Allegorizings Read online

  For everyone knew that Diana was really no Mother Teresa—it was doubtless a tacit part of her appeal for the tabloid masses. She always used to say, though, that she wanted to be an ambassador for her country. People sneered, but they should have taken her at her word. She should in my opinion have been given the all-but-superannuated royal yacht Britannia, which nobody knew what to do with, and invited to rollick her way around the world in the national behalf, living it up without inhibition, taking a new boy-friend to every port (or finding one there), and distributing a taste of outrageous English gaiety among all the nations.

  THE WORLD WOULD have adored it. Diana was one of the loveliest women of the age, and left to her own instincts she might have been one of the most entertaining, too—a patrician Elizabeth Taylor, a seagoing Lady Hamilton. Wherever she sailed in her grand old vessel (built in 1953 and now a museum ship in Edinburgh), with its complement of elegant peccadillo sustained by all the splendour of the Royal Navy, she would have caused a cheerful sensation, and the idea of England itself would have been given a much-needed shot of glamour. Did any nation, ever, have a more fascinating envoy at large?

  The elderly ship, of course, would have been completely redecorated, and fitted throughout with multi-phonic hi-fi and video equipment. The usual Royal Marine band would have been supplemented by a rock combo, and the crew, headed by a handsome young admiral, personally selected by the Princess with particular emphasis on good looks. The Britannia’s appearance would have remained unaltered, except for new and more startling paint colours, but the Royal Barge would have been replaced by a gorgeous Italian-built hydrofoil, together with the speedboats, swimming-pools and hang-gliders necessary to the Princess’s purposes.

  I like to imagine her arriving at one of the remoter Mediterranean islands—Figesta, let us call it—in the course of her mission (defined by the Lords of Admiralty, in their most august antique prose, as “representing the dignities and furthering the interests of Her Majesty’s Kingdom by whatever means and devices She thinks appropriate”). The little port-city is awakened at dawn by the usual reveille gunshot from the Fort of St. Idiama, but this morning it is answered by a deafening 21-gun salute from the harbour. When the smoke clears from the saluting guns the crowds hastening in the half-light down to the waterfront, many of them still in their night-clothes, are astonished to discover in the very centre of the bay, dressed all over, lights blazing from prow to stern and huge standards at every masthead, the pink and gold presence of Britannia.

  Enormously amplified there then sound from its loud-speakers a recording of “God Save the Queen,” but before its last chord has died away, merciful Heaven the rock combo is in full blast, twice as loud, twice as bold, and all around the town, bouncing from fortress walls, echoing from the mountains, bringing every last inhabitant out into the streets, hurrying the polizie down to the quay with guns already cocked, summoning the Provincial Governor himself and his portly wife amazed in their dressing-gowns to the balcony of their palace, the thump and squawl of punkism shakes the awakening dawn.

  The visit to Figesta is a triumph—one long celebration, almost an orgy, embracing the whole island in an ecstasy of enjoyment. Diana, wearing a summer dress of flaming crimson and an amazing hat, goes ashore attended by the Admiral in full-dress uniform, and strolls merrily about the city streets blowing kisses to men old and young, embracing children, jollying along old ladies, tickling the chins of policemen, sometimes breaking into a few steps of a waltz and showered with flowers from upstairs apartments. Huge crowds follow her, singing and laughing, mock-saluting the Admiral and urging her to come inside, lady, come and have Figesta wine. By midday the whole town is in a condition of happy chaos, and even the stern carabinieri are parading arm in arm like chorus boys.

  By the time they reach the Governor’s palace His Excellency and his lady are ready for them, and wait in full panoply (epaulettes for him, feathers for her) between the ceremonial stone dolphins at the door. Don Giorgio the elderly Governor falls to his knees, Signora Minelda sinks into a profound curtsey, but the Princess cries “Oh, you silly old things, let’s have none of that nonsense,” and pulls them both boisterously to their feet. She kisses each of them heartily on their cheeks, she tousles the Governor’s hair, she says ooh how smashing is his lady’s feather boa, and presently accompanies them into the state dining-room for a buffet luncheon—Diana giggling, the Governor in uncontrollable fits of laughter and Her Excellency already merrily dishevelled.

