Summer offered flimsy treats: butterflies scattered above delphiniums, streets flashing with bare legs, children light-footed, perhaps light-fingered, ‘Got a fag?’ as if demanding protection money. A small coloured boy, serious, trusting, thrust at me with a leaf. ‘Is this Nature?’ A Barbados squad gaily collecting for Battle of Britain widows.
My landlady, herself a dumpling war widow, recommended the Midsummer Neighbourhood Festival. ‘It’ll do you good. Saturday. You’ll mix with the Right People.’
Possible, though with its transient population the neighbour-hood lacked neighbours.
Saturday was missal blue and green, my mood a kite, aloft yet tied to the earth of sparkling cafés and bandstands. In Paris, A Midsummer Night’s Dream had made me crave baroque transformations, passionate illusions. An English summer day could exorcize the glance over the shoulder, dangerous staircases, a warning to keep close to the wall. Morning and afternoon, merged in a pageant of calm Regency terraces, mellow gardens, sedate churches, the England of privacy, lordly strength reserved but powerful. Blemish stared down only towards evening, from a poster of a trollish riding-master, black-jacketed, peak-capped, with metallic face and belt, striding the future on huge letters, He Is Coming.
By now, the sky over the Museum was tinged red, and, beyond Bedford Square, in Coram Fields, dusk was filling with tinny, carnival percussion. Uneasy, but obedient to the landlady, I joined the crowds under coloured lights and garish advertisements: Toothpaste Cures, Have Another Pint, Flowers for All. Children’s playgrounds were ashine with stalls, kiosks, strippers’ tents, hot dog and ice cream tables, booths of Madame Katrinas, cosmic tricksters waiting behind zodiacal emblems, shuffling promises like counterfeit florins. A steamy, floodlit oval was ribboned off for tombola, small figures bouncing as if scalded for the waiters’ race and coronation of Miss Bloomsbury. Urchins smeared with chocolate and fudge capered wildly, as drums and guitars surged in swollen, electric rhythms and, ahead, dancers stamped, twisted, in fluid whirligig, swept by ever-changing lights, scarlet, violet, banana yellow, though with little exuberance. They were professional, mechanical; even the children seemed more scheming than carefree. Under a gilded canopy, youths in singlets marked Peace, Arsenal, were throwing darts into the enlarged, dark-eyed face of Anne Frank. A dim, impervious line of police stretched along Mecklenburg Square.
I hastened to a makeshift bar, drinking myself into other illusions. I was the Secret Agent, Hidden Hand, inconspicuous, negligent but, alone, armed against the underswell of crowds: favours withdrawn without warning, the guillotine at the end of the avenue. The rock beat, dodgem cars, mauve and amber flash-boards, the invitation in the latrine, assignations behind canvas, the cannabis whiff and warm, sex-ridden flesh, were all in some unconscious magnetic current, swirling towards an unseen goal, in a glare that made children’s games incongruous, the motionless police explicit and deadly.
An explosion of crimson, rush and good particles. In the manic hues, faces were dried, genderless, unfinished, emitting dull cheers for a giant, dazzling gin bottle, ‘Spinster’s Revenge’, above a piebald tower. Girls with bright-red grins hovered behind planks, selling balloons, toy bears, cakes, cosmetics. The music crashed, heavy air drooped, a flame waved like a sash beside a black, spring-heeled juggler jittering on a huge phallic cone frilled with blue bulbs, performing to a canned, Dionysiac scream, ‘Lovin’ you…’ All was muddled, congealing into a stew of teddy bears, candyfloss Queens and Mountbattens, a dwarf on crutches, a blow-up of Anthony Eden and Nasser fisting in boxer’s shorts. And then. Leaflets fluttered from the tower like shot gulls, someone stooped, picked one up, and, relay runner, slipped it to me. Europe for the Europeans. On cue, voices harsh as crowbars dragged across concrete acclaimed the unfurling of Union Jacks, distribution of The European, headlining, ‘One Free People, One Free Britain, One Free Europe’, some women yelling polecat against ‘Hordes’.
