THE ALDERMASTON MARCH
SIR,—One way and another quite a lot of unwelcome publicity came my way in last week's Spectator. Some of it, in this unexpected context, from myself. (There is an old rule which too many of us too often forget : never ridicule yourself, for people will remember the ridicule but forget the source of it!) Mr. Levin unkindly repeated his implication that I write about the Zeitgeist in the Observer. I suppose I do. Damn! And although Pharos credited me with marching half a mile farther in the direction of Aldermaston than in fact I did, I realise that his intentions were also unkind.
What can be said about my Aldermaston seces- sion? Not much. My mind has been crammed full of excuses ever since the press made the unfortunate discovery that my voice had trembled with a certain eloquence on the plinth at Trafalgar. Square, but that my legs had carried me no farther than Knights- bridge. At which point a pub just beyond Harrods beckoned me away. But the excuses—many meetings unwillingly attended and much work piled up on the desk at home—won't really wash. I marched more than a hundred miles on the ill-attended pilgrimage which I organised a year ago—and was ridiculed for that. I failed to march more than a mile towards Aldermaston and have been ridiculed—with more justification—for that.
But there are some things to be said, if only to
protect the honour and success of the march against the failure of at least one—not of its leaders, for I was never that—of its encouragers. Pharos suggests that the marchers were better off without us. It is certainly true that I, personally, am a privacy- loving and self-indulgent man. I am not a public figure by taste or inclination and it is a credit to the urgency of the issues that I have been winkled out of my normal privacy—after twenty years of it—first by Suez and Hungary and then by the threat of nuclear warfare. The, surprising thing is not that I did badly by not marching to Aldermaston, but that I ever got myself into a position to do so badly in public. From the point of view of the nuclear issue it should be remarked not that Philip Toynbee went home on Good Friday, but that Philip Toynbee has been slightly shifted out of his normal privacy and self-indulgence by the fear and concern which he fears for his family, including himself, his country and his world.—Yours faithfully,
PHILIP TOYNBEE
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