Marina Warner is a Professor of English Literature who has written some almost entirely sane books. She is beautiful, like her mother, who taught Italian Literature at 'A' level and, I believe, gave Charles and Diana Italian lessons back when they were still talking to each other. Both women were intelligent, highly literate, and perfectly sensible. The mother, whom I knew, was sociable, gracious, and took a keen interest in her students. She had recently been bereaved and had many English friends and neighbors who rallied around her. These were the decent, straight forward, sort of people you find in Parson's Green.
I'd not been aware that Ilia, as Marina's mother was known, had married the son of 'Plum' Warner- a cricketing legend. My memory of a visit to her house was having my ear chewed off by an old boy who took it for granted that, because I'm Indian, I would be greatly interested in the bodyline controversy from half a century ago. To my shame, I was. Herr Hitler may have been a bad egg. But what the Australians did was despicable. This put Mrs. Thatcher's victory in the Falklands in perspective. Her crowing over it was bad form. Galtieri was Argentinian. Highly strung, I mean to say. It's one thing to take the fellow down a peg or two but why rub it in?
It occurred to me that the old boy was a 'wet'. The truth is his generation- that of Marina's father- had become quite Socialist during the war. They did not welcome their rescue, by Mrs. T, from penury. They resented the manner in which such property as they had managed to hang on to kept rising in value thanks to the chicanery of a Grocer's daughter. Something like 'bodyline' bowling had occurred. What was truly insufferable was Mrs. T's elocution. She talked to you like your titled Aunt. But, Aunts aren't gentleman as that other Pelham had observed.
Ilia was a sensible woman. She was from Bari- the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated city in that region. It had been been beautified by Mussolini and suffered relatively little during the War. Still, it was just as well that the beautiful young Ilia, whose mother was a widow, married a British officer and was sent to England out of harm's way. I may mention that Plum's mother was Spanish and the family had ben settled in Barbados. Thus, there could be no question of racism. In any case, Ilia was smart, educated, from a good Catholic family, and well able to stretch a Major's salary in those days of rationing.
I wonder if her husband had Intelligence connections. Apparently, he talked W.H. Smith into setting up a Cairo branch at a time when Britain needed assets of a certain type in that City. The well bred manager of a prominent bookshop chain was bound to be very useful without being too conspicuous. But spying isn't cricket. It fractures character. Add in sociable boozing which soon becomes unsocial toping and the wife and kids begin to pay a price.
Marina gives us the following account of how her father ended up in Egypt.
The end of the war found him in India or Ceylon and he had to wait for transport home; it took a while as there were so many other demobbed troops. He came back on the Queen Mary with thousands of other soldiers, and found himself thirty-six years old, without settled profession or job, alongside millions of men in a similar position looking for work in a world shrunken by war.
Britain was bankrupt. There were very strict exchange controls. A Company looking to expand abroad had to justify the monetary outflow in terms of not profit, but the public interest. Meanwhile, rationing was actually getting harsher, not more generous. The question was how to get hold of enough foreign currency to get out of the country.
Because he had enjoyed Cairo during the Africa campaign, because he was a book lover and a wide reader and a high-spirited traveller, he suggested to friends that he open a branch of their business in Cairo to serve the English and French communities
Everybody in Cairo was a spy of some sort back then. If WH Smith could get hard currency to sell books to the Pharaohs, why not do so? The noblest of wars end with the spirit of sacrifice yielding to that of the larcenous spiv. One can't be too precious about such things though, no doubt, it is best to have some sort of National Security alibi.
Marina says ' I have always feared that I am a snob, but a snob deformed by the stamp of colonial ambivalence, the creep and cringe of those exiled from the metropole blended with the brutal superiority of the official, governing class. (In my childhood in Egypt, the British were officially “protecting,” not governing.)
Marina is wrong. The protectorate ended in 1922. The Brits had troops in Egypt and were training, or not training, the Egyptian Army. The bigger question was Sudan where the British Colonial officers were doing rather a good job.
There certainly were some daughters of officers or diplomats, at that time, whose heads were turned by the glamour of the Khedive's Court. Marina herself must have met such people. Were they snobs? No. This was Romance and Exotic Opulence and a sort of pink cushioned, Barbara Cartland divan of Vorliebe, in which the shop-girl might share just as much as the debutante. But it was a fantasy that only the shop-girl got to keep. The debutante might turn into Princess Di. Reality is a car-crash.
