The Boat

by L.P. Hartley

Genres: General Fiction; Classics

Synopsis

English village life in war-time Britain is brought to life in a masterpiece of observation Timothy Casson, a bachelor writer, is forced to return from a contented life in Venice to an English village. Taking a house by the river where he can pursue his passion for rowing, he has to do battle with the locals to overcome his isolation and feelings of incompleteness. This most complex of Hartley's novels examines the multiple layers of Casson's relationships with servants, local society, and friends.

Release date: May 1, 2014

Publisher: John Murray

Print pages: 480

Sample

CHAPTER I

‘THIS is a quiet little hole,’ said the cook. She was telephoning to a friend in the market town of Swirrelsford, eight miles away.

‘I don’t think I shall want to stay here long. And Effie doesn’t want to either. Her feet play her up something terrible. All stone floors they are in our part, and the scullery, you never saw such a place, a real death-trap. And then there’s that man. What’s that you said, dear? Oh not him, he’s all right in his way, a bit potty, if you ask me. No, it’s him. . . . Oh, I thought you understood who, dear. I wouldn’t demean myself by mentioning his name. The gardener, if you can call him one. You’d have to laugh if you saw what he brings in. Yesterday I took the basket straight in to Mr. Casson, just as it was, and showed him. ‘That’s for three people,’ I said. I didn’t need to say any more. So I just said, ‘Will you please speak to him about it?’ But he won’t, not he, he hasn’t the spirit of a wood-louse. And where does it all go to, that’s what a good many of us would like to know, because it doesn’t come in here. It’s not very nice, is it, dear, having to deal with people like that? that you can’t trust, no, not an inch. And what makes me mad is that Mr. Casson likes him, just because he sponges up to him. But of course he’s lived abroad and doesn’t understand what honesty is. Italians are not people according to our ideas, and anyhow they’ll soon be fighting against us, the dirty tykes. Ice-creamers, some call them, but it’s too polite for them. So under the circumstances I shall give in my notice. . . . Why don’t you say something, dear, you leave me to do all the talking. . . .

‘I don’t know what you mean. Of course you could have got a word in. Anyhow you have now, haven’t you? You’ve said quite a lot. Yes, of course he is a single man, I admit that, at least I suppose so, you can’t be sure with anyone who’s lived abroad, and he doesn’t go poking his nose into what isn’t his business. He wants to have guests though, but I put my foot down about that. “I can manage,” I told him, as straight as I’m telling you, “if you don’t have guests.” “I get rather lonely sometimes,” he said. “Yes,” I said, “but think if you were in the trenches like our poor boys are. They’ve got good reason to be lonely, they have.” People ought not to talk that way even if they are too old to be out there. He didn’t say anything, what could he say? Besides the tables are turned now, they can’t talk to us like they used to, they know they can’t get anyone in our place. The boot’s on the other foot now. That’s why I shall give in my notice. You aren’t saying very much, dear, you never used to be so silent. . . .

‘Yes, I can, I know it is nice to be near you, dear, but I could get a place in Swirrelsford any day, and the buses only run from here three times a week. Yes, I should think he’s fairly well off, it’s not that, and I must think of Effie first, as I always do, and she always has liked the country. She says the air would be doing her good if it wasn’t for her feet. But I don’t know – the mists that come up out of this old river – why, sometimes you can’t hardly see across the lawn. I shouldn’t call it healthy. But Mr. Casson says he wants to go out in his boat. He must be mad. Think of boating in this weather. We ought to have central heating with Effie as delicate as she is.

‘Yes, dear, I’ll think over what you said, but I think I shall give in my notice all the same, because it never does to be put upon, and if I do, he will understand better how difficult things are here and what I have to put up with from that man. Goodbye, dear, cheerio, Abyssinia.’

She put down the ivory-coloured receiver, opened the shutters, switched off the light, and left the telephone room to glimmer pallidly in the winter dawn. In the hall she found Effie, sweeping the black and white square tiles.

‘Oh, Beattie, what were you saying?’ The housemaid was tall and slender, with pretty, fluffy, faded golden hair and a small round face flushed with tea and exertion. Beatrice was short, dark and compact, her powerful nose a curving ramp beneath her continuous black eyebrows.

‘What made you tell her you were giving in your notice?’

