Views /Opinion

Russians came, but not as some imagined

by Ian Jack
It was on a train from Bristol on an October afternoon in 1978 that Dirk Bogarde told me about the Russians: how they would come, and what he would do when they came. That was a long time ago. Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist party ruled the Soviet Union in those days, and in Jim Callaghan’s Britain, our idea of bread was a slice of something spongy and flavourless that came out of a wrapper. I remember the bread because of something Bogarde had said earlier in the day at a signing session in a Bristol bookshop – he’d just published the second volume of his autobiography. The bookshop’s owner had provided a plate of Mother’s Pride sandwiches. “Mmmm,” said Bogarde, feigning appreciation as he bit into his limp cheese-and-tomato, “you know, you simply can’t find this kind of bread in France.”
He lived in Provence then with his manager and partner, Anthony Forwood, and towards the end of our interview on the return journey to London, I wondered if he’d ever leave Provence and settle in England again. “Never,” Bogarde said, followed by what I thought was, “Or not at least until the rushes come.”
For a moment I imagined that “the rushes” might be an in-joke among film people, perhaps a slang phrase for death or the travel bug. But I’d misheard him, because he went on: “And, of course, the Russians will come sooner or later. I may be lucky. I should be in my early 60s by then [he was 57], and if I stay, my age may save me from the internment camps. Either that or I shoot the dogs and quit.”
Naturally I wondered if he was teasing me, just as he’d had some fun with the bookshop owner and his sandwiches, but it became clear that he seriously believed a Soviet invasion of western Europe was imminent and inevitable. The atmosphere in Britain was just as he remembered it in the late 1930s – complacent and appeasing in the face of an obvious enemy – but at least the Channel would prolong our resistance. The Russians would reach Provence far too easily. He’d not long driven home by motorway from Vienna: “Marvellous, I thought, we’ve done it easily in a day. And then I thought, my God, what am I saying? If it takes us a day’s driving, it will only take them a day too …” 
Once the dogs had been shot, he intended to make for the airport at Geneva; the road west to the Spanish border would probably be clogged by refugees. Or he might take a large white tablecloth from his farmhouse in Grasse and spread it out on the nearest beach, and hope to be spotted and taken off by landing craft.
These imaginings had a certain storybook quality. Bogarde had real experience of warfare as an intelligence officer in France soon after D-day and in the aftermath to Arnhem, but he was also a romancer and not beyond invention. (For example, the claim in his autobiography that he was among the first Allied officers to reach Belsen was discredited after his death.) In the event, the ordinary processes of life took over and the actor moved permanently to London 10 years later after his partner became terminally ill and their household in Provence was dissolved. There had been no need of Russians, who began to turn up in great numbers on the Côte d’Azur in the next century when Bogarde himself was dead.
He died in 1999 at his flat in Chelsea, and I thought of him this week when I read Tina Brown’s remark that “if Putin is so worried about Russian minority populations, why hasn’t he invaded Kensington and Chelsea?” More than 300,000 Russians are believed to live in London now, but none of them got here as Bogarde and many others imagined they might – armed with Kalashnikovs and a plan of Highgate Cemetery showing Marx’s tomb (rather than with credit cards and property brochures for Highgate villas). Once again, the future has turned up not quite as it was advertised.
The American writer and journalist Joe McGinniss, who died this week, wrote several TV series and books, including his insider account of Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, The Selling of the President, which deepened the country’s sceptical view of political conduct. But perhaps the sentence he’ll be best remembered for is not one he wrote, but one he inspired: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” It begins Janet Malcolm’s book, The Journalist and the Murderer, and its sentiment has been strongly contested since it was first published in the New Yorker in 1989.
“Morally indefensible” is a fierce and untenable phrase for most of the traffic that flows through the pages of a respectable newspaper – the reporting of share prices, political speeches and airline disasters – but this everyday aspect of journalism wasn’t what Malcolm had in mind. What concerned her was what she was brilliant at herself: the extended inquiry into an event or question that depended on the journalist befriending their human subject – befriending and then, to a greater or lesser extent, betraying them by publishing a story that refused to confirm the subjects’ idea of themselves. (Stories never do.) McGinniss had gone much further down this road than most by pretending to believe in the innocence of an army doctor, Jeffrey MacDonald, who was on trial for the murder of his wife and two daughters, long after he was convinced of his guilt. He needed MacDonald to go on trusting him and confiding in him so that he could produce a book. When it appeared, the murderer sued him for fraud and breach of contract.
Malcolm’s examination of the case is a wonderful disquisition on journalistic behaviour – I’d rank it with Waugh’s Scoop and Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning as one of the three best books on the subject. “Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments,” Malcolm writes. “The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.” It may not be entirely true, but it’s always worth remembering.
The confusion between the words “nation,” “country” and “state” has become acute at the BBC, with alienating effects in the three parts of the United Kingdom that aren’t England. This week, in his documentary on the growing economic gap between London and the rest of the UK, Evan Davis used the “country” and “Britain” as interchangeable descriptions, though the programme didn’t venture north of Hebden Bridge or west of Wallasey. When a drugs company moved offices from Cheshire to Cambridge, Davis described it as “moving from one end of the country to another,” which is a limited view of English, let alone British, geography. And there was the continuing problem of our old friend, “the North,” which always refers to the north of England and never the north of Britain. Davis comes from Dorking, where everything north of Oxford Circus assumes a hazy dimension, but editors at the BBC should know better. On the “national” News at Ten the other night, England’s football match with Denmark was described in detail while we were told only that Scotland’s team had won away, without giving the score. The combined effect of these and other metropolitan irritants suggests that the BBC is quietly but effectively campaigning for a Yes victory in the referendum.
