News of the Old Podcast

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com

I am looking at a photograph taken on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue a little after 8 on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, and wishing my father was still around to fill in a few details. It’s a dramatic image. Center foreground is a cop in a riot helmet who seems to be weighing whether to use his night-stick on the photographer, Michael Boyer of the Associated Press. Behind him, moving right to left, similarly accoutered colleagues are chasing people down the sidewalk outside the Conrad Hilton. That’s where Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee, is headquartered along with his rival, Senator Eugene McCarthy, for the duration of the Democratic National Convention under way three miles south at the (since demolished) International Amphitheater. Wedged between the chase — perhaps mêlée is better — and the wall of the Hilton is an involuntary chorus of deeply uncomfortable spectators. Most would clearly rather be somewhere else if getting there didn’t entail being beaten bloody by Mayor Richard Daley’s enraged gendarmes on the way.Among the pursued is Dad, dapper in Lob shoes and Savile Rowe suit with silk square billowing from breast pocket. Mother always insisted he be properly dressed. She would not have been amused to see the notebook peeking from his jacket’s side pocket. That’s how you spoiled a good suit’s cut. In his left hand are papers of some sort, in his right a handkerchief to provide rudimentary protection from teargas and the charnel house stench of the stink bombs the Yippies have been tossing about to make some sort of point. A cop a good deal larger than Dad, who was 5’ 3” in his socks, appears to be gaining on him with intent. Is this the galoot who put my father’s arm in a cast?I lucked into the photograph because, with the Democrats once again holding their convention in Chicago (rather more joyously this time), it seemed a good moment to dig into this episode of Dad’s life for the biography I’m working on — tentative title: Chronicler — in tandem with the one about my great aunt. I was 12 when it happened. Dad was the London Sunday Telegraph’s Washington correspondent. My mother and I were holidaying in England at the time and heard about his getting injured from a BBC news bulletin. I was less concerned about his health than thrilled by his fame and derring-do. Mother may have taken a different view. Dad supplied further details in the story he filed for that Sunday’s editions and in person when he joined us, bandaged, the following week. He wrote of it again in his book, America in Retreat, which came out in 1970. For all that, and even though we visited the scene together in 1976 en route to covering that year’s Republican convention in Kansas City, I have been never entirely clear on what went down. So it was wonderful — thank you, Google — to run across a picture that put Dad slap in the thick of things to go with the one I have of him with Mussolini’s corpse in Milan’s Piazza Loreto in 1945.Let’s take a step back to consider what was happening that day. Tens of thousands of mostly young protesters had descended on Chicago united in their understandable rage against the war in Vietnam and the possibility of being drafted to fight in it. They had arrived under a smorgasbord of overlapping aegises, among them Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Protest (Yippies), Dave Dellinger’s Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam (the Mobe), and Tom Hayden’s Students for a Democratic Society. Many had come to help McCarthy somehow wrest the nomination from Humphrey. “Dump the Hump!” was their battle cry. Others preached outright revolution and meant, quite openly, to cause mayhem. All, by the third day of the convention, were fully up the noses of Mayor Daley and his boys in blue at whom they had been throwing epithets (“Pigs!’ being a favorite and among the more polite) and a variety of missiles, ranging from bags of human waste to things that can cause serious injury.At this point, a lot of them were in Grant Park. Daley, who didn’t want them anywhere near the convention proper, thought they should stay there. The main body of the park is bounded by Lake Michigan and Lakeshore Drive to the east and a railroad cutting to the west, on the other side of which, running parallel, is Michigan Avenue. Put riot police or National Guardsmen on the bridges across the cutting and you block access to Michigan Avenue and the rest of the city, at least in theory. By late afternoon, thousands of demonstrators had found their way around or through the various cordons and were seething south down Michigan Ave. towards the Hilton where the Hump was recovering from a collateral dose of teargas and getting ready for his acceptance speech the following night.The Hilton occupies a full block on the west side of Michigan Ave. facing the park and the lake and is bounded by Balbo Drive to the north. Here the police decided to make a stand to keep the mob from the hotel’s main entrance. On of the corner of Balbo and Michigan was the Haymarket Lounge, to which Dad and other members of the fourth estate had, I believe, repaired for early evening refreshments. Its floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows afforded a congenial vantage point from which to observe developments on the street outside. As the action heated up, the more daring of the journos put down their drinks to take a closer look. They were greeted by a phalanx of police advancing toward them down Balbo.Marino de Medici of Rome’s Il Tempo, writing 50 years later, remembered:I saw it coming like the giant wave of a tsunami, mostly policemen swinging batons and hitting people with a ferocity that I could not expect from an arm of the law. Suddenly, I felt that I had become a target and I shared my fear with a colleague standing near me, Stephen Barber of London’s Sunday Telegraph. A few seconds later the arm of the law came crashing down on us, breaking the right arm of Stephen as he was trying to fend off the blow. I was lucky because at that very moment the large plate glass window of the travel agency office facing the street came crashing down. I quickly rushed into the empty space and escaped without injury. Here’s Dad in his piece for the Sunday Telegraph:I got beaten up on the pavement outside the Conrad Hilton hotel right after a bright, bearded lad in sandals with the Oxford Book of English Verse under his arm had informed me: “Now you people are going to feel police brutality. I can tell. Just you watch!“He could read the signs, I gathered. A group of blue-clad men had materialized from a side street. They were pocketing their numbered badges. “That means they are going to get rough,“ the boy said.Sure enough, it so happened.The pavement was supposed to be sanctuary. But there were photographers at work. The police made them their prime targets all week. In this case, they suddenly exploded upon us, just as the poetry lover predicted.I was lucky to fall in the first wave. People behind me – almost all onlookers rather than demonstrators, as it happened – were driven back in such a panic that the plate glass window of a hotel bar [The Haymarket] shattered. A middle-aged woman screamed. The police sailed on, through the window, still swinging their clubs. “They’ve gone mad,” someone said. It struck me as quite an understatement. It is at this point that Winston Churchill, the statesman’s grandson, Louis Auchincloss, a Kennedy clan in-law, and a young woman, identified by Churchill as Anita Miller, enter the narrative. Churchill, 27, was covering the convention for the London Evening News, Auchincloss for NBC.Dad’s take for the Sunday Telegraph:Anyone was fair game – convention delegates included. And to interfere was to risk arrest or a beating or both. Winston Churchill and, Mrs Jaqueline Kennedy’s half-brother James Auchincloss – both reporters – were chased by three or four policeman on foot and another on a motorbike who rode straight over the curb to try and smash them against a railing, simply for intervening to rescue a young girl who was being brutally slugged by a plainclothes man armed with a cosh.The eyes of these thugs…simply blazed with insanity. There is no other word for it. Hitler’s storm troopers were the same type. And here’s Dominic Harrod, reporting for the Daily Telegraph:A well-dressed 20-year-old Chicago girl who happened to be on the scene was run down from behind by a plainclothes policeman from whom she was running, obeying his yell to “move on“. As his baton hit her shoulder and she fell, Mr. Winston Churchill, reporting for the Evening news, and Mr. Auchincloss, working for the National Broadcasting Company, ran towards her.As she rose, and I was moving towards the mêlée, the plainclothesman darted away across the avenue towards parked police vans. At that instant, a motorcycle policeman hurtled along the road, screeching to a noisy standstill a yard from us, one wheel against the curb, before turning and roaring off across the street again. Within minutes, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Auchincloss, Mr. Stephen Barber, correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, and I were picking ourselves up after another charge this time on foot, and comparing baton bruises on heads, wrists and thighs.Churchill’s version, as paraphrased by the United Press, went like this:He said he was standing not far from the hotel with Mrs Kennedy’s half-brother when a young blonde girl ran past to escape police attacking demonstrators about 100 yards away. Suddenly, he said, a plainclothes man dashed across the road, pulled a blackjack from his pocket, grabbed the girl and began beating her.He said he and Mr Auchincloss went to help the girl. He said he asked the man his name.“The only answer we got was be be attacked by him also,” Mr Churchill said. “Mr Auchincloss was hit a couple of times and I was knocked to the ground.“As I picked myself up, a three-wheeled police motorcycle charged the two of us and pinioned us agains the wall near the pavement.”Mr Churchill said he and Mr Auchincloss clambered over the wall and got away.Writing America in Retreat a year or so later, my father recalled the scene thus:I had my arm broken when a helmeted lunatic clubbed me as I watched Winston Churchill and Jamie Auchincloss — both reporters on the scene and scarcely militant radicals — rescuing a young girl from a plain­clothes man who was lunging at her with a billy club at least 100 yards from the main mêlée. The girl, we dis­covered, was not even a McCarthy supporter — she was for Nixon — but that made no difference. As far as Daley's boyos were concerned, it was open season on the young and any who might be presumed to sympath­ize with them.In my own retelling over the years — and in spite of knowing better — I have, I confess, often made my father the hero of the piece, having him run to the rescue of both Churchill and Ms. Miller. Churchill died in 2010, the same year Auchincloss went to jail for possession of child pornography, so I have had little fear of contradiction. I now happily spike my version in favor a much better one I found in the memoirs of Connie Lawn, a redoubtable radio journalist and dear family friend we sadly lost in 2018.At one point, as I walked through the crowds with press tags hanging clearly from my chest, I was the victim of an attack, and thvus temporarily became an unwilling participant in the news, as well as a reporter. The police charged, and one heavy officer slammed his billy club down on my head. His eyes widened with shock and disbelief when the club bounced back at him. Those were the days of the stiff, teased hairstyles and wigs. My own waist length hair was rolled up under such a wig, and it probably was the only thing standing between the billy club and a skull fracture. One of my colleagues, Winston Churchill II, wasn’t so fortunate. As he and his fellow British journalist, Stephen Barber, strolled through the park that