiety, yet it was one of the gayest mornings that I have ever spent. I began by being amused when I noticed on reaching Waterloo Station that my fellow-visitors were differently arrayed: some of them were dressed as if about to enter the Royal Enclosure at Ascot ; others, including myself, wore the sort of clothes one wears when destined to spend a wet morning in the open air. I am always amused when people find them- selves incorrectly dressed ; half the visitors that morning were over-dressed and the other half were under-dressed : that is the sort of thing that makes me laugh inside. It was thus in a mood of quiet merriment that I strode across the bridge that leads to the entrance ; that I pushed through the calculating machines that serve as turnstiles: and that from the dripping terrace, with its blue tiles and still sticky railings, I surveyed what for all of us will remain the centre of the Festival of Britain—the Dome and the Skylon—surely the fattest and the slimmest constructions ever devised by the ingenuity of man. From that moment my merriment expanded in ever-widening circles of surprise. I had expected the Exhibition to provide beauty and power: I had not expected it to be the very soul of wit.
* * * * It may be that on subsequent visits to the South Bank, when I plod round from stall to stall armed with a catalogue and my sense of duty, the first rapture will be dimmed. But never shall 11 quite forget how suddenly it dawned upon me that this Exhibi- tion differs from all previous exhibitions because it has been conccivcd in a mood of high spirits. I had known that it was intended, as the British Council is intended, to express the British way of life: I had foreseen that I should find exhibits illustrating the past history of our island and the glories of our literature, industry and hygiene: I had expected to be reminded of the solid virtues of our island race and the merits and achievements of the Welfare State. What I had not counted on was that the master who has inspired this Exhibition would have the imagina- tion to see that it was the new Britain that we wished to demon- strate rather than the old. "Give the boys and girls their fling" must have been his inspired motto ; in a hundred studios and workshops youths and 'maidens gaily set themselves to expressing exactly what they felt. Instead, therefore, of the South Bank being a monument to our past greatness, it is a manifestation of our present resilience. Instead of its becoming, as it might have become, a huge memorial chapel to past splendour, it is a clamorous assertion of our infinite gifts of adaptability and resource. In place of the cemetery I had dreaded, I found a maternity home, gay with pink and blue, and resonant with the cries and gurgles of the world that is to be. I returned to the drab outside encouraged and entranced.
What will puzzle, and I hope delight, the foreigner who visits the South Bank is that he will find it expressive of our sense of humour and our sense of nonsense. I do not know to whom we owe the inspired frivolity that gives to the Exhibition its champagne feel. Is it the effervescence of Mr. Morrison that we should applaud, or Mr. Gerald Barry's poetic imagination or the undergraduate high spirits of Lord Ismay? It is really astounding that people who have had to deal with such a burden ol detail, who have had to solve so many constructional and other problems, who have been harassed by the cruelty of weather and the problems of labour, should have retained their gaiety and have managed to infuse their brave laughter into the Exhibition as a whole. Now that one actually sees the product of their corporate courage, one is forced to admit that this really was the only note to strike. The whole world knows that we are a very venerable nation ; what it needs to be told is that we are also extremely young. Everybody is aware that we are patient and enduring ; the qualities that require emphasis are our ingenuity, our imagination and our resource. The humour displayed by this Exhibition may be of the variety that the Germans call Galgenhumor, and we, in not quite the same sense, call "gallows-humour." It certainly possesses a defiant element, but is it any the worse for that? "What sort of people," we shout across our old river. "do they think we are?" I am glad, indeed, that we should show them that we are not an elderly people. grumbling over the disappearance of our health and wealth that we are not a pompous people with slow movements of the mind ; but that We are alert, intent, ingenious, experimental, determined, and, in our pursuit of happiness, laughing each to each.
The jokes made on the South Bank are not silly jokes ; as all good jokes, they are serious jokes: some of them may be too subtle to be immediately apprehended,'others are in the nature of family jokes, apparent only to the elect. Youth is the age of irreverence, and there is much irreverence but there is no harsh mockery, the laughter is affectionate. I do not mind how much the Festival becomes indebted or how much it costs: we needed a national tonic. I walked back across the bridge, watching the whirligigs whirling: "Tournez," I murmured to myself: "Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois, Tournez cent 'tours, tottrnez mine tours, Tournez souvent et tournez toujours, Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois."
(
Previous page
