I noted yesterday how well HV Morton could write, on my reading of his I Saw Two Englands, which covers two trips across the country before and after the outbreak of war. Although much of it is more or less hack travel writing, this is also a fascinating portrait of a country on the cusp of war, and in the early “phoney war” period.

Two of the book’s images might sum it up:

This is labelled “crookmaker of Pyecombe”. Morton laments that this is an England already almost gone – indeed you might call it a pre-WWI-style relic. “The head of the crook is of iron or steel, and nothing makes a better crook than an old gun barrel. The haft of the crook must be formed of unpeeled hazel for the shepherds will not have ash. They polish the hazel until it looks like mahogany.
As the purpose of a crook is to catch a sheep by the leg, and as the various breeds of sheep in England vary in size, there are many patterns. A Sussex crook would be of no use to a Kent shepherd, and a man herding Dorset Horns would require still a difference pattern. … Pyecombe crooks last more than a lifetime, but as there are fewer shepherds than ever on the Downs, there is not much genuine demand for them today. Instead the Mitchell brothers are generally busy making crooks for bishops and hikers.” (p. 111.-112)

Yet in between his accounts of architectural and cultural relics in the first section of the book, Morton is also seeing an England waiting for war. At Fotheringham, the site of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Morton finds a hand-written notice on the wall of the church about what is to be done after the proclamation of a state of war: “The Church bells will not be rung or chimed during the whole period of a state of War for any ordinary or special services … In the event of an enemy air raid threatening the village, the ALARM will be sounded by two, or more, of the church bells being rung continually for two, or more, minutes. When the alarm has sounded DON’T …. Be surprised at anything that may happen.” (p. 178)

At his hotel the next morning Morton meets an historian who says: “I gave up reading the papers last September and feel better for it in every way … there are not sufficient facts available these days on which anyone could base an opinion, therefore I feel I miss nothing.” (p. 179)

He also writes about class in a distinctly looking-down-the-nose way that must still have been acceptable in 1939, but that by the end of the war would, I suspect, have sounded a bit much. So in Fittleworth, Sussex, in the Swan, he has what he says is the only interesting conversation he has ever had with a bar maid. “The girl told me that she had been getting up at six o’clock for the past few mornings in order to photograph a family of foxes living on Fittleworth Common… no one, except perhaps Thomas Hardy, could have imagined a barmaid in the bracken, watching for little foxes.” (p. 113)

This of course is the post-outbreak photo, of members of the Women’s Land Army (“land girls”) being trained at an agricultural college. “As we were walking round, a shapeless female figure in voluminous garments passed across the weeping landscape … ‘She used to be a fashion artist,’ said the Principal. Another figure in corduroy breeches clumped past with a spade across her shoulder. ‘She was a typist,’ said the Principal. ‘No, I’m wrong, a ladies’ hairdresser.'” (p. 276) While he’s there a group of evacuated London schoolboys come past on a tour and express astonishment about where their food comes from.

The overall image is of a country is a state of slightly bemused dislocation, waiting for the bombs to fall, and in the meantime being disproportionately shocked by minor changes to their lives. “In the public-house between Frome and Bath … the tap room was full of the usual country characters, all talking about the War and listening to the B.B.C. news bulletin. Until the War the names of B.B.C. announcers had never been divulged, but as soon as War was declared, these gentlemen owned the best-known names in England. At first the phrase “and this is Frank Phillips reading it” was as startling and extraordinary as if The Times leaders had been signed.” (p. 214)

The postscript of the book has Morton as a member of the Home Guard (“Dad’s Army” – and this sounds like that) leading his platoon in a search for downed German airmen. “Harry and George clumb upon a mound of hay and prod about in it; and I am reminded of some story, read long ago, of Roundheads searching for Cavaliers…. Danger gas skipped us for a century or two; and now we are back in Danger, with a gun under the bed and an ear cocked for the sound of a signal” (p.285-7)

*****
One more interesting snippet as my postcript.

“The verb to canter is, of course, a contraction of a ‘Canterbury gallop’, which was the easy hand gallop into which the pilgrims urged their horses, possibly when they came to level stretches of the South Downs.” (p. 69)

(My edition is Metheun and Co London, 1942, I’d imagine the original, produced to the “Book Production War Economy Standard” – it is a hardback, but the paper’s very cheap-looking.)

