CHILD
One
of my earliest memories is being pushed very fast in a pram. The day
is hot; and we are in Plymouth. I do not know where we are going, but
I feel some urgency, and so I am leaning forward in my pram to make
the wheels go faster, as everyone does who can see the wheels. Then
I am surprised to see that we are passing endless fields of broken stones.
Actually I see they are not all stones. There are also piles of bricks,
which are reddish; and broken slates, which are black and grey. Occasionally
lengths of wood stick at angles.
This strange sight is on the other side of a low wall
which is no higher than my shoulder. In the wall there are gaps, each
has a single step up from the pavement of a long slab of whitish limestone
but then these gaps, which only open onto short paths of patterned tiles,
and then lead only up to, and then under, the strange piles of stones.
I have never seen anything like this before.
Our own house has a path like this, also short; but
it does lead to our front door. It is made of grey concrete really,
clean but quite cracked, but it has the same grey limestone step. On
the left is a big cherry tree whose fat black trunk oozes a sticky glue
in the summer in which ants are caught, struggle, and die. In the summer
the flowers from this tree fall so thickly that their petals are blown
about: thinly, but just like snow. We have only ever once seen deep
snow. Then I was five.
The house next door has a high wall on the right,
painted white, but the paint has faded and is flaking. Our door is painted
shiny green and it has a knocker in the shape of a lady's hand. The
hand is holding a brass ball to knock with. This was polished by my
Granpa every week, and I used to think it special, but since that time
I have seen the same design in several towns in Europe: in Budapest,
I think; also in Bordeaux. But at the end of these paths, there are
no houses, or trees, or doors. Beyond the place where the door might
have been, and beyond where the stairs should have started, there was
sometimes a deep hole. You could not see into these holes, for they
were full of dirty rubbish and bricks.
One of the boys in our back street had told me what
this means. The people in the house had gone down under it into their
cellar, he told me, to get away from the bombs; but then the house had
fallen in on top of them and they had died there in rows, and had gone
to hell. I used to wonder, lying in my bed, how they had done that.
Was it like being called in to see the doctor's, perhaps? Or did they
all slide sideways all at once, the way they were sitting? I was puzzled
that they had gone to hell. Most people, I understood, went to heaven.
Surely only bad people went to hell. But what about the ants? I supposed
there might be ants in heaven.
This was one of the mysteries I used to puzzle over.
More serious was why my parents shouted at each other so much. Late
at night I used to ask God to make them stop. Many small children think
they are the cause of their parents' quarrels. I know that now. Then
I just lay there, and felt guilty. It was I who was their problem, this
much was clear.
These were hungry times for almost everyone. We used
to get food parcels from relations in Canada. The chewing gum had a
peculiar flavour: it was root-beer, I found out years later. And National
Geographic magazines came for my father, with pictures of fighting on
the other side of the world. Quite often they also had pictures of naked
ladies which I examined with particular interest. They were always black
naked ladies. "Because of the heat", my grandfather said.
He said that where they lived this was normal: being almost naked, sometimes
entirely so; the black men too.
The stone-fields which had so surprised me were the
remains of Devonport, that part of Plymouth nearest to the Navy's dockyards.
Further to the east, in our part of Plymouth, the bomb-sites had been
almost all cleared. Usually this would leave a smooth rain-puddled layer
of mortar and pulverised brick. They were our playgrounds. They smelt
a bit, as was only natural; and there were sometimes deep holes to be
avoided; but the powdered bricks produced a pleasant pink texture, and
tiny flakes of mica twinkled in the sunlight like fairy dust.
One day I buried all my mother's jewellery in the
bomb-site next to our house, and next day spent an exciting afternoon
being dragged hither and thither to try to remember where it was I had
buried it. I was sobbing, of course, as was only natural, but I was
also secretly gratified that my efforts had generated so much - that
is, the proper amount - of excitement. As I understood it, in the art
of burying treasure, the whole point of it, was to lose the map. I had
made sure of this by never making one. As for the X that marked the
spot, I was also unsure whether this should actually be on the ground
as well as on my map, so I had omitted both of these as well. Mother's
tiny store of treasure was never found. Later a printing works covered
the site.
