h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Good Morning Melvyn,

I wish you a Happy Birthday, good helth, good luck and success and joy in whatever you are going to do.

Have a pleasant day.

Best wishes,
Thomas

Good Morning Thomas

Thank you for your good wishes and positive support...I gladly share this "Day" with the Earth...May this new year be good for both of us and all other 22 April types.

Have a good day yourself.

Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

I hope you´ve had a nice day yesterday and I just drop by here to wish you a Happy St George´s Day.

There´s not much I can celebrate here, just to think about England (as I often do anyway) and my late Grandmother who got the chance to start a new life in England more than 60 years ago.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Yes.. It is nice to have St. George's Day the day after my birthday.. I have my own suspicions that William Shakespeare was one of us 22 April boys, but his parents registered his birth on 23...There has been a perhaps predictable English tinge to some of my fb comments today.

Have a nice St. George's Day yourself.

Cheers

Melvyn

Thanks Melvyn and have a nice evening.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Hope things are well with you..

We are just back from another stay in France, and while sharing these thoughts about my trip on May 3 back to my mother's village in the Cotswolds after more than fifty years I thought that I would share them with you.

NOT SET IN STONE

The spire sits high upon a hill.
Weaving up the narrow lanes I glimpse it still.
And when at last the old churchyard appears
It’s scarcely changed in more than sixty years.

Across the way the gravel drive
Still leads to a yard that was once so alive.
No heavy horses now, no wagons, dog or cow.
In the pigsty, no piglets or sow.

But I guess I’ve always known
Not everything is set in stone.

The stable door is bolted and locked for good.
But for how long, the paint is peeling from the wood?

I skirt the green to great-grandma’s door
But they tell me no-one is really living there anymore.
The boarded well in the garden that made it too dangerous for me to play
Is gone. But there’s no-one here to play today.

And haunting old haunts it’s very clear
It took hardy folk to live up here.
And sitting and musing near to the market cross
It reminds us all of life’s profit and loss.

But I guess I’ve always known
Not everything is set in stone.

But if I’ve come full circle to the past
It’s the present and the future that’s brought me here at last.

For children of children have children have children of their own,
Though that too is not something set in stone.
And its baptisms of water and, yes, of earth, wind and fire
That brought me back this day to this spire.

Because I guess I’ve always known
There was always hope for a rolling stone.

Welcome back Melvyn,

I´m sorry to be that short bound now, but I just like to say thanks for the poem and I wonder whether this from yourself. I like that.

I´ll come back to it tomorrow.

Have a nice evening.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Melvyn,

I´m sorry to come back to your last post again that late. I´ve been busy with other things of late.

I´ve just realised after reading your poem again that you´ve written that yourself. My compliments for that one. I´m sorry if my first comment on that might have gone down the wrong way. No offence inteded.

You may remember our conversation from last year regarding that book about English history which I found sounding similar to your essays when I´ve read the book review about it on the website of the Cambridge University.

As Penguin Books had it on their website to be publish as a paperback edition in June this year, I was waiting until that date to get a copy of it. Yesterday it arrived and it is a real thick book, containing around 1,000 pages after I was having a quick overview on its content.

I´m currently bound to finish another book related to NI, but I´ll seek to find the time start with the new one I was talking about now and which is this:

http://www.penguin.co.uk/books/the-english-and-their-history/9780141976792/

I´ll see whether I find the passages more or less similar to your essays when I´m on it. But it´ll take a while before I can get to it. I´ve also a book about Magna Carta, which was published this year as well and I might read that first (for it´s not so thick).

I hope you´re well and that you enjoy the Summer and keep cool during this heatwave as we are as well in the grip of it.

I hope to read from you soon.

Until then,

Cheers,
Thomas

Morning Thomas

Good to hear from you... Someone in the EU has to be constructively busy these days!!!

No offence taken... I realised that you had not understood that I wrote it...And, as you read with interest, what I wrote about my brother for my sister-in-law, I might post the letter that I have been trying to write to my more or less estranged sister about the whole experience of that visit and how it brought a new sense of reality to my understanding of the impact of history on my own roots... As usually happens when I start trying to write her a letter I soon realize that I have written more than she is probably prepared to read.

I looked at that book. It seems that this author and myself have much in common, including France and the French...His previous book published in 2006 seems to cover similar ground to my book written just before then entitled "Cock and Bull Stories. Do We Have to Fight"- all about this theme of the French Cock and the English John Bull...Without being paranoid, it is interesting to note that one of the 'publishing houses' to which I have sent sample chapters of both that book and my previous "English Peace" handles Penguin Books.. I can not rule out that I may have encouraged them to find and author whose thoughts on these subjects they might be willing to publish.. A Cambridge Professorship is a much better selling point than my obscurity.. But perhaps we will see when I finally emerge from my obscurity...

Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

“Someone in the EU has to be constructively busy these days!!!”

Yes, the Greeks are all over the place in the news these days and frankly, by all the pity I do have for those poor people among them, their government was playing very high, maybe a tad too high and we´ll see about their chances after the Greek people voted on the referendum on Sunday.

