Stand on Zanzibar

John Brunner’s fine bit of SF dystopia, circa late 1960s. I had it as a paperback, which disintegrated and  was discarded many years since. Brunner took on the American complaint of British SF: ‘Here we are trying to get off the planet. You lot can’t even get off your island’. With this book he cracked the American SF market.

The essential conceit was by 2010 the world’s population would no longer fit onto the Isle of Wight (>150 square miles), with some small social segregation, but would need the space of the island of Zanzibar (around 600 square miles). Brunner projected that by 2010 the world population would be around seven billion — one of several anticipations he nailed, along with the failure of the Soviet Union, the rise of industrialised China,  the prevalence of electronic media, the dominance of the Great Computer … well, OK, we’ve decentralised that one.

The Anglo-Zanzibar War

This was going to be my point-of-departure, until I remembered Brunner. According to wikipedia:

The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a military conflict fought between Great Britain and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history

Which piece of profound historiography derives from (roll of drums and eye-balls) The Guinness Book of Records.

As far as I can see, the War amounted to two Omani sheikhs, one British-backed, the other German-supported, squabbling over who got the late Sultan’s harem. Any need to sanitise that, dress it up as pro- and anti-slavery factions.

Let’s start with why the British were there in the first place

Follow the bouncing ball:

• Portugal had been at odds with the British over Mashonaland, Nyasaland and so the Zambezi basin.
• This would have bridged the Portuguese colonies on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean shores — blocking the British attempt to build a north-south, Cape-to-Cairo corridor.
• Lord Salisbury was having no such nonsense, dismissed the Portuguese claims as ‘archaeological’, and issued an ultimatum (January 1890).
• The result was an agreement (August 1890) endorsed by a formal convention (11 June 1891).
• Mashonaland and Nyasaland went to Britain, and Portugal got the Zambezi basin (i.e. modern Mozambique).
• For the British the bonus was a ‘protectorate’ of the sultanate of Zanzibar, but more significantly a freer hand in East Africa, checking the growing German interests in Tanyanika (and so towards the Upper Nile).
• That required a quid-pro-quo to assuage the Germans: the grant to Germany of a strip in West Africa, from Kamerun up towards Lake Chad.
• Not uncoincidentally, from the British point-of-view, that queered the pitch for French expansion in the same area.

Since it was ‘be nice to the Kaiser’ week, another strip (the ‘Caprivi strip’) came gift-wrapped. This had no particular value, except to expand German South-West Africa (modern Namibia) towards the Victoria Falls. But, again from the British perspective, putting a spoke in any Boer ambitions in that direction.

Clever stuff?

You betcha. But the clincher was a land-swap:

• Germany had been building the Kiel Canal since 1887.
• About thirty miles out of the Elbe and Weser estuaries, and the coast of Holstein, stood the rocky and sandy outcrop of Heligoland (total area, about half a square mile).
• Heligoland had been seized by the Royal Navy in 1807 (think Battle of Copenhagen); and formally annexed by Britain, from Denmark, in the wash-up at the Congress of Vienna.
• The small population of Heligoland — who would be Frisian rather than German — apparently quite liked being British; but the Royal Navy had not been using the island for any real purpose.
• So Salisbury traded Heligoland for Zanzibar (apparently to the disgruntlement of Queen Victoria, British public opinion, and the folk of Heligoland). On the whole, one can instantly see the basis for the disgruntlement: a British naval presence, immediately opposite Cuxhaven, and Brunsbüttel (whence Seiner Majestät Flotte could debouch from the Baltic into the North Sea) would have a certain merit.

Any potential snub to the French was bought off by recognition of their influence in Madagascar.

Explosive stuff!

The story of Heligoland almost ends with the biggest non-nuke bang of WW2.

