DIARY CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
The Mexican earthquake disaster and the recent spate of child murders have one thing in common. Confronted by such images of extreme human horror we feel so helpless in our desire for 'something to be done' that perhaps not surprisingly people want to lash out, to find someone to blame. For the enraged housewives of the Rotherhithe estate where they found the body of the little girl who had been murdered with her schoolfriend, this emo- tional outlet came in hurling eggs at a police van and abuse at waiting journalists. As for Mexico, the Sunday Times found a not dissimilar outlet in lashing Mr Timothy Raison for the 'fathomless inadequacy' of Britain's immediate response in providing £60,000, 'enough to take even the most complacently earthquake-proof breath away'. This may have made the Sunday Times feel better, although even the leader writer appeared to recognise that the £60,000 only represented the 'petty cash' our ambassador in Mexico City was autho- rised to spend immediately, while a much larger relief effort was set in train. In fact there are few countries in the world where we are better placed to offer help in a sympathetic manner than Mexico. Mr Raison's Permanent Secretary at the Over- seas Development Administration is Sir Crispin Tickell, who happens to be a former British ambassador to Mexico, has long known and loved the country and has many friends there, including the present Mexican ambassador in London. It also just happens that Sir Crispin has a particu- lar interest in the seismic peculiarities of the country. While he was in Mexico he set out to climb all the country's active volca- noes, no mean feat since some of them rise up to 17,000 feet. He was just on the verge of climbing the last and highest, Popo- catepetl, when he was recalled to London.
Astriking feature of the Mexican earthquake, according to someone who was in a Mexico City suburb, was the patchiness of its impact. 'It was like being in Kensington, feeling nothing more than a ripple, then discovering that the City of London had been destroyed.' My only personal earthquake experience was as far from the Mexican horror as could be imagined. One morning last year our bed- room window shook slightly in Somerset a tremor from the earthquake in North Wales. A cousin, in a farmhouse near the epicentre, reported that it had been terrify- ing: a long rumbling roar, swelling through the mountains, to the point where the house shook for nearly a minute. A New Zealand girl with much earthquake experi- ence also once told me: 'You can always tell when one is on the way because of the peculiar smell in the air.' The sight of bits of an old Wellington bomber being fished out of Loch Ness brought to mind Richard Ingrams's immor- tal comment on the bringing up of the Mary Rose: that, despite all the ballyhoo, it looked like nothing more than 'a load of old planks'. Since time immemorial, few things have exercised such archetypal fas- cination over the human imagination as the digging up of long-buried treasure. But these days a new element seems to be at work. The greatest excitement over the Wellington seems to have been discovering still legible pencil notes written to the crew, unfinished film in a camera, flying helmets lying about — everything 'just as it was' when the aircraft crashed in 1940. Similarly the fascination of discovering the Titanic seemed to centre on the chance to re-evoke the thought of all those passen- gers in their dinner jackets and tiaras sitting down to an elegant Edwardian dinner in the first-class saloon. The greatest treasure hoard provided by the Mary Rose consisted of a mass of tiny, muddy objects like cups, knives and but- tons which might recall 'the everyday life of an English sailor in 1545'. In other words, what we value today is not so much piles of shining gold bars as anything that our fantasies can elaborate into a 'time capsule', connecting us with the imagined innocence of a lost age. It is another instance of our all-pervading 'creative nos- talgia'.
Long before the appalling Amadeus, I was intrigued by the strangely persistent desire some people have to caricature the personalities of great composers of the past, by making them out as uncouth insensitive boors who seemed to have no connection with their music. A favourite target for this kind of denigration has been Schubert, often portrayed as a boozy, owlish simpleton. I shall never forget my surprise when I first read Schubert's sensi- tive, intelligent diaries and letters, long out of print, and I am glad to see a lot of them reprinted in the appreciative life of Schubert just published by Charles Osborne. Indeed precisely the same point about this strange urge to blacken Schubert's character was apparently made by the composer's great friend Bauernfeld, who at the end of his life wrote a fine passage (quoted at length by Osborne) in which he said that people liked to depict Schubert as 'a drunken savage', whereas be was 'anything but unversed' in literature and 'the theory of his art'. 'His diaries contain his own, sometimes extremely ori- ginal thoughts . . . and his favourite com- panions were artists and people with artis- tic affinities.' Schubert's only real social handicap was that 'he suffered from a genuine dread of commonplace or boring people', in whose company 'he felt lonely and depressed'. This made him 'silent and apt to become ill-humoured' and would occasionally lead him into 'using some coarse expressions which made people shrink away from him'. One can well imagine how, if Mozart had had to spend an evening with Peter Shaffer, he might have reacted in similar fashion.
Iam still trying to puzzle out the most complicated mixed metaphor yet thrown up by this year's party conference season — David Steel's warning that 'we must not put on the shoulders of the Monarch the strain of picking up the pieces behind a pack of politicians determined to pursue party advantage in splendid isolation and attempting to seize the blank cheque of Prime Ministership'. Would candidates please attempt to draw what is going on, using one side of the paper.
Ibegan this diary four weeks ago with the rain flooding down on my runner beans. Today a warm autumnal sunshine is slanting down over the garden, as small tortoiseshells and speckled woods flutter over the 'butterfly plants', buddleia and sedum. As usual, nature this year has remained totally unpredictable. Although I was cruelly robbed of a prize for my tomatoes at the Bruton Horticultural Show because no one told me you have to leave the stalks on, I did win a measly third prize for my cucumbers, and gazed in awe as usual at the carrots grown by more expert hands. (How on earth do they grow carrots a foot long? Mine, though delicious, scarcely exceed two or three inches.) And after an almost barren year in 1984 we have never had such a splendid crop of runner beans. My old friend Richard Ingrams maintains that gardeners like to boast about these more than anything, as sym- bols of the gardener's virility. Next week he will have the chance to tell you how his beans have fared this year, as he will be taking over this Diary.
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