”
“Ah, that’s only for show!
“Ah, that’s only for show!
Orwell
The idea
of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his
parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his
lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a
man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh,
after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and
university education and found it a ‘sickly, debilitating debauch’. There is much in
middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class
angle.
In a working-class home — I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of
comparatively prosperous homes — you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human
atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker,
if he is in steady work and drawing good wages — an ‘if which gets bigger and bigger —
has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall
more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar
easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best.
Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances
mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one
side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing,
and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting
himself on the rag mat — it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it
but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.
This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so many as
before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question — whether Father is in
work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round
the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and
could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years into the
Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the things I have
imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is
‘educated’, it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands
who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says ‘Ah wur coomin’ oop street’. And there won’t be
a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of
rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly
be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no
poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have
been sup-pressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won’t be so many children, either, if
the birth-controllers have their way. But move backwards into the Middle Ages and you
are in a world almost equally foreign. A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in
your face because there is no chimney, mouldy bread, ‘Poor John’, lice, scurvy, a yearly
child-birth and a yearly child-death, and the priest terrifying you with tales of Hell.
Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modem engineering, nor the radio, nor the
cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are published yearly, nor the crowds
at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interiors —
especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was
still prosperous — that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live
in.
SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)
The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the
Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who
have been raped and crucified before the eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is
the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the
NEWS CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with their far subtler methods of
distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the
struggle.
The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government
(including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution
than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of
compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao
fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever
about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time
past a reign of terror — forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the
press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial — has been in progress.
When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had
long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any
other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the
people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not
because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the
Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries
at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes — the Communists.
Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-
line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle
is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying
to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are
so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England
have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force;
that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois refonnism and using the
whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of
revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as
wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them. Mr
Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In
Spain the Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that
the Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few
collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and
presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there is no longer any need to
placate them. To see how the present situation arose, one has got to look back to the
origins of the civil war.
Franco’s bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in that it was a
military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion, and therefore had not much mass
backing, though Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart
from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge,
parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various forces which
are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and
clericalism; but so does the ‘liberal’ bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more
modem version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn’t called Fascism. The ‘liberal’
bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for
the degree of progress implied in the phrase ‘la carriere ouverte aux talents’. For clearly
he has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too
poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops’
vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course to the friend of the
catamite of the duke’s illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of such a blatant reactionary as
Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality
deadly enemies, are lighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular
Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People’s
Front). It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist,
as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.
In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to make
itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism,
they are not lighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois
democracy, i. e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for
Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers understood the
issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated they did not content themselves
with driving the rebellious troops out of the towns; they also took the opportunity of
seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government
by means of local committees, workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made
the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active revolutionaries were
Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in
nominal control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent
Government had been of approximately the same bourgeois-refonnist character. At the
beginning this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in Catalonia,
was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was still happening
when I reached Spain in December) to disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power
slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-
wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of
hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified.
Henceforward every move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed
towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution. Out of the many
illustrations I could choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers’
militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with officers and men
receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality, and the substitution
of the Popular Army (once again, in Communist jargon, ‘People’s Army’), modelled as
far as possible on an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense
differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a military necessity, and
almost certainly it does make for military efficiency, at least for a short period. But the
undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every
department the same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the
outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary bourgeois State,
with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the status quo.
This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have taken place
without foreign interference. But the military weakness of the Government made this
impossible. In the face of France’s foreign mercenaries they were obliged to turn to
Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms sup — plied by Russia has been greatly
exaggerated (in my first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary
machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into power. To
begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good military qualities of the
international Brigades (not necessarily Communist but under Communist control),
immensely raised the Communist prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico
were the only countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get
money for their weapons, but to extort tenns as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms
were: ‘Crush the revolution or you get no more arms. ’ The reason usually given for the
Russian attitude is that if Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet
pact (and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also,
that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in
Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure has been exerted by the
Russian Government. But this, even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties
of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the
Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they control, plus the
Communist press of the whole world, have used all their immense and ever-increasing
influence upon the side of counter-revolution.
In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in Spain, on the
Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the
Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even
more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was
accompanied.
Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He would
tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution,
because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism
and defend democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the
Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. It is a mistake to think that this has no
relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small and comparatively weak. We
shall see its relevance quickly enough if England enters into an alliance with the
U. S. S. R. ; or perhaps even earlier, for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to
increase — visibly is increasing — as more and more of the capitalist class realize that
latter-day Communism is playing their game.
Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite
real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending — not in so many words, but by
implication — that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of
meaningless wickedness, an aberration, ‘mass sadism’, the sort of thing that would
happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs. Present Fascism in
this fonn, and you can mobilize public opinion against it, at any rate for a while, without
provoking any revolutionary movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois
‘democracy, meaning capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the
troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois ‘democracy’ are
Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling him an impracticable
visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue, that he is splitting the anti-Fascist
forces, that this is not the moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the
moment we have got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are
fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to shut up, you change your tune and call him a
traitor. More exactly, you call him a Trotskyist.
And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word — in Spain at this moment you can be thrown
into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial, on the mere rumour that you are a
Trotskyist — is only beginning to be bandied to and fro in England. We shall be hearing
more of it later. The word ‘Trotskyist’ (or ‘Trotsky-Fascist’) is generally used to mean a
disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to split the left-wing
forces. But it derives its peculiar power from the fact that it means three separate things.
It can mean one who, like Trotsky, wished for world revolution; or a member of the
actual organization of which Trotsky is head (the only legitimate use of the word); or the
disguised Fascist already mentioned. The three meanings can be telescoped one into the
other at will. Meaning No. I may or may not carry with it meaning No. 2, and meaning
No. 2 almost invariably carries with it meaning No. 3. Thus: ‘XY has been heard to speak
favourably of world revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist. ’ In
Spain, to some extent even in England, ANYONE professing revolutionary Socialism
(i. e. professing the things the Communist Party professed until a few years ago) is under
suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of Franco or Hitler.
The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case, unless one happened to
know the contrary, it might be true. A Fascist spy probably WOULD disguise himself as
a revolutionary. In Spain, everyone whose opinions are to the Left of those of the
Communist Party is sooner or later discovered to be a Trotskyist or, at least, a traitor. At
the beginning of the war the POUM, an opposition Communist party roughly
corresponding to the English ILP. , was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the
Catalan Government, later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced
as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands
on being flung into jail.
Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described as ‘working loyally’
beside the Communists. Then the Anarcho-Syndicalists were levered out of the
Government; then it appeared that they were not working so loyally; now they are in the
process of becoming traitors. After that will come the turn of the left-wing Socialists.
Caballero, the left-wing Socialist ex-premier, until May 1937 the idol of the Communist
press, is already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and ‘enemy of the people’. And so the
game continues. The logical end is a regime in which every opposition party and
newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course,
such a regime will be Fascism. It will not be the same as the fascism Franco would
impose, it will even be better than Franco’s fascism to the extent of being worth fighting
for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be
called something different.
Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been against
revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the Russian aid, tended to produce
greater military efficiency. If the Anarchists saved the Government from August to
October 1936, the Communists have saved it from October onwards. But in organizing
the defence they have succeeded in killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not outside). They
made a militarized conscript army possible, but they also made it necessary. It is
significant that as early as January of this year voluntary recruiting had practically
ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army
has got to win with weapons, and it is unlikely that the Government will ever have a large
preponderance of arms unless France intervenes or unless Germany and Italy decide to
make off with the Spanish colonies and leave Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a
deadlock seems the likeliest thing.
And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not intend to lose, that is
certain. On the other hand, an outright victory, with Franco in flight and the Germans and
Italians driven into the sea, would raise difficult problems, some of them too obvious to
need mentioning. There is no real evidence and one can only judge by the event, but I
suspect that what the Government is playing for is a compromise that would leave the
war situation essentially in being. All prophecies are wrong, therefore this one will be
wrong, but I will take a chance and say that though the war may end quite soon or may
drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into
economic zones. Of course, such a compromise might be claimed as a victory by either
side, or by both.
All that I have said in this article would seem entirely commonplace in Spain, or even in
France. Yet in England, in spite of the intense interest the Spanish war has aroused, there
are very few people who have even heard of the enonnous struggle that is going on
behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite
deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the Spanish situation
from being understood. People who ought to know better have lent themselves to the
deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist
propaganda.
It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had been given a
truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an opportunity of learning what
Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism
as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic
void has been established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the
great war ‘against Fascism’ (cf. 1914, ‘against militarism’) which will allow Fascism,
British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.
