A Writer's World (16 page)

Every line of his evidence squirms, and makes the whole court squirm, and when in one mystical moment of self-abasement he observed that perhaps he ought to hang himself in public, ‘to atone for these terrible things’, there can be few people in the court who were not tempted to agree with him.

It was not exactly a prophet who descended upon us this morning out of Westminster, imperturbably patrician though Harold Macmillan looked as he walked, so slowly, so fastidiously, with such a gleam of smooth grey Etonian hair, towards the rostrum of the United Nations. It was though, incontestably – and in this sad assembly it makes an agreeable change – a statesman. The Prime Minister probably did not stir many wild passions, except in the most atavistic of British breasts, like mine, but at last, out of the welter of the Assembly’s rhetoric, somebody has at least tried to see his opponents’ point of view.

The point of Macmillan’s speech was this: that at the base of the Cold War, at the heart of our anxieties, lies fear. The powers are afraid, each of the other. The West has been afraid ever since the war of communist expansion by force. The Russians are afraid, for understandable reasons of history, of yet another foreign invasion of their territory. The task of the world, said the Prime Minister, was to remove the causes of fear and thus, by progressive stages towards disarmament, to divert our resources at last towards the nations’ real needs – ‘to meet by public and private investment the needs of expanding and politically maturing populations’.

It was not a speech of theatrical gestures, of world-shaking propositions. It was the speech of a civilized, cultivated gentleman, honourably reflecting the aspirations of decent people everywhere, and thus bringing to this Assembly, for all the speaker’s studied parliamentary detachment, a paradoxical streak of emotion. As a performance it was flawless. Macmillan began by expressing his pleasure that the new President of the Assembly should come from Ireland – ‘a country with which my own has so many close ties’. I do not know whether he meant this ironically, but he allowed a long pause to follow the observation, and as this vacuum was filled by a slowly rising murmur of laughter from the Assembly so there crept into the Prime Minister’s graven cheek the merest sly suspicion of the end of his tongue.

He countered with equal artistry several interventions by Mr Khrushchev, who seemed to be in his most boorish mood, sprawling and pouting in his seat, and who apparently failed to detect the genuinely conciliatory tone of the speech. Twice Khrushchev, waving his arms and half rising in his seat, shouted interventions in tumbling Russian, and the second time the Prime Minister, allowing the thick flow of Russian to die away across the delegates, observed sweetly that he would prefer to have it in translation – a retort which, though it may sound flat in a newspaper dispatch, was in fact so unexpected and so decisive that the whole Assembly laughed and clapped.

Mr Macmillan ran through his familiar range of styles, from the Churchillian to the faintly fireside, but it was a speech burdened with unavoidable handicaps. Throughout it one felt the overriding British need to satisfy American opinion and avoid any suggestion of weakness. Throughout it we felt the need, no less genuine, to convince the Russians that, though their viewpoint is often understandable, nevertheless they are not going to scare the West into submission. And always we felt this postimperial statesman to be haunted by the embarrassments of colonialism,
so that much of his talk had to be self-defensive, and some of it sounded, willy-nilly, patronizing.

Still, it was something in the nature of a triumph. It had the art of statesmanship to it, and it was greeted with warm, prolonged, but never raucous applause, only the communist delegations, obediently following their master’s example, joining Mr Khrushchev in a rather sulky kind of disapproval. As for the substance of the speech, it was not, to be honest, revolutionary. It consisted partly of a defence of British and Western attitudes, partly of almost reluctant reproofs to the Russians, partly of sensible expressions of conciliation, partly of proposals for another move towards disarmament, partly of a plea for a kind of economic summit détente, in which the economic resources of the world would work in harness rather than in rivalry. But as a whole it was really an appeal for a fresh start, a chucking away of hogwash, and a return to common sense. Its real significance may turn out to be, not that it brings the squabbling giants together, but that it demonstrates to the rest of the world, even from a frankly partisan viewpoint, the stupidity of the Cold War and its hopeless essence of misunderstanding.

Through an ambuscade of aircraft the traveller stumbles – more aircraft, it seems, than he has ever set eyes on before, with their fierce noses and high tails shining dully in the snow, hulking and unfamiliar, like great predatory pike: but inside the stuffy, ill-lit reception hall a line of prickly porters, in brown quilt jackets and fur hats, lounges and slouches on benches, while an official in a blue cap peers myopically at documents, turning them this way and that for a better grasp of their purport, like a country policeman in a farce.

A fusty crowd of passengers, muffled in wrappings, hangs about the Customs desk: a fat, broad-faced woman in tears, her child tugging at the strap of her handbag; a sallow man in a velvet hat, arguing over a suitcase of brocades; a covey of Chinese, dignified and double-breasted; a welter of thick-set, sweaty, colourless men with badges in their lapels and elaborate medals dangling from their chests. Among them all the traveller warily passes, a shuffling, heavy-breathing porter carrying his bags behind, and into the car that waits outside; and so down the dank, snow-muffled road, through a landscape numb with cold, he is driven towards the city.

