When I hear the phrase ‘I’m not a violent person...’, I often fail to restrain myself from saying, ‘Yes you are, you fucking deluded fool, you’re as violent as me and everyone else’. It’s almost universal among the English middle classes to fraudulently disavow their own human propensity to violence. This explains why their ritual displays of niceness grate so much on the rest of us.
The ethics of personal violence are not straightforward. A few days ago one of Snorri’s teachers took me aside to tell me that he’d received a red card for punching another boy in the tummy. Snorri was at our feet, arranging some coloured wooden blocks on a shelf. The teacher was expecting me to say something to Snorri to make him feel ashamed, but I was reluctant since she hadn’t elaborated on the details of the incident. I mumbled something that sounded disapproving, while Snorri looked up at me, struggling to dissemble the appropriately solemn look on his face.
On our way out of the classroom I asked him why he’d punched the lad. ‘He snatched a book off me’, he said.
‘You can’t go brawling in the classroom, Snorri’, I told him sternly, 'getting yourself into trouble for no good reason. Upsetting everybody.’
You see how morality is often cobbled together on the hoof? Later I told him a partly true anecdote from my own boyhood.
I came home from school bawling because a lad called Cooky had beat me up for nothing, punched me in the face and bust my lip. Blood all over the place. My Old Feller said, ‘Stop blubbering, turn round and go back and find that Cooky and give him what he’s given you. And
don’t come back till you’ve done it.’
It was easy enought to find Cooky (David Cook), he lived just up our street. I saw through the window that he was sitting at the table having his tea with his three older brothers when I knocked at Cooky’s kitchen door. When he opened it I took a swing and it landed right on his lughole. Douf.
Then Cooky and his brothers punched and kicked me up and down their passageway for twenty minutes. When I got home I sneaked past the Old Feller and straight upstairs to my room.
A bit later he shouted up the stairs, ‘Turn out alright then, lad?’
‘Oh aye’, I shouted back, whincing from the pain in my ribs, ‘Smashin.’
Speaking of violence, formerly boys were expected to carry knives. Lads in the various youth militias, like the royalist Boy Scouts, carried 8 inch bladed sheath knives openly on their belts. Our local butcher’s lad, an amiable giant and simpleton, always had a two foot jungle machete hanging from his belt, even when making meat deliveries on his bike. I had a First World War British Army issue jack knife, with a thick 4 inch blade and a big spike for taking stones out of horse’s hooves.
The blades that the Glasgow razor gangs used to slash people’s faces could be bought at the better class of barbers, and the flick knives Teddy Boys stabbed each other with were sold as souvenirs of Bridlington.
Stabbings were rare because it was considered cowardly to fight with a knife. At the pictures it was always the one with the black stubble who pulled the knife, got booed, and lost. Fists, swords, and guns were suitable means to dispatch an enemy, but not stabbing with a knife. Knives were associated with foreigners, usually from southern or eastern Europe, and particularly with Arabs, who after lying to you and robbing you were liable to sneak up behind you and stab you in the back.
In a fair fight situation, if a combatant brings out a knife his adversary can without loss of face put up his hands, turn away, and refuse to continue the fight. Any spectators are expected to boo, or in some other way express their disapproval of the knife puller; and if the latter subsequently attempts a lunge at his opponent’s back, restrain and disarm him. All this would bring great dishonour to the one who pulled the knife.
Some months after the David Cook incident I waited for him as he made his way home from school, concealed, at the end of a gennel. When he turned the corner into the gennel I smashed a housebrick into the side of his face.
I don’t usually have much to say about Christopher Hitchens, other than that I used to flog Worker’s Fist outside Belsize Park tube station with his brother, but this is worth reading HERE
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I took my 6 year old grandson Snorri to school this morning, and discovered that his class was being taken into the city centre this afternoon to see Lizzie Windsor. I’d overheard groups of mothers twittering about something like this, but had no idea that it was about to happen. So far as I know the school hasn’t asked permission of his family, which I certainly would have refused. Snorri has no interest in such things, and it’s saddening to picture him standing in a row among his classmates, looking bewildered and waving a little paper Butcher’s Apron. If he brings such a thing home as a souvenir I intend to amuse him by urinating on it.
As I was leaving the school one of the fathers remarked to me cheerily, ‘They’re off to see the queen this afternoon, eh?’ I replied as pleasantly as I could, ‘I don’t hold with such things myself. I’m a republican.’ He marched off without comment. Now I’m marked out as a weirdo, but I don’t care.
