Owning Up by George P. Pelecanos (Mulholland Books 2024)

 

Afterward, Caruso stood and spoke on behalf of his son. What he said had been carefully written and rehearsed, but it was from the heart. A young male lawyer in the gallery was smiling at Caruso as he spoke, as if something was funny. Caruso’s blood jumped, he wanted to slap the smile off that cunt’s face, but he got through the speech, which was really a plea for mercy.

[From the novella, 'The No-Knock'.]

Daily Sketches: A Cartoon History of British Twentieth Century Politics by Martin Walker (Paladin Books 1978)

 

Bernard Partridge

Punch, January 29, 1908.

Partridge was. the heir to Tenniel in Punch’s pages, and by this time Punch’s cartoons carried all the authority of a statement from His Majesty’s Government (or at least so one German Ambassador told Berlin). There is an elegant ambiguity about this cartoon — the attacked capitalist is not sympathetically drawn, but neither is that sly grin on Keir Hardie’s face. It is not clear which side Partridge is taking. But the dog’s ferocity, and its French jacobin hat (a cartoon symbol of subversive foreign ideologies since French revolutionary days) show that Partridge was worried. The Leitmotif of potential class war is clearly present. There is an interesting echo of a famous nineteenth-century Punch cartoon, featuring similar dogs, and titled ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’. Partridge would have been familiar with it.

An Evangel of Unrest: The Life Story of Bonar Thompson by Bonar Thompson ( (Marble Arch, W.l. 1926)

From the commencement of the conflict until my arrest in 1916, I spoke against it, in various parts of London, particularly in Finsbury Park—the scene of many a deed and vow.

The "Daily Herald" League, from whose platform I hurled the challenge to every warmonger in London, was a magnificent band of rebels who carried the war against war into the enemy’s camp with unrelenting vigour and audacity, contesting the ground inch by inch without qualification or reservation.

* * *

The campaign of “rounding up,” "roping in” and "combing out” was prosecuted by the enemy with the utmost determination. Every art and artifice, every dodge and device, by which to lure the young men into the war-trap, was employed by an unscrupulous and unprincipled governing class.

Touts and informers were lurking at every street corner on the look out for any poor devil who might not care to offer his carcase as a bullet stopper. Such as these were dubbed ”shirkers" and ”slackers,” and no effort was spared to land them in the net. I had many an encounter with the harpies and hirelings who lay in wait for the likely recruit, the following dialogue invariably taking place :—

Question: ”Why aren’t you in khaki?”

Answer: "Because there's a war on."

Question : ”What would you do if the Germans came here ?”

Answer: "Volunteer for foreign service.”

With the Recruiting Officer a similar interchange occurred :—

R. O. : " Well, lad, have you thought about it?” 

B. T. : ” Yes.”

R. O. : ” Going to join up?”

B. T.: “No!”

R. O. : ” How’s that?”

B. T. : ”I’ve thought about it.”

The Fleet Street Scribblers were working overtime in their lie-foundries manufacturing elaborate fabrications for the delectation of a gullible population. German spies, plots, atrocity stories, children’s hands cut off, corpse factories, and a hundred likely and unlikely stories festering in the fevered fancy of the rabble rousers of the reptile Press.

The ordinary Englishman had an impression in his head at the beginning of the war that the German people were neither better nor worse than anybody else.

This illusion had to be destroyed. All such errors must be swept from his mind. The Germans were not ordinary human beings. They were fiends in human form, vermin who must be destroyed like rats.

As one eminent Churchman, Father Bernard Vaughan, so veil put it: "There are two classes in the world to-day— human beings and Germans. The duty of every Christian is to kill Germans, and go on killing Germans."

These noble words rang out like a clarion call to the nation, rousing the laggards from their lethargy, opening men’s eyes to a realisation of the situation.

Very soon the whole population—with the exception of a negligible number of morbid and dangerous fanatics—was in the grip of the gospel of Hun-hating, waves of patriotic enthusiasm sweeping them along on their holy mission.