Thin flurries of snow are chased by the wind across the road. The windows of the car are thick with ice, frost and condensation. Blurred in a haze of winter, as if seen through a toper’s eyes, are the places along the route. There are shambled lines of shacks and shanties, painted an ancient peeling blue, with rickety verandas and precarious porches, knee-deep in snow, invested by old outhouses, fences, dog-houses, bits of masonry. There are clusters of small houses, tightly huddled together for warmth and comfort, as if they have heard the howling of wolves. There are wide desolate acres of snow-encompassed land, cruel and grubby, supervised by brooding firs and crossed perhaps by a solitary old woman in a trailing tattered coat and a green kerchief, bundled with packages and buckets, and pushing her way like a lemming towards some unseen homestead in the wood.

Sometimes a gaunt horse hauls a sledge lop-sidedly down road, piled high with baskets and packing-cases; or a car ploughs past with a puff of oily exhaust and a whiff of crude oil; or a great rough-hewn lorry, painted a sombre green and wrapped around the bonnet with quilted fabric, rumbles darkly through the trees; and presently there appear through the misted windscreen the first tokens of the city. A suburban trolley-bus slides alongside, painted a bright blue and yellow, its windows so steamy
that only a blur of head-scarves and wrinkled faces can dimly be seen, or the pink tip of a child’s nose pressed against the glass. The traffic thickens, the empty countryside falls away, and soon there looms out of the fitful snowfall a monstrous parade of buildings. Huge, square and forbidding they appear, of no definable style or period, like so many vast eight-storey breeding-houses. They look shuttered and deserted, but for a bleak light here and there, and they rise sheer and stern on each side of the road, window after window, block after block, mile after mile, like enormous piles of ammunition boxes in some remote and secret dump. Only a few squat women move in and out of their vault-like doors, and the television aerials standing awry on their roofs seem sad but lovable impertinences. Immensely wide is the street that strikes through this gloomy cavalcade, and presently the rhythm of the buildings shifts, like a train crossing the points. Dreadful symmetry gives way to a jumble of old and new and indeterminate: a sagging, classical portico behind high walls; a rickety cul-de-sac of single-storey chalets, the plaster and lath peeling to show the criss-cross beneath; a bridge across a frozen river, its ornamental urns stacked with sculptured rifles, swords, trumpets and machine guns. The traveller rubs his window with his fur hat, and sees that the city has closed in upon him.

Not a drop, not a hint, not a memory of colour enlivens its frozen outskirts. All is brown and grey and stacked with snow. The stocky pedestrians of the place are swathed in greatcoats, furs and high boots, and move stuffed and bundled along pavements, their children so encased in hoods and sheepskin that only their eyes appear like gems among the wrappings. Machines bustle everywhere, clearing away the sludge – jolly little motor-sweepers, like benign weasels, and huge clanking devices with spindly arms, like lobsters, and suction chutes, and tall frowning snow-ploughs; and among them, wearing padded jackets over white aprons, an army of rugged women sweeps, shovels, and picks, leaving an intricate meshed pattern of brushes on the pavement, and an obligato of swishing and chipping constantly on the air.

From an iron grille in the ground a plume of steam arises, and in its vapour crouches a flock of birds – half a dozen proud shabby pigeons, a few rapscallion sparrows. A line of small boys paces on skis through the trees of a garden, and an old philosopher with flaps over his ears sits defiantly on a bench reading a book, the snow like white fur upon his coat collar. Across the vast crossroads a stream of huddled figures endlessly plods, hurried along by the chivvying of whistles and the testy gestures of
belted, padded, high-booted, fur-hatted policemen. The city feels at once curiously empty and claustrophobically crowded: empty because its buildings are pallid and aloof, like monuments to dead scientists; crowded because to the movements of the scurrying citizenry there is something dark and inexorable, as though nothing could ever staunch its sheer weight of numbers – as though impelled not by pleasure, industry, ambition, or even duty, but by irresistible physical instincts, like birds migrating, or small black salmon fighting their way upstream.

But now there appear, in glimpses among the office blocks, weird and spectral skyscrapers, solitary above the rooftops, ornamented strangely with spikes and pinnacles, like the pavilions of Eastern satraps; and just as the dusk begins to fall the traveller sees before him, raised upon an eminence, a huge and haunting fortress. Ancient turreted walls protect it, a wide icy river lies beneath its gates, and within it there shine clusters and globules of gold, complicated bell-towers, citadels, palaces, weathervanes, emblems of power and politics, a mound of cathedrals and barracks and florid watch-towers, an immense straggling tesselated rampart, a dome with a gigantic flag streaming arrogantly in the wind.

In the square beneath this chill marvel he steps from his car; and joining a silent queue of citizens, he passes between a pair of sentries, rigid as idols, their collars turned up around their cheeks, their boots glistening, their small eyes hard and unshifting. Slowly, meditatively, like mutes, the queue shuffles between granite portals into a bare and massive building. Officers in long grey greatcoats peer watchfully from its shadows, and only the cries of a heedless baby break the silence as the crowd, bareheaded and awe-struck, presses clumsily down the granite steps into the stomach of the edifice. Silently, silently it lumbers on, with a pulse of breathing and a swish of thick clothes and an awkward clatter of boots on stone: until at last the traveller, hemmed in willy-nilly among the pilgrims, finds himself within an inner chamber, like a dungeon. Four silent soldiers stand there with their rifles, and the endless queue winds its way around the room like a fascinated viper, button to button, breath to breath, gazing always at the crystal box that stands in the centre.