From the back-end of 1944 until 1952, the RAF was using Heligoland as a way of disposing of surplus high explosive. In April 1947, in one go, the Royal Navy detonated 6,700 tons of munitions in Heligoland. Only in 1952 were the uninhabited remains of Heligoland, with large quantities of UXB still lying around, returned to West Germany.

The West Germans issued a stamp.

​

For a real joke of a war…

… there’s the 1859 Pig War between the US and Britain.

What is cultural captivity?

Kinkering kongs their titles take
From the foes they hostage make …

Every choirboy’s semi-deliberate Spoonerism, for a not-particularly-illuminating hymn. Very much a product of the age of imperialism, late Victorian (but of course) from a time when (the lower end of) the Church of England was aspirant lower-middle-class Tories at prayer.

Since when the world, outside of Coca-colonisation and the machinations of the Kremlin, has become post-imperial and less loving of ‘conquests’.

Were any conquests ever successful in imposing and maintaining a total hegemony? More likely, there emerges a new shared culture. The Empire on which the Sun never Set has left a legacy of any numbers of English dialects and creoles. The Oxford English Dictionary — lest we forget essentially recording “British’ English —  identifies 1,665 words of African origin, 4,843 from Australasia, 1,123 from the former Raj, and — the real marker of how power has shifted — 37,026 from ‘North America’. To the great distress of our nativists, there are four figures worth of ‘Irish’ origin, though the OED distinguishes, somehow, ‘Northern Irish’ from the rest. I have to wonder how: Ulsterisms are not readily exclusive of Glasgow east of the Bann, or the common vernacular of the north-west across that vast crucial divide. Even so, to the great distress of nativists, of all persuasions, Anglo-Hibernicism rules, OK.

Anyway, back to the idea of borrowed culture. And there is a perfect example in — what I see as — a remarkable literary continuity, relevant to the notion of conquest and merged continuity.

A good pagan, from 12BC, Horace has:​

Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit et artes​

intulit agresti Latio​

Or, if you prefer a crude translation, and every historiographer’s cliché:​

Captive Greece took captive her savage conquerer and brought the arts to rustic Latium​

​

When we refer to the Latin Vulgate we find Ephesians 4.7-8 has, what must be, a conscious imitation of Horace:​

7. uncuique autem nostrum data est gratia secundum mensural dationionis Christi​

8. propter quod dicit ascendens in altum captivam duxit captivitatem dedit dona hominibus​

​

Don’t sweat it: the Wycliff Bible (say AD1382) does a straight version of that, in English:​

7 But to each of us grace is given by the measure of the giving of Christ [after the measure of the giving of Christ]; ​

8 for which thing he saith, He ascending on high, led captivity captive, he gave gifts to men.​

​

That persists, through Tyndale (AD1525) and Coverdale (AD1535)  into the Geneva Bible (1599) — which was the version available (and clearly used, though not as far as I see in this usage) by Shakespeare, and which the King James version pillages, intact:​

Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.​

As a conclusion, the word-of the mouth, and the words-of-the-minds can never be made captive. When Douglas Adams had his sub-ether band newscaster give the advice:

We’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

It could as easily have referred to how we make words interact across nations, times and cultures.

Just don’t start me, again, on how the Welsh drover’s bwg became, thanks to Admiral Grace Hopper, the bane of every computer programmer.

Producing and consuming history

Had you asked me about the expression, I would instantly have assumed:

Ireland produces more history than it can consume locally.

I mean: that’s a known known, a ‘given’, a fact of life. We all accept that any website with Irish history as a thread will revert to MOPEry.

MOPEry? Aw, c’mon! Liam Kennedy blasted that one in Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish? — a collection of essays deriving from the Great National Myth:

Sighing harps, the riveting of chains, Erin betrayed and enslaved by the Saxon: here were soft-focused images that, with the superlatives of politicians, would help fashion a national rhetoric to thrill the generations of newly English-speaking Irish people.