Making a great effort, Beatrice turned on Effie a look that was almost hostile. ‘I wish you wouldn’t listen at the keyhole, dear.’

‘I wasn’t listening,’ cried Effie, indignantly. ‘You don’t know how you raise your voice when you get excited. Anyone can hear you. I expect Mr. Casson could hear you quite well. Hark! He’s running his bath.’

The two women listened to the sound as it came sliding down the curving stair.

‘I don’t care if he does hear,’ said Beatrice. ‘Do him good, that’s what I say.’ She paused to savour her defiance, and then went on in a different tone.

‘But what’s come over you, Effie? The other day you were as keen to go as I am.’

‘Oh I dunno,’ said Effie, ‘I can’t be forever chopping and changing. You go if you want to. I shan’t, not for a while, anyhow.’

Beatrice looked at her in consternation.

‘But we’ve been together all these years.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ said Effie airily. ‘Maybe we should get on better on our own. A change is good for everyone, they say.’

The pause that followed was broken by the rasp of hob-nailed boots grating on the flagstones in the kitchen.

‘There he is!’ cried Beatrice. ‘I declare the sound of him makes me want to gag. Come with me, Effie. I really dursn’t face him alone.’

‘Why, what’s wrong with him?’

‘What’s wrong with him? And you of all people to ask me that!’

‘I’ve got my sweeping to do and my table to lay,’ complained Effie. ‘He’s no different from other men. He won’t eat you.’

‘Oh, Effie, and I done the telephone room for you and opened up the shutters.’

‘Very well, then,’ said Effie. ‘But talk about people wanting their own way!’

Propping her brush against the white panelled wall, she followed Beatrice through a swing door down a short passage which ended in a side door, and had a door on the right which led into the kitchen.

‘Good morning, ladies,’ said the gardener, straightening himself from the stooping position which gardeners so readily assume. ‘How are you, this fine morning?’

His bright brown eyes held them. He was a thickset man of about forty-five, whose breadth made him look shorter than he was. His brown moustache was inclined to be ragged, and even at this early hour his hands were caked with earth.

‘Mind your muddy boots on my clean floor,’ snapped Beatrice. ‘I had to do it all over again after you yesterday.’

‘There now, isn’t that a shame?’ said the gardener, shifting his glance from Beatrice to Effie. ‘If I’d known, I’d have done it for you.’

‘Like hell you would,’ said Beatrice, but her tones lacked conviction, and the taunt fell flat.

‘ ’Tis Mrs. Burnett that do the scrubbing anyhow,’ said the gardener. ‘You’ve no call to grumble.’

‘Mrs. Burnett didn’t come yesterday,’ said Beatrice, triumphantly establishing her ground of complaint. ‘She sent a message to say her mother was took ill. There’s some folks in this village whose relations are always falling ill, I’m thinking.’

The gardener smiled at Effie.

‘What a nasty sarcastic tongue your friend’s got,’ he said. ‘I wonder you don’t get kind o’ sour, listening to her day in, day out.’

‘Well, she does get a bit on my nerves at times, but I don’t mind, do I, Beattie? I dare say your wife says a few words to you on occasion.’

‘Oh no, Mrs. Wimbush doesn’t, not she,’ said the gardener. ‘She’s got plenty to do without that. She’s got five children to look after, not counting me. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself if I was a well-off single gentleman like Mr. Casson. Some people has all the luck.’

‘Meaning who?’ demanded Beatrice.

‘I shan’t mention no names because you wouldn’t like it if I did. And I don’t mean Mr. Casson, either.’

He winked at Effie, who found it increasingly easy to keep her temper as the others were losing theirs.

‘Now, you two,’ she said pacifically. ‘You’d argue the hind leg off a donkey. Don’t pay any attention to him, Beattie, he only wants to tease.’

‘I wish he’d clear out of my kitchen, then,’ stormed Beatrice. ‘The proper place for gardeners is in the garden.’

‘All right,’ said Wimbush. ‘You can bring your own wood in next time. I’m not going to get it for you, you old so and so. . . .’ The rest of his remark was drowned by the sudden whirr of an electric bell.

‘That’s him,’ exclaimed Beatrice. ‘Now he’ll be wanting his breakfast. Men are all alike – they’ve no consideration.’ She bustled into the larder, slamming the door. Wimbush picked up the empty skep and said to Effie:

‘Don’t you ever get fed up with that old bitch?’