MARRAKECH (1939)
As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but
they came back a few minutes later.
The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women — threaded their way across the
market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a
short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here
are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a
rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-
ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it
a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name,
no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of
hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be
certain where his own relatives are buried.
When you walk through a town like this — two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at
least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in — when you
see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to
believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality
founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces — besides, there are so many of
them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they
merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral
insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they
si nk back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are
gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a
walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy
underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over
skeletons.
I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.
Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in
fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle
I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the
piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the
bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted
again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow
remain hanging in mid-air.
An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled towards us.
He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of
quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he
said shyly in French:
“/ could eat some of that bread. ”
I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man
is an employee of the Municipality.
When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval
ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to
own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have
ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six
feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster
everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street
there is generally running a little river of urine.
In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black
skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits
cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the
lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a
lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his
grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.
I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a
cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews,
many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette.
Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of
cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I
had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve
hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible
luxury.
As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs,
except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-
workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters — whichever way you look you see
nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the
space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn’t here. Perhaps he is on his way, however.
You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the
poorer Europeans.
“Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews!
They’re the real rulers of this country, you know. They’ve got all the money. They
control the banks, finance — everything. ”
“But,” I said, “isn’t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny
an hour?
”
“Ah, that’s only for show! They’re all money-lenders really. They’re cunning, the Jews. ”
In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned
for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square
meal.
All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the
work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In
northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a
second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances
are that you don’t even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical
landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up
soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the
peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less
interesting to look at.
It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as
tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But
where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does
Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to
an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and
bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of
the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food
out of an eroded soil.
Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on it.
Huge areas which were once covered with forest have turned into a treeless waste where
the soil is exactly like broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with
frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double like
inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds
with their hands, and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk
instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched
wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one’s shoulder, and fitted underneath
with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as
much as the strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a
donkey yoked together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other
hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no harrows, they
merely plough the soil several times over in different directions, finally leaving it in
rough furrows, after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong
patches, to conserve water. Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is never
enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty
or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.
Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each
carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of
them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women,
when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old
creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load
of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her
hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but
mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I
seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,
that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a
father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot,
carrying the baggage.
But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at
about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their
firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say
that I had seen them. Firewood was passing — that was how I saw it. It was only that one
day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a
load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time
I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin,
bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on
Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.
There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is
hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be
considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken
off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing
creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter.
After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it
into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.
This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas — on the whole — the plight of the
human beings does not. 1 am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with
brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled
back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old
woman under her load of sticks.
As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward — a long, dusty
column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men
in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.
They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is
difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were
hidden in reach-me-down khaki unifonns, their feet squashed into boots that looked like
blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small, ft was very
hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs
and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.
As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he
gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not
contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive, ft was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look,
which actually is a look of profound respect. 1 saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is
a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch
syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has
been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.
But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter
twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past.
“How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their
guns in the other direction? ”
It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other
in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating
chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all
knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was
almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of
anned men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them
in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.
BOYS’ WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS’S REPLY (1940)
You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a
small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the
same: a few posters for the DAILY MAIL and the NEWS OE THE WORLD outside, a
poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling
of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny
papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.
Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly overlaps at all
with that of the big news-agents. Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the
number and variety of these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime — cage-
birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess —
has at least one paper devoted to it, and generally several. Gardening and livestock-
keeping must have at least a score between them. Then there are the sporting papers, the
radio papers, the children’s comics, the various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the
large range of papers devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women’s legs,
the various trade papers, the women’s story-papers (the ORACLE, SECRETS, PEG’S
PAPER, etc. etc. ), the needlework papers — these so numerous that a display of them
alone will often fill an entire window — and in addition the long series of ‘Yank Mags’
(FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, WESTERN SHORT STORIES, etc. ), which are
imported shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And
the periodical proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the ALDINE BOXING
NOVELS, the BOYS’ FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS’ OWN LIBRARY and
many others.
Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of
the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in
documentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is
aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably a
very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly,
which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely. The same applies to
some extent to the daily papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the
weekly paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter. Papers like the
EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or the ORACLE, or the
PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist because there is a definite
demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers as a great national daily with
a circulation of millions cannot possibly do.
Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys’ twopenny weeklies, often
inaccurately described as ‘penny dreadfuls’. Falling strictly within this class there are at
present ten papers, the GEM, MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION,
all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR
and ADVENTURE, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the circulations of these
papers are, I do not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to fluctuate widely. But
there is no question that the combined public of the ten papers is a very large one. They
are on sale in every town in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through
a phase of reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which are much the
oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the rest, and they have evidently
lost some of their popularity during the past few years. A good many boys now regard
them as old fashioned and ‘slow’. Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they
are more interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere survival
of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling phenomenon! .
The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequently appear
in the other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with
Chums and the old B[oy’s] 0[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and
they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen — or
twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected
with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or
more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be
treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two,
probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.
The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and the schools
(Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim’s in the GEM) are represented as ancient and
fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are
fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very
minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and
year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a minor
character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely
altered. All the principal characters in both papers — Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry
Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them — were at Greyfriars or St Jim’s
long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having much the same kind
of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect. And not only the characters but
the whole atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by
means of very elaborate stylization. The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank
Richards’ and those in the GEM, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could
hardly be the work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be written
in a style that is easily imitated — an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite
different from anything else now existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will
do as illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:
Groan!
‘Shutup, Bunter! ’
Groan!
Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter’s line. He seldom shut up, though often
requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less
inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went
on groaning.
Even groaning did not fully express Bunter’s feelings. His feelings, in fact, were
inexpressible.
There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and
lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party
and a little over.
Harry Wharton & Co. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were landed and
stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc. , etc. , etc.
Here is one from the Gem:
‘Oh cwumbsT
‘Oh gum! ’
‘Oooogh! ’
‘Urrggh! ’
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed it to his
damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked at one another.
‘Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy! ’ gurgled Arthur Augustus. ‘I have been thwown into
quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahsl The wuffians! The feahful outsidahs! Wow! ’ etc. ,
etc. , etc.
Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find something like them in almost
every chapter of every number, to-day or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that
anyone would notice is the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first of these two
passages contains a hundred and twenty-five words and could be compressed into about
thirty), seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually playing its part in creating
the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious expressions are repeated over and
over again; ‘wrathy’, for instance, is a great favourite, and so is ‘diddled, dished and
done’. ‘Oooogh! ’, ‘Grooo! ’ and ‘Yaroo! ’ (stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so
does ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’, always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of a column
or there-abouts consists of ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’ The slang (‘Go and cat coke! ’, ‘What the
thump! ’, ‘You frabjous ass! ’, etc. etc. ) has never been altered, so that the boys are now
using slang which is at least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various nicknames
are rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded that Harry
Wharton & Co. are ‘the Famous Five’, Bunter is always ‘the fat Owl’ or ‘the Owl of the
Remove’, Vemon-Smith is always ‘the Bounder of Greyfriars’, Gussy (the Honourable
Arthur Augustus D’Arcy) is always ‘the swell of St Jim’s’, and so on and so forth. There
is a constant, untiring effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every
new reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to make Greyfriars and St
Jim’s into an extraordinary little world of their own, a world which cannot be taken
seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a
debasement of the Dickens technique a series of stereotyped ‘characters’ has been built
up, in several cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-
known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he ranks
with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens.
Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real public school. They run
in cycles of rather differing types, but in general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type
of story, with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights,
canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one in which a boy is
accused of some misdeed committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal
the truth. The ‘good’ boys are ‘good’ in the clean-living Englishman tradition — they keep
in hard training, wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc. , etc. , — and by way
of contrast there is a series ofbad’ boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others, whose
badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting public-houses. All these
boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel
if any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence.
Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the
form in which it actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories,
and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the
spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together — that is all it
ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’. Even the bad boys
are presumed to be completely sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is
probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In the nineties the
BOYS’ OWN PAPEr, for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full of
terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like ST WINIFRED’S and TOM
BROWN’S SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the
authors were not fully aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist
as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years’ issue of the two papers the
word ‘God’ probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’. On the other hand,
there has always been a very strong ‘temperance’ strain. Drinking and, by association,
smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult (‘shady’ is the usual word),
but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In
their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a great deal in common with the
Boy Scout movement, which started at about the same time.
All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism.
of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his
parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his
lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a
man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh,
after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and
university education and found it a ‘sickly, debilitating debauch’. There is much in
middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class
angle.
