The following is one of a series of articles published in Apropos, the parish magazine of Rimmington Mains throughout 1978 and 1979; entitled On The Rocks, they were one man’s lament for the loss of the Britain of his youth, a Britain that he thought ought not be lost. The author, Major Laurence Alamein, was something of a war hero, fighting in North Africa under Montgomery (he captured an airstrip practically single handedly using only a Mills grenade and a captured Axis motorcycle) and later became Managing Director of Shoshone Oil. He died at Armley in 1985.
On The Rocks.
The moral conduct of Britains today is perhaps at the lowest standard that ever it has been. There was a time when words such as honour, respect, fidelity and duty carried some real meaning; no longer. I am in the habit, each morning, of leaving my young wife to take a stroll along the river to the spot where the willows stoop to drink, where an ancient sagging summerhouse reclines on the grassy riverbank, there to admire the sun as it scatters its first golden glitter on the water. I often linger under the porch, on the gravel, to listen to Bendrix’s cows’ maternal lowing or to watch the early morning mist disappear from the river. I watch the snails. I listen to the larks. I forget the desert.
This morning my routine did not differ. I woke to find Laura, my wife, gone. This was not unusual: often she slept in the far wing, there to escape the “thunderous drone” of my snores. She is so much younger than I, and unprepared for an old man’s snores. I did not mind her absence. I liked that she felt safe enough in this dark old house to sleep alone. I liked her confidence, the way she had taken on the role of lady of the house so completely. But I should have guessed. My wife and I, I believe I may have elucidated before, have been married not quite a year. I will admit that I was surprised that she should find any interest in an old man with a duff knee, but it seemed she did. I should have guessed. The cage of my heart first felt the fluttering wings of doubt against its bars at the wake – as I have come today to refer to the wedding reception – when, after I had made my speech, which was lengthy but peppered with light-hearted witticisms about military life in the desert, bravely facing-down the stony glares of my few remaining relatives (envious, I had thought then), I had regained my seat to hear her state that I had looked like Hitler. “Hitler?” I had enquired, stung, and believing myself to have misheard. “Hitler,” she had repeated. “The way you shouted and punched the air with each of your jokes” (she said the word “jokes” with a derisive curl of the lip) “and the way you kept on running your hand through your hair: just like Hitler at Nuremberg.” I had attributed her words to wedding-day tiredness, but there have been similar acid comments since, and I began sometimes to wonder whether my family had been right. I should have guessed.
My stepson from my first marriage was – is – presently staying at the Hall. This morning I looked in on him and found him absent too. There was nothing odd about his absence, either: often he walked to the village for a newspaper early in the day, and I thought it probable that just such an activity had taken him from the house on this sunny spring Sunday morning. Why he had chosen to visit, I had no idea, but I was not unhappy to welcome him into the house. Though his mother and I had fallen to bickering in the years before she had died, the two of us, he and I, had always remained on good civil terms – indeed, it was he that introduced me to my present wife. They had, it seems, been at university together. They were – are – good friends. I should have guessed.
And so I strolled out along the riverbank enjoying the rising sun and listening to the birdsong, admiring the bedewed cobwebs and the lushness of the lawns and the languid eddying of the brown river, but nevertheless plagued by the notion of something somewhere being amiss. There were trails in the wet grass that did not belong to Hazlet, the gardener, or to Montgomery or Harris, the cats. At first I suspected prowlers, and took a sharp lawn edger from the potting shed and advanced stealthily along the river to the summerhouse. Such an edger functions much like a bayonet, and I felt my pulse quicken. I was not back in the desert, but I was at the ready. I have forgotten the desert. The trails ended at the summerhouse, and I knew then that my wife was not in the far wing of the house, and I knew that my stepson was not walking home from the village with the illustrated Sunday ‘papers under his arm. I knew that they had conceived a plan together, and that I had been taken in by it entirely. I had disappointed myself most of all. I had allowed myself to believe that she, a vibrant young woman, would find me interesting enough to marry and I had allowed myself to believe that my stepson bore me no malice for his mother’s death. I had been wrong. But it does not matter now. I should have guessed, and though it is late in the day, I finally have made the guess, and I have set the balance right. I feel now as one feels when suddenly driving from a gravel track onto a tarmac highway, all the unsettledness has gone and I am left with a feeling of acceleration and uncanny smoothness. I know this highway will be short, but it feels better.
So I write this edition at the home of my neighbour Salmon, a communist but a good sort nevertheless, who is ignorant of the events of the last few hours and is fussing around with tea and bought fondant fancies. I write to you from Salmon’s home, my kind and loyal reader, be careful and mind that such a sequence of events does not ambush you as it did I even though I have braved Rommel’s Afrika Corp, even though I have braved the desert sun, even though I have fought for my country and my queen, for it is just this sort of behaviour, just this sort of degeneration, that is driving Britain on the rocks.
Major Laurence Alamein (ret.), April 1979.
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