My father and Mrs T

In the fractious debating society that was my childhood, my father would sometimes grow eloquent on the evils of socialism. By his own account, he had fallen for left wing ideals in his youth, but had come to see the error of his ways. Education paid for by the state, healthcare free at the point of delivery with government-issue orange juice thrown in, a generous family allowance to be collected every week from the post office – we benefited from all these provisions, and I never heard him utter a word against them. But socialism he was definitely against.  

This might sound like a paradox but it made more sense back then. For one thing, there was a lot more socialism around. When my father complained about socialism he wasn’t thinking about health and education. He wasn’t thinking about pensions either, or the Gas Board or British Rail.

  

He'd grown up in harder times. He pursued education as long as scholarships would allow, but at 16 he was apprenticed to his father’s trade and became a carpenter and joiner. During the postwar housing boom, he worked as a foreman for a house-building firm. After a couple of years, he asked for a pay rise. When the boss refused, they got into an argument and he was fired on the spot. Living in a company house and with a wife and seven children to support, he decided to go into a partnership with a friend who had £1,000 to invest, and embarked on a precarious business as a speculative builder.  We might have been children of the welfare state, but he was a self-made man.

What he was really talking about when he talked about socialism was stroppy workers holding the country to ransom, and people thinking the world owed them a living, and union leaders with the power to bring down governments lording it over the rest of us with their beer and sandwiches at number 10. When Margaret Thatcher was elected Conservative leader in 1975, he and my mother finally joined the party they’d been voting for all those years, and from then on their faith never wavered.

I heard about Thatcher’s death from a homeless man sitting outside Holborn tube station. He held a scrappy cardboard sign that said: RIP Thatcher. Dingdong the witch is dead. I had no idea this old song was about to go viral. The homeless man looked about 28, too young to remember Thatcher in office, a generation too young to have rioted against the poll tax, bought his own council house, lost his job in a Yorkshire coal pit or bought shares in a newly privatised utility company. I was surprised he cared one way or the other.  

Next day I learnt from the front page of the Daily Mail that he was part of a movement: “30 years of left wing loathing for Lady T explode in sick celebrations of her death”. Violence had, apparently, “erupted at ‘death parties’ across the country”. More young people with eerily long memories. Even so, it struck me as an odd choice for a conservative paper to relegate to the inner pages all its pictures of their heroine with her children, and with the Queen, and with victorious troops in the Falklands, so that it could lead with THE FLAMES OF HATRED. But I suppose the Mail knows how to keep its readers happy.

American TV took a more upbeat view. From a quick sampling of CNN and MSNBC I gathered that Thatcher’s greatest achievement was working with Reagan to bring the Soviet Union to its knees, though no one asked how the two leaders had brought this about, and that without Thatcher Britain would have turned into Greece, though no one explained why it might not just as easily have become Sweden. Mysteriously, Thatcher was also credited with being Britain’s first working class prime minister. I wondered what her father, Alderman Roberts, whom she revered for his business acumen, would have made of that.

For a more nuanced view, I turned to the Guardian. They had Philip Hensher on hand to imagine an alternative history in which Thatcher lost the Tory leadership election, leading to a present in which “Perhaps we would be waiting six months for a mobile telephone, and paying the bills to the post office… I don’t believe it would be a very advanced telephone, either.” Scary stuff. On another page, Ian McEwan was explaining that “There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her… She exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation’s masochistic imagination”. This put my father’s enthusiasm in a whole new light, though it didn’t explain why, to the day she died, my mother kept a commemoration Thatcher plate on display among her very best china.

Personally, I won’t be worshipping at the Lady’s shrine, but I won’t be dancing on her grave either. I’ll admit it’s hard to forget the particular air of vindictiveness that she brought to the task of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich, a job her successors have attended to with greater tact and more polished smiles. But although she seemed to make it all happen by sheer willpower and self-belief, there have clearly been larger forces at work in our increasing subjugation to unregulated markets. 

Thinking about those debates of my childhood, I recognise now that what allowed me to fulfil my parents’ aspirations for me was neither pure socialism nor untrammelled capitalism, but a mixed economy, with scope for individual enterprise, support for those who needed it such as mothers with children, and the opportunity for anyone from any background to achieve their potential. The educational doorway I stepped through, which was opened by Atlee’s Labour government in 1946, has been squeezed shut in successive stages by New Labour and the ruling coalition. You can’t pin that one on Thatcher. And she didn’t bring down the Soviet Union either, and she didn’t invent global capitalism, and she wasn’t actually a witch.

