Equality, Fraternity, etc.
By JOHN BARCLAY YOU are a professional man with £800 a year most years, a wife and two children. You have not enough capital to buy a house in a high cl. res. dist., but too much income for a council house. Anyway, your work keeps you closer in than the suburbs, and your wife wants to live near cheap shops. So you purchase two labourers' cottages knocked into one on the edge of the soon-to-be-slums of your semi- industrialised provincial town. The railway is not far off, there are five pubs within a hundred yards of your house, and the front door opens straight on to a narrow pavement. Very convenient, centrally situated, as the agent said, and your wife has only the length of a street to push the pram and pull the toddler to the shops.
She is plunged at once, though, into problems•of economic geography. The food shops are plentiful and cheap; but there is no stationer who sells writing paper without lines; the local library lends only three kinds of book — " CRIME, WESTERN, LOVE "—and there is a fish-and-chip restaurant, but no coffee-house. The baker does not 'stock wholemeal, and the abounding furniture stores are full of shiny sideboards and cubic armchairs which they suggest you should carve at and sit in now, and leave your executors to pay for. Your wife cannot find any fabric or wallpaper, lampshade or lino, that is not suffering from jaundice or varicose veins. All the same, the people who do buy these things are good people, good at heart; their aesthetic taste has nothing to do with their downright goodness of heart, whatever the moral school of critics may say. Your neighbours are considerate, kindly—in a word, goodhearted. They never let their children out in the rain, and keep a coal fire burning for them all the summer. They even ask your own three-year-old in to watch their television on a July afternoon, and fill him with acid drops and chocolate eclairs. Your child, however, does not understand. He has not yet acquired a proper political piety and the tact that needs to go with it. He raises impious questions of inequality—why may he not say " now " for ' no ' ? Of liberty—please may he go and play in the gutter with Reen ? Of fraternity, perhaps, when he learns to punch his mother and murmur mutinously against his father. *Smacked, sent to bed, deprived of his dinner, he becomes the family's first martyr to democracy. His baby brother is more fortunate. In this district babies are never heard to cry. At the first whimper a soapy arm whisks them up, cossets them, feeds them with weak tea and white bread, and returns them to loll fatly befrilled in their colossal baby carriages. But your baby—though there can be no doubt that all babies are equal—your baby at first lies naked in his folding pram, yells and is ignored. Goodhearted neighbours knock on the door to say he is crying, remark on his laCk of a fur jacket, retire muttering darkly about neglect. Your wife is soon forced by public opinion to abandon her harsh rules.
To your neighbours, a baby's cry is the one sound that rends their, good hearts: no other disturbs their goodhearted equanimity. Their own bespoke dance tunes are broadcast throughout the morning from all their surrounding houses, and every evening when dad comes home their uncountable TV aerials quiver to bombardments on the newsreel, gun- fights on the playlet. At about nine the pubs join in. These age-old centres of English social activity have not yet been ousted by mechanical forms of entertainment; still -their wooden skittles clatter, to shouts of encouragement, disparage- ment and praise; still the beer-handles slam, the till clangs, the powerful wireless envelops good, hearty conversation in its thudding accompaniment of folk music. The goodhearted publican yells " Time ! " and rings his bell, but nobody takes any notice—is not the Englishman renowned for his contempt of petty restrictions, and are not all the policemen conscien- tiously patrolling the high cl. res. dists. ? Not until after mid- night do the gay noises die away—the homing motor-bikes. the ladies' laughter, the great belches straight from the heart, the comradely expectorations on your doorstep. But these sounds are whispers to the happy cries of Britain's new generation of bonny kiddies, at play from breakfast-time to closing-time about your walls. You must, of course, protect your windows from stones, your children from itinerant cases of mumps, your nerves from realistic imitations of machine carbines in action and the screams of those they have wounded, and your class prejudice from language no less obscene because it'proceeds out of the mouths of babes, if not yet of sucklings. You may mildly suggest that fifty yards away the green acres of park would make a better playground than the unadopted alley behind your house, but you only gain a name with the children for despicable fussiness, and with their parents for a criminal lack of goodheartedness. More limited in its effect than the noise is the dirt. Like the police, the road sweepers are all away in the high cl..res. dists.; an old man once a week moves down your street, leaving outside your door a pile of granite chips, toffee papers and dung. Your little boy samples potato chips, ungratefully marooned in the road, your wife finds horrible things on the window-sill. But these are only reminders of the great warm mass of humanity that lives about you, that laughs to take your sunflower heads for buttonholes, that keeps the cats who ,tread familiarly upon your roof and wail at night. There is, too, the gay, intimate talk of your neighbours, and the sense it gives you of being a 'Engle pulse in that mighty beating heart that is urban England. What a. fine training it is in repartee to argue'the merits of a football team that you have never heard of; what an opportunity for your wife to brush up her medical training when she discusses her neigh- bour's intestinal troubles. Then there is the proverbial wisdom of the English mind, the all-solving morceaux of wit so freely proffered should you happen to mention an intellectual dilemma. And that gentle, kindly speech of everyday greeting that, without being intense, reaches with its goodness into the very heart: " All right ? 'that's right. I always say it's all right so long as you're all riglIt. Bye bye." And every evening a wealth of passing human drama filters through your window panes: " So I says to her, I says,' ' I'll tell you what,' I says, I will really,' I says, and she says, You'll what ? ' she says, I'm sure,' I says, I said to her." What material, if only you were Priestley ! But you are not. Ydu are not worthy of the great experience. And it is doubly bitter, when you move into a smaller and less convenient house in a high d. res. dist., to find yourself des- pised by your snobbish new neighbours for not possessing jewellery, books, a piano, curtains, pictures, a gold, watch and chain, which you have had to sell to purchase. peace and quiet. But if you had them still—ah, then, in this celestial silence, you could hear the watch ticking in your pocket, and listen with one ear to the sound of fine dust settling on the string of G sharp.
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