Irish history as sold to susceptible young minds, to becomes a fixation. It is all about the Anglo-Norman invasion, Cromwell, the plantations, the Ascendancy versus the ‘people’, rebellions, suppressions, the Wild Geese, The Wearing of the Green, penal laws, An Gorta Mór, emigration, Fenians, the Rising, the Six Counties … And that’s the sum: Irish History for Dummies. Or as Kennedy puts it:

There is an almost palpable sense of victimhood and exceptionalism in the presentation of the Irish national past, particularly as reconstructed and displayed for political purpose. It is a syndrome of attitudes that might be summed up by the acronym MOPE, that is, the most oppressed people ever. Less extravagantly stated, the claim is to being one of the most oppressed people in the history of world civilisation. But the burden of the story so far is that there was a large gap between images of singular oppression and the material and cultural conditions which were the lot of people in Ireland.

A-Effekt

Kennedy’s title borrows from Brecht:

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

In the drama, immediately after Galileo’s recantation:

ANDREA (loudly): Unhappy the land that has no heroes!

(Galileo has come in, completely, almost unrecognizably, changed by the trial. He has heard Andrea’s exclamation. For a few moments he hesitates at the door, expecting a greeting. As none is forthcoming and his pupils shrink back from him, he goes slowly and because of his bad eyesight uncertainly to the front where he finds a footstool and sits down)

ANDREA: I can’t look at him. I wish he’d go away.
SAGREDO: Calm  yourself.
ANDREA (screams at Galileo): Wine barrel! Snail eater! Have you saved your precious skin? (Sits down) I feel sick.

GALILEO (calmly): Get him a glass of water.

(The little monk goes out to get Andrea a glass of water. The others pay no attention to Galileo who sits on his footstool, listening. From far off the announcer’s voice is heard again)

ANDREA: I can walk now if you’ll help me.

(They lead him to the door. When they reach it, Galileo begins to speak)

GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero.

Nothing to see here!

None of this is ‘novel’.

Yeats played the same game with the ‘heroes’ of Easter, 1916.  The woman who spent her days in ignorant good-will, the man who had kept a school, the drunken, vainglorious lout are all Transformed utterly — because that is the requirement of the National Myth.

Here’s another example: borrowed shamelessly from Michael Dobson doing a review for the current issue of London Review of Books:

‘None could witness a play of Shakespeare or hear declaimed such lines as those which close King John, or those of John of Gaunt when dying,’ [Salmon and Longden] declare, ‘without a quickening of the pulse and a belief in the destiny of “this royal throne of Kings, this sceptered isle, the envy of less happier lands.”’ But Gaunt’s speech, as an airline advertising agency discovered in the 1990s, is very poorly suited to inspirational use, or indeed to quotation at all. It’s not just that those successive alternative phrases for ‘this England’ go on for so long (19 lines) before finally breaking down into repetitive near incoherence: ‘This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,/Dear for her reputation through the world ...’ The problem is that one finally arrives at the sentence’s main verb to be told that this land ‘Is now leased out – I die pronouncing it –/Like to a tenement or pelting farm.’ Inconveniently, the national poet’s most famous invocation of the glories of England doesn’t depict the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, but a constitutional upheaval two centuries earlier, during which a dying medieval aristocrat invokes an even earlier heroic past only in order to point out that it is emphatically over. It has been supplanted, he tells us, by a mortgaged time of ‘inky blots and rotten parchment bonds’.

Grammar school boys (and girls — though to us, at that age, they were a remote sub-species) rote-learned those lines as inspirational adulation of post-War England (note the specific nationalism). At least we recited down to this dear, dear land (with or without the antisemitic stubborn Jewry).

A commodius vicus of recirculation

Now reprise to top of this post. My original miscue.

For, as Fintan O’Toole says, an excess of history over local consumption wasn’t Ireland:

In The Jesting of Arlington Stringham, a story by Saki (H.H. Munro), the eponymous politician in a debate on the Foreign Office in the House of Commons remarks that “the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.”

