The other day I boarded the Edinburgh tram at Ingliston Park & Ride, next door to the airport, and travelled eastward to the end of the line at Newhaven, on the Firth of Forth. It cost me £2, which I thought was value for money. It would have cost me £2 even if I had alighted at the first stop, Gogarburn. You could recast the Gospel parable of the vineyard owner hiring labour at a flat rate, on to the Edinburgh tram. £2 for one stop, £2 for 12 stops, unless you choose to go west from Ingliston, one stop to the airport terminal, when the fare is hiked up by more than a factor of 4. Makes no sense.
It was a lovely day in Newhaven. There was a softness in the air and, down at the harbour, I could have been in Italy. I walked back by the tram lines, one stop, to Ocean Terminal, where the Royal Yacht Britannia is berthed. I was minded to board, but frankly I resented paying £19.50 so I just kept walking. Incidentally, I see that Balmoral Castle is opening up to visitors for a short summer season. £100 for a visit, £150 if you include afternoon tea. Are the Royals short of a bob or two? £50 for a cup of tea? Come on! Extraordinarily, the place got booked up within about 40 minutes.
I walked back up Leith Walk towards Edinburgh’s Princes Street. Towards the top end of Leith Walk on the north side there are two second-hand bookshops. I ducked in, in my continued futile quest for two first edition Bonds – Casino Royale and Moonraker, and also for any single one of the Corrigan series of children’s books by R. B. Maddock. But early Bonds are vanishingly rare, and Maddock I suspect has been cancelled, as the colonial outlook has expired. When I emerged, the weather had suddenly changed. There was a squall, so I dashed across the road to Topping, a magnificent bookshop you can lose yourself in, on another apparently futile quest, for the one Nevil Shute missing from my complete collection, The Rainbow and the Rose.
Eureka! Who would have thought it? I bought it, got another £2 tram ticket at Picardy Place, and hopped on a tram back to Ingliston. A hapless fellow traveller didn’t have a ticket and was faced with the choice of alighting to buy a ticket at the tram stop for £2, or buying one on board for £10. Like the airport tariff, it makes no sense. It’s a gravy tram.
En route, I settled down with The Rainbow and the Rose, and was immediately hooked. The title is borrowed from a beautiful sonnet by Rupert Brooke, The Treasure, initially mysterious yet, on finishing the novel and in retrospect, entirely apposite. Like Corrigan, the Shute is politically completely incorrect. It was published in 1958 by William Heinemann, but the edition I picked up in Topping was a Vintage Classic, published in 2009. Congratulations to Vintage for not employing “sensitivity readers” to attenuate Shute for modern sensibilities. I dare say Shute novels are dated. They are certainly of their time. The style is often said to be pedestrian, more resembling an academic report than a novel, the plots predictable, and clunky. And yet many of these books have never been out of print. Shute was a pilot and an aeronautical engineer, aviation is a recurring theme, and the books are full of technical detail. The Rainbow and the Rose paints a picture of civil aviation as it was, particularly across the South Seas, in 1958.
Many of the books have a fey, dreamlike, supernatural quality, and this is certainly true of The Rainbow and the Rose. Here, Shute employs and evokes an elision of personalities that might confuse the non-alert reader. You stop and say, who is the narrator? It’s a very clever idea. A recurring theme of Shute’s is the idea of the independent man forging a career, and a life, through self-will, determination, and hard work. I’m not sure what his politics exactly were, but I have a notion that the post war government in Britain was not to his taste, so he upped sticks and moved to Australia, where enterprise and entrepreneurship he considered were valued, and rewarded. He left a drab, bankrupt country in search of life, hope, and colour. I wonder what he would have made of the choices on offer here at the General Election on July 4th. It would not appear that the main political protagonists, or antagonists, are stirred and moved by any compelling or inspirational idea. We have a contest between bureaucrats determined to persuade us that they are not going to wreck the economy, and similarly determined not to make a big campaign gaffe at the last minute. I am reminded of a remark passed by a tutor of mine at Glasgow University back in the Dark Ages. “The only difference between Mr Heath and Mr Wilson, so far as I can see, is that they are both exactly the same.”
jamescalumcampbell 