He was one of the very few people who made me laugh out loud. He does still.
For which, old pal, much thanks.
Up until a very short time ago, no nation on earth enjoyed as splendid a popular Image in the United States as the English; the visiting Briton basked. And no one ever asked him actually to demonstrate those qualities on which his glory was based; he was simply required to Be. Whatever his personal appearance, whatever his character, or behaviour, or background, when he passed through a crowded room, hushes fell, beautiful women gnawed their lower lip, strong men dropped their eyes, and small boys lifted their shining faces, as to the sun. For all knew this man’s inheritance. Not, necessarily, the facts of it; but this ignorance was unimportant to them. Across a thousand panoramic screens, they had seen his clouds of glory trailed, and now, encountering the Englishman in the flesh, they recognised the presence of something greater than they knew. And so they roared at jokes they did not understand, because the English Sense of Humour was a rare and precious thing, they nodded at his truisms, seeing immediately their hoary wisdom, they saw his inarticulacy as noble taciturnity amid the sounding brass; and husbands, noticing their wives’ idolatrous looks, dashed in herds to their tailors to order suits made up from old army blankets, specifying the dashing trousers, flared at the knee, the cunningly asymmetrical jacket, the skilfully frayed shirtcuffs.
Americans, in that sweet not-so-long syne, knew where respect was due. Millions of feet of celluloid had taught it them, and they had met nothing to say it was not so. They had seen the Englishmen in War, whistling dirty songs at the Japanese, escaping in guffawing droves from cretinous camp-commandants, knocking back bitter in the mess before going out with a boyish toss of the head to paste Jerry over Kent, while all the world wondered. Americans had gaped at the Miniver set, picking shrapnel out of their tea and fussing over the Young Conservatives’ Picnic. In Peace, too, they had seen and doted; England was God’s Little Acre, a thatch-dotted paradise of trafficless lanes where blithe spirits in veteran cars chugged from one hunt ball to another, swam in Piper-Heidsieck, watched the dawn come up over Pont Street, and spent their serious hours redecorating mews cottages. Just as Jack Hawkins had been everybody’s CO, so now everybody’s Daddy was Cecil Parker, and Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne were always running through the drawing-room on the way to Ascot. Between War and Peace, there were Times Of Stress, when the British, played by John Mills disguised as Richard Todd, or vice versa, tightened their belts, stiffened their lips, chased the natives out of the rubber, and went back to their airmail copies of the Telegraph. The Common Folk, of course, were a splendid bunch. In War, they died uncomplainingly like flies, sat in the ruins of their homes and told uproarious Cockney stories, and, adrift in a lifeboat with Noel Coward, were never at a loss for a spirited song. When Peace came, they all went back to being chauffeurs, bus-conductors, publicans, comic burglars, bank clerks, and Stanley Holloway. They were deliriously happy.
When I first came to America, this image still hadn’t changed much. True, a backward glance from New York towards the horizon might have caught those little fistshaped clouds forming, but it was some time before the first cans of Truth were unloaded on the docks. At first, it was easy to argue my way out of American suspicion. ‘Look Back In Anger’? ‘Room At The Top’? Flashes in the pan, I said. I would laugh nervously. Alarmist minorities, I said. But when the new wave of British filmmaking broke across this continent and swamped Old Albion in its scummy tide, I knew I was beaten. For, worst of all, it hit at a time when some of the facts of English life were finally filtering through to the average American; word was out that the garlands were showing a tendency to wither on the brow, and the films provided the clincher. America knows. Over the last few months, San Francisco cinemas have shown: ‘Saturday Night And Sunday Morning’, ‘The Entertainer’, ‘A Taste Of Honey’, ‘The Long And The Short And The Tall’, ‘Sons And Lovers’, ‘The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner’, ‘Term Of Trial’ and ‘A Kind Of Loving’. In succession; to packed houses; and against the background of Time’s articles on the decline of Britain, and Mr. Acheson’s penetrating twang.
Now, I’m not complaining. I’m delighted, Lord knows, that English filmmen are at last making films. I can hold up my head among the cognescenti. But not among the masses. And this overnight switch of Image is hard to bear. Now these Americans who once looked on me with awe, look with derision, or pity, or revulsion. If they bother to look at all. For they know the Truth. They know that I was born in a narrow street, in a scrofulous terraced hovel, to a withered old mother of twenty-four, her delivery screams drowned by the roar of the machine-shop/pit disaster. As a child, I stumbled wretchedly about in a pall of silicotic filth, unaware of the sun, occasionally catching a dim glimpse of my father, an emaciated creature in long underwear and a cloth cap, as he was dragged home, stewed to the gills on dole-money, from the local thieves’ kitchen. I never had much of an education, due to long absences from my hellish school after regular beatings by me mum’s fancy-man (tattersall waistcoat, moustache, Vauxhall), and weekend jaunts to drizzleswept boarding-houses with the nubile milk-monitor in 5A. However, the educational problem was easily solved by sending me: (a) to Borstal, where I was thrashed by the staff, humiliated by Etonians, and ostracised by my fellows, or (b) to a bicycle factory where I got my kicks from dropping dead rats (with which England is bubonically overrun) into the packed lunches, or (c) – if I was a girl – down to the waterfront to watch the boats. A short time later, sex reared the ugliest head outside a Hammer Film; due to the constant presence of drunks in underwear mashing tea all over the hovel, I pursued love’s young dream in bus-shelters, grimy cinemas, on canal-banks, behind bill-boards, and so on. My partners in the great awakening were diverse; every American schoolboy knows that I have: (a) Gone to bed with the foreman’s wife and got her pregnant, (b) Gone to bed with the blonde from the typists’ pool and got her pregnant, (c) Gone to bed with one of the sailors and got myself pregnant. This is the new Time Of Stress, and acting in the new True British Fashion, I faced the problem squarely by: (a) Nipping off to my auntie, the cheery abortionist, (b) Marrying the girl and promising her a life of loveless squalor, (c) Playing house with a young homosexual and waiting for the Day.
But suppose I managed to survive this jeunesse dorée; what then? Well, I might have gone into showbiz, and, living the glamorous life of a matinée idol in Bootle summer stock, entered my senior years without (from sheer luck) having got anyone pregnant, and with the comfy recognition that I was merely an alcoholic failure. Alternatively, had I gone into a respectable profession like teaching, I would have got all the plums the other fellows got (penury, frustration, domestic disaster, social rejection) simply by giving private lessons to a little girl to keep myself from the workhouse. Naturally, there was justice in all this – if I hadn’t been a dirty pacifist, and had gone off to Burma to whistle with the rest of the lads, I could have landed a job in a public school. Mind you, I mightn’t have got a look-in on the whistling routine; the Americans now know that I should have wound up in a grass hut with six typical British chaps, beating the living hell out of a senile Japanese until his mates turned up to square the odds and give us what we deserved.
Nevertheless, though I have been passing these last months with all the misery of an ad-man watching the Truth knock the stuffing out of a beloved Image, it wasn’t until last night that I actually broke and ran. The cinema that had been responsible for most of the punishment suddenly interrupted its run of English films to show an American low-budget movie, called ‘David And Lisa’, and since this took as its subject two young inmates of a mental hospital, I went along with glee at the prospect of having the ball in my court for a rare hour or so. The manager smiled at me in the lobby.
‘Hi there!’ he said. ‘Just in time for the short subject. You’ll like it. It’s an English documentary.’
‘Splendid!’ I said, with a touch of the old panache. After all, I was safe enough. It was probably a Pathé Pictorial, one of those delightfully exportable Technicolor