All these houses in Devonport had been blasted by
the 'effin' Luffwaffer' - as it was called rather cheerfully in Plymouth;
for in the end, both it - and 'thurt bleddy ol' Gurrin' - failed. They
had been mostly doing their best to drop their bombs in the naval dockyards,
which were rather more important to the war than the city, but on the
way they had bombed much of the city as well. My great-grandmother Rennie
had lived in the streets beside the dockyard wall, and had twice survived
being bombed. I was taken to see her when she was 102, and was rather
disappointed that she looked so well. What I learnt in her presence
- in, to be precise, the presence of a reverential audience of family
and neighbours - was that she far preferred being under the stairs or
under her bed than in the cellar. The entire chimney-stack can fall
into a cellar. The second time Gurrin' had a go at her, she had therefore
been under the stairs, and after the smoke and dust had cleared, was
found poking a stick out of the rubble in order to be noticed. Many
of her neighbours had died in that same raid and she was regarded as
prodigal proof of the value of independent thinking. Follow not the
multitude, for they will have their chimney fall in on them, and they
will all go to hell.
One night when the giant footsteps were thudding across
the city, my mother got under her marriage bed with me. If a 500 pound
bomb fell through the roof, she presumably expected it simply to bounce
off the mattress and out again. I was only a few months old: an impressionable
age. From under the bed mother offered God a deal. 'Spare my child,'
she told Him, 'and I will dedicate the rest of his life to You.'
It wasn't very original; she only told me of it many
years later, which was far too late to take it back, and I was not grateful.
"Well, thanks a lot, Mother" was my notably cool response.
"You might have asked my opinion." "Oh, no, dear"
was her automatic reply, "You were far too young to be asked."
So it was that I was sold into the service of God. And if you are not,
I am not sure how serious this is either. A lot of things happen just
by accident.
To the seaward side of Plymouth is one of the world's
great natural harbours: the Sound. It was created when the rivers Plym
and Tamar broke through the coast to leave the heights of Mount Edgcumbe
on the right and Staddon Heights on the left, together digging out a
channel so deep that even the biggest ships can pass so close inshore
that one could hit them with a hard-driven cricket ball. I can remember
standing on the Hoe and watching the great grey flat wall of an aircraft
carrier sliding past, with some of its planes ready on deck, all its
flags streaming and sirens blaring all around. I guess this would have
been at the end of the War. Even more vivid is the joyful memory, repeated
several times, of seeing the great grey Sunderland flying boats returning
from patrolling the Atlantic, and roaring from far out at sea in over
the straight black line of the distant breakwater to touch down on the
gleaming Sound and leaving behind a long straight triple lane of white
foam. That was always a wonderful sight. I knew nothing at that time,
of course, of the terrible cost to both sides of the Atlantic War, and
what these beautiful machines had done to help to win it.
All around the Sound steep slopes rise above the city
where they form a long smooth hump-backed plateau. At one end, to the
East, is the massive bulk of the Citadel, below it are the Mayfair Steps
from which the Pilgrim Fathers are said to have sailed to their New
World. At the western end some of the finer houses of Plymouth are built
there looking out to sea. This long plateau is the Hoe. On the 29th
July 1588, Francis Drake was playing a match of bowls with his captains
on a green on these heights when the news came that the first ships
of the Armada were in sight.
There is a statue of Drake there now, still playing
bowls. I used climb up and sit by his feet. A very stupid modern revisionist
historian recently called Drake 'little better than a pirate'. Such
nonsense. Drake was one of the most formidable fighting sea captains
of his age, also one of its greatest navigators. In 1577 he was sent
to sink, burn, or capture Spanish shipping in the Pacific, and to bring
back as much gold and silver as he could find, for it was this looted
treasure from Mexico and Peru that made Spain the most powerful monarchy
in Europe.
This is exactly what he did. But how he did it remains
a wonder.
He left Plymouth with five ships on December 13th
1577. Before he had reached the Pacific he had lost four - three sunk,
one turned back - and was left only with his own ship, the Golden Hind.