Effie drew herself up. ‘What a horrid word to use, Mr. Wimbush. I won’t talk to you if you speak of my friend like that.’ She looked at him again and at his big earth-caked hand, as brown and tough as the skep that dangled from it, and something in her melted. ‘Well, I do a bit at times,’ she said.

‘Now you’re different,’ said the gardener. He squared his shoulders, and smoothed his hair with his free hand. ‘You and me could get on quite well together.’

‘Oh Mr. Wimbush,’ tittered Effie. ‘You oughtn’t to say that.’ The larder door opened, and he stumped out.

CHAPTER II

TIMOTHY CASSON sat down at his writing table. It was of oak, or imitation oak, stained nearly black, and very solid; large brass studs clamped the scratched and faded leather to the wood-work. It had the inertia, without the strength, of massiveness; it was a dead weight, which challenged his mind to lift it. He looked across the ink-stained surface to the snowy scene beyond. The light streamed up at him, filling the cornices behind his head with pale blue shadows. Gingerly he pushed open the shell-inlaid lid of the converted knife-box; it fell back with a startling rattle, as though guillotined. Lined with violet velvet, the deep slots did not surrender the quarry easily, but at last he fished up a sheet of paper, and began to write.

 

THE OLD RECTORY,

UPTON-ON-SWIRREL,

NR. SWIRRELSFORD.

16th January, 1940.

MY DEAR MAGDA,

I am here at last. As a matter of fact I ‘moved in’ just before Christmas, but seem to have had no time to turn round. Not that I’ve much to do, but you know how curious and unreal one feels in a strange house. Nothing here is mine, of course; my things are all at Villa Lucertola, in the care of dear Amalia and Armando: you remember them – you thought them such a handsome couple. I know you don’t like Italians much, but they weren’t really Fascists, though latterly they had to pretend to be.

Well, I took this house furnished. I can’t imagine what you’ll say to the furniture; it’s what you most dislike, heavy and dark brown, everything upholstered and self-important like a stage dowager of the ’nineties, with some shiny stream-lined pieces of modern date among them, hard and sharp and engine-turned, that look as though they would hurt if you touched them. The house itself is rather nice, or might be; it’s been bedevilled, of course, but the garden-side isn’t altogether un-Queen Anne and has such a lovely view. There’s the substratum of a little terrace, and then a dipping lawn, and then the river; and beyond the river, on the opposite bank, a Stonehenge effect of fantastic pink Wagnerian rocks, leaning affectionately towards each other, like drunken dolmens, and the green of the moss on their sides and the yellow grass on their crests – I can’t tell you how vivid it is against the pink. Not now, of course; now they’re covered with snow, and the pink, which shows in patches, looks almost black. Snow falsifies every colour-value, doesn’t it? but I must say the Welsh hills, which must be any number of miles away, do look rather wonderful, and with that remote, high, mystical light on them where their summits touch the sky.

The boat-house you would love. It’s Gothic Revival, with stained-glass windows and a pointed roof, which just shows from where I’m sitting. And I needn’t tell you there’s a boat inside, my boat that I had brought here – indeed I took the house, really, to give a home to the boat. For reasons too boring to go into I haven’t been able to use it yet. But I shall. What do you think I ought to row in? Shorts do not become my advancing years (forty-nine now, dear Magda) and flannel trousers are so dull. But now I must, if only to keep my figure from falling too far below your exacting requirements. Tell me when you write. You have an absolute sense of period – but I never quite know what period I belong to!

I haven’t mentioned the war, have I? But then no one does. Most people think it’s practically over. But you’re in a better position to judge than I am, with your work at the Ministry of Appearances. I expect I ought to have tried to get a war-job, but then I am so unwarlike. And you have always said that one has but one duty – to look right for the circumstances. But I’m not sure I could look right in a war. Khaki’s the only wear.

 

Timothy paused, thought, and sighed heavily. On the blotting-paper he tried to make a drawing of Magda’s face. The parrot beak was a vile travesty of her nose, which was really only a little pronounced; and the wavy hair, that was always dressed so smartly and as though it had a special understanding with the brush, had turned to copper-wire.

