Elizabeth Harding's Blog, page 2

The Archers and tick-box drama

Dare I now listen to Radio 4 at GMT 7.01? Listening to The Archers was something I did for decades, then stopped, quite suddenly in September 2015. I wasn’t the only listener to suddenly stop my daily date with the BBC and it’s possible that a great many more ceased being a member of the audience on precisely that date.

Why did I do it? The main storyline at that time involved Helen Archer’s squeeze, Rob having it off with his estranged wife. We all knew the dates but suddenly the sprog that resulted from that coupling turned out, through paternity testing not to be Rob’s at all. Although the tacky cheapness of such an overworked story-line made me sigh, I knew that worse was to come.

It was a half-arsed and last-minute decision to change the story and introduce yet another ‘issue’, as though we hadn’t been overwhelmed by them a lately. And that issue was to be domestic violence of the gas-lighting sort, not involving fisticuffs but psychological manipulation. If it hadn’t been an ‘issue’ it might have led to some real drama. Instead of which it was dialogue employed to bring across a message.

But, predictably, after months of being bullied the worm turned and Helen was put on trial for stabbing Rob and subsequently acquitted. (I did look now and again at the plot synopsis.) So can I now listen once more?

It wasn’t the first time that the programme has been used as propaganda. The Archers began, as everyone knows, with propaganda in mind. Through the drama came the messages hot from the MIn of Ag advising farmers how to farm in post-war Britain. Swathes of directions were read out (while the farmers themselves put the kettle on no doubt) making it very clear that the programme was ‘an everyday story of country folk’.

Jennifer’s pregnancy in 1966 was certainly an issue but they handled the situation differently then. We didn’t have the sigh-worthy ‘if you have been affected by this programme……’ appendix that was to blight the programme, turning dramatic stories into axe-grinding (and teeth-grinding) social propaganda and characters into puppets.

I remember Shula being slapped by a bloke and coming back from the police station with a mouthful of statistics on domestic violence. But that totally unbelievable turn to a promising storyline was because the actor himself needed a get-out situation. As well he might. Still, it could have been handled without the hobnail boots.

The programme reached its nadir when they began to have experts on to guide them through the issues. It was one thing having an agricultural story-editor; it’s quite another having experts as characters.

We’ve had experts on IVF, on depression, on homelessness, but none of the stories really went anywhere. The issues themselves were the characters. The last one before the Helen fiasco, on Mike’s Down’s Syndrome daughter, halted in mid-act, as it were. Simply because the scriptwriters were following a formula and a formula comes to an end. I could say they lost heart. The drama wasn’t real.

What the scriptwriters are now expected to do when presented with an issue is to tick boxes then work in some dialogue. And with the Helen issue it happened with knobs on. Although there was a lot of verbal abuse it didn’t mean much. It was all deeply unpleasant but not involving. The whole story was twisted and moulded to suit the issue. So very tick-boxy.

And the main reason why this story didn’t work was because it was back-to-front and upside down. If Helen had been the perpetrator, it might have worked and given us some genuine pathos and tragedy. She was always the self-centred, controlling, bullying one, even if she wasn’t really aware of it. It wasn’t for nothing that contributors to the now defunct Archers Message Board referred to her as the Thin Controller.

But that wouldn’t have sat easily on the shoulders of many tick-boxers, Sean O’Connor, the producer, included. We can’t have a woman as a controlling bully, can we, however much form she has? Because according to the laws of the Medes and Persians, women are always victims. (Sigh)

What the directives for the Archers scriptwriters seem to be are these: firstly consult an issue-generator; secondly, tick the relevant boxes; finally create predictable, two-dimensional issue-driven storylines without context.

Richard III and Jimmy Porter

When I went to see Ralph Fiennes in the live broadcast of Richard the Third at the Tuschinski a couple of weeks ago I was again struck by how much fun it is to appear in this play. Yes, fun. Everyone gets to rant and rave and spout streams of vituperative venom in a most satisfactory way.

The fact that Richard is a pantomime character created initially by Thomas More as an exercise in Tudor brown-nosing (he obviously couldn’t keep it up) is neither here nor there. It’s the ranting and raving that counts and no doubt many an actor has felt the cathartic effect of mentally replacing that unfortunate Plantagenet with their own villain of choice, whether that villain be spouse, mother-in-law, theatre producer, landlord, agent or great- uncle Albert.

