Dreaming, I was only dreamingI wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart, dearDarling, I hope that my dream never haunted youMy heart is telling you how much I wanted youGloomy Sunday
It’s dark by now and I’m in Ophir Gardens casting my mind back to Eglantine Avenue over the dark gulf of intervening time, and it’s dark by now there too. The record comes to an end and I think how there seemed to be more hiss and crackle on your vinyl copy, more of the atmospherics of lost time, forty years since Billie laid the track down and I imagine the dust of 1942 sifting down into the grooves of the recording back then, getting into the voice and the instruments, and making that slight lisp in her enunciation all the more poignant.
You got up and drew the curtains and the noise of the wind in the trees outside died to a whisper. I can see her with that white gardenia in her hair, you said, isn’t it strange how the song makes you see the singer, she’s standing in a spotlight in a bar in New York, you said, and it’s dark but there’s those little tea-lights in faceted glass holders on the tables and you can see hands holding cigarettes and cocktail glasses, a face or two maybe, the smoke curling up and drifting into the spotlight, and I think how strange it is that your few words, But so hard to forget, should make me see you as you were then, or what you have become to me since then. I see the blue vein in the back of your hand as you write and you go over to lift the needle from where it’s bumping at the end of the last track. You know, she took her name from Billie Dove, you said, her favourite movie star, her real name was Eleanora Fagan Gough. Her father was Holiday but she hardly ever saw him, I think she took his name as a kind of accusation, or revenge. Not that you’d ever know from her autobiography, they say she made half of it up, you said. Billie Dove.
You went over and touched the two intertwining doves of the L’Air du Temps stopper. Nineteen forty-eight, you said, March 16th, Billie plays Carnegie Hall, she was released from the reformatory just eleven days before. So you see, your Lalique bottle will always remind me of that, of Billie’s greatest concert. Do all your bottles have memories like that? I asked. Well, they’re all souvenirs of one kind or another, you said. Some of this, some of that. Inconsequential things, sometimes. Business trips even, the little bits of pleasure that happen when you’re somewhere on business, and you manage to escape the business for a while. Well, I don’t know that much about your business, I said, and then you began to tell me.
I work for MO2, you said. You won’t have heard of it. Technically — but unofficially, as it were — we’re supposed to report both to Home Affairs and the Northern Ireland Office, but they leave us pretty much alone. MO stands for Mass Observation, you know the group that was set up in the Thirties? Only vaguely, I said. Didn’t the film-maker Humphrey Jennings work with them? You know, Night Mail? My father loved the Auden poem that was written for it, and I recited
This is the Night Mail crossing the border,Bringing the cheque and the postal order,Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,The shop at the corner and the girl next door …
And behind my own voice I could hear Auden’s clipped English accent as the steam train trailed its long plume of smoke like writing across the English landscape. My father used to recite the fourth line in a broad Belfast accent, I said, it’s a proper rhyme when you do it that way. Well, it’s near a proper rhyme in Yorkshire too, you said. Anyway, you said, Jennings was one of the founders, it all started off quite by accident. By coincidence. It’s 1936, the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, erstwhile poet, that’s Harrisson with two esses, has a poem in the New Statesman, same issue as a poem by Charles Madge, and a piece by Jennings. Bunch of left-wing intellectuals, some might call them. They begin to collaborate. The ordinary British people have never been looked at properly before, so they begin to observe them. They want to know how things are, so they can make things better. They get other writers and artists on board. William Empson, for one, you know, the Seven Types of Ambiguity bloke. They hire a team of investigators, young middle-class clerks mostly, set them up in a terrace house in Bolton, mix with the working class. The investigators go to the pub, mix in, watch the drinking habits of the men, how often they use the spittoon, that kind of thing. They keep a record of everything, down to the number of pints they drink themselves. The portions of chips they bought at the end of the night, they even used to count the chips in the bag and put that into the record.
Then Harrisson recruits the poet David Gascoyne, Marxist, surrealist, you said, and in a way this is really a surrealist enterprise. And Gascoyne gets them to take on Humphrey Spender, the photographer, brother of the poet Stephen. You know Spender, those classic shots of Bolton, all smog and grit and washing on the line. The famous one, the two little boys peeing with their trousers half-down, and the factory chimneys belching out smoke in the background. Spender felt a little guilty about it all, thought of himself as a snooper, an eavesdropper, which of course he was in a way. Which they all were, for all that they were doing it for the greater good. But no one had done this kind of thing before, and Spender loved the detail, the way the light shone on the cobbles. He’s got a lovely picture, the chromium-plated parts of a Hoover someone had displayed on the mantel of their front parlour.
Mass Observation aimed to focus not only on the people, you said, but the things surrounding the people. Hence the mantelpiece ornaments, men’s penknives, their pipes, their collar-studs, kitchen implements, women’s hatpins, sewing-kits, anything they thought might represent the people. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of dialectical materialism. There’s a file somewhere of button-boxes and their contents, you know the sort of thing your mother might have had, biscuit-tins or tea-caddies filled with odd buttons — and here I remembered sifting through my mother’s Quality Street tin of buttons, buttons of Bakelite and Celluloid, mock tortoiseshell and amber, buttons for blouses and shirts and jackets and overcoats — quite incredible, really, you said, the level of detail they went into.
Anyway, you said, that’s where MO2 got its inspiration from, to begin with. Sometime in the early Seventies, some bright spark in Westminster decides Westminster doesn’t really understand Northern Ireland. This is about the time when the Brits — listen to me talking, and I’m half a Brit myself — decide for once and for all to get shot of Northern Ireland. So the bright spark gets them to set up an MO-type organisation. Of course it’s all done with a nod and a wink. They spend a couple of years putting wheels in motion, recruiting staff, before some other bright spark comes to the conclusion that the original MO methods wouldn’t be entirely appropriate for Northern Ireland. Just think of it, the Bolton people sometimes thought the MO people were spies. Spender nearly got his camera smashed on a couple of occasions. So it’s back to the drawing board, and they come up with MO2. And that’s a misnomer, really, for what they decide to do is not Mass Observation, it’s more like Focused Observation — FO, if you like — because they go for selected groups of people, not the ordinary folk, whoever they might be — and there’s nowt as queer as folk, you said in a stage Yorkshire accent — and not so much the people at the top, but the people they think might rise to the top. The up-and-coming cream, the incipient meritocracy. For this is a long-term project. After so many centuries, what’s another decade or two?