Cockney Quixote

Cockney Quxote

OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE (224 pp.) --Wolf Mankowih-- Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.50).

We are Kitchener's Army The Army of the Free We cannot shoot, we cannot fight What bloody use are we?

Thus with proud self-derision the Old Contemptibles* of 1914 sang as they marched to battle. British Author Wolf Mankowitz has written a superb novel about an Old Contemptible who has lived beyond his era, beyond World War II (when everything was "more efficient"), and on into the Welfare State. The old fellow recalls the recruiting poster of World War I, "Kitchener Wants You," and adds his sardonic comment: "He's about the only bastard what does."

The old soldier's only surviving name is "Old Cock," and his last surviving grip on Britain's economy is a job as curator of a rubbish dump in London's bombed-out East End. Slightly addled but still marvelously eloquent after his life in the trenches, Old Cock has one friend, known only as "Arp" (from the initials on his Air Raid Precautions uniform jacket). A bomb had deprived Arp of everything --house, family, name, memory and speech. But Old Cock talks enough for two--his language flows like pig's ear in a boozer on Saturday night and is rich as hot gammon. In a country of free teeth he has only five blackened stumps ("tombstones") and possesses nothing much but a cherished tapeworm, which he "gasses" with liberal quantities of raw onion. But his friendship with Arp glows like the lavatory float of "valuable copper" in a desert of uncommercial junk.

Bowlers & Rozzers. Novelist Manko-witz evidently sets up these two old human ruins as symbols of man's condition on earth, with well-meaning officials as their natural enemies. The officials are the book's runts and spivs and riffraff--the ones who have fared best under the Welfare State. Old Cock pegs them down (to quote the most printable of his memorable vocabulary) as bowler-hatted, bean-eyed, lousy, bootlicking Picklewaters. The old man is quite a social thinker. After one brush with authority--represented by an arrogant doorman--he reflects: "If we have to take to wearing bowlers before we can get a bit of simple cooperation from our fellowman, who shall not be spat on from a mighty height?"

The novel's plot concerns Old Cock's attempts to hold on to his job and to keep Arp secure in his Nissen hut, located on the edge of the garbage dump. Among his adversaries are not only the city authorities and the garbage men (who have no respect for a well-conducted dump), but a film company run by a madly implausible American operator named Claygate Corst. Though Corst doesn't have "enough do-re-mi in his pocket to acquire a second-hand mouse-trap," he takes over the decayed movie studios next to the dump. At this point the whimsicality that infects British writers when they deal with cockneys unfortunately takes over the novel. Old Cock arrays himself in a junkpile suit of armor and routs the rozzers, crying in his version of Shakespeare: "Here I come, you lousy whoresons!"

"You'll pay for it," they shout back.

"I always have," Old Cock replies. "I always paid for me pleasure and I always bloody well will." So yelling, he knocks the helmet off one purple-faced bobby.

Beer & Baccy. However this bit of fancy does not occur before Old Cock has duly delivered himself of a few well-rounded reflections on the "Socialist mob, the thieving upstarts," and stated his Weltanschauung: "Cutting the cackle, it's a bloody washout in which the baby is thrown out with the bathwater and devil take all. Talk about Rights. What Rights? Then I will tell you . . . the right of an Englishman true-born and free to get his beer and baccy, his Java, bread and scrape, plum-and-apple, cut off the joint and choice of two veg . . . good things sent in plenty from heaven above but niggled into pigeon holes by charity charlies with scrag-end notions of that arithmetical dead loss and bad debt Man . . ."

Author Mankowitz might well be Britain's answer to the Schweppes Man, proving that the language of England is not a clipped and snooty modification of the inarticulate. Born in London's East End, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper, Mankowitz took himself on a scholarship to Cambridge, ran a shop, became an authority on Wedgwood china, worked as a film scenarist. He writes best about what he knows best: the cockney. His unforgettable cockney Quixote belongs not (as Novelist Elizabeth Bowen suggests on the book jacket) with James Joyce but with Joyce Gary's articulate and wonderful crew of loudmouthed Londoners.

* So called from the Kaiser's legendary assessment of Britain's military strength: "contemptible little army."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.