History

1. “I shall never believe in ghosts until I hear of one that spends its time turning on the hot water or switching the electric light off and on. A ghost that merely glides past all these fascinating modern improvements is not, to my way of thinking, genuine or convincing.” (p.15)

2. “Indeed, from their willingness to provide tea and sell fudge, it is clear that the old houses of Alfriston fully appreciate the profit to be made from those who are so starved of beauty that they will go miles to look at a thatch.” (p. 102)

These from H.V. Morton’s I Saw Two Englands, 1939 (covering journeys before and after the outbreak of war).

As befits a highly prolific writer he’s uneven, but when he’s good he’s very good.

He’s even got a personal society.

More later, hopefully.

I’m a fan of Lionel Shriver as an author, but as a social commentator she’s way off-beam. Writing in
this weekend’s Guardian, she says:

“After talking myself blue about “maternal ambivalence”, I have come full circle, rounding on the advice to do as I say, not as I did. I may not, for my own evil purposes, regret giving motherhood a miss, but I’ve had it with being the Anti-Mom, and would like to hand the part to someone else.”

While I can sympathise with her being fed-up with a one-line media stereotype, she then goes on at great length to talk about her desire for her own life as her own “evil purposes”, saying of her (relatively) child-free generation: “We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don’t especially care what happens once we’re dead.”

What tosh. I’m childless myself, entirely and absolutely by choice, and know lots of other people who’ve also chosen not to have children, but this means we have more time and energy to devote to the present and future of our societies and our world. While parents have chosen, as is their right, to put vast amounts of time and energy into helping usually at most a couple of human beings face the future, we’re doing the voluntary community work, conducting the environmental campaigns and generally facing the issues that take entire societies into the future.

To say that this is more “selfish” than putting the same effort into passing on a few of your genes is ridiculous. Indeed there’s a case to be made that if anyone is being selfish it is the parents – certainly those who have more than their replacement allocation of two children.

European societies, as Shriver discusses, are getting very exercised by their ageing social structures, but the world’s population is still growing at a great rate – probably far beyond its sustainable carrying capacity. All that needs to happen is for it to be more evenly distributed.

And if a reminder of the enormous pressures to which we are subjecting this fragile planet were needed, two stories in the Guardian today certainly provide it.

I was struck by a line in a story about China building a railway to Tibet: “The roof of the world is melting.” Then there was the piece about how budget airlines are taking off in India.

The railway is taken as just one symbol of that “those billions are travelling, earning and consuming more than ever before”. But the very foundations of the track, and of the future, are put at risk by that very growth, even though the trouble the engineers are having with the permafrost melting is entirely down to Western over-consumption over the past two centuries.

The human race can’t afford to have them consuming at Western levels, yet if there is to be any hope of convincing them not to do so, we need to dramatically cut back ourselves. The childless are helping with that problem, through that choice, and many others.

So if you’re looking for a new “anti-Mom”, here I am.

An email today reminded me of one of those wonderful “labour-of-love” websites that often don’t get the attention they deserve: Parthia.com.

It is a collection of varied resources about the ancient civilisation, with a particular focus on coins. And if you think that sounds rather dull, well check out this collection of images of horses from Parthian coins. I was reminded anew of just how fine the workmanship on ancient coins can be.

There’s also the inevitable collection of recipes – mainly arriving via the Romans. Pliny reckoned their bread would keep for centuries, if you consider that a recommendation.

The only Parthian (real) site I’ve visited is Dura Europos, on what is now the Syria-Iraq border; then it was the Rome/Parthian border. It is a magical, haunting place, set on a great bluff over the Euphrates. (The atmosphere is only magnified when you know that the actual archaeology of the final battle here was preserved in the bones of the defenders”).

That’s the question Barbara Ehrenreich tries to answer in her brilliant Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War. Or, to put it more precisely, what predisposes the human species to get caught up in war fever?

Her answer, to simplify, is that it comes from the fact that we are the only species to have gone from being mainly prey to almost entirely predator. “Here is what we might call the missing link within the theory of human evolution itself: how a poor, shivering creature grew to unquestioned dominance. Before and well into the age of hunting, there must have been a long, dark era of fear when the careless and stragglers were routinely picked off, when disease or any temporary weakness could turn man into meat.” (P. 45)

The point at which the roles began to turn, Ehrenreich reports, citing William H. McNeil among others, is when humanities and humans started to act as a group, making noise, throwing sticks and stones and otherwise acting together. “As any demagogue knows, a crowd is most likely to bond into a purposeful entity when it has an enemy to face. Millennia of terror seems to have left us with another ‘Darwinian algorithm’: that in the face of danger, we need to cleave together, becoming a new, many-headed creature larger than our individual selves.” (p. 82)

Further,: “The transformation from prey to predator, in which the weak rise up against the strong, is the central ‘story’ in early human narrative. Some residual anxiety seems to draw us back to it again and again. We recount it as myth and reenact it as ritual, as if we could never be sufficiently assured that it has, indeed, occurred.” (p. 82)

And humans continue to promote this anxiety culturally – through stories of beasts “coming to get them” if they’re bad, through horror movies, through Roman ‘games’ plus the human child is for a very long time just as vulnerable as our early ancestors.

