Interconnect

It was comforting in the late 1960s to learn that the composed, sturdily elegant figure of Basil D’Oliveira was in the England cricket team. He was a man, we felt, who would see us through. This absorbing book, significant beyond the confines of cricket, is an account of the suffering and frustrations that beset his early career, the astonishing web of intrigue, bribery and political pressure in which he later found himself, and his eventual triumph. Because of his straightforward cricketing skills, his mere presence in England, and in the England team, could be said to have changed the world. This book is also a history of the stupidity and injustice of apartheid.

Stephen Potter, author, radio writer and producer (1900-69, floruit 1940s and 1950s), is an instantly recognisable name, as his son Julian ruefully remarks, ‘to those over 70’. He belonged to the particularly English genus of the highly professional amateur. Cantankerous J. B. Priestley — whom Potter revered and loved working with — had Potter’s number. ‘Mary asks when I’m coming back [after illness] and I say Tuesday. J. B. says, “Well, that’s the start of the week really. And then why not slog straight through to the finish, till Thursday?”’ That comes from Potter’s diaries, which his son has been burrowing into, photocopies sent from Texas. The entry begins revealingly.

The subtitle, ‘On Settling’, is apt; the book is about the author’s settling in (you could nearly say ‘into’) what he calls ‘the claylands’, near Malmesbury in Gloucester-shire, and about the ‘settled’ nature of that place, the threats it has survived, the way it has adapted and, by extension, the manner in which England and ‘Englishness’ have evolved. Concerning ‘Englishness’: today happens to be St George’s Day in brilliant sunshine. Earlier this morning there was a radio phone-in and people complaining that St George wasn’t even English, his flag has been hijacked by football hooligans, and so on. (Phone-ins are un-settling.

In AD 9 the Roman general Varus at the head of three legions was surprised by German forces in the Teutoburg forest, and utterly defeated. It was one of the greatest disasters ever suffered by a Roman army, even if not on a scale comparable to Cannae. This defeat marked the end of any serious attempt by Rome to conquer Germany as Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul and incorporated it into the empire. How serious that attempt had been is a matter of dispute. Nevertheless subsequently that frontier of the empire was fixed on the Rhine. In northern Europe the god’s promise to Aeneas of ‘empire without limits’, recorded by Virgil, proved false.

This book is so important and good it deserves a more crowd-pulling title. Besides, is ‘Revival’ the right word? True, after a silence of 300 years some authors began to write from the Catholic point of view, but this has gathered no popular momentum. Also the word ‘Catholic’ in a title is likely to put people off. Speaking as a Catholic myself (an interest to be declared at once), I know well the kinds of expression a reluctant confession of my allegiance provokes: incredulity, or suspicion or, worse, a sort of loopy awe, as though a Catholic must be privy to other crackpot mysteries, such as the magical properties of crystals (or crystal balls).

The story of the emergence of the poet from the prose writer Edward Thomas — not his emergence as an acknowledged poet, that took another 30 years — is probably well known but is so astonishing it can bear a brief retelling. From his early twenties Thomas had been earning a living, supporting his family (he married when he was 21) by articles and reviews, a staggering number of these, and by prose books of various kinds, more than 40 of them; the thought of the work rate gives one a headache and certainly maddened him. Some were editions of poets, with long introductions, some historical, most were about the countryside, and belonged to what he contemptuously called ‘the Norfolk-jacket school of writing’.

When I first met Terry Smith ten years ago, in the library of Long Lartin top security prison in Worcestershire, he was part of a cockney criminal elite as exclusive and self-perpetuating as the Whig junta that once controlled England. Along the austere corridors in that microcosm of misanthropy and discontent, Smith and his ilk cut quite a dash in their Day-glo designer sportswear, dispensing favours here, meting out summary justice there, employing the less prosperous prisoners amongst us to fetch and carry after regular Lucullan repasts and hooch-fuelled revelries. ‘We were the living embodiment of extroversion,’ Smith suggests in retrospect. ‘A collection of colourful crooks [who] loved to brag and flaunt our natural style, flair and wealth.

Susanna Moore’s fifth novel opens on board the Jupiter in February 1836, with the ladies — make that a capital ‘L’ — Eleanor and Harriet, together with their brother Henry (the incoming governor-general), en route to India. Storms rattle the halyards, rats scrabble at the sodden travelling library and Eleanor, our raisonneur, is somewhat put out to find her own excrement floating back and forth through the flooded cabin. Subsequently, as the Bay of Bengal looms before them, she professes herself ‘shocked at the violence I discover in myself’. Later, inevitably, she will be shocked by the violence she discovers in other people. A first sighting of Calcutta’s chaotic quayside offers only ‘a melancholy absence of official dignity’.

Twenty years ago Clive James’s poetry represented all that I most disliked about contemporary Englit. For a start it was practically ubiquitous. Barely had one laid down the Christmas number of the London Review of Books containing a lengthy Jamesian summary of the bygone year, it seemed, than one walked into a bookshop to find a remaindered copy of Charles Charming’s Challenges winking at one from the bargain bin. Then again, an air of metropolitan cliquishness rose off its shiny surface like sweat.

Pretty soon after beginning his two-week descent into the Dantean world of the modern deep-sea North Atlantic trawler, Redmond O’Hanlon, far too old to be anywhere near one of these boats, let alone in January, let alone with a Force 12 Category One hurricane in the offing, not to speak of the burden of being ‘Worzel Gummidge’ or ‘Mister Writer-Man’, as the trawlermen call him, with his incomprehensibly expensive camera equipment and his vast literary-cultural-natural-historical baggage, lies in the cramped coffin of his bunk and starts to feel sick: My gullet and stomach rose out of my body.