Redefining marriage? What's so new about that?

The US Supreme Court is currently debating whether to uphold or overturn the 1996 Defence of Marriage Act, an attempt by Congress to obstruct the spread of same-sex marriage across individual states. On this issue American politicians are still divided largely on party lines. 

Here in Britain the Conservatives have seen the benefits of indulging popular support for same-sex marriage, an inexpensive way of shedding their image as the nasty party while continuing to grind the faces of the poor. Opposition is left to backbench traditionalists and church leaders, most vocally the Catholics and of course, standing precariously on their established status, the Anglicans.

In Britain, the state got into the business of regulating marriage in 1753, while leaving the Church of England largely in control. Oddly, the legislation established some kind of exemption for Jews and Quakers, though not for Catholics, who had to continue being married by clergymen whose status they didn’t recognise. 

In 1836 the Church lost its monopoly, when parliament introduced civil marriage. Now, like any other religious organisation, the Anglicans can refuse to preside over a wedding ceremony, but have no power beyond that to decide who may or may not marry. On the question of same-sex marriage, they’re entitled to their opinion but it really isn’t up to them.

I’ve got some tangled history with this subject. I was raised Catholic but at 16, prompted by a wildly rebellious urge, joined the local Anglican choir. I learnt to sight-read hymns in four-part harmony and acquired the knack (an Anglican peculiarity) of reading the words of a psalm from one book and the music from another. For this I will always be grateful. I also discovered to my surprise that the vicar thought highly of historical figures I’d been taught to think of as villains, such as Thomas Cranmer. Not many years later, no longer considering myself a Catholic, I got married in an Anglican Church.

After I was divorced (a humane solution beneficial to both parties) I went out for a while with a nice Catholic girl, until she told me she’d have to break it off because I was a married man. Young and naïve as I was, and something of a literalist, I consulted a Catholic priest. After some questioning he told me that my marriage needed no annulment being null from day one, since, while still technically a Catholic, I had neglected to seek the permission of a Catholic bishop, permission that would have been granted on condition that my fiancée and I undergo a course of training on the significance of marriage.

(The vicar who married us had, in fact, delivered his own, very Anglican, version of marriage preparation. I remember a meeting in the vicarage during which he blushed and stammered, said ‘You’re clearly both intelligent people’ and handed us a pamphlet which instructed us that sex was ‘very, very pleasant’.)

I immediately told the nice Catholic girl that it was OK, I wasn’t married after all. I saw to my dismay that she wasn’t as thrilled with this news as I had been. I would later be told often enough that ‘It isn’t you, it’s me,’ but would never again be dumped with the line, ‘It isn’t me, it’s the Pope.’  

By the time I was ready to get married again (to Leni Wildflower) I’d lost interest in organised religion, but Leni had spiritual inclinations and was quite keen to be married in the eyes of some god or other. So I approached a friend who happened to be an Anglican priest of a fairly liberal kind. He turned us down because of that first marriage, which he told me remained sound as far as the Church of England was concerned whatever the Catholics might think.

So Leni asked a rabbi, a professional colleague in California, who said, ‘I don’t do mixed marriages’. Since the rabbi was female this hair-raising response could not be blamed on a strict adherence to orthodoxy.

In the end we settled for a California Methodist who allowed us to stamp on wine glasses to cries of mazel tov, and to say whatever we wanted about God, Vishnu or the cosmos.  

Remembering the muddled motives for war

The Iraq war began 10 years ago this week. I wrote this poem 3 or 4 weeks before it started. I find it interesting to look at it now as a piece of personal and social history. I’d been living in America since Bush became president, so it’s written from an American perspective. It was my best attempt to articulate the mood of the time, so far as I could make sense of it.

WHY WE WILL DO THIS

February 2003

We will do this to unseat the evil doer.

Because he gassed the Kurds, his own people, as Hitler gassed his own people, the German  Jews,

and other people's people, while the hand-wringers wrung their hands.

Because we will bring down Saddam as we once brought down the Nazis,

launching our missiles against their Holocaust, as is recorded in the book we have written about ourselves.

We will do this because we are the backbone of the Security Council.

Because the UN is the League of Lesser Nations, cynically dealing for oil that is rightfully ours.

Because Saddam has the power to incinerate our cities, and his puny force can be crushed under foot.

Because the policy of containing the tyrant within his borders has a name and that name is appeasement.

