Vanilla slices

AUBERON WAUGH

A Place in England Melvyn Bragg (Seeker and Warburg 36s)

Nobody should sit down to write about the pre-war English working class without first

having read Max Beerbohm's parody of Arnold Bennett, which appeared in A Christ. mas Garland under the title Scruts'. If Mr Bragg had read it, he might have avoided certain pitfalls: `Ginny McGuffie's bread and cake shop, the best vanilla slices he had tasted, so fat with sweet custard that just to touch them was to make them ooze.'

Ugh! Perhaps some working class food tastes less repulsive than it looks and smells.

but as a literary device this nostalgic gloat.

ing over the gastronomic splendours of fish and chips back home, of mum's toad in the hole, of pea and pie supper in the Congreg- ational Hall has been overworked. Far from exciting compassion and tender concern in the reader, it can only excite nausea.

Like me, Mr Bragg is far too young to remember Jarrow and unemployment he tween the wars. Unlike me, Mr Bragg man- ages to feel remarkably bitter about it. even now. There is nothing wrong with that, of

course, so long as one does not suppose that

these ancient grudges provide useful or rel- evant equipment with which to tackle the modern world. It's a function of the histor- ical novel to revive dead passions and antag- onisms, to re-create emotions and atmos- pheres. Mr Bragg does it very well indeed.

The only disconcerting thing is that the book somehow contrives to end in the year 1966.

Harold Wilson and *Nobby Stiles heat the goose-stepping Teutonic hordes of West Ger- many on the field at Wembley.

Never has the English working class been so triumphantly vindicated. One can quite see that if the 1966 World Cup did not quite justify all the suffering between the wars, at least it gave some sort of purpose, and might have provided that happy ending to an every- day story of working folk which working folk themselves, quite rightly, demand.

But the introduction of a world in which he is at least vaguely at home, so soon after a world which is no more familiar to him than Bluebeard's castle, had a strangely dis- locating effect on this reviewer. There is quite literally nothing I am not prepared to believe about the condition of the working classes in Cumberland during the nineteen- thirties. Mr Bragg suggests that they all had to bicycle eleven miles to arrive at work by seven'o'clock. I am sure he is right. Our hero worked eight shifts of eight hours every week (one a day and two on Wednesdays) for foul' pence an hour. Oh dear! His foreman treated him brutally, his employers sacked him tin. fairly. Gulp. His little woman is magni6. cently described, the North Country ideal oi womanhood: honest, puritanical. god-fear. ing poll-fodder of the party which then pro- duces Mr Crossman, Mr Benn and. so help me, Mr Michael -Stewart to mock thern. Needless to say, on meeting her, our hero learns that her mother had died a f ew weeic after her birth; this unbalanced her father who was killed in a fire; her foster-father had been injured in an industrial acciden! (there was no compensation in those days. dl course) and so her foster-mother had to take in washing and unwanted children. Go on. whip me, Melvyn. It's all my fault. However. with the nonchalance of their class, they merely buy a tandem, while the hero gets a new job where 'the conditions of work'— needless to say—'were foul'. Read as a sociological treatise, Mr Bragg's new book is better than anyone has a right to expect. Whether or not it presents an accu- rate picture scarcely matters. It certainly rings true. Anyone who can read it and remain dry-eyed throughout should visit the doctor and have his compassion for the poor etc. checked over. Judged as a, work of imagination, it must win similar acclaim. One might almost suppose that Mr Bragg had been supplied with various figures for em- ployment, hours and earnings in Cumberland by Mrs Castle's Department of Employment and Productivity, and told to clothe them in flesh and blood. If this had indeed been the case, one could only say that he had made a magnificent job of it, and congratulate Mrs Castle on her patronage. And the wealth of authentic topographical anthropology is posi- tively staggering. It is only when one judges it as a novel—beside the timeless masters of this genre: Hardy, Galsworthy, Arnold Ben- nett, A. J. Cronin, Daphne du Maurier—that one begins to have very considerable reser- vations.

Perhaps it is pedantic to complain that many of the characters are cardboard ones: so, after all, are most of the people one meets. One can't suppose that the work- ing classes are so very much different. No, the chief complaint is lack of a story, let alone anything so effete and bourgeois as a plot with interlocking parts. Basically, we learn how a working class lad progresses from being footman in the north to running a public house in the south and that's it. (It doesn't make any difference to call it a quest for self-fulfilment.) It will be enough for most people, and would be enough for me, too, if I didn't have to write a review of the book. The only time I found 'myself seriously irritated was when Mr Bragg tried his hand at satirising the upper and middle classes— our folk. He does this twice, once with Colonel and Lady Sewell, once with a vicar, and the result is abysmal. Apart from any- thing else, Colonel Sewell's wife would not be called Lady Sewell unless he had hap- pened to marry a baroness in her own right with the same surname as his own, which seems most unlikely. If Mr Bragg's intellect is too mighty to consider such trifles, he shouldn't try to write about them. We don't try to write about his blessed working classes in Cumberland, for fear we should get our pea and pie supper mixed up with our vanilla slices.

Never mind, the book is well worth read- ing, if only for the good cry you get at the beginning.