All posts tagged Wolverhampton

An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd (1982)

Nothing today had been remotely how he imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events.
(Gabriel Cobb reflecting on the chaos of the Battle of Tanga, An Ice-Cream War, page 172)

This is a long, deeply researched and immaculately described historical novel, set during the Great War in British East Africa, filling 383 densely printed Penguin pages.

Boyd is a lovely writer. His style is clear and polite, in a very English way. It’s obviously less funny than ‘A Good Man in Africa’, which is a full-on comedy, but it also feels more formal, somehow more old fashioned, appropriately for its historical setting. There are moments of psychological acuity or observational detail or deft phrasing to give pleasure on every page.

Part 1. Before the war

Chapter 1. 6 June 1914, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

Introduces us to Temple Smith, ‘a very fat man with a thick black walrus moustache’ (p.310), the American owner of a sisal plantation in the south of British East Africa (what will later become Kenya). Smith has travelled down to Dar es Salaam, which is in the adjoining colony of German East Africa, in order to collect a consignment of coffee plant seedlings. He is ambitious and wants to expand his farm from just growing and processing sisal

Through his eyes we see Dar as it was in 1914 and the arrival of several German ships at the harbour. Smith is greeted by his nearest neighbour from across the border in the German colony, one Erich von Bishop. An efficient crop-haired man, Bishop is here to greet his wife, Liesl, who has been on an extended holiday to her relatives in Europe (where she has put on a lot of weight).

(There’s a bit of backstory, which is that we learn why Smith is in Africa. He was bored being manager of an iron foundry in Sturgis, New Jersey, and had applied to an advertisement to be the manager of a big game hunt to Africa, in this case for the ex-US president Theodor Roosevelt and his son Kermit when they came on a big game safari back in 1909. When he questioned the need to massacre quite such huge numbers of wild game he was sacked but had come to like Africa and decided to stay on and try to make it as a farmer.)

There is an odd, apparently inconsequential episode, when Smith visits a local prostitute in a bordello. She is rake thin, covered in bangles and ointment and smells. When she spits something out the window which lands with a clatter on some nearby roof he chickens out and doesn’t go through with it…

Chapter 2. 8 June 1914, The Northern Railway, German East Africa

Bishop invites Smith to share the train journey from Dar back inland to the nearest station to their farms. We see the long uncomfortable railway journey through the eyes of Liesl von Bishop who is not happy to be back in Africa and, as angry women do, finds both the men pitiful and pathetic. Smith alights at Moshi station where he is met by his native foreman, Saleh.

Chapter 3. 10 June 1914, Taveta, British East Africa

Smith’s farm (which he has named Smithville) with its acres of sisal plants, barns, warehouse to house the massive decorticator machine, some tramlines. His placid wife, Matilda, and two yapping little boys, Glenway and Walker (p.45).

Chapter 4. 24 July 1914, Ashurst, Kent, England

Long chapter introducing us to the Cobb family through the eyes of the spoilt younger son, Felix, who’s just left private school before going up to Oxford next term. Felix has come under the influence of a charismatic boy called Holland, at school, and so fancies himself as a fashionable, progressive intellectual.

Holland’s sway over Felix had been established in their final year at school, and Felix had accepted it with the zeal of a disciple acknowledging the messiah. (p.189)

With the result that Felix finds his family, and everything about the impressive country estate in Kent, unbearable – his father the permanently bad-tempered retired Major Hamish; his sisters Cressida, Yseult and the twins Albertine and Eustacia; his conventional mother and his various male in-laws, namely:

  • Lieutenant Nigel Bathe married to Eustacia
  • Sammy Hinshelwood
  • the honourable Greville Verschoyle married to Albertine
  • Lt Col. Henry Hyam, married to Yseult (who, when war starts, bags a job in the Committee of Imperial Defence)

The only person he likes, adores even, is his older brother, 27-year-old Captain Gabriel Cobb who collected him from the station and with whom he goes for a swim in the old willow pool while filling him in on the latest family gossip. As part of their banter Gabriel chats about his time in the army in India where he hasn’t seen any fighting but he has stuck a few wild pigs. Felix is disgusted and asks whether they squeal. Well, you’d squeal if you were stuck with a spear, laughs Gabriel. This is a characteristically clever piece of prolepsis by Boyd for Gabriel will, himself, be stuck like a pig in the upcoming war (in Part 2, chapter 6).

This grand country pile is, we learn, the reward from a metal company in Wolverhampton which produces items like Felix’s electro-plated nickel-silver cigarette case (pages 52 and 209).

Chapter 5. 25 July 1914, Stackpole, Kent, England

Felix’s jaundiced jealous view of his brother’s marriage to Charis. He is mightily pissed off because at the last minute brother Gabriel told him he was being replaced as best man by Sammy Hinshelwood, Felix being downgraded to chief usher.

Chapter 6. 26 July 1914, Trouville-sur-mer, France

Gabriel and Charis’s honeymoon, filled with details about hotels and seabathing in 1914, but centring on Gabriel’s inability, on two successive nights, to get an erection, despite clambering on top of Charis and sort of rubbing his groin against her (still in his pyjamas) to her complete bewilderment. It’s only on the third night that he bangs his knee, navigating across the bedroom in the dark, she loses her temper and tells him to ‘come and let mummy rub it, you silly boy’ when, to both their surprises, he suckles her like a baby and gets a proper erection, which is a definite improvement, even if he then ejaculates prematurely before he has penetrated her. Sigh. A vivid imagining of the bad old days of total ignorance about almost every aspect of sex.

Next morning he reads a French paper and announces to an astonished Charis that Austria has declared war on Serbia and they must return to Britain immediately, that same day.

Part 2. The war

Chapter 1. 9 August 1914, Smithville, British East Africa

Officious army and customs officer Reggie Wheech-Browning – ‘a ludicrous beanpole of a man’ (p.338) – drops by to tell Smith that war has broken out and to leave his farm immediately. Smith thinks it’s stuff and nonsense and doesn’t budge.

A week later a force of German askaris (African soldiers) led by two German officers marches onto his land and up to his beloved factory. It is von Bishop who he met in the opening chapter. Very politely von Bishop announces he is commandeering Smith’s farm, as his men set fire to his sisal crop and start pulling up the short length of tram track he had lain down. It’s all he can do to prevent von Bishop from vandalising his precious decorticating machine. When asked, von Bishop very politely signs an affadavit itemising all the things he’s burned or is confiscating, but insists he will also be commandeering the farmhouse. Smith has one hour to pack his belongings, wife and two small boys into a mule-drawn buggy, and told to shamble off down the track towards Voi.

On the outskirts he is, ludicrously, fired on by the ramshackle force of askaris led by Wheech-Browning. Once he’s yelled who he is he’s allowed to proceed to Voi where he puts his family up at the government dak, with a view to himself journeying on to Nairobi to establish who’s going to pay him compensation.

Chapter 2. 20 August 1914, Nairobi, British East Africa

Ensconced in snobbish, pretentious, half-built Nairobi, Smith discovers that well-heeled Brits and various foreigners have set up a volunteer defence force while they wait for the relief force to arrive from India but have become disillusioned by two weeks of inactivity. In Voi he’s been greeted by Matilda’s father i.e. his father-in-law the slope-shouldered Reverend Norman Espie.

Smith goes to see his insurance company, the grandly named African Guarantee and Indemnity Company which is in fact a small office above a butcher’s shop on Sixth Avenue run by one immigrant Indian, Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire. Essanjee explains that Smith’s claim of theft of his farm and equipment will have to be confirmed the company’s assessor who is also Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire.

Chapter 3. 30 August 1914 ,Voi, British East Africa

10 days later. Wheech-Browning drives Smith and Essanjee in an early motorbike with sidecar out of Nairobi, past Voi. They stop in the open scrub an hour or so from Smith’s farm when they suddenly come under fire from Germans hiding in a rocky hill 600 yards away. As the reader anticipated, the Indian, Essanjee – the lieutenant dispensable of the situation – is hit twice and dies. Wheech-Browning and Smith bundle his body into the sidecar, and hightail it away from the ambush.

Chapter 4. 26 October 1914, SS Homayun, Indian Ocean

56 days later, and we join Gabriel aboard a tramp steamer sailing from Bombay to British East Africa. He had hung around in Britain waiting for news, then been sent out to India, to Bombay then up to Rawalpindi to join his regiment, the West Kents. But then to his disgust he was separated from them and posted to a subaltern regiment, the 69th Palamcottah Light Infantry, part of Indian Expeditionary Force B, and has to entrain all the way back down to Bombay and then board the smelly old SS Homayun for a hot slow boring voyage across the Indian Ocean.

