MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
WHEN on Friday morning you open this benign and unsullied weekly, the General Election of 1950 will have come to an end. Some of the counts will have been held late on Thursday night ; but in many constituencies the candidates, accompanied by their agents and their chief supporters, will this morning be gathered in the town halls and assembly rooms of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, while scrupulous but invigi- lated fingers sort the ballot papers. The square tin boxes, into which the last tessera was dropped at 9 p.m. the night before, will be carried into the counting-house with marked sclemnity ; the pink seals will be broken ; and the little squares of paper which may decide the future of the British Commonwealth and Empire will be poured in a heap upon the trestle table. Deftly will the fingers of the sorters, sitting opposite each other, disintegrate this massed expression of the volonte generale into three or four separate little piles ; while with watchful eyes the invigilators of the three or four parties will pace up and down behind them, seeing that justice is done. From time to time the sorters will gather their heaps into little stacks of one hundred votes, snapping an elastic band around them, and propping this neat pack against its predecessor in the row. At intervals some high official will descend from the platform and remove a section of the row, taking it with him to the upper and decisive table on which, as the hours pass, the three or four rows (some short, some long) accumulate until they reach their climax and conclusion. The candidates meanwhile stroll around, chatting amicably with their opponents, assuming a masterly indifference which they do not feel. The count draws to its close. The sorters one by one lean back from the empty table before them. The result is announced amid applause on the one hand and, on the other, some tentative sounds of disapproval. And thereafter each of the candidates comes to the front of the platform and makes a speech in which he congratulates his opponents and expresses the view that never, in the long history of British democracy, has any election been so straight and clean.
* * * * I am frequently interested and perplexed by the disposal of waste products. The candidates, after a late luncheon of triumph or consolation, will return to their homes. The successful candi- date, as the train bears him away from his constituency exhausted but triumphant, will lean back in his carriage, framing" perhaps the peroration of his powerful maiden speech, wondering perhaps whether it would be in good taste to have the initials " M.P. " added immediately to the name and address so neatly stamped upon his attaché case. The unsuccessful candidates will solace themselves with thoughts of well-earned repose. But in the committee rooms, so lately the scene of passionate activity, a lonely draught will stir the sagging posters and rustle the pages of pamphlets which are now for ever out of date. What happens, I wonder, to all those useless leaflets and envelopes, to the election addresses which have so scrupulously been composed, to the window cards of blue and red, to all the many volatile gadgets of denunciation or appeal? The posters on the hoardings, already defaced by weather and the hands of men, will before long be pasted over with commercial exhortations. But what happens to the string, the printed notepaper and the glue ? The dust-bin is a gloomy repository for such excitement.
* * * * We are efficient, in this country, in disposing of our waste products. The dust-bins are emptied into municipal vehicles and driven away to some remote inferno, and their contents are not seen again by the eyes of the ordinary citizen. These, for all I know or care, may be deposited in the Thames or Medway and float out, under the wheeling wings of sea-gulls, out into the cleansing cold of the North Sea. The Germans, who have always enjoyed making something out of nothing, have in their larger towns installed disposal factories in which the contents of the dust-bins are turned into useful by-products, or verwertet. Many years ago I was taken
by Dr. Adenauer to visit one of these massive installations at Cologne. The litter was edged on to moving platforms which, shaking slightly as they jogged along, pushed the contents of a million dust-bins through a series of sieves and mixers and furnaces. The -metal, I was assured, dropped through the sieges into special containers ; the fats, I was assured, were extracted to make soap and lard ; and the residue, after being cooked for several hours, was mulched and squashed into a glutinous substance which, so I was told, was rich in phosphates and excellent as a top dressing in the fields. Yet, although we, the inheritors of humanism, either discard our dust-bins quietly, or turn them to some useful purpose, the Americans prefer their dumps. There are few sadder sights on earth than the enormous rubbish dumps which disfigure the approaches to many of the fairest cities in the United States. Mountains of refuse shock the eye as the train enters the suburbs, with here and there, above the tattered newspapers and heaps of cinders, the remains of a harmonium, six discarded cabriolets, a broken oboe, twenty boots, and shattered shards and glass which glint and glimmer in the dusk.
* * * * I am not criticising the domestic economy of the Americans ; they are a lavish race. I am aware, moreover, that I am not myself very neat in disposing of objects which I no longer need. It took me many years before I learnt the best method of discarding, without danger to society, those razor blades which had been blunted by time and use. I had adopted the unseemly habit of flicking used razor blades out of the window, without thinking how anti-social such an act can be. I have since been told that the proper method is to store these still sharp but inoperative objects in a tobacco tin (where they form a pretty blue herd like minnows in a stream) and thereafter to bury the tin deeply in the garden soil. But I have not as yet discovered a similar technique for disposing of half-finished medicine bottles, such as cough linctus, which remain for ever as dusty and sticky objects on the shelf. It seems curious to me that these unsightly bottles should possess such permanence, whereas my books, one by one, appear to melt away: I do not think that many people steal them ; it is rather that they themselves just flit. I received a letter this week from a kind gentleman who told me that a friend of his had found a book of mine lying among discarded bits of harness in a junk-booth in the Soko at Marrakesh. The book was Fustel de Coulanges' La Cite Antique and was enriched with many notes and commentaries in my hand- writing. How on earth did this tattered but most precious volume come to rest under the shadow of the Koutoubiya I could never have sold it ; I doubt whether it was stolen ; it must have become wearied of our northern clouds and have flown, like Mr. Churchill to the south.
It is a sad thing to detest litter as much as I detest it and yet to be so incompetent when it comes to disposing of it. Do very tidy people just drop their useless medicine bottles into the waste paper basket and hope that eventually they will sink bubbling into the estuary of the Medway or the Thames ? Or do they rinse them carefully and use them for another time? And how do they prevent their books from flitting to the south ? Such thoughts distress me. I wish I possessed a Verwertungsanstalt of my own and it would be agreeable to feel that the letters which I now drop idly into the paper-basket (letters asking me to lecture at Weston- super-Mare, letters asking me to read the typescript of a novel, letters informing me that I am both a cobra and a toad) could be mulched into phosphates for primulas. My sympathy goes out to the many hundreds of unsuccessful candidates who after luncheon today will take the train back to London, feeling failures, the cheers and the shouting still resonant in their ears, thinking of their now empty committee rooms and of the posters sagging lonely on the walls.
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