Because if we must we will stand alone, as Churchill stood alone with America’s greatest generation

urging a first strike on the fledgling German war machine, as is recorded in the book about ourselves we are even now writing.

We will do this because we are a freedom-loving people, and those who oppose us must learn what it means to be free.

Because a population ravaged and desolate will reach for the ballot box as a hungry child reaches for bread,

their menfolk greeting our troops with broken-toothed smiles, their women wreathing the barrels of our tanks with flowers.

Because those who counsel peace are utopian dreamers.

Because we bleed from three thousand gashes.

Because we are mired in pain and fear and muddied with insoluble contingencies.

Because we ache to leap like swimmers into the cleanness of war.

Papa don't preach

I’m thinking of a Catholic boy, coming of age in 1950s Scotland, having been raised in a culture that conflates sexuality with sin and does its best to keep the lid on both. Unfortunately, for a boy at this time and place, it’s not girls he finds himself attracted to. The practices that invade his imagination are not only associated with profound social shame, they are also punishable by imprisonment. What tempts him is categorised by his own church as one of the 'four sins crying to heaven for vengeance'.

He throws himself into academic work and is eventually drawn to the priesthood. By the time parliament decriminalises homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, he has been ordained and has put that whole complicated issue behind him, taking refuge in a life of celibacy.  He serves as a curate, a teacher, a parish priest. He’s good at his job.

In mid-life he is put in charge of the spiritual development of young men training for the priesthood. Beyond the walls of the seminary it’s a hedonistic time. There are pockets of wild liberation where gay men are indulging their sexual appetites, no longer fearful of judicial punishment and untroubled by thoughts of hell. Is he influenced by this? Or by the knowledge that his life is half over and half his nature lies dormant? Denied the normal comforts and companionship of marriage to which most people eventually aspire, does he find loneliness creeping up on him? Or does his position of unquestioned authority provide an opportunity he simply can’t resist? In the language of his Church, has his job become one continuous ‘occasion of sin’?

Is this a true story, or an outline for a novel by Colm Tóibín?

How about this one? A senior cleric approaching the end of a distinguished and respected career, about to fulfil the sacred duty of voting for the next pope, faces accusations that thirty years ago he made inappropriate advances to four seminarians, accusations that he denies. Now we’re in Philip Roth territory. In The Human Stain, Coleman Silk, a professor of Classics charged with showing prejudice towards two black students, could clear his name by revealing his own deepest secret that he is himself (in a certain ethno-cultural sense) black, though sufficiently light-skinned to pass as white. What if, like Coleman, our senior cleric has it in his power to replace one scandal with another by revealing a long-standing secret – a relationship, for example, consensual and mutually beneficial, with a woman of his own age? In a strange twist, he surprises his conservative supporters by suggesting that the Church should consider allowing priests to marry, a coded intimation of his desire to normalise his private life and finally assert his long-obscured identity.

Perhaps the truth is even more implausible – something Dan Brown might have dreamt up. The whole thing is a conspiracy led by a villainous Italian cardinal with papal ambitions. Our hero is a tough, plain-talking Scot with the rugged good looks of a rugby player, who has made a name for himself by standing up to politicians cravenly seeking popularity with their liberalising agendas, particularly their plans for gay marriage, 'a grotesque subversion' as he sees it. True to form, he opposes the worldly Italian. Whether politically motivated or bribed with promises of advancement, his accusers, like the four assassins of Thomas à Becket, set out to rid their master of this turbulent priest, to neutralise him, at least, for as long as the Cardinals sit in conclave.  

But enough of fantasies and speculations. The important story is of an institution so blind to its own failings that it projects them out into the secular world, condemning the rest of us for our self-indulgence while it covers up its own crimes, a body so damaged by scandal that no one is much surprised by one more accusation, or much impressed by a heated denial or a half-hearted apology. Perhaps some of these many charges are false. But the credibility of the Church is so damaged in this area that, for someone accused, to be a member of its hierarchy makes guilt seem more likely rather than less.

It’s exactly fifty years since the death of the great reformer, John XXIII, who did his best during his brief papacy to bring daylight into the Catholic Church. I wonder if there are enough cardinals interested in renewing that interrupted process. I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile the Church might concentrate on its strong suits, such as concern for the poor, and leave questions of sexual ethics to ordinary people.

Gay marriage? What would Jane Austen have said?