Everyone is seasick. Incidents including a concert party interrupted by a rainstorm and the flogging of a mutineer. Sammy Hinshelwood distinguishes himself by his coarse stories about sex which, of course, embarrass but also arouse the only recently blooded Gabriel. He becomes friendly with the eccentric, intense Dr Bilderbeck who gives him the best advice for life in the front line: always have a pillow and a basin.

Chapter 5. 2 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

Tanga was a major port on the northernmost part of German East Africa, close to the border with British East Africa. Description of Gabriel and his troop loading into a lighter, being towed to the beach, jumping into the neck-high water, making their way to the beach and a little inland. Then the confusing long delay as they wait all through a hot day for instructions, their air of chaos when Gabriel goes up to the ‘red house’ on a hill which is staff headquarters. The constant sound of gunfire from ahead of them. Initial intelligence said the town had been abandoned. Now they realise the Germans have heavily fortified it and are fighting off all attacks.

Chapter 6. 3 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

Plausible sounding account of the battle Tanga in that it’s mostly Gabriel stuck in charge of his 70 or so scared Indian soldiers with a cheerfully naive number two, Gleeson. When they are told to go forward they blunder through dense undergrowth, are dispirited by a flight of Indian troops running back from the front, then blunder into an area of bees nest which attack and sting them very severely. At one point in the sequence of events he bumps into Bilderbeck again, who orders the handful of remaining Indian sepoys to advance. When they don’t move Bilderbeck calmly shoots one in the head at point blank range, a spatter of fresh brain landing on his boot.

Eventually it’s just Gabriel and Gleeson left as they make their way forward, are shot at by people with northern accents who they realise are the Lancashire regiment, identify themselves and discover the Lancs are pinned down by a load of Indian soldiers who take shots every time they try to retreat. Gleeson can speak Hindi so he is sent to the side of the house facing the Indians and starts shouting to them that they’re British.

Around then Gabriel sees a German officer emerge from a house a few hundred yards away, leading his men, in plain view and takes the opportunity to fire a shot. It completely misses but triggers an immense fusillade on the house they’re holed up in. When it dies away Gabriel turns to escape the house and comes across Gleeson lying on the floor with his lower jaw show away to reveal the enormous human tongue, glugging down his own blood and still blinking and moving his eyes.

Dazed with horror Gabriel leaps out the back window of the house and runs for the tree cover, telling himself all the time that he’ll come back to rescue Gleeson which we know he won’t. En route back to the beach he stumbles across a troop of German askaris who chase him, (grotesquely enough, through a graveyard), catch up, then slash at him with bayonets, one severing a thigh muscle so that he falls to the ground, taking two other severe stab wounds in the abdomen before he passes out. I assumed he was dead.

Chapter 7. 6 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

The Germans win the Battle of Tanga i.e. repulse the British attack. Bilderbeck is the British representative sent to supervise the handing over of British stores to the victorious Germans and ferrying the British wounded back to the ships, liaising with a German officer named Hammerstein, assisted by von Bishop whose eyes we see everything through. After the British had been forced to flee from the beaches, their battleships subjected the town to a heavy barrage. A shell landed near von Bishop giving him loud tinnitus so he asks the German medic Dr Deppe to examine him. Bilderbeck discovers Cobb is still alive though severely injured from the pig sticking he got from the bayonets and has a few words with him, in his hospital bed, before he returns to the beach and thence the British ships.

Chapter 8. 16 March 1915, Oxford, England

Six months later. Cut back to Felix who is now in his second term at Oxford. Things are not well. He continues to copy his hero, Holland, but neither of them make much impact in wartime Oxford. All the able-bodied students have volunteered and gone off to war. Felix has a slight astigmatism, Holland an unspecified ailment. Both are regularly handed white feathers by old Edwardian ladies in the street for being cowards. Felix is horribly embarrassed by this and has taken to wearing an eye patch to visibly excuse himself; Holland, true to his provocative aesthetic attitude, wants to be given white feathers and is jokily jealous because Felix has more than him. It’s that kind of jokey, studentish relationship.

But other things about Oxford are disappointing, too. Felix is at war with his scout, a wizened con-man named Sproat and his mute son, Algy. And his tutor is an ancient decrepit don named Jock Illiffe whose overheated rooms pong of cats. Once Felix read him the same essay that he’d read the previous week and Illiffe, sitting back in his chair with his eyes closed, didn’t even notice. With the result that he’s failed his Moderations or ‘Mods’ in History.

To cap it all he’s developed a cold sore at the corner of his mouth, the size of a sixpence, which refuses to go away, which solidifies into a scab, which breaks when he smiles and bleeds. Very unsightly.

So this chapter is a successfully evocative painting of Oxford in the first year of the Great War. It also gives us a Felix-eye view of the Cobb family. The splenetic Major has pinned up a big map of northern France in the study and forces the entire family and all the servants to attend a daily update on the progress of the war. The family have, of course, taken the news about Gabriel being severely wounded, very badly. There’s also news about the various other brothers-in-law and family hangers-on.

Holland has acquired a mistress in London, an artist’s model named Enid who takes morphine and makes his life hell, so he’s writing some jolly good poetry about it. Felix, very much still the shy virgin, has a crush on Holland’s sister, Amory, who’s at art school, and is invited to a party she’s giving.

Chapter 9. 18 March 1915, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Felix catches the train back to the family home in Kent. Charis is living there, now, in the former servant’s cottage, which was to have been her and Gabriel’s newlyweds home. She keeps bursting into tears about Gabriel. His father is still short and angry, but his flesh hangs off him. He looks like a demented Victorian cleric.

What a horrible old man, Felix thought. (p.199)

The Felix chapters are drily comical, with overtones of Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Cyril, the sweary working class man Felix liked, his son now tells him has been killed on the Western Front. Felix is genuinely shocked and upset. Then Charis springs it on him that the family have arranged a birthday party for her on 29 March, he’s invited, in fact everyone’s expecting Felix to ‘squire’ Charis. But it clashes with Amory’s party. Family duty or the (remote) possibility of sex. Decisions decisions for a young man.

Chapter 10. 29 March 1915, Café Royal, London

We meet Felix and Holland in the stylish Café Royal, whence they catch a cab to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and upstairs to a sordid flat where Amory lives and which is hosting a very bohemian party, packed with artists and models, all smoking and drinking heavily, a girl playing guitar to an adoring coterie etc. Felix is introduced to Pavelienski or ‘Pav’, the east European model Amory models for. Amory herself is a thing chestless woman who almost completely ignored Felix and is irritated when Holland insists he accompanies them to the famed bohemian nightclub, the Golden Calf, as Amory had booked a table for 16 and Felix is supernumary.

(The Cave of the Golden Calf was a real nightclub, a consciously bohemian creation decorated by leading artists of the time – Wyndham Lewis, Charles Ginner and Spencer Gore – praised by Ezra Pound and frequented by Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Augustus John. Wikipedia)

Anyway, Felix’s attempts to seduce Amory go disastrously awry as she shakes him off and calls him a ‘silly boring little boy’, getting up to go and dance with Pav. Suddenly sober and realising what a fool he’s made of himself, Felix goes wandering through the dark streets of London feeling poetic and soulful till he comes to a baked potato stand, buys one, is propositioned by an old prostitute, taken back to her squalid digs, is fleeced £2 for a horrible experience, unable to get an erection (like his brother Gabriel, in Trouville) so the hooker starts to masturbate him and he climaxes almost immediately (like his brother in Trouville), ejaculating over the sheets, prompting the outraged prossie to tell him to ‘fuck orf out of it’. Felix stumbles into his clothes and down the steep stairs and out into the bleak streets. Sex, eh.

Cut to Felix having taken the milk train back down to Kent and, having been cleaned out by the whore, forced to walk through the dew-drenched countryside to Stackpole. Here he’s surprised to see the light on in the cottage, knocks and is admitted by Charis who is still wearing her gown from the night before, the night of her party, the party Felix rudely missed in order to undergo his series of humiliations in London, as he now ruefully thinks. Sitting in her small front room in front of the fire sipping tea he suddenly feels intimately close to her, his brother’s wife, and tries to stifle the thoughts. The reader wonders whether they’ll end up becoming an item, two damaged ingenues…

Chapter 11. 17 June 1915, Nanda, German East Africa

Three months later. We discover that von Bishop’s wife, Liesl, has been nursing the injured. Kicked out of her house on the border with the British colony, she spent a few months in Dar until, out of boredom, she volunteered to help at the hospital but was then evacuated with all the long-term patients to a hospital far in the south and inland, at a place called Nanda.