Whatever you write on this site, I´m interested to read it (re the letter to your sister).

“I looked at that book. It seems that this author and myself have much in common, including France and the French...His previous book published in 2006 seems to cover similar ground to my book written just before then entitled "Cock and Bull Stories. Do We Have to Fight"- all about this theme of the French Cock and the English John Bull...Without being paranoid, it is interesting to note that one of the 'publishing houses' to which I have sent sample chapters of both that book and my previous "English Peace" handles Penguin Books.. I can not rule out that I may have encouraged them to find and author whose thoughts on these subjects they might be willing to publish.. A Cambridge Professorship is a much better selling point than my obscurity.. But perhaps we will see when I finally emerge from my obscurity... “

I´ve had some very similar thoughts like you when I´ve come across that book review the first time and although I didn´t want to say it in such a straight way, I was also thinking about the publishers you contacted and provided with your extracts of your own writing, if there wasn´t something going on behind the scenes they didn´t tell you. But by fair chance, there is always a possibility of coincidence and likeminded people who share the same angle and interests. I was recently thinking that some of the titles, the author chose for the chapters, might be a rather common term for some historical periods. Still, it sounds sometimes as if it was taken from your writings. If one had thought that class distinction and academic reputation are a matter of the past and now overcome, he is proved wrong by that very example.

As I said before, it´s certainly too early to give an assessment of the book in compare to your essays which I know, until I´ve read that book. I´ll see when I can start reading it, because in the past couple of months I´ve started to read various books and switched between them. But the one I´m currently reading needs to get finished to finish the subject this book is about as well.

I assume that your next trip to France is due in a couple of weeks and our planning for our summer holiday will be the first two weeks of September. I´ll let you know about my start and progress with reading that book.

I hope things are all well with you and your Granddaughter.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

I tried posting my letter, but h2g2 objects to some word, so I will post in pieces, which will help me to find the 'offending' word.

Dear June,
Perhaps this is finally a letter that I will feel able to send to you since I can write about something that touches upon our shared experience of Leafield, though yours carried on much longer than mine for when I went there on May 3rd I had probably not been there for fifty years. But I suppose that you have not been back since the death of Auntie Lizzie.
It is a few years now since Vanessa mentioned on the phone that her best-friend from her school-days was moving to a village in the Cotswolds, and, when I asked out of curiosity what it was called, said “Something like Leafield”. At which I told her that this was where her “roots” were on her grandmother’s side.
Subsequently she has gone to Leafield on many occasions connected with her friend’s marriage, pregnancy etc, including going to the Christmas Carol festival at Leafield Church last Christmas: and, when she was visiting us in Bligny in March, she asked if we “minded” her getting Christened in Leafield Church, because she had accepted to be a godparent to her friend’s son, and the vicar would not accept her as unless she was. In fact even Sylvie had been “done” in infancy so we did not “mind”, and this seemed to be an ultimate opportunity and reason to go to back to Leafield and revisit what were not exactly childhood “haunts”, as normally understood. But I suspect, in fact, that many “ghosts” are only fleeting visitors, as we were on our family-trips to Leafield in the Forties and Fifties: but for all that the sense of an ongoing “Lost World” from which we had become separated has remained powerful.
I subsequently wrote this song summing up part of the experience of that day.

NOT SET IN STONE

The spire sits high upon a hill.
Weaving up the narrow lanes I glimpse it still.
And when at last the old churchyard appears
It’s scarcely changed in more than sixty years.

Across the way the gravel drive
Still leads to a yard that was once so alive.
No heavy horses now, no wagons, dog or cow.
In the pigsty, no piglets or sow.

But I guess I’ve always known
Not everything is set in stone.

The stable door is bolted and locked for good.
But for how long, the paint is peeling from the wood?

I skirt the green to great-grandma’s door
But they tell me no-one is really living there anymore.
The boarded well in the garden that made it too dangerous for me to play
Is gone. But there’s no-one here to play today.

And haunting old haunts it’s very clear
It took hardy folk to live up here.
And sitting and musing near to the market cross
It reminds us all of life’s profit and loss.

But I guess I’ve always known
Not everything is set in stone.

But if I’ve come full circle to the past
It’s the present and the future that’s brought me here at last.

For children of children have children have children of their own,
Though that too is not something set in stone.
And its baptisms of water and, yes, of earth, wind and fire
That brought me back this day to this spire.

Because I guess I’ve always known
There was always hope for a rolling stone.

