Thirteen Such Years Page 23

  To-day, love for our country, and the readiness to fight for that country if need should be, is not the wish to impose our will on others, but to preserve for ourselves, against outside interference, a way of thinking and a way of life evolved through centuries;—the growth of our climate and of our soil, as peculiar to ourselves as the plants and creatures that draw their sustenance from that soil and climate;—by nomad people who found here conditions congenial to themselves, who with the world to wander through chose this one country for their own. Patriotism is the resolve to order our own affairs according to our consciences and instincts, knowing them to be our own; loving them because they are our own; recognising through that love and knowledge the right of other peoples to their own affairs; conscious of the many excellencies of their ways of life, but unable to absorb them, entirely, since they are theirs, not ours.

  Children see life in terms of their own desires; believe themselves entitled to any pretty toy that may ensnare their fancy. The patriotism of Agincourt and Crécy was boyhood, magnificent, beglamoured, blind. In an adult world the rights of the individual are admitted.

  There are those who maintain that the feats of science, the train, the aeroplane, the telephone, the radio have altered men’s ways of thought. It would be more true to see those feats of science as an expression of mankind’s growth towards maturity. We learned to fly because we felt the need to fly. Life during the last century, particularly during the last decade, has grown infinitely subtler, more complicated, more highly geared. We are attuned to finer shades of thought and feeling. But we are not different people because we travel across Europe by an aeroplane instead of by a coach: because by lifting a metal instrument we can hear and answer a voice across the three thousand miles of the Atlantic.

  The problems set us are those that puzzled our grandfathers: they seem different only because we see them with older eyes.

  §

  We have been described, we whose youth was passed in the nineteen twenties, as a generation that was born to chaos, that has seen life in terms of chaos, that has no use for permanence. It is an earlier generation that says that, a generation that saw permanence in other symbols: that was reminded by old buildings and old institutions, by obligations to race and family and caste, handed down from one generation to the next, of the slow processes of change and of survival. They could feel, holding the present, that they also held the past and future. They could see eternal processes at work.

  Those particular symbols have been destroyed for us: but they have been replaced by other symbols. For us, as for Heraclitus, the eternal processes are symbolised by the river: fluctuant and changeless; different from one moment to another; unaltered through the ages.

  §

  One of the most gracious, and level-headed men that I have known is a Canadian who spends a third of his life in London, two thirds of it in New York. He has an ambassadorial ease of manner. Engaged, as a New York publisher, in a profession more subject than most to chance and caprice and fashion, he is never flurried; he always appears to be thinking back and thinking forward; to be poised between the past and future. I have sometimes wondered whether a part anyhow of his strength might not be attributed to the presence perpetually beside him of running water. In London he stays always in the Savoy, in the same suite. The curve of the Thames runs mistily below his window. From his New York office on Park Avenue he sees the East River streaming past Manhattan’s skyscrapers. For many weeks of his life he has watched the Atlantic beating upon the bows of the Aquitania. Is it too fanciful to suggest that the unconscious arrangement of a life in tune with the symbol through which a school of Greek philosophy explained the story of mortality has given him the sense of detachment that is his strength?

  Certainly it is in that symbol that we of this generation have had our life explained to us.

  The crested, swift-flowing river has swept down and borne away with it the institutions, opinions, allegiances, securities that maintained Victorian, Edwardian and early Georgian England.

  It has taken all with it, but it has left itself; changing and unchanging; always the same, yet always different. To us, as to Heraclitus, it can symbolise all life and all mortality; can give through its symbol direction and significance to our lives.

  A Note on the Author

  Alec Waugh was born in London in 1898 and educated at Sherborne Public School, Dorset. Waugh’s first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), is a semi-autobiographical account of public school life that caused some controversy at the time and led to his expulsion; Waugh was the only boy ever to be expelled from The Old Shirburnian Society.

  Despite setting this questionable record, Waugh went on to become the successful author of over 50 works, and lived in many exotic places throughout his life, many of which became the settings for future texts. He was also a noted wine connoisseur and campaigned to make the ‘cocktail party’ a regular feature of 1920s social life. Waugh died in 1981.

  Discover books by Alec Waugh published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/Alec Waugh

  A Family of Islands

  A Spy in the Family

  A Year to Remember

  Brief Encounter

  Fuel for the Flame

  Guy Renton

  His Second War

  Hot Countries

  Island in the Sun

  Kept

  Love in these Days

  Married to a Spy

  My Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles

  My Place in the Bazaar

  Nor Many Waters

  No Truce with Time

  ‘Sir,’ She Said

  So Lovers Dream

  Unclouded Summer

  The Balliols

  The Fatal Gift

  The Lipton Story

  The Loom of Youth

  The Mule on the Minaret

  The Sugar Islands

  Thirteen Such Years

  Wheels within Wheels

  Where the Clocks Chime Twice

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been

  removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1932 by Farrar & Rinehart Ltd

  Copyright © 1932 Alec Waugh

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  eISBN: 9781448211098

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