A new clutch of patients arrived along with their doctor, Dr Deppe. One is Captain Gabriel Cobb. He is still alive, recovering from severe wounds, learning to walk with crutches. Liesl is a bad-tempered fat woman. So pale and freckled, she sweats continually. Her only pleasure is the brief shower at the end of the day when her maid, Kimi. pours several buckets of water over her head. Then she dries on a frayed towel, slips into casual clothes, eats and goes to bed early. Teutonic joylessness.

Chapter 12. 21 November 1915, Voi, British East Africa

Back to Temple Smith. It’s about a year after he was evicted from his farm. He joined the East African Mounted Rifles but has done nothing except practice drills and acquire more bits of uniform which barely cover his fat frame, while Voi expands into a vast armed camp containing Indian force B, South African coloureds and whites, Kings African Rifle blacks, a huge heterogeneous force.

He’s been called in to meet the head of this force, Brigadier-General Pughe. He’s s short pompous man who turns out to be drunk on brandy and promptly ignores his advice about the lie of the land. Serves the stupid British right.

Talking of which Smith walks back towards the enormous camp, past the fenced areas for donkeys and horses (dying by the dozen due to tsetse fly) to the aerodrome which amounts to a big area of flat, cleared scrubland and a couple of warehouses made out of canvas awning. The entire presence of the Royal Air Force is just two BE2C biplanes.

To Smith’s immense irritation the officious twerp Wheech-Browning is dressed up in flying gear with a reversed cap and flying goggles and about to go for his first flight with flying officer Drewes. it’s a disaster. They bounce along the ‘runway’ but after lifting about 12 feet slowly sink back to the ground. It’s too hot, the air is too thin. But it carries trundling along towards a drainage ditch, pitches head first into it and Drewes is killed. Bystanders rush over to the wreckage to pull his body out but Wheech-Browning, indestructible, emerges as blithe and jolly as ever.

Chapter 13. 10 December 1915, The King’s Arms, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Felix and Charis have ended up becoming an item. We find them in bed in a pub 30 miles or so away from Stackpole. They have had eight sexual encounters and are familiar with each other’s body. We watch Charis inset a tiny sponge dabbed in an unnamed solution attached to a fine thread into her vagina, the thread just sticking out. Contraception 1915. They both know the ghost of Gabriel hovers over their couplings but neither has the guts to raise the subject.

Nigel Bathe came back from Mesopotamia where he lost both arms in a bomb-throwing training exercise when one went off in his hand. Christ. The casual horror not of war but the incompetent preparations for it.

A recap of how Charis and Felix became lovers i.e. he repeatedly kissed her and wore down her rejections. In the end she’s lonely want wanted comforting. They devised stories about visiting distant relatives as excuses for meeting up in remote inns for weekends of love.

On the train back from Aylesbury to London Felix admits he feels dreadfully guilty. Charis reassures her that they have created their own bubble of love. But inside she is full of remorse and guilt. Humans and their ridiculous emotions. But then this is a novel. A verbal artifice created with the aim of describing extreme or complex emotions, all for our entertainment.

Chapter 14. 11 March 1916, Salaita Hill, British East Africa

Detailed description of the war in Africa. Temple Smith is obviously going to be our eyes and ears for this. On 12 February the Brits launch a headlong assault on Salaita Hill where 600 South Africans are mown down by German machine gunners. A second attempt finds the hill abandoned, the Germans have withdrawn from the town of Taveta to scrub country and two hills beyond General Smuts from South Africa is put in charge of the campaign. A month later, against Smith’s advice, the Brits insist on trying to storm the two hills. He watches the whole sorry fiasco and watches the obstinate stupid British officer in command, Colonel Youell, shot in the neck and quickly bleed to death.

Smith accompanies his body in a field ambulance back to staff HQ, reports to General Pughe who is completely drunk then, in utter disgust, goes into town, gets his mule-handler to saddle up his mule and heads off towards Smithville, his homestead which he hasn’t seen for 18 months.

First of all, there are no Germans there. After a lot of tense creeping towards the farmhouse in expectation of being shot he discovers that every surface in every single room has been covered in human faeces. Then he encounters Saleh, the old chief servant, Saleh shows him that a) the grave of his dead baby daughter has been opened and the bones scattered everywhere (they collect them together and rebury them) and b) the Germans have taken the decorticator – almost as soon as Smith left, according to Saleh. Smith vows revenge against von Bishop. The tone and intemperance of his vow reminded me fleetingly of Morgan Leafy’s tone of permanent rage in Boyd’s novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’…

Chapter 15. 24 June 1916, Nanda, German East Africa

Back at the German hospital several things have happened to Gabriel. He has recovered enough to be able to walk around freely. The research base had been converted not only into a hospital but a prisoner of war camp. The British officer in charge had conceived a plan for Gabriel to keep infecting his thigh wound with dirt in order to remain an invalid and therefore outside the prison camp and in the hospital. He also suggested that Gabriel help out with basic nursing activities, for example washing German wounded or holding them as they evacuated their dysenteric bowels – because from this privileged position he was able to a) pilfer supplies and b) find out the latest military situation (which is that the Germans are slowly withdrawing along the railway line in face of solid British advances, towards Dar).

But the chapter starts a few weeks after all the British POWs have been evacuated to the coast. There is no military reason why Gabriel should continue malingering. The truth is he’s fallen in lust with Liesl. She doesn’t give a toss about him, is a big, solid, no-nonsense German Frau who goes about her duties with angry efficiency. but a few weeks previously Gabriel, dropping off some of the cigarettes he’s taken to rolling from local tobacco for both of them, glimpsed her stripped naked having her evening shower – and was seized with raw lust. Now he can barely be in her presence without trembling although she, of course, is completely oblivious to his behaviour.

Chapter 16. 25 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Charis is finding the affair unbearable. She’s spent 18 months writing letters to Gabriel and never had a reply. She stops and feels dreadfully guilty, so guilty that she has a second wind and writes Gabriel a long letter explaining that she’s been having an affair and why – but not naming Felix as the lover, and posts it to the Ministry of Defence as usual.

As usual, Felix drops by the cottage late that night. He’s taken to doing this, taking Charis’s sexual availability more and more for granted. After their latest midnight sex and Felix has returned to his room, Charis writes Felix a simple note saying she is going away, she has written Gabriel telling him everything.

Except that she didn’t tell Gabriel everything in her letter to him, she didn’t identify Felix as her lover. I predict the discrepancy between the two letters will cause trouble. I predict Felix will think Charis has written to Gabriel about naming him and be stricken with panic.

Chapter 17. 26 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Felix opens Charis’s letter at an otherwise typical family breakfast, reads its few lines, jumps to his feet yelling ‘Jesus Christ!’ and runs down to the cottage to find Charis long gone. Turmoil. Panic. He is of course distraught that she’s told Gabriel everything but something in the tone of the note makes him panic think she’s killed herself so her runs to the ornamental fish ponds they spent so much time mooning beside. Notices the big stone bust of the emperor Vitellius is missing. Leaps into the freezing water and discovers her body. She had tied round her neck with twine then tied it multiple times round the bust and chucked it in. She looks peaceful in submarine death, her hair floating calmly round her face. Well, this is a fine pickle!

Chapter 18. 1 July 1916, Sevenoaks, Kent

There’s an inquest. Felix lies his face off and claims to have lost the letter in the frenzy of searching for Charis, maybe in the pond. Everybody believes this except the local doctor who Charis had been doing refugee work with, Dr Venables. Venables asks him for a drink at a bar in a hotel not far from the magistrates’ court in Sevenoaks where the inquest is held. Here he asks Felix point blank if he was having an affair with Charis. It takes all Felix’s self possession to try and appear calm as he pretends to be outraged and deny it. Venables then asks whether Charis was having an affair with anyone else, which Felix says he doubts. Thoughts are rampaging through his head. The calm reader, used to this sort of thing, realises that Charis was probably pregnant.

Part 3. The Ice-Cream War

Chapter 1. 25 January 1917, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

It is six months later. Unsurprisingly Felix has enlisted. Equally unsurprisingly, it’s in a regiment which is fighting in Africa and we now meet him on deck the troop ship as it steams into Dar es Salam harbour. He’s with the Fifth Battalion, the Nigerian Brigade, being cobbled together from African conscripts, not at all fashionable. But it is Africa. He is driven by guilt, the need to do something, out of which slowly formed the idea of a quest to find brother Gabriel.