Thanks to the Internet I was able to do some ‘scouting’ prior to the day. On the Leafield website I found some old photos from probably Mum’s early childhood, with one featuring a group of children sitting on the grassy bank near to the market cross, with one little girl, who cannot be seen clearly, bending forward and looking straight at the camera in a posture that seemed to me to be so characteristic of Mum. I also found footage of the Beer and Rock Festivals started up a few years ago by the new owners of The Fox near the Green, the Christening invite having mentioned that this was happening at the same time. “Google Earth” also made it possible to zoom on the satellite images and try to match the lay-out as seen from space with my childhood memories. The farm and yard was, as I remembered, just opposite the Church, itself set on a corner, with the house that our grandparents then moved in to close by, and I thought I could see where great-grannie and Auntie Lizzie’s cottage was backing on to the hill-top “bump”, probably with the Ordnance spot, for, as I was reminded on the day, Leafield was for a long time the highest spot in Oxfordshire.
On the day, as things turned out, what with bad weather and having to find my way, having decided to go via Witney and the smaller lanes, it was something of a rush to get to the Church by 11 pm, and fortunately I did not have to act upon my ideas about just where to park. I got into Leafield just a few minutes before 11 am and was immensely relieved to find space right by the churchyard 10-20 years away from the entrance where people were gathering all connected with the five christenings that were to take place. And the main business of the day took up the next hour before various intervals gave me the chance to pursue my personal agenda.
In the interval before we drove off to a restaurant for our celebratory lunch I was able to move my car to the parking near the Leafield Community Centre, just behind the relatively new houses including the one where Vanessa’s friends the “Caunts” live: but not before I had wandered across the road from the churchyard up the gravel drive towards the farmyard. I was surprised to be able to see above the stone walls to the surrounding countryside, on both sides, and could not decide whether it was because I was now grown up-enough compared with the little boy I was, or whether vegetation had been cut down. Certainly my memory of the patch of land between the farmhouse and the road was of an orchard where sometimes a riding horse was put to graze. Now there were one or two fruit trees but most of the area was a lawn with one of those children’s netted trampolines, and a few other children’s outside-toys nearer the house.
I also remembered a farm-gate, and had anticipated having to open uninvited. But there was no gate, and no need of a gate. I suppose it was only once that Grampy Shayler took me around and showed me the yard, the stables, the sheds with various wagons and other pieces of equipment, and even took me across some of the field, including that with a rabbit warren. But trips down to the outside loo meant going past the pigsty and in winter the cattle-pens with stocks of large mangle-worzels piled nearby for fodder, and, what struck me was the notable absence of any signs of agricultural activity, to all appearances it seemed since our grandparents moved out when Grampy retired. I actually made several trips up to the yard during the day without finding any real signs of life, apart from a parked car and a couple of children’s bicycles just left, lying on the ground.
And, of course, there were good reasons for people not being there. Other Leafield families too were occupied with Christenings or with The Fox’s Beer and Rock Festival and its village fete activities. But the general state of dereliction and lack of TLC seemed all too similar to Bligny and our bit of Burgundy, where there also has much that is “set in stone”, and a very similar stone to “Oxford” and “Cotswold” stones, and in quite a contrast to picture postcard places like Minster Lovell, which I had driven through.
There were cars parked outside the house that Grannie and Grampy moved into as well, and, in fact, at the end of my afternoon general ramble around, when I was sitting on a bench near the market cross, I saw a man come out of the house and had a chat. One of the things I recalled there too was the loo (Were our trips all about sitting around drinking cups of tea while the ticking of clocks was punctuated by “safe” conversation, and inevitably, from time to time, the need to go to the loo?) I remembered that, there too, there was an outside loo just facing the back door. The current owner confirmed that it is still there, but he uses it to store his firewood.
Generally the house itself, too, is little changed, and the owner confirmed that he has done little since he bought it about six years ago, and that it was/is in need of serious renovation and improvement. He has plans submitted to knock down that toilet and extend the house as part of that refurbishment, because the house is once more a “workshop” in what was the West Country tradition, the whole question of the Internet making it increasingly possible, once more, for people to integrate work and home life and reduce the amount of “wage slavery” and commuting. In his case he could work from home usually for three days a week, and benefit, as I had observed, as Colin did, from being able to spend more time and have more contact with his children.
Finding Great-Grannie and Auntie Lizzie’s house was more problematic for I am not sure we walked there once we had a car. But it seemed to me that I had found it, though I carried on a bit further before coming back to what appeared to be the same simple garden fence, where there used to be gooseberries, the wood now rotting away. I thought that I remembered a boarded over well that I was warned off as a child, but saw no evidence. But a garden shed stood more or less there, and, in these Health and Safety days I can imagine such a thing being filled in and “made safe”.
Again there was little sign of life, apart from something stuck on the inside of the window of front door that you got to via a path that went two sides of a rectangle that seemed very familiar. But the house adjoining had been extensively modernised, and again a view of the “bump” on the hill beyond did not chime with my childhood. Nevertheless seeing a man even older than myself near the house and shop on the “main-road” nearby, he passed me on to his wife who told me that she had lived, either in that house, or even closer to Great-Granny’s, for 82 years; and had obviously known both her and Auntie Lizzie.
In fact as we were chatting another neighbour came along who she said had known Auntie Lizzie particularly well. She was, of course, quite a character and, as they put it, having spent so much of her life looking after and caring for her disabled mother, she then looked after and cared for everyone else, until she herself needed caring for. At which point I remembered that you and Mum went to see her quite regularly, and suspected that the neighbours (possibly this man and his wife) were helping themselves to her property as she declined: an avenue that I thought it wisest not to explore.
The old-lady, who must be in her late-eighties, since she had moved to Leafield as a child, repeated the old ‘mantra’ that it takes about three generations for a family to become properly a part of a village and still thought of herself as an alien and an outsider. Having come from lower-down and lusher surroundings she had learned of Leafield as a place renowned for people who, for example, in sports played it hard and rough, with matches against other villages often ending up with fisticuffs.
According to her the Shaylers were one of the four extended families that made up the community of Leafield so that there was a great deal of inter-marriage between cousins, which made me wonder whether this had had any impact on what may have been the “jumping from the frying pan into the fire” choices of Mum and Auntie Audrey, in so far as they made conscious choices, when they got pregnant.
She remembered Audrey marrying and becoming Mrs. Braden (?) and having a son Ray Braden. who I suggested was probably our cousin Ray, when he took his step-father’s name, which she thought might well have been the case.
I asked her too, if she had known Uncle Chris, Auntie Dot and family, who I remembered as living in a more modern house: and she said that they and their four children had lived just in “that house” on the other side of the road, with an eldest son, our twin cousin daughters and a younger son: all now apparently ‘gone’ in one way or another.

