From the diary of a writer-publisher: 10

7 April
Walking home the three quarters of a mile or so from the centre of Cambridge, I saw six people and no cars. As in Georgio de Chirico’s surreal paintings, people are now weirdly visible even from a distance by their sheer verticality…

Something small but significant has happened in the local side streets. A squirrel hopped unhurriedly across the road right in front of me, then two Jays flew out of a garden and settled in another front garden, only feet from the house and someone watching them at the window. The Jay is such a woodland bird and so exotic-looking, that many urbanites would surely not know what they are looking at.

Jay illustration from RSPB.org.uk

The natural world has begun to creep back as the streets and skies fall silent and humanity retreats. A neighbour has long-tailed tits nesting in his front hedge flush with the pavement, which in my experience is unprecedented for such a nervous bird. Other people report seeing hedgehogs for the first time in years. I have never seen goldfinches and chaffinches at our bird-bath before, and the dawn chorus seems much louder.

I don’t find anything sinister about this, but it does bring home to you with a jolt how other to human existence the life of the natural world is. A great naturalist once said to me concerning over-anthropomorphic attitudes to conservationism: ‘We have to remember that the animals don’t know they are dying out.’ Either for religious, philosophical, or Darwinist reasons, we feel continuous with the organic world, so it is a jolt to see it getting on without us. But it’s not such a jolt as when people talk of COVID-19 being ‘the planet fighting back’. We think of the Earth as living, but this phrase implies it is inanimate, alien to us and hostile — which we don’t really like to think it is, since it is our home. Is it right to identify COVID-19 with ‘the planet’, when viruses aren’t organisms?

21 April
It suddenly occurred to me that I don’t recall Kittie Calderon mentioning the ‘Spanish flu’ (which killed 100 million people) once in all the extant correspondence of hers that I have read for 1918-19. Then I remembered that Charles Evelyn Pym (‘Evey‘) bracketed that flu and Kittie in a letter to his young wife Violet on 29 October 1918:

I am so distressed to hear of Jack [their ten-year-old son] getting this beastly flu. I do trust you will keep him thoroughly warm for a long time and I hope they [Ludgrove School, where Jack was a boarder] have got a good doctor. I am sorry you are going to Kittie now, as Hampstead must reek of it. I got your two letters together this evening and do hope you will get good news, and that it is a mild form.

Violet and Kittie were very close and Violet would occasionally stay with her at 42 Well Walk in the heart of Hampstead whilst visiting London. Presumably Violet was hoping to collect Jack from the school, which in those days was at Cockfosters. Evey was writing from the huge military camp at Etaples, Pas-de-Calais, where he was Assistant Provost Marshal. As Catherine Arnold writes in Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History, Etaples is ‘a strong contender for the birthplace of Spanish flu’, although its epicentre is thought to have been China.

As ever, I am indebted to John Pym, Jack’s son, for showing me his grandparents’ correspondence back in 2011 and allowing me to quote from it here.

29 April
Referring, I fancy, to three uncommon words and a neologism in the sample of ‘Making Icons’ that I pushed out to sea in my last diary-post, a loyal follower quotes to me in an email the first verse of a poem by Hilaire Belloc that I did not know:

I mean to write with all my strength
(It lately has been sadly waning)
A poem of enormous length —
Some parts of which may need explaining.

It so happened that, although I regard Notes as an admission of defeat, I had decided only the day before that ‘Making Icons’ would need a few. Well, three quarters of the poem doesn’t need them, but it’s a different matter when you get to the eight stanzas that engage with the long process by which this:

[seasoned lime]

[unfinished icon by Leon Liddament]

27

To author, he easters from praise and prayer
his hearted image, in slow, soft strokes.
Himation…book…halo and hair…
with pencil, then scribed on space. An acre
of gold he lays on bole’s yellow ochre:
leaf lifted on squirrel tuft through the hushed air
and suddenly sucked to sturgeon’s lock,
then burnished and buffed, basted with glair.
He puddles raw umber, indigo, terre
into cut-outs of colour like late Matisse.
Such basal abstraction might make us stare,
seeing an icon where nothing fays.

(This kind of verse is ‘concatenated’. The last line of each of the four stanzas in a set ends with the same rhyme, which may be the same word or a variation on its sound, and the same word/similar sound must start the first line of the next stanza. In this particular set of four the last words are fays:faith:face:Face and the first words of the last three stanzas and first one of the next set are faze:phaseless:facings:to face.)

However, I’m very grateful to my correspondent for also quoting to me a footnote that Belloc himself appended to the first verse of his poem (‘Dedicatory Ode’):

But do not think I shall explain
To any great extent. Believe me,
I partly write to give you pain,
And if you do not like me, leave me.

7 May
The social distancing observed in the queue outside our local greengrocer’s is admirable: people stand four metres apart in a line stretching across the shopping court, so that others heading for shops beyond can pass precisely two metres between them. However, the greengrocer’s itself is small and allows four customers at once. There are also up to two staff in it. This means some very tight choreography if you are to observe distancing inside the shop. The other day, seeing a short but well built woman charging at me, I was about to move to one side but noticed just in time that I’d be coming perilously close to a third person, so I performed a two-hop manoeuvre, smiled at the woman and warbled: ‘You do the hokey-cokey and you…’ Not a flicker of response.

