ARTS
Two immense naval guns point at your chest as you go through the gates of the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth Road, SE1. Surrounding these weapons is a grass circle encircled by perfumed country roses. Is this the way to present war gracefully? Look up and you see a grand, domed classical building, erected in 1811 as Bed- lam lunatic asylum, but which has since 1926 housed the relics of war. That is, it began as a shrine of memory to the Great War and since then has collected further items from the second world war, Korea and, most recently, the Falklands cam- paign. Now, in the new, enlarged museum — which has trebled in size — an enclosed interior space keeps the machines of war where madmen once took their exercise. There must surely be some irony here.
For the past year the museum has been virtually closed whilst undergoing its ex- pensive refurbishment. The total cost has been £20 million — £171/2 million coming through a government grant and £21/2 million from private sponsorship. Her Majesty the Queen will open the new museum at the end of next week. With taxpayers' money being thus spent we must hope that visitors will come away with a more informed understanding of the hor- ror of war. Admittedly, the War Museum is not simply there for that purpose — it is also an archival and record centre — but with its fresh image there can be no doubt that its first intention should be to make
Museums
England's toy battlefield
Simon Blow
those of us who never experienced colossal war know what war is like. It must be more squarely presented than at my preparatory school where we marched under sections named Kitchener, Beatty, Jellicoe and Haig.
Jingoistic patriotism at the Imperial Museum is left well understated. Weapons from all sides are on display in the covered hall. There is a doodlebug suspended from the glass ceiling, looking like a taxider- mist's wasp, and a V2 that looks ready to go. Unmissable is that unwieldy British Great War tank with a caterpillar's lurch, 'The Evolution of the Cathode Ray (Radiolocation) Tube', by Mervyn Peake and next to it a Nelson's column of a German periscope. There is a German submarine and an Italian torpedo — one painted a dashing sky blue, or is it sea blue? I thought the camouflage chic but clumsy. Better done are the sand-coloured desert tanks. A particularly large one had `Monty' inscribed on it, and out of its cockpit the brisk and dapper Field Mar- shal's head would pop — beret on the slant — just as in the photographs. Depressing, though, is an Argentinian anti-aircraft gun captured in 1982. The wars do not stop. I saw schoolchildren running round the ex- hibits as if they were maypoles. Oh well: `Peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war'.
How can the true hell of war be con- veyed? Because we all play soldiers as children, battlefield relics do inevitably have an appearance of toyland. No matter what kind of solid scholastic description is given to a gun or a torpedo, one's instinct is at once to fiddle with the knobs and see if it works. So war through a display of weapons does not seem translatable. To make it real the museum has decided to try the ever-so-fashionable lived-in look. In the basement there is a chamber of horrors providing two vivid entertainments: 'The Blitz Experience' and `The Trench Experi- ence'. Only the Blitz Experience was near- ly complete when I visited, and this is what happens. In a simulated shelter you are introduced to two East End families. You hear their anxieties and attempts to cheer each other up. They sing songs like 'Roll Out The Barrel'. When the air raid is over you go out into the smashed street, while a burning London, topped by St Paul's, crashes and sparkles in the background. The effects are certain)/ excellent, but where is the feeling of fear? I could realise a thrill and a curiosity, but no more. And so I hear children pulling at their mothers and wailing, 'Take me back to the Blitz. Don't want to go until I've been to the Blitz.' Such enthusiasm could bring back bombing in a flash.
And do those posters in the glass cabinets mean anything to those of 45 or under? In our consumer-bent society the headlines must be entirely comical: 'Go through your wardrobe. Make-do and mend' or 'Don't take the squander bug when you go shopping'. And yet I am assured that those days of rationing played pretty good havoc. I was told the other day of a woman waiting in line in wartime Harrods to get her allowance of rationed lavatory paper. Just as her turn in the queue came up there was no more paper and she was turned away. Pent-up with anxiety and nerves, she simply broke into tears. It is this side of war that no display cabinets can ever hint at.
Or can they? Looking at the museum's cabinets for the second world war,. I wondered why there was no mention of wartime literature. There is no copy of John Lehmann's New Writing, or Cyril Connolly's Horizon, or samples from the work of writers who identified that time in fiction. A. reading of Henry Green's dis- turbing novel of the Blitz, Caught, or the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen, William Sansom or Julian Maclaren-Ross will go further to impress outsiders with concrete experience than any make-believe lived-in look. Are the museum's organisers fright- ened of literature as something too inac- cessible to foist on the public? Though there is a new bookshop it is mainly given over to postcards, posters and colour books on destroyers and battleships. Tuck- ed away on shelves in slim volumes, any decent literature is thin and takes last place. But, really, the organisers need not fret so. Kenneth Baker has not yet drop- ped reading from the education syllabus.
Where the new museum triumphs is in its art collection. If weapons and son et lumiere effects give an atmosphere of toyland, then it is in the extensive art galleries that the sad crisis of war is fully conveyed. There is a gallery for the Great War artists and one for the second war, plus galleries for special exhibitions. I was not much struck by the John Singer Sar- gent room, in spite of his enormous canvas `Gassed'. There is still too much of the hand of the society portraitist. But there are two excellent paintings by another portraitist, Sir John Lavery, which show how subject matter can be successfully changed. Of course there are paintings by Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer, but it is the lesser-known works that can startle. Eric Kennington's 'The Kensingtons at Laventie' — painted on glass — has a surprising elegance, with the silent, stand- ing soldiers in their blue uniforms and pale turned-away faces. In the second war gallery there are, thank goodness, no paintings of tanks in action. The tragic drama of the trenches that made them art was not there in the second world war, and desert manoeuvres are for the cinema. As with literature, it was the home front that held the artist's eye. The bombing of London was drama enough for Muirhead Bone and John Piper, while Mervyn Peake could make men at work on the evolution of the cathode ray (to do with radar, I'm told) appear like balletic harlequin figures as they hold their glass-blowing devices. There is also an alternating contrast be- tween starkness and gentleness in the second war paintings. Rodrigo Moynihan's recruits undergoing medical inspection has no softness, whereas Elsie Dalton Hew- land's brilliantly coloured picture of a nursery for war workers' children has definite Kate Greenaway streaks of sweet-
ness and innocence. And yet the sadness is not lost, given the brutish world that surrounded them.
The bright June sunlight as I came out, and the heady perfume of those roses, belied the seriousness of this museum. In an age where we shrink from unpleasant- ness it would do no harm to remember that the weapons held here are not in fact toys, but killers. And this museum, set approp- riately in the blitzed landscape around Elephant and Castle, should be seen by anyone who is lulled by our modern false sense of security. The warning of where that can lead came from the pleasure- driven aesthete Brian Howard who, in 1940, summed up those drifting, inter-war years with a poem called 'Gone to Report'. He explains in its closing lines how plea- sure, in the guise of the poem's Mr Plea- sure, deceived them all: He was paid by so many powers that one shakes with shame To think of them. Time, the Army and Navy, Pain and Blame, The Police, the Family, and Death. No one will escape. He got every name. And he wasn't at all what he said he was, Mr Pleasure.
This poem, printed in full, should be draped from the columned portico of this former mental asylum, and now important museum.
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