How times have changed. I recall when Snorri’s mother was about the same age being asked permission by her school for her to join an outing to see Lizzie’s appalling son, Charlie. When I refused on the grounds of republicanism, her teacher gave the distinct impression of being genuinely pleased by my display of principles. Thus encouraged, I went on to express my objection to my daughter waving a Union Jack while British troops were oppressing our Irish family, which broadened the teacher’s smile even further.
Again, it was my grandfather who introduced me to the loathing of royalty. Whenever a Jew or a royal would appear on television, he’d struggle out of his chair and furiously berate the set with his walking stick, smoke and sparks flying from the Woodbine he always had in his mouth. ‘Bloody gannets’, he called the royals. This of course made a strong impression on a young mind.
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Almost everyone has heard the story, probably an urban myth, about the feller on an aeroplane who finds himself sitting beside the Dalai Lama. To his astonishment the traveller notices that His Holiness is enthusiastically devouring an enormous fried bacon banjo...You know the rest.
When I come across anecdotes of this sort, ones that briefly illuminate some unexpected biographical aspect of the far-famed, hopefully amusing or intriguing, I copy them into a dedicated notebook. I prefer the stories to be verifiable, or at the very least plausible. Perhaps one day I'll tidy it up a little and post it on the net.
I came upon one a couple of days ago, in David Cesarani's biography of Arthur Koestler,(London 1998). I'm no great admirer of the latter, but in the late 1950s, just before I became a teenager, Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge, Doctor Bronowski, and Bertrand Russel used to appear on the telly. I liked them immediately because they didn't sing or dance, or appear on what they then called 'variety' shows.
I hated all the singing on television, a sickening, depressing series of moans and shrieks that went on for too long. Hearing names like Alma Cogan, Alan Breeze, Mario Labonza, Frankie Vaughan, Peculiar Fart, Andy Stewart, Sabrina, Maurice Chevalier, Doris Day, Winifred Attwell, Flanders and Swan, made me feel ill. The Black & White Minstrel Show was the worst, and brought on explosive diarrhoea. Whenever singing or dancing came on telly I left the room.
But Koestler, Muggeridge, Russel and the rest, I quickly gathered, were called intellectuals, as indeed was Bernard Levin. People looked up to them. The idea of them crooning brainless songs accompanied by dancing nancyboys got up as jamjar golliwogs was preposterous. I was deeply impressed, and resolved, there and then, to become an intellectual myself. I became a regular viewer of shows like 'The Brains Trust', gradually abandoning the antisemitism my Red Grandad had exposed me to.
Koestler was the best looking and most stylish of the TV intellectuals, so he became an early model in my bid to join their ranks. I was unaware as a twelve year old that he was a CIA asset, and a wife-beating piss artist. Koestler often sported a cravat or spotted dicky bow, which I thought the finest garments I had ever seen. I longed to wear a spotted dicky, often taking the tram to the local branch of Austin Reed to gaze at them through the window. But it was impossible. Where I was born, walking the streets in a spotted dickie bow would have the same outcome as putting a sign around your neck saying, 'Please beat me to a pulp and leave me hanging from the park railings.'
The anecdote I came across in the Koestler biography has in it Koestler, Sartre, and Camus - Simone de Beauvoir is the diarist. 'Mamaine' is Mamaine Paget, Koestler's longterm partner and skivvy:
As a joke, Sartre was making love to Mamaine, though so outrageously one could scarcely have said he was being indiscreet, as we were all far too drunk for it to be offensive. Suddenly Koestler threw a glass at Sartre's head and smashed it against the wall. We brought the evening to a close. Koestler didn't want to go home, and then found he'd lost his wallet and had to stay behind in the club; Sartre was staggering about on the sidewalk and laughing helplessly when Koestler finally decided to climb back up the stairway on all fours. He wanted to continue the quarrel with Sartre. 'Come on, let's go home', said Camus, laying a friendly hand on his shoulder; Koestler shrugged the hand off and hit Camus, who then tried to hurl himself at his aggressor; we kept them apart. Leaving Koestler in his wife's hands, we all got into Camus' car; he too was suitably soused in vodka and champagne and his eyes began to fill with tears: 'He was my friend. And he hit me!'
A street in central Paris in the late 1940s. It's three thirty in the morning. Raining heavily. Koestler crawls along the pavement, muttering about his wallet and emitting dog noises. Sartre is doubled over the torrent rushing down the gutter helplessly laughing. Camus sits at the wheel of his car blubbering. .
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