The hunting that occurred, as we got to the top of the food chain, was primarily a large group activity – herds that occurred in great numbers were driven off cliffs, into bogs or human-made traps, a task that would require every member of the tribe to participate. It was only perhaps as recently as 15,000-10,000 years ago, with the combined effects of climate change and, probably, human predation, that animal numbers fell to such a point that a few mobile, adult individuals would travel, perhaps long distances, to stalk and spear game.

Not coincidentally, Ehrenreich suggests, that roughly coincides with the first evidence of what looks to us like war, a rock draw in Spain showing bands of stick figures wielding bows and arrows against one another. Graves from the same era in Egypt and East Asia support that conclusion (p. 117)

But this was not a case of competition. Ehrenreich suggests that as gathering and crop growing developed “the majority of adult men would have found themselves in need of some substitute for the hunter-defender role. As encounters with wild animals (both game and predators) became less central to human survival, so, potentially, did adult males become less central to the survival of women and children. In their engaging study of warfare among southwestern American Indians, anthropologists Clifton B. Kroeber and Bernard L. Fontana propose that war may indeed have arisen to fill the void. One by one, they eliminate the various materialist theories – involving land and access to water – which have been offered to explain these peoples’ perpetual wars, and propose instead that war exists because it is a prestigious thing for men to do, that it is an exciting and even “religious” undertaking.” (p.124)

And once this direction was taken, it was hard to stop. “As it spreads from place to place, war tends to stamp a certain sameness on human cultures. At the most obvious level, it requires that each human society be as war-ready as the other societies it is likely to encounter … No doubt there are other directions in which human cultures might have evolved – towards greater emphasis on the arts, for example, or philosophy, or more lighthearted games and rituals. But war, once chosen by some, quickly became the ‘unchosen direction’ imposed on all.” (p. 134)

War has traditionally been analysed by reference to social and economic structures of societies, but Ehrenreich says, it has persisted through all of these. It can be thought of she says, as a meme. Ehrenreich says this concept is still rather loose and inadequately theorised, but suggests that in the case of war “it would have to be conceived as a loose assemblage of algorithms or programs (in the computer sense) for action ” (p. 234)

“If war is understood as a self-replicating entity, we should probably abandon the many attempts to explain it as an evolutionary adaptation which has been, in some ecological sense, useful or helpful to humans. … Culture, in other words, cannot be counted to be ‘on our side’.” (p. 235)

“It is … a parasite on human cultures – draining them of the funds and resources, talent and personnel, that could be used to advance the cause of human life and culture. But ‘parasitism’ is too mild a term for a relationship predicated on the periodic killing of large numbers of human beings. If war is a ‘living’ thing, it is a kind of creature that, by its very nature, devours us. To look at war, carefully and long enough, is to see the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago.” (p. 238)

But there are actions that can be taken to combat the meme, for “if the twentieth century brought the steady advance of war and war-related enterprises, it also brought the beginnings of organised human resistance to war. Anti-war movements, arising in massive force in the latter half of the century, are themselves arising in massive force in the latter half of the century, are themselves products of the logic of modern war, with its requirements of mass participation and assent. When the practice and passions of war were largely confined to a warrior elite, popular opposition to war usually took the form of opposition to that elite.” (p. 239) And within anti-war movements, humans can discover that euphoria of banding together for common survival, Ehrenreich suggests, that they first found when a band of humble hominids drove off a sabre-toothed tiger by working together.

It is a brilliant account, and I’d highly recommend reading the book, which has far more complexities than I have space for here. My edition is Virago, published 1997.

Which makes me think about bringing it up to date. What is changing in the 21st century, it seems to me, is that certainly the dominant Western states are moving away from “mass” wars. Of course this is only a good thing, in the avoidance of bloodshed, but if wars are to be conducted by robots and drones, as the Americans seem to be aiming for, the impetus for anti-war movements that Ehrenreich identifies will have disappeared. (Unless of course the robots decide to rebel!) And if the humans involved are those from lower socio-economic groups (also the case in America and other Western societies), they’re the ones with the least voice to speak out against the wars in which their sons and daughters are dying.

Perhaps we all need to do something about that.