  So it goes, all that day and through the night. There is non-stop dancing in the streets. Wine flows out of every fountain in town, and runs down the very gutters. The band is in full frenzied flow as the evening lights come on, and merrily drunken sailors from the Britannia rollick in squares, flirt in courtyards and enthusiastically whistle whenever they glimpse the Princess. At sunset the Governor and his party are taken on board the hydrofoil for a champagne whizz around the harbour before a shipboard dinner, which is extremely convivial, lasts a long time and concludes with a showing of the television show Dad’s Army, a favourite of the Governor’s wife.

  “It has been fun,” Diana tells them as the gubernatorial party is piped ashore, the Admiral saluting and half a dozen hastily sobered ratings standing at attention. “Thank you so much—oops, mind how you go, Minelda dear—goodnight, Giorgio—lovely to have met you, and all your darling people—what a smashing place you have here! Buoa noche—is that how you say it? Mind how you go! Have fun!” And a few hours later, when the sun comes up, the people of Figesta emerge sleepily into the streets, and Giorgio and Minelda look wistfully out to sea from their balcony, Britannia has gone.

  Could the Queen’s worst enemies have resisted such diplomacy?

  THE ENGLISH TRIED to make Diana a patron saint, but she was much better suited to be a patron sinner. She was not a serene young novitiate at the altar rail, she was more a mixed-up kid, as they used to say in her time, a kid next door, in trainers and a baseball cap out on the town.

  The mass British public adored Diana as it adored rock stars or footballers, with a hysteria that was stoked constantly by the tabloid Press, and she was presented as the very antithesis of everything that the British Crown represented, with its age-old traditions of pomp, protocol and imperial complacency. No matter that she was herself an aristocrat, from one of England’s oldest families. She was thought of as a young confessor to unmarried mothers, divorcees, night-clubbers, rockers and rebels everywhere. She consorted with showbiz celebrities. She was the epitome of populist glamour. Moreover, patrician though she was, there was something reassuringly common about her. She was less like the descendant of an ancient earldom than like the expensively educated though not very bright eldest daughter of a self-made billionaire. Undeniably beautiful though she was, she was better suited to a Dodi Fayed than to a Plantaganet.

  St. Teresa of Avila is cherished because she often lost her temper with God. Churchill is beloved although he was a boozer and a reactionary, Nelson although he was an adulterer. Diana should be remembered not as a victim or a martyr, as her ageing fans remember her, but as a national emblem of risk and delight. Too late! Having dined at the Ritz that summer night in 1988, the poor girl died with her playboy in the back of a Mercedes limousine—far too soon, but not an unsuitable end for her. They should have given her Britannia while the going was good, and she might still be roaming the ocean waves with Dodi or another, refuelled by tankers at sea and admirers on shore, and taking with her something of Merrie England—remember Merrie England? —wherever she disembarked.

  Two

  Three ships came sailing

  Ships of Youth

  THREE SHIPS REPEATEDLY came sailing into the imagination of my youth. I spent much of my adolescence in their figurative company, and sixty years on I look back to them as to kinds, or aspects, or exemplars of youth itself. Others may see youth personified in three graces: for me it is in three great ships.

  It was the age of the great ships, and in
particular of the North Atlantic liners, before long to be as extinct as the galleon or the clipper ship. I grew up in the knowledge and the fascination of them, and especially of three iconic vessels whose construction and celebrity spanned the years of my own youth. One was French, one British, one American, and for me to this day they each express one attribute of that marvellous condition, being young.

  The youngest was the French Normandie, which was launched at San Nazaire, in a frenzy of patriotic pride, when I was six years old. Next came the Queen Mary, whose construction on the Clyde sent the British Press almost into hysterics when I was ten. A third was the United States, built and launched with less fanfare at Newport News in my twenty-fifth year. The lives of the three vessels overlapped, which meant that they were present in my consciousness for nineteen years of my susceptible youth.