In a working-class home — I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of
comparatively prosperous homes — you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human
atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker,
if he is in steady work and drawing good wages — an ‘if which gets bigger and bigger —
has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall
more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar
easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best.
Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances
mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one
side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing,
and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting
himself on the rag mat — it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it
but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.
This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so many as
before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question — whether Father is in
work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class family sitting round
the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to our own moment of time and
could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip forward two hundred years into the
Utopian future, and the scene is totally different. Hardly one of the things I have
imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labour and everyone is
‘educated’, it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands
who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says ‘Ah wur coomin’ oop street’. And there won’t be
a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of
rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there will certainly
be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no
poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have
been sup-pressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won’t be so many children, either, if
the birth-controllers have their way. But move backwards into the Middle Ages and you
are in a world almost equally foreign. A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in
your face because there is no chimney, mouldy bread, ‘Poor John’, lice, scurvy, a yearly
child-birth and a yearly child-death, and the priest terrifying you with tales of Hell.
Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modem engineering, nor the radio, nor the
cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are published yearly, nor the crowds
at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interiors —
especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was
still prosperous — that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live
in.
SPILLING THE SPANISH BEANS (1937)
The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the
Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who
have been raped and crucified before the eyes of DAILY MAIL reporters, whether it is
the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the
NEWS CHRONICLE and the DAILY WORKER, with their far subtler methods of
distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the
struggle.
The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government
(including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution
than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of
compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao
fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever
about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time
past a reign of terror — forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the
press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial — has been in progress.
When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had
long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any
other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the
people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not
because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the
Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries
at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes — the Communists.
Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-
line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle
is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying
to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are
so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England
have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force;
that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois refonnism and using the
whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of
revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as
wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them. Mr
Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In
Spain the Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that
the Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few
collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and
presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there is no longer any need to
placate them. To see how the present situation arose, one has got to look back to the
origins of the civil war.
Franco’s bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in that it was a
military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion, and therefore had not much mass
backing, though Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart
from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge,
parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various forces which
are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and
clericalism; but so does the ‘liberal’ bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more
modem version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn’t called Fascism. The ‘liberal’
bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for
the degree of progress implied in the phrase ‘la carriere ouverte aux talents’. For clearly
he has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too
poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops’
vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course to the friend of the
catamite of the duke’s illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of such a blatant reactionary as
Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality
deadly enemies, are lighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular
Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People’s
Front). It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist,
as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.
In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to make
itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism,
they are not lighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois
democracy, i. e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for
Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers understood the
issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated they did not content themselves
with driving the rebellious troops out of the towns; they also took the opportunity of
seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government
by means of local committees, workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made
the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active revolutionaries were
Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in
nominal control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent
Government had been of approximately the same bourgeois-refonnist character. At the
beginning this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in Catalonia,
was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was still happening
when I reached Spain in December) to disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power
slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-
wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of
hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified.
Henceforward every move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed
towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution. Out of the many
illustrations I could choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers’
militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with officers and men
receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality, and the substitution
of the Popular Army (once again, in Communist jargon, ‘People’s Army’), modelled as
far as possible on an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense
differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a military necessity, and
almost certainly it does make for military efficiency, at least for a short period. But the
undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every
department the same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the
outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary bourgeois State,
with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the status quo.
This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have taken place
without foreign interference. But the military weakness of the Government made this
impossible. In the face of France’s foreign mercenaries they were obliged to turn to
Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms sup — plied by Russia has been greatly
exaggerated (in my first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary
machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into power. To
begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good military qualities of the
international Brigades (not necessarily Communist but under Communist control),
immensely raised the Communist prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico
were the only countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get
money for their weapons, but to extort tenns as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms
were: ‘Crush the revolution or you get no more arms. ’ The reason usually given for the
Russian attitude is that if Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet
pact (and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also,
that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in
Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure has been exerted by the
Russian Government. But this, even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties
of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the
Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they control, plus the
Communist press of the whole world, have used all their immense and ever-increasing
influence upon the side of counter-revolution.
In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in Spain, on the
Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the
Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even
more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was
accompanied.
Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He would
tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution,
because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism
and defend democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the
Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. It is a mistake to think that this has no
relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small and comparatively weak. We
shall see its relevance quickly enough if England enters into an alliance with the
U. S. S. R. ; or perhaps even earlier, for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to
increase — visibly is increasing — as more and more of the capitalist class realize that
latter-day Communism is playing their game.
Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite
real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending — not in so many words, but by
implication — that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of
meaningless wickedness, an aberration, ‘mass sadism’, the sort of thing that would
happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs. Present Fascism in
this fonn, and you can mobilize public opinion against it, at any rate for a while, without
provoking any revolutionary movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois
‘democracy, meaning capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the
troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois ‘democracy’ are
Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling him an impracticable
visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue, that he is splitting the anti-Fascist
forces, that this is not the moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the
moment we have got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are
fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to shut up, you change your tune and call him a
traitor. More exactly, you call him a Trotskyist.
And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word — in Spain at this moment you can be thrown
into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial, on the mere rumour that you are a
Trotskyist — is only beginning to be bandied to and fro in England. We shall be hearing
more of it later. The word ‘Trotskyist’ (or ‘Trotsky-Fascist’) is generally used to mean a
disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to split the left-wing
forces. But it derives its peculiar power from the fact that it means three separate things.
It can mean one who, like Trotsky, wished for world revolution; or a member of the
actual organization of which Trotsky is head (the only legitimate use of the word); or the
disguised Fascist already mentioned. The three meanings can be telescoped one into the
other at will. Meaning No. I may or may not carry with it meaning No. 2, and meaning
No. 2 almost invariably carries with it meaning No. 3. Thus: ‘XY has been heard to speak
favourably of world revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist. ’ In
Spain, to some extent even in England, ANYONE professing revolutionary Socialism
(i. e. professing the things the Communist Party professed until a few years ago) is under
suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of Franco or Hitler.
The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case, unless one happened to
know the contrary, it might be true. A Fascist spy probably WOULD disguise himself as
a revolutionary. In Spain, everyone whose opinions are to the Left of those of the
Communist Party is sooner or later discovered to be a Trotskyist or, at least, a traitor. At
the beginning of the war the POUM, an opposition Communist party roughly
corresponding to the English ILP. , was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the
Catalan Government, later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced
as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands
on being flung into jail.
Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described as ‘working loyally’
beside the Communists. Then the Anarcho-Syndicalists were levered out of the
Government; then it appeared that they were not working so loyally; now they are in the
process of becoming traitors. After that will come the turn of the left-wing Socialists.
Caballero, the left-wing Socialist ex-premier, until May 1937 the idol of the Communist
press, is already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and ‘enemy of the people’. And so the
game continues. The logical end is a regime in which every opposition party and
newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course,
such a regime will be Fascism. It will not be the same as the fascism Franco would
impose, it will even be better than Franco’s fascism to the extent of being worth fighting
for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be
called something different.
Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been against
revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the Russian aid, tended to produce
greater military efficiency. If the Anarchists saved the Government from August to
October 1936, the Communists have saved it from October onwards. But in organizing
the defence they have succeeded in killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not outside). They
made a militarized conscript army possible, but they also made it necessary. It is
significant that as early as January of this year voluntary recruiting had practically
ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army
has got to win with weapons, and it is unlikely that the Government will ever have a large
preponderance of arms unless France intervenes or unless Germany and Italy decide to
make off with the Spanish colonies and leave Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a
deadlock seems the likeliest thing.
And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not intend to lose, that is
certain. On the other hand, an outright victory, with Franco in flight and the Germans and
Italians driven into the sea, would raise difficult problems, some of them too obvious to
need mentioning. There is no real evidence and one can only judge by the event, but I
suspect that what the Government is playing for is a compromise that would leave the
war situation essentially in being. All prophecies are wrong, therefore this one will be
wrong, but I will take a chance and say that though the war may end quite soon or may
drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into
economic zones. Of course, such a compromise might be claimed as a victory by either
side, or by both.
All that I have said in this article would seem entirely commonplace in Spain, or even in
France. Yet in England, in spite of the intense interest the Spanish war has aroused, there
are very few people who have even heard of the enonnous struggle that is going on
behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite
deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the Spanish situation
from being understood. People who ought to know better have lent themselves to the
deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist
propaganda.
