Precarious Balance

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30965, 22 January 1966, Page 4

Precarious Balance

Clean Young Englishman. By John Gale. Hodder and Stoughton. 193 pp. The derisive implications of its title are not borne out by the subject matter of this book, which is the serious autobiography of a gifted journalist, to whom insanity has loomed in threatening fashion at certain points of crisis in his life. John Gale was born in the 1920 s of prosperous business-professional stock. His grandfather had been a distinguished officer in the Coldstream Guards, and the boy himself became commissioned in his grandfather’s regiment during the last war. He tells his life story, as far as it has gone, in a somewhat disjointed way, while managing to convey vivid impressions, notably of his home life in Surrey and holidays in. Dorset. John and his two brothers, Peter (later killed in the war) and Adrian, received the conventional schooling of their class. John being sent to Stowe, which seems to have left little impression on his character. His training to become an officer at the Guards' Depot, Caterham, is however, described so evocatively, that even those people unacquainted with this well known, training school for the Army must be able easily to visualise its layout and regime, despite the jerky reportage of the author’s style. For a young man with a tendency to mental imbalance military service in Palestine towards the end of the British Mandate must have been a severe strain, though he evidently enjoyed a spell with the Transjordan Frontier Force, and found routine regimental duties not wholly unpleasant The murderous activities of the Irgun Zvei Leumi must however, have taken toll of the nerves of one who was not yet 21, and he began to drink heavily. Once demobilised he could not settle to anything, though, i

having failed to get into Oxford, he entered the Sorbonne and spent some instructive years wandering about Europe. Then he married and realised that he must get down to some settled job, and journalism seemed the most promising prospect from his personal point of view. A Midland newspaper gave him his grounding in this profession, and led to his being employed by the “Observer.” For this weekly journal he covered both the Suez episode and the Algerian war, about which his genius as a reporter becomes evident in these pages. Unluckily the mental strain imposed on him by both assignments began to tell on a mind very susceptible to the impact of disruptive world events. The manicdepressive state to which Gale was working up is obvious from his flashes of self revelation. A Negro cobbler in Hollywood, examining some shoes he had brought in for repair, remarked “You’ve come just in time,” and this innocent comment “made me believe that I was a Messiah, come just in time to save America ... I sat with a feeling of responsibility, elation, and yet, also, of calm.” He began to get “fuzzy feelings” in his feet couldn’t sleep, and shouted loudly at total strangers in the course of conversation. And the in-

consequence of his thoughts became more pronounced: “The Television Psychiatrist didn’t remember me. He owned a chocolate-coloured Bentley.”

Four months in a clinic restored the author’s mental stability, but there is an ambiguous note about the closing phrases of this book which do not augur altogether happily for the future. Readers will hope that any fears they entertain may prove groundless, for journalists of John Gale’s calibre are not to be found every day, |