Mr Standfast

Old Springy’s been a busy chap of late. Little time for blogging - and little to say when he does, because social intercourse has been rather constrained.

Duty, that stern taskmaster that cannot be ignored, has called for Springheel and the call has been answered. The well-oiled machine that is British Bureaucracy has hummed with activity. Letters have been drafted, submissions analysed, reports have been written and meetings chaired. Reams of paper have been utilised and gallons of tea drunk. The outcome? Oh...Nothing tangible, perhaps. Nothing very much that the layman could understand...but to a connoisseur, it is a thing of beauty. One does not, after all, administrate to achieve anything. One is not a jobbing bureaucrat or an administrative labourer.

One administrates because it is one’s Art.

But enough of such tawdry matters. I was moved to write this because I have, in the course of my recent labours, sought solace in the writings of an extraordinary man. I do not know if John Buchan was the only Governor-General of Canada to write thrillers, but I am reasonably confident that he was the best. And I have recently been re-reading some of his Richard Hannay novels with great enjoyment.

They are not literature, although Buchan was a fine writer at times and had a deft ability to sketch character or describe scenery – especially the West of Scotland, which he knew and loved so well.

His plots turn on extraordinary coincidences or various deus ex machina - but then so does reality, sometimes... Some of the background assumptions of the writer are extraordinarily inappropriate nowadays (and one might argue were always so, had we but realised it). There is no escaping the impact that nearly a century of time has had. Hannay himself is a type of Englishman that no longer exists, firstly because he isn’t English by descent, but Scots, and secondly because from early childhood until his thirties he lived in South Africa. Culturally, he is a colonial citizen who thinks of a Britain he has never seen as “home”. That is a lost concept now, I think.

But Hannay is a type of character once considered typical of middle-class England - intelligent but not intellectual, educated but not especially cultured, decent, stoic, plucky rather than heroic, but dogged. He says and thinks some rather surprising things in the books. Here you have novels written around the first world war that speak sympathetically of ordinary Germans, that depict Conscientious Objectors sometimes as cowards, charlatans and dupes, but also, in some cases, as decent men whose beliefs have led them to an impossible position. A later story (the Three Hostages) contains a passage where a character lays many of the world’s ills at the feet of the Jews – only to have Hannay remark that he doesn’t really believe that himself. Hannay is no iron jawed bigot, or lowbrow Imperialist thug.

And they have, despite their flaws, three great virtues to me. They open a window on a Britain that is now long lost. They are often very funny. And they are a rattling good yarn.

So, slip into a comfortable old tweed suit, pour yourself a decent single malt, light your pipe, and settle down in your favourite armchair with something by John Buchan. And the hours, I can assure you, will fly past.

Now I  am afraid I must go. I have foreign anarchists to thwart...