SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
Mr Heath made some hopeful remarks about arriving at a 'settlement' with Ian Smith the other day and, obviously, many Tories would dearly like to see amicable relations restored with Rhodesia. I find it therefore the more surprising that none of these wellwishers has been heard to utter a word of warning about the chilling effect on opinion here of the Rhodesian treatment of the Tangwena people, who are being cruelly evicted from their ancestral lands.
The point is not that this eviction is unique, but that the Tangwenas are display- ing an unprecedented unwillingness to be shifted like cattle from one stretch of land to another many miles away. It is an awk- ward problem for the Rhodesian govern- ment. If they give in, no doubt other African tribes will be tempted to resist when their turn for 'resettlement' to suit the white man's convenience comes round. On the other hand, decency and justice demand that this peaceable band of African farmers should be allowed to remain in their ancestral lands (which aren't in fact of much value to anyone else) if they so passionately wish to do so. They have lived there, after all, since long before any white faces were seen in Rhodesia.
The whole affair has a repulsively bullying character and if, as seems very likely, it ends in violence and perhaps the imprisonment of the chief it will, rightly, arouse indignation far outside Rhodesia. The chance of Rhodesia being accepted as a respectable country will be accordingly reduced. Some of Ian Smith's friends in this country would do him a service if they spoke up now and told him so.
Up in the air
Like a great many intelligence or psycho- logical warfare operations, the story of the German attempt to deliver Evgenia Ginz- burg's anti-Stalinist book by balloons to East German has some richly comic aspects. There is, of course, nothing new in this form of clandestine propaganda. It is some years now since I came across evi- dence of a tremendously hush-hush meeting of American `psy-war' experts in a Euro- pean hotel, summoned to plan some great anti-communist coup. Their long delibera- tions were conducted in suites with all adjoining rooms carefully reserved and kept empty so that no hostile agents might eaves- drop. The fruit of this cloak-and-dagger convention proved to be nothing more than a plan to dispatch propaganda into com- munist countries by means of balloons. My irreverent informant added subsequently that the wind proved uncooperative and all the balloons went in the wrong direction, but even if this detail was untrue I don't suppose the operation was of the slightest political value. Neither, I fear, do I believe that the ballooning of Ginzburg's appro- priately named Into the Whirlwind, in weatherproof wrappings, is likely to lead to any perceptible liberalising of the East Ger- man state. Such adventures are attractive to frustrated romantics but it's hard to see them as strikingly practical enterprises.
The current German affair is made thoroughly bizarre through the involvement of the Rowohlt publishing house, which has a long list of revolutionary writers in its catalogue. I shall wait eagerly to see how the authors' response, a demand for `participation' in the management of the firm, prospers. The mere thought of having authors running their firms is enough to make a few publishers I know turn pale. I suspect they could contemplate the export of some authors by balloon with far greater equanimity.
The great refusal
In the country we wouldn't much mind a dustmen's strike that went on for weeks or even months. Compost heaps and bonfires can swallow up most of the refuse, and there's plenty of space to heap up the in- destructible metal and plastic. But some of the sights of London in recent days have been enough to turn a squeamish stomach, especially when the imagination has been kindled in advance by tales of monstrous flies and invading hordes of rats.
The strike has at least made us see the dustman for the pillar of society that he is. I am aware, now, of the subtle but definite change in his standing which has occurred in my lifetime. A few years ago dustmen (freely referred to as 'scavengers' when I was a boy) were regarded as the unlucky pariahs of the community, and were fre- quently cited as social victims by earnest reformers. Conversely, an old man I knew used to clinch his arguments against edu- cating the masses with what he judged the knockdown question, 'Who'll be the dust- men then, eh?' Yet there never seems any shortage of them nowadays, as there always is of, say, bus drivers, and they are fre- quently efficient and cheerful men. I con- clude there is a lot to be said for the job in modern industrial terms. The dustman's work is performed in the open air, it is rela- tively unregimented, human contacts abound, and there is agreeable scope for private initiative, especially if the local council hasn't miserably prohibited 'totting'. My own dustman claims to have built up a stamp collection worth hundreds of pounds by keeping his eyes open. He seems a happy man, and I think I would rather be a dust- man than work on an assembly line. But I don't think the London dustman's lot will be a very happy one for some time to come if they don't go back to work soon.
Poet's port
I was enchanted by a talk on the Third Programme the other evening by Sir Charles Tennyson, who will be ninety next month. Human links with the distant past have for me a fascination, and the subject of this talk was the poet Tennyson as seen by his grandson nearly eighty years ago. So, out of the box of transistors and similar para- phernalia came a firsthand account of a man born just after the battle of Trafalgar. And a very engaging account it was. Sir Charles (an admirable raconteur) depicted him as a somewhat outlandish figure in old- fashioned clothes, his egg-shaped head bald on top and with an untidy fringe at the sides, who shuffled around the countryside on long solitary walks. His baggy trousers and bent knees resembled, to his grandson, the hind legs of an elephant.
Every evening after dinner (and he was a good Victorian trencherman) the old man, we learned, consumed a pint of vintage pon. Perhaps this had something to do with the `fact that he preferred to breakfast alone, although he claimed that that was when he " got his 'best ideas'. Evidently his grand. children found him decidedly awe-inspiring. I am wondering which present-day poet will qualify for a similar old man's reminiscence on three-dimensional colour TV around the year 2100.
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