night, Churchill also found himself on the receiving end of the billy club treatment. Barber, desperately trying to rescue his friend from the battering, yelled at the cops, “You can’t hit him – he’s Winston Churchill!” “Right, buddy,” one of the cops sneered, “and we’re the tooth fairy.” They began hitting him even harder, breaking his wrist in the process. Here’s the full chapter from America in Retreat featuring the Chicago rumble. It’s entitled Turning Right and Turning Inwards. Nixon entered the White House in January 1969 as the quintessence of middle-class, middle-income America — the champion, as he sees it, of the “silent majority” of the non-Black, non-young, non-trendy and non-poor: the people who go to Church most Sundays, pay their mortgages, agonize over their incomprehensible children, worry about inflation, the rising crime rate, drug addiction, and pornography, and detest the Vietnam war but find it hard to face losing it. They were fed up with race riots. The gold drain perplexed them. Foreigners seemed to be losing respect for the dollar. It had, surely, been different under Eisenhower — and here was Nixon, blessed by Ike from his sickbed and with the national father figure's grandson, David, be­trothed to his daughter, Julie. His nomination had taken place at the Republican convention at Miami Beach — the archetype of all that is most stridently vulgar about affluent suburban America and its values, a man-made redoubt constructed of neon, concrete and polyethelyne on sand, isolated from uglier realities by a polluted lagoon. America was tired and fretful — not least of all about her world role.In public, Nixon naturally talked about “making the American dream come true” and foreseeing a day when “America is once again worthy of its flag…(and) of respect.” But underlying the tub-thumping was a hard core of realism. He had shelved any idea of “winning” a mili­tary victory in Vietnam. In private — and before he was nominated — he was amazingly candid about it. At a closed session of party delegates, which was surreptitiously tape-recorded by the Miami Herald at the time, he let the cat out of the bag. Someone had asked him, he said, if he thought the war was lost. “I said that if I believed that, I won't say it. The moment we say the war is lost you're not going to be able to negotiate, you see. The only way...is to convince the enemy you've some strength left.” He then went on to claim he would get out of Vietnam the way Eisenhower had from Korea — by negotiating and making the South Vietnamese strong enough to permit a US withdrawal. And “regard­ing the future, there won't be any more Vietnams!” he promised.Similarly, Nixon unveiled his intention to duck the world policeman commitment. He was most warmly applauded when he talked about getting the allies to share the load “so we don't fight their wars for them”. As for Russia, he was for telling its leaders that as neither they nor the US wanted nuclear war so the time had come to negotiate. 'We've got to broaden the canvas from Vietnam — they have no reason to end that war. It's hurting us more than them,” he said. “But we could put the Mideast on the fire. And you could put Eastern Europe on the fire. And you could put trade on the fire. And you could put the power (sic) bombs on the fire...and you say: “Now, look here. Here's the world. Here is the United States. Here's the Soviet Union. Neither of us wants nuclear war...They want something else but they don't want war.”So they'll say: “What are we going to do in order to reduce these ten­sions?”” There was, needless to say, not a word about keeping the allies informed in any of this.Nixon's vision sharply differed from that heroic Camelot-by-the-Potomac of the Kennedy era. It was a vision unlikely to charm the young, the poor and the Black, who remained a minority in this land for all the noise they made. America suddenly seemed middle­-aged, having reached that condition in record-breaking time, compressing British imperial experience of a cen­tury following Trafalgar into not much more than a couple of decades. The nation was quietly throwing in the sponge. The Democratic Party Convention in Chicago of 1968 saw Nixon's opponents locked in bitter battle over the Vietnam issue. Nixon himself was already determined to withdraw from Vietnam as rapidly as he could. There were no longer any hawks in the running — only variants of doves. Even the third party candidate, former Alabama Governor George Wallace, while pick­ing General Curtis LeMay as his running-mate, took very good care to insist that he felt America should never have got into the war in the first place and that he, too, would never keep “American boys” over there indefinitely. The plain, unvarnished truth was that the nation wanted to get out of Vietnam. There was no longer the faintest echo anywhere of Kennedy's famous pledge “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship…to assure the survival of liberty.” Nor was anyone for carrying on as Johnson's “guardians at the gate”.What occurred at Chicago, therefore, was a 'happen­ing' that could have easily been avoided. The spectacu­lar collisions between Mayor Richard Daley's police riot squads and demonstrators outside the Hilton Hotel, where both Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Eugene McCarthy were headquartered, were pure guerilla theatre, along with the sideshow riots in Grant Park and elsewhere. They were a way of letting off steam. It was plain enough that the militant activists of the emerging New Left — the Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam, or Mobe, and the Youth Interna­tional Party, the Yippies — were spoiling for trouble. They wanted to prove that the whole system was rotten, and that the only thing to do was tear it down. Theirs was the “politics of confrontation”. As a studied insult to their elders, the Yippies nominated a pig named Pigasus for the Presidency of the United States. National flags were burned. Communist flags were brandished.By making common cause for the moment with the frustrated McCarthyite youngsters, the New Left calculated that they, too, would become imbued with hatred for the cops as “fascist pigs”, “enemies of the people”, “baby burners” — to cite a few milder epithets employed — and become converts to the revolution. When the police be­haved badly in their turn, which was entirely predict­able in a force that is notable for indiscipline and cor­ruption even by American standards, the young nihil­ists and their allies were delighted and exultant. Public sympathy swung to the side of the police, which shook liberal commentators to the core. As something of a connoisseur of civil disturbance, I reckon the mayor muffed it. Had Daley and his police chief had the wit, they would have profitably permitted the motley demon­stration on the main day of the Convention to march on the hall in the Chicago stockyards, as its organizers wished to. It was a hot and sticky August day. The dis­tance was some five miles. Moreover, the route would have taken the long-haired collegiate and predominantly middle- and upper-middle-class pacifists, with their out­rageous slogans and North Vietnamese flags, right through an area of the city that is largely inhabited by working class “ethnics” who tend towards superpatriotism. Unlike the affluent, the children of these folk have enjoyed less opportunity to dodge conscription for Viet­nam by extending their education year after year and securing student deferments. These were Daley's people. They are the sort that hang out the stars and stripes from their front porches. Had the Yippies and the Mobe led the Minnesota Senator's children through their streets, the scenario would have been rather different: Chicago's police would have appeared on the nation's (and the world's) televison screens protecting the mis­guided offspring of the over-privileged from the right­eous wrath of the less so.As it was, the police went berserk. They cracked not only demonstrators over the head but onlookers as well. I myself had my arm broken when a helmeted lunatic clubbed me as I watched Winston Churchill and Jamie Auchincloss — both reporters on the scene and scarcely militant radicals — rescuing a young girl from a plain­ clothes man who was lunging at her with a billy club at least 100 yards from the main melee. The girl, we dis­covered, was not even a McCarthy supporter — she was for Nixon — but that made no difference. As far as Daley's boyos were concerned, it was open season on the young and any who might be presumed to sympath­ize with them.More serious than the mayhem on Chicago's streets — and far more damaging to the Democrats — were Daley's strong-arm tactics inside the Convention hall. He packed the stands with supporters, harassed anti­Humphrey delegates and tinkered with the public address system to gag them. It was all so blatant, the Republicans were overjoyed. Nixon was reputedly beaten in 1960 largely because Daley's well-greased party machine in Cook County carried the day for Kennedy by wholesale fraud, stuffing ballot boxes and generally rigging the vote in the time-honoured way. This prac­tice is — or was — an accepted feature of Chicago life, as in other big American cities, even if it is slowly dying out. Daley wanted Senator Edward Kennedy, as a fel­low Irishman, to run: when he would not do so, he transferred his loyalty reluctantly to Humphrey.The uproar at Chicago was both a cause and effect of the growing alienation of America's brightest youngsters. Long before Chicago one began to encounter the phenomenon of “turned off” American student youth. Even as McCarthy's children's crusade was in full swing, I met angry young SDS (Students for a Demo­cratic Society) adherents who regarded the adopted leader of the anti-Johnson movement as a fake. They would tell one without equivocation that in their view American society was so hopeless that nothing would do but to scrap the entire “power structure”, McCarthy included. When asked what they would wish to see replace it, they would reply that any attempt to answer that question must of necessity “institutionalize” the revolution, which would mean creating another “power structure” that would be as bad as that which preceded it. An alternative to this somewhat self-defeating line of reasoning occasionally advanced went like this: “Why should we tell your generation what we want? If we do, there is a chance that you will seek to corrupt our revolutionary purity by proposing a seductive compromise!”The popular idols of those who indulged in this circular dialectic were, of course, Che Guevara, the Cuban-Argentinian lieutenant of Fidel Castro, who being dead could not betray the cause by contradicting any propositions advanced in his name hereinafter, and Herbert Marcuse, the ex-German political scientist of San Diego, whose works are almost unreadable and hence seldom seem to have actually been read by his disciples. Then there were Maoists, with the little red book, and dozens of other schisms and factions too numerous to mention or bother about. The most fanatic of all to emerge thus far was a small but wholly violent group who called themselves the Weathermen, a few score of whom deliberately staged “four days of rage” in Chicago in the autumn of 1969 during which they smashed up cars, windows and shop fronts in a frenzy of violence, the sole object of which was to pro­voke “the pigs” into blazing action with CS gas and night sticks flashing. The police duly obliged.It seems almost incredible now but as late as 1964 it was fashionable for American educators and liberals generally to deplore the conformist tendencies of the nation's youth. They were insufficiently politicized, the complaint ran. The assassination of John Kennedy had numbed them and LBJ lacked charisma. A sense of cause began to develop with the passage of Johnson's civil rights legislation. A number — never very large­ — felt impelled to missionary efforts amongst the down­trodden Blacks of the deep South, helping the hitherto disenfranchised to register to vote and taking