MICHAEL WHARTON

The Stretchford Chronicles

1981

OPENING THIS BOOK at random in order to recall the real Michael Wharton hiding under the pseudonym Peter Simple, I hit on this passage: “This is England’s End. And it may be right and fitting that modern England should end in a torrent of litter, shouting, iced lollies and mechanical uproar spilling down over the rocks and into the inviolable sea.”

Here is a voice like no other. Michael was a heart-felt conservative. The custom of the past had made the country great and valued, only to be replaced by experiments that made the country small and unworthy. Much too clever to indulge in anger about a process of modernizing that he could not prevent, he turned to satire as the highest and most unanswerable form of political and social commentary. Socialists, ecologists, technicians and scientists, all manner of people, were busy creating an absurd and ugly life for everyone, when they ought to know better.

Stretchford is the name that Peter Simple has invented for the kind of town that is a model hell. When he talks about it, his face takes on the hardness and coloring of a Toby jug. From time to time, one of the benighted might unexpectedly agree with some opinion of his, in which case Michael liked to quote a line from Virgil: nec tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis (not with such help, nor with such defenders). In other words, he will be responsible for himself.

The Peter Simple column that he wrote for the Daily Telegraph made the kind of mark on the conscious public that Gulliver amid the Lilliputians had made. Peter Simple is the title of a novel by Frederick Marryat, a long-forgotten Victorian author, and I have no idea why Michael took it over for his purposes. True, he could be hard on himself. His ideal newspaper was The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald. One columnar hero was Colonel Sibthorpe, a Member of Parliament in Victorian days who set his face against every kind of change so single-mindedly that he could not be considered serious and therefore nobody except Michael has ever heard of him.

Memorable caricatures have escaped from the column to become part of the national literary stock. Mrs. Dutt-Pauker, for instance, is the owner of Beria Garth in Dorset, Glyn Stalin in Wales and Marxmount, the Hampstead mansion where she is grandmother to a “four-year-old, bearded, baleful-eyed Maoist demonstrator.” Other typecast enemies to be mocked to death are President Ngrafta of Gombola, the “brilliant progressive Tory MP Jeremy Cardhouse,” Dr Heinz Kiosk “chief psychiatric adviser to the South-Eastern Gas Board,” and the Earl of Mountwarlock whose major-domo is “one of the few practicing werewolves left in the Midlands.” Some thirty years ago, to give one more example of his inventiveness, the column purported to be a letter from Sandra to Clare Howitzer, an agony aunt. “My boyfriend, Jim, is a manic-depressive, one-legged, homosexual dwarf. He wears kinky boots, carries a flick knife, sucks ice-lollies all the time I am talking to him and is very hairy. I am wondering whether my love for him is just a passing teenage infatuation or whether we can establish a normal, adult, satisfying, psychologically complete love-relationship.” To which Clare Howitzer replies, “You have got a real winner there.” The satirist proves to be a prophet. At one point, I asked him what the effect of his column was. “Absolutely none at all,” and he added quickly, “I don’t expect to get more than a footnote in the history of literature.” Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver satire, the greatest in the language, has indispensable insight into human nature and the life of his period, and the same goes for Michael Wharton.