Page 50 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

and after a few hours, there was little left unembellished) one plainly became rather
quickly a bit tiresome. Additionally, we now lived in deepest Sussex, I was without
a vehicle, and, even worse, without feminine company. David was at school and
therefore absent, and both parents were out earning the daily bread.

Reflection, therefore, became something of the order of the day. I realised
that the environment in which I had grown up was somewhat removed from the
realities of the real world. The British system of public (which is to say, private)
education presented one with a reality that was unequalled in its tautness. I had
been to two schools that represented the best that our parents could do for us,
and those institutions had tried to instil an understanding of life that was frankly
myopic; the British had for long rightly been the ubermenschen, the Empire was
inviolate, the Russians had merely helped us win the war, and the Americans
were for the most part brash ingrates (in 1944-45, “The Americans are oversexed,
overpaid and over here,” was not by any means a silent lament). In boarding
school, I and most of my companions had greatly enjoyed use of the library, for it
contained such exemplars of the gilded age as the Biggles, Bulldog Drummond,
John Buchan, G. A. Henty, Kipling and R. M. Ballantyne, the ‘Nile’ books of Alan
Moorehead, the leisurely lives of Somerset Maugham’s characters, and school
curricula that emphasised the civilising influence of Speke, Gordon and Living-
stone, all heroes whose lives were expended for the betterment of the uncivilised
masses and from which we all, to a greater or lesser extent, had learned that we,
the British, with the senior Commonwealth members, still had a job to fulfil in
the world’s affairs.

The problem was that so much of this belief-system was, self-evidently, based
on sand. The independence of India and Pakistan had generally been unenthu-
siastically greeted by the British public, whose view was that those countries
should be grateful for what the British had bequeathed them. Before reading a bit
more history, for example, I had not heard of the Amritsar Massacre. In Africa,
the Mau Mau Rebellion had caught the headlines during its currency, no views
other than that it was a savage and entirely unwarranted uprising by disaffected
ingrates having appeared in the news as the savagery went on, and elsewhere
in Africa, the Gold Coast inexplicably had decided to forego the glories of the
Empire and become the unknown state of Ghana. By this time, the Malayan
Emergency had been defeated, but far from the world being more settled, the
forces of apparent enlightenment were evidently on their way out; already, Indo-
nesia had forcefully ejected the Dutch, the Vietnamese had displayed the hubris
of the unknowing by siding with the French during the war but whose perfidy
was thereafter demonstrated when they emasculated the French army, one of the
world’s finest. Further, most of French West Africa seemed restless, and the Con-

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