part in various protest marches — often at considerable physical risk. But it was not until the spring of 1965 that the so-called Free Speech Movement was well and truly launched on the University of California's sprawling campus at Berkeley, San Francisco, by a 22-year-old New Yorker named Mario Savio.Savio, who had been busy as a civil rights activist in Mississippi, announced that he was “tired of reading history — I want to make it!” He organized a series of protests, boycotts, sit-ins and the like, not only for free speech, which meant plain foul language for its own sake, but also, for banning the bomb, against the Vietnam war and denouncing Alabama's Wallace. It culminated in a victory of sorts in forcing the resignation of the university's president, Clark Kerr. There were also clashes with police. Politically it produced the opposite of its intention — a sharp swing to the right in California with the election of Ronald Reagan as law-and-order Republican Governor.Earnest analysis of this early unruliness, which in due course spread eastwards back across America, have tended to put it all down to the frustrations of the com­puter age. They saw the student as being increasingly crushed by the exacting demands of specialization. The bigger US universities are so vast that it is impossible for professors to know or even to meet personally more than a fraction of the boys and girls they teach. It is not uncommon, for example, for 2 000 students to attend a lecture in some vast hall while yet more, often scores of miles away on another campus, are sitting in on the same performance piped in by closed-circuit TV. Several State universities boast 30,000 or more students. The feeling of being little more than an auto­maton in a network of irrelevant studies controlled by punch-cards fed to master automata is easily acquired. Then there are the social and parental pressures on the American child to “make the grade”. Since already one­ half of the youngsters who emerge from the secondary school system are expected to go on to college it flows inevitably from this that a mere bachelor's degree is scarcely a passport to a good job. Indeed, the latest phenomenon is that PhDs are in serious over-supply. This in turn is making it more important to go to a prestige college than to win the highest qualifications a less well-known one can confer.Students tend to be particularly disaffected in the Arts and social sciences — the soft disciplines. Not only do many students doubt whether what they are being taught is worth knowing, but so do some oddly assorted elders. Spiro Agnew, the vice president Nixon picked with uncanny skill to function as his political lightning conductor, is one. Gore Vidal, the novelist, is another. Agnew thinks that overemphasis on higher education is denying many a potentially good plumber useful earning time. Vidal thinks it serves as a means of fudg­ing employment statistics — a parking lot in the passage from childhood into life. Educators, needless to say, disagree — and with one another, too.The problem is compounded, if not caused, by afflu­ence — the same affluence that permits American middle­ class youngsters to indulge their whims in experiment­ing with marijuana, LSD and other more dangerous hard drugs to the degree that it is now becoming a real menace in secondary schools. Parental control, never a strong point with the beneficiaries of Dr Benjamin Spock's popular pediatric teachings, is minimal. Ameri­can youngsters often seem actively to despise their mothers and fathers — certainly to a much more evident degree than in, say, Britain. The generation gap is real. Not only that, but such wiseacres as Dr Margaret Meade, the anthropologist, who ardently supports the cult of youth-knows-best, testify that it is inevitable and right that it should be so.It can be argued that the child is right to question whether it is worth so much effort to attend his classes in order to end up in the kind of dead-end job his father holds down. The computer age is palpably reducing a widening range of middle and upper-middle executives in business and government into little more than mech­anized clerks. The function of decision-making, which alone distinguished the salaried white-collar worker from lowlier, wage-earning office help, can increasingly be turned over to a data-processor. For example, whereas once upon a time it was up to a local bank branch manager to judge a customer's creditworthiness in respect of a loan for a new car or improvements to his house, nowadays he is not encouraged to do anything more than feed the required information on to a card for the benefit of a centralized memory bank, which makes its ruling in the form of a 'read-out'.When a dock worker loses his job to a fork-lift it is seldom before his union has succeeded in coming to terms with management. This has been the pattern in getting automation accepted in America much faster than elsewhere. The union agrees to accelerate retire­ments in return for management's contributing large sums to its pension funds, for example. A bargain is struck. The docker who is duly found redundant has fewer illusions about his place in the scheme of things. He is content to go fishing or start a new career in some other field. But the educated executive, shunted aside by the cybernetic age, is emotionally less able to cope with it. How do you tell a man who has been earning $15,000 a year or more and has his name on the glass door of his cubicle that a thing of plastic tapes, whirling discs and ciphers has effectively displaced him? But his son may interpret the message only too accurately.The modern American child, too, to an even greater degree than his European counterpart, is apt never to have known a situation where three meals a day failed to materialize. His parents may bore him with reminiscences of the Depression years or the War. He will half heed them, if he heeds them at all. He is, in short, pampered and spoiled, much more indulged than loved. On top of this, he — and his sister — are constantly exposed to the mendacities of high-pressure advertising on the TV and in the Press. They are endlessly regaled with news and comment that reveals politicians as charlatans, crooks, self-seekers — and very many indeed certainly are. They cannot visit the drug store news­ stand without being confronted by the assumption that their entire generation (and a good part of the nation) is sex-obsessed or queer, high on pot and copping out. Lawlessness and corruption is condemned by the same elders as condone it — and profit from it. They perceive on all sides abundant evidence that the society they are expected to inherit is a very sick one, whose values and priorities are in a terrifying tangle.The youngsters, who turned to McCarthy as a kind of Pied Piper in 1968, found in him a safety-valve for their pent-up frustrations. It often struck me watching him that they invented him as a symbol rather than that they followed him. He would have made a very strange President if by some astonishing miracle he had been elected. His philosophy of office was so excessively low key he would have been well nigh invisible. He would frequently remark, for example, on how he felt the White House should be turned into a museum with the fences torn down. Except that he was thoroughly against the Vietnam war, he was dispassionate to the point of vacuum on most issues. He could also be bafflingly recondite before mystified audiences. I once heard him deliver a fearsomely technical lecture on the problems of international monetary liquidity to a convivial gathering of master builders and their wives in Wisconsin. It can hardly have won him many votes. But the kids, although sometimes in despair at these antics, adored him to a point where it began to worry responsible adults in his party: what on earth was going to happen to them when the adventure ended?In the eyes of America's well-to-do liberals, the unrest in the nation's schools is largely due to Vietnam. This may be so in their schools, perhaps, but in poorer districts it is more due to racial tension and crime. The common denominator in both is an alarming growth in drug addiction amongst the young. I would not suggest that a mafority are nowadays “hooked”, but rather that it is fashionable both in the ghetto and in white suburbia to be hip to the drug scene. A quarter-million kids slept out at Woodstock at a mass folk music concert, in their bell-bottoms and beads. They experienced the great uni­versal love-in feeling of cause and solidarity by march­ing on the Washington monument to protest. All this may sound as harmless as Beatlemania, but American children do not do things by halves. The pot cult became almost conformist. Spot-checks of public and private schools all over the country in 1969 showed that scarcely any were free of this drug problem and one-in-ten was seriously worried about heroin. Senator Tom Dodd stated in Congress in January 1970 that drug addiction had become the principal medical problem in the US armed forces and that, at a conservative estimate, 12 million Americans have taken marijuana and 250, 000 are addicted to heroin. The “Woodstock nation” was not quite as sweet as it had seemed at first. Time magazine reported on the pop festival in August 1969 in ecstatic terms. It “turned out to be history's largest happening,” the paper re­corded, “…the moment when the special culture of US youth of the '60s displayed its strength, appeal and power…may well rank as one of the significant politi­cal and sociological events of the age.” In fact, this lioniz­ing of a counter-culture spawned by the flower-people of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and cemented by hard rock music and dope was a foolish attempt on the part of the over-30s to participate vicariously in the seemingly enviable freedom of Youth. Americans of the kind that get to be magazine writers and editors are mortally afraid of seeming square. And doubtless this accounts for their failure to record subsequently that Woodstock died five months later at Altamont outside Berkeley, California, when an attempt to repeat the magical rally ended hideously. It was estim­ated afterwards that 500 000 turned out for this second concert, stars of which were Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. Someone had engaged the notorious Hells Angels — a gang of motorbike-riding thugs — as guards. This in itself was enough to guarantee tragedy, which came surely enough. Four youngsters were killed. A Black boy was ritually stabbed to death by Angels right under Jagger's nose as he sang 'Sympathy for the devil' on stage. Over 100 were beaten up by these same hoodlums with clubs and chains. Perhaps 1000 were treated for LSD overdoses. At least two performers were hospitalized — one of them a pregnant girl singer. Time magazine, having waxed so eloquent about Wood­ stock earlier, overlooked its Californian sequel which was surely quite as “significant...of the age”.It is not my purpose to moralize about drugs. Suffice it to say that youngsters who take even the soft drug do so partly because it is socially accepted but more so because it releases tensions — and it is, in turn, this which they have turned into their excuse. The slum­ dweller is buying oblivion from his miserable surround­ings, and then resorts to robbery with violence to pay the pusher. The better-off suburbanite seeks release from the hang-ups that derive from inner conflicts of a more sophisticated kind. The fact remains that the entire hippie/youth revolt/ghetto riot/crime-in-the-streets/drug scene is stirring up a powerful groundswell of reaction in Middle America against the young—its own young included.Dr Calvin Plimpton, head of the excellent, if expen­sive, New England private school named Amherst, recently wrote an open letter to Nixon ascribing the “turmoil on the campus” to the failure of political leaders to address themselves “effectively, massively and per­sistently (to) the major social and foreign problems of our times”. He was doubtless sincere — and was much