Anyway, long uncomfortable train journey to a station in the middle of nowhere called Mikesse. He’s collected her by a Scot with an impenetrable accent named Gilzean. Five hours bumpy driving to a camp where he’s informed his regiment are the other side of the river Rufiji. Since the British invaded German East (as it’s known) at Kilimanjaro in the campaign Smith had witnessed the scrappy start of, they had driven the Germans steadily south and across the Rufiji river when the rains came and fighting stopped.

From this camp Felix has to continue riding a mule along muddy tracks alongside porters, sometimes through swamps, eventually reaching the wide Rufiji river, across which he is taken by ferry, then into his regimental camp, outside which porters are burning a huge mound of horses and mules which are killed off in epic numbers by tsetse fly. He’s arrived at the dump named Kibongo.

Chapter 2. 15 April 1917, Kibongo, German East Africa

Three months later it has rained every single day, food has run low because the trails to the river on the north side have been flooded and the ferry has been washed away. Felix and his battalion are stuck on the south side and on emergency rations. They’re all wasting away, reduced to eating the few monkeys they can shoot. Some black troops regularly die from eating the corpses of horses or mules. Wretched. Except for the ongoing comedy of Felix’s inability to understand Gilzean’s impenetrable Scottish accent.

Chapter 3. 15 July 1917, Nanda German East Africa

With Gabriel in Nanda. The Germans are losing the campaign. Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears. Dr Deppe has been moved on and Gabriel has stopped rubbing dirt in his wound to keep it infected. Deppe’s replacement tries to get Gabriel incarcerated with the new contingent of POWs but Liesl insists he is left free to carry on his medical assistance. Ongoing comedy because Liesl appears to have no idea that Gabriel burns with almost uncontrollable lust for her big full-breasted, thunder-thighed body.

The British have landed at Kilwa south of the mouth of the Rufiji so will be fighting their way towards Nanda. Something about the way the narrator keeps reminding us that Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears begins to make me suspect it will be found and Gabriel will be arrested and shot as a spy. Will he get to kiss Liesl before then or cup her huge breasts in his shaking hands? Doubt it.

Chapter 4. 19 October 1917, Lindi, German East Africa

The British advance, fighting increases, more Germans are taken prisoner, but it is the fate of Felix’s company to do peaceful duties far from the fighting, building latrines or walls, flattening land for airfields, accompanying supplies to supply depots near the front line etc. Felix gets time off from supervising the digging of latrines to go to HQ at Lindi on the coast to see if he can discover anything about Gabriel. Here he bumps into fat Smith and, in a coincidence, it turns out they’re both looking for Bilderbeck. And in an outrageous coincidence the first (unmarked) door Smith opens is to an office occupied by Reggie Wheech-Browning, his nemesis.

Wheech-Browning is able to inform Smith that von Bishop is still alive or that the British Army has no notification of his death (so Smith can continue his quest to kill him for despoiling his farm) and Felix that no news has been received of Gabriel’s death (so Felix can continue his quest to find him).

He tells them about Bildebeck’s end; he was in a siege of some German troop, went up onto the walls to harangue them every night, and one night snapped and charged the German lines shouting how they were preventing him from ‘finding his girl’, one of the many odd obsessions which made Bilderbeck such unnerving company for Gabriel and everyone else on the ship from India.

Chapter 5. 19 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa

Chapters 5 to 10 take place over the course of 6 days and form one continuous episode, the arrest, escape and trek of Gabriel Cobb.

The German army in German East has been commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Now his HQ has arrived at Nanda which is swollen with staff, soldiers and askaris. Liesl and Gabriel discuss the fact that the British are now only 50 miles away. In a few days, chances are, he’ll be liberated. Gabriel is surprised to discover this makes him unhappy. Here in the hospital, as a glorified orderly, he feels safe and secure. He decides to sneak round the back of Liesl’s bungalow for one last surreptitous look at her nakedness but when he sees it packed with German officers realises his folly.

He is caught, lightly interrogated, found guilty of spying but not shot as I expected. Instead he is locked in an old mealie sack shed for several days. On the first night Liesl comes to see him. She says they’re going to take him with them. He almost cries and begs her help. She comes back the next night with a metal hinge. It takes Gabriel ten minutes to dig a channel under one of the loose wooden walls.

He trembles with lust and fear and panic standing so close to that large body, those trembling breasts. Liesl, apparently still unaware of his feelings, gives him a sack containing food and water and tells him not to try to get through the lines to the British but hide somewhere for a couple of days till the Germans have left, then slip back into Nanda and find her.

Chapter 6. 22 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa

To his vast irritation von Bishop is tasked by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, head of the entire East German Army no less, with recovering the escaped prisoner. He says goodbye to Liesl and notices how big and manly she has become. He doesn’t know her any more. He chooses three of the ruga-ruga, natives with filed teeth reputed to be cannibals, and sets off north to find the fugitive.

Chapter 7. 22 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Day one of Gabriel’s trek north. He is in poor shape generally, worse after three days locked in a shed. It’s hot, the thorn bushes scratch him, his injured leg starts to seize up. Locals in villages he passes notice him, the children throw stones. His plan is to press on across the wide flat plateau till nightfall.

Chapter 8. 22 November 1917, near Nambindinga, German East Africa

Unusually for once Felix’s company is in the vanguard of an advance. Much good it does them as one of his fellow officers, young Loveday with the irritating habit of peppering his conversation with French phrases, is blown in half by a landmine.

Anyway, suddenly arrives Wheech-Browning, that bad penny, ‘that ludicrous bean-pole of a man’, to inform Felix they’ve heard news of Gabriel. Smith was in an advance force which has taken Nanda, discovered the POW camp and some of the soldiers told them Gabriel had been there for years, had been arrested, had escaped just the day before.

Wheech-Browning drives Felix into Nanda, where they come across Smith questioning Liesl who, of course, he met right back at the start of the novel. He wants to know where Bishop is but now, as WB and Felix arrives, informs them of the enormous coincidence that von Bishop (who Smith is after) is chasing Gabriel (who Felix is after).

Felix introduces himself and asks the all-important question: Did his brother ever receive a letter from home? Liesl answers promptly and authoritatively NO, and Felix feels a wonderful sense of sweet relief flood his body. So Gabriel never learned about his affair with Charis. In fact, the reader knows he wouldn’t have in any case, as Charis never mentioned Felix by name. But Felix doesn’t know this.

He needs to go out into the bush to find Gabriel. Smith wants to find Bishop. They both ask WB but the latter says that if, as they claim, it’s a case of security / intelligence well, he’ll jolly well have to come, too. Is there no limit to the man’s irritatingness?

Chapter 9. 24 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Exciting description of Bishop and the ruga ruga’s pursuit of Cobb across the plateau. They see a fire as dusk falls. They creep up but one trads on a stick, the mule hears and starts hee-hawing, and they see the figure flee. By the time they get there the small base by the fire is deserted, with Cobb’s sack of stuff, bread, a book, abandoned. Bishop sends the three natives to capture Cobb. Why does the book Cobb had belong to von Bishop. Mysteries. He falls asleep, wakes at dawn next morning. After some time the three natives return. One is carrying a sack. As Bishop sits with his rifle, one of them throws severed Cobb’s head into the dirt at his feet.

And that, children, is what you get for peeping at naked women having a shower!

Chapter 10. 25 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Smith, Felix and Wheech-Browning come across the camp the next day. There’s a small burial mound. Half a mile away a business of vultures and big birds. When they ride over to it they see it’s a body without a head, already half eaten. Going back to the camp they dig into the mound and find Gabriel’s head buried wrapped in a blanket. Felix is convulsed with weeping. Both he and Smith are plain puzzled: who would do a thing like that?

Part 4. After the war

Chapter 1. 15 May 1918, Boma Durio, Portuguese East Africa

Six months later and the German forces have retreated into Portuguese east Africa but are still at large. Felix’s Nigerian regiment is decommissioned, the men sent back to Nigeria, but he wants to stay on and hunt von Bishop, so he takes up Wheech-Browning’s offer of a job in Army Intelligence. But, in the classic style, instead of being anywhere near the fighting he is turned into a supplies officer at a nowhere dump in the middle of rich agricultural land, Boma Durio, where he makes ragged friendships with some of the Portuguese officers

The chapter opens with the arrival of, you’ve guessed it, Intelligence Officer Wheech-Browning. He gets Cobb to give instruction to the Portuguese officers in how to use the (very simple) Stokes mortar. It doesn’t work very well so he goes to pace out the distance and is horrified when he hears the lick and sees a puff of smoke meaning a mortar has been launched. He yells at the Portuguese captain who’s accompanied him to run but the mortar detonates, ripping his clothes off, covering him in bruises and cuts. Dazed he staggers to the crater and realises it was a direct hit on Captain Pintao who has been vaporised.

