PROVINCIAL
By EVELYN SIMPSON
WHENEVER I see references to the state of "public opinion" in England, and when I read the results of the investigations of the Mass Observers, I wonder how many of those who talk so glibly or so earnestly have been down in the south-west corner of the country and listened and talked to the ordinary people in the towns and villages. Not many, I think.
I am not suggesting that we are different down here from people anywhere else, because I don't know ; but I do know that there is a whole lot of interesting and rather surprising information to be collected simply by keeping one's ears open and making a few journeys in the branch-line trains on market-days. This first struck me in the 1938 crisis, when, on the very night that Mr. Chamberlain decided to go to Munich, and when it was almost impossible to get near the booking-offices of the London termini, I came across a farmer in the 6.30 from Paddington that was disgorging floods of " refugees " at every station after Weston-super- Mare. He wanted to know why the train was so full. I told him. He looked at me in uninterested wonder, and began to tell me about Taunton Fair.
The other day, two women got into my carriage between Yeovil and Exeter, and the following dialogue took place ; incredible as it may seem, it is authentic.
A.: Well, what's the news?
B.: Well, when did you hear the last? I suppose you've read the paper this morning?
A.: Well, no, I can't say I have. Let me see, now. When did I last see a paper? 'Bout six weeks ago, I should think. You see, we live a long way from the town, and the post- man's left on his round before the papers come, and, well, 'tis no use having the paper the next day, is it? So it's about six weeks since I had a look at a paper.
B.: Oh.. . . I suppose you must depend a lot on the wire- less.
A.: Well, we have got a wireless, but, when this war began, my husband said to me, "You know, this is a lonely place, and there's no one much to talk to, except the men on the farm and the postman, and if you keep turning on the wireless, you'll only worry yourself silly about the old war, so better not turn it on at all ".. Very sensible, too, don't you think? Mind you, I was very tempted to turn the knob once or twice last week, just to see how things were getting on, but I thought to myself " Better not," I thought, "better not." Don't you agree with me?
In contrast to this, there was the fur-coated lady who was going to visit a daughter in Bridgewater with a broken ankle, and who put "it all" down to the Jews and to Lord Halifax being "too Christian." She told the carriage to read Douglas Reed's books, and to be assured that she knew what she was talking about, for she'd travelled a great deal (not like Mr Chamberlain, who ought to be impeached for not having gone abroad enough). Moreover, had she not been to have her eyes "done " by a most celebrated specialist in Wimpole Street, who happened to be a Jew? And had he not said to her "Mrs. So-and-So, you don't know what you're letting yourself in for when you admit all these Jews into your country. Do you think I don't know my own people?- And then he went on to tell her of plots against England being engineered by the refugees, and a lot of other things he'd made her promise not to repeat. And when she said to him "Why don't you tell the Government?" he said, "What do you think would happen to me if I did? I should be poisoned, or shot, or put out of the way somehow. Dr. Weizmann would soon see to that."
Her solution of the problem was to collect all the Jews and put them in some desert place (not Palestine, that would never satisfy them) and let them raise loans. No amount of typographical variety can convey the tones of her voice as she harangued a positively hypnotised company. I was torn between aesthetic appreciation of her eloquence and a conviction that I must stop it somehow, but just as I nerved myself to say that my father was a Rabbi and that my husband had just escaped from a concentration camp with his back a mass of scars (neither of which statement was true), the train drew up at Bridgwater platform, and she alighted, her last words, uttered when her foot was on the very step, being "Now, don't forget, Disgrace Abounding and Insanity Fair."
Then there was the young Communist, who waved the Daily Worker at me and told me that it was the only paper that spoke the truth, and that Russia was not fighting the Finns, because the Finnish Government had asked for help against the Fascists. When I mildly asked who had elected the Government, he said the Soviet Union ; and when I asked why they'd done that, he said because Chamberlain and Daladier had told the Finns to provoke the Soviet Union : and when I asked how did he know, he said because the Soviet Union said so ; and when I asked what were the proofs, he said proudly he didn't need proofs of what the Soviet Union said. When I pointed out that Molotov had been a trifle inaccurate about facts on one or two occasions, he said, well, he had to say something, and, anyway, he hadn't been as inaccurate as Daladier and Chamberlain, and what was good enough for the Soviet Union was good enough for him. I asked him if he had ever been to the Soviet Union. and he said no, he couldn't afford to. I asked if he'd met any Russians ; he said no, they weren't allowed to leave the Soviet Union—he didn't know why.
A few days after this, I met a commercial traveller who had been listening to Lord Haw-Haw, and who said, "You know, there's a lot in what he says. We are the aggressors, say what you like." This I took to be an extension of my charwoman's opinion (she comes in on a bicycle from the country) that, when Warsaw fell, the war was over, and England and France would make peace, and we should be to settle down again, since there was no longer anything to fight about. This was the point of view, too, expressed without rancour by a young R.A.F. man from a little village near Plymouth. "After all," he said, "we don't know what we're fighting for, and there's no one who can tell us, is there? " I thought of all the wireless talks, and the papers, Yellow, Blue and White, and the W.E.A. classes, and the street-corner meetings, and the Left and Right Book Clubs, and I wondered what had slipped up so that this amiable youth, who was thoroughly enjoying his engines and his "mates," and who quite accepted the fact that there " ought " to be a war with him in it, was quite in the dark as to what it was all about.
When I mentioned—as being the most concrete things I could hit upon—the concentration camps and the suicides in Nazi countries, and the treatment of Jewish children in Berlin and Vienna, he said, "Yes, there's that, I suppose, but we've only got ' their ' word for it. We don't know that it's all true." When I produced from my own circle of acquaintances an example of each kind of brutality, he was convinced, and said, "Yes, of course that sort of thing couldn't go on. We have to stop it." Which made me think that there was quite a lot of work for the B.B.C. and its programmes for the Forces, and we might have a little less cinema organ and cabaret, and a little more simple explanation of "what it was all about," made to seem real and vivid, and not quite so Olympian and casual as most of the references in the News Bulletins are. Nearly everyone listens to these ; my soldier had indeed heard the other night that the Jews in Germany were not to have any more milk, but he hadn't bothered to put that statement into terms of human beings, and babies and old people dying of starvation. He was horrified when I had performed the very simple operation for him.
But perhaps the most characteristic remark was made by the wife of the caretaker in the flats where I live. When the boiler had burst, all the cold taps frozen, all the lavatory chains refused to pull, and I remarked desperately, "We only want an air-raid now, and it looks as if they're going to begin soon," she laughed heartily, and said, "My, we shall have a job then, shan't we?" And her husband is a full-time decontamination squadder I
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