I’ve also been afraid throughout that at some deep level of my being, I’ve been marked by my early years, and shall betray my childhood saturation in derring-do adventure and empire yarns, in G. H. Henty and Rider Haggard, in the Prisoner of Zenda and the Hornblower books in John Buchan and Captain Marryat, literature I devoured as a child bookworm from the shelves of my father and his parents’ bookcases, stories in which the world is English (the term British wasn’t in use then) and the villains are foreigners, “natives” of Smyrna, Samarkand, Calcutta, Khartoum—Orientals, a term which covers Jews and Arabs almost regardless.
No. 'Levantine' was a term which might be used by an anti-Semite. Orientals were curious creatures out of the Mikado.
Or they’re generically “Indians,” and indeed the breadth of this term, embracing peoples from the North to the South Pole, the Caribbean to the subcontinent, discloses the blanket sense of otherness
in which case Italians and Germans too were Indians with respect to British ipseity.
that issued from the vantage point of imperial London to demarcate most of the rest of the world.
This is foolish. London regarded its Empire as an extension of its ipseity. Alterity began at Calais. George Wigg, a Labor MP, attacking Churchill in Parliament in 1949, said 'The hon. Gentleman and his Friends think they are all "wogs." Indeed, the right hon. Member for Woodford (Mr. Churchill) thinks that the "wogs" start at Calais. If one views people like the hon. Gentleman from the angle of a private soldier, one realises that to them there are black "wogs" and white "wogs." The attitude of hon. Members opposite to the black chap is not much different from the attitude of some of them towards the private soldier, and that is why the Forces have a great sympathy with the native peoples.' Wiggs was angry that Italy was going to get back territory in East Africa. The truth is Bevin offered to create a Greater Somalia which would include Kenya's north eastern province, but the Somalis mistrusted the British. They preferred the mandate go to Italy.
The question I put to myself isn’t so much “Am I a Snob?” as do I see with “the eye of the Empire”?
This is silly. That Empire was melting away. Suez was a disaster. Eisenhower forced Eden to withdraw. It turned out, Nasser was the hero of the story. France and England and Israel were the Evil Axis. Marina was pretty smart. What she was reading at the age of 10 or 11 was belied by the news being relayed on the radio and TV. Her cohort entered University a decade after the winds had changed. England was begging to join the Common Market. Marina represented exactly the type of European blending that the rest of England hankered for. Snobbery was no longer about pedigree. It was about style, sophistication, a cosmopolitan savoir faire which Marina, like her mother, possessed in ample measure. Many of her father's generation- as must happen to those who fought in a prolonged war which initially seemed hopeless- found it difficult to center themselves. But, that war, more than any other in European history, was won by women. Of none could it be said that 'alone of all her sex' she had prevailed. Whatever women endured and achieved, they did so collectively. This was the saving grace of the London to which Ilia came in 1944. This was the Labor run country in which she first went into labor. Marina was born in 1946. Whatever it was she saw, she saw with eyes washed clean of the stain of conquest and exploitation.
The temperamental South Italian, the phlegmatic Anglo Saxon- in Marina's home those roles were reversed-
Discomfort, unease, constraint, suffocation, these almost capture the sense of oppression I felt with my father, a man also given to rage and then to bouts of abject remorse, who also kept everyone around him, most particularly my mother, in a fever of anxiety that a spark might fly at random and his ready fury catch alight. And then, in the name of righteousness, railing that things were to be done this way, that only ignorant fool women could fail to understand how matters stood in the world and what the done thing was, he would explode and as quickly subside, leaving everything undertaken around him—the walk, the meal, the drive in the car, the outing to the theatre, the proposed new dress—wrecked.
Okay, the guy had a drinking problem. Still, he was enterprising. He bet big on Ilia and won big. It may not have been cricket, but then which marriage is?
One thing puzzles me. Marina gasses on about a pair of brogues her father bought her Mum when she moved to England. It is obvious that, at a time of rationing and 'repressed inflation' it made sense to get a sturdy pair of flat heeled shoes (her mother was rather tall) which would last. Marina however sees something significant in the etymology of the word which is simply the Gaelic for shoe and thus, quite naturally, refers to Ireland's distinctive footwear and accent and supposed treachery from a Protestant view point.
A reviewer for a Catholic magazine writes-
Warner walks the reader through the shifting meanings of the word “brogue.” Now, it “means strong lace-up footwear with decorative pouncing or perforations.” In 1537, though, in its first recorded usage, it meant “an escheat; a fraud, a trick.”
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