An Audience with an Elephant (23 page)

It was at the American airbase near here, the last air show that will be held, for the Americans are pulling out of Upper Heyford. The Dutch came, the French, there was the last operational Vulcan bomber, and then the Czechs arrived. They came in two MiG-29s. The US technical people swarmed all over them as soon as they were down, for this plane was the great threat of the Gulf War, and is the most manoeuvrable, the most advanced fighter-interceptor in the world. They marvelled at the roughness of the finish, the lack of electronic controls (‘man, you really have to work in there’) and the perfect aerodynamics. Each plane costs £10 million.

I was one of a crowd staring at the MiGs when two small men in light grey flying kit approached the barrier and grinned at us, showing rows of fillings. They put two boxes down, sat on some stools they were carrying and opened cheap suitcases, out of which they took some English phrase books and began selling not only cap badges but generals’ stars.

I do not think that anything quite like this had ever happened before. It was as though Napoleon’s Old Guard, still in being and undefeated, had pitched a booth and started selling off its Eagles. Or Hitler’s SS had started flogging daggers and cap badges, not in defeat, but with the organisation intact but bankrupt.

The Czechs were such merry men. I pointed to the phrase book and the one with the amazing teeth laughed, ‘Is good, is English book.’ And all the time my eyes kept flitting to that terrible fighting machine behind him. Later, when they had stopped selling the trinkets that might allow them to stand a single round of drinks in the mess, one took off in the MiG and the thing punched a hole in the clouds. I watched this, playing uneasily with my new badge.

I told an American sergeant about the little stall and he said, ‘Were they really? Whereabouts was this? I guess we should have a photograph for our records.’ But they didn’t, it was too sad for that. Only, of course, it wasn’t sad at all. Good God, there we were, sunk in nostalgia for an Armageddon that hadn’t happened. And it hadn’t happened not because of military might or a sudden rush of morality, but because the books no longer added up. They have the bailiffs in; we just have them peering into the garage.

The last Vulcan, which unlike the MiG, really is a thing of beauty, took off. For a moment it was as decorous as a Victorian lady, with those long wings almost touching the tarmac – until the sound hit us. The American commentator could have been providing the sad-sweet soundtrack to a compendium of film comedy: ‘And so Fatty Arbuckle fades into the sunset, loveable and innocent. . .’. Only he was talking about something that delivered H-bombs. ‘And if no more funds are found, this could well be the last flight of this elegant old aircraft, once the pride of Britain’s nuclear strike force. . .’.

The Vulcan came by at 300 feet, turned in salute and opened its bomb doors in a spectacle of quite staggering obscenity. It really did, and we all clapped, we really did, clapping what could have been the last thing in this world thousands of people saw.

About 10 miles to the north of this village, the A5, before that straight as an arrow, goes into a long bend for no apparent reason, except that in doing so it skirts a very large field. Twelve miles to the south-west there is a bustling town surrounded by wire. You might not think there was any connection but, as the old monumental masons used to cut, ‘as the one is now, so shall the other be’. For the second time in British history the legions are pulling out.

That field was called Bannaventa when the A5 was Watling Street; a Roman town covering 30 acres. The town behind the wire is the American airbase at Upper Heyford, which some of you might live long enough to see also become ‘old foundations, the stones of ruined walls and the like ploughed up’. It has just been announced that the bombers are going.

No one knows how a Roman town died, but there was nothing abrupt about it: fallen columns, public buildings used as a quarry, fires upon the mosaics and finally a place of ghosts to be avoided. But the end of Upper Heyford will be abrupt. A paragraph in the national newspapers became headlines in the local weeklies. . . ‘Massive Blow to Local Economy’. Over 5,000 servicemen and women are going, with 7,000 dependants, possible as soon as within two years. Add to this the thousand local people who work there and the many more for the contractors employed by the base, and you get the figure conjured up by someone of a £100 million a year loss to the area.

Nobody could have come up with anything as neat as that for Bannaventa, for in its time the town
was
the area. It had been there for over three centuries, the American airbase for only 40 years, during which time it could for most purposes have been on the moon. There is a frontier in Oxfordshire: cross that and you are part of an alien economy. The slot machines take dimes; supermarket steaks are half the price they are beyond the wire, pork spare-ribs twice as expensive. There is piped American television and the flats have the verandas of small-town USA, homesickness being held at arm’s length here.

Yet rural Oxfordshire is all around (Flora Thompson’s Juniper Hill is just down the road); its roads go straight through the base, so you can watch the baseball games on the lawns as you go by. What makes it more extraordinary is the official fiction that this is an RAF base. Road signs tell you this, and there is even an RAF Commander, whose flag flies a few feet higher than that of the USAF Commander, in spite of the fact that he has half a dozen men under him, the other, 5,000. Thirty per cent of these live behind the wire, the rest in rented village houses. It is the wives of enlisted men who suffer most – out of the States for the first time and able to afford houses only in remote villages. They keep their curtains drawn day and night and their children we see as pale faces in the backs of cars. They always look so sad, our guardians: little families worriedly ordering in Indian restaurants, hesitating about crossing roads, not understanding a word when you try to address them. ‘Pardon me, sir?’

Of course, you get the odd top gun. ‘Wadda we do? We drop bombs.’ He informed me he had seen a lot of Britain. ‘Only I get to see it
fast
, from 500 feet.’ He was a funny man. He told me he flew all-weather planes, but when I asked what problems he encountered, he said, ‘The weather.’ Fresh from their desert training areas, some of them, he told me, had not even encountered clouds before. And I thought of Auden’s Roman legionary on the Wall, with the rain falling and a cold in his nose.

