Another voice

Get them fell in

Auberon Waugh I sPent last week as a National Health patient in the local Taunton hospital with a painful and undignified affliction called a fistula, e'n which I do not propose to dwell. Unlike many People, 1 flourish in hospital ; 1 enjoy uPerations and adore the attention of pretty, sYrnPathetic, efficient young nurses in their ravishingly attractive uniforms. On the first and Only occasion I was asked to appear on the , BBC's Any Questions—it must have been about ten years ago and I have an uneasy feeling that if I was going to be asked tgain, I would have heard by now—some'1)4 asked where the panel would like to sPend its retirement. At the time, 1 was rather taken with mental hospitals as 1 was visiting a friend who had temporarily lost a few screws, so I brightly remarked that I Would like to spend mine in a loony-bin.

The other guests were Enoch Powell, Lord

" igg and the inevitable Marghanita Laski. Everybody was rather nervous at the time in case Enoch said something shocking. We were to have met in Oxford, but the undergraduates there threatened to blow us up, so we met in London instead. 1 can't rernember where Enoch said he would like to Vend his retirement—probably on some Qreek island or other—but when he was aking the telephone rang on David s'ec)bs's desk and we all relapsed into terrified silence. Within seconds we learned that it was I Who had blundered. Jacobs's lizard-like eyes xed on me with loathing and deep moral „ ‘`PtIgnance. 'On the BBC, we do not talk about loonyb'lus,' he said in tones of icy contempt.

ah. Rightyho,' I said.

We talk about hospitals for the mentally sick,' he said. 'That's what I meant,' I said cunningly. wiThere was a long, pregnant pause during t he had the uncomfortable impression rwas waiting for me to apologise. th0r,greasy, gin-stained BBC mandarin on th floor had been listening to the prot,','"nle and decided to exercise his AuthorY. At that moment, my career as Radio uyndit curled up like an old lettuce leaf. nit et when I compare the ghastly solemfulY."DavidJacobs's rebuke with the cheerwo Informality, the friendliness, the pure, h, nib-like cosiness of the various bins I AC visited, I wish I had been less diffident. thilew readers may begin to feel nervous at a s Point, fearing that I am about to go into truIng inaunder about how only the mad are saj sane, how the dividing line between cant Ly anti madness is so fine that only God In ZallY Perceive it, etc etc. They can relax. exPerience, if a person is genuinely You can tell it a mile off. In fact 1 often

recognise such people sitting opposite me in the Underground and it is all I can do to leave the train when it reaches my destination, rather than pass the time of day with them. The reason for my long digression on the subject of loony-bins is that 1 have noticed what appears to me to be a significant increase in the proportion of nurses in them who are black.

This will not worry me at all in my retirement, since one of the few 'progressive' instincts which come naturally to me is a liking for Africans. So far as one can generalise on . these matters, I will be happier for my daughters to marry middle-class Africans than working-class Englishmen if 1 have any say in the matter, which I rather fear 1 won't. My reason for mentioning the high proportion of black nurses in our—ah—clinics for the cerebrally indisposed is to draw attention to what is presumably the cause of it, that psychiatric nursing is yet another occupation which the autochthonous English themselves are less and less prepared to undertake.

The question may soon have to be asked whether there are any jobs at all which the English are still prepared to do, but that is not the purpose of the present inquiry. My reason for drawing attention to the shortage of autochthonous nurses in psychiatric hospitals—I believe there has been a similar, although not quite so dramatic, fall in applicants for general nursing, too—is that the job requires not only discipline, training and hard work but also other qualities like compassion and dedication. And it is this second list of requirements which seems as much in short supply as the first.

We read a great deal about how the younger generation are more open-minded, more tolerant, more concerned for social justice than their parents. Every politician who has ever kissed a blubbering, sugar-stuffed baby in his constituency tells us so. I am almost sure it is a load of codswallop. The chief identifiable characteristic of the twenty to twenty-five age group in England is surely its overpowering wetness, as 1 suggested last week. Obviously there are exceptions but few of them, in my experience, are male. This wetness is compounded for the most part of the following ingredients: idleness, ignorance, lack of curiosity, cowardice, selfishness and simple stupidity. I can't explain this last characteristic unless it is something to do with all the sugar they are given. (This also hastens puberty in girls, I was fascinated to learn last week, which is why children of poorer families are not only fatter but also more sexually developed than children of the middle class. It has nothing to do with the poor being un

able to afford meat. Being stupider, they simply stuff their children with sweets. Jolly interesting.) On the other hand, this stupidity may be the symptom of a greater cultural and racial degeneration such as once befell whoever it was who used to live in Nineveh and Tyre.

If we are really involved in a process of biological decline there doesn't seem much we can do about it, and it rather falls outside the scope of this article, which is to urge the return of National Service.

Plainly, this would not be of the slightest military advantage and might easily do the army irreparable harm, but the army is not my first concern. The main reason that young people today are so idle, ignorant, incurious, selfish and timid, I am convinced, is simply that none of them has ever experienced discomfort, let alone physical suffering. It may seem officious, even sadistic to inflict it on them now, but there comes a time when a man begins to worry about who will look after him in his old age, and 1 simply don't trust the present crowd. Another point is that there can be no enjoyment in life unless one has first experienced some equivalent deprivation with which to compare it.

Recently, I went to dinner with some hospitable neighbours whose delicious meal was rounded off by a pudding accompanied by a Château d'Yquem 1949. Throughout the meal, the talk was of our schooldays, when we did drink the stale of horses and the gilded puddle which beasts would cough at. I thought of my days in the army, when I did eat strange flesh which some did die to look on. Obviously, Antony would not have appreciated Cleopatra so much if he had not had to make do with horses for so much of his career. And so it goes on.

The most cogent argument against the re-introduction of National Service has always been that the electorate won't buy it : any such proposal will lose votes and is therefore unthinkable. 'But the time is fast approaching when the electorate is going to be confronted with the fact that few, if any, of its most cherished desires are economically viable: that higher wages for less work, lower taxes for greater public expenditure, more privileges for fewer obligations must lead to inflation, unemployment and economic collapse; and however much our oily politicians promise to deliver the goods, the final result will always be the same: their wretched voters will be reduced to eating each other.

So our precious parliamentary system is going to have to reculer un peu pour mieux sauter, as the French have it ; allow itself to get a little worse before it gets better, as our politicians like to say; or, in plain English, put a sock in itself. Next week I shall probably discuss the various National Leaders on offer—Enoch, Jack Jones, Canon Collins, General Sir Walker Walker-Walker, Bernard Dru, etc—and debate whether we might not do better to appoint some outsider—an Unknown Mental Patient, for instance—to the job.