Unperturbed by this nearly complete disaster, he went on to raid the
major ports of Valparaiso and Callao, and then to capture, burn and
plunder ships all along the Pacific coast. El Draco, the Spaniards called
him: the Dragon. Then he sailed north as far as the present borders
of Canada; then turned west, crossing the Pacific, mainly using captured
Spanish maps, and reached England again in September 1580 loaded with
such treasure and spices that seven months later his grateful queen
knighted him on the deck of his battered Golden Hind.
Nearly three years at sea, in those days. Modern sailors
with all of their modern equipment would find that hard. He was mayor
of Plymouth in 1581; then for two other years he was a member of Parliament.
To that crowd on the Hoe on that bright summer day, with all eyes looking
towards Mount Edgcumbe whose bulk hid the approach of the Spaniards,
he was not just the first of their captains, the first English sailor
to circumnavigate the globe. He was their man: a Devon man, through
and through. Even the clean water they could drink came from the aqueduct
he had built to bring it down from the granite heights of Dartmoor.
And very few amongst that crowd would have any reason
to welcome the King of Spain. Two years before Elizabeth had sent Drake
under Lord Howard (a member of a great family of English Catholic nobles)
to attack the Spanish fleet at Cádiz. This 'singeing of the King
of Spain's beard', as the balladeers called it later, delayed the Armada
for a precious year. But now his great fleet of 130 ships, with 3,000
soldiers already on board, were prepared to demonstrate his determination
to destroy this monstrous irritant to his Empire; to make the English
Catholic again; and then to turn an even greater force to subdue his
rebellious Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. The Inquisition had
been unable to extirpate these Dutch rebels. Elizabeth had been supporting
them.
The English knew perfectly well what to expect if
Philip were to succeed. The Inquisition had no notion of either forgiving
heretics or of general amnesties. Thirty years before Philip had married
the English queen, Mary Tudor, and before she had died three of her
own bishops and 300 of her other subjects had been burnt for heresy.
The English had probably little real affection for their own bishops,
but they had all heard what happened to the English sailors taken by
Spanish ships at sea. They were sentenced to imprisonment, to the stake
or the gallows, or were sent to the galleys for life. If a Catholic
hierarchy was ever restored in England, they knew that many more English
heretics would soon be lighting up the English skies.
And so everyone expected Drake to order his captains
and their ships out to sea at once. Instead - as every schoolboy in
Britain used to know - his calm comment was: "Well, there's still
time to finish the match."
Perhaps he knew more than his audience could have
known at the time. Elizabeth's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, certainly
knew something of the plans of the Spanish admiral, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia,
Alonso Pérez de Gúzman. If de Gúzman had ordered
only a few of his ships to blockade the Sound, Drake and his ships would
have been trapped like wasps in a bottle. But de Gúzman's orders
were continue up the Channel with all his fleet and to embark more Catholic
troops at Calais for an immediate invasion of England.
Lord Howard and Drake followed them, attacking them
repeatedly, but keeping their own ships out of range of the heavier
Spanish guns, whilst they pressed the great galleons and the many transports
together like sheep harried by dogs. The Spanish would normally have
been secure in this formation. But the English took fire ships with
them. They were the 16th century equivalent of guided missiles. Ignoble,
even cowardly - but that is just what might be expected of such a nation
of loathsome heretics - fire-ships had never been used on this scale
before. But there had never been such a target on this scale before.
Blazing and roaring like the hounds of hell, Drake's
fire-ships drifted down with the wind, heaven-sent to the English, into
the hopelessly tangled mass of hundreds of Spanish ships all crowded
together. Fifty of them were so damaged that their troops abandoned
them. Two burnt and sank at their moorings. And when de Gúzman
abandoned the plan of invasion, and tried to return his fleet to Spain
around the north of Scotland and Ireland, another terrific storm wrecked
even more. The survivors who struggled ashore were killed by the Scots
or the Irish, and almost all the treasure was lost that they had brought
to pay for the invasion of England. Out of the 300 ships that had sailed,
only 67 returned to Spain, and even to a country with Spain's enormous
wealth, the cost of this was crippling. The damage to its prestige was
even more serious. It had lost its fight to conquer England; to failed
to put down the Protestant revolt both in England and the Netherlands,
and it had failed to dominate much of the rest of Europe.
