A Somerset Lad

The parody of Vera Lynn’s lyric expressed the feeling of many of those whose meat ration during the Second World war included whale meat. My father, a child in London during the war years, remembered it as tough and tasteless.

An Internet search suggests that the meat reached people’s kitchen tables in cans. It would seem logical that it would arrive processed and preserved, stacked in boxes on freighters bringing supplies. Probably it would have come from North American sources, whaling fleets would not have been able to operate in European waters. The brand name under which it was sold seems to have been Whacon, although information seems sparse. It seems to have been unrationed so was presumably more easily obtained than traditional meat which had become scarce with the drive to grow grain and vegetables. Perhaps it was its availability which made it memorable..

Having one uncle who farms beef cattle and another who raises pigs, I have no problem with people eating meat and happily do so when visiting my Aberdeen Angus eating uncle. For health and economy’s sake, I eat vegetarian meals, but that’s more a matter of inclination than conviction.

I think, however, I would draw a line at eating whalemeat. They seem too intelligent creatures to deserve such a fate as ending up on a dinner table.

I had assumed that most Europeans shared a similar view of eating whales. I had assumed that the vast mysterious mammals had attained a place in the natural hierarchy where they ranked alongside cats and dogs in commanding human respect.

While watching the BBC 4 Scandi-crime series Trom, it was a surprise to discover that whalemeat was still on the menu for families. The fact that some eight hundred pilot whales are caught for meat each year was an unexpected discovery.

While some among the Faroese hunt whales, in France there has been great concern about a beluga whale that had swum up the Seine. There seems to have been widespread media interest in the operation to try to persuade the whale to return to cold salt water.

In contrast with the more abstemious Danes, France has seemed more often a place where animals of all shapes and sizes have ended up on the dinner table. Snails, horse, and each September the shooting down of all sorts of birds, not to mention the bullfighting popular from the Basque coast to Provence.

From a purely rational viewpoint, the resources expended on attempts to save a single whale seem irrational, but rationality has never formed part of our attitudes to animals.

Maigret entered the interview room where the person being questioned sat with Janvier. Maigret looked at the frightened young man sat opposite Janvier. ‘Why don’t you talk to me and let Janvier go to terrorise someone else?’

Sometime later, Maigret returned to the room. The young man had a bloodied nose. Janvier looked at his superior officer, apologetically. ‘He fell over and hit his face on the floor.’

Maigret glared. ‘I would prefer that he didn’t fall over again. He’s a human being.’

Maigret seems a reassuring character. Georges Simemon had a grasp of human nature, an understanding of the reality of post-war Parisian life.

Simenon’s stories come with a mood of justice. Amidst the seaminess and violence of life in Maigret’s Paris, there is a sense that the police judicaire will bring about a satisfactory resolution of cases. Villains will be apprehended and subject to due process. Maigret does not shy from telling the ruthless and the unpenitent that the guillotine awaits them.

Maigret’s justice is about people getting what they deserve. Working people can have confidence in the police. Criminals cannot hide behind expensive lawyers. There is an equality in the system which was probably far removed from the realities of the society in which Simenon lived.

I like Maigret. I like stories that are fair. I like the thought that ordinary people don’t get trodden on, I especially like the thought that thugs and bullies end up in the cage in the basement of the préfecture de police and will never again have the opportunity to cause misery.

With the passing years, I have found the Christian ideas of forgiveness increasingly difficult. Notions of ‘grace’, that you can do what you like and then say ‘sorry’ at the end and be forgiven for everything, seem fundamentally unjust.

Jewish teachings have become much more attractive. The Yimakh Shemo, the Hebrew curse, ‘May his name and his memory be erased’ seems more closely to correspond with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, than does the easy forgiveness proposed by Paul.

Jews have no concept of hell, instead a year after the death of a person the person is allowed into the world to come, or they are destroyed forever.

The obliteration of names from memory seems a just reward. Maigret tells one prisoner that they will not be remembered for their crimes, instead they will be executed and they will soon be forgotten forever.

Maigret understood justice.

The evening news has become annoying.

Each night this week the bulletins have included the fortunes of the England women’s football team among the headlines. This evening no superlatives were spared in describing the victory of the women’s team over the Swedish women’s team. To listen to the vocabulary used  one might have imagined that the game was a watershed in the history of art or science. ‘Gravity-defying’ was the term used to describe the scoring of one goal.

‘Nine million viewers,’ said the presenter. Well, yes. It was at peak viewing time on the BBC, is that a great deal different than it would be for any programme that had been hyped for days.

Were I a woman, I would have been embarrassed at the ridiculous boosterism of the television reporters. I grew up in a community where there was no need for people to seek equality, it was assumed. Women in that community would have felt no need for anyone to talk them up.

Farm life demanded the efforts of all who could participate. My grandmother owned her own fields and had her own income. A diminutive figure of four feet ten inches, she was mother to seven, grandmother to twenty, and a woman with an extraordinary capacity for work.

Men assumed an equality without it needing to be discussed. Children would be as likely seen perched on the footplates of tractors or sat smiling on open trailers as being pushed in prams (of course, once a child reached twelve or thirteen years of age, they might be found driving the tractors themselves).

The working equality of farms meant boundless opportunities to be outside, and to wonder at the misfortune of those who had to endure life in towns and cities.

Perhaps it was the nature of country life that led to an assumption that all people were equal. Equestrian sports arose from country life.  Show jumping, dressage, cross-country had their roots in hunting, and woe betide anyone who might suggest a woman coukldn’t ride to hounds. It is some fifty years since Princess Anne rode in the Great Britain equestrian team in the Olympic Games.

When Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader in 1975, no-one in our community thought it odd. Mrs Thatcher would have made a formidable figure riding a fifteen hands hunter.

Perhaps the notable story behind the football competition is that they have taken five decades to reach a point that women on horses passed almost unnoticed.