After my chats I wandered back up the Green, watched the “Rock Group” perform a couple of numbers quite well in the marquee set up in front of The Fox, while taking in the atmosphere of the Leafield village fete and walked back up towards the market cross, to sit and muse about Leafield as a whole, and how it must have formed Mum, and our lives through her, before heading “back to the future” represented by Vanessa, Daryl, Isobelle and their rather different Leafield-connected world.
In due course I came back to our present realities of South London and then of Burgundy and when I “shared” my poem/lyric with Facebook “friends” when we came back to Norwood last week one of the appreciative comments came from Heather Samworth, as we knew her back in Crotch Crescent days, whose own “roots”, I have discovered, were in Carterton, not far from Witney, while she has a daughter and family living in Stanton Harcourt, different connections for us.
Another comment came from an old friend of an old-friend and colleague, who I only know through Facebook. Being a former English teacher she quoted bits of a poem by Laurie Lee, prompting me to reflect that Laurie Lee was very much a man of the Cotswolds, with one at least of the episodes in "Cider With Rosie" very evocative of the West Country context.
I have in mind the one in which a Hardyesque "Return of the Native" venture turned tragic because someone, who had emigrated and "made it" in the Southern Hemisphere, came "back home" to visit, laden with gold, and spent the evening drinking in the ale-house and swanking about how well he had done in contrast to those who had stayed rooted, where they were in those times of economic decline and depression…He was found murdered the next morning- an unsolved crime.
”Hardyesque” because so many of Thomas Hardy stories have a brooding and dark undertone, most spectacularly perhaps “Jude the Obscure”, the story of a young man from a humble background who “made it” to Oxford University, only to feel so depressed that he committed suicide. So I was somewhat surprised when Vanessa’s best friend gave birth to a son last year, the one who was just Christened in May, and chose to call him “Jude”. Apparently “Jude” is no longer associated with Thomas Hardy, or even possibly “Judaism”, but with the actor Jude Law.
I had some thoughts about all of this, and our ‘roots’, last year when I read a terrific biography of the Australian Nobel Literature Lauriat, Patrick White. His ancestors migrated from the declining woollen West-Country in the 1820's, gambling on the possibility of taking their sheep-farming expertise "down-under", as people began to see “Botany Bay” as more than a solution to the “transportation of convicts” problem handed to Great Britain by the American War of Independence.
Long before Patrick White was born just before the First World War, in a swanky-hotel London, where he parents were staying during an extensive “Grand Tour” of “The Old World”, his whole extended family were "self-made" Australian aristocracy. But in many ways White's whole life can be seen as a "rolling stone" attempt to get back to something more firmly set-in-stone than the mere “skin-deep” reality of a “New World” based upon largely transitory and short-term advantages.. This may help to explain White’s love for Greece, so deeply bedded in antiquity, like his lifelong Greek "partner", with whom he got together when serving in Greece during the Second World War,
This “view from a land down under” also encouraged me to read Clive James' autobiography. His life being not dissimilar in many respects in its search for things of enduring worth and value, which inevitably brought him back to Great Britain, because his fatherless and often isolated childhood was shaped and informed by the library of books from the “old world” that his grandfather had accumulated to read out in “the outback”.
Not for the first time, I thought of the time when the Smart family might have taken advantage of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’ scheme in the Fifties. But a friend and teaching colleague from Gloucester would often refer to the way that his own family did try ‘the scheme’ and quickly discovered that it really was a case of ‘frying-pan and fire’ all coming back to a Britain’s that was more of a ‘land of opportunity’, at least for them.