I thought about the much-maligned Dicky when I was listening to a programme this week from the BBC Archive on Four featuring David Tennant about a play that was first produced sixty years ago. A play that caused shock waves to ripple through the English Theatre because of the gratuitous and ranting and raving. It was of course Look Back in Anger by John Osborne and it is clear that although Tennant sees Jimmy Porter as a monster he is attracted to the character.

I last saw this play in the sixties but I can’t say I’m keen to see it again, simply because of all the ranting and raving. Some people have said they find it difficult to understand what he is ranting about although the reasons are clear enough. When he uses his wife as a verbal punchball accusing her of not feeling enough, of being intense enough, and hoping she would have a child who would die in order to make her feel, it is of course it is Jimmy Porter himself who can’t feel. He looks around at the people he sees in the grey, pallid, conservative era and sees only the lassitude in a people recovering some kind of equilibrium in a postbellum period.

It is always a dangerous thing to look for biography in the life of a novelist’s or playwright’s work and we should do so with hesitation even if we know that the Porter marriage is based on Osborne’s own first marriage. But I believe we have to take John Osborne’s own life as the basis for the play, with, however, a couple of caveats. Osborne upgrades and downgrades Porter at the same time. Porter is the working class, university-educated intellectual whereas Osborne himself went to a minor public school but not to university. Osborne, to his own dissatisfaction, came from the class that Orwell called the shabby-genteel.

In spite of that I think we can safely say that the chronologies match and that Porter was born in the same year as Osborne, 1929. Which would make him sixteen when the Second World War ended. It would seem that Osborne/Porter was suffering from the same syndrome Orwell experienced after the First World War – the feelings of envy and guilt of having been too young to take active part.

Those six years had been filled with high emotion, an intense carpe-diem mentality and the constant fear of violent death. Yet somehow it also gave a certain satisfaction to those involved. How often have I heard people who took part say that the war years were the happiest time of their life.

But the time of high-intensity gave way to a period that was characterised by lack of housing, overcrowded classes, a puritanism that had been set aside in the conflict years and returned with a vengeance, censorship, a disregard of the needs of mentally-wounded ex-combatants and a dumbing down of real emotion. That high-intensity had given way to lassitude and a domesticity that was pursued like the Grail.

This is what Jimmy Porter is ranting about and all that belligerence that so many people spent in war has been saved up and released in mental marital fisticuffs.

But does this have anything to do with the violent diatribes in Richard III? In a way it does. If we look at the period in which the play was written we can see that a similar period of lassitude had over taken England. With the defeat of the Armada the fear of a Spanish invasion had died down somewhat, puritanism and censorship were the spectres haunting the theatres, paranoia manifested by an increase in the Secret Service.

So it was just at this time in 1591 that Richard III was penned, the message being, ‘Things were much, much worse under this monster. Then our dear Harry comes along and puts things right. Think on. We´re much better off now.´

And so we have the ranting and raving directed towards this deposed King - on a suggestion by William Cecil perhaps, the personification of Elizabeth’s administrative arm? Who knows? Wherever the idea came from, it gave the actors the opportunity to spit and swear and forget their frustrations in a constant spout of vindictive vilification.

Cheese, vultures and Bumbling Boris.

From what I heard on the radio this morning, bumbling, bouncing Boris has been backtracking, saying that the people who voted for Brexit because of immigration (which is most of them) voted for the wrong reason!! The real problem with the EU, says he, is lack of transparency and accountability.

No, really? In that I agree with him, wholeheartedly. It doesn’t however mean that we have to opt out. What we do is work at improvements from within. That’s what we do.

Everyone can think of an instance of EU legislative idiocy. Let’s consider French cheeses. A few years ago a ruling demanded that all French cheeses should be made from pasteurised milk, because…..wait for it…….unpasteurised milk might contain salmonella and salmonella is bad for the pregnant women. Now, wouldn’t it be easier for pregnant women to give up, for the duration, eating that lovely Camembert from the farmer’s market in Normandy? But I forgot – it´s too simple a solution.

Another instance comes to mind – last year I was walking in the Pyrenees and at one hair-raising stretch came to mind the sad story of the woman who, a couple of years back, had fallen from a cliff not too far away. By the time the helicopter of the rescue service arrived (a mere three quarters of an hours later) there was only bone and a bit of cloth left. Her body had been completely devoured by vultures.