Some brave fellows, itching to do their bit in the sacred cause of ”right against might,” could not wait until they got to France to show their patriotism, and commenced operations on the Home Front by raiding shops kept by poor German shopkeepers in the East End, many a deathless deed of devotion and heroism being recorded in the great onslaught on those poor German pork butchers' establishments.

The Dead Pass by Colin Bateman (Headline 2014

I make a habit of grabbing any and every excuse not to do the right thing, which in this case was going to see what was likely to become my step-grandchild, helpless and gurgling in hospital, instead of wasting my time with a rain-damp old woman who'd taken an eighty-mile bus ride to see me. It's the nature of me. And I don't mean in a good way. But I am a helpless slave to avoidance. So I said to the woman that I'd try and track Dan Starkey down and if she wanted to pop into the cafe across the road I was pretty sure he'd be down shortly.

'Order a pot of tea for yourself,' I said, 'and a Diet Coke and two German biscuits.'

'I don't like German biscuits.'

'They're not for you,' I said. But I gave her the wiseacre smile I had perfected over the years, calculated to charm and defuse any situation; you would have thought that over those years I might have realised that actually it doesn't have that effect, that usually it makes matters worse. But no, only in retrospect. But I'm a great one for perseverance, as bad guys usually discover, so I kept at the smiling even though she wasn't getting it at all. Maybe she had her mind on other things. She nodded at me, then trundled off.

The Gold Bat by P.G. Wodehouse (A & C Black 1904)

The Field Sports Committee at Wrykyn—­that is, at the school which stood some half-mile outside that town and took its name from it—­were not lavish in their expenditure as regarded the changing accommodation in the pavilion.  Letters appeared in every second number of the Wrykinian, some short, others long, some from members of the school, others from Old Boys, all protesting against the condition of the first, second, and third fifteen dressing-rooms.  “Indignant” would inquire acidly, in half a page of small type, if the editor happened to be aware that there was no hair-brush in the second room, and only half a comb.  “Disgusted O. W.” would remark that when he came down with the Wandering Zephyrs to play against the third fifteen, the water supply had suddenly and mysteriously failed, and the W.Z.’s had been obliged to go home as they were, in a state of primeval grime, and he thought that this was “a very bad thing in a school of over six hundred boys”, though what the number of boys had to do with the fact that there was no water he omitted to explain.  The editor would express his regret in brackets, and things would go on as before.

Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson (Nine Eight Books 2024)

Chapter 1 Temple Fortune

"Golders Green," said Lawrence, "is the worst place in the world when you need to piss."

We left the underground station in this north London neighbourhood, which has been home to the city's Orthodox Jewish community since the 1950s, and found the public toilets closed, abandoned, isolated by a dirty grey wire fence.

“This is the only area in London where you can’t find a hedge or tree just a little ways away to let off steam,” Lawrence said, dragging his narrow frame from the hall to the street with surprising speed. The wind gently stirred the black curtains of hair on either side of his baseball cap. “The last thing you want is to be caught pissing in a hedge in Golders Green. In certain parts of south London it wouldn’t be a problem, and I could write a book about it. But you have to be respectful here.”

Lawrence had first visited the neighbourhood a few years earlier. He had taken to taking long walks through residential areas, without a map and without a clear objective, to clear his mind and find solutions to his problems and, above all, ideas for new songs. Perhaps Golders Green would provide him with the inspiration he needed for that elusive success he had been chasing since 1980, a success capable of transforming his life and immersing him in a glorious bubble of fame and money. One day, while walking around Muswell Hill, he noticed a sign that said “North Finchley”. All he knew about the neighbourhood was that the teenage punk group Eater came from there, so he decided to do some research.

—“Let’s see what the place where Eater came from is like,” I thought. It turned out that Finchley was a very residential area. From there I came to Finchley Central, and eventually ended up here. And I fell in love.