The Flaws of the UN? - 7 March 2003

Getting into bed the other night, licking my lips at the prospect of a new bed book, once I hefted it aboard I couldn't help sighing with the thought that I have chronically weak wrists - because all my bed books seem to run to 800 pages and weigh about five pounds.

That's because they are memoirs or autobiographies and more often than not the only book the author ever wrote or will write.

My present sweetmeat is by the late Sir Alexander Cadogan who was for most of his heyday the permanent under secretary of the Foreign Office during the second war and afterwards, later the British ambassador to the United Nations.

He was in at not so much the birth of the UN but its conception, in several meetings in Washington, while the war was on, with the foreign ministers of the Soviets, United States, Canada.

He wrote in his diary at the time: "The idea of having the five permanent members - the US, Britain, France, Soviet Union and China - have a veto on any use of force to stop aggression means that the new league will be a parody of the old with most of its disadvantages."

The charter, he said, was based on the assumption that the Soviets, America, Britain, France and China would always agree on who was an aggressor, including one of themselves, and would live happily ever after. A preposterous hope.

Of course we didn't have access at the time to the thoughts of Sir Alexander Cadogan though I remember at the San Francisco baptism ceremonies I, like every other journalist I knew, thought of Cadogan as a pretty cool cucumber or a professional cynic.

I now see that his prescience, his foresight, was appallingly acute.

But I won't spoil your breakfast or your twilight wine this time for glancing at the Cadogan tome that night I espied at a higher level of another pile of books a mercifully slim volume of essays by the late and greatly missed English poet and critic Philip Larkin.

By what most of us call luck or coincidence and the great Dr Buechner calls "The grace of the Lord", I opened the book at the printed text of an interview which a famous English newspaper was holding with Philip Larkin and at once my eye fell on an exchange which exactly suited the topic I had in mind to talk about.

Larkin having said that contrary to the going legend about him he'd had a happy loving childhood, he found himself now required by this rather solemn highbrow interviewer to say more about his childhood and say but yes, he was unhappy - an outsider anyway.

Larkin: "Well I didn't much like other children. Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody.

"Then I realised it was just children I didn't like. Once you started meeting grownups life was much pleasanter."

The interviewer wondered why.

"Well," said Larkin, "children are very horrible aren't they - selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar brutes."

The interviewer gave up on children and turned to writing.

I hasten to say that Larkin was childless, indeed he never married.

He said that the prospect of living a whole life in the same place with one person was too much to ask of either human being.

However, I mentioned his having no children to point out that his generalisation about them did not allow for the escape clause or note of exemption.

He should have said "except for one's own children" and then surely the rest of the sentence is true - children are notably selfish, noisy, cruel, totally self-centred.

I sense a shudder of embarrassment passing like a prevailing wind from proud parents in northern Scotland to southern New Zealand.

Personally, as in other matters, Larkin spoke the first truth that came into his mind and he never went on to modify it or make an apologetic reservation.

Believing that he did speak the truth I have to add that I've always marvelled with, yes, admiration at people who say they love children in general and on further acquaintance appear to prove it.

Which brings me to say let us now praise a famous man - famous, I'm afraid, only in this country.

A man who I truly believe had more to do with helping three or four generations of very young children grow up into useful, decent, tolerant human beings.

His name is Fred McFeely Rogers. He died a week ago at the youngish age today of 74.

He would have been as unrecognisable as Fred McFeely Rogers as Bernard Shaw would have been if he'd been called George B Shaw.

Fred Rogers was universally - in the small universe of North America, that is - Mister Rogers.

He was a child's idea of the ideal father or perhaps of God.

For almost 40 years on television he undertook every weekday to attract, to entertain and to influence the behaviour of children between the ages of three and six.

And from the evidence of national polls there are millions of parents who have said in effect, Thank goodness my child was brought up on or by Mister Rogers.

What prompted this slim, good-looking, diffident man to give his life to the raising of tots?

At the age of 24 he saw for the first time a television programme, nothing unique, horrifying, distinctive, just the medium - television itself - and he decided at once he would not become a priest, he would use this new worldwide pulpit to encourage children to face life by using his gift of talking simply and entertainingly to children every morning, absolutely without a hint of preaching or setting up rules or, as I've noticed with most well-meaning child lovers, to act very sweetly and twinkly and quietly patronisingly to the little brutes.

Even so you'll guess rightly - no intellectual, no member of the intelligentsia was ever to be found guilty of admiring anyone so plain, so childlike as Mister Rogers.

Many critics, both humble and double dome, have tried to define Mister Rogers' method.

If it was a method it could be taken on and imitated, couldn't it? It never was.

It was put as well as anyone I've read by one Daniel Lewis who last Friday wrote a page-long obituary notice in the New York Times.

The programme, by the way, was called Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood.

I quote: "For all its reassuring familiarity, Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood was a revolutionary idea at the outset and it remained a thing apart through all its decades of television.

"Others might entertain the young but it was Fred Rogers, the music man, Protestant and student of behaviour who ventured to deal head on with the emotional life of children."

He knew very well and he could tell superior folk what he was doing.

"The worst of their fears," he said, "are manageable and mentionable."

I can't think of another teacher, broadcaster certainly, who could, without fear, affectation or calculated delicacy, sit down and begin: "Now children, about this war they're talking about" - or - "Did you know any grownup who got married and then later on got divorced?"

A pause. Well he did, he said. "It happened to a boy and girl I knew and you know what they did? They cried and cried and you know why? They thought it was their fault. Well of course it wasn't their fault."

Fred Rogers was born in a small Pennsylvania town, an only child, who from babyhood on took to puppets and by the time an adopted sister arrived he could handle them and mimic voices and put on a nightly act for her.

Puppets remained a home hobby, along with playing the piano, all his life and composing little songs.

After high school he spent a year at the Ivy League college in Dartmouth and then went down to Florida to a famous college, graduated with highest honours in music composition and decided to enter a seminary.

But on his last vacation at home he saw, for the first time, and was startled by, this extraordinary new invention - television.

He was at first repelled by it but then he thought of his puppets - what a marvellous showcase this offered.

He horrified his parents by saying he'd abandon the priesthood and was going into television.

He started with a local station as a gofer - he did all the humble service jobs.

Eventually he got to do a puppet show at a station in his home town of Pittsburgh.

And by degrees added to his shows a personal homily addressed to the child audience.

He was in his 40th year when he went on public, non-commercial television nationwide and for another 25 years was as familiar to three generations of pre-school children as Santa Claus.

If there is a kingdom of heaven and you can't enter it "except ye become as a little child", Mister Rogers was better qualified than anyone I can think of to be let in to the sound of trumpets.

That last phrase reminds me irresistibly of an immensely popular, late Victorian novelist who it appears is today absolutely unread - the funny, savage, Amanda Ross who, when her mother died, wrote a four-line epitaph.

And I leave you to decide whether it was the tribute of an adoring daughter or a little brute getting her own back.

"The silver trumpets sounded loud

The angels shouted 'Come!'

(Then) Opened wide the golden gate

And in walked mum."

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