What has this to do with bumbling EU bureaucracy? It’s like this – for many centuries, farmers in the Pyrenees were used to leaving the carcass of a dead sheep in a place where the vultures would find it. In the system of transhumance, sheep are taken up to the cooler uplands for the summer. It’s inevitable that a sheep or two die during that season. Letting the vultures have the body is a quick, clean and efficient way of disposing of the remains.

However, an EU ruling made it illegal for the farmers to do this. They had to dispose of the carcasses in some other way. Don’t ask me why. The result is that this efficient, natural cycle was disturbed and vultures were going hungry. And it also changed their feeding habits. A bird that had been a scavenger became a predator and began to attack other creatures, including humans. My hope as I was crag-hopping was that if I were to fall, I would die quickly rather than having a vulture feeding off my flesh prematurely.

This is an idiotic state of affairs. But daft decisions based on total ignorance shouldn´t mean that we ought to clear off completely and fragment the EU.
As I said above, everyone has a favourite story such as the two I have related. Perhaps we should make a compilation of Silly EU Rulings. At the very least, it should make an amusing loo book.

Brexit - Who? Me?

So a referendum has indicated that the UK ought to leave the EU……..

Well, a referendum as a ‘toe-in-the-water exercise’ to test the mood and the temperature of that mood is, perhaps, worthwhile on certain occasions but that I can understand the fuss but everyone, even the journalists think withdrawal from Europe is an automatic consequence. Of course it isn’t.

Unless I am mistaken, a referendum has absolutely no constitutional clout and must be ratified by an Act of Parliament. It isn’t at all certain that such a bill would be passed. And even if such a bill were passed, a subsequent Act could nullify the previous one. This is what I had been counting on and I wasn’t really too worried. I hope people won’t forget that little thing – parliamentary democracy.

So is it right say to the people, ‘Thanks very much. We’ve noted what you want but now I’ll be about my business; you know the business I was elected to do’?

Absolutely. That’s what referenda are for. It’s time some politician woke up and realised the fact.

What I think it would be a good thing to make a note of is this – it appears that the better-off and the better-educated have voted to remain in the EU. This seems to indicate that the EU is very bad for the lesser-educated, the poorer and the disgruntled in general.

It isn’t the case of course. It’s a matter of perception and how a situation is perceived has little do with facts, figures and other elements of proof to the contrary. If you feel on the edge of society, that your food bills don’t balance with what’s in your bank or purse, that foreigners are a threat to your economic welfare, that dispirited teachers are not having any positive effect on your children, that you have to wait in pain for months for an operation, you blame the situation as it is now.

And Now means being in the EU. So the EU is, by deduction, responsible not only for the very real problems of welfare cuts, for cuts in care, in education and the NHS, for child poverty and food banks (which it patently isn’t) but also for the increase in supermarkets of aubergines, red peppers and other poncey vegetables, for wine and food in pubs, for all sorts of people speaking all sorts of foreign languages. And of course being in the EU also explains climate change and volcanic eruptions, sink-holes in Salford, the decline in Morris dancing, that unseasonal shower of hailstones and the increase in the number of two-headed calves in Wiltshire.

In fact there aren’t many things that can’t be blamed on the EU. Therefore, leaving it must bring about a glorious change, mustn’t it? Children will go happily to school and achieve great success, Aunt Ethel will luxuriate in her care home, where the well-qualified care workers will dance to her every whim, there will be good solid British beef on every table every day, and when each morning breaks to a brilliant new day we shall dance in the dew before going off to our well-paid, fulfilling jobs.

The sad thing is that the poor and generally disgruntled don’t seem to be able to blame the politicians on the home turf for the very real ills they suffer but accept as normal billionaires in Westminster who have profited from the privileged stratum of a dual system of education and also of health care, systems that cannot possible be fair. In many European countries private education, for example is regarded as peculiar. So why not tackle that sort of fundamental inequality first and look to Europe for some good examples?

Why, oh why are scholarly e-books so expensive?

I needed to buy ‘The Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century’ by Anne MacNeil published by OUP. It had been well-cited and so this morning I turned to Amazon where I saw I could buy a Kindle edition for ……..£105! I cried aloud, ‘You must be bloody joking,’ fell into a chair, and took a whiff of sal volatile to recover from the shock. But I’m still trembling.