If you do go out, people who would normally just wave insist on gassing at you from an ever-diminishing distance. This happened to me this morning. A neighbour crossed the road to talk to me, standing in the road to my right whilst I remained on the pavement. To my left was a seven-foot privet hedge. Suddenly a couple appeared twenty yards away walking towards me on the pavement. Without wishing to offend my neighbour, I had to move further up the pavement then step into the road infront of a parked car two metres from him and two from the pavement. However, as I moved a bloke came out of his drive in front of me back first, sweeping stuff into the gutter. Trapped! I executed a pirouette and double chassé, smiled and did my hokey-cokey thing, but again no-one responded.

Has this virus killed the Great British Sense of Humour, or is it just me?

14 May
As an example of one of the unpredictable spinoffs of the pandemic, my brother-in-law told me about a first-year university student who, when his course was abruptly suspended, got a job at an Amazon warehouse and enjoyed it so much that he decided not to go back to university. Apparently the young man could not praise highly enough Amazon’s observance of COVID precautions for its staff, enjoyed the working conditions and money, and persuaded himself that a ‘real job’ like this was for him.

The story pricked my conscience. Back in December, I posted about the Morning Star attacking Amazon as the worst violator of workers’ rights in Britain. The newspaper’s claim disturbed me not because I use Amazon much (I positively prefer shops), but because we had just published our first book with Amazon. Stalwart Calderonia-follower Clare Hopkins then described in a Comment feeling ‘sickened’ by reading the section on Amazon in James Bloodworth’s newly republished Hired: Undercover in Low-wage Britain and I replied that I would ‘definitely investigate Bloodworth’s book’. I didn’t, but I have now. Ironically enough, Bloodworth sells his book on Amazon:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The book is described by the blurb and its author as an ‘exposé’, ‘revelations’ and ‘research’. Anyone expecting those activities from the 66-page section on Amazon will, I fear, be disappointed. Bloodworth does not even tell us how long he worked at the Amazon centre in Rugeley, Staffs. To describe something as ‘research’ that is based on four fragmentary interviews with people who have worked there and an inexplicably undetailed account of his own experiences, betrays an ineptness with English words that is woefully visible throughout. Only three of the chapters in this section are actually about Amazon, the other two concern Rugeley and its mining past.

Maybe I have missed something, but I have read this section three times and could not put my finger on anywhere that Amazon broke British labour or health and safety laws. Bloodworth makes much of the penalties for going to the loo whilst working at an Amazon centre, but the ‘bottles of urine from employees too scared to take bathroom breaks’ on page xvi become ‘on one occasion I came across a bottle of straw-coloured liquid perched inauspiciously on a shelf’ on page 50. Bloodworth has been compared to George Orwell, but I am afraid this is absurd, as Orwell showed and Bloodworth merely tells.

Nevertheless, I agree with Clare that the regime at this Amazon centre is sickening. There may be nothing illegal about it, but its robotic and totalitarian essence is completely alien to our own work culture. Bloodworth is certainly right to identify it with Modern Times maniac Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management. For me this is the point. British manual workers never have accepted the culture of the American factory, and never will: ninety per cent of the workers Bloodworth describes at the Rugeley centre come from Eastern Europe and feel they have no choice but to work for Amazon, whilst British locals hate the idea. Immigration is a serious theme of this section. Another is the truly disgusting iniquity of the agencies who control Amazon’s workers, regularly pay them late, regularly underpay them, and regularly fiddle their payslips. These agencies should be investigated, prosecuted and stopped.

I am sorry to say this, but the book as a whole is a bit of a fraud. Bloodworth tells us as much on page xi of his introduction, but does not seem to realise it. The book is marketed as an exposé etc of zero-hours contracts and the gig economy, especially at Amazon, and Bloodworth tells us himself that he ‘set out to write about the material poverty that often accompanies such work’, but ‘quickly realised that it was just as important to write about the British towns I was living in’. Consequently half of the book is about these towns, present and past; particularly past. Bloodworth is steeped in the socialist writers of the 1930s, whom he regularly quotes, and loves nothing so much as to spend an evening at a social club listening to reminiscences of the glorious days when miners were ‘rich’ (p. 59) and had a belligerent union fighting for them.

Although Bloodworth warns several times against ‘romanticising’ the ‘working-class’ past, his book is built around an academic nostalgia for it. So powerful is the nostalgia that it, together with Bloodworth’s matchless command of left-wing clichés and his tendency to rant, filled me with yearning for the good old days of Dave Spart’s column in Private Eye.

20 May
Let’s be honest, this diary is pretty boring, cerebral stuff. If you want to know the really exciting things that have been happening in our lives during lockdown, go to Mrs Miles’s new blog at: adiaryofdoing.wordpress.com. I can’t compete!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.