The education he received was cramping and old-fashioned even for his time. But the old traditions of sectarian misdirection still in spite of a certain advance in technical efficiency, cripple and distort the general mind. “All that has been changed,” cry indignant teachers under criticism. But the evidence that this teaching of theirs still fails to produce a public that is alert, critical and capable of vigorous readjustment in the face of overwhelming danger, is to be seen in the newspapers that satisfy the Tewler public, the arguments and slogans that appeal to it, the advertisements that succeed with it, the stuff it swallows. It is a press written by Homo Tewler for Homo Tewler all up and down the scale. The Times Tewler, the Daily Mail Tewler, the Herald, the Tribune the Daily Worker; there is no difference except a difference in scale and social atmosphere. Through them all ran the characteristic Tewler streak of wilful ignorance, deliberate disingenuousness and self-protective illusion.
The opening phase of world catastrophe took Edward Albert completely by surprise.
A slogan that dominated the English world at that time was “Safety First.” In his childhood, Edward Albert remembered there had been a card with that inscription upon the mantelshelf of his mother’s living-room, but that had been a chance anticipation. He could not remember how it had got there or what became of it. The Safety First phase in British history came later, and it was largely due to an organised campaign on the part of the Insurance companies, transport services, and all the great damages-paying corporations, to train the public not to incur damage. It spread through the whole social body; it intensified the respectful feudal tradition that you cannot be too careful if you want to avoid trouble; it infected and dominated the administration of the country; it became the national motto. Dieu et mon Droit was felt to be an old-fashioned piece of swagger that might easily get us into difficulties. So that when at last Mr Neville Chamberlain gave up appeasement, in a fit of exasperation at the unendurable mockery of his umbrella, and declared war, Edward Albert, in common with a very considerable number of his comfortable independent fellow-citizens, made no attempt whatever to join in the fray. He concentrated his thoughts very largely on the discreet husbanding of his investments and whatever safe forms of tax evasion could be discovered.
Throughout the later months of 1939 Tewler England and Tewler France did not so much wage war as evade it. They potted at the enemy from behind the Maginot line and left Poland to its fate. They watched Russia readjust its frontiers in preparation for the inevitable struggle against the common enemy with profound disapproval. That Prince of Tewlers, the young King of the Belgians, obstinately refused to prepare a common front against the gathering onslaught. He was neutral, master in his own country, he insisted, and nothing could happen to him. He uttered a squeal for help when his frontier collapsed upon him and vanished from the scene, and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men will never restore a Europe that will have any rôle for him again. The military science of France and England required that when an army is outflanked it should either retreat headlong or surrender. When confronted by a pincer-like movement, a soldier and a gentleman abandons his men and material and bolts home, ascribing his defeat to the decadent morals of the time. The British tradition then was a Day of Prayer, But wars are won by ungentlemanly persons who break the recognised rules of war and swear freely. The reaction of Almighty Providence to these Anglican praying bouts was ambiguous. The English and French strategists got themselves soundly licked by tanks, planes and this professional horror of nippers, and they were rather scandalised by the obstinacy of their men who insisted upon going on fighting until disaster took on an appearance of glorious retreat. Goebbels had only to say “Envelopment” or “Penetration”, and the confidence of the American and English military experts ran out at their heels. Pétain surrendered France. Until that happened Morningside Prospect had seemed a whole world away from bloodshed and violence. But the French collapse sent a shock through the villas. Newspapers fluttered at the garden gates and men sat in the golf club house with grave faces and stopped to talk war upon the tees. The Prospect had felt very stout-hearted about the U-boat sinkings and the German sea raiders. Its confidence in our navy was uncritical and complete. It gloried vicariously when the ship-saving instincts of the Admiralty were outraged by the Ajax and the Achilles, and Nelson came down from his aloofness in Trafalgar Square to revive the traditions of mutinous in-fighting. Morningside had never believed that our island frontiers could be scaled. And then came a positive air invasion of Britain. This scared and impressed the Prospect very badly, and it was only a year later that a belated but well-written pamphlet told them and the world all about the Battle of Britain. What was more obvious was that air raids were increasing at a great pace and that the Battle of the Atlantic was affecting the grocers’ bills. There had been black-out regulations in operation after November 1939, but the Prospect had never taken them very seriously until the autumnal raids of 1940. Then the mutual watchfulness of the neighbours was stimulated to the pitch of acerbity. Mr Copper of Caxton, in spite of his mature years, almost had a fight with a young fool on leave who was actually smoking a cigarette! outside one of the Celestial Prospect villas, and he followed this up by a denunciatory visit to the Brighthampton Police. The Brighthampton Police asked Mr Copper if he couldn’t perhaps do something to help, instead of just giving trouble,
Mr Copper was before all things a clear-headed man.
“It’s come to a point when people like us have got to look after things a bit,” he said to Mr Pildington. “We ought to have some sort of Vigilantes about.”
Mr Pildington thought there ought to be a Committee of Public Safety. “There’s people,” he said, “been coming up air raid nights and sleeping out on the links. It isn’t safe. It isn’t—orderly. We ought to call a meeting.” In a week the idea was well in hand. There was a suggestion that either Sir Humbert Compostella or Lord Foundry, formerly Sir Adrian von Stahlheim, be made chairman, but Sir Humbert, it seemed, was on a mission to America for an indefinite period, with his entire family, to organise American and British trade relations, and Lord Foundry was too deeply occupied with the production of munitions to be able to spare the time. He was known to advocate the production of tanks of the land ironclad type on a large scale, but so far the British military authorities had only been badly defeated twice by these unsportsmanlike weapons, and Lord Foundry had an up-hill job to put his ideas into operation. By the summer of ’41, however, he was making the country tank-conscious. But I anticipate. The meeting was in October, ’40. There was some doubt about inviting Mr Droop to the meeting.
“I can’t stand that leg-pulling of his,” said Mr Copper, “when it comes to serious things.” But liberal ideas prevailed and Mr Droop came to the meeting and didn’t bring up any nasty remarks about Sir Oswald Mosley or anything unpleasant of that sort. Indeed in some ways he was almost helpful.
The Committee met and passed several resolutions. They would employ the two jobbing gardeners who worked the Prospect as night watchmen and they would make a subscription to the Local Defence Volunteers. They then dispersed, thinking heavily. “I don’t like the way things are going,” said Edward Albert to his Mary. “I feel somehow we ought to be doing more about it.”