There’s a lot of nonsense talked about why printed editions of academic books should be more expensive than so-called ‘trade books’ and articles have been written on the economics of the situation that are full of mind-numbing and eye-glazing- over obfuscation. But even more nonsense has been written about the e-book rip-off. Publishers are to blame, not authors. What it boils down to is that publishers would much rather sell expensive print books to institutional libraries than cheap e-books to individual readers.

Yet from the author’s point of view it is much more satisfactory to know that 2,000+ readers have each bought an e-book for £10 rather than to know that 200 print copies have been bought by university libraries. For a student, having a book on an e-reader expedites study and it feels much better to have a book always on hand. For someone whose undergraduate days are a long way in the past but is doing research - or for a member of the general public who wants to read the text out of simple interest - a cheap e-edition makes a scholarly book much more accessible.

So, a message to the OUP and other publishers - stop playing silly buggers and ensure that there’s a hefty reduction in the price of e-books.

Keywords: price of e-books; scholarly books; academic books; OUP; expensive e-books;

Parlez-vous espagnol?

When I was eight years old and my father came home with a couple of second-hand books, I was curious to see what he had bought this time. The last time it had been The Mill on the Floss – ‘It’s about time you read George EIiot’ - and a collection of Russian fairy tales. My mother thought the title story, The Soldier and Death didn’t seem very cheery but a book was a book. My reading tastes were, partly on account of my father, becoming very eclectic and I was becoming a literary scavenger.

This time however he had a more serious purpose in mind. He presented me with a beautiful green book, not very big but with a cloth cover that was embossed in gilt. Korth’s Spanish Grammar 2/6. Even the price was gilt-embossed. It had been published in the 1890’s and was a handsome book. ‘You ought to learn Spanish,’ said my dad. ‘There are more people speaking Spanish in the world than any other language.’

Well well. I thought about it but as I hadn’t come across any of these exotic people it didn’t really matter and it didn’t worry me. After all, my dad was also an advocate of Esperanto and I believe he had taken it up in his youth but it had never amounted to much in the way of international communication. It had gone the way of 1930’s New Thought, crystal wireless sets and the Marxist-inspired workers' solidarity that would prevent another war. Nevertheless, I set to with Korth as my teacher and within a short time was making lists of Spanish nouns. I didn’t keep it up though. I was only eight, after all.

But it all came to mind as I was standing in the passport queue at Schiphol in Amsterdam the other week and the instruction to have our passports ready was to be read in English, Dutch ….and Spanish. What? Where had French gone? Perhaps the notice had been up there for many years and I’d only just become conscious of it. Feeling very worried, I checked my passport – a new one and therefore up to date – and saw to my relief that all the information was as it should be – in English and French. Phew. All was well with the world.

The three basic languages in the EU are English, French and German and indeed the European Commission operates trilingually under this fact. If we squeeze the parameters a little, English and French emerge as the linguistic binary star. So how did Spanish slither in unobserved and usurp French as the language of diplomacy? And why?

My father’s assertion that more people speak Spanish than any other country has a lopsided logic that might indicate that we should really all be making an effort to learn Mandarin (the Chinese sort, not the civil service sort). The thing is - native speakers of Spanish are, outside Spain, mainly lumped together in one continent and even then in the west and the south. In the biggest country in South America the people speak Portuguese. In any case, within Spain itself the local languages take precedence in everyday communication. And don’t dare wander into Barcelona and even as far south as Valencia and claim Catalan is a dialect.

Bearing this in mind, it is fair to say that it isn’t the first language that makes diplomatic cultural and trade relations run smoothly but a second language.
I’m not going to talk about English here as it’s simply a fact that it’s the world language that is reverted to when knowledge of a country’s primary language is insufficient. In former Eastern Bloc countries where English was ignored during the political freeze, and also in China nowadays, the teaching of English can be a nice little earner. But can that be said of Spanish?

My dad claimed that Spanish was a world language as did the chappie at Passport Control when I asked him about it. But could anyone, in fact wander into a shop or cafe in Finland or Ukraine or Thailand or Burkina Faso and casually initiate a conversation in Spanish? Perhaps, but I think not.

Time was when educated Russians spoke French better than Russian and when they had their scuffles they swore at each other in French. When English slipped in and later became the lingua franca it was almost apologetically. But there is no doubt that that if we look at the demographic distribution of French speakers we can see that the language hangs on quite tenaciously in various parts of the world, most importantly in Africa and the Middle East. And Anglophones have always seen French as the twin of English in the area of culture and communication.

