Britain

British Criminals, Then and Now

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The British secret agent Odette Hallowes was awarded both the George Cross and the French Legion of Honor in recognition of her heroism during WWII. Some years after the war, a burglar broke into her mother’s home, and among the items he stole was Odette’s George Cross. A public appeal for the medal’s return was made, and the burglar sent it back with the following note:

You, Madame, appear to be a dear old lady. God bless you and your children. I thank you for having faith in me. I am not all that bad – it’s just circumstances. Your little dog really loves me. I gave him a nice pat and left him a piece of meat – out of fridge. Sincerely yours, A Bad Egg.

Even this criminal had enough identification with his country and its history and accomplishments to recognized that Odette’s GC was something that really ought to be returned to its owner.

Does anyone think there are many among the current UK rioters who would do the same?

Getting away from politics

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Some people here know that I am a complete detective story addict. Not only do I read them, I read about them, I discuss and analyze them with several articles to my credit (if I may use that expression). What follows is a discussion of the latest Lord Peter Wimsey novel. In case this book has not hit the States yet, let me explain.

When Dorothy L. Sayers abandoned the writing of detective fiction she had completed six chapters of a novel Thrones, Dominations about Lord Peter and Harriet, now married and back from their honeymoon. For various reasons, possibly because of the Abdication Crisis, the novel was not finished. There were a couple of amusing short stories, not of the first order, and a series of letters about the war in The Spectator, purportedly from the Wimsery – Delagardie family through late 1939 early 1940. Then nothing. Sayers went on to write literary and theological essays, religious plays and to translate Dante.

In 1998 Jill Paton Walsh, herself a writer of detective and other novels, published a completed version of Thrones, Dominations. Four years later she wrote A Presumption of Death, which began with those letters and developed various themes in them to create an interesting novel with a much better plot than the previous one, of the Wimseys and others during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. Last year Ms Paton Walsh went further and produced a completely new novel The Attenbury Emeralds about Sayers’s characters, using some references in the various novels and short stories but inventing her own plot.

The book takes place in 1951 and the main theme (the plot is rather silly) is the adjustment everyone has to make to post-war Britain. Lord Peter, Harriet, Bunter, the Parkers have now become Jill Paton Walsh’s characters as much as Sayers’s. Hmmm. This is my take on that development and the latest novel, posted on the Conservative History blog.

London Burning

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Another night, another night of riots, arson and casual lootery, relatively untrammeled by the efforts of law enforcement, and perhaps slightly slowed down by the efforts of massed local residents and business owners. After three or four nights of this destruction, which leaves the internet plastered with pictures that look like the aftermath of the WWII Blitz, I would have hoped that the local residents were beginning to assemble and barricade their streets, rather than leave them open for the ‘hoodies’ to do their worst.

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Declaration of Independence

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My annual act of civic piety is to read the Declaration on July 4. I have it in several places, including the Documentary Source Book of American History, 1606-1913 (1925) edited by William MacDonald, Professor of History in Brown University. College kids used to read the original source documents as a first year course. God help us. I was perusing the documentary record leading up to the Declaration. It was building up for a long time. The thing was not going to end happily.

The signers of the Declaration did not get to sit on their porch in a peaceable and prosperous country (drinking a rather stiff vodka and tonic) and being relatively carefree about it. They were making a hard decision to embark on open war with the most powerful country in the world, with a good chance of being beaten, hounded and harried, their wealth destroyed, their families scattered, their cause lost, and their own lives ending with a rattle of drums from redcoated drummer boys, and a broken neck at the end of a British noose.

They signed it anyway.

They stated their principles, they rolled the iron dice, and they gave us our country.

God bless America.

Lord, please make us worthy of them.

Nevil Shute Norway

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One of my favorite novelists is Nevil Shute. He was an engineer, as was I, plus he writes about people with an ability to show their humanity and their deeper motivations without a lot of explanation. He is the engineer’s novelist, the businessman’s novelist and should be on every list of conservative novelists. I have read all his post-war novels, most of his wartime novels and a selection of his pre-war novels. He died in 1960 and all his books are still in print.

I was a college student when “On the Beach,” possibly his most famous novel, came out. It scared me so badly that I have not been able to enjoy rereading it, as I have his other books. I was a college sophomore and familiar with his other work at the time. I had read his aviation novel, “No Highway,” and was aware that the plot device in that book, of metal fatigue causing a new airplane to crash without explanation, had been prophetic. Shortly after “No Highway” had come out, the British Comet jet airliners had begun to crash and, when finally identified, the cause was metal fatigue.

Shute had written another prophetic novel in the late 1930s, called “Ordeal,” which predicted the effects of the Blitz on London. Both of these books, with their predictions borne out by history, caused me to be very shaken by “On the Beach.” A rather successful movie was later made from this novel, which Shute hated because it had suggested that the two principle characters, played by Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, had slept together while he believed it important to establish their morality, even when doomed.

I very nearly dropped out of school after that book and spent a year or two getting over the idea that I would soon be fried in a nuclear war. My reaction was based as much on my regard for his novels as for the topic, itself. A quite good movie was made from “No Highway” with James Stewart, Glynnis Johns, and Marlena Dietrich.

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