A Son of the Rock

W H Allen, 1973, 188 p.

Rupert Croft-Cooke, a prolific author in the immediate post-Second World War era, has been all but forgotten by the wider world in more recent years and his books are not easy to come by. He was though the favourite author of my dear friend Eric Brown (whose loss earlier this year I still have not come to terms with) and if not for his enthusiastic advocacy for Rupert, as Eric always called him, I might not have picked this up. As it was I was vaguely under the impression it would be a novel.

On starting to read it I discovered it was one of no less than twenty-one books of memoir (now classified under the general heading of The Sensual World) which had appeared by this edition’s publication date of 1973. Six more were to follow. The Dogs of Peace is the fifteenth in the series and relates to Croft-Cooke’s life in the aftermath of the Second World War. Not that knowledge of the earlier books is necessary in order to enjoy this one. Croft-Cooke’s writing is pellucid and entertaining and the book presents a picture of that lost world which is at once recognisable yet shadowy.

At times it is a catalogue of names of the literary great and good (and sometimes not so good) of the time. Croft-Cooke’s connection with the publishing world – not least his book reviewing for the weekly illustrated Sketch (he delightfully quotes one of his summings-up as “The whole story is milk-and-Waughter”) – means he was familiar with all the literary names we still recognise – and quite a few we don’t. Or at least I didn’t. He was a great admirer of the now also all but forgotten Oliver Onions whose work I have at least sampled.

Around this time Rupert inadvisedly launched a lawsuit against the publisher Hutchinson who had delayed publication of one of his books beyond the stipulated time frame in order to queer the pitch for the release of a later Croft-Cooke book due to appear from a different publisher. Rupert’s experience of the legal system is much as you would expect. An oddity I noticed was that he employed the word practicants rather than practitioners for its habituees.

The war had changed a lot in the country. Rupert reminisces about the circus troupe he had toured the country with in the thirties and spent quite some time trying to reconnect with a gypsy he had also travelled with in those days but was met with a high degree of suspicion.

He represents people’s attitudes towards the government as being resentful, saying the populace believed that government ineptitude denied them the fruits of victory. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him (and, by extension, them) that the all but bankruptcy the UK endured as a result of the war might have had something to do with it. And of course, never having been occupied, the UK did not benefit from the Marshall Plan. Nevertheless the relative prosperity he noticed in his journey to France was striking. (I have to add that a similar difference exists today. I have only just returned from a fortnight in the Netherlands and the contrast with run-down Britain was stark. The road surfaces and signage were superb, the trains clean and on time and the supermarkets pristine and well-stocked.) Government ineptitude – not to say callousness – has certainly denied Britain any fruits at all in recent years.

Perhaps Rupert was a Tory, though. How else to explain his barbs directed at the Festival of Britain? He berates it in the book not just once but twice. He also contrasts the post-war Police with earlier incarnations, “it is generally recognised that between 1945 and 1960 much of the English police force was at its lowest a blackmailing, thieving, bullying lot of wastrels serving for the sake of the perks and exploiting the reputation for honesty and good nature which their predecessors had guarded ever since the days of the ‘peelers’.” Things haven’t moved on much since then. Perhaps they’re even worse.

Though never directly acknowledged (Rupert of course lived most of his life at a time when acting on such impulses was illegal and the habit of concealment can be difficult to break) his homosexuality can be adduced from a passage or two.

Overall this is an interesting and illuminating account of those mid-twentieth century years.

Sensitivity warning. Contains the word negro.

Pedant’s corner:- “parking metres” (meters,) “Micky Mouse” (Mickey) “Orson Welles’ acting” (Welles’s.)