If there’s an urtext for the rom-com I suppose it must be Pride and Prejudice. Shakespeare influenced the genre, but didn’t lay down its essential structure. As You Like It and Twelfth Night are perennially enjoyable but, as models, they’re too specific to the Elizabethan stage with their disguises and identity confusions. In the eighteenth century there was Fielding. But in Tom Jones the emphasis is on Tom’s picaresque scrapes, including a luckily unconsummated encounter with a woman who turns out to be his long-lost mother – more romp-com, in fact, than rom-com.

It was Jane Austen who first took as her subject the struggle of two young people in love to overcome obstacles on their way to the altar, and who chose to embed that struggle in a realistic social context. This has provided the model for endless romantic stories in which the motivation is love, the goal is marriage, and the filling in the narrative sandwich is all the stuff that gets in the way. 

But Pride and Prejudice is actually more complicated than that, and the link between love and marriage is a lot murkier. For Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte, marriage is a practical arrangement, the only way to achieve some degree of independence in a world where other careers are closed to women. And if that means being hitched to the risibly pompous Mr Collins, she’ll take it, rather than sink into despised and impoverished spinsterhood. For Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who has long had her eye on Darcy as a son-in-law, marriage is nothing more than a system for cementing bonds between aristocratic dynasties. What's love got to do with it?

For Darcy it’s a work in progress. When he first meets the hideously vulgar Bennett family, he persuades his friend Bingley not to get engaged to the eldest daughter, Jane, wanting to rescue him from this damaging connection. But he doesn't follow his own advice, because he can’t get Jane’s sister Elizabeth out of his head.

In fact marriage in Pride and Prejudice is in a state of dynamic instability. My favourite moment is when Lady Catherine visits Elizabeth to tell her to keep her hands off Darcy. The scene is memorable for purely dramatic reasons. But it also acts out the inter-generational struggle, when the old notion of marriage is confronted with the new and finds itself impotent in the face of change. Lady Catherine asserts her rights as a person of inherited wealth and power. Elizabeth is interested only in the news that Darcy might still be available. We take it for granted that Elizabeth should listen to her heart rather than to Lady Catherine, but it wasn’t always so obvious.

Today the institution of marriage is riding a new wave of dynamic instability. An unlikely alliance between the Conservative leadership and the centre-left parties has nudged it on its way. The Church of England, which lost its right to oversee English marriages in 1837, still clings to what remains of its moral authority. Tories in the shires hanker after traditional certainties. But Elizabeth Bennett stands up to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and the old hierarchies are subverted.

Armed and dangerous

In 2007 a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed 32 people. I was living in America at the time, and I heard a man on the radio argue earnestly and in measured tones that to reduce the chances of such a thing happening again students on college campuses should be allowed to carry concealed weapons. It took me a moment to realise he was serious. I honestly hadn’t thought of this solution before. 

Since then I’ve become more familiar with the reasoning of the gun lobby. Last week I heard an impressive and moving interview with the parents of one of the 20 children killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The father made an eloquent plea for change. ‘Something in our society,’ he said, ‘needs to be healed.’ He urged American parents to ask themselves, ‘What is it worth doing to keep your children safe?’ Into my head, unbidden, came the answer. ‘You can buy yourself a gun for a start.’ I didn’t mean it, but I’m sure there were plenty of others saying the same thing, who did. 

An attachment to guns has often seemed like a requirement for holding high office in America, almost as essential as believing in God. Running for the presidency in 2004, John Kerry made sure to get himself photographed, in combat fatigues, on a duck shoot. Being a decorated war hero wasn’t enough. When Hilary Clinton was running in the Democratic Primary against Obama in 2008 she claimed to have always enjoyed shooting ducks. At least Obama was spared this indignity. Even if he'd been tempted to pose loading a gun, imagine how those 'optics' would have played with the demographic Kerry and Clinton were reaching for. 

Now that gun control legislation is back on the agenda, some Democrats are still wheeling out their animal-killing credentials, as if only that will earn them the right to join the conversation. Joe Manchin, Democratic senator from West Virginia, put it this way: ‘I just came with my family from deer hunting. I’ve never had more than three shells in a clip. Sometimes you don’t get more than one shot anyway at a deer. I don’t know anyone in the hunting or sporting arena that goes out with an assault rifle. I don’t know anybody that needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting. I mean, these are things that need to be talked about.’

It’s strange the way deer and wildfowl keep getting dragged into the argument, because whatever the Second Amendment is about it’s not about hunting. What it actually says is that ‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ That seems to mean that the country should be equipped to defend itself against foreign attack, though it might conceivably mean that individual states should be equipped to defend themselves against an oppressive federal government. 