Rather a nice little story, it is too. ‘Nice’ in the sense of preciseness, not of pleasantry. Dry to the point of bitterness. It can be read here.

 

Upwardly-mobile mollusc

A bit back I found I had a voyeur: up on my bedroom window-pane was a snail. I am talking of quite a height — certainly fifteen feet or more above garden level.

What didn’t made sense was the snail population below was devouring anything vaguely edible. Up here, as far as I could see, it was only fresh air. Still, it wasn’t doing any harm, so I let it be.

By the third day I had given it an identity, borrowed from The Magic Roundabout — Brian the Snail.

And then, as suddenly as Brian had appeared, he was no more. Our local blackbird was taking a closer interest than usual in our back area, so I vaguely assumed termination by Turdus, or murder by Merle.

And then today Brian was back. He had relocated around the corner of the house, and was happily gliding across the landing window.

Thunder

I have a peculiarity — well, one of many.

I enjoy thunder storms. So we removed to York, which seems avoid such delights.

We’ve been promised one this evening. It didn’t show. The Lady in my Life reckons will turn up around two o’clock in the morning. We’ll see.

Summoning the ghost of oneself

Those drear post-WW2 years established the dire reputation of British food. One prime example was Camp coffee essence. Coffee in-so-far as the syrup contained all of 4% coffee.

The label haunted my childhood nightmares. Not because, in its original form, it epitomised the racist and imperialist elements of our society — as time went by, the turbaned servant’s complexion lightened, and he was finally allowed a seat beside the white sahib. No: because there on the original on the tray is a bottle of Camp coffee essence. So, logically, were it magnified, on the label of the bottle would be a diminutive replication of  … Oh! You get it! It’s the Siphonaptera:

So, Nat’ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller yet to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum:
Thus ev’ry Poet, in his Kind
Is bit by him that comes behind.

Thank you, Doctor Swift: don’t call us, we’ll call you! And … hey-ho! … I have been this way before.

Then, before the Derby Lightweight 79XXX DMUs put in an appearance on East Anglian by-lines, we eager students were conveyed to daily schooling on antiquated rolling stock, behind a Great Eastern Railways D17 4-4-0 .

And here’s another marvel!

Those carriages often had mirrors above the seats: two mirrors, each reflecting the one opposite. So one could see the back of one’s head. And beyond that, another image of one’s face. A whole tunnel of selfs disappearing into a cloudy distance. In truth, because the mirrors were never wholly aligned, the tunnel would swerve, and always to the left.

Meanwhile …

Back in real time, I’m re-reading Gore Vidal’s The Golden Age, the seventh and concluding episode of his account of Narratives of Empire.

When it appeared, in 2000, the book was seen as ‘controversial’ because it drove home the notion that FDR had connived, by acts of omission, at Pearl Harbour, and thereby bringing the USA into the War. The book is ‘of its time’: it covers the years episodically from 1939, through the War and post-war to 1954. Which is also the life of Vidal himself from later teenager to successful novelist.

Vidal, but of course, takes the opportunity to pay off a whole clutch of personal grievances. Here, two of the main characters, Peter Sanford and Clay Overbury are predicting the path of various papabili:

Clay stared at the photograph of himself and Truman. “Why now and not in two years? Because after Truman we’re going to have at least eight years of a Republican president. Probably Eisenhower or MacArthur. Then a Democrat. Someone new. Born in this century, not one of these old folks, these holdovers from the coach-and-buggy era. It’s all going to change. Well, for me to be ready in 1960, I’ll need at least eight years of national exposure in the Senate. So that’s what I mean to have.” […]

Clay was on his feet. He stretched. For an instant, Peter thought that Clay had actually arched his back. “Everything’s now in order for me to start the long march. There’s also no one else, which is a help.”

“Hubert Humphrey?”

“Too far to the left. The South won’t take him.”

“Lyndon Johnson?”