quoted in prestige newspapers — when he said the uproar in the universities “derives from the distance separating the American dream from the American reality”. This is a factor and I have touched on it earlier. But in my view it has been the hypocrisy of teaching the young for so long that the dream and the reality are one that has created much of the problem. Dr Plimpton's Amherst statement had it that “huge expenditure of national resources for military purposes...the critical needs of America's 30 million poor, the unequal division of our life on racial issues” are responsible for the “mal­aise of the larger society”. It is probably much truer that his more idealistic students — one of whom is David Eisenhower, Nixon's son-in-law — find it impossible to square dropping napalm on Vietnamese villagers in order to save them from Communism as part of an imperial mission with the anti-colonialist tradition they have been led to believe are their heritage. A less inhibited and probably larger group is just as badly disturbed over the failure of American armed might to produce instant results.Here, then, one comes to the other ugly factor emerg­ing in American politics. Nixon was more haunted in 1968 by Wallace than by Humphrey. George Wallace took 13.5 per cent of the popular vote nationwide and won the five solidly segregationist States of the old South where the American Civil War lives on. There can be no greater mistake than to ignore the phenomenon of his support in the North also. Wallace goes down very well amongst the natural enemies of the better-off, better-educated McCarthy kids — who are to be found amongst the other half of the secondary school output that does not get to go to university. The poor whites of the South and the blue-collar workers who live in big city suburbs in the industrial regions of the Middle West, for example, feel threatened by the advances Black Americans made under Johnson. They know that Blacks moving into the house next door as a result of anti-discrimination laws knocks down the value of their mortgaged homes. Tell them that this will only be temporary and that in due time the problem will iron itself out and you are not apt to get their votes. They also know that the forced integration of State schools depresses educational standards even if this should not be so in theory. It is easy to be liberal, they argue bitterly, in a lily-white suburb or if one is rich enough to send one's youngsters to fee-paying institutions. Nixon may still be haunted by this Wallace spectre. If anything should complicate Nixon's plan to disen­gage from the war, he will be in deep trouble — and so will America: a country divided against itself, full of doubts and fears and looking inwards. The tide may well be turning away from acceptance of the policy recommendations of an educated elite — and against the elite. The day of the simplistic know-nothing yahoo may be dawning. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com

I am just back from a couple of days of thrarrghing around the hills and hollows of southern and West Virginia with my friend Roland, he on his Harley, I on a BMW whose early years were spent under the bum of a New Mexico Highway Patrolman but which remains remarkably lively, nonetheless. In the course of our rundfahrt, we visited my parents. They are buried on a wooded ridge above the headwaters of the James River, he in a traditional casket, she, or more precisely her ashes, in a bottle of Roederer, her favorite champagne. How she came there is a story for another day. Today I will tell of his interment. Or rather, I will have James Srodes do the telling. Jim, also no longer with us, dammit, and his wife Cecile were a huge and much loved part of my parent’s life and mine. His roots were in middle Pennsylvania. He and my father committed journalism from the Washington office of the London Daily Telegraph where dad was bureau chief until, just 58, he died in harness in the early spring of 1980. Both of them were among the best at what they did and they had a lot of fun doing it in each other’s company. What follows is, I hope, self-explanatory. Of Donald Anderson and Daniel’s Mountain, I shall have much more to say. Don included Jim’s letter in his unpublished memoir, Before the Break of Dawn..1366 National Press Building Washington, D.C. 20045April 8, 1980 Dear Mom,I hope you don't mind but this is a round-robin letter to Nigel Wade, Alan Osborn and Karin Swiers who all knew and loved Steve Barber as much as we did and who would be interested, and I hope take some comfort, in the following report of his funeral.I don't know if you ever met Steve's friend Donald Anderson. When Steve and Deirdre first came to Washington in 1963 they lived in an apartment complex down in southwest Washington and met Donald, who at that time was an aide to Adam Clayton Powell. It was rare enough for anyone to have a black friend in the Washington of 1963 and, I think Donald would agree it was a rare thing for a black man to have a friend like Steve at any time. In the years that followed the Barbers were frequent visitors at a farm Donald had built down in the Virginia foothills. The home was on a mountain in a quite extensive bit of property that the Andersons’ white master left his slaves back in the 19th Century.At any rate, when Steve first fell ill but appeared to be recovering, he and Donald fell to chatting and when the conversation drifted around to it, Steve opined that he doubted that he would want to be buried back in England; that he really considered America his home. At that point Donald offered the use of his family burial plot on the hillside of that lovely mountain. Andersons dating back to 1822 are buried there and Steve was mightily amused at the prospect of being the first free-born to buried there. And there the matter rested.So it was last Thursday that we took Steve to Daniel's Mountain. Simon, Deirdre, her other son Charles McLaren, a nurse from the hospital who had grown fond of Steve, Cecile and I, Hugh and Liz Davies from the office and Congressman Wyche Fowler, who has Andy Young's old Congressional seat and was a longtime friend of Steve's and of Donald's. Gawlers’, the Washington funeral home, brought the casket down and the Davies and we brought the overflow of flowers in a rented station wagon. Our trip was marred somewhat by Hugh s inexperience with a car that big and with American super highways where the trucks whiz past at a high rate of speed and finally he came all unstuck when his erratic driving earned him the attention of the Virginia Highway Patrol, a ticket and a good old fashioned you're-in-a-heap-of-trouble, boy, lecture. For someone like myself whose sense of manhood is inextricably bound in the skill with which one drives motor cars, the experience was a trying one for me. Then we arrived at Daniel's Mountain and the fun began.The rutted, washed out track up to Donald's farm rose at a 50 degree angle with a steep drop off at the left down the side of the mountain. We could see the gashes on the hillside to our vright and the tire gouges from where the hearse had preceded us and fully expected to see it on its side several hundred feet down the slope. Not so, however. For when we reached the top there were two drivers smoking as they leaned up against the muddy, branch-scraped side of their "coach" (everything is euphemism in the funeral business — hearse is coach, death is inevitable, the deceased is referred to by the first name and the coffin is now called by its brand name style, e.g. The Monte Carlo with the Tufted Taffeta Lining)."Oh, my God, look what's happened to Hammersmith,”  Cecile cried and I almost passed out. Deirdre's one consolation through it all had been her good natured silver grey Weimaraner which was being brought down for the funeral after three weeks in a kennel. And there he was...with his right hind leg cut off at mid-thigh. Except that it wasn't Hammersmith but Victor, Donald's dog who had been getting around on three legs in fine fashion and was waiting to play with his good friend Hammersmith who had not yet arrived.Catching our breath, we recovered in Donald's modern cabin in the sky, looked down the sunny valley which was just turning green, marveled at his white peacock and inspected the cemetery where we found that the hole was too big to accommodate the automatic rope and pulley mechanism that lowers the Walnut Tudor with Percale Lining after committal.Moreover, in backing the truck through the trees to get to the hole, the firm delivering the cement vault in which the Tudor etc. would be deposited, cracked the vault against a tree and knocked a big chunk out of it. Another vault was sent for from the Clifton Forge plant and it was agreed that we would move the ceremony from the graveside to a pleasant hillock overlooking the valley and then after taking Dierdre back to the cabin, shift Steve to his final rest.Say what you will about the Funeral Industry, they give good value. In our innocence Simon and I had contracted with a D.C. firm merely to transport Steve and did not specify anything else. A Clifton Forge lodge brother joined our service by providing the vault. Neither had any interest in cooperating with the other, both pitched in right away when they saw we knew nothing about what we were doing and within minutes a decorous awning was up, artificial grass was laid, folding chairs were placed and covered with a felt covering and after we placed Steve, the flowers were banked into a truly lovely sight, what with the valley spreading out below the blue sky. It was marvelous.And so was the funeral service itself. Donald recruited Pastor Davis from his local church and we were treated to a genuine Afro-Baptist call to rejoice in the wonderful life of a dear friend who was now gone from this earth but whose memory remained to urge in each of us that each day is a precious gift. Life, Pastor John Davis said, is a moth fretting at the cloth of immortality: he can never succeed. Throughout Victor and Hammersmith romped among us, peeing on the flowers, rolling luxuriously in the warm leaves and causing us all to choke back tears from the sublime marvel of the scene. How Steve would have roared. It was a theme we would repeat throughout the day. How he would have loved it all.FOOD, of course, is an important ingredient in any funeral. Donald had had a delicious corned beef cooking throughout the day and Hugh and I volunteered to get the cooked cabbage from Donald's cousin — Mrs. Arbulla Mack — who lived over on the adjoining mountain top. By the time I had pushed Donald's tiny VW over the second bridge consisting of two simply laid tree trunks across the stream, Hugh was making small animal noises in the back of his throat. Mrs. Arbulla Mack lived up a 60 degree hill in a tiny house where she had lived most of her 81 years, the last 20 alone, gardening, sewing and cooking the finest cabbage on the Eastern Seaboard."Welcome to hell's half acre," she shouted to Hugh, who promptly fell in love with her. "Now you be careful, this has been cooking all day and it'll scald the pee out of you.” And then she laughed and laughed until we had bumped down the hill out of sight. She had already told Donald earlier in the day to convince Deirdre that Steve was "in a better place and had laid his burdens down and was waiting for us to catch up with him".Interestingly, after a journey to Mrs. Arbulla Mack's, the road to Donald's house looked like a highway by comparison. We returned to find Donald stripped to the waist playing a lament on his bagpipes. His first interest in the instrument was awakened when he was a student at the London School of Economics, and at this point he had been playing the pipes for nine years. He paced slowly across the front yard of the house while everyone took turns freshening Deirdre's drink and insulting Donald's vanity about his well developed torso.At one point the menfolk slipped away to help shift Steve. A new vault had arrived and it was suggested that we put the coffin in the vault and then lower the vault on the