Whatever the rest of Europe might think had been responsible
for this miraculous rescue, the English - especially in Devon - had
no doubt. To the Swiss, it is William Tell; to the English, Francis
Drake.
(Softly)
Oh, Drake is in his hammock,
And a thousand miles away.
Captain, art thou sleepin' thar below?
Slung atween the roundshot in Nombre Dios Bay,
Captain, art thou sleepin' thar below?
(Stronger) But if e'er the Dons strike Devon,
He'll quit the port of Heaven,
(Mightily) And he'll drum 'em up the Channel,
As he drummed 'em long agoooo!
You
could not be a boy in Plymouth and not know this song. And so I grew
up, I suppose, with the idea that all Englishmen should be like this.
Like Drake and Howard, and Frobisher, and the Hawkins (the father and
the son), and Hudson, and Hawke, Rodney, Blake, Anson, Jervis, Nelson,
Hood, Cochrane, Cooke. I was persuaded that to be truly English was
to be as I imagined them. Calm and resolute; thorough in preparation;
swift in action; adaptable; modest; slow to anger; eager to laugh -
and, of course, deadly.
With occasional disasters, tens of thousands of men
like these roamed and ruled the oceans of the world for over two hundred
years. From the high walls of the Citadel and the Naval and Marine barracks
to the red ensigns fluttering from the gliding warships and smooth black
submarines, all the way down to the mean streets around the dockyard,
where grimy pub doorways stank of piss and vomit, the entire city reeked
of these traditions.
It could, at times, also reek of fish. Our part of
town was not the poorest, although the windows of the houses in the
streets around ours were often not separated from the pavement by even
the pretence of a garden, so that one could look directly through their
curtains into their front rooms. Usually there was no-one there, but
within the room and in front of the window, instead of potted plants
or sleepy pottery cats or slinking dogs, there might be occasionally
a fine model warship or even - in one front-room that I always liked
to look into - a sleepy old parrot in a cage gnawing on a tattered piece
of cuttle-bone stuck between the bars. If I tapped on the window it
would give a sneer and turn its back.
At our end of Plymouth you could smell the sea as
soon as you stepped outside. This was especially true in the summer
when the house-fires were out. Sometimes I would be sent to buy fish
for supper from the fish-market, and sometimes this would be with my
grandfather's company. 'Shore-leave', he called these expeditions, and
he would dress for them especially carefully: brown suit, waistcoat,
small gold fob-chain, clean shirt, full collar and tie, and finally
a grey trilby pulled well down.
On the way to the market, down in the inner harbour
by the Customs House, at least once he usually needed to vanish into
one of the many corner houses from which a mutter of voices and an occasional
burst of song told of company I was not to meet. Reappearing, wiping
his lips with his handkerchief, with his trilby now on the back of his
head, looking rather pleased with himself but also rather anxious, he
had always just 'popped in to see a friend'. To which statement he would
invariably add: 'Which you don't need to think to mention back home.'
I don't think I ever betrayed him. The market was
more interesting. Great flocks of white and grey seagulls with their
great sharp red and yellow beaks and their cold cruel eyes, were everywhere
in Plymouth, but there were never so many or so frenzied as around the
fishmarket when the boats were unloading their catch. Skeert-skeert,
skeeert-skeeeert, skeeert-skeeeeert! they would swoop and squabble,
strut and peck and lunge at each other. The market was a long open shed
built right on the edge of the quay so that the boats could lift the
fish straight onto the worn granite slabs. The fishwives standing amidst
the cones of melting ice seemed at first waist-deep in fish. Covered
in front by black rubber aprons, their hair tied up under a kerchief,
and their hands red and swollen from the wet and the cold, they worked
at a furious pace at the long tables. Flick, flick, chop, chop, smack,
flick; filleting and chopping, scooping the glistening guts into bins
beside them, their bright, bloodied knives never pausing - until my
Granpa's nudge told me which one I should ask.
