Dinner party in Hampstead
Auberon Waugh
Common prudence inhibits me from commenting on the last stages of Mr Thorpe's vigorous denial of the charges against him. It was on the evening of Black Thursday, with the words of Mr George Carman QC echoing dully in my ears — 'My Lord, on behalf of Mr Jeremy Thorpe I offer no evidence' — that I took myself to dinner with friends in Hampstead.
This was the first time I had dined in Hampstead for nearly ten years. These occasions were no more than a dim memory, fortified by readings from Peter Simple: the magnificent food and wine, the beautiful women and sensitive men tortured by guilt as they eat it, the gentle, self-depreciating, civilised conversation oi intelligent people who do not show off too much, peacocks with their tails down until some important moral issue arises. Then up go the tails and the various rituals of aggression, courtship and self-abasement begin.
Hampstead has seldom been far from my thoughts in the long years of exile in Combe Florey. Whatever the drunken warthog Alan Brien may say to the contrary, my father was born in Hampstead, or very nearly in it.
I shall not shame my host and hostess by revealing their names — I shamed them enough by waving my hands over my head and talking too loudly in the excitement of dining in Hampstead. Suffice to say that the host was a writer, the hostess a publisher, the guests included a (justly) famous female novelist, an eminent civil servant connected with the arts and an art teacher. All that was missing was a Filipino butler, but we managed well enough without him. From the subject of mugging, which seems to upset Hampstead dwellers more than it upsets Somerset villagers, we moved on to discuss whether or not negroes have difficulty in swimming; and if so whether this is the result of social discriminaton, diet, lack of muscular coordination or adipose distribution — what one of the guests learnedly described as 'subcutaneous fat'.
Nobody doubts that they can dive well enough, but sinking — for which they have an aptitude — is not the same thing as staying afloat, and it was on this point that several people present, as well as myself, needed reassuring. I had to report that on my African travels I had seldom, if ever, seen Africans swimming and we all agreed that it was as much as human conscience could bear if, in addition to their distinguishing pigmentation, these people had difficulty in keeping afloat.
From this the conversation passed to various forms of guilt which afflict us all — the civil servant testified that if he ever slacked at work for twenty minutes, he felt he was stealing money from the taxpayer — and in due course to the various other burning questions of the hour — whether or not Mr Thorpe was guilty of sodomy, whether or not he would be found guilty of conspiracy and incitement to murder. It was a very jolly evening and we were all laughing like mad — or at any rate I was — when one of the guests (I think it was the deservedly famous female novelist) made the conventional noises which herald an important statement of principle.
'I think', she said, and we all fell silent and looked guilty, or thoughtful, or deeply interested in our plates, 'that everyone should be paid the same wage. That is what I have always believed.'
A momentary shiver ran round the table. Obviously, people in Hampstead are used to this sort of conversation-stopper. For my own part, I was certainly not going to be drawn. The novelist concerned is a highly intelligent woman with an attractive, kindly face who writes beautifully, and with a reckless, infinitely sympathetic sense of humour on occasion. Why spoil an agreeable meal by discussing her fatuous belief?
So we passed on to discuss the Pope's triumphant visit to Poland and the Archbishop's ignominious return from Eastern Europe at the same time. Dr Coggan plainly set off with a Joyful Message for the world, that Marxism and Christianity were not irreconcilable, that Communists and Christians could lie down together no less fruitfully than Prince Michael of Kent and poor old Tom Troubridge's ex-wife, whose name for the moment escapes me. Somehow, Pope Ringo managed to eclipse him. The question remains whether he should be allowed to retire quietly after this incident, or whether he should be publicly humiliated, made to change sex or whatever is the Anglican equivalent of hara-kiri. Poor old St Donald a Duckett, as he has wittily been called. Yet what a fatuous and odious enterprise, at a time when people are just beginning to realise what socialism means in practice. I hope the old booby's retirement is disagreeable, his roof leaks, his lavatories are blocked, his cats turn savage and his little scottish terrier eats a hedgehog.
But it was the female novelist who shocked me more. Coggan belongs to a generation of half-wits. He is old and ugly and all his churches are falling down. The female novelist is the same age as I ant: intelligent, attractive and successful. Is .it still possible, after all that has happened 01 Europe and the world, for clever, youngish people in Hampstead to announce that they think everyone should be paid the same wage? I won't say that the green chartreue turned to bile in my mouth because it didn't, but for the first time I began to thud( wistfully of the joys of Somerset in spring. One could point out the vast areas of the world where night has descended, which now live in misery and oppression as a result of this superficially attractive idea. One could point to the tens of millions of peoRle who have been killed in order to impose it. One could point to the Berlin Wall, through which only old age pensioners are permitted to hobble to freedom after the socialist state has extracted every ounce of forced labour from them; to the miserable poverty of working people in Eastern Europe, where skilled workers are, in all material terms, less well off than the unemployed in Britain. One could point to Soviet Russia, where cat ownership per head is less than a third of the figure for non-whites in South Africa. These are places which are groping towards the Hampstead ideal of an equal wage,', although none has yet reached it, and ION are retreating from it into ever higher differentials. Or one could point to the Third World. ' Refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia may be seen as exceptional and temporarr the necessary price of social change. But China, at least they have been glakil strenuous attempts to impose materta equality for thirty-one years, having killed ,„ off some twenty million landlords, peasan" and capitalist traders in the process' Refugees are still pouring into Hong 1011 across the land frontier and being sent back at a record rate of 823 a day. So far this year 37,787 have been caught and sent haek,i Now there is talk of building a Berlin Wa! in reverse, to keep these wretched people ill their egalitarian paradise. Perhaps it is nothing to Hampstead that all over the world people are fleeing .111, terror from their pretty little ideas of socia' re-organisation. Perhaps one needs to take them by the hand and demonstrate the simple fact that if everybody is paid 1,11fe same, nobody does any work; so a gigar!`'„ apparatus of coercion and repressich' becomes necessary to make them work; the coercers then proceed to grab a greate. share of the cake for themselves and their families, but nobody does more work th, at; he has to and everybody is poor, miserable and repressed. But I suppose we might as well ask thet Archbishop of Canterbury to drink a.toast to the devil as expect a Hampstead thulke, to agree that inequality is best. And HOP stead is such a pleasant spot.
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