truck pulley into the hole. We sweated and strained and finally after crushing a few fingers we got the Walnut-and-so-on into the cement vault. The lid was placed and the pulley began to lift the vault off the ground as the front end of the truck rose higher and higher off the ground and finally snapped the suspension, pitching the vault and coffin on its side toward us in a swinging arc that had about two tons behind it. With one horrific gasp we all lunged at the box, steadied it, lowered it back to the ground and unchained the truck which was driven away in disgrace. All this, mind you, with the dogs romping, Donald's pipes keening, sweat pouring and us alternating between tears and gales of laughter as we became convinced that Steve was amusing himself mightily at our clumsy efforts.A larger truck was obtained. We were all by now quite drunk. Donald was quite bug-eyed from playing laments to distract Deirdre from coming back to the cemetery and dogs were showing no signs of slowing down. The peafowl began to scream. "He's doing it on purpose, you know," Charles McLaren said to me. "He's toying with us." I agreed readily. Steve's laughter was almost audible. Finally we got the vault lowered into place and the two slackjawed local yeoman who had been assisting us stepped calmly onto the vault top and began dropping the clods of earth into the hole just as Deirdre got bored with Donald and came around the house to see what we were doing. With a whoop of tears she fled back into the house. Later when she walked up to the horse stables and saw that Donald had converted the damaged vault into a watering trough for his horses, she was recovered enough to laugh with the rest of us and agree, Steve would have loved it.The rest of the day dissolves into a haze of images. The fireplace, the laughing and the tears, the smell of cabbage and corned beef, the cry of the peacocks, the James River below in the valley, the noise of the freight train out of sight in some other hollow. The four of us left at an early hour that night and slept down below in a motel on the highway. We rose at dawn the next day and drove back in silence.There really was not much to say, after all. Steve is gone. We buried him on Daniel's Mountain in a way that would have pleased him mightily: for all the amateurism and macabre gaffes, it was an act of love and that is all that counts.Love, Jim This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com

The National Enquirer is a shadow of its former self. I worked there for a month in 1981 when it was owned and edited by Generoso Pope. I was no fan of his then but in retrospect I can’t imagine him catching and killing for Donald Trump. His guys would have caught and published, the way they did with Presidential aspirants Gary Hart and John Edwards. They would have ripped the lid off Trump’s encounter with Stormy Daniels in real time, not years after the fact. The Apprentice would have been riddled with moles on the Enquirer payroll. We would have known all there was to know about what was being snorted and with whom the star was getting hot and heavy. The schmuck being told “You’re fired!” would have been Trump himself. Or so I’d like to think. Generoso Pope was weird but knew what he was doing. He hired Brits and Australians with Fleet Street instincts and scruples and used his checkbook to get scoops, not hide them. By the standards of the time, he also paid extremely well. I was a Brit, so they thought I might be a good fit. I wasn’t. This is something I wrote when I go back from my brief encounter. It was published in the now defunct Washington Journalism Review.To understand the National Enquirer, it helps to hear a parable. Actually, the story is more or less true. It is meant as a gentle warning to newcomers, and it was as such that I was told it.A Wall Street Journal reporter, it seems, one day discovered that prestige could no longer meet the demands of mortgage, college fees, alimony and the IRS unless supplemented by a massive, indeed impossible, raise. This common quandary has driven some to drink, others into lobbying. Our man chose the Enquirer.  Confident that his substantial, though sober journalistic talent could be moulded to the tabloid’s taste, he signed on and moved his family to its headquarters in Florida. His salary doubled, the sun shone brightly on his new condominium, he acquired the beginnings of a tan.The Enquirer gives its recruits a month to prove themselves. No problem, he thought. Three weeks in, it was becoming plain he would not make the grade. Either he must produce a blockbuster, or ... well, it didn’t bear much inspection. He began to thrash around.The result was nothing if not inspired. Dallas star Larry Hagman, he wrote, was even more fiendish than the JR he portrayed. Why, even as a child he had delighted in tearing the wings off sparrows and biting the heads off mice. The Amazing Untold Story. The only question was how to stand it up.  In this respect, the author was considerably more diligent than Janet Cooke whose fabrications had so embarrassed the Washington Post; under the circumstances he had to be. More exalted practitioners of the craft may consider the Enquirer’s interpretation of ethics and accuracy a trifle idiosyncratic, but the bladder has standards, and sticks to them.  It uses greed and paranoia to spur reporters to new heights of inventiveness and zeal, but realizes the First Amendment’s mercy can be strained. So there is a balancing mechanism, the Research Department.  Its members are cunningly paid less than the reporters whose work they scrutinize and approach their task with the baneful enthusiasm of Inquisitors.  That the Enquirer is published at all is not their fault.However, Research was no match for the creator of Hagman: Hollywood Caligula.  Their basic strategy is to demand dozens of taped interviews and the names and numbers of all sources in order to re-report each story. His response was to enlist a corps of friends around the country and assign them roles as indiscreet Hagman intimates.  The deception was well‑rehearsed, there was pressure from above, where the story positively screamed record sales, and the splendid act of desperation sailed though the guard rails. Even the libel experts retained from Edward Bennet William’s law firm were impressed. Six million shoppers got their money’s worth.So, alas, did Hagman’s lawyers. After a brief flash of glory, the reporter was given ten minutes to clear his desk under the businesslike gaze of the Enquirer’s armed security men. A tragic end, but better perhaps then simply being branded No Good, or as the Enquirer laconically terms its rejects, NG.The genial Scot at the National Press Club bar painted a pleasing picture of opulence in the Florida sunshine. If there was a touch of the hustler in his broad Glasgow accent, it was belied by the half‑moon spectacles, professorial tweeds and Mont Blanc fountain pen. He had found me at a vulnerable moment. My previous employer, a British newsweekly, had folded, the job hunt was going badly and I was broke.  I could scarcely afford to go to a supermarket, much less scorn the drivel on its checkout counters. Sympathy for Carol Burnett, whose suit against the Enquirer I once cheered, had became a luxury.The recruiter suggested I try my hand at Articles editor. It started at a thousand a week, carried the responsibility of creating and running a network of reporters, and might, in the event of some really spectacular death or disaster, involve a little travel.  Poverty, and the slightly rakish prospect of building a Smileyesque Circus dedicated to ferreting out the Untold, Amazing and Bizarre, were ample stimuli.  Three days later I was on a prepaid flight south.The Enquirer resides in Lantana, one of those countless ribs of real estate whose primary function is to separate Palm Beach from Fort Lauderdale and 1‑95 from the Intracoastal Waterway. A bland tract of telegraph poles, tired palm trees and prefabrication, it is remarkable on two counts, a large population of Finns and numbing soullessness. It was perhaps my misfortune to be ushered into the presence of Mike Hoy, the Executive Editor, at lunchtime. The place was all but empty, and thus conveyed, in its efficiently pastel way, a sense of innocent cheerfulness, like an outsized kindergarten. One of the newsroom cubicles was stacked with exotic toys. I began to suspect that the people who worked here might be having fun.  Hoy, thirtyish, Australian and modeled on the lines of Cliff Richard, offered me a tryout almost immediately, then explained why the company would not, as had once been its practice, rent a car for me. One of my more exuberant predecessors had driven an Enquirer Hertz into the waterway.Then he said something rather strange. “I want you to know that we really are looking for editors.” I thought this scarcely needed saying. That impermanence was an institution at the Enquirer did not occur to me, nor, as yet, did the connection between its desperation for new blood and whatever had possessed the predecessor to sink his car.Every aspect of the Enquirer, from its management techniques to what it prints, is governed by a surgically precise appreciation of human frailty, for this is the great achievement of its own and publisher, the splendidly named Generoso Pope Jr. His relationship with his employees approximates that between the God of the Old Testament and the Children of Israel minus forgiveness. His control is total and awe‑inspiring, his ways mysterious, his retribution swift.When he deals with a man, he likes, to use his own very secular phrase, to “have him by the balls”, and usually succeeds. Under Hoy’s guidance it was hoped I would quickly learn to divine his will.Known simply as The Boss or GP, he dominates the waking thoughts, and more than a few sleeping ones as well, off all at the Enquirer, yet no one, except* perhaps his most trusted henchman Iain Calder (another Scotsman), can be said to know him.  Even Hoy at number three in the hierarchy, lives in terror.An authorized account, published in 1976 by the Miami Herald, describes him as “a tall man, built like a Bronx precinct captain”. 54 years have softened that somewhat, except for the face. Said an editor, one of the few women in the higher echelons, “There doesn’t seem to be anything behind his eyes.” The effect is a mask of staring malevolence, which may be unfortunate, but certainly does little to endear.  There are times when he seems to crave a locker‑room camaraderie with his editors.  This normally occurs in the evening when everyone else has left. He perches himself on a desk and starts to josh. The atmosphere is like an overstretched elastic band.  His humor is coarse, painful and revolves around the attributes of absent secretaries.  I recall one episode vividly. An editor had just been assigned a particularly beautiful girl,  sweet‑natured with long pre‑Raphaelite hair, and, as Pope put it, built. He suggested a swap, then, making an open‑palmed gesture just above his waist, remarked, “I like milk in my coffee.”He is, however, educated. A top of his class graduate in engineering from MIT, he reportedly served in the CIA’s psycholgical warfare unit. That said, glimpses of his life beyond the Enquirer, which he purchased in 1952, are virtually non‑existent His father was the publisher of the New York Italian paper Il Progresso, which has spawned the inevitable legends, none of them proved. I particularly like the one which has a Genovese family boss, back in the early days, distributing the weekly payroll from a cash‑filled black bag. Some see murkiness in the fact that since he moved the operation from New Jersey in 1971 he has never left south Florida. He says he hates to fly.  Such stories add to his eery mystique. Other contributors include the gun‑toting plainclothes security men who haunt the premises, the spot checks on reporters’ telephone conversations, and the uniformed Lantana patrolman who escorts him to and from his car.I cannot say I knew any of this when I started, though day one should have taught me more perhaps than it did. My first mistake was to turn up in coat and tie.  