Diary
The other morning I went round to my local newsagents to buy a carton of eggs. It had looked from the inside rather nice outside — sunlight on the snow, children in woolly hats dragging sledges towards the Park --1 but I slipped and broke all the eggs but two. This sent me straight upstairs to get out my favourite book, The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the man who went with Scott to the Pole and brought back the eggs of the Emperor Penguin. His descrip- tion of the journey he and two compan- ions, Bill and Birdie, made to the sea ice off the Barrier Edge at Cape Crozier, in darkness, in fog, and in temperatures of minus 67 degrees, is beyond belief. When they camped it took them two hours to prize open their sleeping bags, frozen solid and shaped like coffins; and when at last they lay down in them it was so cold that they shook all night as though their backs Would break. At dawn it was a relief to crawl out onto the ice and face the dreadful day. And still they marched — and all on Packets of Huntley and Palmer biscuits. When Garrard returned to England Birdie and Bill had perished in the tent with Scott — he took the Penguin eggs along to the Natural History Museum and was kept waiting at the door by some oaf Who protested that he wasn't running a grocer's shop. Afterwards, Cherry- Garrard became close friends with George Bernard Shaw and lost his mind (nothing to do with Shaw) though on a good day he could write: `. . . At the. Poles a man must make up his mind that he may be rotting of scurvy, as Evans was, or living for ten months on half rations of seal and full rations of ptomaine poisoning, as Camp- bell and his men were, but no help can reach him from the outside world for a Year, if then. There is no chance of a cushy wound; if you break your leg on the Beardmore you must consider the most expedient way of committing suicide.' I know he was a public school boy; all the same the mind boggles.
I'm going to Dublin this weekend, and
apart from visiting the bookshops intend to ask questions about the new proposals to legitimise bastards. An Irishman recent- ly assured me that if such proposals looked like getting off the ground it would bring down the Government. I don't know who I m going to ask, but perhaps I'll meet someone up the ladder at Greens. I had a friend in Liverpool called Mrs T. who sinned before the war and was put in a home for wayward girls in Tipperary and treated shockingly by nuns. She said she could have been kept there for years if she hadn't escaped with her bundle of shame to England. When she pegged out her draw- ers on the line she used to say she was washing the curtains of her master's plea- sure. The baby grew up to be a grand lad and a great comfort to her, though she once arrived on the doorstep in a fine lather after finding a used conservative in his pencil-box.
TWestast Monday I went to the National 4 minster Bank lunch, something which takes place every three months at a restaurant in Camden Town. It used to be a spirited occasion, during the course of which we were given lectures by repre- sentatives from 'main branch' on suitable subjects like tax evasion, insurance and investments. These worthwhile chats have since been discontinued, due no doubt to the fact that by the time main branch rose to his feet none of us were in any condition to listen. Now, I'm not complaining about my bank — I don't ever have to suffer that degrading business of standing there spare while they go off to scrutinise balances with a microscope — but there have been one or two incidents which make me wonder if they're hot just a touch biased against women. First and least upsetting was the off-hand way they treated my suggestion that I might borrow money to have the roof mended, second was the chauvinistic letter of thanks to the Artificial Limbs Supplier for having scooped me up out of the gutter and carried me home, and third was the astonishing case of the missing £150. I shall give a brief outline of this as yet unsolved mystery, in case this sort of thing becomes commonplace. I had gone to the counter downstairs, drawn out £150 in fivers and climbed one flight of stairs to the traveller's cheques department. I placed the bag at my elbow and indulged in a little light- hearted badinage with my bank manager who had left his maximum security wing to wish me bon voyage. Seconds later I 'I only dressed like this because the weather men, said it was going to snow. dipped into my bag to get out a pen and found the money gone. You could have knocked us all down with a feather. I was advised to wait until the end of the day, until the accounting had been done, before informing the police. All the same, spying two policemen outside the bank I has- tened to tell them of the theft; all they did was to pester me as to the name of my employer. I had taken out another £150 and, in dumb show, proceeded to demon- strate how difficult it was to nick a bundle of fivers not bound by a lassie band. The sight of the notes almost got me arrested. A correspondence lasting several months has gone on between the bank and myself. The words 'supposed theft' were used, which can only mean that they think I hid the money under the stair carpet or handed it to an accomplice on the way up. I doubt if they would have used the same phrase to the Artificial Limbs Supplier. I would have thought that the bank was insured for such happenings, and am busy on a meaningful lecture to be delivered over the taramasa- lata and the vine leaves next April.
Watching a debate between Denis Healey and Caspar Weinberger, it becomes obvious how ridiculous it is for politicians to argue properly on television. The subject was Communism and whether the Russians really intended to conquer the world. Was it Communism the Americans were determined to eradicate or Mother Russia? We were shown footage of Mrs Reagan tearfully wanting to embrace a whole classroom of slant-eyed toddlers in China. Mr Healey put up a very good case against this sort of whimsical hypocrisy, hotly refuted by Mr Weinberger, who, incidentally, has overtones of Roland Cul- ver, an actor adored by my mother on account of the cut of his jib. But then Mr Healey called him Casp, or maybe it was Cap, and Weinberger called him Denis, and in moments the argument was in ruins. Knowing one another as they must, and liking one another for all I, know, it requires a lot of energy to show bottle in front of millions. That has to be left to Arthur Scargill, who is bloody-minded rather than world-weary and speaks from conviction rather than habit.
'Thinking of eggs, I remember bringing 1 home a young man for tea when my parents were out. I had met him at the home of the Criddles, who were in both sugar and the Communist Party and gave refuge to Bevin Boys during the war, and I cooked him egg and chips. I provided knives and forks but he ate it with his fingers. My brother, who was sitting at the table doing his homework, closed his eyes in shock, at which the young man apolo- gised and bowed his head. 'You should have let on,' he said. 'I didn't know you was Catholic.'
Beryl Bainbridge
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