THE SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

note that Dr Ralph Bunche has been adding his small voice to those raised by, or from, the Foreign Office against George Brown. Foreign emissaries no less than other men can be tiresome when tight. I recall Sir Denis Brogan once instructing me that no one could understand diplo- matic history who had not seen an Ambas- sador drunk; and since then I have seen sufficient drunken diplomats to cure me of any illusion that the conduct of foreign policies was all protocol and politesse. The unctuous chorus of condemnation of George Brown has a nasty sound, the sound of something organised.

Bunche may never have been drunk; but in my experience he was never much use sober. His principal qualification I have always assumed to have been his negroid ancestry. He was sent to the Congo during its worst days of chaos following Indepen- dence, because it was thought that the Congolese politicians would take more readily to a negro representative of the United Nations secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, than a white one. This move failed, for Bunohe is by no means a black negro but is of rather a light khaki colour, and looked not at all black to the Congo- lese, many of whom thereupon viewed him as a white man's stooge.

In those. terrible and confused first days the only way reporters could file their news stories was through the Telex system at Leopoldville (as Kinshasa was then called) general post office. We used to scamper up there from the Memling hotel each evening. There was usually much delay and difficulty in getting a line through. On one occasion the New York Times correspondent and myself were informed that because of Priority calls being made, we were unlikely to get our copy through that night. We thereupon descended into the area where the telex calls were going out, and discovered a solitary Congolese operator, who pointed With a shrug to vast rolls of 'priority' mat- erial which had still to go. We looked at what was being sent. It was Bunche's report to Hammarskjeld.

Interminable ramblings

At that time, the United Nations possessed no cypher capacity in the Congo, and it was all in clear. We naturally started reading it, and discovered that Bunche's priority mes- sages referred to news we had all reported two and three days previously and which was already, therefore, available to the United Nations in the pages of the New York Times. We had no compunction, con- sequently, in bribing the Congolese operator

pull out the plugs and send our stuff instead of the interminable ramblings of Bunche.

A day, or so later the United Nations

press man got to hear of this and summoned a press conference, demanding an explana- tion. We gave him the correct explanation, which made him angrier still. The following evening the United Nations placed armed Swedish soldiers throughout the telex area of the post office.

The autumn leaves

One of the intensest pleasures of childhood was to run through gutters filled with leaves, or to kick leaves made into piles by autumn whirlwinds; and the redolence of leaves burning in parks, too, is sweetly nostalgic. The fall of leaves on a calm frosty morning, and the alternative when high winds tear them off the trees are as fine memorials of the passage of time, of transience and of seasonal decay as anything the natural world affords for the encouragement of that con- dition of half-delight we call melancholy.

The usual efficiency of London's street cleaning means that rarely is one given the chance to kick through piles of leaves. Sud- denly these last days the streets of the city have seemed different and I wondered what it was. I knew it wasn't the piles of plastic- bundled rubbish accumulating in unused doorways. These were unusual, to be sure, but unusual in a perfectly obvious way. It was all the leaves around the pavements. in the gutters, blowing into drifts wherever the wind made a regular draught, that I had not seen for years, that I had not con- sciously seen since my schooldays. The leaves, I think, would almost always im- prove the street scene, except that whenever I looked closely at each drift and pile, among the leaves were pieces of wrapping paper, empty crisp packets, bedraggled contracep- tives and like detritus. It is extraordinary, and fortunate, how such litter makes a drift of leaves look, upon inspection, ugly.

The duty of Councils

Of all the duties borne by local councils, I would have thought that the disposal of sew- age and of refuse to be, along with policing, the most essential. The Government is en- titled to the view that wage demands should 'It's still the cheapest kip in London' be resisted, or to the opposed view that wage demands are none of its business. But the duties of a Government in this respect are not necessarily the same as the duties of Councils. I can see no point in electing local councillors if they are unable to pay their employees sufficient to perform the essential duties of keeping the sewage works working and keeping the rats off the streets. Dustmen and sewage workers are the most, not the least, important of council employees, and their work is unpleasant and badly paid.

Sympathetic strike

There are strikes for which I have little sym- pathy. The present strike is not one of these. I have no sympathy at all for the councils and corporations whose Government-encour- aged intransigence, masquerading as `taking a firm line', is bringing about the pollution of our rivers, and the infection of our streets. There have been times these past days when I have seen empty London streets at dead of night, with leaves and litter blown about by a noisy wind, and have felt that this is what London would look like after some nuclear holocaust had destroyed all human life and organisation.

Gardener gagged Buckingham Palace appears to have become irritated at my criticism of its harsh and un- necessary ban on the publication of a book written by Mr Horace Parsons, who before his retirement was Head Gardener at Sand- ringham. I am quite unrepentant. I thought, and still think, that the decision was a bad one, lacking charity and any sense of natural justice. Mr Heseltine, who is. I believe, the Queen's press secretary, endeavours to de- fend the bad decision by asserting the neces- sity of protecting the Queen's privacy. I withdraw my comment that senior Royal courtiers and secretaries and advisers who have worked for the Queen have since written books. I had in mind such memoirs as those of Sir Frederick Ponsonby, the first Lord Sysonby, who was keeper of the royal Privy Purse for twenty-one years and put in forty-one years' service at Court: but this was before the present Queen's reign. So, also, was Crawfie's stuff. The Duke of Windsor has of course written his memoirs, and Queen Victoria herself had books pub- lished. Dermot Morrah, Arundel Herald Ex- traordinary, has written many books on the royal family, including his most recent, To Be a King about Prince Charles, published in 1968; but doubtless Extraordinary Heralds are not courtiers. Nor, despite his Km). could the distinguished historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennet be thus described; he wrote the authorised Life of King George vs. Tele- vision cameras have lately been allowed, indeed encouraged, to intrude upon the Queen's privacy, but that, too, is different.

Unfair insinuation, but

So it would clearly be unfair to insinuate that the rule against employees and ex-em- ployees writing about their employment was allowed to fall 'only on less senior members of the Royal Household'. I remain, however, of the opinion that if such a rule be neces- sary, exceptions should be allowed to it and that such exception should be made for what a Buckingham Palace spokesman called a 'perfectly innocent' book by a Head Gar- dener.

THE SPECTATOR