But my visit to Leafield, where I was able to see the regional similarities and differences with “our” Burgundy, where the finest buildings speaks loudly of the French Middle Ages, brought home to me in a very real way the West Country that was described by Iris Morley in her 1954 study "A Thousand Lives. An Account of the English Revolutionary Movement of 1660-1685"- ending in the tragedy of the Monmouth Rebellion and its aftermath.
I suppose that Ms. Morley’s book was aimed at the idea of a revolutionary “time of hope” that had sustained the war effort during the Second World War and was now “at hand”. The promises of “Homes fit for heroes” that had sustained the British war effort during the First World War had not been fulfilled, leading to disappointment and bitterness: and so during the Second World War it had been necessary to make a stronger political commitment to the task of producing a “You’ve never had it so good” Britain as part of a “Brave New World”.
By the end of the war there had been much talk of the emergence of a new Civilization of Science and Technology that would make it possible for Scientists and Technocrats to help us to “win the peace the way that we won the war”, and by the 1950s much of the Marxist view of the scientific inevitability of History was being treated as accepted wisdom for Communist and non-Communist Historians alike. Thus Ms. Morley could write in her “Epitaph” for her great flowering moment for the West Country: “From being the most highly developed part of the country, it gradually sank into second and third place. This stagnation was not without its gift of bitter suffering and by the early nineteenth century her population showed a striking decline. Men could no longer support themselves from her shrinking industries and the living to be got from agriculture was not great.” (page 245)
Hence Patrick White’s ancestors were not alone in migrating out of the West Country during the hard times of the post-Battle of Waterloo ‘Great Depression’ 200 years ago: and the works of Thomas Hardy were written largely during the next “Great Depression” of English Farming during the half-century before Mum was born, when the region was characterised by a hard life of struggle brought to the wider public in the late 1930s by Flora Thomson’s “Lark Rise to Candleford” books.
But, for Iris Morley, it was the “common people” of the West Country who had stood firm at a crucial moment in the fight for the revolutionary ideals of “Brave New World of the common man”, formulated by the most “avant garde” thinkers and writers of the “English Revolution” during the time of Oliver Cromwell, at a moment when English traditions of the rights and liberties of the people against the pretensions of domineering government faced a very real threat of being swept away, as had happened in most parts of Europe: and Ms. Morley’s title is taken from the defiant speech made by one of the leaders of the Monmouth Rebellion on the scaffold. “For had I a thousand lives, they would all be engaged in the same cause”.
So standing in Leafield, having driven through various towns and villages where so much had been invested centuries ago into setting life into solid and enduring stone, I was reminded of the “seasons” and tides of History that made a mockery of the seeming remoteness and isolation of this tiny village from the “wider world” and the great sweeping course of History. For surely the West Country had been touched and altered by the cult of “Go West Young man” and the vast new opportunities connected with the discovery of America, and other far flung places, that was to drive so much of History for more five hundred years, before anywhere else in the British Isles.
But, though Mum was born at the start of what the great British/European Historian Eric Hobsbawn has called “The Age of Catastrophe” (1914-1945), in many ways for the West Country, things may actually have seemed brighter once the gathering storm finally broke in 1914 than they had done during the ‘Great Depression’ suffered by the English countryside for the previous nearly half-century. That had been a time when vast changes were happening in the world, but the kind of vast changes that culminated in world war, while leaving the West Country, as Ms. Morley said experiencing what almost felt like terminal decline outside the “tide of history” that was running so fast.
And, though the Great War was a new kind of war fought on an industrial scale with the benefit of awesome new machinery and technology, it still needed the British Tommies, many of whom left farm work and jobs like mining to go to the Front Line: and, as we know through Grampy Shayler, it also still needed vast numbers of horses, including the heavy horses that needed experienced handlers like him especially in the Hell of the Western Front. Moreover the war also called for every ounce of food that could be wrested from the English countryside, so farming and with it country life found a new lease of life, that carried on to some extent after the war had been won, though not as much as after the next war that left the legacy of the Marketing Boards where you worked along the Marston Road. But after 1918 world prices for food, raw materials and commodities, that had fallen by 30% on average between 1870 and 1914, only to rise dramatically during the war, remained high: and, though we have now largely forgotten it, by the late 1920s when Mum left school at the age of 12 and entered into the world of work, there were some grounds for optimism and a belief that the Peace of Versailles might yet be made to work.
In spite of the huge numbers of horses needed to supply the horse power during the war, huge strides were made in other forms of ‘horse-power’ and other technologies. There were new possibilities for another less “Dark and Satanic” industrial revolution, with new “light industries” that were powered neither by coal nor oil but by electricity reducing noise and pollution. And thanks to the National Grid the new industries could be located anywhere like Witney, or, on a much larger scale, in the new Cowley complex just outside of Oxford.
The Witney factories like the Witney Blanket and Smith’s alarm clocks able to draw in workers like Mum from the town and within cycling distance: while the Cowley works called for a much larger Labour force, for which new housing estates were built like New Marston and those up in Cowley itself, with many people, it seemed from the Welsh accents that seemed so common in Crotch Crescent, coming to Oxford, like Dad, from the depressed old “Heavy Industrial” regions of South Wales.
One way or another therefore Mum and Dad got caught up in a new period of revolution, which we three children were then thrust into, me in 1944, more or less when Dr.Julian Huxley published “On Living in a Revolution”, a series of articles that I first read with great interest about 20 years ago. In fact I have often wondered whether Dr. Huxley was one of those academics, who became an accessory part of our world through the Oxford local Labour Party as the “revolution” had involved scrapping the separate university seats in the Commons, or whether those we did come across merely had similar Oxford “utopian” ideas about the possibilities of a “Brave New World”, in spite of the critical views of Dr. Huxley’s brother Aldous Huxley, whose republished 1933 novel of that name was more ‘New World apocalyptic’ than ‘Oxford utopian’.
And, looking back, this dichotomy between optimism and pessimism, that can be found in the work of the Huxley brothers, shaped a crucial and formative moment in my life, when on 22 April 1951, my seventh birthday, the news came through that Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson had led a revolt that would break up the Labour Party, making the fall of the Attlee Government inevitable and creating a situation in which the Labour Party, entrusted with managing the Julian Huxley’s “revolution”, could no longer be considered a party of government, but a party of protest, pressure group politics and industrial strife. Perhaps in some ways a seven year-old child is likely to be more susceptible to such shocks than those more hardened by life experience and its disappointments. In my case I had been born after darkest hours and these had been years during which the world seemed to be climbing up out of Hell.
But as the Oxford Historian H.A.L. Fisher had written, when that late 1920s optimism gave way to World Chaos and the drift back towards Hell “The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of History; but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation can be lost by the next.” This quote is used as a frontispiece in the “History of the World” that I was given for Christmas in 1955, having just finished my first term at grammar school as part of a next generation of “chosen ones” that bore so many of the hopes for a “Brave New World” expressed by Julian Huxley in his essay “Education as a Social Function” (1941).