I suppose she’ll miss them, the solitary peace campaigner who lives in a caravan with a small daughter on the base perimeter, her cat a present from the military police. The Americans gave her lifts to the shops, and she sounds proprietorial when she talks about the rates of climb in an F-111. But not everyone will miss them. There is a village called Ardley, which has a Saxon church and was a quiet place until 1970, when the F-111s came. At take-off the F-111 with its after-burners on makes as much noise as two jumbo jets, and some mornings there are two hours of continuous take-off. Ardley is just three fields away.

The MOD offered to buy some of the villagers’ houses, but only on the basis of individual decibel readings, so one man might qualify while his next-door neighbour didn’t. The latter appeared doomed to be as tethered to the landscape as a mediaeval serf, for who would buy a house in a dying village? But that threat is lifted, the silence is coming.

As it came to Bannaventa: so completely that for a thousand years men argued as to where this had been.

Fantasies

Up the Workers! (If We Can Find Any. . .)

OT SO ORNATE
as the
Book of Kells
, nor as old as the
Black Book of Carmarthen
, the
Book of Thame
is more mysterious than either. Its two volumes, each the size of a family Bible and fastened with pink ribbon, are kept in an Oxford library and are so fragile researchers are recommended to read them on microfilm. The Book is a report on the Oxfordshire market town compiled by its Communist Party in 1955.

That Thame ever had a Communist party is a great shock to its inhabitants. ‘What?’ said Mike Le Mesurier, the Mayor. But the fact that this party produced the most complete report ever compiled on a small town comes as even more of a shock to its members, of whom there were once eight. ‘Never heard of it,’ said Cecil Aldridge, chairman of a party formed in 1953 only to be dissolved a few years later. Mr Aldridge, a retired ambulance driver, alarmed at having his past leap from the phone, refused to be interviewed. ‘I’ve gone off all that sort of thing.’

The mystery, though, is just beginning. Until six years ago, when it was transferred to Oxford for security reasons, the Book was at Thame library. But nobody at the library has any idea where it came from. ‘I’ve been here ten years and it was always kept under the counter,’ said the librarian. ‘You must admit, the Communists did a wonderful job.’

Everything is listed: the local papers and their political leanings; ‘quasi-military units’ (these turned out to be the grammar school cadet force and the Observer Corps); chapels and churches (there is a detailed aerial view of the vicarage); with the names of every officer of every organisation in the town, including a Miss Lane, secretary of the Society for Promoting the Gospel among the Jews. The Communists even listed the Town Ghost, a priest said to do the washing-up at a sixteenth-century guesthouse.

Almost half a century on, the
Book of Thame
offers a unique insight into the pre-occupations of a Communist cell in the middle of England at the height of the Cold War. Had it come to Thame, the Red Army would have known exactly where to drink (every pub is photographed), where to shop (every shop is noted, including the one run by a man who kept bees and also managed to fit in being the town undertaker), and when to be on the alert (‘When the Church clock and the Town Hall clock strike together, there’ll be a death in the town’). Ignoring Stalin’s question (‘How many divisions has the Pope?’), the local party went into great detail on the town’s religious organisations. The sermons of a former vicar were listed, including one at Lent on the theme ‘Beguiled. Beset. Bewitched. Beloved. Betrayed.’ The Methodists, the Party noted dryly, were a considerable force in Thame.

Even more care was lavished on the affiliations of local papers, especially the
Thame Gazette
(‘Whereas formerly it devoted many columns to the Tory cause, and less to the Whig, and very little to the working class, it now keeps clear of all contentious news reporting’). Political organisations were analysed, like the Conservative Working Mens Club (‘Most of their activity seems to be the holding of smoking concerts’). Of their
bête noire
, the Primrose League, sinister and in the wings, they noted wistfully, ‘It naturally has many supporters in high places, and so can arrange annual fetes in high places.’

The Communists themselves had to be content with meeting in a school, until the authorities banned the use of schools for political purposes, at which point they hired the Town Hall – before their funds ran out. After this, one of their number, a market gardener, lent them a garden shed. ‘We also met in each other’s houses,’ recalls Celia Yeates, who, as the beautiful Celia Prosser, then 23 and made to be photographed against the dawn by Eisenstein, represented Thame, unknown to its inhabitants, at the Fifth World Festival of Youth in Warsaw in 1955.

‘You weren’t a Communist, were you?’ asked her husband, looking up from his evening paper.

‘Of course, don’t you remember?’

‘I played a lot of cricket in those days.’

But his wife remembered her youth in a Communist cell. ‘I can recall my father Charlie Prosser and Will Warren, both members, talking about spying. Will said he would pass on secrets if he thought they would be of benefit to mankind. And my father said he would, too. The only thing was, my father was a builder and Will a printer. They didn’t know any secrets.’

Celia joined mainly to please her father, in whose office she then worked. Not that it did her much good. Charlie Prosser resigned in 1959 because the Communist Party wasn’t Left enough. He went on to become a county councillor, parish councillor and a member of the rural district council, all at the same time. Later he became a magistrate. Still, his daughter enjoyed her trip behind the Iron Curtain, where she was unaware of any surveillance. In fact, she wished there had been, because she kept getting lost in Warsaw.

Mrs Yeates remembered old Comrades. There were Pat and Ken, whose surnames she had forgotten. Pat had been on the stage, Ken painted labels for some firm, and they once did a reading of a play the two had written. What was it about? ‘Oh, Oliver Cromwell.’ Then there were Will and Nellie Warren, who were vegetarians, which caused a major crisis in the cell when some well-wisher gave the Party a live hen for its sale of work (Will, after much debate, gave the hen back). Nellie used to weave, and had woven her own wedding dress. They also crystallised their own fruit. One of their two sons, Mrs Yeates recalled, ran away from home because there was too much politics in it. The other crisis, apart from the hen, was over the Red Army’s invasion of Hungary.