“Texas? A bribe-taker? Never.”

“Your fellow congressman Jack Kennedy? His father can outspend my father any day.”

“He’ll be dead by 1960. He’s got no adrenal function. ‘Yellow Jack,’ they call him. Just look at him. He’s a skeleton. No, the field is clear for me.”

“Ten years is a long time to keep any field clear.”

Ummm …

Somehow, Solon the Wise sneaks in here:

Call no man happy until he’s dead.

And here’s another wiseacre creeping into Vidal’s baggy plot:

Peter realized that they knew each other from Washington. Gene Vidal was several years younger than Peter. Each had been at St. Alban’s; each had attended Mrs. Shippen’s; then war had taken Vidal to the Pacific and Peter to the far more perilous corridors of the Pentagon. Now, to Peter’s bemusement, Vidal had dropped his Christian name and as Gore Vidal had published a first novel; a second novel was on the way. Although Peter would have preferred death to reading a book by a Washington contemporary even younger than himself, he had not realized that the book he had read about—some kind of war novel—was by the boy that he had known prewar.

“My mother insists that Gore writes just like Shakespeare,” said Cornelia, causing the young—twenty? twenty-one?—author to blush.

Peter nodded gravely. “With our new civilization we’ll certainly need a Shakespeare sooner or later. Why not you?”

Vidal shook his head sadly. “I could never manage those rhyming couplets at the end of scenes.”

That’s chutzpah. Wholly Vidal. Very Camp.

 

Making sense of a word: “fake”

Dear Old Dad somehow came across a pair of US half-dollars. That was back in the early 1950s, so the silver content was quite high: something like 90%. which meant intrinsic value would now be far greater than face value. The problem is, such coins wear badly. Dad kept the coins in his jacket pocket as some kind of talisman. When he died, after half-a-century, what was left amounted to two flattened discs.

Something similar happens with words. We wear them down, until they lose their original value. Or, as in the case of something like 0.72 oz of silver, accrue something more than their original use.

Consider what has become almost the word of the moment: fake. As in ‘fake news’ (which generally comes with capital letters).

In its earliest appearances, right at the start of the eighteenth century, it emerges from cant. The very first citation in the OED, taken from the The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser of 2nd June 1810, is sinister indeed:

One of the persons then said ‘here are fifty soldiers after us; we’ll faik them as they pass;’ to which the other replied; ‘no, we’ll take no life if we can help it.’19 

The second is from 1819, in a compendium of ‘flash language’:

To fake any person or place, may signify to rob them; to fake a person, may also imply to shoot, wound, or cut; to fake a man out and out, is to kill him; a man who inflicts wounds upon, or otherwise disfigures, himself, for any sinister purpose, is said to have faked himself;..it also describes the doing any act, or the fabricating any thing..to fake a screeve, is to write any letter, or other paper; to fake a screw, is to shape out a skeleton or false key, for the purpose of screwing a particular place…

The OED, bless it!, has a specific comment of fake‘s latest manifestation:

fake news  n. originally U.S. news that conveys or incorporates false, fabricated, or deliberately misleading information, or that is characterized as or accused of doing so. The term was widely popularized during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, and since then has been used in two main ways: to refer to inaccurate stories circulated on social media and the internet, esp. ones which serve a particular political or ideological purpose; or to seek to discredit media reports regarded as partisan or untrustworthy.Some earlier evidence may not represent a fixed collocation, although the practice of ‘faking’ news stories was much discussed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

That even comes with an accompanying note, from Jonathan Dent, who runs a parallel, and instructive quarterly website on how the OED records developments in language use:

A new sub-entry at the freshly revised fake traces the history of fake news back to at least 1890, as awareness of the amount of false or fabricated news stories sent to newspapers was on the rise (three years later, it was reported in the Toronto Mail, legislators in Connecticut introduced a bill providing for the punishment of anyone submitting ‘sensational animal stories’ and other fabricated exclusives to local or national newspapers in the hope of earning an easy $5 or $10 fee). These days, of course, the phrase is more likely to be used to refer to misleading stories — especially those designed to serve a particular political or ideological purpose — circulated on social media and elsewhere online, or simply to brand any unflattering or critical media coverage as inaccurate, untrustworthy, or unduly partisan.