Then appears Wheech-Browning who apologises profusely and explains that he had the lanyard in his hand when he sneezed. Terribly sorry, old chap. Wheech-Browning, his rise and rise, might, in a funny sort of way, be emerging as the central subject of the entire novel.

Chapter 2. 13 November 1918, Kasama, Rhodesia

Von Bishop is still with the German army commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. After going south into Portuguese, capturing supplies, they’d doubled back north into the German colony then headed west into Rhodesia which is where they now are, having captured a town full of provisions.

Many men and some of the officers are coming down with and quickly dying from the Spanish flu. Von Bishop is still haunted by the horrible killing of Cobb on the plateau. The ruga ruga spoke no English and he didn’t speak their language. They did what they thought would please him (like Pharaoh beheading Pompey for Caesar). Next night the three natives disappeared, leaving von Bishop to rendezvous with von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force at the river crossing into the Portuguese colony. He lied that they found Cobb’s body dead from exposure and buried it.

Von Bishop is strolling round town when a motorbike courier arrives. He is British so von Bishop informs him he is arrested while the courier gets out his case and hands von Bishop a note announcing that the war is over and hostilities have ceased. At last, he thinks, with huge relief.

Chapter 3. 2 December 1918, Nairobi, British East Africa

Felix is recuperating at a convalescent home for officers in Nairobi. He’s just received a letter from his mother telling him his father has been sent to a sanatorium, and that his friend Holland recently telephoned from Russia to announce that he’s joined a revolution there. Turns out Felix was hit in the occiput by shrapnel from the mortar and it badly affected his sight, which was fragmented but has, mercifully, almost completely recovered as the wound healed. He regrets not writing earlier to inform them of Gabriel’s death.

He had been reading a newspaper when the letter arrived. It had an account of the final surrender of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his vexatious German Army. They had all been transported to Dar. It listed the 30 or so officers and included von Bishop’s name. At that moment Felix conceived a plan. He was going to travel to Dar, find von Bishop and shoot him dead in revenge for the gruesome murder of his brother.

Chapter 4. 5 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

Description of how von Bishop, along with the other captured officers, surrendered at Abicorn, were shipped up Lake Tanganyika to the port of Kigama and then the long train journey to the coast. Here they are greeted as heroes by the German community and von Bishop is reunited with Liesl who, he immediately notices, has lost a lot of weight, is back to the slim figure she had when he saw her off to Europe in 1913. They go to the small bungalow she is being allowed as a German civilian. The maid gets him a beer and almost immediately Liesl asks what happened to Gabriel.

Von Bishop tells the prepared lie, that he found Gabriel dead of exposure. Liesl apparently believes him. For a second she was going to say something – ‘Erich, I…’ – probably going to admit that she helped Gabriel escape, but Erich doesn’t want to hear it and talks over her. Liesl changes tack and goes on to say that she recognises one of the British men who came after von Bishop, saw him here in Dar just the day before. We know she’s referring to Felix.

Chapter 5. 9 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

The climax of the book. A few nights later Felix sneaks up on the bungalow now inhabited by von Bishop and his wife. He is full of confused moral contradictions like human beings so often are, at least in fictions. He has a great big service revolver. He climbs noisily in through an open window and sees a prone body on the bed and whispers, then pokes, then shouts at the unresponsive German. The door opens a light goes on and von Bishop’s wife tells him Erich is dead. Died three hours ago of Spanish flu.

Felix improvises an excuse for being there, something about wanting to talk to him about his brother’s death. He asks Liesl if Erich told her how Gabriel died and she says ‘Yes’ in a calm manner, so calm that Felix instantly realises she knows nothing about the beheading. Erich must have lied to her. She is ignorant. On the spot, he decides not to tell her. It doesn’t matter any more. Why carry on spreading suffering?

Epilogue

Epilogue. 3 January 1919, Mombasa, British East Africa

Felix and Temple Smith have met up and review the whole story. They’re on the quayside at Mombasa as Felix prepares to get his boat back to England.

Both smile wryly at the flu beating them to the revenge they wanted to wreak on von Bishop. The narrative ends on a comic note for while Felix is still puzzled by Liesl’s complete indifference to her husband’s death, Smith is vexed about the disappearance of his precious decorticator. He’s scoured the farms of the entire region round his homestead and never found it.

They wave him off as he gets the small lighter out to the steamer and he mounts to the railings. Then the decorative canon onshore fire a salute to a battalion of Indian troops preparing to embark on a steamer. The loud noise triggers Felix’s optical problem, the result of the mortar injury, his sight becomes fragmentary and patchy, the sea and sky, the land and the people on it, all reduced to jagged fragments.

Thoughts

English scenes

Of the 18 chapters in the section titled ‘The War’, no fewer than seven are set in England and feature Felix Cobb. Of the total 40 chapters, 10 are set in Britain (or Trouville). My point is there’s a lot of scenes and events set in England for a book supposedly about the war in Africa. Not complaining or criticising, just pointing out that a lot of these scenes are as – if not more – effective than the African ones. I felt I got to know Charis, Felix and Holland better than most of the African characters.

Conveying information

Giles Foden has written five novels set in Africa, each incorporating large chunks of history, including one set in the same region of East Africa during the Great War (‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’). So I’m able to do a direct comparison and say Boyd is much better at integrating lots of factual backstory with a complex plot. In Foden it feels like the plot stops while a character clumsily invokes the historical facts. In Boyd the third person narrator tells us everything we need to know then smoothly goes on with the plot. Boyd is a much smoother, more accomplished writer in this technical sense of arranging his plot and integrating factual material. His prose is also much more smooth and finished and not odd and cranky as Foden’s is. He also has a continual dry sense of humour which peeks out at all kinds of moments, unlike Foden who is heavy and humourless throughout. When Foden tries to be amusing, as in ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’, it’s like watching Gordon Brown try to tell a humorous anecdote i.e. you feel embarrassed for him.

Comic coincidences

Stories need coincidence of a kind which don’t happen in real life: old lovers bumping into each other etc. In Foden’s stories the coincidences are unbelievable because he takes them, like everything else, with deadly seriousness. Boyd has a lovely sense of humour which helps you accept his coincidences. Thus, Smith’s life is bedevilled by a tall officious British officer named Wheech-Browning but the way they keep bumping into each other, instead of undermining the story (as it does in Foden), because Boyd plays it for dry laughs, somehow the comedy takes the edge off the improbability and laughs you into believing it. It has (it occurs to me) the same kind of comedy of coincidences Waugh deploys so well in his novels, with the same scapegraces popping up in unlikely places.

Influences and echoes

Isn’t there a scene in D.H. Lawrence where posh people die in the pond of their big posh house? I remember it from the movie version of ‘Women in Love’. The memory of this made me think of the English scenes as a kind of nexus of tropes from Lawrence (for the passion), Huxley (for the social comedy) and Waugh (for the withering satire). Boyd is a very good, very entertaining writer, but maybe the reason he’s never had a breakthrough work and never become a really big name is because what he’s good at is refreshing existing tropes and memes: the comedy of ‘A Good Man in Africa’ contained multiple echoes of English farceurs from Kingsley Amis to Tom Sharpe. I’ve mentioned the English writers who the English scenes in this book bring to mind. Even the war scenes, in their ridiculous futility, remind me of Evelyn Waugh’s (surprisingly numerous) war scenes.

So he’s a very good, very entertaining writer, full of echoes.

Credit

An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd was first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1982. References are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

William Boyd reviews

  • A Good Man in Africa (1981)
  • An Ice-Cream War (1982)

Africa reviews

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Modernity Britain: Opening the Box 1957–59 by David Kynaston (2014)

Opening the Box is the first book in volume three of David Kynaston’s epic social history of post-war Britain.

It opens on 10 January 1957 as Harold Macmillan drops by Buckingham Palace to be made Prime Minister, and ends on Friday 9 October 1959 as the final results show that the Conservatives have won a staggering majority of 100 in the General Election: so the book covers about two years and nine months of British domestic history.

I say ‘domestic’ because there is no, absolutely no, mention of the British Empire, the independence struggles / small wars the British Army was fighting, or the impact of foreign affairs on Britain. The Suez Crisis was dealt with briskly and briefly at the very end of the previous volume: this book is utterly focused on the domestic scene.

In its end points Kynaston provides the usual bombardment of quotations from hundreds of diverse sources, from housewives and soldiers, social planners and architects, young and thrusting writers and crusty old critics, politicians idealistic and cynical, commentators on rugby, cricket, soccer and horse-racing – alongside summaries of scores of numerous sociological reports and surveys carried out during these years into all aspects of social life, and social policy – on housing and new towns and flats, consumer behaviour, ideas of class, the family, and so on.