It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had been given a
truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an opportunity of learning what
Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism
as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic
void has been established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the
great war ‘against Fascism’ (cf. 1914, ‘against militarism’) which will allow Fascism,
British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.
MARRAKECH (1939)
As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but
they came back a few minutes later.
The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women — threaded their way across the
market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a
short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here
are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a
rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-
ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it
a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name,
no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of
hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be
certain where his own relatives are buried.
When you walk through a town like this — two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at
least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in — when you
see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to
believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality
founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces — besides, there are so many of
them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they
merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral
insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they
si nk back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are
gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a
walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy
underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over
skeletons.
I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.
Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in
fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle
I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the
piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the
bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted
again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow
remain hanging in mid-air.
An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled towards us.
He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of
quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he
said shyly in French:
“/ could eat some of that bread. ”
I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man
is an employee of the Municipality.
When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval
ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to
own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have
ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six
feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster
everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street
there is generally running a little river of urine.
In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black
skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits
cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the
lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a
lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his
grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.
I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a
cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews,
many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette.
Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of
cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I
had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve
hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible
luxury.
As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs,
except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-
workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters — whichever way you look you see
nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the
space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn’t here. Perhaps he is on his way, however.
You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the
poorer Europeans.
“Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews!
They’re the real rulers of this country, you know. They’ve got all the money. They
control the banks, finance — everything. ”
“But,” I said, “isn’t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny
an hour?
”
“Ah, that’s only for show! They’re all money-lenders really. They’re cunning, the Jews. ”
In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned
for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square
meal.
All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the
work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In
northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a
second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances
are that you don’t even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical
landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up
soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the
peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less
interesting to look at.
It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as
tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But
where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does
Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to
an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and
bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of
the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food
out of an eroded soil.
Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on it.
Huge areas which were once covered with forest have turned into a treeless waste where
the soil is exactly like broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with
frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double like
inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds
with their hands, and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk
instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched
wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one’s shoulder, and fitted underneath
with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as
much as the strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a
donkey yoked together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other
hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no harrows, they
merely plough the soil several times over in different directions, finally leaving it in
rough furrows, after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong
patches, to conserve water. Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is never
enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty
or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.
Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each
carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of
them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women,
when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old
creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load
of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her
hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but
mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I
seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,
that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a
father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot,
carrying the baggage.
But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at
about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their
firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say
that I had seen them. Firewood was passing — that was how I saw it. It was only that one
day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a
load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time
I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin,
bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on
Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.
There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is
hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be
considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken
off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing
creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter.
After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it
into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.
This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas — on the whole — the plight of the
human beings does not. 1 am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with
brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled
back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old
woman under her load of sticks.
As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward — a long, dusty
column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men
in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.
They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is
difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were
hidden in reach-me-down khaki unifonns, their feet squashed into boots that looked like
blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small, ft was very
hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs
and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.
As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he
gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not
contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive, ft was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look,
which actually is a look of profound respect. 1 saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is
a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch
syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has
been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.
But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter
twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past.
“How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their
guns in the other direction? ”
It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other
in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating
chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all
knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was
almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of
anned men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them
in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.
BOYS’ WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS’S REPLY (1940)
You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a
small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the
same: a few posters for the DAILY MAIL and the NEWS OE THE WORLD outside, a
poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling
of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny
papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.
Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly overlaps at all
with that of the big news-agents. Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the
number and variety of these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime — cage-
birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess —
has at least one paper devoted to it, and generally several. Gardening and livestock-
keeping must have at least a score between them. Then there are the sporting papers, the
radio papers, the children’s comics, the various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the
large range of papers devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women’s legs,
the various trade papers, the women’s story-papers (the ORACLE, SECRETS, PEG’S
PAPER, etc. etc. ), the needlework papers — these so numerous that a display of them
alone will often fill an entire window — and in addition the long series of ‘Yank Mags’
(FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, WESTERN SHORT STORIES, etc. ), which are
imported shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And
the periodical proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the ALDINE BOXING
NOVELS, the BOYS’ FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS’ OWN LIBRARY and
many others.
Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of
the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in
documentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is
aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably a
very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly,
which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely. The same applies to
some extent to the daily papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the
weekly paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter. Papers like the
EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or the ORACLE, or the
PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist because there is a definite
demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers as a great national daily with
a circulation of millions cannot possibly do.
Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys’ twopenny weeklies, often
inaccurately described as ‘penny dreadfuls’. Falling strictly within this class there are at
present ten papers, the GEM, MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION,
all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR
and ADVENTURE, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the circulations of these
papers are, I do not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to fluctuate widely. But
there is no question that the combined public of the ten papers is a very large one. They
are on sale in every town in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through
a phase of reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which are much the
oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the rest, and they have evidently
lost some of their popularity during the past few years. A good many boys now regard
them as old fashioned and ‘slow’. Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they
are more interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere survival
of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling phenomenon! .
The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequently appear
in the other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with
Chums and the old B[oy’s] 0[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and
they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen — or
twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected
with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or
more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be
treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two,
probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.
The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and the schools
(Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim’s in the GEM) are represented as ancient and
fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are
fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very
minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and
year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a minor
character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely
altered. All the principal characters in both papers — Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry
Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them — were at Greyfriars or St Jim’s
long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having much the same kind
of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect. And not only the characters but
the whole atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by
means of very elaborate stylization. The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank
Richards’ and those in the GEM, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could
hardly be the work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be written
in a style that is easily imitated — an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite
different from anything else now existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will
do as illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:
Groan!
‘Shutup, Bunter! ’
Groan!
Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter’s line. He seldom shut up, though often
requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less
inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went
on groaning.
Even groaning did not fully express Bunter’s feelings. His feelings, in fact, were
inexpressible.
There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and
lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party
and a little over.
Harry Wharton & Co. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were landed and
stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc. , etc. , etc.
Here is one from the Gem:
‘Oh cwumbsT
‘Oh gum! ’
‘Oooogh! ’
‘Urrggh! ’
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed it to his
damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked at one another.
‘Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy! ’ gurgled Arthur Augustus. ‘I have been thwown into
quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahsl The wuffians! The feahful outsidahs! Wow! ’ etc. ,
etc. , etc.
Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find something like them in almost
every chapter of every number, to-day or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that
anyone would notice is the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first of these two
passages contains a hundred and twenty-five words and could be compressed into about
thirty), seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually playing its part in creating
the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious expressions are repeated over and
over again; ‘wrathy’, for instance, is a great favourite, and so is ‘diddled, dished and
done’. ‘Oooogh! ’, ‘Grooo! ’ and ‘Yaroo! ’ (stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so
does ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’, always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of a column
or there-abouts consists of ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’ The slang (‘Go and cat coke! ’, ‘What the
thump! ’, ‘You frabjous ass! ’, etc. etc. ) has never been altered, so that the boys are now
using slang which is at least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various nicknames
are rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded that Harry
Wharton & Co. are ‘the Famous Five’, Bunter is always ‘the fat Owl’ or ‘the Owl of the
Remove’, Vemon-Smith is always ‘the Bounder of Greyfriars’, Gussy (the Honourable
Arthur Augustus D’Arcy) is always ‘the swell of St Jim’s’, and so on and so forth. There
is a constant, untiring effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every
new reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to make Greyfriars and St
Jim’s into an extraordinary little world of their own, a world which cannot be taken
seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a
debasement of the Dickens technique a series of stereotyped ‘characters’ has been built
up, in several cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-
known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he ranks
with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens.
Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real public school. They run
in cycles of rather differing types, but in general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type
of story, with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights,
canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one in which a boy is
accused of some misdeed committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal
the truth. The ‘good’ boys are ‘good’ in the clean-living Englishman tradition — they keep
in hard training, wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc. , etc. , — and by way
of contrast there is a series ofbad’ boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others, whose
badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting public-houses. All these
boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel
if any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence.
Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the
form in which it actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories,
and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the
spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together — that is all it
ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’. Even the bad boys
are presumed to be completely sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is
probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In the nineties the
BOYS’ OWN PAPEr, for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full of
terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like ST WINIFRED’S and TOM
BROWN’S SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the
authors were not fully aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist
as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years’ issue of the two papers the
word ‘God’ probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’. On the other hand,
there has always been a very strong ‘temperance’ strain. Drinking and, by association,
smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult (‘shady’ is the usual word),
but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In
their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a great deal in common with the
Boy Scout movement, which started at about the same time.
All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism.
