DIARY JOHN MORTIMER
Readers of the Spectator have already heard something of the great battle over the Henley cinema. Its importance is that it shows the extent to which small country towns, and life in the English countryside, are in danger from government inertia and the destructive gales of free market forces. Waitrose already have a large store in Henley, but it wants to enlarge its empire to swallow up the Regal, showing no consideration whatever for the life of a town from which it makes a great deal of money. Film-going in London is, on the whole, a pretty squalid experience, but in Henley it is a delight. Every film, however Short, has an interval during which the bar is open. A magnificent organ arises from the depths to play music which, so the manager informs us, is 'available from Messrs Woolworths'. Henley has a remark- able small theatre in which Mrs Siddons acted and which is now run by a highly efficient amateur group. Otherwise the Regal is the one place for young people to go in the evenings. One by one our local towns, like High Wycombe and Maiden- head, have been degutted and their centres turned into hideous 'pedestrian precincts', filled with shoe shops, building society °ffices, wilting shrubs in concrete pots and supermarkets. No one in Henley wants to lose the Regal, or feels the slightest need for more acres of Waitrose, indeed 7,500 People have signed a petition against it. This may not mean, as someone suggested, that it has been signed by everyone in Henley who can write but at least it shows that the community is united in opposition to Waitrose. If, by some mischance, the supermarket chain wins its forthcoming Planning appeal it will be a triumph of commercial insensitivity over the public will. It might also have been thought that the virtue of Conservatism was to con- serve, but the destruction which began with the end of local bus services is continuing with the closure of village schools and tearing the hearts out of the country towns. The suburbanisation of England is an apparently unstoppable pro- cess.
It's not only our Conservative rulers who are insensitive to the life of the country- side. Both the Labour Party and the SDP intend to add fox-hunting to the long list of prohibited activities, which will presum- ably include smoking in public places and watching avant-garde films on television. As I have said, I don't smoke and I find it but to maintain my position on a horse, but hunting is not only a primitive instinct but a source of fine literature and a sight of great beauty. Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches show that hunters are often those who care most for animals and the country- side; but such paradoxes are beyond the sufferers from the Whitehouse syndrome, an irresistible urge to pass criminal laws against any occupation which they find it impossible to enjoy or understand. Be- sides, it was Reggie Paget, a remarkable old Labour MP, who told me that the best form of death was to be found in the hunting field. It cuts out the long, boring years in the old people's home.
Disconsolate about the Thames Valley (will it become nothing but a huntless dumping ground for Waitrose supermar- kets and American Air Force bases?), we drove to Shropshire, which is far enough away from the surburban sprawl. Peter Nichols, alternately triumphant and disillu- sioned in the London theatre, has retired to a large rectory set in a snowdrop- covered graveyard. The only sign of pre- sent trends in his village is that the church is, for the first time since 1085, without a vicar (it seems that vicars' wives have to work to keep the family going and so insist on living near a town). We sat at breakfast and our wives agreed that they had heard almost exactly the same dialogue during the long watches of the night. We could think of nothing to write, indeed would probably never write again; to stop writing and live on our pensions would be a great relief and yet if you can't write you might as well be dead. So we drove to Hay-on- Wye and filled the back of the car with secondhand books and found an improb- able pub in Wales, run by a talented Italian, where lunch in the bar consisted of oysters, crabs, lobsters, oxtail and home- made pasta. As the gentle rain shrouded Abergavenny it seemed that we might possibly write again tomorrow, at least until the next long night of despair. It was news which our wives took with consider- able fortitude. To be married to a writer is by no means an enviable occupation.
Back in the Chilterns there are still, of course, pockets of resistance. Parts of the chalk hills have never been cultivated and breed rare plants, snails and butterflies. By the woods near my house is a wild flower so rare that the admirable Bucks, Berks and Oxfordshire Naturalists Trust post a man to guard it, when it's in bloom, all the daylight hours. This is a necessary protec- tion from ruthless botanists who have already stolen some specimens. We are getting better at preserving badgers, hedgerows, and butterflies, but don't seem to have noticed that vicars and schoolchil- dren are endangered species. And no man has been sent from BBONT to guard the cinema against vandalism by Waitrose.
Leo McKern has agreed to come back from his native Sydney to play in another lot of Rumpoles. It'll be the first time that I have written these legal comedies whilst not practising at the bar and the difficulty, as always, is calming down the weird happenings in the courts to make them credible to an audience. I had lunch with an old friend, also a lapsed barrister. We met in the Tate Gallery to sample the wines and discuss the beauties of not being at the bar. He told me that before the war he was Marshal to Mr Justice X, having to go on circuit with him, look up his law, sharpen his pencils and listen to his anec- dotes. The Judge spoke in sonorous prose whilst sentencing homosexuals to five years' penal servitude and muggers to a flogging, but on the bench he would whisper asides to his Marshal in baby talk. Waped oo, did ee? The naughty man, ee did, ee did,' he would coo under his breath as a wronged woman gave evidence, and when a scruffy witness appeared in a murder trial, 'Got a bit of dandruff on his collar, ee did, ee did?' Put this lunatic in a Rumpole story and no one would believe it for a moment. In any event there can't possibly be any judges like that around today. Can there?
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