  Contemplating them now, in my memory as in my fancy, really is like analyzing my own salad years, because in each of them I see some facet of what I wanted to be like myself. Great ships exert their personalities just as humans do. I always remember the Cunard official who remarked to me once of the new Mauretania (built 1939) that her two funnels were too close together—not because they produced insufficient draft, or added too much topweight to the vessel, but because they were “out of character.” The thing about my three ships was this: that each one was a complete personality, balanced in itself, and self-sufficient, with smokestacks where they should be.

  I WOULD BE deluding myself if I claimed to see much of my own nascent personality in the Normandie (79,300 tons). She is often said to have been the most beautiful liner ever built, and she was made for adulation. Never since the days of the China clippers, perhaps, was a ship fashioned with such grace and instant fascination. Just the look of her was her own logo, and one of the most famous poster pictures ever was the stunning bow view of the Normandie painted by Cassandre in 1935—her vast stylized bulk filling the printed page, perfectly immaculate, with a tiny tricolour at her prow and sprinkled gaily across the shadowy side of her hull, a little flock of thirteen white sea birds, frolicking in her flank.

  The picture speaks of power, modernity, calm (for only the merest flicker of a bow wave shows), and pleasure—pleasure especially, because it is those cavorting gulls that steal the scene. The Normandie was certainly the most exhilarating of my three ships, attuned to celebrity from the start, and she was decorated in such a riotous excess of art deco, such an avant-garde extravagance of paintings, tapestries, carpets, etched-glass windows—adorned with so many ornamental columns, symbolical murals and statues—stocked with such splendid wines and mouth-watering victuals—frequented by such marvellously dressed aristocrats, artists, actors and ladies of fashion—sailing the seas, in short, in such almost unapproachable sophistication that if we are to believe the publicity pictures it was all a trifle vulgar.

  But gloriously, sensuously vulgar. Somebody gave me a cutaway picture of the Normandie, which opened into three sheets displaying the vessel in full glory, and I used to love peering into its cabins and staterooms, the vast Grand Salon full of black-tied gents and befurred ladies, the smoking-room approached by a flight of stairs fit for any presidential entrance, the concert hall where I imagined Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker in full blast as the ship sailed on.

  Some of all this I envied, and half-wished that it represented my kind of world: but at other times I viewed it with a scornful eye, and thought that ship of magnificent hedonism—the largest, and fastest, and most powerful of its day—unworthy of its calling.

  FOR IF I wasn’t exactly a prig, I was a wartime foundling, and I chiefly admired qualities of strength, perseverance, even austerity—the qualities most cherished in Churchill’s Britain. The next ship that came sailing into my mental seas was, in those respects at least, more to my taste. The Queen Mary (80,300 tons) was, as it happens, bigger and faster than the Normandie, but she was not half so glamorous. Completed in 1936, and hailed by the British with just as much hyperbole as the French had greeted the Normandie, she had in truth not much about her that was novel. She stood recognizably in the line of the famous Cunarders of the past, like the ancient Aquitania, which was still in service then, and her personality was inherited—when that Cunard man complained to me about the Mauretania’s funnels, he was thinking of the corporate style of his company, which indeed reached a climax in the huge three-funneled Queen Mary.

  She was a bit boring, actually—big, strong, fast, grand, but rather dull. She had none of the innate charisma of the French ship, but she truly represented the capital virtues of the British. Not very excitingly modernist, her decor was replete with imperial referrences—every British colonial possession seemed to have contributed some native wood carving or indigenous craft. Of course, portraits of the eponymous monarch abounded (although legend says that the Cunard Line originally intended to call the ship the Queen Victoria).

  But there, the Queen Mary fitted her times, her nation, and her heritage, and I was vicariously proud of her. She represented in my mind the ethos of the stiff upper lip, and I was big on that in those days.