"What's it, my lill' duck?" one would ask,
wiping her hands as I held out my money, mute, fascinated by the smell
and the noise and, above all, by the blood all around like a slaughter-house:
which, of course, is what it was, only the slow puzzled tangle of lobsters
and crabs in their boxes were still alive - but their claws were tied.
"Luvlly mackerels. Six, isn?" Snick, snack, flick; six times.
"There you are, my luvver, all wrapped up in th' Westermornin'noos.
Can't do better'n 'at, can us?"
Grandfather Harry - my mother's father - was
spry, slight, much below average height, but he had played rugby for
Cornwall as a youth, and even when I knew him he could run up two flights
of stairs, a bucket of coal in each hand for the bedroom fires. He had
spent the first half of his life in the Navy, much of it on the South
China Sea, although he had been on a cruiser during the disaster at
Gallipoli, when thousands of mainly Australians and New Zealanders,
but also French and British tried to land in open boats right under
the Turkish machine guns. "And the sea," he told me, "-
and, mind you, we were lying a good mile offshore, was pink all around
with blood."
Apart from this, and some occasional mention of China,
from whence he had brought the fat porcelain Buddha, a fine piece with
its great round belly and a seraphic smile, which my mother still has
on her sideboard, there was never much discussion about Granpa's service
for his King and the Empire. His wife, my grandmother, discouraged such
talk. She spent much of every afternoon reading the Western Morning
News, forming the words with her lips as she read. She was always very
severe with Granpa, for he was in disgrace. He had been in disgrace
for nearly thirty years. Apart from the occasional 'shore-leave', he
rarely escaped her vigilance.
He was an intelligent man, and clever, and had risen
to a good rank in the Navy for he had been a Chief Engineer. But then
he had made the very serious mistake of questioning either the judgement
or the skills of his admiral, Lord Beatty, one of the most celebrated
naval commanders of the Great War. In such matters naval discipline
was unforgiving. He was at once reduced to the ranks. The effect on
his family, his wife and three daughters (I never knew the eldest; she
died of consumption) was immediate too. Suddenly to lose an officer's
rate of pay was a disaster socially as well as financially. He worked
as an engineer in the dockyard for the rest of his working life, and
according to my mother was highly regarded. During the worst years of
the War he was called back again, but I never heard anything about that
either. Ships damaged in war commonly resemble a real shambles, real
slaughter-houses. That could not have been much fun either. Whenever
the opportunity arose, Granpa could drink the sea dry.
The Navy has always demanded more of its men almost
continuously than other services, and alcohol has always been its companion.
Churchill was unfair when he wrote: "Naval tradition is rum, sodomy,
and the lash." But a 19th century seaman who might certainly have
known all three, was being factual when wrote in his memoirs: 'To be
drunk is considered by every sailor as the acme of sensual bliss.'
This inclination must be in my genes. On the whole
Granpa always bore his servitude with invariable good humour. I only
once knew him to rebel, and then only very quietly. He was well into
his seventies when, one Christmas, my mother managed to assemble an
entire platoon of bottles, rare enough in our still somewhat straitened
circumstances. Left alone to decorate the Christmas tree - I think that
was his allotted task - within an hour or so Granpa drank the lot: the
brandy, the whisky, and the port, and was found smiling seraphically,
still sitting bolt upright in his chair, but as completely detached
from human concerns as his own china Buddha. "A dead marine"
was what he had the habit of calling any empty bottle. Around his chair
lay an entire platoon of dead marines, their duty done.
My Granpa taught me how to tie more knots than I would
ever need to use. He would sometimes tell me facts that I would never
need to know: as for example that the torpedo's anti-freeze is pure
alcohol. Whenever a flotilla was ordered from the South into the North
Atlantic, there was always frantic activity to drain off the very weak
mixture it had become to replace it with pure spirit. 'We used to say'
he would murmur, as his fingers tweaked and twisted lengths of string,
'it had evaporated.'