For many Americans it seems to be about something different – your right as an individual to protect yourself from someone who breaks into your house or tries to rob your store or attacks you in the street. For a hardcore minority it’s about your right as an individual to protect yourself against the agents of a government that's infringing your basic liberties.

Either way, forget duck-shooting. If you want to respond in kind to an assault from a homicidal thug (or a federal agent, if that's your concern) you'd better be armed with whatever they’ve got. And you’d better have it ready. An unloaded handgun, safely locked away where your kids won’t be able to play with it, won’t do you much good if an armed criminal breaks into your house. If a crazy person opens fire in the shopping mall, even your semi-automatic Bushmaster is useless if you’ve left it at home. On its own terms, the logic of the gun lobby seems unanswerable. Violence in school? Arm the teachers. Violence on campus? Arm the students. Violence in the streets? Arm everyone.

The only counter to this line of reasoning is the cumulative evidence of what really happens. A child finds a loaded weapon and kills someone by mistake. An angry boyfriend, who might otherwise throw a fist, pulls a trigger. A law-abiding citizen reaches for a gun to defend himself and is beaten to the draw – because, outside of daydreams of rescue and revenge, psychopathic killers and crazy people usually beat law-abiding citizens to the draw.  

These days I live in London, near to a place called Newington Butts, which is now mainly a housing estate. The name ‘Newington’ indicates that at some point in the middle ages it was a new settlement. A ‘butt’ is a target for archery practice. Newington became Newington Butts in the sixteenth century because archers trained here. It was England’s longbowmen who had won the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and thereby defeated the French. And in 1511 Henry VIII had decreed that all men under the age of 40 should own a bow and arrow, reasoning, no doubt, that a well armed militia being necessary to the security of a free state he’d better make sure Englishmen knew how to handle a longbow.

If I woke up one morning and bought myself a bow – a lightweight aluminium number with a quiver full of steel-tipped arrows – and wandered through Newington Butts with it, maybe I could try that argument out on the local constabulary.

Early collaborations

I drifted through Grammar School in one of the lower streams. I worked out later that it wasn’t only the boys who were streamed – in some subjects it was the teachers as well. In particular, there was a dynamic English department of which I was barely conscious. Meanwhile our English teachers were the backwoodsmen. They were less than enthusiastic but I liked them. Worse things can happen at school than benign neglect.

For a couple of years we had Alf (as I’ll call him here), a non-specialist who, having overseen the decline of his own subject, was kept occupied overseeing us. Our weekly homework was usually a list of three or four essay titles, dictated out of his head into our exercise books: The Worst Holiday, My Hobby, Loneliness – that kind of thing. The last on the list was always the same: Anything else you can think of. His comments on my work were laconic. 15/20 Good. 14/20 Quite good. 16/20 Good if original. For an essay on Crowds, I cut out and glued a picture from the Gloucestershire Echo of people waiting on the platform to see the Queen pass through the local station. I pointed out the danger that the people at the back might push forward in their excitement, throwing the people at the front under the Royal train. Alf wrote: 14/20 Not very likely.

It was probably my father who’d given me that thought. Health and safety was one of his things. But he was good at stories too. Under the generous rubric of Anything else you can think of, he helped me with a few tales of adventure – first person narratives, often set, I realise now, in the pre-War world of my father’s imagination, in which a couple of pals might set off on their bicycles into the countryside in pursuit of a burglar, to be congratulated by the local constable once the burglar was safely behind bars. I did all the writing, but he was happy to feed me plot ideas while he got on with other jobs.

The story I remember most clearly involved a local convict, whose escape is reported in the local paper. Our first-person hero and his friend do some research and decide to stake out the home of the convict’s aged mother. The convict catches our hero snooping around the house and takes him hostage at gunpoint, while the police, summoned by the friend, gather outside with loud hailers. There seems no way out of this impasse. Then the aged mother turns on the radio, and the newsreader reports that an escaped convict has captured the son of local builder Wilfrid Treasure.

‘You’re never Wilf Treasure’s son!’ the convict says. ‘Best boss I ever ‘ad, ‘e was. I was working on ‘is site, diggin’ the footin’s when they came to arrest me. Insisted on paying me out in full, your dad did, before ‘e’d let them take me away. ‘Ere, Ma, put the kettle on. I’m giving myself up.’

That’s the way I remember it, including the forest of apostrophes. I’ve no idea what Alf made of this crudely embedded commercial  for the family business. He gave me 15/20 and wrote: Implausible, but quite well written.