Quotes from Anglo Saxon Attitudes

 

MRS SALAD came each year to get her present from Gerald before luncheon on Christmas Eve. It was always the same present - a five-pound note and a large pink cyclamen in a gilded basket tied with pink ribbon. This year, Gerald had attempted a variation by presenting her with a scarlet poinsettia, but he knew at once that he was wrong.

'Oh, it's a lovely foreign thing. Bright as blood,' Mrs Salad said in her old, croaking tremolo, and she peered at it through the haze of mascara'd moisture that always clung to her eyelashes and stuck in little beads on her black net eye-veil. 'I dare say it'll draw the flies. But lovely for them that likes bright colours. Just like the stuff the girls put on their finger-nails now. Like a lot of old birds giving the glad in the Circus, or the York Road, Waterloo, more likely. Trollopy lot.'

And Mrs Salad's black-dyed curls and fur toque with eye-veil shook in disgust, though whether against the painted nails of the modern girl or the behaviour of prostitutes was not clear. In either case, it was righteous disgust, for, despite her scabrous imagination, Mrs Salad always boasted that she had kept her body clean 'as Our Lord had given it to her', and for make-up, although her face was liberally covered with rouge and mascara and enamel, she had never used nail-varnish.

'Now the cycerlermums,' she continued, 'is as delicate as my sister-in-law's skin. Her husband wouldn't have her wear a soiled garment not a day longer than was needed. Spurgin's Tabernacle they was,' she added. Many of Mrs Salad's images were drawn from the anatomy of her family. 'Well, there it is,' she said, giving the poinsettia a final survey. 'More of a leaf, really.' For all their cloudiness, Mrs Salad's eyes were very sharp.

It was not an auspicious beginning for the visit, and this year Mrs Salad seemed more frail than ever, her agile mind more random. Her shrunken little body in its black cloth coat with a bunch of artificial Parma violets was bent with arthritis and her match-stick legs trembled on her high-heeled patent-leather boots with grey kid uppers.

'I came from 'Endon by Underground,' she said, 'and a musty, high-smelling lot they are that go by it now. My son-in-law offered to bring me in his car. But Gladys wouldn't have it. Wanted it herself for a bit of la-di-da, I dare say. Lovely chap, he is. Used to be in the Navy. Often I've seen him of a morning when he's taking his tub, stripped to the waist. Better than any boxer. But it's all for Gladys. He's not the one to give it away to any little cheap bit that comes along.'

Gerald, who was well used to Mrs Salad's reminiscences, handed her the customary glass of sweet sherry and asked her how she liked living at her daughter's.

'Oh! it's a loverly residence,' Mrs Salad said, carrying her glass with shaky hand to her smudged scarlet lips. '

'Gladys isn't equal to it,' she added with dignity, 'though she's my daughter. My son-in-law saw it at once. "Mother," he said to me, "you make the place like a palace and it fits you like a glove."' Mrs Salad here moulded one of her black kid gloves to her small, knotted hand to illustrate the point. Then she continued, 'And a beautiful class of neighbours too. Though it's a trashy lot next door. Makin' h'objections without call. My grandson Vin come at weekends and he likes to sun himself in the garden. He strips thin but very delicate, and a lovely choice of the trunks. Gold-and-white satin. They starts makin' h'objections. I didn't lose my dignity. I just said, "You filthy trollopy lot," I said. Well, you know me, dear. How's Mr John?'  she asked, giving Gerald a sharp glance.

Poor chap. Answering a lot of silly questions from the poorest of the poor. They won't thank him for it. Vin's met him often. A la-di-da lot they move with. It doesn't do any good to ask about it. We shouldn't understand it if we did. But there you are, it doesn't do to criticize, just because their larks aren't ours, does it?'  Gerald had no idea what Mrs Salad was driving at, but he agreed. 'I had a lovely powder-puff from Miss Dollie. She always remembers me. You goin' to her for Xmas?'

It was Gerald's turn to look sharply at the old woman. 'Now, Mrs Salad, you know very well that I haven't seen Mrs Stokesay for years.'

'No,' said Mrs Salad; 'more's the pity. You took what you wanted and passed on, as men will. Oh well, who can blame you?'  She shrugged it off with an ancien régime worldliness. 'Nobody wants to wear an old pair of shoes. But you had lovely larks while it lasted. And very nice to work for, you both were, sin or no sin.'

Her feelings about the poinsettia she made very clear, for she ostentatiously left it behind when she said goodbye.

