MR. F. P. AND MR. B. B.
By E. L. WOODWARD hours of rude health I have often made out lists of books I which I would read in bed if I had an illness. I mean books which I have tried to read, and failed to get beyond a chapter or two: All Rosenberg on racial purity, Spengler on the decline of the west, or some of the earlier froth-blowers, such as were Herbert Spencer or Buckle, or even—dare I say it?—no, I dare not mention this revered nineteenth-century name. I am now in bed, and I have had influenza, and, to my dismay, the printed word has failed me. I do not want to read the niggly, wormy little letters huddled together on a page like bacteria on a lantern-slide. I can only listen. If I could hire an orator, I would get him to stand at the foot of my bed and declaim. The Letters of Junius , Clarendon ; Sir Thomas Browne ; Francis Bacon ; the Agamemnon, which I once learned by heart, and have now entirely forgotten.
There are no orators to be hired, and in their place I turn on the wireless. The news bulletins, Mr. F. P., Mr. B. B., and their confreres. Phone and antiphon in measured impartiality, icier and most impartial when they are reading One of the B.B.C. jokes. I raise my pillow in salute to Mr. F. P., Mr. B. B. and their confreres. Not once have they sent up my temperature. They fall in with my mood when I am sipping Vichy water. (No political implications. I bought a crate of Vichy water before the war. I offered to sell it back to the vendor in September, 1939, but, luckily for me, he would not take it. I have 29 bottles left. The label says that if you cannot go to Vichy, the life-giving springs can come to you. This always was the cheapest way of imbibing Vichy water, as the local municipality found to their cost before the war. Nasty gossip said that, in a search for a new clientele to fill their hotels, the Vichians devised the neighbouring Glozel discoveries." Well, they have a clientele now_ . . .) I listen with the greatest pleasure to Big Ben, but I fear that I may be listening in the wrong way.' That is to say, I don't contemplate. Or rather I can't contemplate as I ought to contemplate. I find it hard to guess why Big. Ben has been chosen as an aid to contetnplation of an tiPlifting type. One might as well expect the popping of cham- pagne corks, or the pleasant clink of oyster-shells on plates to canalise the silences at a Quakers' meeting. Big Ben reminds me of all manner of things, but not of uplift. It reminds me of excursions to London (from far-off Shooter's Hill or Hamp- stead) in childhood, and of waiting, on the pavement over against Boadicea, for the clock to strike twelve. Boadicea, Cleopatra, Victoria—the three queens most real to me in those years. Had I not seen the statue of the first, the needle of the second, and the funeral of the third? And, now, Big Ben reminds me of walks back to the Temple along the Embank- ment on summer evenings, of the voyage to Cythera, of the steamboat leaving for Greenwich at Westminster Pier, of the L.C.C. trams gliding like swans across the bridge, and every tram an act of defiance to the House of Lords. Or, again, there was that fantastic moment at the last Coronation when, within sight of Big Ben, from a loud-speaker above my scat, the voice of the Archbishop of Canterbury reciting the State prayers suddenly caught me eating a ham-sandwich, and my moral voice within could not give a clear ruing about the propriety of combining ham-sandwiches with the liturgy.
Anyhow I like Big Ben, and, even if I cannot get into the right mood about him after dinner, I wish he would strike his time-signal before the six o'clock news. (As for the midnight news, Heaven knows what underworld of croons and wails pours forth if you tune in at 11.55 p.m.). I cannot bear the 5.59 p.m. evocation-goodnight to children everywhere. Peter-Panism at its worst. Apart from the fact that I do not feel inclined to include the striplings of the Hitler Youth, junior class, in any salutation until these tiny conscripts have been taught better manners, I do not see why the B.B.C. should stick to the flat-earth fallacy. Tens of thousands of English-speaking children—not to men- tion hundreds of thousands of other children—are just getting up at 5.59 p.m., Greenwich time, millions of others are fast asleep, or, again, are nowhere near bed-time, and would object strongly to being hustled off early by Uncle X or Auntie Y of the B.B.C.
Yet even of listening, of uncontemplative listening, there can soon be enough. Moreover, one cannot get much entertain- ment now in twisting the knobs, and butting into the news in other countries. There was a time when you could pick up a rough knowledge of foreign languages by hearing the news in English, and then turning it on in a not-too-strange continental tongue. You could follow the same news round most of Europe. But now it is not the same news. You may be critical of our own news-service. You may think that some of the talks almost bless Herr Hitler for provoking this war, as the Christmas carol blesses the apple which was the cause of the long tale of Paradise lost and Paradise regained. You might suppose, for example, from some of these speakers that we, who have built more houses than any other European country in the last twenty years, had never thought of pulling down our slums until Hitler started to blow them up. You might imagine, from other speakers, that this war is going to give an immense spurt to brotherly love in Europe, and that the neighbours of Germany, having tasted the bliss of serving German masters, are going to throw themselves eagerly into a great European federation containing sixty million Germans.
Yet, however much you may puzzle over the oratory dealing with the day after tomorrow, at least you can believe the B.B.C. news about yesterday. And, if you want confirmation of the B.B.C. news, listen to the versions put out by the G oebbels- Gayda lads. (Have you ever noticed how closely Goebbels, in appearance, resembles the Mad Hatter—substituting a look of meaningless hate for the M.H.'s look of meaningless amiability?) Well, listen to this German-Italian arabesque of words for half an hour or so, and you will come back with relief to the cold affirmations of the B.B.C. Here is the news, and this is B. B. reading it. . . . Allah is Allah. . . . But let all muezzins cease, and let me hear Big Ben. The Victorians put up a sorry building for the High Court of Parliament. Nevertheless they gave the Commons of England a very good clock, and (though I live within sound of Great Tom) the best of all bells.
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