AN ILL-WIND
By RICHARD CHURCH
THE Prime Minister has tried to kill Official English. Having spent twenty-four of the most formative years of my life in Government Departments, I almost began this premature grave- side oration by the following minute: " I am directed to state that in the view of the Prime Minister it is considered, under Section One of the Common-sense Act, 1940, that having regard to the present emergency, and to the exigencies arising under the abnormal conditions arising therefrom, officers and staff of all Government Offices shall, on and after the date of this memorandum, discontinue the use of such terminology as has hitherto been practised in all communications, minutes and reports, and shall substitute, wherever possible, a direct expression of facts and opinions in phrases of as limited scope as is compatible with —" But there I stick : I flounder once again in a past which happily I escaped from some years ago. How much it resembles a bog Looking back on these years, I lift my feet with difficulty, and begin to feel that old sense of stifling. What bitter humiliations I recall as I think of the " In-tray" and the " Out-tray,' the ramparts of files which hold my depressed handwriting, semolina upon semolina of words, stringing out over the best and what should have been the brightest years of my life. I could feel anger even now, though I am safe, and dare to think I have escaped, with my sense of the English language intact. Is it a false security? A cold sweat creeps out from my skin as I admit the doubt. For who could escape the creeping stain of those ill-used years during which I was caught in the machine and made to grind out the stuff that masquerades as English under the heading " On His Majesty's Service."
Does His Majesty know what a mis-service that is? Hitherto none of his Ministers has warned him that his loyal and faithful people have, as a body, no voice except this chipped and flattened gramophone-record, Official English. What a vile dirge it is! How insidious its poison, working on the brains and vitality of the Civil Services who have to turn it on. I know, as the Prime Minister knows, what a hateful simulacrum it is. I recall how I entered the Service, as an eager youth, resolved to dedicate my life to literature and to earn my bread and butter as an official. I would keep the two activities apart. Before and after office hours I would " play the sedulous ape" to the most lucid masters of verse and prose. For seven hours a day I would lie fallow and submissive, until an opportunity should arise for me to strike a blow of revolt.
That programme held for some years. From five in the morning until breakfast-time, and again from six in the evening until midnight, cutting sleep to a minimum, I laboured to capture the secret of sound, ringing English that said what it meant. What a joyous fight! An open-air fight, amongst heroes: that is how it seems now I look back. And with what contempt for the dangers involved I gave myself to the con. ditioning demanded in official files. I got the jargon by hear. " Stock" letters, in which all Government departments delight because of their safety against the possibilities of departure from precedent, or the disruptive display of individuality by junior officers, became my horn-book. I memorised whole " runs," congeries of words like those passages in the Nordic Sagas c7hich recur without meaning. I tried to make myself a model of docility in the matter of minutes and reports.
But I was always suspect. I could not live down the evidence of the activities of my other half. It was known by my superior officers that I was gradually becoming a " writer." And amongst Civil Servants, as a body, public self - expression has up till recently been regarded as the stigmata of a bounder. I was watched and warded: treated kindly but firmly. At last I struck. There came a day when, inflamed perhaps by a small success in the other world of letters. I wrote the following minute in a file. It was concise, and it stated the case with absolute exactness I wrote, " This man is a liar." And I signed the minute. My immediate superior officer was a typical Civil Servant. That is to say, he was not typical of anything. He was distinctly odd. He was a flat-earth theorist, and had often tried to convict me of sin and degeneration in believing that the earth was round. He also had an unfailing supply of chocolate creams in his pockets, which he would slip into his mouth with an un- conscious, wiping motion. He also rattled his money in his trouser pocket. He was a purist, and believed that only a picked few were to be saved ; all of them flat-earthists. Apart from all this, he was a typical Civil Servant, cautious. lone- winded, non-committal, and again cautious.
He brought my minute back. The room was hushed. He looked at me, and my two colleagues looked at me. I heard the last chocolate cream dissolve in his two-dimensional anatomy. " Did you write this? " he said. I pointed to my signature and said nothing. " You know that once a minute is written it can never be deleted from a file?" I replied that I had no intention of deleting it. I had said what I meant, and I had stated the facts. I began to grow inspired. My two selves incandesced and flamed together. I stood up, I approached him, I took the file and, selecting the apposite items of correspondence which had provoked my minute, I fluttered them before him between finger and thumb. I poured forth rhetoric about the monstrous machine of bureaucracy which for years had been undermining my character, and I told him, in effect, that I was now a David about to slay a Goliath.
And was there a grand climax to this literary rebellion? No! There is never a climax in the Civil Service. Indiscre- tions are swallowed up. The tide of precedents, the waters of jargon, roll on and crumble such audacious little sand castles. Nothing happened. My minute was followed by a long one from the flat-earth theorist, the chocolate cream addict, in which he passed on the information that, having regard to the circumstances as evidenced in the correspondence, it would appear that the applicant's statements were not strictly in accordance with those within the cognisance of the Depart- ment. And he was right. So was I. But he is, I suspect, still a valuable Civil Servant. And I, by the grace of Bunyan, Hazlitt and others of that kind, have escaped. Now, however, that the Prime Minister has put his foot down, I begin to wonder whether I was not precipitate.
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