Rise and fall of a fever

Colin Welch

An elderly friend of mine had an eye operation under local anaesthetic. Afterwards he was propped up in bed, unable or forbidden to move his bandaged head to right or left, his narrow tunnel vi- sion focused inexorably on the wall op- posite. An old crony came to see him and sat down in the chair beside the bedhead, out of sight. With tremendous drama, no detail omitted, my friend related what had happened to him: the local, the probes and knives, hooks and scissors, advancing menacingly into the insensate but still seeing eyeball. The crony's reaction was most disappointing: no comradely gasps, no winces, no cries of horrified disbelief, nothing. Dismayed by this apparent lack of feeling, my friend ever so slowly turned his head sideways and downwards till at last the crony swam into his ken. Far from unfeel- ing, the poor man had fainted.

The word 'unwell' kindly used of me last week by the editor was in fact a euphemism for acute inflammation of the gall bladder. A most fitting punishment, Mr Hattersley might deem it, for one whose pen is forever dipped in gall, to have his repository of that precious fluid transfixed by swords from front, back and sides, swords then turned slowly...

Now, if you are still with me, dear majors and readers, may I note a few of the tran- sient dimly perceived phenomena which sped or jeopardised my recovery? First favourable influence was in fact the Health Service, which works so kindly and effi- ciently in places like Wiltshire, though per- forming so wretchedly in the urban areas whose needs it was so ill-tailored to meet.

Two sharply adverse factors — the col- lected short stories of E.M. Forster and the annual conflagration, clearly visible from the sickbed, of rural Wiltshire. Each year this innocent county goes up like the Cities of the Plain. Towering walls of flame dance across each blackening stubble field. There are even miniature Dresden fire-storms, in- verted maelstroms which suck up every- thing movable into their swirling vortices and scatter it far and wide. Remaining trees and hedgerows are again scorched, singed, incinerated, decimated. Smoke pours like fog-banks across roads, rises in thick pillars to form a great brown pall, through which the sun peers wanly. Over the whole countryside falls, as over Pompeii, a rain of filthy ash. Are we, too, doomed?

Farmers say this is good farming prac- tice. Other farmers agree. It wasn't when I was young, when everything was frugally ploughed back. Farmers say they have to feed the nation. Aha, but which nation? Most of this happens on chalk downs recently grass-covered, on which sheep safely grazed. If downs are now (perverse- ly?) devoted to grain, if their value soars dizzily, why is this, if not to attract sub- sidies and add to otiose grain mountains which will be sold off to our hungry enemies? Good practice? It strikes rather as sanctions struck Neville Chamberlain — the very midsummer of madness. (Temperature 99.4) You could hardly apply such a vigorous expression of E.M. Forster — more like the twilight of madness or the midsummer of whimsy. But these genteel progressive whif- flings, with their feeble imaginings of im- palpable utopias, their epicene Pan fancies, their 'Georgian' arcadian musings (how like they are not to the shrewd best but to the in- sipid worst to Galsworthy!), their young Greeks coming singing predictably over the streams on a mule (beauty in their pose, sincerity in their greeting), their fey women who, offended Irene-like by the real world of 'claims', 'position' and 'rights', turn into (or perhaps always were) trees. (100.4) , Equally lowering I found the antics of the World Council of Churches. Who, I feverishly wondered, were these 'bearded heavies' (John Whale's phrase), these 'tall, bearded and surprisingly young' arch- bishops and so forth who repeatedly strode to the rostrum to spout the Kremlin's views? Were they perhaps KGB officers? The so-called patriarch or metropolitan once nauseatingly embraced by Archbishop Ramsey was apparently in fact a colonel! How the persecuted Christians of the Rus- sian empire must feel their sufferings mock- ed by these mirthless farces! (101.4)

Even the dear old Spectator jogged my bed by depicting on its cover Mr Reagan `warmongering' and printing within a tale of von Hoffman about the sinister `Strangelovian creatures in the White House basement', whom Mr Shultz was supposed to 'cool off'. What on earth does Mr von 1-1 think he would find in the base- ment of the Kremlin? The pen of a Hoff- man, ETA, might be inadequate to describe such 'creatures'. (102.8) With sophisticated faux-naiveté Mr von Hoffman writes that 'the number of enemies, threats, crises, and delicate and dangerous situations has far outstripped our national capacity to understand'. With the word 'my' (ie., his) substituted for 'our national', 1 could well believe this. But truly the number, reality and danger of enemies, threats, crises, etc., is in no way governed by Mr von H's or anyone else's capacity to understand them.

`Almost every morning', continues the sage, `an armada of ghastly power has been dispatched to some other place which only the ideological fanatics in the Administration are interested in'. Is it absurd of me to sug- gest that even groaning invalids in places like Wiltshire, also presumably of interest only to 'ideological fanatics', are interested in Nicaragua, or should be? Our generation was taught the hard way for whom the bell tolls, as also that far-away countries of which we know nothing can matter. (103.8) 'There, there,' says the kindly doctor, `don't excite yourself. Dwell rather on what has brought happiness and relief, and have patience ...'

Yes, Patience to be sure, and Gondoliers.

The temperature falls at the mere an- nouncement of such felicities (102.8) as also at the recent re-rediscovery of Lord

Emsworth's lost pince-nez — 'Baxter, my dear fellow, I've lost my glasses ... You

haven't seen them anywhere by any chance?"Yes, Lord Emsworth,' replied the secretary, quietly equal to the crisis. 'They are hanging down your back.' (102.4) A minor relapse was caused by F. R. Leavis on Wodehouse, quoted in Tom

Howarth's Cambridge Between the Wars:.

`His humour is a cross of prep school and Punch, his invention puerile, the brightness

of his style the inane, mechanical and monotonous brightness of the worst schoolboy slang.' Then I remembered who was talking, a man from whom (to quote a poet he once boasted of having 'dislodged') dispraise were no faint praise. (102.4 still).

Like anti-biotics, Howarth's book is nasty enough, not in its own equable tone but in what it has to record — the train of solemn idiotic left-wing freaks, Forsters, disaffected homosexuals and polymaths which crawls, glides and minces through its pages is longer than I would have wished or even expected. Like anti-biotics, it has powerful restorative effects. Many ad- mirable donnish jokes. Dons discussing how to finance a needy exhibitioner, son of an engine-driver: at worst, 'he could always

come up in loco parentis.' (101.4) Some memorable donnish opinions: the professor- ship of English literature 'would be a pro- fessorship of English fiction, and that of a light and comic character, and for that reason ... unworthy of this university' — better if it had been? (100.4)

Noteworthy excerpts from A. C. Benson's (still?) unpublished diaries, when master of Magdalene. At a university ser- mon, 'I looked round. Stanton's head was embedded in his chest, Parry asleep with a look of uplifted piety, Nairne's skull-like head dangling on his thin neck, one of the Bedells asleep, his head pillowed on the other's shoulder. I was aroused by a sharp

sound to my left: Hadley, rigid with sleep, snored and struggled. ... A disgraceful

scene of infinite futility and grotesqueness.

We scuttled away.' On dining at Christ's: the fellows 'not rude, only rather bourgeois ... rather plebeian men'. In the face of such refined and atrabilious gall my own prosaic sort can only dwindle and retire with a deprecatory grin. (99.4) One degree to go. Half of it achieved bY harsh attacks on Nigel Lawson for having no policy about sterling. Bully for him, I thought, and there the matter rests ...