But what does all this have to do with ousting French from its position as a world language and sliding in Spanish? I pesume it’s to do with an American and South-American lobby. To an American who can't afford to go go farther than Mexico for his annual holiday it must seem that the whole world speaks English and Spanish. Even then, there are some people in the US who pretend they don’t speak English, having a beef about English being the modern world language.

A couple of years ago I followed an online course just for fun but some of the contributors on the forums were quite obviously miffed Spanish speakers who refused to write in English. I’m not sure that giving in to the arms-crossed, lip-pouting attitude of people with a chip on their shoulder is a good reason to do away with French as the language of culture and diplomacy.

Like most Romance languages Spanish is mellifluous. If not as melodic as Italian and harsher to boot, it is still easy on the ear – and on the eye. And knowing one Romance language can make it easier to learn others. An Italian (non-native) speaker I know can read Cervantes quite easily without having learnt any Spanish at all.

English will, in time, fade and will be superseded by some other language that may not, at this time be a language at all but some obscure dialect of insignificant geographical origin. Who knows?

Three years ago I followed a short course in Spanish prior to spending a couple of weeks in Spain. And no, I did not use my gilt-embossed Korth. But if I were now intent on gaining the original two-and sixpenny worth through effort and the trudging conjugation of verbs it wouldn’t be because lots of other people in places I'm unlikely to visit speak the language for a number of mundane reasons. It would be because of the magic of a particular land, because of its history, geography, its architecture together with the images and sounds of the country evoked by its language.

And what about the people? Well yes. I think that, for my parents’ generation it was the suffering of the Spanish people during the Civil War that fired the Socialist imagination. It would lead to greater things. And for those of the International Brigades, learning Spanish was a necessity if they were to be of any use.

And for some who had already washed up on the peninsula for various reasons it gave deeper meaning to their own Hispanic experience. For the reactionary Roy Campbell it was the Toledo light of El Greco. For Laurie Lee, it was a political epiphany tinged with romance. And after Lee’s year-long trek playing his violin to earn a crust he could speak Spanish very well. In his descriptions he leaves a glittering portrait of a country and its people. To exemplify this and to conclude I shall simply quote, not from ‘As I walked out…’ but from the title of an essay by Lee - ‘Spain - the Gold Syllable.’ That just about says it all.

Keywords: language; Spanish; French; global language; Spain

The timeless Jane Eyre?

Walking through a chilly but brilliantly sunny Leiden with a bunch of people last week one of the friends, Charles, suddenly said to me, without any preamble, ‘I used to like Stendhal but I don’t think I’ll read him any more. Why is it that we (!) have this idea about some of the late greats but Charlotte Bronte’s books remain always fresh and you can never tire of reading Jane Eyre?’

Well, as we had just been wandering around the Archaeological Museum it wasn’t really the sort of question I was expecting, especially as Charles normally preferred French and German literature anyway. And apart from the fact that there were one or two logical fallacies in his overcrowded assertion that ought to have been tackled, I was used to his discursive habits and so homed in on what he was getting at.

The truth is that I haven’t read Stendhal for a very long time, but I first read Jane Eyre when I was eleven, most recently twelve months ago, and many times in between. I did point out that Charlotte’s other books never had the same resounding success as Jane Eyre but perhaps that was the point. It could be said that Villette was a more mature, balanced book but it was Jane Eyre that defined Charlotte as a novelist.

It is of course two hundred years ago that Charlotte was born and so we have heard a great deal about her a-lately and there is, I presume, more to come. In December I wrote a blog post about the National Theatre’s play based on Jane Eyre and was given a resounding wrap over the knuckles by a friend in the theatre who thought it simply wasn’t on to compare a play to the original novel.

But is Charles right? Does the book remain fresh over time and continue to surprise? I’d like to return to when I was given the book as a Christmas present when I was eleven years old. I was thoroughly gripped and the one thing that gripped me most as a child was Jane’s rebelliousness, her ability to tell the truth, to stand up for herself and what she thought was right. I disliked books where a child always accepted authority without question, even though she might seethe inside.

In my teens it was the passion that attracted me, the passion plus the idea of equality. It was only later that I saw economic independence as part of the relationship between Jane and Rochester. It was probably this more than anything else that made Jane realise that without it, being Rochester’s mistress was simply not on. Later when she became rich she went back to Thornfield with the intention of staying with the man she loved. She did not know of the death of his wife but this time, she would call the tune.

