DIARY
JOHN MORTIMER
What can explain the huge increase in telephone tapping in an allegedly free soci- ety? It seems unnecessary when, thanks to British Telecom, you only have to ring a friend to overhear a complete stranger's conversation. Who is forever listening to whom? Either we have read too many spy stories or the judge who is meant to super- vise this distasteful process is nodding through too many applications. Those who suspect their telephone is being tapped needn't strain their ears for mysterious clicks. Tapped lines are beautifully clear and quite without the usual bangs, whistles and distant shouts from car salesmen in Esher haggling over a deal. A barrister friend of mine was defending certain anar- chists who were all acquitted of the offences with which they were charged. He worked so hard on the case that he forgot to pay his phone bill, despite two red notices. To his amazement he was not cut off. When he at last rang for an explanation it became clear to him that his phone was being kept going for tapping purposes. This week's tip to readers of The Spectator: if you go around in flak jackets and red head bands shaking your fist at members of the constabulary you may well escape paying your telephone bills.
Can it be only 20 years since the Oz trial? It seems in another century. These were the distant days of beads and Nehru jackets and Afghan waistcoats, when we were arguing about 'Children's Lib' and the `alternative press' and whether that lovable character Rupert Bear might be depicted in a high state of sexual arousal. Two mo- ments stand out in my memory. One was when the comedian Marty Feldman, whom I had unwisely put forward as a witness for the defence, called the judge a 'boring old fart'. On his way back from the witness box after this display of tact Marty whispered to me, 'Great to be working with you at last.' The other was when a witness was asked where Oz magazine was printed and gave an address in Buckingham Palace Road. `For Heaven's sake!' the judge was roused to a rare moment of passion. 'Can't we keep the Royal Family out of this?'
Iwas gardening and a voice came over the radio: `...when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars; And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night...'
— the brave, sweet, passionate voice of a young girl. Peggy Ashcroft was dead. I am old enough to remember her Juliet, which was all of those things. I remembered the profile of a curly-haired schoolgirl ap- proaching love with delicate determination. Delicacy and strength were always com- bined in her. One recent Christmas I was reading poetry with her in a church in Paddington. As we waited, chewing the sandwiches provided in the vestry, one of her front teeth fell out. Undaunted she jammed it firmly back into her mouth and immediately went out to read a long poem with not a single vowel sound impaired.
During the last war acting Captain Williim Douglas Home, now in his 78th year and enjoying a successful life as a play- wright, refused to participate in the bom- bardment of Le Havre before the civilian population had been evacuated; 3,000 Frenchmen died and not one enemy sol- dier. Captain Douglas Home was court- martialled and sentenced to a year's impris- onment. This week his application to the Ministry of Defence to review his convic- tion has been rejected. Presumably the Ministry of Defence hasn't heard of the rul- ing at the Nuremberg Trials which placed an obligation on soldiers to disobey orders which would result in unnecessary and unjustified civilian carnage.
This week, almost 40 years after Willie Douglas Home's act of heroism, I hap- pened to visit the Imperial War Museum in aid of a scene in a novel. In a handsome building in Lambeth the engines of death and destruction are set out in the chic sur- roundings usually associated with Ameri- can modern art. Small, carefully polished fighter planes dangle from the ceiling like mobiles. Battle scarred tanks are exhibited `I've just discovered we're on one of those Shilling hats.' as though they were abstract sculptures. The air is filled with recorded, officer-class voices gently reminding us of battles long ago. In these pleasant surroundings you can walk through a first world war trench 'com- plete with sounds, smells and other special effects'. I opted for 'the Blitz experience', and was shut, with a party of visiting Ger- mans, in an air raid shelter. As the tape started, 'My name's George and I've been a warden down this street for the last couple of years . . I remembered when we sat with our gas-masks in our laps with the housemaster in the shelter under my school in the London suburbs while Gracie Fields sang 'Wish me luck as you wave me good- bye' on the wireless. Then there was a remote possibility that we might all, includ- ing the housemaster, have been blown to smithereens, saving us a lot of anxiety about the School Certificate. With this ele- ment of excitement lacking, the experience in the Lambeth Road was a little flat, and I left before the All Clear.
Apall of silence is hanging over the world of television while the companies wait, in a state of suspended animation, Whilst the sealed envelopes, containing their cash offers for a franchise, lie in the ITC, apparently unopened; although may- be someone can't resist a peep. Since they don't know each other's bids, the game, one applicant's chairman said, is like play- ing poker in the dark. With a quality test both before and after this strange auction, it's hard to see what real change this com- plex exercise will bring about, except to raise another lump of money for the Gov- ernment. On this score no one knows whether the companies may be offering far too much or, perhaps more probably, the Treasury may find by the end of the decade that it's lost heavily on the deal.
Desperate for sunshine we fled to Saint Paul de Vence for four days (two of them were hot and bright, two cloudy). Picasso, Braque and many of their friends used to pay their bar bills with paintings in the Colombe d'Or, and their works, togeth- er with a Dufy and a Matisse, hang on the walls. In the courtyard, under the trees and beside a wonderful Uger mural (no doubt the result of a year's free pastis), the brief menu is scrawled in painted letters and consists of only a few dishes, all excellent. `Consumer choice' was a talismanic word in the last decade, and yet restaurants who offer a huge selection to their customers, pages and pages in a scarlet folder with red tassels, are always ghastly. 'The wider the choice, the worse the quality,' applies to restaurants as well as television.
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