Unlike a traditional historian Kynaston skips quickly past even quite major political events from the period (and even these tend to be viewed through the prism of his diarists and journal keepers) in order to measure their impact on the ordinary men and women caught up in them.

This is his strength, his forte, the inclusion of so many contemporary voices – experts and ordinary, powerful and powerless – that immersing yourself in the vast tissue of quotes and voices, speeches and reports, diaries and newspaper articles, builds up a cumulative effect of making you feel you really know this period and have lived through these events. It is a powerful ‘immersive’ experience.

But in this, the fifth book in the series, I became increasingly conscious of a pronounced downside to this approach – which is that it lacks really deep analysis.

The experience of reading the book is to be continually skipping on from the FA Cup Final to the Epsom Derby to the domestic worries of Nella Last or Madge Martin to a snide note on the latest political developments by a well-placed observer like Anthony Crossland or Chips Channon, to a report by the town planners of Coventry or Plymouth alongside letters to the local press, to the notes of Anthony Heap, an inveterate attender of West End first nights, or the thoughts about the new consumer society of Michael Young, to the constant refrain of excerpts from the diaries of Kenneth Williams, Philip Larkin and even Macmillan himself.

This all undeniably gives you a panoramic overview of what was happening and, like the reader of any modern newspaper or consumer of a news feed, to some extent it’s up to you, the reader, to sift through the blizzard of voices and information and opinions and decide what is interesting or important to you.

The downside is that you never feel you’ve really got to the bottom of any of the issues. Even the big issues, the ones Kynaston treats at some length (20, 30, 40 pages) never really arrive at a conclusion.

The housing crisis

The housing crisis existed before the war, as social reformers became increasingly aware of just how many millions of British citizens were living in squalid, damp, unlit, unventilated Victorian slums with no running water, baths and only outside toilets – the kind of conditions reported on by George Orwell among others. But the situation was, of course, greatly exacerbated by the German blitz on most of Britain’s major cities, from Plymouth to Glasgow. By 1957 it was estimated there were some 850,000 dwellings unfit for human habitation in the UK.

The result was city councils who were well aware of the need to modernise their cities, to get rid of the old slums and rebuild not only houses but, potentially, the entire layout of the cities. Arguably this was the key issue for a generation after the war and Kynaston reverts to it repeatedly. He quotes town planners and architects as they engaged in fundamental debates about how to go about this task, the most obvious division being between ‘urbanists’, who thought working class communities should be rehoused within the city boundaries, if possible close to or on the same location as the existing slums, once they’d been demolished and new houses built – and ‘dispersionists’, who thought a large percentage of big city populations should be moved right out of the inner cities to a) brand new model estates built on the outskirts of the city, like Pollok outside Glasgow or b) to new towns, overspill towns built 20, 30 or 40 miles away, which could be planned and designed rationally from scratch (places like Stevenage or Harlow).

This debate overlapped with another binary set of alternatives: whether to re-accommodate people in houses or in blocks of flats, with barrages of argument on both sides.

Proponents of flats made the simple case that building vertically was the only way to accommodate such large populations a) quickly b) within the limited space within city borders. They were backed up by zealously modernist architects who had an ideological attachment to the teachings of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus and thought, at their most extreme, that the new designs for living would change human nature and bring about a new, more egalitarian society. So aesthetics and radical politics were poisonously intertwined in the strong push towards flats.

Ranged against them were a) the tenants, who didn’t want to move into flats, pointing out that flats:

  • are noisy and poorly sound-proofed
  • have no privacy
  • have no gardens
  • so that the kids have to be penned up inside them (‘awful places for families to live in’ – diarist Marian Raynham)
  • the rents are higher

And b) the more conservative or sensitive architects and planners who recognised the simple fact – which comes over in survey after survey after survey that Kynaston quotes – that people wanted a house of their own. Interestingly, this wish turns out to itself be based on an even simpler idea – that almost everyone interviewed in numerous surveys, by writers and newspaper journalists – wanted privacy.

  • ‘I think that the natural way for people to live is in houses,’ Mrs E. Denington, vice-chair of the London County Council’s Housing Committee.
  • ‘Houses are preferred because they are more suitable for family life,’ Hilary Clark, deputy housing manager Wolverhampton

Kynaston emphasises that the years covered in his book were the tipping point.

1958 was the year when modernism indisputably entered the mainstream. (p.129)

During 1958 it became almost a cliché that London’s skyline was changing dramatically. (p.132)

Through the four books so far, and in this one as well, Kynaston gives extensive quotes from slum-dwellers, flat occupiers, new home owners, planners, designers, architects and the sociologists who produced report after report trying to clarify what people wanted and so help shape decisions on the issue.

But – and here’s my point – we never really get to the bottom of the problem. Kynaston quotes extensively and then… moves on to talk about Tommy Steele or the new Carry On film. But I wanted answers. I wanted to hear his opinion. I wanted a systematic exposition of the issues, history and debate which would lead up to conclusions about how we now see it, looking back 65 years.

But there is nothing like that. Kynaston just describes the debate as it unfolded, through the words of reports and surveys and sociologists and architects. But his debate never reaches a conclusion. And after a while that gets a bit frustrating.

Industrial relations

The 1945 Labour government famously nationalised a range of major industries and then, just as famously, ran out of ideas and lost the snap 1951 election.

As the 1940s turned into the 1950s industrial relations remained poor, with Kynaston repeatedly mentioning outbreaks of strikes, sometimes on a big enough scale (like the London dockers strike of 1949) to affect food supplies and spark a range of outraged opinions in the housewife diarists who are among his core contributors.

As the 1950s progress we get snippets of middle class people taking student or holiday jobs down among the working classes and being shocked by the widespread slackness and the culture of skiving which they discover. To balance the picture out, he also gives us, from time to time, vivid portraits of some of the ‘captains of industry’, heads of large companies who turn out to be eccentrics or egomaniacs.

Altogether, as usual, the reader has a vivid sense of the feel of the times and the experiences of a wide range of people living through them. But there are no ideas about industrial policy, trade union legislation, its impact on industry, the economy and the Labour Party which was often seen as being in thrall to stroppy and irresponsibly organisations.

In fact I did glean one idea from reading well over 1,500 pages of Kynaston’s history: this is that around about 1950, the British government and British industry had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to seize the industrial and commercial advantage across a wide range of industrial and consumer goods. German and Japanese industry still lay prostrate after the war and the Americans were focusing on their home markets. If the right investment had been channelled by a capitalist-minded government into the right industries, and if Britain had adopted German-style industrial relations (e.g. having worker representatives on the boards of companies) to ensure unified focus on rebuilding, then Britain might have anticipated what became known as ‘the German economic miracle’.

But it didn’t. The trade unions preferred the freedom of collective bargaining (i.e. found it more convenient to be outside management structure so that they could blame the management for everything and go on strike whenever it suited them), the Labour government was more concerned about a Socialist-inspired programme of nationalising industries in the hope of creating ‘the New Jerusalem’, and many managements found selling the same old products to the captive markets of the Empire and Commonwealth far easier than trying to create new products to market in Europe or America.

At all levels there was a failure of nerve and imagination, which condemned Britain to decades of industrial decline.

The catch is: this isn’t Kynaston’s idea – he quotes it from Correlli Barnett’s searing history of post-war failure, The Audit of War. In a nutshell, Kyanston’s wonderful books present the reader with a Christmas pudding stuffed with a vast multitude of factoids and snippets and post-war trivia and gossip and impressions deriving from an incredibly wide array of eye witnesses. But it is precious thin on ideas and analysis, and at the end of the day, it’s the big idea, the thesis, the interpretation which we tend to remember from history books.

The consumer society

This volume definitely depicts the arrival and triumph of ‘the consumer society’. I had thought it was a later phenomenon, of the 1960s, but no. By 1957 56% of adults owned a TV set, 26% a washing machine, 21% a telephone, only 12% a dishwasher, and 24% of the population owned a car. Aggressive new advertising campaigns promoted Fry’s Turkish Delight, Ready Brek, Gibbs SR, Old Spice, the Hoovermatic twin tub, Camay soap and Blue Band margarine.

People faced with ever-widening products to choose from need advice: hence the Egon Ronay Guide to restaurants, launched in 1957, followed in October by Which? magazine.

Even Mass-Observation, which started with such socialist ambitions in 1937, and has provided Kynaston with such a wealth of sociological material for the previous four books, had, by now, become ‘an organisation devoted to market research rather than sociological enquiry.’