As it turned out she didn’t have to stand up to the world in defiance. Strangely enough I noticed only last week that the whole relationship between Rochester and Jane is not one of equality but of one of dependence – Rochester’s dependence on Jane. Right from the beginning he leans on her. At the end he is still leaning on her. Jane has more than independence. She is totally in control. Did Charlotte Bronte mean this to happen?

Charlotte was not fond of Jane Austen’s ‘ladies and gentlemen’ but there is something that both novelists both shared – a horror of poverty. Jane Austen’s philosophy seems to be - ‘Marry for love – but don’t forget it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man.’ Charlotte Brontë’s philosophy seems to be – ‘Marry for love but make sure you have your own income.’

I say ‘seems to be’ because the book changes with each reading. I’m not going to analyse the story or the characters. A great many other have and will continue to do just that. All I can say is that the novel that I first opened on that snowy day also opened a new world to me. It’s a chameleon of a book and gleams and glitters in new and unexpected places.

Theodore Stephanides - new publications

Colenso Books (London) have sent me word of their publication of ‘Sweet-voiced Sappho’ a translation by Theodore Stephanides of the poems of Sappho and other Greek poets.

Colenso have undertaken to publish (or re-publish as the case may be) the life’s work of Stephanides whom many will remember as the eccentric polymath in the books and letters of Gerald Durrell and Lawrence Durrell.

I have already bought 'Autumn Gleanings' from Colenso through Amazon. I am now looking forward in particular to Stephanides' war memoirs. I have been trying to get hold of ‘Climax in Crete’ for some time but every copy I’ve managed to track down has cost an arm and a leg. So I’ve given up. Let’s hope Colenso can come up with an affordable edition. Good for them!

The Christmas tree - a fashion statement?

When I was sixteen (many moons ago I’m afraid) I went to a Christmas party with a bunch of other girls. I had made an effort. My hair, taken up high in the fashion of that time was dotted with glittering gold pins. My dress was a gleaming green with gold lurex threads through it. On my feet were gold high-heeled shoes. My eyelashes fluttered with glittering bits of something and my eye shadow made it seem as though a couple of rose chafers were happily hibernating on my eyelids; from my earlobes dangled earrings, fake emerald and ruby in some gold-coloured setting. My handbag was a gold-coloured clutch bag. In those days we didn’t know the word ‘bling’. It hadn’t yet become an acceptable, if somewhat cynical fashion accessory.

Before I left for a frolicsome evening I went in to see my parents. My dad, in his armchair, put his newspaper down, looked at me over his spectacles. His look seemed non-committal for a moment but his comment was unequivocal. ‘Bloody hell! You look like a Christmas tree.’

I sniffed, drew myself up to my full height and picked up my coat. I made the gesture of leaving the house in high dudgeon but I was not really annoyed. After all, what could a fusty father know about fashion, especially Christmas party fashion? My mum uttered a few notes of doubtful approval of my apparel and as the door closed, I heard her telling my father off for being so hidebound.

Truth to tell, I can say, looking back, that his judgment was probably spot-on. It is more than likely that I did look like a Christmas tree. As we girls moved around that evening we must all have looked like a whole bouncing Birnam wood bedecked like sacred pagan evergreens, heavy with votive offerings.

Whether the Christmas tree came in from the cold through the caprice of Prince Albert or an earlier consort Princess Charlotte, it shows a distinct desire of the those of the late-eighteenth-early nineteenth century to tame the wild, to domesticate it, make it pretty. At Christmas it had been, for centuries, the custom to bring in greenery to deck the mantelpiece or table. But bringing in a whole tree is a pretty massive statement. The wild wood, with its own laws that had little to do with those of the farmer, was a place of fear, of awe. Bringing in the tree inside and decorating it tamed the wild folk, the wodwos, even Pan himself.

Nowadays I decorate our Christmas tree according to what is in the box of tree decorations, to what has survived and what has been recently added to. The contents of the box are, like most other people’s, really an ad hoc collection of glass balls, red, gold, green and other colours, angels of glass, straw or porcelain, gold and silver tinsel and of course, lights. Yes, we have small tree candles, but unlike the proper candles that I buy from the nearby abbey and spread around the house, they don’t burn all the time. Like other people, we have small electric lights of red, green and blue. We do have some colourless lights, but I dislike them.