Dr. Huxley may well have had in mind the limitations of the inter-war period which had made it possible for a “man of the people” like Adolf Hitler to become the most powerful man on Earth, when he wrote “One of the major defects of the world today is the dearth of men of imagination, intellect, and sensibility in high places. In the majority of cases, such men seem to lack the drive and confidence needed for public life. The result is that the tough and blatant, the unimaginative, or the pushing types too often rise to the top.”
But, though Huxley could look forward to the educational reforms that would promote his “revolution” including measures that would train: “an elite which shall be efficient and truly representative of the country as a whole”, structures that have a “top” are almost guaranteed to elevate “the tough and blatant, the unimaginative or the pushing types” who will probably always tend to “rise to the top”, since they are the ones who will be willing to use that kind of power freely.
This whole idea of a “meritocratic elite” began to be put forward during the Victorian cult of progress, when, with new scientific ideas like Darwinism, people were increasing ceasing to believe in an active God taking any interest in life on Earth, while those who ‘kept the faith’ argued that God had given humankind the capacity to reshape and manage the Earth on an industrial scale, which did tend to mean that by the very nature of the awesome powers available it was often those most willing and able to use those powers “smartly”, who stole a march on everyone else, while others were hesitant.
And I suppose that has applied especially to the Atomic Bomb, which was born at the same time as me. In fact the background to the Bevan-Wilson revolt in 1951 was the outbreak of the Korean War, as the new world organization, the United Nations, had been given the power to wage war on behalf of the “world order”. The “lesson” drawn from the history of the League of Nations was that earlier international military intervention might have ‘nipped in the bud’ the rise of the Axis Powers before they were capable of thrusting the whole world into a global conflict.
Rather like right now the Korean War brought protests especially from Bevan that the Welfare State provision of free prescriptions, that he had fought so hard to achieve, would be lost as part of the cost of this war, one of the most controversial aspects of which, when it became obvious that it was not winnable ‘on the ground’, was the whole question of whether or not General Macarthur was right to even talk about “nuking the *********”.
Not that people like Bevan were “pacifists”. Many in the Labour Party and most people in other ‘Left Wing’ parties have tended to believe in the Marxist internationalist analysis that argues that the real war that they should fight was the “class war”. And since 1951 there have been many leaders and potential leaders, who, like my contemporary at Cardiff, Neil Kinnock, who said that, if he became Prime Minister there were no circumstances under which he would use Britain’s nuclear deterrent. In the event of a successful invasion we would all have to do the Welsh thing and go to hide in the mountains and fight a guerrilla war. But, as Jeremy Paxman pointed out in “The Political Animal”, the very first task that faces a new Prime Minister on his first day in 10 Downing Street, is that of sitting down and writing by hand the instructions placed in sealed envelopes and given to the captain’s in charge of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, to be opened in the event of them discovering, by certain signs, that Britain is being wiped out by some enemy, upon which they are ordered to launch their own nuclear weapons possibly escalating the conflict to a nuclear holocaust, and possibly the end of life on Earth as we know it.
What person of “imagination, intellect, and sensibility” would willingly put themselves in such a position? Well. Jeremy Paxman gives at least part of an answer, quoting a piece of Cambridge research that shows that a disproportionate number of people who make it to the top in politics are driven to “go the extra mile” and sometimes overstep the limits by personal trauma and tragedy, David Cameron being a recent example.
But surely there is a case for arguing that in most fields of life these days ‘high achievers’ are mostly people who are “driven”, as I was reminded when reading a major biography of the Beatles. And for the Beatles, like many of those of my generation who only got access to an academic secondary education and then on to college or university in accordance to educational changes aimed at bringing about Dr, Huxley’s “Education as a Social Function”, our tendency was to reject war and conflict in all its forms and to imagine, work for and portray or evoke through our creativity the idea of a world of peace and harmony.
And, as an old man sitting in Leafield, not far from where I last saw my grandfather, who was then probably about my age, I could reflect, perhaps more clearly than ever, on the extent to which I had been a “driven” individual, but, for all that individuality I could still see myself as part of a wider continuum stretching from way from way back before Mum was born, that will go on into the future that will face my children and grandchildren and their worlds.
As such it was a rare opportunity to see my personal history some sense of perspective that grew out of my West Country and Oxford roots, a continuum that went back to and through Abraham Annesley and much more than “A Thousand Lives”, many of which, like Annesley’s and my-own, had involved people who felt driven to head for “Front Lines” of age-old conflicts, difficulties and enmities. And I suppose that the fact that so many of these challenges have remained unresolved, so that the world is now confronted by the very real prospect of a new “Bursting of the Dykes” not unlike the one it faced in 1938 and 1914, must make me too feel like Annesley that “had I a thousand lives they should all have been engaged in the same cause”.
But there does come a time when one has to adjust to old age and Vanessa’s Father’s Day card the other day advised me to “relax and enjoy… you deserve it”.

