Another voice

Swallows and Amazons

Auberon Waugh

Living as I do in the depths of the country I find that my knowledge of life around one comes about entirely from the newspapers. Sometimes I see things reported in them which I cannot immediately assimilate, so I cut out the passage and brood about it. often for months afterwards. Last month, for instance, there was reported the tragic case of a Chesterfield housewife who had died of shock after finding her sixteenmonth-old daughter dead in her cot. The newspapers were certainly right to report it by any criterion of news value: it was a dramatic and unusual event of interest to their readers; the emotions it aroused were the entirely wholesome ones of pity and sorrow ; the mother's death was a phenomenon of genuine medical and scientific interest.

But it was not any of these aspects which held my attention. The family's next-doorneighbour, interviewed by a staff representative of the Daily Mail, paid this tribute to the dead woman:

'Carol was very placid. I have never known a mother with so much patience with her children. I have seen her pour out four different types of pop for the children and they have left them all. So Carol has simply poured them out some milk. Most girls would have lost their temper, but not Carol.'

It is, indeed, a touching testimonial. I doubt whether any of my neighbours will be able to think of anything half so nice to say about me. But it was the glimpse into the mores of Hazelhurst Avenue, Chesterfield, which had me spellbound. How many types of pop would an ordinary Chesterfield housewife be expected to offer her children before losing her temper? Is this—the patient or 'permissive' way—the best method of dealing with children who have problems with their pop?

Alas, the Tragedy overshadows any such debate. But we only ever learn of these problems in circumstances of some high drama to which they are irrelevant. I remember at the time of the Moors Murders trial being fascinated by one particular episode. Brady and Hindley were living in a council house at the time which they shared with (I think) Hindley's old grandmother who was partially deaf and immobile. On one occasion when they were murdering a child upstairs, the grandmother complained that she had heard strange and disturbing noises. 'Oh, that's all right, Gran,' said Hindley—or words to that effect : 'I just dropped a tape recorder on my toe.'

Here, again, was a completely fresh insight into the working class predicament.

Do they frequently drop tape recorders on their toes, and, if so, what can be done to help them ? How many working days are lost to British industry through injuries of this sort? It should not be beyond human ingenuity to devise a soft case for tape recorders which would be proof against all but the most determined attempts at selfmutilation by council house tenants. Other remedies, like banning the sale of tape recorders, or requiring everybody who uses one to wear huge indiarubber galoshes on his shoes, must be set aside on libertarian grounds.

One only learns about these things obliquely but of course if we were presented with them as bald facts—that a common source of discomfort and noise in working class homes nowadays is attributable to injuries sustained by the careless or inexpert handling of tape recorders—we might disbelieve them. That has always been my reaction to claims that the crime rate is soaring. Perhaps it is, but so far as I can see it is much the same as it always was. A number of people have a vested interest in telling us that it threatens to run out of control; among them the police and disciplinarian or punishment freaks are only the most obvious. Criminals have no professional body able to speak up for them and assure us that on the contrary they are a dwindling, harassed and discriminated-against section of the community. For myself, I prefer to keep an open mind.

The same posture is surely required for last week's headlines about a massive rise in female crime. This claim was not backed by a single statistic, at any rate in the report I read. It came from an address by Ms Daphne Skillern, Britain's only woman police commander, to the Royal Society of

Health Congress at Eastbourne. She said the police are concerned about it. She hinted that men might be becoming less criminal while women grew worse. TodaY it was not unusual, she averred, to find women participating in serious and violent crimes. Girls were indulging in vandalism and football hooliganism, forming int° gangs and attacking people. It is a horrifYing thought, if true, and of course one can think of hundreds of reasons for it.

On another page of the same newspaPer that day there was a report which seemed to underline what Ms Skillern had to say. A fifteen-year-old convent girl was sent t° borstal for threatening a Norwich jeweller with a knife and seizing nineteen rings valued at more than £.10,000. At least, she had the sense of decorum to disguise herself as a man, with bandages around her chest. Her disguise was so good that it fooled the police for some time after she was arrested. I will only really believe what Ms Skilled' has to say when male criminals take to wearing lipstick and false breasts in order to carry conviction and strike terror into the hearts of their victims.

Perhaps this moment is just around the corner. There is a vociferous lobby anxious to advance corporal punishment for schoolgirls. Their reasons for this are known onlY to themselves and to God. What shocked me is not that they should harbour t11° secret longings, but that they should de" mand their satisfaction with such self' righteousness'. They do not even bother to assure us, like fox-hunters, that little girls like being beaten. The horrible change Ise!, coming as a result of the Government's eV' and half-witted Equal Opportunities Aet does not lie so much in the women therli; selves—many are as delightful, soft an° womanly as they always were—as in men's attitudes towards them. There is a new ruthlessness in the air, a vindictiveness not easilY to be distinguished from hatred. Obviously, it is echoed in the rhetoric °f the lesbian or lunatic fringe of the feminist, movement. Nor can we honestly preten° through our gallantry that this repulsive measure has left the whole female sex unscathed. Tiresome, humourless, oPini°11,; ated women who have always been allowe" to hang around the wrong sort of dinned' party in London are more strident now all., more self-confident. Physical violence sometimes necessary to shut these woolen up now, where a well-delivered snub w0I'lld have done the trick in the past. But 1110 estly don't think there are any feminill monsters in London today who can 01,9: pare with Mary Wollstonecraft, for in

all all

stance, or Lady Caroline Lamb. An-,i the man-hating rhetoric which we hear froni feminism's wilder shores is infinitelY 1,4 dangerous, it seems to me, than the

cynicism which has replaced all the illusi°"

nd nd and hypocrisies with which men surrou e ed their womenfolk in the past. We ha!, that

them birched yet. I wish I could believe ‘,

women were the gainers. Once again the' seem to have been had for mugs.