For some reason a naked bulb brings on a mood of intense depression, not quite as awful as that engendered by those blue-tinged energy- saving bulbs but a despairing mood of no-frills functionalism, of earnest and joyless austerity sets in. You can’t reach any lower depths. Perhaps it’s just that everything is stripped of softness, of magic. It makes me think of a waiting room in a shabby provincial bus station, but without the romance.

Yet some people prefer little bare bulbs on trees. ‘We go for the aesthetic approach in Christmas trees,’ I was once told. ‘Only white lights and silver ornaments and those are sparsely and strategically distributed. Anything else is, well, vulgar.’

That’s as may be. I shall continue to decorate my tree with odd, sometimes very odd coloured glass balls, silver birds, glass angels, tinsel, strips of gold and anything that glitters and gleams. Let’s face it – if a Christmas tree can’t look like a Christmas tree, what can?

Ted Hughes and Kim Philby – unique, original, or rough, scuffed and slightly foxed?

When I was reading two biographies recently I discovered that a fox emerged, quite fortuitously, as a character that forced the respective and totally unrelated subjects to confront a number of truths about themselves, truths that followed on from deceit and treachery.

These biographies are the recently published Ted Hughes, the unauthorised life by Jonathan Bate and A Spy among Friends – Kim Philby and the great betrayal by Ben Macintyre.

In folklore, the fox has a peculiar attractiveness. He symbolises cunning and craftiness, yet incorporates into his character a certain ability to get out of difficult and outrageous situations. I’ve sometimes thought that Sisyphus must have had a fox as a familiar. From the mediaeval Reynard to Erwin Rommel, slipperiness has been a declared characteristic of the fox.

Let me first mention a couple of poems of Ted Hughes. His well-known and well-cited poem The Thought-Fox came as the result of a dream warning about the poet facing up his responsibilities as an artist. There is the blank sheet of paper, the visitation, and

‘with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the hole of the head.’

Hughes, as an undergraduate, had dreamt of a wounded, burnt fox calling him to task for being dishonest to his own poetic self. Hughes then gave up reading English and turned to Archaeology and Anthropology. A few years later, he wrote the poem.

At the end of his life, another poem, Epiphany, from Birthday Letters tells the tale of the poet-persona being offered a fox-cub, the realisation of what it would entail and the subsequent rejection of the fox.

‘What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox,
The long-mouthed flashing temperament….’

In could be said Hughes was describing himself.
And another intriguing encounter with a ghost fox comes in Hughes short story ‘Deadfall’

So what do all these references have to do with deceit and treachery? It just seems to me that Hughes was a man who had created parallel lives and had compartmentalised his existence in such an expert way that when he was within one life he didn’t really see his extramural behaviour as deceit. This compartmentalising had become a fundamental part of his consciousness.

I’m not going to write a review of this controversial biography (Hughes’ widow withdrew the ‘authorised’ designation at a late stage). It is certainly worth reading, being wonderfully lucid, well-researched and honest. But I want to concentrate on what I see as a connection between the fox motif and Hughes’ life of deceit and dishonesty.

That Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevil caused his first wife Sylvia Plath a great deal of distress is well-known. What is not so well known is that through the years he seemed to shag anything that moved. In the late sixties he referred in a diary to the triumfeminate of his own life as ABC (Assia, Brenda, Carole), but these were just the women he was considering marrying; it seems that when it came to shagging-partners he could have gone right down the alphabet without any bother.

The fact that the fox was so fascinating to Hughes and such an archetypical symbol of slipperiness, betrayal and deceit, could not have been lost on him. Of course a poet lives in his own world, with its shifting realities and changing parameters and paradigms, and ironically enough it might be that this was the one real world to which he had a holdfast. Hughes had his literary life in London and his county life of hunting, shooting and fishing in Devon. He could be and often was the amoral bohemian during the week and the country squire at the weekend.

When he became Poet Laureate, Hughes might have seen these two lives as merging and perhaps made a decided effort to hold on to a secret life, a foxy, tricksy life yet one that was genuine, insofar as it had nothing to do with his other lives.


But now we come to Ben McIntyre’s book on Kim Philby and how he deceived his friends, especially Nicholas Elliot. It does strike me that in a profession where the ability to deceive and betray is part of the job description and to be perfidious and duplicitous is a worthy accomplishment of a spy, the shock and hurt that arises when ‘friends’ are found to have been used and betrayed is a little naive.