I suggest the term has evolved down to the last fifteen words there. The fakery of Donald J. Trump is to denounce his critics’ use of established and verifiable fact.  In a way then we have come full circle: denouncing ‘fake news’ is intended to ‘kill’ a story. Trump’s problem is, like Dad’s coins, he has rubbed down any credibility in his own value.

The potency of cheap … reading

Credit where it’s due: it’s Noël Coward’s Private Lives. He gives the line to ‘Amanda’ (Gerty Lawrence in the original production):

The music, which has been playing continually through this
little scene, returns persistently to the refrain. They both look
at one another and laugh.

ELYOT: Nasty insistent little tune.

AMANDA: Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

Similarly, the extended ‘lock-down’ drives me to drink (whisky-and-water, Aussie red) and past books.

One that came as a happy return was James Michener’s first outing, Tales of the South Pacific. There must be a tattered paperback copy in every second-hand shop internationally.

Michener later developed something of a copyright in family and other epic chronicles. These longer efforts — to me — tend to the formulaic. His prolific output can be written off as easy reading. On the other hand, there is a genuine liberal heart at work, and a writer conscious of structures.

I’m not claiming Tales of the South Pacific as ‘great literature’. It was good enough for a Pulitzer, and was further sophisticated into Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. I don’t demur from ‘sophisticated’: it took some chutzpah and back-bone to be firmly anti-discriminatory and pro-equality in the America theatre of the Senator Joe McCarthy era. That transformation derives from just two of the nineteen episodes and eroded many of the harder edges of Michener’s more of the earth, earthy book.

Michener introduces himself as the frame-story:

I served in the South Pacific during the bitter days of ’51 through ’43. I was only a paper-work sailor …

He was, in reality, a naval historian, and the encountered many of the real-life personalities of the Pacific War:

There was Old Bull Halsey who had the guts to grunt out, when we were taking a pasting, “We’ll be in Tokyo by Christmas!” None of us believed him, but we felt better that we were led by men like him.

I also knew Admiral McCain in a very minor way. He was an ugly old aviator. One day he flew over Santo and pointed down at that island wilderness and said, “That’s where we’ll build our base.” And the base was built there, and millions of dollars were spent there, and every one agrees that Santo was the best base the Navy ever built in the region.

Not a bad contact list. And Santo is Vanatu — where, it is suggested, the Chinese would like to take over.

What many readers of these Tales fail to recognise is Michener is catching the spirit of the mean (and women) at the sharp end. For much of the time they were caught in a cycle of inertia, interrupted only by moments of high drama and death:

I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.

The musical version conjures something very different to the characters in Michener:

There were the men from the lesser ranks, too. Luther Billis, with doves tattooed on his breasts. And good Dr. Benoway, a worried, friendly man. Tony Fry, of course, was known by everybody in the area after his brush with Admiral Kester. The old man saw Fry’s TBF with twelve beer bottles painted on the side. “What in hell are those beer bottles for, Fry?” the admiral asked. “Well, sir. This is an old job. I use it to ferry beer in,” Tony replied without batting an eyelash. “Been on twelve missions, sir!”

“Take those goddam beer bottles off,” the admiral ordered. Tony kept the old TBF, of course, and continued to haul beer in it. He was a really lovely guy.

They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge.

Tony Fry, something of an enigma in the book, disappears completely: Ray Walston (in the movie) remains cunning, corrupt, tattooed … and lean. Paul Osborn did the film-script — over two decades, he’d already worked his way from ‘uncredited’ to screen-doctoring Steinbeck’s East of Eden. He knew what worked.