And there were expressions that he taught me, relics
both of the Navy and his one-time classical education: for he certainly
knew Latin. "Pump ship" was the naval equivalent of 'making
water'. Confusing to anyone who has only heard it in a medical context,
making fresh water from sea-water was vital for the ship's turbines
and her men, but pumping ship was emptying water from the bilges. "Three
sheets to the wind", was to be as out of control as a sailing ship
which has lost control of three of its sails (the sheet is the rope
to the sail, not the sail itself). "Dead in the water", and
"desks a-wash" were very similar and were used much in the
same way. My favourite, however, was always a heartfelt "By Jove!",
which was used when another more direct appeal to the Almighty might
be overheard. He used to call me "old chap" before I was ten,
but he waited until I was sixteen before he explained the value of drinking
the oil from at least one tin of sardines before going ashore - "and
then you'll still be sprightly, when all the rest is decks awash!"
Other members of my mother's family I scarcely had
the time - or the inclination, I suppose - to meet. I wish I might have
known her Aunt Emma, for she had a reputation as a psychic. More impressive
still was that she had an invisible familiar with whom she used to argue
vehemently, especially when she was tiddly. (Nearly everyone on the
Cornish or Celtic side of my family - except I suppose my mother - were
imbued with that notion of sensual bliss described earlier. The Devonshire
side, my father's side, were almost all more abstemious. But, as we
will discover, there was a reason for this too.
Being a sensible soul, my mother might have treated
the invisible companion as unimportant whenever she went to stay with
her aunt. But one night when she was sleeping in the same bed with her
- as was entirely common for young people in those days - she was wakened
by her aunt's fiercely whispering: "All right, all right. But put
it down now, or you'll waken the girl."
By now fully awake, my mother sat up in bed - to see
a heavy round table in the corner of the room swaying about several
feet from the floor. As she watched it settled - or was set down - gently;
and the room was still again. Her aunt told her she should go back to
sleep, and she did. There were no more alarms during her visit.
Clearly this was all nonsense. Obviously she dreamt
it all; or her aunt had a wire to lift the table to the ceiling; or
there was a big black dog underneath it scratching its ribs. On the
other hand, such things were not thought so unusual in Cornwall, or
in Devon. Massive pillars and slabs of granite were known to have 'walked'
to their place in lonely circles or to cover chambered graves on the
moors. An old Abingdon stone-mason showed me this part of his craft
many years later, moving a great block of stone of many tons across
his yard whilst crooning a rhythmic dirge. He told me that this is how
the megaliths of Stonehenge and Avebury, and of many of the other circles
across Europe, had been moved by just a few men. Before the idea may
be rejected - in favour of boats, log-roads and sledges - it also explains
how these stones could have been moved through forests, because they
were moved upright. It would have been necessary to clear and level
a path.
Before she married, Mother had been a slip of a thing.
In a photograph of her in naval uniform she is as slim as a reed. But
when I first began to notice her, she was splendidly buxom, and she
remained fairly substantial for the rest of her life. She was always
strikingly pretty, however, even beautiful, and without too much coquetry,
but, as women always are, she was perfectly aware of her attractions.
She had also a very musical but very penetrating, laugh. My father would
say she would laugh to see a cat's tail on fire, which I thought typically
unkind when I first heard it, but eventually I began to realise that
her laughter was both another way to call attention to herself and her
reaction to anything unusual. When one day I told her that a friend
of mine had had an hysterectomy, this produced a perfectly hysterical
gale of laughter. And when I asked her what the hell there was to laugh
about, she explained that she would never have discussed this sort of
problem with a man.
There was never any talk of sex in our family. Eventually
I worked out for myself that my parents must have had intercourse at
least twice in their lives: they had two children. But there was never
any explanation of this: none at all. As far as they were concerned
to inform us - or, at least, me - it might all have been via a combination
of gooseberry bushes and fairies. There seems at that time to have been
a kind of superstition that if young people knew nothing about sex,
they could not do anything about it. When my sister began to menstruate,
for example, and I wanted her to go swimming and she would not, my grandmother's
final desperate explanation was: "Your sister's got a stomach."
Everyone has a stomach. I left, alone, and in a huff.
