Low life
Only one thing on my mind
Jeffrey Bernard
Like most people who are old enough to have taken part in the last war or to have observed the Blitz from the comparative safety of a house in Holland Park, I have been able to think of nothing else for the past few days.
It isn't just the enormous coverage by the newspapers and television of the VE Day celebrations, it is the fact that I have always been morbidly fascinated by the military history of it and by the horror that the idea of Nazism gives me. I have also just coinci- dentally read Alan Bullock's biography of Hitler, A Study in Tyranny. With the odd friend I have often played the game of wondering, had the Germans successfully invaded this country, just who would have collaborated or become a member of the Resistance. I now find myself wondering what faces fit membership of the Nazi party. Most of the faces that wouldn't seem to me to be out of place at a tea party in Bertesgarten seem to come from the pre- sent Conservative party, with the exception of Jeremy Thorpe who is almost a dead ringer for Goebbels. But I can see the faces of Kenneth Clark, Michael Portillo and Jeremy Hanley floating comfortably above a being enhanced by an SS uniform.
Islam will revolt me just as much as the old Nazis well before they have killed as many people. Jeremy Hanley must be rehearsing for the role to judge by the utter bollocks he talked when the Tories got a battering in last week's Council elections. He said that they lost seats because most Tories opted to stay at home to see what would happen. Anyone with as low an I.Q. and the ability to lie so glibly must be cut out for one thing and one thing only: politics.
It was also reading Alan Bullock's book as well as others in the past that made me annoyed with the British naivety of making heroes out of some of our enemies. Had the bomb plot against Hitler succeeded, Germany would have been taken over by the Prussian elite officer class and by right- wing lunatics. Rommel was not James Mason, neither was Klaus von Falkenberg a Boy's Own paper hero.
Although I was only seven the day war was declared, I remember the Blitz vividly and I remember climbing up on to our roof to watch the sun rise in the East. It was, of course, the worst night of all when the Ger- mans flattened the East End and made the water boil in the Docks. But at my prep school in East Grinstead, Sussex, in the term-time I switched allegiances to the Fiihrer by turning the dormitory lights on to attract the attention of Luftwaffe bomber pilots in the hope that they would destroy our headmaster, the Reverend Walpole E. Sealey. He once caned me for scraping out the dregs in a jar of mar- malade and then told me that many mer- chant seamen had risked their lives in bringing that marmalade across the Atlantic. I could just imagine them steam- ing along through U-boat-infested waters all saying to each other, 'We must get this marmalade through to Jeff.' But I attracted no piloted bombers, just a V-1 rocket which landed on our playing field luckily missing the cricket pitch.
Later on in the war when I was ten, I attempted to set fire to a barrage balloon that was anchored in Ladbroke Gardens. I failed but I thought it was worth an Iron Cross of some class or other. Most of my hatred of the authorities in those days is now directed against Essex man and the Reich founded by Margaret Thatcher, that too was meant to last a thousand years. But, of course, most Germans didn't know what was going on and the day Hitler came to power they were all at home waiting to see what would happen.
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