Topics

1957

  • January – Bolton Wanderers beat Leeds United 5-3, the third series of Dixon of Dock Green kicks off, the Cavern nightclub opens in Liverpool, Manchester United beat Bilbao 3-0 to go into the semi-finals of the European Cup, Lawrence Durrell publishes Justine, Flanders and Swann open a musical review at the Fortune theatre, strike at the Briggs motor plant, 20-year-old Tommy Steele continues to be a showbiz sensation, end of the Toddlers’ Truce the government-enforced ban on children’s TV programmes between 6 and 7pm,
  • February – launch of BBC’s weekday new programme Tonight, publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, publication of Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott (‘urbanists’ arguing that extended kinship networks in Bethnal Green provide emotional and practical support which Bethnal Greenites who’d moved out to new estates in Debden missed),
  • March – the Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition visited by the Queen and Prince Philip, a Gallup survey showed 48% wanted to emigrate, start of big shipbuilding and engineering union strikes,
  • April – opening night of John Osborne’s play The Entertainer
  • May – Manchester United lose the FA Cup Final 2-1 to Aston Villa, petrol comes off the ration after five months
  • June – British Medical Council report linking smoking to lung cancer (reinforcing Richard Doll’s groundbreaking 1950 report) the government refuses to intervene; ERNIE makes the first Premium Bonds random draw, brainchild of Harold Macmillan; end of the pioneering photojournalistic magazine Picture Post founded in 1938, whose star photographer was Bert Hardy;
  • 20 July Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaks at a Tory rally in Bedford to mark 25 years’ service by Mr Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary, as MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, and claims that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’; national busman’s strike; publication of Room at the Top by John Braine.
  • September – the Wolfenden Report recommends the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private; Ted Hughes’ first volume of poetry, The Hawk In The Rain, published; film version of Lucky Jim released, criticised for watering down the book’s realism
  • October – at Labour Party conference Nye Bevan comes out against nuclear disarmament, disillusioning his followers and creating a rift between the party and much of the left-leaning intelligentsia; 4 October Sputnik launched into orbit by the Russians; fire at the Windscale nuclear power plant; publication of Declaration, an anthology of essays by Angry Young Men (and one woman): Doris Lessing, Colin Wilson, John Osborne, John Wain, Kenneth Tynan, Bill Hopkins, Lindsay Anderson and Stuart Holroyd.
  • November – top of the charts is That’ll Be The Day by Buddy Holly and the Crickets; the Russians launch a second satellite, this one with a dog, Laika, aboard; the General Post Office introduces postal codes; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament set up in response to Britain’s detonation of a H-bomb;
  • December – the Queen’s first Christmas broadcast, from Sandringham;

1958

  • resignation of the Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft after his insistence that government spending should be cut was rejected; launch if Bunty comic for girls
  • February – launch of Woman’s Realm magazine; 6 February the Munich Air Disaster in which a plane carrying the Manchester United football team, support staff and eight journalists crashed on take-off, killing 23;
  • March 1 BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop opens;
  • April – publication of Parkinson’s Law and Dr No; first CND march to Aldermaston; Balthazar, second volume in The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Raymond’s Revuebar opens in Soho; London bus strike;
  • May first performance of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter and A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney and Chicken Soup with Barley by Arnold Wesker;
  • July The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates; introduction of Green Shield Stamps; the first Little Chef; the Empire and Commonwealth Games held in Cardiff;
  • August – release of the first single by Cliff Richard; Kenton and Shula Archer born; the Empire theatre in Portsmouth closes down, replaced by a supermarket; Notting Hill Riots, the most serious public disorder of the decade, petrol bombs, knives, razors, huge mobs chanting ‘Kill the niggers’ – the race problem Winston Churchill had fretted about in 1951 had arrive with a vengeance with about 165,000 non-white immigrants living in the UK; coincidentally, the launch of The Black and White Minstrel Show; Christopher Mayhew presents a TV series titled Does Class Matter?
  • September – Carry On, Sergeant, first of the Carry On films, released; publication of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams, which more or less founded ‘cultural studies’;
  • October – first editions of Grandstand and Blue Peter;
  • November – publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young;
  • December 3 National Coal Board announces the closure of 36 coal mines, as a result of falling demand due to coal being ‘brutally undercut’ by oil (p.236); 5 December Macmillan opens the 8.5-mile-long Preston bypass, first stretch of motorway in England, which will become part of the M6; John Betjeman’s Collected Poems published, representing one strand of middle class culture, while A Bear Called Paddington is published, first in a series of books, plays and films which continues to this day; 30 the government announces the full convertibility of the pound, meaning it won’t have to run down gold stocks defending it, but at the same time becomes vulnerable to speculation;

1959

  • January Henry Cooper becomes British and British Empire heavyweight champion;
  • February 3 Buddy Holly dies aged 22; film version of Room at the Top released marking ‘the start of the British new Wave in the cinema’; debut of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be at the Theatre Royal Stratford East; March To Aldermaston a documentary about the 1958 march, edited by Lindsay Anderson with Richard Burton reading Christopher Logue’s script;
  • March release of Carlton-Brown of the Foreign Office starring Terry-Thomas; the year’s most popular film, Carry On Nurse; Goldfinger published, the seventh James Bond novel; march from Aldermaston to London; expansionary Budget;
  • May: C.P. Snow gives his lecture about the two cultures (ie most people who run things knowing masses about the arts and nothing about science); Sapphire directed by Basil Dearden is a whodunnit with strong racial overtones; 17th a black student Kelso Cochrane is stabbed to death in Notting Hill leading to raised tensions in West London and ‘Keep Britain White’ rallies and worried reports about the lack of ‘racial integration’ in Birmingham;
  • June
  • July: The Teenage Consumer, a pamphlet by Mark Abrams defining them as aged 15-24 and unmarried;
  • August: Cliff Richard number 1 with Livin’ Doll; President Eisenhower makes a state visit and is on TV chatting with Harold Macmillan;
  • September: City of Spades by Colin McInnes and Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse published;
  • October: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe; Noggin the Nog created by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin; and the General Election: Conservatives win 49.4% of the vote and 365 seats, Labour 43.8% and 258, the Liberals 6, giving the Conservatives an overall majority of 100.

Studies and surveys

Being a list of the studies and surveys carried out during the period by sociologists, universities, newspapers and polling organisations:

  • 1954 Early Leaving a study of who left state school early, and why (children of the unskilled working class made up 20% of grammar school intake but only 7% of sixth forms)
  • 1957 Abrams study of 200 working class married couples (they lacked the ambition required to push their children on to further education)
  • 1958 Edward Blishen survey of TV’s impact on families (too much violence; difficult to get the kids to go to bed afterwards)
  • 1958 J.B. Cullingworth surveyed 250 families who’d moved to an overspill estate in Worsley from Salford
  • 1959 J.B. Cullingworth surveyed families who’d moved to Swindon
  • Floud et al study of grammar schools in Hertfordshire and Middlesborough (over half of working class parents wanted no further education for their children after school)
  • Margot Jeffreys interviewed housewives in an out-county LCC estate in Hertfordshire (1954-5)
  • 1957 Maurice Broady conducted interviews on the huge Pollok estate outside Glasgow
  • Eve Bene survey of 361 London grammar school boys on attitudes and expectations (45% of working class kids wanted to stay on past 16, compared with 65% of middle class pupils)
  • 1958 Ruth Glass investigation of racial prejudice
  • 1958 Geoffrey Gorer study of television viewing habits (families don’t talk as much)
  • 1958 Television and the Child by Hilde Himmelweit (kids routinely watch TV till it stops, TV is a great stimulator but fleetingly, shallowly)
  • 1962 Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden Education and the Working Class a study of 88 working class kids in Huddersfield who went to grammar school (charts the parents’ progressive incomprehension of what their children are studying)
  • 1958 The Boss by Roy Lewis and Rosemary Stewart, about the social background of captains of industry e.g. family connections and public school still paramount
  • 1959 The Crowther Report, 15 to 18 (children of unskilled working class over-represented, the kids of non-manual workers under-represented: i.e. they were a sink of the poorest)
  • 1959 Ferdynand Zweig survey of working class men and their attitudes to washing machines
  • 1960 Michael Carter survey of 200 secondary modern schoolchildren as they left school
  • 1961 William Liversidge survey of grammar school and secondary modern school leavers

Patronising and condescending

Although Kynaston several times harps on the fact that Macmillan (Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963) was an Old Etonian, that his first Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, was another old Etonian and when he was sacked he was replaced by Derick Heathcoat Amory, another old Etonian, that in fact nearly half of the Macmillan cabinet went to Eton – there turns out to be surprisingly less condescension and patronage from these phenomenally upper-class toffs as you’d imagine. In fact the reverse: Macmillan’s diaries worry about all aspects of the political and international scene but when he tours the country and meets people, I was rather touched by his genuine concern.

