—Tellurian Edition—
A
DAY AT THE THE GOODWOOD REVIVAL turned out to be a close contender for the Official Aristasian Event-of-the-Year Award. It is the only major international sporting event in the Pit to base itself firmly in Quirridoria with a little bit of Infra peeping in at the edges.
It being a well-known fact in the Yeek that very few people can speak the Queen's English, and of those few almost none are female (the reason for this sexual difference need not detain us here, but it has to do with the feminine tendency toward obedience — which is a good thing except when there are bad shepherds): this fact, as we say, being well known, some one from outside the Yeek had to do some of the announcing, and Miss Cadogan of Avendale District, Quirinelle was invited for the job.
So along bowled the Aristasian continge. And very glad we were that we had. It was an utterly gorgeous Indian-summer's day in September. The car park was full of real cars (nothing after 1966 was the rule) and the majority of people were dressed either exactly like human beings or like the nearest they could manage. There were a few g'doinkers in Pit-pyjamas, but they were the odd minority, as they always should have been.
The recommended styles were Urban Sophisticate, Country Set and Military. There was a lot of each in evidence. Not too many tweeds, the weather being what it was, though a surprising number of fur stoles — often carried. military uniforms were everywhere reminding us that we were on the border of Kadoria-in-Telluria. Some people were casually dressed heat-weeds in shirtsleeves, but even there the dress was genuinely and respectably casual; not the dressed-out-of-a-dustbin-and-paying-through-the-nose-for-it casual of the pee-eye-tee.
The
entire atmosphere was of uncanny normality. Uncanny not because of
what it was but because anything else could exist. The thought that these people
spent their "real" lives as walking bean-bags and unpaid sandwich-men
was what lent the air of eeriness to the atmosphere. rather as if one were watching
a loving couple in a sweet, rose-covered cottage with their smiling, healthy
toddlers, and knowing they were actually robots with machinery clanking under
the radiant plastic skin. But more of this later.
Much of the first hour was spent trying to find the studio in this utterly huge place where none of the stewardy-wallahs seemed to know anything about anything. If it is true that the Beginning of Philosophy is admitting that we Do Not Know, then these people must all have been budding Platinas. However they were all delightfully dressed so one readily forgave them their lack of vulgar functionality. To combine aesthetics and function is the mark of true civilisation, but if one cannot have both, then one should stick to the important thing. Which they did, with commendable resolution.
However we did ultimately find the studio, which seemed to be a group of caravan-things in a grassy place that you couldn't get into without a pass.
When we got there, we eventually managed to nose out some B.B.C. types. These people actually looked like B.B.C. types — I mean real ones: British Broadcasting rather than Bongo Brainwashing — and just to prove it, they were in charming, gentlemanly, amateurish chaos. They had no script for Cadoggers, but simply thrust at her an organiser's schedule of events, quite incomprehensible to any one who was not an organiser, and very possibly to any one who was as well, and ticked off the bits they wanted her to announce.
"Just
do this lot," said the charming, gentlemanly B.B.C.-wallah with a cheery
smile.
Fortunately there was a competent brunette on hand, an it was the work of but scant hours to knock the incomprehensible mess into something resembling a readable script.
After Cadoggers had laid down her first track, the recording B.B.C. chap expressed amazement. "I hope you don't mind my saying this," he said "But you sound just as if you'd stepped out of the 1940s."
"Yes, I am supposed to," said Cadoggers, secretly wincing that a good Quirinelle girl, born and bred, could be mistaken for a Kadorie.
After the first session we wandered back to the cars. None of the charmingly-dressed stewardy-wallahs could help us in the least about sections of the car park and where they were, but we had a charming time soaking up sunshine and taking photographs, some of which you see here before you. We decided to leave our furs in the cars, but as we were nearly there, some uncouth fellow pointed at said furs and shouted:
"That's very non-P.C.!"
I could not work out whether he was ranting about ordinators or constabels, but some one pointed out that "P.C.", in the Pit, stands for Policed Consciousness and that wearing furs (which represent both Femininity and Superiority — two of the Octopus's principal bomb-targets) is one of an almost endless list of things supposed to indicate that one's consciousness has not been sufficiently policed.
I
was very annoyed with the fellow, because, of course, after that I could not
leave my fur in the car. I had to wear it, or at least carry it, in order to
make it perfectly clear that my consciousness was not policed — and that
if it were, it would certainly not be Johnny Octopus and his orchestrated mass-media
who were policing it.
Very inconsiderate of the chap, I felt, on such a hot day. Still, if the military could wear their heavy tunics buttoned to the collar, I could do my bit for the War effort too.
We had a delightful lunch at the Spitfire Café with Pvt. Cheeseman of the Home Guard in full uniform, who talked about the notion that it is too uncomfortable to dress formally in hot weather being purely psychological. If it is part of what one Simply Does, the one simply does it and thinks no more about it.
I have always felt the same myself. After all, if bongos (as they probably soon will) considered it in order to walk the streets naked, they would be assuring us that they could not possibly submit to the mediaeval rigour of wearing any clothes at all in this hot weather. However, since they have not yet reached that stage they invariably wear some clothes (using the term "clothes" in the loosest possible sense) and consider it no great hardship.
The
Spitfire Café was charmingly Kadorian, rather like the N.A.A.F.I. with
girls in uniform serving. Mechanics from the race track wore proper overalls,
diners wore all manner of things, but almost all of them real. One suddenly
seemed to find oneself in a real world.
Which brings one back to our question of normality. As I said at the beginning, the whole event was pervaded with a sense of normality that was eerie not in itself but in that it felt like a curious oasis of normality suspended in a world of clown-like abnormality. At times the miasma from outside seeped in. A naval officer could be drinking beer out of a bottle. The odd gloop in Pit-pyjamas was to be seen. On one occasion — but only one — I heard a workman in a chequered neck scarf asking, with a little embarrassment what he looked like. He looked like a workman rather than a jester pretending to be a workman, as presumably he looked the rest of the time. In general, though, people looked normal and at ease. It was the bean-bags who looked out of place.
I do not say that most people looked exactly like their Quirridorian counterparts. That is rather another matter. But they did look, on the whole, normal. To one like myself who has never grown used to the abnormality and insanity of the Pit; who never leaves the house without being struck afresh by the grotesqueness of it all, it was like breathing outdoor air for the first time in ages.
It
led one to conjecture about the whole question of normality in the Pit. How
did these people feel? In many cases, one had the sense that they too felt that
they were back to normal. One felt that if the relentless pressure of the orchestrated
mass-media, the advertising industry, the orchestrated mass-media, the political
pontificators, the orchestrated mass-media, the educational system, and, of
course, the orchestrated mass-media in favour of moral social and aesthetic
inversion were for a moment eased, they would readily snap back to being normal.
One felt that if, for even a few weeks, they had good shepherds rather than bad ones, who told them that they ought to be dressing properly and behaving to match, there would be a huge and almost unanimous sigh of relief among the vast majority of the Pit-population. The type-threes would take a little longer, but not much. Look how their Communist sympathies evaporated overnight when Daddy Octopus pulled the plug. Type-threes are consciences-for-hire. Make it clear that they will advance their careers and get applause, smiles and pence from those in power if they behave normally rather than abnormally, and suddenly behaving abnormally will lose most of its attraction.
It won't happen of course, because the vested interests are all on the side of abnormality. Degeneration is where the big money is and nobody gets paid or promoted for anything else.
That is the brute fact. But as to whether things could change — or rather, how quickly they would change — if the Octopus lost its stranglehold on Pit culture, the Goodwood Revival was a very interesting indication.