And that is minus one or two passages that I have edited already. Perhaps you can understand why I have decided that I need to drastically reduce.

Meanwhile I have started writing something much shorter aimed at the history behind this global crisis. In part perhaps because I found myself three days ago debating the British Empire in India, and History in general, on Facebook, with someone who turns out to be a recently retired university academic, who has promised a more substantive critique of my point of view.. but in the what we might regard as the true spirit of historical discussion..

Back to Wimbledon etc Two favourites playing right now.

Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Thomas

Just to say thanks and let you know what your intervention has led to.

I am currently writing "Millennial Thoughts" to try to throw light upon the state of the world as we face the thought of another 1000 years, if we last that long.

But same old problem.. What to do with it, when it is written?

Well having looked again at the book you have just bought, etc, I have looked up Robert Tombs of Cambridge University and found both an email and a college address..

So I will be writing to him about the interesting "great minds think alike" nature of our literary efforts and inviting his opinion on this latest piece of my work.

I am just wondering whether or not to mention this interesting coincidence involving Penguin Books... I definitely get the impression these days that those in the business of producing books and articles start with finding a project for which there might be a market, and then finding the writer who they are willing to pay to write it.

Publishers have almost invariably replied that my work is indeed interesting but there is no market for it.. But perhaps I am naïve to believe in what Matthew Arnold called "The republic of letters" within which he aspired to be merely a "plain citizen"...He wrote this to explain why he did not take the title "Professor", when he became professor of poetry at Oxford...Possibly, however, his illustrious father "Dr." Arnold never made it to a chair, and he did not wish to outdo him... Nevertheless as an actual professor at Oxford, and the son of a famous father, he does not seem to have had much trouble getting into print.

Hope things are well with you.

Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

Thanks for your post.

“I am currently writing "Millennial Thoughts" to try to throw light upon the state of the world as we face the thought of another 1000 years, if we last that long.

But same old problem.. What to do with it, when it is written?”

Sounds like an interesting title to me. I know that what to do with it when it is written, except than to put in on h2g2 remains the essential question to you. I´m still on an Irish internet forum (a different one from that I´ve been the past couple of years). Still, there´s nothing yet I had come across that could give any further advice as I could give you in the years behind.

I´ve made the effort to copy and paste all your entries from the “Towards Project” and as you´ve given the whole pieces a re-edition in some ways and put it together in extra links. The whole of it (well as I usually print them in A4 format) contains over 200 pages (in A5 format probably the double of that) and would fairly do for at least a good average paperback edition in print. I´ve done this as I told you the last time to have it complete in one piece to compare it with the book if some similarities arise while or after reading the book by Robert Tombs. From a first glance of the content of his book it might take a long read until I might get to the histori-cal periods that match with those in your Towards Project. I haven´t started reading it yet so I shall see to start with it soon.

“Well having looked again at the book you have just bought, etc, I have looked up Robert Tombs of Cambridge University and found both an email and a college address..

So I will be writing to him about the interesting "great minds think alike" nature of our literary efforts and inviting his opinion on this latest piece of my work.”

That of course would be very interesting if you´d get a reply from him. But I wouldn´t expect too much from him in regards to the Penguin publisher.

“I am just wondering whether or not to mention this interesting coincidence involving Penguin Books... I definitely get the impression these days that those in the business of producing books and articles start with finding a project for which there might be a market, and then finding the writer who they are willing to pay to write it.”