No, the really condescending and patronising comments come, as so often, not from the politicians (who, after all, had to be careful what they said) but from the intellectual ‘elite’, from the writers and cultural commentators and architects who all too often looked right down their noses at the ghastly taste and appalling interests of the proles.

Housing

Throughout the book, most of the modern architects regard themselves as experts on human nature, experts on what people want, and are bravely, boldly undeterred by the actually expressed opinions of real people in places like public meetings, letters to newspapers and suchlike bourgeois distractions. Alison and Peter Smithson were among the leaders of the British school of Brutalism. For them architecture was an ethic and an art. As Alison wrote: ‘My act of form-giving has to invite the occupiers to add their intangible quality of use.’ They helped to develop the notion of ‘streets in the sky’, that ‘communities’ could be recreated on concrete walkways suspended between blocks of flats, a form of ‘urbanism that abandoned the primacy of the ground plane in favour of a rich spatial interplay of different layers of activity’.

No matter that the overwhelming majority of ordinary people opposed these plans. The architect knows best. And the planners. Kynaston lists scores of chief architects and planners in cities like Glasgow, Birmingham, Coventry, London, who oversaw a quickening pace of mass demolitions, of slums, of old buildings of all kinds, in order to widen roads, create urban dual carriageways, build new blocks of flats, taller, more gleaming, more visionary, streets in the sky! And if the poor proles who would then be shepherded into these badly built, dark, leaky, anti-social blocks murmured their reluctance, they were ignored, and patronised. Kynaston quotes an article written by Raphael Samuel on the Labour council of Aberdare in South Wales who devised a plan to demolish a third of the town’s houses despite vehement opposition from the inhabitants.

The Glamorgan planners did not set out to destroy a community. They wanted to attack the slums and give to the people of Aberdare the best of the open space and the amenities which modern lay-out can provide. It did not occur to them that there could be any opposition to a scheme informed by such benevolent intentions; and, when it came, they could only condemn it as ‘myopic’. (quoted page 320)

My point is – neither the planners nor architects who refused to listen to ordinary people were Old Etonians; the opposite; they tended to be locally-born, Labour-voting architects and administrators which made their frustration with their own people’s obstinacy all the more pointed.

Culture

The situation was different in the humanities where the most vociferous Marxists tended to have had staggeringly privileged upbringings. Take the Marxists historians E.P. Thompson (educated at the Dragon Preparatory School in Oxford, Kingswood private School in Bath and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) and Christopher Hill (St Peter’s Private School, York and Balliol College, Oxford), they took it on themselves and their tiny cohort of like-minded communists and academics, to define what the working classes really wanted, and it turned out it wasn’t clean accommodation with hot and cold running water, a washing machine and a nippy new car out the front – Thompson and Hill knew that the working classes really wanted to create a new kind of man for the modern age!

Thus Kynaston ironically quotes E.P. Thompson ticking off Labour politician Anthony Crosland for the crime of suggesting, in his pamphlet The Future of Socialism, that after a decade of austerity and rationing what the people wanted was cafés, bright lights and fun. No no no, lectures Thompson:

Men do not only want the list of things which Mr Crosland offers; they want also to change themselves as men.

Says who? Says Edward Thompson, Kingswood School Corpus Christi College.

However fitfully and ineffectually, they want other and greater things; they want to stop killing one another; they want to stop this pollution of their spiritual life which runs through society as rivers carried their sewage and refuse throughout nineteenth-century industrial towns.

‘This pollution of their spiritual life’ – Thompson is talking about television, specifically ITV, which was polluting the working class with poisons like Gunsmoke and Opportunity Knocks. The actual working class has always been a terrible disappointment to men like Thompson and Hill. Kynaston details at length their agonising about whether to leave the communist party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and then how they go on to set up independent Marxist magazines and write articles for other like-minded over-educated academics who fondly thought their little articles made a bit of difference to anything.

But it wasn’t just the privately educated Marxists, genuine men of the people like playwright Arnold Wesker, son of a cook and a tailor’s machinist, who had a really tough upbringing and meagre education in  Stepney and Hackney. He is quoted as attending a left-wing meeting addressed by Raymond Williams (grammar school and Trinity College, Cambridge), author of the pioneering book Culture and Society and then Labour front-bencher Richard Crossman (Winchester and new College), who wrote a column in the Daily Mirror. This is Wesker describing the meeting in a letter to his wife:

How could he, as a Socialist, support a paper [the Mirror], which, for its vulgarity, was an insult to the mind of the working class; a paper which painted a glossy, film-star world. (quoted p.143)

The point is that, at this distance, I admire Crossman for writing a column in the Mirror, the bestselling newspaper of its day i.e. the most-read by the ‘working classes’ – for addressing the world as it is, for making the most of it, and find it hard not to dislike Wesker for his arrogance: ‘the mind of the working class’ – where is that exactly? how does he, Wesker, know what ‘the mind of the working class’ is thinking, or wants?

A little later Kynaston quotes the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (Charterhouse and Jesus College, Cambridge) who wrote a series of articles about television in which ‘he came down hard on working class viewers’:

Not only did they eschew ‘topical programmes, discussions and brains trusts, serious music and ballet,’ instead obstinately preferring ‘films and serials, variety and quizzes’, but almost half of them were ‘addicts’ (defined as watching at least four hours a night), with as a result ‘all sense of proportion lost in their gross indulgence, and their family life, if not wrecked, at least emptied of nearly all its richness and warmth.’ (p.152)

My point being that is it not Macmillan and his Old Etonian chums saying this; it was left wing architects, planners, historians, intellectuals, writers, anthropologists and sociologists who were most critical and patronising of the actual working class as it actually existed (despairing that ‘the workers’ were not the idealised heroes of communist propaganda, but lazy blokes who liked to drink beer from cans in front of the Benny Hill show).

Race

There is a similar sense of disconnect on the issue of race and immigration, which Kynaston explores in some detail à propos the Notting Hill Riots of August 1958.

He shows how almost all the reporters, journalists, sociologists and so on who visited Notting Hill and other areas with high immigrant populations (the West Midlands was the other hotspot) discovered, not the virulent hatred of the American South, but nonetheless consistent opinions that immigrants got unfair advance on the housing waiting lists, exploited the benefits system, lived in overcrowded houses and made a lot of noise – all leading to a strong groundswell of popular opinion that immigration needed to be controlled. (There were 2,000 immigrants from Commonwealth countries in 1953, 11,000 in 1954, 40,000 by 1957).

But all the leading politicians, and most MPs, stood firmly against introducing immigration restrictions and were careful not to blame or stigmatise the coloured communities, even when there were gross incidents of racially aggravated riots, like at Notting Hill. The politicians realised it would be very difficult to devise any form of immigration control which wasn’t, on some level, based on the fact that you were trying to stop people with black skins entering the country i.e. naked racism, tantamount to apartheid in Wedgwood Benn’s opinion.

The handful of Tory MPs who did call for restrictions accompanied were shouted down. At one parliamentary meeting, one Tory MP, Cyril Osborne, accompanied his calls with accusations that blacks were lazy, sick or criminal, and drew down such a tsunami of criticism that he was reduced to tears. All MPs observing this realised that immigration was not a topic to speak out on. If any mention was made of it, it must be in the most positive and emollient terms. Thus the political class, the men who ruled the country, painted themselves into a position where free and frank debate of the issue was impossible.

But the actual population of the country, ‘the people’ which all parties claimed to speak for, disagreed. There is a surprising paucity of sociological research, field studies and surveys on the subject (compared with the welter of research done into the endlessly fascinating subject of ‘class’). But Kynaston quotes a Gallup poll taken at the time of the riots, in August 1958, which revealed that:

  • 71% disapproved of mixed marriages
  • 61% would consider moving if significant numbers of coloured people moved into their neighbourhood
  • 55% wanted restrictions on non-white immigration
  • 54% didn’t want people from the Commonwealth put on housing waiting lists on the same level with locals

People’s opinions were simply ignored. The rulers of the country knew best. No attempt was made to limit immigration which continued to grow throughout the 1960s and indeed up to the present day, which has resulted in our present blissful political situation.

Related links

Related reviews

Reviews of fiction from the period

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by Simon on February 4, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 4, 2019

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