Until I arrived here I had not known that the British urban peasant is as stuffed with superstition, misinformation, prejudice, raw bigotry, self-deluding self-importance and low cunning as any inhabitant of a Port Said souk; he can also be quite as good-hearted, sociable, ferocious in word and kindly in deed as his Arab counterpart.
In Aristotelian terms, as I told the older Cornelius boy, about the only thing distinguishing the Briton from the Berber is that the Berber washes more frequently. But he is unteachable. Last week he admitted he had never heard of G. H. Teed, who knew more about the British Empire than Kipling! The boy despises his own heritage. Such shame, I told him, is useless. Britain could be a great imperial power again. He laughed at me. He guffawed in the face of his country’s finest traditions. Only in a truly decadent country would such irreverence go unchallenged. He says he does not hate me, only what I represent. Myself I represent I say, and God I represent. Is that what you hate? It is a mystery what he finds amusing. Mrs Cornelius has hinted more than once that his father was insane. It seems extraordinary that I was only forty when he was born. Two lifetimes.
Mrs Cornelius insists I was just as obnoxious at their age. I somehow cannot see that.
Saa’atak muta qadima, as they say in Marrakech. She is very defensive of those children and yet they are a tremendous disappointment to her. They showed a few seconds from Ace Among Aces on the television a few weeks ago. There we were in the same scene, Max Peters, Gloria Cornish and Lon Chaney - a moment of exquisite camaraderie, of poignant memory. I telephoned Granada to ask if they would let me watch the whole film. They said it came from America. I got the name, something like When Hollywood Was King, but I never heard.
There are many people in Hollywood now who suppress the truth about silent pictures. If they did not the public would soon begin to question their talent, their creativity! We are allowed only to laugh at the past or to forget it. This is how they control us. They put joke music in place of dramatic music. I know their strategies and obfuscations. They respect no one. The silent film was a rare art form. The talkers encouraged lazy directors, second-rate actors, just as big budgets were to ruin television. There is something to be said for the discipline of limitation. It was disgusting what they did to Griffith and the rest of us.
The reason I never continued my movie career was because I left Hollywood a silent star but returned to a world where American English had become the only language permitted an actor. And the Zionists say they care nothing for Imperialism. They took control of everything. Their ambitions are reflected in their films. Look at Hollywood’s devotion to Kipling. Kipling’s books are loved second to the Bible by Texans. The Jew is the arch-chameleon. The Arabs will tell you the same. One only has to look at the BBC. It is controlled by Jews.
I was talking only the other day to Desmond Reid, the scriptwriter, in Henneky’s. He works there. He agrees with me. ‘Lefty faggot yids, mate!’ His words, not mine. He writes the thrillers. I think he was with Dick Barton, Special Agent. He says I help him with his ideas. Reid was the first professional writer to suggest I order my memoirs for publication. Although he did all the Sexton Blakes in the 50s he never knew G.H. Teed personally. Apparently Teed died in hospital suddenly of a tropical disease before I arrived in England. Teed, I told Reid, was my soul’s ease during some of my most trying years. Teed knew a thing or two about world politics. Unlike ‘King Kong’ Wallace, who wrote against Jews and Anarchists but was probably a secret Zionist and a Mason, George Hamilton Teed possessed the world traveller’s sophisticated understanding of English values and of the Englishman’s responsibility always to exemplify those values.
Reid says it is no longer permitted to voice such honest, common-sense opinions nowadays.
His own television work suffers, he says, from that kind of censorship. The belief that we have a free press is a nonsense, he says. In many aspects Nazi Germany had a freer press than contemporary Britain.
Our picture was in the Film Fun. They said it was Richard Dix and Elizabeth Allen, but that was the remake. Dix never could grow a moustache. It is typical - they care nothing for their history. I have the clipping. I showed it to them. It’s the fine photography and crashes that provide the thrills - Variety. Peters and Cornish are never less than adequate. ‘Oh, let the past bury the past!’ Sammy, that fat fryshop Romeo, hangs around Mrs Cornelius and claims to be an old friend from Whitechapel. (This is what the British call ‘tolerance’ and the rest of us call moral torpor. Through such somnambulism are empires thrown away.) Why does she let him come round? The man has no mind, no soul. Morality must change, I am the first to agree, to suit our conditions. The morality of the Bedouin Arab is as valid to him in his deserts and watering-holes as the morality of the Japanese samurai or the Russian Cossack in his native sphere. Morality, I say, is specific. Virtue is general. To speak for a New Morality is not to speak for Chaos but to recognise Change. I am over seventy and even I understand that. Perhaps experience has taught us what these spoon-fed hippies can never learn.
This is certainly not the British Empire I was brought up to admire.
In caverns deep beneath the dunes and sarira a hundred empires might have come and gone leaving behind no more than a mystery, a few scraps of language, perhaps the trace of a legend, a crumbling pillar. It grew vividly clear how frail were human aspirations and I was sure that very shortly our mummified corpses would add a further numinous stratum to that shifty geology.
Since rescue was unlikely I became doggedly fatalistic, reconciled, like the Bedouin, to my end. This is how some of us survive. Others, when there is little water and they are lost with the nearest human settlement weeks away, retreat, as a saving state of mind, into raving madness: the very alternative Kolya had taken. He now assured me we were on course for Zazara but refused to let me see the compass. ‘There’s no point in your confusing the issues, Dimka dear.’ Anyway, he said, we had passed beyond the material state and would soon enter the golden limbo which lay before the gates of Heaven. We had nothing to fear. He forced more of his excellent cocaine on me. He had at least a kilo.
Soon the only sane company I had was my grumbling camel, Uncle Tom. Kolya continued to develop his obsessions with the theory that not only was Wagner heavily influenced by Arab music but that the composer had been at least a quarter Bedouin. ‘We know he experienced his own spiritual struggle in the desert.’ He hummed a snatch of Parsifal. It is always depressing when a good friend is gripped by such paranoid banalities.
Although we were still not quite out of water, Kolya was drinking and splashing with complete abandon. He claimed that the cocaine which sustained us improved in direct proportion to the amount of liquid consumed. I was only glad that he was at least equally generous with the camels, who were now considerably fitter than either of us.