Trapped in hallucination, yet with rear-gunner attention, I glimpsed a Suzie twirling through kaleidoscopic rays clasping a blonde hippie, heard hoarse babble about the Age of Aquarius. ‘Dynamic Change Is Looming. Pisces Decadents Vanquish Hierarchical Powers of Europa and Albion.’
A chilly wind had begun, clouds sagged, dense with rain. A boy scowled, ‘She won’t go the whole hog.’ Leathered Freikorps in square black glasses barged past, whistling at a crude pennant, telegrams of hate, depicting Khrushchev as an ogling pudding, then more, Union Jacks, glaring birds from a diseased tropic and, in searchlight strength, a screen was covered with a bearded, fur-capped ape bayoneting a map of Europe.
‘More words to the square breath. To ditch the international punt-about, political anarchy, we must scrap potty nation-states, what Buchan called shoddy little countries. If I knew how to spit I’d do it now, at Northern Ireland and the promise of independent Scotland, let alone talkative Wales. Who in cock-robin needs Maltas, Luxemburgs, a Basque land, with UN votes outnumbering their betters? The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein is as obsolete as stout Cortez. Petty loyalties corrode like bad ink. To weep for Lithuania is tinker-bell sentimentality. I haven’t much time to explain, though see that it’s necessary.’
The speaker, Alex Brassey, youngish, controversialist, with red, coarse, jumbled hair, more rust than rich tawny. He was covered, rather than dressed, in dark-blue cord jacket and baggy greys and, unlike those ranged behind him on the platform, was tieless. He inspected us, tolerant but slightly reproachful auctioneer. ‘I’m not’, he assured everybody, including his fellow speakers, ‘ridiculing patriotism. Probably I’m alone amongst you down there who can understand, indeed spell, escutcheon. But my patriotism is personal as a toothbrush. Not place but atmosphere. England doesn’t mean green fields and holiday camps. But…’ he hesitated, as if risking a joke unlikely to elicit laughter, ‘values, civilized give-and-take.’
A few did laugh, jeeringly: his own chuckle was barman’s assent, in this college debate about the feasibility of a Britain independent of Europe and the USA. In the arc behind him, backed by flamboyant posters – Federate for Peace, USE, Elvis Rules – were a Tory politician who had lost his seat for opposing Suez, a Girton don advocating total British integration with Europe, a composer once gaoled for refusing conscription and, tireless bemoaner of Britain’s lost opportunities, jowled and piggy-eyed, a CND vice-president, novelist, the Modern Dickens. He had grumbling mouth, possibly discontented by Brassey’s assumptions about escutcheon. I remembered that he had once, though not recently, asserted that the genius of humanity was Soviet Literature. Upholder of traditional English decency, he had lately been divorced, in discreditable circumstances.
Brassey was flowing like tap water. ‘Blast Latvia and Belgium, archaic as Assyrian bas-reliefs or airport coffee.’ His grin, around yellow, irregular teeth, was craftily confidential. ‘But each to his own.’ A throat-cutting gesture induced more rowdy laughter and indulgent nods from behind, save from the Modern Dickens. ‘But yes. Atmosphere. We can forget King Arthur, the Golden Years of Elizabeth, Palmerston’s handy gunboats. Of course, whether you like it or not, probably not, we’ll be shoved into Europe. That’s not the real issue. Understand this…’ – the chin jutting from the narrow, too conspicuous head was blotched as a pub table, as if disturbed in mid-shave; I listened only fitfully, to a mixture of arrogant contradictions and puzzling allusions – ‘nationalism isn’t patriotism, as, except in your cafeteria, chalk isn’t cheese. I’m not against provincialism. A society in which provincial is pejorative is lopsided. But nor am I parochial. I loathe flags, morally, politically, aesthetically. Pre-war nations were mostly huge, unpleasant, tinny dictatorships or midget fire-bombs, all like Sweden and Switzerland profiteering on neighbours’ blood and pickled in self-righteousness. The solution…’