Years later the shelves of the adult section of our local library provided
more information. There I learnt with mingled horror and fascination
that the smooth marmoreal pudenda of the female statuary I had examined
surreptitiously in several municipal art collections hid mysteries of
a far greater complexity than even I had conceived.
And I was not alone. When popular books about sex
first dared to appear, it was not uncommon to read of marriages which
never had been consummated: not out of any fear of the consequences,
nor even out of repulsion - although the experience is well-known of
the Oxford aesthete John Ruskin and his horror at what was expected
of him by his adored young wife Effie on his marriage night - but even
more simply because neither of the poor blessed creatures knew what
to do: and never found out!
Some may have been amongst the happiest of marriages,
but happy sexual fulfilment has such obvious parallels with happy spiritual
fulfilment that both may have been equally stunted or shallow or have
turned very ugly. The annals of the saints are not all tales of bliss.
For every life spent in beatific contemplation or ecstatic communion
we may count thousands of poor, sad creatures, beating, flogging, cutting,
burning themselves, in frenzied masochism - and also killing many more
thousands of others with the same dopey enthusiasm.
John Ruskin's deep love of beauty - and, more particularly
perhaps, of his tremendous confidence that he knew better than any what
beauty is, combined, as obviously it was, with the terrifying difficulties
he experienced in expressing affection physically - all that this may
help me to explain myself a little better to myself. For here is emerging
a background to my life I had not really examined before: a tightening
cocoon of anxiety, confusion, and suppressed natural desires, that I
could not break through and which only got stronger with the years.
I am sure I had a real affection for my parents. Yet
virtually everyone of their generation was odd in one way or other,
often to the point of being completely dysfunctional. And it was not
only about sex. Both my father and mother had serious problems with
the truth. I do not mean that they were dishonest. About what they believed
to be true they were totally honest. They found lying disgraceful; they
scorned any kind of pretence, and they viewed anyone who might have
sought benefit from deliberate dishonesty with real disgust.
I admire these traits. I inherited them and value
them highly. I always felt uncomfortable about lying, as if I had just
not been particularly clever. But the real difficulty for people of
their generation was that they believed to be true what they wanted
to believe. Generally this was whatever made them feel more comfortable,
more secure, and more optimistic. They recognised other values of course,
but these three tests formed a kind of sieve of Eratosthenes, the ancient
Greek who worked out how to discover whether any given number is a prime
number or not. It is a slow method and clumsy, but no one has found
a better way to be sure.
Similarly, everything that passed their three tests
was real. Anything that did not pass was not just ignored: that would
mean that something different could be believed. Their solution was
far simpler. Alternatives did not exist.
Recently I saw a biography of Brando, an actor of
striking physical beauty, great intelligence and remarkable acting talent.
He spent a major part of his life campaigning for less fortunate people,
and personally he was a complete disaster. He only wished, he remarked,
that he had been brought up in a orphanage.
It is hard to admit: but a child can survive a great
deal of obvious abuse, if, then or later, it can correctly identify
the treatment as abuse. Far more difficult is when a child is not abused
either physically or mentally, but has instead its understanding of
what is real constantly confused by apparently loving parents.
Both my parents were adepts of this kind of alchemy.
God only knows how they acquired their degrees, but both graduated summa
cum laude, and when they wielded it together it had enviable power.
It transformed our unremarkable existence into a continuous heroic pageant.
The French and English kings met in the Middle Ages to compete in displaying
their wealth, and power, and extravagance. The place where they met
was called the Field of the Cloth of Gold. These monarchs were infants
compared with my parents. They held the keys of the world. The world
was their cinema and in it their reality was precisely what they wanted
it to be. Usually both had starring roles. Mostly, I came to realise
much later, they fought over who should be director, or who should have
the starring role.
The effect on a less agile and adaptive mind - like
mine - was frequently to leave it with a number of very puzzling questions.
So great was my parents' pride in their native city, for example, that
for quite a number of years as a small child I was convinced that in
some fashion or other, as yet imperfectly understood, we owned it. I
was also born in a castle, a real castle. It was not our castle. It
belonged to some local nabob who had given it up to be used throughout
the war as a maternity hospital.