Luther Billis and Tony Fry were a pair! Luther was what we call in the Navy a “big dealer.” Ten minutes after he arrived at a station he knew where to buy illicit beer, how to finagle extra desserts, what would be playing at the movies three weeks hence, and how to avoid night duty.

Luther was one of the best. When his unit was staging in the Hebrides before they built the airstrip at Konora he took one fleeting glance at the officers near by and selected Tony Fry. “That’s my man!” he said. Big dealers knew that the best way for an enlisted man to get ahead was to leech on to an officer. Do things for him. Butter him up. Kid him along. Because then you had a friend at court. Maybe you could even borrow his jeep!

Tony was aware of what was happening. The trick had been pulled on him before. But he liked Billis. The fat SeaBee was energetic and imaginative. He looked like something out of Treasure Island. He had a sagging belly that ran over his belt by three flabby inches. He rarely wore a shirt and was tanned a dark brown. His hair was long, and in his left ear he wore a thin golden ring. The custom was prevalent in the South Pacific and was a throwback to pirate days.

He was liberally tattooed. On each breast was a fine dove, flying toward his heart. His left arm contained a python curled around his muscles and biting savagely at his thumb. His right arm had two designs: Death Rather Than Dishonor and Thinking of Home and Mother. Like the natives, Luther wore a sprig of frangipani in his hair.

After which, it’s down to There is Nothing Like a Dame. The ‘dame’ being Mitzi Gaynor — a.k.a. Nellie:

The next girl was Nellie Forbush. She was a slender, pretty nurse of twenty-two. She came from a small town in Arkansas and loved being in the Navy. […] In Denver she would have lived somewhere in the indiscriminate northern part of the city, by the viaduct. In Albuquerque she would have lived near the Mexican quarter. But on the island of Efate where white women were the exception and pretty white women rarities, Nellie Forbush was a queen. She suffered no social distinctions.

Military custom regarding nurses is most irrational. They are made officers and therefore not permitted to associate with enlisted men. This means that they must find their social life among other officers. But most male officers are married, especially in the medical corps. And most unmarried officers are from social levels into which nurses from small towns do not normally marry. As a result of this involved social system, military nurses frequently have unhappy emotional experiences. Cut off by law from fraternizing with those men who would like to marry them and who would have married them in civilian life, they find their friendships restricted to men who are surprisingly often married or who are social snobs.

Only the most tone-deaf miss the problems Michener worked in there.

Sixty-seven years

Very few dates stick in my ever decaying memory. But I know where I spent much of the day on 2nd June, 1953.

The story starts much further back. By my calculation in the late 1920s.

Two young demoiselles — let’s call them Betha and Mollie —  took the train each morning to Fakenham Grammar School. They looked forward to Monday mornings when a certain Harold Davidson would travel on that early morning train, and do their Maths homework for them. Harold Davidson? Ought to ring a church bell as the infamous (and arguably unfairly so) Rector of Stiffkey.

Betha and Mollie grew up, but remained friends. One became a midwife in London, and later my mother.

The other, once a Miss Fickling, later Mrs Marshall, continued to live at the family pub, the Carpenter’s Arms in Wighton.

So, on Coronation Day, 1953, I was with the Marshalls at the Carpenters Arms, where they had one of these new-fangled television receivers. Black-and-White, of course, very grainy and distinctly iffy — the East Anglian transmitter at Talcolneston (phonetically ‘Tacklestun’) didn’t come into service until the following year.

And that’s how I come to remember Coronation Day, 1953, Tuesday 2nd June, 1953.

The Carpenters Arms still survives and — despite rapacious brewers — prospers, more of a gastro-pub (but that reflects the change of population). For many years it was closed. Then it reopened under an assumed name, The Sandpipers, or something similarly fanciful. I’ll remember it when the choctaw bars, recently ‘off ration’, stood beside the till.