 

By the way, did you get a small token from me at Christmas? A bottle of scent – I got it at Bertini’s the last day I went shopping in Venice. The name would have amused you, but it was so embarrassing that I soaked the label off, so as not to shock the Customs. Italians love up-to-date English slang, but they don’t always know when to use it. I can only say (and this is a compliment, so don’t be offended) that if the object had really been what it was so quaintly called, to have given it to you would have been like sending coals to Newcastle. All the same, little as you need it, I can’t help hoping it reached you!

My spare rooms aren’t quite what I could wish, but when they are more comfortable, you will come, won’t you? Such heavenly country, and only five hours from London – a mere nothing.

Ever yours, TIMOTHY.

 

I like your cagey address. But you seem to have turned into an algebraic symbol!

 

He took an envelope and wrote—

   Mrs. Magda Vivian,

     Box 2xy, W.C.D.O.

Timothy got up and walked about, rubbing his hands, for the wood fire did not suffice to warm the room. But he regarded the fire with pride and affection and it warmed his spirit because he had cut the logs himself, with the help of the gardener and a two-handed saw. Coal was already getting scarce, but Timothy, like others in those early days, found an exhilaration in answering the call to austerity.

His circulation restored, he sat down again, and again angled for writing-paper in the finger-pinching velvet.

‘Esther, my dear,’ he wrote,

‘This is just to wish you, rather late, a very Happy New Year, and to give you my news, such as it is.

‘As you see, I took the Upton house after all – you called it a golden plan, and I hope it will turn out to be. In the end I decided in a hurry, and without showing the agreement to my solicitors, which was perhaps not very sensible—’

Timothy broke off. Esther had a wholesome horror of a grievance, and after all he had only himself to blame.

‘Miss Chadwick, my landlady, is a very nice woman, and descended, I should think, from a long line of Deans. She has a patina of 1880 Isle of Wight high bourgeois culture, which I like. She wasn’t in the least impressed when I told her I was “Lombard” of the Broadside; she only said, with acid sweetness, that my article made the rest of the paper seem so high-brow, and added “I’m afraid you won’t find our farm labourers as picturesque as your peasants.” To my relief, the Broadside is keeping me on, to write about the English countryside instead of the Italian, and my job is listed as a reserved occupation, which means I shan’t be “directed into industry.” “Pictures of Britain” they want me to call my sketches. At any rate I ought to have a fresh eye, not having lived in England, except as a visitor, for eighteen years.

‘The only drawback is, the people round here are much less forthcoming than my friends on the Brenta; so the one article I’ve written so far was a landscape without figures. Miss Chadwick said something about behaving in a neighbourly way, and I fully mean to, but she also said that village people are naturally reserved with strangers: so how am I to begin? At present I rely on the society of my servants, two middle-aged women of extreme respectability, who have always been in service together. I think I am going to like them very much. They are a little distant with me, but of course that is the way with English servants, and doesn’t mean that they like one less. My gardener is an amusing fellow, a regular card; and I think they all have good times together in the kitchen (Servants’ hall we have none. This is a small house, six bedrooms all told). I can hear their voices sounding most animated over their elevenses. I think we are a happy nucleus.

‘But to return to my neighbours, or lack of neighbours. I feel you can advise me about them, having lived so much in the country. I wish I’d taken notes, all the times I’ve stayed with you at Langton Place! Only of course it’s different for you: your family is the pivot on which the village has turned for generations. If you want to know anyone, you merely have to call on them. I can’t do that, I have to wait to be called on, it seems. (In Italy, as you know, it’s the other way round.) But I have one acquaintance in the district – a very important one, only I haven’t seen her yet: Mrs. Lampard.

‘She is important because she is the chief landowner round here, she rules the roost; and she is specially important to me because, apparently, I have to get her permission before I can use my boat. It’s a question of the fishing-rights. The agents told me—’

Timothy thought, frowned, and scratched ‘the agents told me’ out. Esther would not want to hear the tale of their misdeeds.