  I ALSO ADMIRED the reckless, the dashing, the incorrigible, and no ship ever satisfied those philosophical criteria better than the United States (53,350 tons), which erupted into the Atlantic after World War II, when I was in my twenties. She was a secret ship, and that intensified her allure for me.

  Secret, because she was really not a proper passenger ship, but a quasi ship of war, and I admired the martial virtues, too. She was intended always to serve when needed as a kind of super-troop-ship, and for years the details of her hull were not released to the public. Her speed was kept secret into the late 1970s, although she had long proved herself the fastest liner on the Atlantic.

  The look of her, anyway, was exciting enough. Not as thrilling as the Normandie, not as impressive as the Queen Mary, something about her stance, I thought, spoke of raffishness, slinkiness, perhaps a little criminality. There was nothing wooden about her—literally, for her visionary designer William Gibbs insisted that everything must be of metal—partly as a precaution against fire, partly to reduce weight and increase speed. So the whole ship, in substance and in style, was metallic. Two enormous oval funnels were placed well forward, giving the vessel a suggestion of powerful impetus, and on board the ship, with steel corridors and metal fittings everywhere, and lashings of aluminium, there was no pretending that you were anywhere but on board a seagoing mechanism. Nobody was going to say, on the United States, what a small boy said to his mother when she took him for the first time down the gilded elevator to the Normandie’s voluptuously glittering Grand Salon, “But Maman, when are we going to see the ship?”

  So the United States was the third of my ships, and I rejoiced with her when, many years later, I read that her maximum speed had been released to the public at last: 44 knots, faster than any other passenger ship ever built. I envied her characteristics, too. I wanted to be lean, fast and raffish, like her.

  THUS I COVETED the qualities of all three, an admission Freud might have relished—rather more interesting perhaps, than the old urges to murder one’s father, or be a fish. I wanted to be elegant, I wanted to be strong, I wanted to be racy, and so I transported myself in fancy, during the later decades of my adolescence, to one or another of my three Atlantic liners.

  They responded in kind. The fabulous Normandie spent her last years ignominiously sitting out the war at New York’s Pier 88, until she was burnt out and broken up. The Queen Mary behaved as you would expect of her, transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Atlantic, braving the worst the U-boats could threaten: and she is with us still, like a dowager in reduced circumstances, keeping a stiff upper lip as a floating museum in Long Beach, California. As I write the United States is still afloat too, gutted and emasculated at Philadelphia as a potential cruise ship: but her speed records have never been beaten, and when I want to, I can still re-create in my mind the bold metallic vibrations of my tourist-clas
s cabin, when she whisked me home across the Atlantic at the start of my maturity.

  Us against Them

  LONG AGO IN Wales in the days of beads and Beatles, I marvelled to hear that a village on the coast of northern California had communally opted out of the world. Its name was Bolinas. Its citizens had removed their road signs, to dissuade uninvited and unsuitable visitors, and they had defiantly declared a kind of New Age separatism.

  Of course many people scoffed—those crazy Californians!—but for me that small item of news, on the inside pages of the newspapers, was like a little flame flickering in the west. It signified individuality challenging conformity, eccentricity cocking a snook at normality, Us defying Them, small against big.

  NOT THAT THERE then seemed to me much wrong about the bigness of the United States. Whenever I visited the country I was captivated, like almost all visitors, by the majestic scale of it—by the mighty landscapes of course, but no less by the colossal energy and confidence of the place. I loved the great trains criss-crossing the continent, and the airports with their myriad flights arriving from the four corners of the Republic, and the burgeoning skyscraper cities, and the roster of exotic names—Duluth and Albuquerque, Milwaukee and Miami and Chattanooga. . . . I loved the speed of everything, I loved the swaggering generosity, and although there were often times when I disliked American policies, I thought it marvellous that on the whole this gigantic power seemed to exert its bigness for the good of humanity. In those days most of humanity thought the same.