The Higher Authority wore shirtsleeves and an increasingly familiar pair of pants, a style, admonished Hoy,  that I would do well to emulate. I blundered again by trying to strike up a conversation. Apparently one did not talk to colleagues, be they only six feet away, except by internal telephone and with one’s back turned. I needed a coffee. “Put a top on it,” someone hissed as I carried a cup to my desk, “The Boss doesn’t like stains on his carpet.” To atone, I worked through lunch, another miscalculation. “The Boss believes in lunch.” Next day I ate, grateful for a temporary escape, only to be informed that I’d been seen leaving the office with the wrong people. My companions were said to be under some form of cloud and best avoided. Besides, what was I doing having lunch? I wondered whether Pope ever specified his desires before punishing those who transgressed them.The arena in which this curious drama was to be played out might have been a newsroom in any large daily before the age of computers. The open plan layout was symmetrical about a narrow avenue across which two rows of editors, about nine in all, numbers varied, were occasionally polite to one another. Behind them sat their secretaries, each busily pretending to callers that her boss worked in a private office. Next, pinched into lines of narrow, benchlike desks came the 40 or so reporters, each owing allegiance and his job to a particular editor. Finally the writers, responsible for the Enquirer’a deathless prose and probably the happiest group. Deemed creative by the Boss, they were left in peace. At the end of the central aisle, rather too close to where I had been stationed, was a series of glass boxes. Pope had a grander sanctum elsewhere, but it was here he would come when he wished to make his presence felt.  Assistants ensured that a pack of Kents and a lighter always awaited his arrival.  My first impression was that my fellow editors all looked very ill: exchange their typewriters for oars and they would have made perfect, though at $60 000 a year and up, very expensive, extras for the sea battle in Ben Hur. Among the healthier looking was my neighbour to the right, yet another expatriate Scotsman.  The gossip editor,  he had lost his laryngx to cancer and went about his duties in a hoarse, high‑pressure whisper punctuated by clicks. Across the way sat a man with a weight problem, feverishly working his way through a bag of tangerines. Two triple bypass operations had slimmed him down somewhat, a fact Pope considered humorous: “It’s good to see old Levy fits in his chair these days.” And then was a character they called the Poison Dwarf, a wizened homunculus with a peach blossom accent. Had he really been 55, his appearance might not have been so distressing. He was 38. The reporters seemed to be faring better. Many might have been worthy candidates for the SPCA. They had  the furtive look of kicked and beaten labradors.  Foot‑soldiers, they were at least insulated from the Maximum Leader by their editors, whose paranoia‑induced savagery was the mild price of relative security.  The reason I had been brought in from outside was that none of them wanted to risk their necks or their $45 000 a year any more than was strictly necessary. Now and then one or two were forcibly promoted, given the option of leaving or climbing, which regularly amounted to the same thing: climbers who failed at editor could expect to be fired, and the chances of making it were no better than those of a World War One subaltern on the line.One of the luckier ones was the young Englishman sitting to my left. Promoted some months previously, he had begun his career on a small provincial paper outside London, and had been lured to Florida by wealth and warmth. In an earlier age, he might have set out to make his fortune in some tropical colony. He seemed to be doing all that was required of him, his file drawer was full of good stories in progress, yet there was a smell of doom about him. Colleagues shied away, spoke of him with, of all things in this emotional charnel house, compassion. He was being executed, Enquirer‑style.First they cut his salary, then removed his reporters, forcing him to rely on stringers, finally demanded a massive increase in output. “This is the way Pope always does it,” he said one evening towards the end, “They dig you a grave and say climb out if you can. You never can. The grave just gets deeper.” Several days later his deck was empty. It reminded me of a scene from a Bond film. Mr Big holds a council of operatives, one of whom has failed to satisfy. A flick of a switch, and the offender is electrocuted, his remains brusquely flushed through a convenient hole in the floor. In this case the victim was allowed to reincarnate himself as a reporter. A rare privilege.The editor’s defrocking could be ascribed to no particular commission or omission, it was just the way things worked around here. A sympathetic reporter noticed my puzzlement. “The Boss is a toy train freak,” she explained, “I think he likes to see us as a vast train set.  He throws points, sets up obstructions, and races us off bridges just for the hell of seeing what happens.”In terms of how they are put together, there is probably little difference between the National Enquirer and, say, Time. To the structuralist, anyway. Leads are developed and assigned, reporters and stringers turn in voluminous files which are rigorously checked for accuracy, boiled by writers into the house style, and finally, with luck, published. There, however, the resemblance ends.The process begins with the lead. Each editor is expected to submit thirty or so to The Boss every Friday of which perhaps half a dozen may be approved. On the rest he scribbles the ubiquitous initials NG. The ideas come from reporters and stringers (who both receive up to $300 if their offering gets into print), other publications (there is always a race for the new Omni, Cosmopolitan and Self) and the imagination. Memorable specimens from the last, and frankly largest, category include “The Junk Food Diet”, “How Brooke Shields, Loni Anderson and Farrah Fawcett are Wrecking Your Marriage” and “Let’s Get Accredited as a Salvation Army Fundraiser and Go Knocking on Celebrity Doors to See How Generous the Stars are” (in the hope, apparently, that the reporter will get savaged by a guard dog).A number of celebrity leads are preemptive, developed in advance like obituaries. The Elizabeth Taylor‑John Warner separation was probably ready to run before they had even said their vows and certainly for months before it occurred. At this very moment at least one editor is contemplating marriage between Robert Wagner, widower of Natalie Wood, and his television co‑star Stephanie Powers.Even the most grizzled veteran cannot second guess Pope’s taste with any certainty. His notions of what constitutes a contemporary star are quixotic, but seem to derive from movies of the fifties and sixties (hence Sophia Loren, Princess Grace and, by association, her unfortunate daughter Caroline) and the top ten Neilson‑rated shows that he happens to watch (not 60 Minutes). Dudley Moore, of 10 and Arthur fame, fails to register on the grounds that he is, and I quote, “not big enough.” Tom (Magnum PI) Selleck didn’tt have them right stuff either, until Pope was persuaded to poll his secretaries.There are, however, some totally reliable No Good’s, chief among them blacks, except when they practice voodoo, witness aliens, or are child comic Gary Coleman.  I presented Hoy with a heart‑warming story of a young New Orleans man who had survived a grain elevator explosion and 80 per cent burns to become a multimillionaire (a surefire hit under the Rags to Riches category).  Hoy immediately asked me what colour he was. Black. Kill it. Gays, meanwhile, may be beaten up at will.  An outraged account of San Francisco’s demographics was headlined “Sick! Sick! Sick!” That the Enquirer, a self‑styled Equal Opportunity Employer, has no minority employees is not coincidental.Once an approved lead has pleased Story Control, a computer programmed to weed out duplicates, it is ready to be reported, and the ethical mayhem really begins.  If celebrities are the potatoes of tabloid journalism, miraculous medicine is the meat. Unfortunately, the medical fraternity likes to be circumspect about describing its advances, and talks of percentages, hopes, possibilities, rarely of anything so definite as  a cure. This is too grey for the Enquirer which does not recognise the subjunctive mood.  The trick, therefore, is to get the medical man, who in his right mind would never even talk to the Enquirer to say things that would cost him his shingle if he tried to say them in the New England Journal of Medicine, and say them on tape.  This is known as Burning Docs.Technically, the reporter’s path is strewn with regulations. Not only must his interviews be taped, but he has signed a waiver binding him to identify himself as working for the Enquirer and as using a recorder, thus excusing his employers when, as he must, he sidles past the law. If his editor wants him to get a doctor to say something, he is under considerably more pressure to produce than to be an upright citizen. Refusal to carry out an order is treated with military firmness.There are many ways to ease on the record indiscretion from an interviewee, the most popular being the old Twenty Questions ploy. The subject is stroked into a state of trust and then hit with a series of convoluted queries, phrased in Enquirerese, to which he will answer, if the reporter is adroit enough, merely yes or no. These little words can be made to speak volumes. Critical readers may have wondered how it is that supposedly sophisticated professionals, when quoted in the Enquirer, always manage to clutter their remarks with an effusion of amazings, incredibles and fantastics.This method is openly encouraged by Pope. In a memo distributed to all newcomers he commands bluntly: “Ask leading questions.” Lest it be carried too far,  reporters are then reminded, “quotes should not only be appropriate but believable. A Japanese carpenter should not sound like Ernest Hemingway, or vice versa.”Add to this Pope’s rather confining taste in vocabulary, and the results can be bizarre. Reporter Byron Lutz had worked hard to produce “The Biggest Swindle in US History”, the tale of a computer rip‑off inside the federal government. He had even persuaded a Justice Department official to agree that it was indeed “the biggest swindle”, a questionable assertion by itself. Enter the Evaluator, a character whose task it is to condense finished files into single paragraphs for the benefit of Pope and the writers. The following scene ensued:Evaluator: This won’t get through, Lutz. We don’t use swindle.Lutz: But that’s what the guy at the Justice Department called it, it’s on the tape.Evaluator: It’s got to be robbery.Lutz: But there’s a difference.Editor (intervening): He’s right. Let’s look it up in the dictionary.Evaluator: Hey, I don’t care. The Boss don’t like swindle, make it robbery.  Editor: Get on it, Lutz, get your guy to say robbery. Now.What makes the reporter’ s mission particularly tough is that he is often covering not a set of circumstances his editor knows or believes to exist, but one that the editor wishes to have happen. A new TV series has emerged, perhaps, and The Boss wants an exciting story about its participants. Or an editor may conclude that there has been too striking an absence of Farrah Fawcett. A reconciliation with Lee Majors is needed to fill the gap. Thanks to a large array of “insiders”, “friends” and “intimate sources” many of Celebrity romance stories are frequently the work of stringers whose main activity is to hang around fashionable watering holes. Maitre d’s and waiters are also retained. Thus the Enquirer usually has a pair of eyes in place when an interesting couple appear in public for the first time, or have a violent quarrel. The venues for the events which led up to the death of Natalie Wood were Iittered with informants.Hollywood sex, in the Enquirer, is a formulaic affair. The starting assumption is that any physical contact represents romance. At the lower end of the scale, hand holding is described by “insiders”, who do not have be told the Enquirer style,  as “they looked like a pair of teenagers in love”. Any kiss less demure than a peck is evidence that the relationship has turned “hot and heavy”.  