The Guardian
by Ian Jack
It was on a train from Bristol on an October afternoon in 1978 that Dirk Bogarde told me about the Russians: how they would come, and what he would do when they came. That was a long time ago. Leonid Brezhnev and the Communist party ruled the Soviet Union in those days, and in Jim Callaghan’s Britain, our idea of bread was a slice of something spongy and flavourless that came out of a wrapper. I remember the bread because of something Bogarde had said earlier in the day at a signing session in a Bristol bookshop – he’d just published the second volume of his autobiography. The bookshop’s owner had provided a plate of Mother’s Pride sandwiches. “Mmmm,” said Bogarde, feigning appreciation as he bit into his limp cheese-and-tomato, “you know, you simply can’t find this kind of bread in France.”
He lived in Provence then with his manager and partner, Anthony Forwood, and towards the end of our interview on the return journey to London, I wondered if he’d ever leave Provence and settle in England again. “Never,” Bogarde said, followed by what I thought was, “Or not at least until the rushes come.”
For a moment I imagined that “the rushes” might be an in-joke among film people, perhaps a slang phrase for death or the travel bug. But I’d misheard him, because he went on: “And, of course, the Russians will come sooner or later. I may be lucky. I should be in my early 60s by then [he was 57], and if I stay, my age may save me from the internment camps. Either that or I shoot the dogs and quit.”
Naturally I wondered if he was teasing me, just as he’d had some fun with the bookshop owner and his sandwiches, but it became clear that he seriously believed a Soviet invasion of western Europe was imminent and inevitable. The atmosphere in Britain was just as he remembered it in the late 1930s – complacent and appeasing in the face of an obvious enemy – but at least the Channel would prolong our resistance. The Russians would reach Provence far too easily. He’d not long driven home by motorway from Vienna: “Marvellous, I thought, we’ve done it easily in a day. And then I thought, my God, what am I saying? If it takes us a day’s driving, it will only take them a day too …” 
Once the dogs had been shot, he intended to make for the airport at Geneva; the road west to the Spanish border would probably be clogged by refugees. Or he might take a large white tablecloth from his farmhouse in Grasse and spread it out on the nearest beach, and hope to be spotted and taken off by landing craft.
These imaginings had a certain storybook quality. Bogarde had real experience of warfare as an intelligence officer in France soon after D-day and in the aftermath to Arnhem, but he was also a romancer and not beyond invention. (For example, the claim in his autobiography that he was among the first Allied officers to reach Belsen was discredited after his death.) In the event, the ordinary processes of life took over and the actor moved permanently to London 10 years later after his partner became terminally ill and their household in Provence was dissolved. There had been no need of Russians, who began to turn up in great numbers on the Côte d’Azur in the next century when Bogarde himself was dead.
He died in 1999 at his flat in Chelsea, and I thought of him this week when I read Tina Brown’s remark that “if Putin is so worried about Russian minority populations, why hasn’t he invaded Kensington and Chelsea?” More than 300,000 Russians are believed to live in London now, but none of them got here as Bogarde and many others imagined they might – armed with Kalashnikovs and a plan of Highgate Cemetery showing Marx’s tomb (rather than with credit cards and property brochures for Highgate villas). Once again, the future has turned up not quite as it was advertised.
The American writer and journalist Joe McGinniss, who died this week, wrote several TV series and books, including his insider account of Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, The Selling of the President, which deepened the country’s sceptical view of political conduct. But perhaps the sentence he’ll be best remembered for is not one he wrote, but one he inspired: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” It begins Janet Malcolm’s book, The Journalist and the Murderer, and its sentiment has been strongly contested since it was first published in the New Yorker in 1989.
“Morally indefensible” is a fierce and untenable phrase for most of the traffic that flows through the pages of a respectable newspaper – the reporting of share prices, political speeches and airline disasters – but this everyday aspect of journalism wasn’t what Malcolm had in mind. What concerned her was what she was brilliant at herself: the extended inquiry into an event or question that depended on the journalist befriending their human subject – befriending and then, to a greater or lesser extent, betraying them by publishing a story that refused to confirm the subjects’ idea of themselves. (Stories never do.) McGinniss had gone much further down this road than most by pretending to believe in the innocence of an army doctor, Jeffrey MacDonald, who was on trial for the murder of his wife and two daughters, long after he was convinced of his guilt. He needed MacDonald to go on trusting him and confiding in him so that he could produce a book. When it appeared, the murderer sued him for fraud and breach of contract.
Malcolm’s examination of the case is a wonderful disquisition on journalistic behaviour – I’d rank it with Waugh’s Scoop and Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning as one of the three best books on the subject. “Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments,” Malcolm writes. “The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.” It may not be entirely true, but it’s always worth remembering.
The confusion between the words “nation,” “country” and “state” has become acute at the BBC, with alienating effects in the three parts of the United Kingdom that aren’t England. This week, in his documentary on the growing economic gap between London and the rest of the UK, Evan Davis used the “country” and “Britain” as interchangeable descriptions, though the programme didn’t venture north of Hebden Bridge or west of Wallasey. When a drugs company moved offices from Cheshire to Cambridge, Davis described it as “moving from one end of the country to another,” which is a limited view of English, let alone British, geography. And there was the continuing problem of our old friend, “the North,” which always refers to the north of England and never the north of Britain. Davis comes from Dorking, where everything north of Oxford Circus assumes a hazy dimension, but editors at the BBC should know better. On the “national” News at Ten the other night, England’s football match with Denmark was described in detail while we were told only that Scotland’s team had won away, without giving the score. The combined effect of these and other metropolitan irritants suggests that the BBC is quietly but effectively campaigning for a Yes victory in the referendum.
The Guardian