The Mauretania’s four red-and-black funnels send plumes of smoke up into the blue pallor. The sea is calm, from horizon to horizon, and here we are secure until Liberty is sighted and Babylon’s terraces rise yellow, cream and orange in the setting sun. Until then I shall walk along her polished decks, nodding to acquaintances, lifting my hat, taking the air while a little light spray refreshes my face and Helen Roe seizes my arm and cries, pointing, ‘Can you see the dolphins?’ We are somewhere near the West Indies. Helen is certain she saw a gull yesterday. ‘Or at least some sort of bird.’ The decks stretch ahead of us like so many cloisters around which we stroll, talking softly, a chosen community. We give ourselves in gentle and unconscious celebration to the spirit of practical science which is represented by the vessel herself; thousands of cubic feet of man-made metal and machinery, kept alive and on the move by the sophisticated ingenuity of our engines. These alone, a hundred years ago, could not be imagined.
History does not change, because people will always prefer the false comfort of repetition. In crisis they look for the familiar, they fall back on convention, no matter how unsuited it is to their situation. Neophobia is the great destructive disease of the human race; it is spread through hysterical gesture, anxious phrases, nervous tone: a smell.
Our ship glides towards red and gold cupolas and spires: Moscow and the Kremlin. Formal salutations are offered to the Tsar, the constitutional ruler of this noble democracy. In turn his welcome is extended to us. The Great Powers are in peaceful balance. They have taken charge of the world again. The ship rocks like an old house in the wind. ‘They’ll put yer in an ‘ome, Ivan, if yer go on like that.’ Mrs Cornelius means well. Hers is a more ordinary human vision, perhaps, than mine. America should have accepted responsibility. It was no one else’s fault. We have seen some good times, she says. Remember L.A., do yer? She roars as she recalls an anecdote. Her memory is better on the little details. I can still see the huge white seaplane rising over Long Beach and banking towards Catalina Island. Water pours shining from her floats. She is obscured for a moment behind a clump of tall etiolated palms. Then she appears again, her engines yelling as she makes the tight turn and finally disappears. The sound fades; the surf remains. I am not sure I was meant for such brilliant and perpetual sunshine. I never accepted their injections. Perhaps I should have stayed on the horse. White faceless heads turn towards the Cross. Christ is remembered in fire and moonlight. In Tennessee Christ is revenged in blood and steel.
Mrs Cornelius says in the long run everything usually turns out for the best. It is a tribute to her tolerance and optimism. Personally, I can no longer keep my spirits up. Too many have suffered. Too many have failed. The little girls sing their songs in the Church. Christ is Risen! We have trampled death with death and to those in the tombs we bring life! I see no evidence. All but a handful of us are left. The rest, we should face it, are all Judenknechte these days. On a Thursday afternoon I close my shop. I walk up towards the tranquil convents in the norther parts of Portobello Road. Here the scrap-metal merchants advertise what they will pay for lead, copper, zinc on greasy blackboards propped outside doorways hung with old coats and clean rags. There is an air of peace on Thursday afternoons, a stillness; a pause in the conflict. The sound of car engines becomes muted and distant, like bees in a summer garden. In July and August you see butterflies in the street, dancing over the waits of the monasteries. The children run up and down the kerbs and steps; they cry secret names from unwashed mouths, grimace with unwanted faces. The nuns smile without meaning. The litter of the morning waves and flaps. Nervous dogs with tucked-in tails sniff carefully from stack to stack and any prize is seized swiftly, then they run, forever guilty, anticipating attack. They snarl and huddle in the alleys and sidestreets. Buildings lean and sway under the burden of degenerate poverty; old women pick rotten fruit from the gutters, moving ponderously and bending painfully. Swaggering boys purse their lips at you, their hands in back pockets, and call like carrion to one another across the gaps in the city. Little painted girls ogle you from lascivious, contemptuous eyes. A bank of cloud rises above walls and roofs, blinding white with the sun behind it; a choir of angels and the Virgin Mary. To inhabit a city with a pulsing golden dome I should have to go back nearly fifty years. Then all this seemed capable of remedy. Mrs Cornelius’s sons call me a sleazy old fascist, but they say this to everyone. I am a visionary, no more, no less. They could not understand how desperate things seemed. They have come to accept this horror as the norm. We hoped for better. In 1959 I wrote that our chances were almost all gone. What was left of the Empire? What of the Law? Does this make me a luftmentsh?
In 1964 I wrote to Harold Wilson begging him in the name of sanity to consider the real problems of this country. He must have laughed as he crumpled up my letter and put his two hands firmly on the wheel, turning our ship towards the mirage. They said we had easy money. They said we were enjoying a new age of Liberty and Hope. I saw only Licence and Damnation. They said I was a complaining old Jew. They will say anything to diminish my warnings. Today some of them surely must understand how, on every level, they deceived themselves. Little creatures scuttle amongst the ruins, tittering and grinning, creeping from fissures, retreating under broken slabs. This is the inheritance of Carthage. Is the Socialist glad of his euphoria now? Did it achieve what we hoped? Khob’n in bod! These champions of the working class added a new dimension to property speculation; and sold the country lock, stock and barrel to the red-lipped brokers of Carthage.