‘Miss Chadwick told me that the fishermen would certainly resent my rowing my boat on their private waters. I said I knew nothing about fly-fishing; but surely it doesn’t begin till the mayfly rises? She said, “No, but the fish have to have a quiet time to breed.” I went into this with my gardener, who after all belongs to the place and knows how fishes behave, and he said it was rubbish, because the fish withdraw from the main river and go into creeks and inlets to breed, so my boat couldn’t disturb them. “Anyhow,” he added, “Nature is nature, and if the fish wanted to breed neither your boat nor a battleship would stop they from breeding.” I challenged Miss Chadwick with this, and she said, with a slight air of superiority, that one would not go to gardeners to learn about the habits of fish. In fact she disabled his judgment. “And in any case,” she said, “if you do put your boat on the river it will be regarded as an unfriendly act and make a bad impression. But of course if Mrs. Lampard says you can!—”

‘So what luck that I know Mrs. Lampard. At least she was brought out to lunch with me at the Lucertola – twice, if I remember. And she asked me to call on her in London, but I never did. That was a good many years ago; she was rather formidable then, and I gather is more so now. But I wrote to her just after Christmas, reminding her of our meeting and asking if she had any objection to my using the boat; and her secretary replied, quite civilly, but rather formally, and not referring to our having met abroad, to say that Mrs. Lampard was not very well but she would let me know about the boat later. And there for the moment the matter rests. Don’t worry! – I shan’t make a grievance of it!

‘It looks as if the war might fizzle out, doesn’t it? But I expect you are frightfully busy, helping and organizing and smoothing things over. I haven’t any evacuees yet, and I rather hope I shan’t, for Beatrice and Effie, my very nice maids, don’t like the idea of them. So at the moment I have three spare bedrooms, or shall have when I’ve collected a few more sheets and blankets. Miss Chadwick—’

Timothy erased ‘Miss Chadwick’. He hadn’t realised how the scores were mounting up against her. He went on – Langton is a long way off, but if you could spare a few days at the week-end or in the middle of the week, you know how welcome you would be, dear Esther, and you would raise me in the esteem of my staff (who have had rather ‘good’ places, they tell me). Just send a telegram.

Timothy signed his name and had already written on the envelope ‘The Hon. Mrs. Morwen, Langton Place,’ when he paused, shrugged his shoulders, sucked his lips in, puffed his cheeks out, opened and closed his hands. To weigh one imponderable against another, what a hopeless task! He took up his pen again.

‘By the way, did you get a small gift from me at Christmas? Very likely not, so many things go astray, besides, the shop may have forgotten to put in my name. It was a thermos flask – a dull, empty present, but I’m told they may get scarce. Don’t bother to write if you have got it – what can one say about a thermos flask? But send me a postcard if you haven’t, and I’ll stir up the shop.’

Two letters by eleven o’clock and such long ones; already he had something to show for the day. But not very good letters: too much about himself and not enough about his correspondents. Mme. de Sévigné would have made them feel, from the first word, that they were living in her mind, and that they were the object of these letters which, without them, and her need to get into touch with them, to glorify them and surround them with a pearly nimbus of affection, could never have been written. And she would have contrived to give them news of herself, all the same – only, herself mingled with them, drenched in their consciousness of her. And he had said almost nothing about the war.

What would they think of that? Though so different, they were alike in being far more war-minded than he was. Mme. de Sévigné frequently referred to the wars – ‘The success of the French in every country surpasses belief, and I give thanks for this in my evening prayers.’ But enough of her.

Posterity, at whose dim, unexpectant face Timothy sometimes peered, would learn nothing about Magda and Esther from these letters. It would not see Magda’s tall slight figure with its awkward grace, or hear her throaty voice, a little huskier, perhaps, from the cocktails and cigarettes; they would not realise how purposeful was her transcience as the air parted and closed behind her in flat and bar and restaurant and night-club. She hated to linger; she must move on or be overtaken by the boredom which was ever at her heels – her only constant companion. Of her two husbands there remained no trace, not even the name of the last one. She was about as permanent as a manicure or a massage, much less permanent than a permanent wave. And she had rather that effect on one; that was why people liked her (those who did like her). She was a wash-and-brush-up, a shampoo; to those whom the phrase applied, a beauty treatment; astringent, but freshening. One associated her with any fashionable resort, but not with any special place.

Whereas Esther was inconceivable apart from Langton, and the many-voiced creative stir of its shifting or indigenous population – the relations, the children, the guests, the dogs, and now (Timothy felt sure) the soldiers and the evacuees. Timothy stayed with her whenever he came to England. She did not always notice him when he was there, but she wanted him in her system; she was indignant if he delayed to come, and rather reproachful when he went away. No one ever stayed with Magda, except for bed and breakfast, even in the days when she had a husband and a home; for long together, the non-amorous proximity of another person bored her.

