The Decent Inn of Death

I was on an official, non-pastoral visit to the All Souls or West London Cemetery, Kensal Green.  As one of the cemetery directors and I strolled in the winter sunshine down the principal allee, he drew my attention to one of the many grand stone monuments.  It adorned the grave of some high Victorian notable, and in the way of memorials to one of his time and status, unreservedly proclaimed his many qualities and achievements.  These included the boast that he had "abstained from alcoholic drink for 50 years".  The director and I joked that, since neither of us had 50 years left to us in which to abstain from drink, there was no point in starting now.  But there is a delicious little irony here.  And it is, quite simply, that the cemetery in question was immortalised in a poem extolling (or at least, defending) the pleasures of booze.

One of the less commonplace features of my suburban and otherwise pretty ordinary childhood was to have been a son of a man who loved poetry.  He did not love it in any highbrow or intellectual way, but out of a natural and quite unaffected empathy for the romantic and the lyrical.  There were always poetry books in our house, which my father would take from the bookcase again and again to remind himself of an invariably misremembered turn of phrase from Keats or Shelley.  One of these was an (even then, distinctly dated  - and I suppose more serious poetry-lovers would judge - rather "popular") anthology compiled during WW2 by Field Marshall Earl Wavell: Other Men's Flowers.  This contains pretty much every poem you've ever learned/loved/hated/avoided, including G K Chesterton's The Rolling English Road, reproduced below.

Now I won't attempt to analyse or critique the poem since Carol Rumens has done so rather expertly here: http://bit.ly/trhHw6. But, in case you don't feel like looking, suffice it to say that GKC wrote it in 1913 because he feared that American-style Prohibition was about to be introduced in Britain.  The Rolling English Road is a defence of the moderate enjoyment of alcohol, which is the Englishman's birthright, predating even the arrival of the Romans - who, GKC suggests, "straightened" the rambling roads that had already been established by the drunken natives.  The English have always had a weakness for alcohol, he seems to say; it's part of who we are. Get over it.

But it's the final stanza that has always resonated.  In this he seems to say that drunken episodes are normal enough in the young and we shouldn't be unduly censorious about them.  But as life draws to its close, we need to perceive more clearly the way ahead, and to "see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death".  There are many good things to enjoy before we get there (not necessarily excluding a glass or two).

• The joke is that there is a pub not far from the cemetery gates called the "Paradise by way of Kensal Green".  Forthcoming attractions: Pump Up the Volume and NU Northern Soul.  I wonder if its proprietors see themselves as landlords of a decent inn of death?  I'm guessing probably not.

The Rolling English Road - G K Chesterton

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,

And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;

A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread

The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,

And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;

But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed

To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,

The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run

Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?

The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,

But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.

God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear

The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,

Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,

But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,

And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;

For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,

Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

Meryl's Maggie

Thanks to the the generosity of Premier Christian Radio, I have seen an early preview screening of the film The Iron Lady about Margaret Thatcher.  It is due to go on general release in the UK on 6 January 2012.

Now whenever you speak of Mrs T, the mention of her name always has to be followed by the parenthetic "(whatever you think of her)" as though she were the Judas-figure of some religion whose adherents are likely to be offended if these words are not appended as a matter of form.  And, figuratively speaking, that's not far from the truth of the situation.  There are people who are so blinded by their hatred of her (or perhaps, nowadays, their parents' hatred of her) that it is not possible to mention her without assuring one's listeners of - at the very least - one's disapproval.  Any intimation, however inadvertent or misleading, that the speaker might have a sneaking regard for her is solecism enough to get him or her permanently barred from social situations as diverse as afternoon bingo sessions and dinner parties in gentrified inner suburbs.  You might never be able to stand on Everton Brow or Primrose Hill again.  Extreme care is needed.  I guess that the film is going to be big, so listen out for those words "(whatever you think of her)" and have them to hand in case drawn into an unexpected conversation about it.

This demonisation depends partly on depriving her of her humanity which, to be fair, she did a pretty good job of herself.  When you adopt as a policy position if not an imperviousness then an unresponsiveness to criticism or doubt, and a preparedness to humiliate your most faithful colleagues when they falter, you are hardly going to commend your softer side to the world.  And the film contains plenty of material which shows her in that light (most notably in cabinet discussions about the poll tax).  But, inevitably, that is not the whole story.

I don't want to spoil it for you; but I don't think it will hurt to explain that the film is set in the present, in which a confused, hallucinating lonely old woman, imprisoned in her large but gloomy London flat, contemplates the disposal of the clothes of her dead (but nonetheless ever-present) husband and is haunted by flashbacks of her earlier life.  The pathos and sensitivity with which Meryl Streep plays this is extraordinary.  It is hard not to be moved by it.  Yet it is equally hard to fault her portrayal of the younger woman.  From her girlhood in the grocer's shop, through her earliest attempt to get selected as candidate, and into Parliament and Downing Street (all in the face of serious male chauvinism, it is easy to forget) Meryl's Maggie struck me as authentic as any re-creation of her could be.  Not only is her voice and accent nigh-on perfect; but her appearance is as close as I imagine you could get it without the real-life subject playing the part.  If you've ever cared for a confused elderly person you will recognise the accuracy with which Streep conveys the sheer loneliness of dementia.  Jim Broadbent is also excellent as Denis and Olivia Colman as Carol; and there a number of other good cameos (I liked Richard E Grant as Heseltine).

When the film is released, I predict a good deal of noise from those who are determined to keep her name in the mud where it belongs.  They will, I suspect, claim that it portrays her too sympathetically.  But nothing in the film will trouble the staunchness of those who need to hate her.  The point for me is that the film achieves the considerable feat of separating the person from the caricature.  This Maggie lives and breathes and grieves - and drinks quite a lot of whisky. She is simply human.  (Whatever You Think of Her.)

Photo: courtesy of guardian.co.uk