His wife and family had been evacuated to Hertfordshire (quite near your wife's village, so perhaps she knows them) and he said his wife found the country a little dull, but the CHILDREN were doing splendidly and getting so fat and sturdy on the good country food and fresh air. He said he thought country people were so kind, much more NEIGHBOURLY than they were in Town. So I said, I expected that was because on had fewer neighbours and VALUED them more, and of course, in case of sickness and so on, one couldn't always get to a doctor or hospital so quickly, so that neighbours expected to help one another. But the thing that MOST struck him, he said, was that his children were learning such a lot. He said: "You'd be surprised, the things my kiddies are getting to know — all about animals, and what they eat and how to look after them, and how to grow things — the know a lot more than their parents, my kiddies do. It makes me realise," he said — he was a very intelligent man and so nice — "that I don't know nothing! What do I know? Only how to drive a cab round London — anybody could do that. But I go down there and talk to the family that's taken us in — very kind people they are — and we sit down after supper and talk about quite different TOPICS from what I'm used to. My wife, too — you know, the women usually (excuse me, miss) just talk gossip and that; but down there, we all discuss topics."
Now isn't that a splendid tribute to the country people? And isn't it nice to think that those children, when they grow up, will understand what they read about Agriculture, and Milk and Pig-Marketing Boards, and all those DIFFICULT "Topics" that we all have to vote about — so often without knowing anything!
I've put all this into my report, of course, but it cheered me up so much, I thought I'd like to tell you. Your friend in "the Department" (even to you, I'd better not mention names, had I?) is most friendly, and says our reports are VERY helpful, because we just LISTEN to what people say, instead of asking questions — and as you so RIGHTLY say, dear Lord Peter, if you ask questions, everybody gets self-conscious and tells you what they think will sound well. I used to think it was so cynical of one's nurse to say, "Ask no questions and you'll hear no LIES" — but I dare say she was really a very good psychologist in a practical sort of way.
I must stop now. All your "cats" and "kittens" send you their very LOUDEST purrs!!!
Most sincerely yours,
KATHERINE ALEXANDRA CLIMPSON
7. Extracts from the private Diary of Lord Peter Wimsey, somewhere abroad.
Tuesday
… My brother writes that he is planting oak-trees in the Long Coppice. I acknowledge that there is something in him that is indomitable. He is persuaded that the next generation, if not this, will see the end of our stewardship, and for him (being what he is) that means the end of everything that was England. Even if we, by some miracle, are not left ruined beyond repair, even if a new kind of society does not take the soil from us and hand it over to God knows what kind of commercial spoliation, his personal situation is hopeless, because he can place no confidence in his heir. He knows well enough that Jerry would not care if the whole place were surrendered to ribbon-building or ragwort. But what the land requires, the land shall have, so long as he is alive to serve it. All the same — oaks!
Two hundred years ago, life presented little difficulty for such as us. Personal privilege and personal responsibility marched together. Now, something within us makes common cause with those who attack privilege, but forbids us to deny the responsibility. I have tried — Heaven knows how hard — to view myself in the light of history and acquiesce in my own decay, but there is some vital imperative in my blood that breaks down my own indifference…
Wednesday
Arguing all evening with P-; very leftish, of course, denouncing the present economic system and eloquent about freedom and equality. What madness coupled those two words together? They are mutually destructive. The "system" arose from the determined struggle to "free" economics from the control of Church and State. The war-cry was "equal opportunity" for all. What happens when you demand equal opportunity for the rabbit and the tiger? P- talks about "the natural law"; I presume he does not mean the law of the jungle, nor yet whatever it is theologians understand by the term. (Who was it said that whenever the word "nature" came into an argument he prepared himself to hear bad reasoning?) What do we know about nature, except that it is man's nature to be "unnatural"? Where does man begin? Marx said that man "first distinguished himself from the animals when he produced the means of subsistence." First — chronologically? We have no means of knowing what man did "first". If he lived like an ape on wild fruit and made a song to celebrate the largest pumpkin, was the song the act of an animal? And where is the proof that the song came into history later than the sowing of pumpkin-seed? This is Rousseu's noble savage all over again. We have no proof either way. Song and pumpkin-seed are alike subject to mutability.
Birds sing — but it is always the same song. Only man sings a new song every day.
"Man first distinguished himself" — "first," then, in the sense of the primary quality of the distinction. But that is to assume what you set out to prove…
Thursday
… I was glad last night's discussion was carried on in French. It would have been better still if I could have spoken Z-'s language, or he mine, but at least we had both to make the same kind of mental adjustment, in order to think in the same speech. To negotiate, not knowing what the other fellow's words mean to him, or what one's own words mean to him, is like wrestling with a feather bed. The professional interpreter is a minor miracle — far better than a man translating his own words badly into a language in which he cannot think — for he does interpret and not merely de-code. Even so, I have heard a phrase change status and stature — change emphasis — in the course of interpretation. The original speaker is still thinking in his own tongue, and the hearer in his. It's a question of approach to the subject; in speaking another language one instinctively alters one's mental attitude to suit the medium. The mere knowledge that other attitudes are possible is a safeguard against insularity of thought, and the politician with no language but his own can never really hope to solve international problems — worse, he can never really understand what the problem is at all. That was the value of the classical education — nothing to do with whether Latin fits you to be a successful pill-merchant or engineer — the value of the double mind. If a diplomatist is not double-tongued he will almost certainly appear double-faced; not through treachery but through ignorance. I would have no man eligible for Parliament that could not think in two languages…
Friday
… Poor P-! he avoided me in the street today. At least I think so. Why else should he dive so hurriedly into the baby-linen shop by mistake for the café next door? It must have been an error of haste — even if some unfortunate indiscretion had brough baby-linen into his life, he would scarcely be making his purchases in person. He probably thought I was going to tackle him about Russia. I wasn't. Does one button-hole a man in the street for a chat about his wife's elopement? Le chef de gare il est cocu, poor devil, and that's all there is to be said about it. He's sincere, and the Helsinki business has been a severe shock to him. He isn't one of the whole-hoggers who are ready to accept an interregnum of fraud and vuilence as a necessary preliminary to the Kingdom of Man on earth. [Passage deleted here, dealing with probably military and political repercussions] Still, oddly enough, my own immediate feeling is a queer sense of liberation. All these years, to express my doubts about the Russian experiment has laid one under the imputation of upholding capitalism, class-privilage, and so on, for the sake of one's own advantage. As though one had been shown God and had slammed the door in His face for fear of judgement. Difficult to explain that the fear was of another kind — or perhaps not fear, but an instinctive mistrust — something in the back of one's mind saying "C'est louche." "A plague o' both your houses," one said, "Moscow and Berlin alike; the moment you get inside the door there's the same bad smell in the basement." Now the offence is rank, and stinks in P-'s nostrils. Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. But was Soviet doctrine ever anything but a weed at root, like the other?