Writing to them had made him wish for their company. He was handicapped, as always in writing to these two old and dear friends, by the fact that Magda had an æsthetic, and Esther a conventional, view of life. Two broad and comprehensive fields of vision; but anything that fell outside Magda’s bored her, and anything that seriously smacked of unconventionality puzzled and irritated Esther. They did not like each other very much, Timothy reflected; neither would be pleased to know that he had written to the other. To Magda, Esther seemed frumpish, muddle-headed, untidy, dull-edged if not dull; while Esther thought of Magda as too smart, too stream-lined, too soignée; trembling, no, poised on the edge of a world she did not care to know, not quite second-rate, but nearly; perhaps, in her hard bright glitter, a little selfish. . . . No, not selfish, for Esther, as a woman of the world, was chary of moral judgments. She would say that Magda was restless or unreliable or disappointing, or that she had thrown away her chances.

Thinking of moral judgments reminded Timothy that he still had a letter to write. But his mind, launched on its career of evocation, would not be turned aside. Suddenly it was filled with light, a light far warmer than the bluish pallor reflected from the ground beyond his window; the light of a July afternoon in the Piazza in Venice; and out of this radiance stepped Tyrone MacAdam, hatless, his wispy hair flickering over his oncoming baldness, like flames round an egg – unshaven, untidy, in fact almost dirty, swinging in his hand the paper bag in which he so often carried his lunch.

‘I’ve come from Verona,’ he announced. ‘I was just in time to see the last performance of Ballo in Maschera. Quite good; but they did it better at Dresden in 1934, and at the San Carlo in 1936, and not much worse, if the soprano hadn’t been so frightful, at Basle in 1931. You’ve seen it, of course?’

Timothy had to admit that he had not.

‘Oh, you disgust me,’ exclaimed Tyro, accepting the chair that Timothy pushed out, squeaking, on the pavement towards him. ‘You well-off English people – yes, I will have some tea, thank you – you come out to Italy and what good do you get from it? You hang about in places like this where you simply see other people like yourselves, gorging and guzzling like yourselves, killing time and killing thought; then just when it’s time to go home you have a look at St. Mark’s and the Doge’s Palace, and then you go back to England and say how rude the Fascists are, because they make you take your feet off the seats in the railway carriages, and how cruel to the Abyssinians, because they use against them the weapons of modern warfare which the English never use, oh never, against races less civilised than themselves. You could have learnt all that by staying at home and reading the paper. It makes me so angry when I see supposedly intelligent people like yourself doing that kind of thing.’

‘But I don’t, I don’t,’ protested Timothy, while Tyro with a grimy pocket handkerchief wiped his fingers and then his face. ‘I don’t like the Fascists, it’s true, and Italy has been far less pleasant since they came into power – for the Italians, as well as us. But I’m not politically-minded in the Continental sense, and I don’t want to be. I don’t think any good comes of it.’ Timothy glared at his friend, who was staring at the strollers and paying him very little attention.

‘I beg your pardon, Timothy,’ he said, with the charming smile and beautiful manners that every now and then flashed through his habitual air of crossness.

‘I was saying I didn’t want to be politically-minded.’ The remark sounded less striking when repeated. ‘I like the Italians very much, just as much as you do, only I don’t want always to see them in a contrast, and as one side of an argument. I just want to get on with them, and enjoy being with them as I have done, most gratefully and happily, for eighteen years, and mean to go on doing.’

‘You won’t go on much longer,’ said his companion, with gloomy relish, ‘because there’s going to be a war, and all brought on by people like you, with no moral sense.’

‘I like that!’ cried Timothy, ‘I’ve done my best, in a small way, to foster good feeling between England and Italy. I’ve even had a row with the editor of the Broadside because I haven’t more openly condemned the régime.’

‘Oh, I know your “Lombard” stuff, exuding sunshine and sweetness, and the signore inglese, cosi buono, cosi ricco, distributing kind words and kinder soldi among the snivelling contadini – cosi grati, cosi riconoscenti. That’s not what’s wanted. What’s wanted is to tell the English that, with their record, they have no right to take a high moral line against aggression. Such hypocrisy! It only brings morals into disrepute. As an Irishman and a Scotsman, and for all I know, as a Welshman, I can tell you that when I hear the word aggression on an English lip it makes me sweat at my knee-caps.’

‘But you always said