And that is why, and only why, I was born there. It
was in the dark, incidentally, because there was a Luftwaffe raid on
Plymouth that night and all the lights were off (castles do not lend
themselves easily to black-out curtains); and I was delivered alone
and in the dark by my mother herself - incidentally - because the nurses
were all in the cellar with the other pregnant mums; delivered in the
dark and alone, still joined umbilically with a mother screaming furiously
with pain, fear, and outrage - incidentally - because before the nurses
all disappeared they had given her an aspirin and a glass of water to
take during her labour. I thus arrived, all unexpectedly, into this
state of dark mad confusion and frightened but furious abandonment.
No wonder that I grew up slightly nervous. No matter. More important
was that my mother never told me of her very decent display of courage,
but only that I should always tell my friends that I first saw light
of day - actually opened my eyes into chaos and darkness - in a castle.
Naturally, for some years I thought we must have owned that too, and
had somehow lost it. My mother explained this too; "It was terribly
drafty", she complained. No wonder, then, that we got rid of it.
But let me not appear too unkind. They were kind,
decent, honest people: honest, that is, as I have defined their particular
kind of honesty: but the older I became the more difficult it became
for me to connect with their reality. At the same time, of course, I
was actually being infected by their virus. I still had my toys, my
scooter, and my Teddy: but their virus was already in my blood.
It was disappointing to discover that all disappointment,
hurt, or failure, cannot be made to disappear by refusing to recognise
that it exists. It was still useful from time to time, a certain degree
of stoicism always is. Adepts of even more esoteric doctrines may indeed
mend bones, close wounds, and heal fevers, simply by conceiving their
patient to be well. But they have always first to see the patient as
unwell, to recognise that the patient does have a problem.
And this is what I was not taught how to do. I was
taught to refuse to recognise that the bone was ever broken, or that
the wound was ever made. In consequence of this, when eventually I was
hurt, and I was to be hurt very deeply - but only as everyone should
expect and know what to do - I could only behave as if it had not happened
at all. There was no-one to forgive, because there was no pain. There
was no loss, so there was no-one to miss. There is a very horrid medical
condition in which a lost limb still feels to be there. It is interesting
- no, again, it isn't: I am just playing this stupid game again - it
is terrifying to discover, as I am finding in writing this, that the
same can be true of a life. In this case the lost limb is part of the
heart.
My poor old Teddy, by the way, to whom I had whispered
so many secrets and gave so much love, was disembowelled in my absence
one day by my dear sister; and since, when she opened his belly, his
natural stuffing had not the appearance that she required, she gave
him a bellyful of entrails of blue toothpaste. He was transformed in
this way into such spectacle of horror that my mother, equally unfeeling
of his importance, threw him out. I never saw him again. By now I was
about ten. I was beginning to learn to keep my thoughts and my feelings
to myself. Clearly something was Not-OK. Probably it was me.
Comment:
To
write about oneself so long after events is an odd experience. One can
see patterns which were not apparent at the time. At first I was disappointed.
What I hoped was to discover features which many share.
Therefore I was disappointed to find emerging this
very high degree of insistence by my parents that the only reality that
mattered was the one that they believed in. This had to be unusual.
At least I thought it was. But then I realised that although their reality
- which of course could change from time to time - was always individual,
the pattern is not unusual. Throughout history the vast majority of
people have always been taught that what parents believe is the only
reality - and that there are no alternatives. This is the reason why
some cultures are so powerful: they induce in great numbers of people,
in whole populations, a kind of social autism, in which people are not
so much locked into an impenetrably private world but are locked irretrievably
into an impenetrable public world - a world in which all that matters
is tradition, doing the right thing, following instructions, and resisting
change.
So, at this stage of my life I was therefore not being
made a very special type of person, as I had thought. I was still unquestionably
in the main-stream. In a little twirling existential eddy of my parents'
own making, of course, but still being carried along the same way as
everyone else. I was being taught to conform to the world of my elders.
This is all very well if they are entirely sane. But what if not?
Colin
Hannaford,
"Soldier."
22/01/05
