England began to go wrong after the old King died. I remember how hopeful everyone was at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Mrs Cornelius bought a television to watch it. She didn’t pay cash. She got it on the ‘never-never’ when you could buy whatever you wanted on credit. You did not have to be a Bertrand Russell to see the result. Almost instantly we witnessed a falling away of morals, people’s failure to accept responsibility for their own actions. You stopped saving and started speculating. This phenomenon was reflected in the large issues as well as the domestic. Even as the English let the old empire slip into the hands of godless black dictators, they anticipated a forthcoming New Elizabethan Age. Presumably we were going to buy that on hire-purchase instalments, too. We were entering an era of prosperity and choice, they said. We had more technicolour films, certainly, and they ended rationing so that you could buy more sweets or cardigans, but they cultivated, in my opinion, a false hope. Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to a Greek was significant to those of us attending the Bayswater Orthodox Church, but then Philip was inducted into the Anglican faith and nothing came of that. Once the Greeks had counted on the British to save Christendom. Now the British looked aside and could not fill their own churches.
I sometimes wish I had not witnessed this decline, that I had arrived later, when the worst was over. But by that reasoning, I suppose, I would have been in a camp again somewhere in Europe. English social coherence lasted untouched to 1950 but was disappearing by 1958 when national service ended. Then came commercial television, the Egg Marketing Board, immigration and the notion of individual rights over the common good.
‘Of course,’ I tell Mrs Cornelius, ‘I blame Adolf Hitler.’ She does not disagree. To fight Hitler, the British Empire had to bankrupt herself. Britain mortgaged her heritage to the United States who pretended to help her fight the War but actually squeezed her dry. She had to sacrifice her workforce and watch her cities, already weakened by Hitler’s bombs and rockets, collapse into rubble. Thereafter she was in permanent debt to the American banks. The Jews decided her foreign policy. When the War was over, the best of Britain’s young people who survived went to Australia, Canada and South Africa, leaving only the riff-raff, the spivs, the Teddy boys and skiffle-kids. Instead of exporting ships, we exported pop music. Many German and Italian POWs chose to stay here, but Britain could not ask her former Allies for manpower because their own numbers were also depleted. So to replace the men she had lost, she called on the very people she had defended herself against, her ‘lesser half-breeds without law or order’, as Mr Kipling called them. Darkies and Orientals flooded into the vacuum Hitler had created of Notting Hill, Notting Dale and Brixton.
By 1955 our entire neighbourhood was a festering slum occupied by drug dealers, calypso singers and pimps. Ask poor Perek Rachman! He was destroyed by them and their degenerate allies, the Negrophilic decadent Cliveden set, Jewish aristocrats like John Profumo and whores like Christine Keeler. Her lovers made up half the House of Lords on one side, and an entire steel band on the other. Sports people and film stars like Freddy Fowler and Diana Dors enjoyed nothing better than being seen with Soho gang bosses and their powerful police friends from West End Central.
I knew all this at first hand from Mrs Cornelius. She was still doing film and TV work in 1950, though her roles became smaller due to American movies attracting a larger public. These, too, contributed to the rot. Richard Widemark and Robert Mitcham had a great deal to answer for. I told Mr Widemark this to his face on the bombsite where they were filming Knights of the City, in which Mrs Cornelius played a barmaid.
‘Mr Widemark, do you know that you are held up as a model for our young people?’ I asked him. We stood together in the ruins beside the Thames. Six o’clock in the morning. Widemark seemed unmoved. He asked me politely if I knew where you could buy American cigarettes. I was able to get him a couple of cartons of Pall Malls from contacts I had in the USAF PX.
After 1946 there was not a Hollywood sofa unsoaked with blood or a lake which did not contain a dozen corpses wearing concrete overshoes. For every Singin’ in the Rain there were fifty Pickups on South Street. Meanwhile, the US scriptwriters rewrote our history to make Americans the heroes of every wartime encounter. Errol Flynn (admittedly Tasmanian originally) and John Wayne (who had had a secret sex change operation) personally saved Burma and China from the Japanese. Robert Ryan single-handedly defeated the Germans on D-Day. Those of us who suffered through the dark years of the War, who saw the British flyers going up day and night against the superior might of the Luftwaffe, still felt America might have stepped in a little earlier and, instead of supporting Hitler and Mussolini and Franco, before Hitler declared war on her in 1941, saved us all the trouble of the War and its consequences. No wonder the British public, who suffered so much, became confused by this imported American communist culture. For a while I was quite bitter about it. I watched Hollywood rewriting my history before my eyes.
‘You’ve lost th’ knack of enjoyin’ life as it comes, Ivan.’ Mrs Cornelius cannot help loving pleasure. Like my Esmé, she is an Erdgeist. She will never lose her joy in existence. She cheers me up in my most gloomy moments. She will not accept thanks. She still denies she got me transferred to the Institute and from there to freedom, even though she met me in Majorca, after I had been saved by Major Pujol. A coincidence? Extremely unlikely!
When the submarine picked us up I was able to hang on to my pistols, but my papers were lost, as was the last of my near useless ‘snow’. I told Major Pujol how I had succeeded in escaping Red Barcelona in the boat, only to be attacked by the Fiat floatplane. He and the Italians were full of apologies, especially once they realised that my dead friend had been an Italian. Zoyea was not so forgiving of them, however, and refused to have anything to do with them or any of the other Italians in Palma even after we reached the city. I was the only one who could comfort her, but she became increasingly melancholic. We remained in Palma for the summer. One afternoon I borrowed Major Pujol’s car and motored down the winding roads until we arrived at the pretty port of Andratx. The fishing village had lost none of its charm. We stopped for lunch at the Restaurant Fleming, and there by the big window I saw Mrs Cornelius. She had just finished singing and stood by the big, dark Broadwood piano looking out to sea. She was a Vermeer. I spoke her name and she turned.
‘Ivan!’ She came over to our table, chortling and winking at me about my delightful little ‘catch’, for Zoyea had now become a very pretty young lady.
Leaving Germany, originally she thought for a holiday, Mrs Cornelius had first arrived in the village with Desmond Reid who owned a flat here. Reid, too, found it politic to leave the rather oppressive atmosphere of Hitler’s Berlin. Did I know Major Nye was in Palma? I did not, of course.