Full‑scale osculation inspires sources to declare “they are closer than this”, referring to an imaginary pair of intertwined fingers.The distinctions are taken very seriously. “You say they kissed?... What kind of kiss? ... On the lips? ... How long did it last?... Did he put his tongue in her mouth?” Equally earnest is the Enquirer’s attitude towards the paranormal. Cranks are not tolerated, and anyone claiming to have been reborn, sighted UFO’s or communicated with the beyond is subjected to hypnotic regression. This is considered sounder evidence than a lie detector because the latter has the unfortunate habit of sometimes being accurate.The reigning exponent of what may be called the “Hey‑Martha‑Will‑You‑Get‑A‑Look-At‑This” school is Henry Gris. His latest find is Dr Azhazha, eminent Soviet scientist. I was unable to discover much about Azhazha during my time in Lantana except that between himself, Gris and Gris’ editor a fertile mind was at work somewhere. He claimed, and there was an artist’s conception complete with silhouetted Kremlin to back it up, that a mysterious cloud had drifted over Moscow one night causing great consternation. A friend of mine, stationed in Moscow for a well‑known British daily, commented, “I didn’t see this cloud, which was perhaps careless. It might have started World War III.”The Enquirer is inordinately proud of its Research Department. A copy of a glowing account in Editor and Publisher is compulsory reading for all arrivals.E&P tells us that Research is staffed by probing professionals, headed by Ruth Annan, a 16 year veteran of Time. Her team includes “two medical specialists, two lawyers, a linguist who speaks four languages, a geographer,  three with master’s degrees in library science, one with a master’s degree in educational psychology, and an author.” A considerable  brain’s trust, and certainly better qualified than many reporters, some of whom have been heard to discuss George Orwell’s 1984 as “the one about a pig named Churchill who gets to rule the world.”And yet it regularly lets through palpable inanities. The concept of a “4 000‑year‑old Stone Age statuette” does not bother it, for example, but this is a quibble. Most of the rubbish that escapes the tireless fact‑checkers is on a grander scale, even in cases where the facts can actually be checked. My own favorite is the charming story of a young and extremely tall Glasgow girl who showed her true saintliness by marrying a sixty‑year‑old dwarf on crutches. Having never been an optimist when it comes to human nature, I called Scotland. The reality was rather grim. “She’s a well‑known b***h,” said my contact, “He was the doting village idiot. She married him on a bet. Now she’s suing for divorce.” My information was not gratefully received.I have no doubt that Research pursues Truth with genuine vigor but as the adventures of the Wall Street Journal reporter demonstrate, it is hampered by one major defect: literal‑mindedness. If the tapes and copy jibe, and sources when contacted agree to what has been reported, the story must, however reluctantly, be granted the imprimatur of accuracy.One disadvantage of Annan and her gang is that they clog up an already hopelessly slow system—lead time is usually three or four weeks—with haggling that, given the nature of the beast, is utterly unnecessary. On the upside, however, their mere existence enables reporters to tell a suspicious world that, yes, really, the Enquirer does strive after fact. As editor Paul Levy told E&P, “Today any reporter can say with justifiable pride that he works for the most accurate paper in the country.”Christmas is a season tailor‑made for the Enquirer. There is uplift in the air, the urge to consume takes on cosmic proportions. The Boss, like so many dictators, is also a fanatical sentimentalist. The place erupts with nostalgia for the imaginary Yuletides of Dickens and Disney. There will be joviality in Lantana, even if the staff must be bludgeoned into it.I have always thought tropical Christmases disconcerting. The sight of a Santa Claus sweating under mounds of cotton wool and red felt is peculiarly uncomfortable, not least when he is ho‑ho‑hoing through one’s office. I suddenly found myself being saluted by a life‑sized mechanical toy soldier every time I came to work. The grounds,  once elegant and restful, blossomed with creches, Wise Men, reindeer and angels trumpeting seasonal musak from hidden loudspeakers.  Every bush twinkled with myriad fairy lights. Model trains chugged and whistled their way around a gigantic candy mountain in the forecourt. The building all but disappeared under bunting. Employees, glum as ever, now inhabited a world of maniacal festivity.This is the one time that the Enquirer opts to reveal itself to the surrounding drabness. The means is a truly heroic tree, Pope’s pride, and at 150 feet billed as the largest in the country. The splendid growth is felled in Oregon, its branches painstakingly removed and numbered, and the whole thing transported in kit form to the Enquirer’s gates on a flatcar. A team comprised of the Lantana public works department and a benign motorcycle gang then reassembles and proceeds to hide it under several thousand lights.Hundreds descend to watch The Boss turn it on, rendering it visible from Boca Raton to Palm Beach. For an instant the brooding glare gives way to beatification. The ceremony over, he wanders quietly through the crowd, listening for criticism of his display. If anything disappoints, it will immediately be rectified.  The woman was right, I concluded. We really are just a part of his extraordinary toy railway. Found NG, I was glad to be going home. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com

August 1897-July 1913On July 11, 1913, Margery Barber boarded the Empress of Ireland bound for Quebec from Liverpool. The passenger manifest listed Canada as her “country of intended future permanent residence”. The socialite wife of her uncle Benjamin had remarked that “when an unmarried young woman gets to 25, I’ve often noticed she begins to call old maids bachelor girls.” Margery was 25 and had shown no sign of wanting to settle down and breed. At last, with the help of family connections, an alternative had presented itself, one that looked like a decent fit. If her parents’ prayers were answered, Margery would soon be making herself useful and finding happiness, perhaps even a husband, in the colonies.“She had a noble, arresting and charming face and could have married anyone she chose,” her cousin Audrey thought. She was tall, lean and formidable whether chasing hares with a pack of beagles, marching up an Alp or wielding a hockey stick. “People were afraid of her,” Audrey said. “She was very strong and powerful.” As a child she was a handful.  Today she would likely have been diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin.  Getting her ready for church could require the concerted efforts of a governess, a housemaid and the one aunt who had what it took to tame her.  Though obviously clever — she had an aptitude for languages, becoming fluent in German at finishing school in Weisbaden — she had been hard to educate. Teachers, she would confess, were “my enemy”.  Authority tested her patience. The feeling was often mutual.  Margery was a rebel, her cause whatever underdog crossed her path. She would bring home strays, human and canine, no matter how ragged or reeking. There were scenes, mostly with Mith, which is what she called her loving but often exasperated mother, Adeline.Adeline Guinness and the Reverend Robert Barber exchanged vows on July 30, 1884, at St Saviour’s Church, Pimlico, up the street from 87 St. George’s Square, the London address to which Adeline’s father, Richard Seymour Guinness, had moved his three daughters and six sons (with a seventh in the offing) from Dublin ten years earlier. The couple received 154 gifts. Richard, who was busy growing the family bank, Guinness Mahon, beyond its Irish base, and who at his death in 1915 would leave an estate valued at £454 219 14s. 3d. — $75 million in today’s money — gave a piano. Sir Samuel and Lady Ferguson (he a politician and poet rated by Yeats among Ireland’s literary giants, she a Guinness aunt), contributed a “large salver”.  Lord Ardilaun from the brewing side of the Guinness tribe was good for a necklace. From below stairs at 87 St Georges Square came a lamp.Rev. Robert was the eldest surviving child of Rev. Richard, vicar of Riseley, who in turn was the first child of Rev. William, vicar of Duffield and Muggington. Of Robert’s six younger siblings, two of the three boys, Henry and Edward, were also ordained. The third, Frederick, joined the Oxford Mission to Calcutta as a lay brother. Henry,  the aforementioned Audrey’s father, had a prison ministry. Edward served as Anglican chaplain in Biarritz and Cairo, played soccer for several forbears of today’s professional sides, and was a hit at parties for his comic turns, but also, it was said, a kleptomaniac prone to trousering his hosts’ bibelots. Frederick landed a job with Hoare, Miller and Co., a prominent engineering firm, which sent him to India where the Barber genes kicked in. In Calcutta he moved between the very high and the very low. In 1891, the Viceroy invited him to a ball to meet the future Tsar Nicholas II. His work with the poor destroyed his health.Rev. Robert and Adeline in 1884Robert was a keen gardener. His sweet peas, cauliflower, cabbage and rhubarb won prizes at the Chippenham and Snailwell Horticultural Society annual fete. He collected butterflies and moths, liked to sketch and could give a serviceable lecture on astronomy if need arose. Audrey remembered him as “an austere scholar who used to knock loudly on people’s bedroom doors to get them up for church.” His writings included a children’s guide to the catechism, a history of Chippenham from pre-Roman times and a life of Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds, a 12th century divine, composed in the meter of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. In his preface to the 800-line poem, Robert thanked Lord Iveagh, another Guinness beer baron and one of the richest men in England, for his “generous patronage”.He also kept a scrapbook of his daughter’s adventures beginning with her departure for Canada. In it, he transcribed Margery’s letters home, adding commentary of his own and pasting in newspaper clips and other items for context. The three volumes he filled before his death in 1928 were known in the family as the Margery Book. They, and Margery’s letters to her mother and siblings after 1928, are the primary source for this story.Adeline remained in the background. That was the way with Guinness women of her generation.  Their male siblings went from the best schools into the family racket, acquired titles and stately homes, and worried about their daughters getting hitched to gold-diggers. Adeline’s niece Lucy fell in love with a starving Hungarian artist at finishing school in Munich. They were kept apart for seven years. Only when he began receiving commissions from European royalty was he finally permitted into the clan. Men of the cloth, on the other hand, got a pass. If Guinness girls couldn’t land rich boys, reverends were an acceptable alternative. And, to be fair, there was more to the dynasty than the pursuit of wealth and status. It had a missionary wing — the Grattan Guinnesses — along with a strong tradition of philanthropy and deep ties to the Anglican Church of Ireland. There is no reason to suppose Adeline felt she might have done better when she married Robert even if her ambitions for him may have been a little more expansive than his own. She might pass through the eye of the needle more easily than her brothers, but she did not want for comfort. The Barbers could afford a butler, a cook, a lady’s maid, a housemaid and a kitchen maid, according to the 1911 census.Uncles, aunts and cousins offered Margery and her brothers, Arthur and Clement, broad avenues to God, the establishment and mammon.  “I remember Uncle Bob with delight when we watched the procession from the Ritz when ‘Mr. Guelph’ as he called him was crowned, or buried, I forget which,” Margery would write. Uncle Bob was Robert Darley Guinness, Adeline’s eldest brother, High Sheriff of Warwickshire, proprietor of Wootton Hall and squire of Wootton Wawen. Mr. Guelph was Queen Victoria’s eldest son Bertie, Edward VII. The Ritz was the Ritz. Uncle Gerald’s stately pile was Dorton House, a Jacobean gem surrounded by Rothschilds in the Vale of Aylesbury. Uncle Eustace’s seat was Green Norton Hall near Towcester. Uncle Richard entertained Rudolf Valentino and Artur Rubinstein at his place on Great Portman Square. Uncle Benjamin’s addresses included Washington Square in New York and Carlton House Terrace in London. He sat on the boards of the New York Trust Company, Lackawanna Steel Company, Kansas City Southern Railway, Seaboard Air Lines, Duquesne Light Company and the United Railroads of San Francisco. At outbreak of World War I,  he saved the German bank Henry Schroder and Co., of which he was then senior partner, from seizure by the British government.  On the morning of August 4, 1914, he hurried Baron Bruno Schroder, the bank’s chairman, down to Whitehall. Within half an hour, the appropriate strings pulled, Schroder, who owed his title to the Kaiser, emerged as a British subject.Margery and her brothers, Clement and ArthurWhen Queen Victoria died, Clement, the youngest of the Barber siblings, was a chorister at St. George’s, Windsor, the Chapel Royal. He sang at Mr Guelph's coronation. It earned him a medal for which he would be ragged as a young subaltern in the Royal Fusiliers. “What did you get that medal for, Barber?” “Singing in the choir, sir!” He had come home from Canada in time for the war after his own stab at emigration. Guinness relations had offered him a position in Vancouver where they were investing in vast tracts of land while lubricating the locals with their stout. He found playing the piano in lumber camp bordellos more congenial than getting rich as a member of the family firm, and came home, his boat crossing paths with Margery’s. Invalided out of the army in 1915, he was hired to run a cotton gin in Egypt where he stayed for the next 37 years, racking up three marriages (the first of which produced my father but ended when he was caught in bed with his sister-in-law) and a second medal, designating him an officer of the Order of the British Empire for “services to the cotton buying commissions in Egypt”.Arthur Vavasour, the eldest, went through the doors that were opened for him and became a banker in London. His youth had passed before the Somme could claim it.  He married and divorced a general’s daughter who gave him Lavender Jane and Jasmine. Their mother was lady-in-waiting to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor when they were tidied away to the Bahamas for the duration of World War II. Jasmine stayed on to midwife the babies of Nassau’s poor. By that time, Artie, as his sister called him, had run off with the daughter of Stalin’s family doctor. Ekaterina Georgievna Speransky wrote crime novels under the nom de plume Kay Lynn and absconded with the family silver, or so it was said, when Arthur died in 1957. By then he was an object of pity and reproach with a reputation for having been not entirely trustworthy with other people’s money, including his sister’s.Which brings us back to Margery. She was heading to Vernon in the Okanagan Valley, a garden spot some 200 miles east of Vancouver where an organization calling itself the Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women had acquired 15 acres for “a farm settlement…to enable women of outdoor tastes and training to gain experience of local conditions.”If you’d like the next installment delivered to your mail box… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com

November 1931Margarita Robertovna, as she is known locally, is writing to her mother, who knows her as Margery. She is squeezing as many words as she can onto a sheet of coarse grey paper, the squared kind for doing sums. First the date. November 14, 1931. Then, carefully printed, her address.Урал Каз Край Рыбак Союз, Цалкарский Промысел, Анкотуиского Район. Copied correctly, this will direct her mother’s reply forty unpaved miles across the steppe from Uralsk in the northwest corner of what has lately become the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.  Her own letter is bound for 6a, The Leas, Folkestone, Kent, a clifftop row house with an occasional view of France. “Dearest Mith,” Margery writes. “Here we are in our new home. Robert and I are delighted with it.“ Robert is her five-year-old.  She calls him Robert to family and friends from her former life. Here the boy goes by other names. She thought of calling him Karl Marx but settled on Kompro, short for Communist Proletariat. Komok is the diminutive she uses. To his playmates he is Kolya.  Robert he inherits from Margery’s late father, an Anglican vicar. He is a good-looking boy. His mother worries he is small for his age. His arrival in the world had not been easy. They have their new home to themselves. It consists, Margery writes, of “a large room with a window and a door at one end and 2 windows at the other. The door leads onto a good porch with a nice food cupboard and place for our hen and cock, and the porch and window look onto the courtyard of the Promisel or Fish Farm; the other two windows look out onto the steppe with a Khirghiz village. They live very scattered so that only 3 houses are visible.”The Khirghiz (Margery’s spelling) are nomads. Or were. They have pastured their herds across the vastness of Central Asia for centuries. Now they are being “sedentarized” under Stalin’s First Five Year Plan. Moscow has decided they must pack up their yurts, settle down and surrender their livestock. This is contributing to a famine across the Kazakh Autonomous SSR that will leave one and a half million dead over the next two years.“Our side walls are inside walls,” Margery continues. “On one side is the head man’s rooms and on the other the “salters” — these are Russian — and the baker, an old man without any family, also Russian. All the rest of the personnel and workers are Khirghiz. Needless to say, I am trying to learn to talk to those as they know no Russian! The head man has a nice wife with 4 children, the eldest boy older than Robert. The latter is as happy as possible, playing with the little Khirghiz as well and learning Khirghiz fast.”Margery turns to the subject of food. In Uralsk, to which they moved in 1926, she and Pyotr, the boy’s father (Peter to Mith and hereafter), wrestled calories from the soil, a few chickens and, until it was socialized, a cow. The steppe is merciless even if you know what you’re doing. The little family has been fortunate that a bit of Margery’s money still reaches them from England via Quakers in Moscow. She has money because her mother is a Guinness of the brewing and banking Guinnesses.“We have as much fish as we can eat — fresh, salted and kippered. I saw the kippers being smoked today. They reminded me of the pictures of Dante’s Inferno.” The fish come from Lake Chalkar, a brackish, egg-shaped puddle left, some say, when an ancient ocean retreated south into the Caspian. The name comes from a Kazakh word for big.  The lake is seven miles long and five miles across. At this point Margery thinks it is 50 miles by 50, an easy mistake. The steppe here is as flat and empty as the ocean. From its treeless shore, Chalkar could be as broad as the Pacific if you knew no better. Big or small,  it “teems with fish” — carp, bream, pike and, most prized, chekhon, an oily cousin of mackerel. “The fishermen — various kolkhoz groups or parties — come and fish, sell their fish to us and are entitled to buy all sorts of goods ad lib for their fish money. So we have a nice shop.” A kolkhoz is a collective farm.  “Us” is the Ural Kazakh Fisherman’s Union which does the salting and kippering and runs the store. There is no refrigeration. That would call for electricity. Peter is keeping the books. He would rather be studying accountancy in Moscow but they didn’t accept his application.  Still, for the first time in their six years together he and Margery will be well supplied as winter sets in. Or so she wants to reassure her mother.“Peter bought a good warm overcoat with his first 1/2 months wages and 400 lbs. of potatoes, and tea and sugar, tobacco, paraffin, soap, onions — 26 lbs. — and tomorrow will receive wages to buy boots, more potatoes and materials so I shall be busy on my machine.”She draws a diagram of the room, labelling its contents. Her pedal-powered sewing machine sits between the windows at the back. She makes and mends with whatever she can find. To the right is the bed she shares with Peter. Onions and flour are stored at the head. At the foot is the stove. Built of mud and stone it takes up nearly half the wall they share with the salters. On top sit a Primus, a samovar and a copper. Between the stove and the door are buckets and a bowl for hands after visits to the communal pit latrine.“Fuel is free, as much as you want — sheaves of rushes from the banks of the lake. I burn 2 sheaves in the early morning, putting my saucepans to one side on bricks and tripods and stuff the rushes in beside them. The copper boils while you burn them and you have hot water for washing. I then take out the breakfast saucepan and put it in the hay box and close up the stove after putting in pies or something to bake.”Against the left-hand wall is a kitchen table.  On it is a cloth stitched together from colored handkerchiefs. These were sent by Mith. Anything more elaborate than a hanky or a pillow case is subject to taxes Margery and Peter cannot afford, or may disappear en route. Then come the table Margery is using as a desk, and a bookshelf. It holds well-thumbed medical and veterinary handbooks, Bukharin’s ABC of Communism, and copies of Wife and Home,  a decidedly bourgeois monthly for young English mothers to which Mith has subscribed her daughter and which, remarkably, arrives like clockwork even when nothing else does. After the bookshelf, there’s Robert’s bed, across from his parents’. Above it hang pictures of Lenin and Stalin alongside Peter’s guitar and mandolin.Also on the walls — whitewashed brick — are a clock, two more Lenins and a medley of mezzotints: a Canaletto of Venice, Hobbema’s Apollo, Courbould’s The Fisherman’s Departure and the Fisherman’s Return, and scenes of Jane Austen-era country life by William Wade: The Compassionate Children, The Citizen’s Retreat and The Farmer’s Door.  Here Wade’s farmer would have been classified as a kulak or rich peasant and, had he been allowed to live a while, worked to death in a labor camp; the horses whose noses the compassionate children are stroking would have been “socialized” by the kolkhoz. Over the sewing machine is a mirror.  In it, Margery sees a woman of aristocratic bearing and vestigial beauty. At 44, she has weathered surprisingly well given the vicissitudes to which she has subjected herself. Had she lived the life to which she was born, she would still have the teeth she has lost as a complication of tuberculosis and other assaults on her immune system. “So you see,” she tells her mother, “it is quite a dear little room.”It is time to finish. The nearest mail box is seven miles off. Peter is going on his bicycle. He  likes an excuse to be out of the house. “Must send this by him. Will write again later. Love from Marg. And kisses.”Curiosity tickled? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit simonbarber.substack.com