Spectator's Notebook

Ted Heath's emphatic personal endorsement of the Maplin project is most heartening. I had begun to think, so many voices being raised against this most sensible of our expensive projects, that it was doomed and that, instead, we would have to suffer that most senseless project, the Chunnel, instead.

It is surely unthinkable that in these present straitened days, the Government will embark upon two major operations at the same time, both of which make demands upon civil engineering resources. It is also, surely, unthinkable that the Prime Minister will deliberately back a loser. Hence my delight that the Government looks like adopting our advice, expressed not so long ago," Maplin Yes, Chunnel No."

There are difficulties, mind you, in being pro-Maplin and living (as I do) in north-east Essex. All my local friends are aghast at the prospect of Foulness being invaded; they talk beautifully about the Brent geese; they extol the loveliness of the marshes and saltings of these excellent parts; they lament the coming spoliation of their sailing places, of the land running into the sea, of the big open sky. I agree with everything they say. But I still think that Heathrow inflicts quite enough damage as it is, and that, if a new airport is needed, then Maplin makes sense.

False conclusion

I hesitate to write it, but my immediate reaction on learning that President Nixon had been rushed to hospital was to assume that he had attempted to take his life. The suggestion that he might find this way out of the Watergate disaster was put to me by one of his close supporters; and When I remonstrated, saying that I did not think Nixon was the sort of man to make such an escape, I was promptly told to think about it. I did, on and off, with the result that when I heard the news, I jumped to a conclusion for which there was no ground whatever. A great deal of the false conclusions we reach are the consequence of previous conversations, frequently of a flippant nature upon a serious topic. More than once I have heard a remark of mine, intended flippantly, being returned to me,a week or so later with its entire import and intent changed but with the words more or less the.same. This must be a very common experience.

Weekend windfall

Lord Hailsham and his family lost no time in looking over and weekending in their sudden windfall: Chevening House and its three thousand acres of park. The Lord Chancellor's wife says We'll live here at Weekends 4 and very nice, too, for the senior Hailshams and the junior Hoggs.

When Lord Stanhope decided to leave his superb house and estate to the nation, he thought it might suit the heir to the throne, or, failing that, a senior Cabinet Minister. He wanted the house to be lived in and used, and, presuming that Prince Charles was not interested, there was much to commend the Prime Minister's offer of it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Prime Minister has Chequers, the Foreign Secretary Dorneywood, so why not Chevening for the Chancellor?Unhappily, Tony Barber eventually declined when he discovered an amendment of the Finance Bill would be required. So a magnificent gift is turned into a weekend perk. The late Lord

Stanhope's former private secretary has voiced her conviction that this was not what Lord and Lady Stanhope wanted or intended at all, and I am sure she is right about that.

Topless in PEA

I recall several years ago, when Malawi was still Nyasaland, driving from Blantyre into Mozambique for, as it were, a day trip. Immediately across the border one visible difference was immediately apparent: the women were all unselfconsciously topless, in the best National Geographic tradition. In Nyasaland all the women were most demurely covered in bright cotton. Nyasaland was colonised

largely by Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, who combined fierce moral prudishness with strong economic hard-headedness: the cotton clothing they insisted upon could have done Lancashire no harm. The Portuguese, and the Catholic missions which went with them, were far less prudish and had far less economic sense.

The poverty, too, in Mozambique (or Portuguese East Africa — PEA — as it was then more commonly known) was more obvious than in Nyasaland. African women and children flanked the dust road, searching with their fingers for edible insects. They were very shy of us at first, but curious also. What my colleague and I were then looking for was evidence of chain-gangs of prisoners doing forced labour; and I seem to recall that we indeed saw one such chain-gang of men shackled together being shuffled along the dust road. At that time, we were not allowed to drive very far into Mozambique without appropriate permits. We had a beer and something to eat and then turned back, driving back past the great black mountain known as Mlanje.

This vast rock, solitary and frightening, contained — I suppose still does — tea plantations on its foothills and lower slopes and the Nyasas, then in the process of winning their independence, had been burning the tea

shrubs, wrecking the simple woodenbridges that carried the estate roads over the torrents that rushed down the mountain, and had even totally destroyed a dispensary and first. aid centre set up especially for heir benefit.

I have seen many mountains, but Mlanje. between Malawi and Mozambique, remains most vividly in my mind. Of all mountains, it is one on whose heights spirits might most easily be imagined to dwell,, or which itself could be most easily imagined to be mighty and alive. Mlanje possessed its own violence, entire and intact, then, and I dare say, still.

Indiscriminate

The Portuguese are quite right when they say that they do not know of racial dis

crimination. The assimilados are first-class Portuguese citizens in every sense. The fact is that in Portugal itself, as much as in its African territories, there are first-class citi, zens and there are the peasants, and only by education (which usually means through the Church) do a handful of peasants ever succeed in becoming first-class. St Thomas Aquinas would have approved.

Portuguese rule is also pleasant for tourists. Portugal is a favourite among the discerning, who are glad that the mobs and plebs go to Spain; Lourenco Marques (or LM as it used familiarly to be known, after the style of KL. by Rhodesian whites who holidayed in the capital of Mozambique because of its food and drink and fleshpots) is one of the most stylish and Europeanised cities of Africa, and, until the Indian army marched in and grabbed it and spoiled it, Goa was possibly the pleasantest spot in the Indian sub-continent, except for those who dreamed of Kashmir, Srinagar and the Shalimar.

I visited Goa shortly after the Indian seizure (but before the Indians had got to work on it), driving down from Poona; and the transition (out of India into — what? this place,neither Indian nor European, but purely and simply Goan — a transplantation which had long since taken on a life and a culture of its own) was swift and remarkable. Everything looked and was different. Goa, thanks to the Portuguese, was much like Portmeirion, thanks to Clough Williams-Ellis, is to Wales. India's grabbing of Goa was a barbarous act which neither at the time nor since has received the condemnation it deserved.

A dotty place

Our man, Peter Ackroyd. who is young enough to see the second world war entirely in the perspective of history, seemed a suitably detached observer to send to the conference on propaganda films at the Imperial War Museum in suitably somnolent and militaristic surroundings. He reports: It was composed of historians and film students and, apart from one remarkable hate session against a smug and dressy leftist chairman, was pretty composed. The point of their papers and discussions was that onceubiquitous organisation, the Ministry of Information. But Alan Taylor was quite clear about its incompetence: and if the bickerings and contradictions of other speakers are anything to go by, it must have been a wayward and dotty place.

But everyone came to see the films. I was born some years after the end of the war, and they seemed a very far remove from the world I know. There were two or three aspects which struck me. Primarily, the enormous gulf between classes which the films established: two men leave a shelter, one puts on a bowler and the other a cloth cap, one calls out " Taxi! " and the other drives him. Camaraderie ended at dawn. The films are pervaded by a kind of romantic socialism, in which " democracy " becomes a form of Russian socialism. The working class are the heroes of the war effort and, by implication. the heroes of the future. Which was not to be. As one film-maker put it, "we were conned into believing in the war."