I´ve had some vague suspicions that something might had gone wrong in all that and that it could be possible that it went the way you think. If that would be the case, it´d be a very sneaky way to deal with clients and readers. But one never knows what ways they choose in publishing companies. As a side note, a couple of years ago I´ve registered at Penguin online to order some books I can´t get in my local shop (there is one in my town that sells a selection of Penguin books on various topics). While I was more about to buy literature via other internet shops, I got back to Penguin recently to purchase that book directly from the publisher. Guess what, they directed me to choose from one of the other online shops they have listed there as their trade companions. So I made my choice and got it from another place. It was striking when I first looked for that book and found it on Penguin´s online shop that there was no price for it beneath. Because that I had to wait until June this year to get the paperback edition, I didn´t mind anyway.

“Publishers have almost invariably replied that my work is indeed interesting but there is no market for it.. But perhaps I am naïve to believe in what Matthew Arnold called "The republic of letters" within which he aspired to be merely a "plain citizen"...He wrote this to explain why he did not take the title "Professor", when he became professor of poetry at Oxford...Possibly, however, his illustrious father "Dr." Arnold never made it to a chair, and he did not wish to outdo him... Nevertheless as an actual professor at Oxford, and the son of a famous father, he does not seem to have had much trouble getting into print.”

Yes, I know and I rather think that those publishers were rather taking some excuses to decline from your offer, but let´s be frank, you works are in the majority of its content about history, a bit refreshed with poetry to give a different angle on how one can look at history. So, the excuses they took appear rather feeble to me.

There´s lots of rubbish out there when one looks at some book shelfs and tables and I often wonder what people are interested in to feed themselves with. But well, ones rubbish is an-other ones classy novel. So, I´d say each one to his own.

What I´ve had in mind the last time when I considered your essays and your efforts to get them published in one work is, that it might be more the case that people just like to “read about history” but not “think” about it and put historical events and periods in context to the present day. But that´s what you did and that´s the problem with the publishers regarding their market “issues and concerns” and the intellectual approach in your essays that is more targeting on making people think about it, rather than just read it.

Many of the books I have about history are such that tells you the story on the period the book is about. I also have some academic written books about special topics such like Northern Ireland and they also have chapters with conclusions (in one of these books it is at the end of every single chapter). But they are less “thought provoking”, they are just telling you how things unfolded, went and led to the present day.

As I remember from your telling about your experiences from your own face book account, there seem to be less or none people who would bother to take a different approach on history that would match with your essays. If you could get at least an even small circle of readers, it would be some progress, besides the sometimes foggy ways of publishers and their decisions to publish or not.

Sometimes the blessings and the curse of the internet are just parted by a tiny line.

“Hope things are well with you.”

I´d say like the French say, things are “so lala”. We have a heat wave again and frankly, I feel to be not made for hot climate.

Please let me know when you´ve finished your new project and I wish you good luck with it.

I´ll see to start with that book about English history this evening.

Just some little private anecdote regarding the 14th July. When I got up that morning, I told my wife in that little French that I know “le jour de la Bastille” and we were humming the French national anthem.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Good to hear from you and get your always sensible and thoughtful reactions..

As for Professor Tombs I see that he is associated with a site about people "loving to read", and I rather hope that, if I send him my Millennial Thoughts as attachments to my email he may read them or at least skim some passages.

As a professor of History at Cambridge he must be at least accustomed to reading undergraduate and post-graduate stuff, and it would be nice to think that he might find some originality and interest in what I have written, even if it comes out in the form of suggesting that one of his post-grad students should work it up into a Ph.D. thesis..

But, I suppose all this intense thinking, in amidst so many other things that have been going on here- plus my allotment catching up, have left me rather drained.. And we are off to Bligny again on Sunday, scheduled to go off with our caravan to a favourite spot in the Alps the next week-end, though that has been complicated by the closing of one of the tunnels which looks like we will have to drive an extra 200 km around both going and coming back...

So just a bit stressed, as is my wife.. I think that is my cue for going off to the allotment.

Cheers for now

Melvyn

Thanks for your reply Melvyn.

I wish you good luck in your approached contact with Prof. Tombs.

Meanwhile, I´ve started to read his book yesterday. I made it to the first pages of the Prelude and from what I can say at this early stage, the first couple of chapters may be different to the Content of your essays. What is striking is that he also referred in his foreword to poetry because he says that one can also take something from poetry related to history.

As you know about my interests in Sir Winston S. Churchill, I´m registered as a newsletter Receiver from the Churchill Centre. In this months newsletter there was a link to a home page of the late Sir Martin Gilbert, the best known Churchill biographer. Having read some of the pages there, I found some similarities between him and yourself. He also studied in Oxford and became a historian by Profession. He also chose to have a different approach on history and was keen to get into the Details of the matter, along with travelling to the sites where history was made (even the bad sites).

As I know that you´ve been to Oxford too as a Student, some parts written on the below selected sites might remind you on your own time there, regarding the attitude of some of the tutors then.

Maybe, if you like to spend some time reading it, I give you the links to some of the pages where he was talking about his life and history:

http://www.martingilbert.com/early-life-education/

http://www.martingilbert.com/sir-martin-on-history/

I wish you a good journey on your way to France next weekend. I´ve noticed the current troubles on the channel tunnel via the BBC News website. Immigration and Refugees coming to continental Europe and the UK seems to be another challenge in our times.

Have a nice weekend.

Cheers,
Thomas