SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

STRIX

Hard-pressed though farmers are, I doubt if any of them grudge their workers the rise in the minimum wage rate which came into force (in an oddly unbureaucratic phrase) 'from the beginning of last Monday. The proportion of the agricultural labour force which is paid only the minimum rate (now £13 3s) and gets no other benefits in cash or kind must be negligible, and quite rightly so. Increasing mechanisation not only calls for a wider range of skills but—because the machines are so valuable—imposes greater responsibilities. The man who drives some gigantic earth-moving machine for a con- tractor can command a wage of £30 because the machine costs £12,000, but it is one machine doing one job all the time; in the course of a year the modern farm-worker may be called on to drive a combine-har- vester (say £4.000, but it can be more) and with a £1,500 tractor to operate a wide variety of implements from a baler to a forage harvester, a plough, a seed-drill and a hedge-cutter. The value of all this hard- ware—and the list is by no means exhaustive —comes to something like £10,000 and if you think of the amount of know-how and versatility its efficient use calls for you may well conclude that the man on the bulldozer is on to a soft option.

Time and emotion

The shortening of the working week to forty- three hours means that what the Wages Board calls the 'weekly short-day' (i.e. Satur- day morning) is reduced to three hours, less a fifteen-minute break for breakfast. There are few worthwhile agricultural operations that can be mounted and carried out in that time, especially on a dark winter's morning and, since the 'short-day' can hardly be further curtailed without bringing the Wages Board into ridicule and contempt. 1971 will presumably see the introduction of a five-day week for the industry—a prospect which ought not to be left out of account in the current negotiations about the Price Review.

I am glad the new Wages Order has abstained from increasing the holiday bonus to long-service employees; the maximum still stands at six days extra holiday for a worker who has been on the same farm for twenty years or more. This sounds a benign sort of arrangement, but it is liable to be self-defeat. ing in the case of old men who have done (as many have) forty or even more years service. They are part of the furniture, they soldier on doing valuable work and giving sage advice, but it is no good pretending that in strictly economic terms they deserve their place in the team. If the farm changes hands and if. as now often happens. the new owner is either some sort of tycoon or a large, im- personal concern, the state's decree that old Joe is entitled—in effect—to a week's extra pay will hardly strengthen his claim to com- passionate treatment under the new regime. My oldest worker has been on the place for fifty years and I would not dream of sug- gesting that he should retire before he quali-

fies for his old age pension; but I suspect that if my land were taken over ba an insur- ance company he would be out on his neck.

The oracle

My most vivid memory of Sir Basil Liddell Hart dates from the first day of the last war —3 September 1939. I had already been called, as they were to say, to the colours, and that evening I went down to Printing House Square to collect the sort of detritus that accumulates in one's office—old pipes, notebooks, unfinished short stories and similar rubbish. My office already had a new occupant; one or two other people drifted in to discuss the non-events of a momentous day; and presently we were joined by Liddell Hart.

None of us had fought, as he had, at Ypres and on the Somme; we all, I suspect, underrated the emotional impact of the out- break of the Second. War (which to us came almost as a relief, certainly as a challenge) on veterans of the First; but none of us expected the pronouncement which he made when asked what he thought the form would be. 'We lost this war', said Liddell Hart em- phatically, 'when we lost Spain.'

Oracles are entitled to be obscure; but in the mood of the hour this statement struck us as far-fetched. We had not lost the war, we had no intention of losing it; to the best of anyone's recollection Spain had never been ours to lose. But—in those days, at any rate—Liddell Hart was a bit of a prima donna, and I am sure that what he really meant was that if the Government had paid more attention to his views on the Spanish Civil War the nation's prospects would have been much brighter. As the Times said in its admirable obituary, he 'combined an extra- ordinary appetite for creative and critical thinking with a passionate desire for fame and approbation that amounted to vanity.'

But it will be by his creative and critical thinking on the art of war that this complex man deserves to be remembered—by that, and by his unfailing kindness to less notable writers and researchers in the same field.

Psittacoincidence

Anomalous birds alight from time to time —generally after a gale—on the hills where I live: a puffin (dead when discovered), a gannet (restored, intact but exhausted, to the distant sea), and a little auk, which survived for two days on the primitive swimming-pool at Strix Hall and must almost certainly have been the first little auk to be photographed in South Loamshire by the Times.

Our first cockatoo appeared last month; a handsome white bird with a yellow crest, variously identified from early sightings as a stork or a small vulture, it finished up on top of a pen containing Japanese pheasants and, evading capture. retired into a tree with the bread offered as bait and was thereafter no more seen.

About four days later I read in the Agony Column of the Times: 'SMALL WHITE COCKATOO YELLOW CRESTED MISSING WEST- MINSTER AREA' A telephone number fol- lowed. Reason told me that the chances of a cockatoo making its way in mid-winter from London to Loamshire under (so to speak) sail were remote; but reason also told me that the number of white cockatoos with yellow crests at large in the British Isles during any given week must be very small. Perhaps the unfortunate fowl had been abducted or kidnapped, and had given its captors the slip? In any case, its owner was clearly anxious and worried; so I rang the telephone number.

The voice that answered was mellifluous and vaguely familiar. 'My name is Strix', I said, and launched into a rambling account of the cockatoo's brief visitation. The voice said it was extremely kind of me to ring but he had got his bird back; it had been re- covered from the garden of a nearby house. 'Are you by any chance', he added, `Itlarma- duke Strix?' I said 'Yes' and (the penny having dropped) 'You're John Gielgud': an agreeable conversation ensued.

I wish my old friend the best of luck with his new play, which opens this week at the Lyric Theatre; I wish he would play King Lear again; and I wish I knew where 'my' cockatoo came from. It must by now be dead from exposure.

The fortunate man

The door of the local gunsmith's opened and from the gelid murk outside there entered a very small, very old man wearing a very large, very old overcoat and three days growth of beard.

'Got any worms?' he croaked; they deal in fishing tackle as well as guns.

The young attendant produced a hygienic- looking carton. 'Here you are', he shouted. 'That'll be three bob.' How much?' asked the gnome, who was hard of hearing. 'THREE BOB' As the transaction was com- pleted, the young attendant asked him if he had had any luck. 'Got two yesterday', he wheezed. 'More than I did', the attendant told him; and a sudden gleam of triumph or complacency lit up the wizened features under the indescribable and sodden hat as the old man shuffled out into the fog.

'Two what?' I asked. 'Chub, I should think, or bream' said the attendant. For an octogenarian who looked as if he had come out of a Victorian workhouse coarse fishing in January seemed neither an obvious or a suitable hobby; and I was about to suggest, tritely, that the old man must be a very keen angler when the attendant went on to reveal that 'some years ago' the old man had won £15,000 on the pools. 'Gave half to his wife and kept half for himself. Said that was the fair thing.'

I collected what I had come for and went on my way feeling vaguely reassured about life in general. It was probably more than seventy years since my compatriot had caught his first chub. or alternately his first bream, on a worm. Only he could tell what vicissitudes had marked his career since then; but at least there had been one tre- mendous slice of luck, one blaze of glory— he had suddenly acquired a small fortune, and he had given half of it to his wife. The blaze had faded, the wealth—or anyhow all its trappings—had gone; but he could still afford the small luxury of buying worms. could still, sitting hunched on a stool in the rain, get from watching a float some of the same ingredients of happiness that he had got in childhood. 1 reckoned he was a lucky MAO.