Postscript . .

•

IF it is true, as the GI than prophesies, that censorship of outgo press messages is to in Moscow, foreign jc nalists there will be dogs deprived of 't' fleas: an irritation have gone, but so will opportunity of a 1 harmless sport. a Nt,, Ur " bet: When I was there years ago, in Stal time, it was probably at its worst : the Russi had been incensed at the hatchet job done in popular papers by British and American co spondents covering the Foreign Ministers' C ference of 1948. who gloried in reporting t Slav squalor and the Muscovite muddle, wit never a kind word for a people pulling itself by its own bootstraps. So down came the cen -0 ship again—never a security measure, for t chance of a foreign journalist's getting anywl near a story that endangered Soviet security vl a celluloid cat in hell's. No, it was intended. a exercised, simply to prevent any suggestior the outside world that the Soviet. Union wt humane, hygienic and kuiturny: I've related ) before how I wasn't allowed to describe 'shaggy' the village ponies in a Russian snows Naturally, the result was that correspond sent to do an objective job on the Russian. st became less inclined to report the positi achievements of the regime, simply because I were not able to report its shortcomings,. A because the mechanics of censorship were tedious—scripted and monitored telephone from a specified box; airmail copy to be rety after censorship, so that the cuts wouldn't Silo it became'one's pleasure to outwit the censor poker-faced irony: one reported that at annual equivalent of our Academy exhihi there were battle-pieces so magnificent that might have been painted by 'cur own ( ; Woodville,' or one wrote congratulating the 71 brains who have worked out a syste-if that ,W.1 make it unnecessary for the lorries plying, tween Moscow and Kiev to give up a their freight space to their own I Lie! -the sy being to establish petrol stations. which I scribed as 'a brilliant new idea with the virtu simplicity,' going on to express the hope thai Soviet Union would soon invent cheque-bool I was burninp with bourgeois impatience at ha to wait for anything up to three days to gel own money out of my own bank accoun means of a letter of application, a form of rec a power of attorney for the messenger, t identity documents. I think it was the 'bouri impatience' that disarmed them.

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plaints to the Foreign Office Press Department, that there was no censorship in the Soviet Union —only 'literary guidance.' After a time, this be- came just another ingredient of the Kafka atmo- sphere of the time; there were dark hours in one's Metropole Hotel bedroom when one wondered whether there was such a thing as the Sunday Times correspondent either.

'11- According to the Guardian story, the Soviet ti Voreign Office is in favour of abolishing the cen- tlorship, and the security experts are against it. l'''^This must be because their jobs are at stake, not lotto' because censorship has any security value. I used e likt to suspect that some, at any rate, of the censors theft (whom one never met, of course, for they didn't 1 N(' exist) knew English extremely well, and under- ill th ,1 to accept the convention, even in one's corn- ns fol howeNer damaging. On the other hand, one had stood perfectly when one was pulling the Soviet leg. I fancied that they used our oblique and evasive stories to irritate rival government departments. pointing out that the Caton Wood- ville parallel or the congratulations on the invention of petrol stations broke no specific rule of censorship, and who were they to go beyond the book of rules?

In something of the same sort of way, a Mos- cow correspondent could always plead the cen- sorship in fobbing of a too demanding news editor in Fleet Street; if censorship goes, it'll be back to the grindstone for some of the old Mos- cow hands.

* V‘hile N‘e are on the subject of censorship, let me record the difference between the Sunday Times's and the Observer's versions of the E. H. Brooks property advertisements on Sunday. In the Sunday Times the phrases were cut out that 1 have italicised in these Observer advertisements ; PREFERRING a basement in BASIL sr., KNIGHTS- BRIDGE, to her vast estates in Africa & the ungodly shadow of Hider: this civilised anti- apartheid gentlewoman has made this really v. light sunny FLAT luxurious . . .

and 'INNOCENT GIRL. Tory M.P.'s Sec (when / told her about Suez and the nurturing of Hitler and Mussolini, she hurriedly disavowed Conserva- tism) MUST LET 1st fir CHELSEA ?HMS . • .

Roy Brooks told me that both papers get ex- actly the same copy, and that when he met 'that Canadian chap' who had bought the Sunday Times he asked him to see that his advertisements . . and oil the map you will see that the

vicarage is marked with ton X. . .

weren't censored: 'he was terribly nice about it, but I suppose when you've bought a toyshop you don't play with the toys.' The Observer, he told me, was more anxious about offending people's religious susceptibilities and notions of good taste: it was the Observer that altered a phrase about a house being 'at the backside of Bucking- ham Palace.'

Andre Simon is so happy, healthy and hand- some at eighty-four as to be a living advertise- ment for true temperance--which is neither to abuse nor to abjure good wine. His latest book, Wines and Spirits (Skilton, 25s.), is a collection of essa}s, old and new, on every kind of drink, from hock to gin, with a useful supplementary list of the world's wines available in Britain. It pleased me that he mentioned Scharzhofbcrg as 'the most famous growth' of the Saar valley (which makes it a Mosel), for I drank the other day a 1959 Dom Scharzhofberger, from the vineyard that belongs to Trier Cathedral and is run by the Dean and the cellar-master, whose combined ages conic to 174. They will have ho truck with the modern practice of incomplete fermentation, so their wine is as dry as it can be, its faults not 'masked' by unfermented grape sugar. In poor years, this makes it too austerely dry, but in exceptional years, such as 1959, the balance is perfect, with great flavour, but with the acidity to give lasting power. Loeb of Robert Street has the 1959 at 22s., and it is one of the few Mosels I would buy to put away.

CYRIL RAY