So how does the fox become a symbol of honesty in a long-term professional deceiver, the KGB and MI6 spy Kim Philby?

Unlike his fellow Cambridge spies Burgess and McLean, Philby was quite at ease with his secret life. In fact, it seems to me he needed it. It constituted half of what he was. But he wasn’t being innovative at all. Philby was simply following in his old man’s footsteps, in just the same way a boy might become a baker, a politician, GP or plumber because it’s the family trade. Although McIntyre doesn’t really go into this, there is no real puzzle about Philby’s double life. Spying was what Dad did. The betrayal of his friends and colleagues in MI6 was part of it.

His father was St John Philby aka Sheik Abdullah. He was a polyglot colonial administrator attached to MI6 who for six months of the year was a smooth-talking civil servant, a member of the Atheneum, a connoisseur of fine wines and a charmer. However, he converted to Islam, gave up alcohol, married an Arabian woman and became an advisor of Ibn Saud……for the other six months of the year. He see-sawed between the two for the rest of his life. He was eventually fired from the civil service and MI6. In the same way, so was Kim Philby.

St John was seen as a traitor (although McIntyre claims he wasn’t) whose loyalties lay with Saudi Arabia. Kim was seen as a traitor whose loyalties lay with the Soviet Union. The pattern is clear.

In the fifties, Philby eventuated in Beirut, surviving the dust of suspicion that had been stirred up after the Burgess-McLean defection. Working as a journalist, he was brought back into the MI6 fold by friend Elliot and both of them lived happily in the Middle East. This of course delighted the KGB. Philby who was only perfectly happy when spying, was Elliot’s informant but of course all intelligence went on to Moscow as well. ‘Elliot and Philby spied, plotted and socialised together in a family relationship that intensified over time’.

Their wives became close, their children played together, they went on family holidays together. ‘Philby was spying on everyone and no one was spying in him, because he fooled them all.’ Of course he was also seeing his Russian minder but this also belonged to his routine.

They were ‘days of professional satisfaction and domestic tranquillity.’ I can well believe this. St John’s paternal example was being followed.

So where does the fox come in?

Well, I can’t say whether father St John had a foxy moment of truth but Ben MacIntyre gives us the story of the fox cub called Jackie that Kim Philby, when living in Beirut, had been given by a couple of friends who had bought her from a Bedouin. She became like a dog and Philby found her ‘hopelessly endearing’ and McIntyre tells us that he even wrote a sentimental article about her for Country Life. But it was just at the time when Jackie the vixen had become a symbol of domestic contentment that two incidents changed the world for Philby.

The first was the death of St John Philby. He died suddenly while visiting his son and was buried as a Muslim under his Muslim name. The death of his father caused Philby to go on a bender. It was the beginning of his downfall.

The second incident was the arrest of George Blake as a KGB spy. In nineteen sixty one Blake was sentenced to forty two years imprisonment and suspicion was once more directed at Philby. When Philby heard of Blake’s sentence, he began to crumble, drank more and made mistakes. He might have survived – he had brazened his way out of a much worse situation a decade earlier - but something happened at home that made Philby want to give up. His wife arrived at their apartment to discover her husband drunk and grief-stricken.

Jackie the fox had died, having fallen (perhaps pushed by the maid) from the balcony. Philby was completely inconsolable, his wife and friend Nicholas Elliot perplexed and worried at his anguish. It seemed totally out of proportion. Only the death of his father had affected him so badly.

Evidently, his despair about his father's death was bleeding into his anguish about Jackie. But was the death of the fox a sudden rush of reality into Philby’s life? His father had been the symbol of duplicity and protean loyalties, the man for whom one life had not been enough. But that theatrical life had ended. The fox, while accredited with slyness, dissembling and mendacity was the one creature who could break down the barriers separating Philby’s lives and draw out genuine emotion.

I wonder if, after his defection to Moscow and he had no more need to deceive or betray, Philby found that his life was without purpose. When he died did he have the last words of his father on his lips - ‘God, I’m bored’?

To finish off - let's return to the fox as seer and truth-teller, if also a creature that is astute and cunning, I shall quote another line from Ted Hughes’ poem Epiphany when he describes his desire to adopt his fox cub he had been offered –

‘How would we cope with its cosmic derangements whenever we moved?’

Cosmic derangements indeed.