We'll come to Hess's chicken in a minute, but first a word about a fine writer, Paddy Scott, old newspaper hand, brought a present to Dublin of a book by one of Belfast's finest writers ever, a collection of Robert Lynd's essays entitled Life's Lit- tle Oddities. Lynd, who was born and grew up in the North, spent much of his life in England, where he became known as perhaps the greatest essayist since Charles Lamb. So thinks Paddy Scott. His essays flow, his asides and ironies are memorable. Writing of James Winder Good, one of the great journalists of the earlier part of the century, he remarks: "He was happiest of all, perhaps, in having been brought up in a city noted for riots."
Apart from Lynd's irony, it should be remembered that those were the days when a riot meant the throwing of stones and rivets. Good was the son of a head constable in the R.I.C. and wrote that both sides were equally hostile to the police - "the Orangemen on the ground that they were `Tipperary papishes', the Nationalists on the ground that they were traitors to their country". Hence Good took a purely aesthetic pleasure in the combats of stone and rivet. Bulmer Hobson told of Craigavon, (then just Craig), and Good during the Carsonite electioneering days. After a good meal and a drink or two, Craig would say to Good who was there to cover the story: "Now Jimmy, don't write down what I say, write what you think I should be saying".
Now to Rudolph Hess, deputy of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, who without permission flew a Messerschmitt fighter to Scotland on May 10th 1941, just a month or so before Germany invaded Russia. He wanted to meet the Duke of Hamilton with whom he had spoken once, to bear the message that the Fuhrer did not want to defeat Britain; he wanted to stop the fighting. If Britain didn't agree, she would of course be wiped out. Anyway it was reported, wrote Lynd, that when news got out that Hess, after landing and breaking his ankle, was given a portion of chicken, a furore arose in warrationed Britain.
"The general theory seemed to be," he wrote, that it is wrong to give a bad man chicken". This amazed him. "Ever since I was a boy, bad men have been allowed to eat chicken. "He thought the BBC should be broadcasting to Germany about Hess's chicken. It would be better still to give Hess a seven course dinner and describe it, course by course, over the air to show what England could do in the way of food even in wartime. A countryman thought that Hess's chicken might bring "old Goering over here, too".
Now if Hess had been given duck or saddle of mutton, that would annoy Lynd. For, he wrote, after eating boiling fowl, he had often been tempted to go vegetarian.