Since Frank Rammage had grown fat, he liked to spend his time doing odd jobs indoors. With his short legs and his pot belly, he couldn't do much that required the use of a ladder, but he laboured hours painting shelves or fixing electric wires. It was easy to spend so much time on these small tasks with four houses to keep in repair, and in Frank two instincts were very strong - orderliness and economy. His innate inclination to keep things tidy had been developed into a mania by his years of service in the Navy; his passion for saving reinforced since he had become a property-owner. These two obsessions were always at war with a third - his philanthropy; he did not mind that a large number of his lodgers were petty crooks, drunkards, tricksters, and middle-class down-and-outs, indeed it was what he chiefly esteemed in them, but he hardly knew how to support their untidiness, their dirtiness, and their extravagance with light and gas. As he busied around putting up a new shelf in his large bed-sitting room, which was all the space he reserved for himself, he prepared to do battle with a lodger over the question of old pilchard tins.

'It's no good. I've told you twice about it and you've done nothing,' he said, gobbling like a Norfolk turkey and thrusting his fat, smooth, pink face at the girl before she had fully entered the room. 'You'll have to go duckie.' He called everyone duckie or dear.

'Well, it wouldn't do much harm if it did smell a few of the stinkers you've got here out of the place,' the girl said, and she took off one of her sandals and shook it over the floor.

Frank's bald head with its ring of carroty fuzz shot forward at her.

'Stop that at once,' he said. 'No wonder you don't get any work at the studios. You'll spend the rest of your life in the ice-cream factory if you don't smarten yourself up a bit. Look at those jeans.'

'Well, what are you wearing?'  said the girl.

It was true that Frank also habitually wore jeans and a woollen T-shirt, but they were scrupulously clean, if, perhaps, a little unsuitable for a man of fifty-nine. It was this aspect that the girl seized on. 'I've never seen anything so silly at your age,' she said.

Frank was now really angry. 'You'd better go,' he said, 'and if you land back in the approved school don't come to me for a goo

He sat for a while very still and tall and languid on the divan. There was something almost Egyptian or Persian about Vin Salad's stillness and languor, with his long, docile, almond-skinned face and his huge, liquid black eyes. His clothes were far from Eastern, however, for Vin was very careful to avoid anything that suggested the ornate or even the flashy black of the Teddy boy. He wore a very plain dark grey worsted flannel suit, with a cream silk shirt, dark red tie, and light suede strap shoes. It was rather a fragile covering for the winter season, but it was all he had at the moment, and in any case, Vin was always shivering slightly with cold even on a hot summer day. Suddenly his eyes flickered in his stillness and the tip of his tongue appeared between his even teeth. It was a saurian movement, but too quick to be sinister.

'Now, Vin,' said Frank. 'I know you don't like Larrie, but he's a good boy at heart. He's Irish and wild and he doesn't tell the truth, but he's not really bad. All this going about with John Middleton's gone to his head, that's all. I'd like to put a stop to it.'

 

'No, I don't think it's at all funny, Larrie,' said Elvira Portway, John Middleton's secretary, and taking the sheet of paper on which he had typed 'A Happy Xmas to all our bleeders', she crumpled it up and threw it into the waste-paper basket. 'John,' she said, 'stop him touching the typewriter, or, much better still, get him out of the office altogether.'

It was perfectly true. Elvira Portway was exactly gorgeous - tall, dark, voluptuous in the Roman style. Perhaps she inclined a trifle to the heavy in that same style, but it was as yet but the briefest inclination. She was a Roman matron before her time, and yet there was about her a quality of naïveté that suggested the English rose. A nice English girl's upbringing, of course, is guaranteed to withstand the impact of many years' persistent Bohemianism, or rather, it controls and makes its own Bohemianism. It was not so much that Elvira's devotion to the arts was' insincere, but rather that it brought with it something of the fresh keenness of the hockey-field.

Oh! Johnnie!' said Elvira, throwing the lipstick on the desk angrily. 'Don't put on that knowing air and don't be so dramatic. I've known for a long time that you knew I was having an affaire with Robin. I thought you didn't say anything because it wasn't your business, and all the time you've been thinking how clever you were and waiting to produce your knowledge at the dramatic moment. No, it isn't Robin. I do my work or don't do it because it interests me or bores me, not because of my private life.'

'I know my dear brother doesn't think so highly of me. I thought perhaps he'd infected you with his opinion,' said John stuffily. 'You've certainly got a wonderful case,' said Gerald. 'Of course, the Minister'll have to take responsibility, but Mr Pelican won't easily wriggle out. What sort of chap is the wretched Cressett? My heart bleeds for him, like that of all your readers,' he said, with a touch of irony in his voice.

John noticed this, but before he could answer, Elvira said excitedly, 'Oh, we don't meet our correspondents. That might destroy the illusion. We're concerned with injustice to individuals. Nice abstract individuals - Pelican the wicked bureaucrat and Cressett the exploited little man. We don't want to get mixed up with personalities.'

Robin Middleton ran up the stairs of his large Hampstead home like a schoolboy after talking to Elvira. Then, outside the bedroom, the depression of reality slowed his step. His wife Marie Hélène was packing his dressing-case as he came into the room

'No, Robin, no! We should have got a divorce. Your father loved someone else and he did not have the courage of that love. To lack courage is not good. There was no reason, if we had been honest, why your father and I should not have been - what did you call it - good friends. But we were cowards, and now we are hardly even acquaintances. And every hour of the day, too, I remember that poor Dollie. She was not a bad woman, Robin, Dollie Stokesay, not even foolish. Do you think, Robin, that I can be happy to think that because of a mistaken idea, a stupid convention, that poor woman is now a hopeless drunkard?'

'Larrie?'  asked John in surprise. 'Have you been plotting something with him?'

Mrs Middleton did not answer the question. 'That's a nice boy,' she said. 'He is very fond of you, Johnnie. He is a bit fussy, perhaps. He thinks you don't look after yourself properly in London.'

John laughed aloud. He pictured his mother and Larrie blarneying each other into this scheme. All the same, there were a hundred reasons why he would be glad to see Larrie out of London, if he was willing; but to stay at Thingy's was out of the question.

'I wish our Communist friends were here to see it. It would warm their dear little Marxist hearts, which must always be a bit lonely on Christmas Day. What a partnership! Robin Middleton, the head of our greatest steel-construction business, the champion of "more free-enterprise houses for all", and Selwyn Pelican, one of our top red-tape manufacturers, the champion of that rousing slogan, "Every brick laid means a civil servant paid". With their combined pull on the noose, who dares to say old England won't be hanged?

'I suppose the wretched woman thought that two years in Auschwitz and the loss of all her possessions were truth enough.'

'Really!' Donald's prim voice was shocked out of its drawl. 'Are we to be spared no sentimentality, John, even the exploded realist nonsense that unhappiness is somehow truer than happiness, or that...'

Whatever he would have said further was drowned in Ingeborg's

The spectacle was at once revolting and pitiable to Gerald. At first, he was enraged at her neglect of Kay, her utter selfishness; and then he was overcome with pity for her disintegration, her utter panic. He blamed his own weakness for letting her take on too much work. At the last, however, it was physical nausea that gripped him. Inge in collapse became somehow no longer a human being, simply a mass of red, crying flesh, either too revolting to look at or else too pitiable to bear. At the end of a week she became herself again, only relapsing when Kay's accident was mentioned, her blue eyes rounded in p

'I like the Regency style,' said Robin doggedly.

'Yes, darling, you don't know anything about it, but you know what you like. I've told you again and again that's no reason for saying it.' She turned to Gerald. 'It's the awful effect of Freud on the middle classes, you know; they think they've a moral duty to say whatever dirty thing comes into their minds

 

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

 

Angus Wilson

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Gerald Middleton is a sixty-year-old self-proclaimed failure. Worse than that, he’s "a failure with a conscience." As a young man, he was involved in an archaeological dig that turned up an obscene idol in the coffin of a seventh-century bishop and scandalized a generation. The discovery was in fact the most outrageous archaeological hoax of the century, and Gerald has long known who was responsible and why. But to reveal the truth is to risk destroying the world of cozy compromises that, personally as well as professionally, he has long made his own.

 

One of England's first openly gay novelists, Angus Wilson was a dirty realist who relished the sleaze and scuffle of daily life. Slashingly satirical, virtuosically plotted, and displaying Dickensian humor and nerve, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes features a vivid cast of characters that includes scheming academics and fading actresses, big businessmen toggling between mistresses and wives, media celebrities, hustlers, transvestites, blackmailers, toadies, and even one holy fool. Everyone, it seems, is either in cahoots or in the dark, even as comically intrepid Gerald Middleton struggles to maintain some dignity while digging up a history of lies.