FRANK

"What you've got to have to do good physics, is really solid periods of time."
Richard P. Feynman

   Even when a writer is determined to write nothing that his readers can disbelieve, sometimes he finds he must.
   Once it was possible to drive into the centre of London at almost any time of day; and park. That's twice, in one sentence. The second part of was certainly not the easiest; but, if you knew some leafy squares, a few quiet side-streets and hidden cul-de-sacs, it was always possible. There was still traffic, of course, and that morning I was half way down Brook Street when I realised that I could not possibly reach Soho in time. I double-parked by a row of shiny black limousines at the entrance of a grand hotel and assumed, as a drill manual would say, an upright position : I got out. The Queen's personal banker was watching me with keen attention.
   On closer inspection he was not the Queen's banker. He looked much more like an ex-marine sergeant-major: calm, competent, and very tough indeed. He had probably met more royalty, con-men and half-cut millionaires than I had eaten sausage rolls. He wore an immaculate blue suit with lapels a little too wide; and was bare-headed. Behind him hovered two reserves, each wearing a black coachman's top-hat with a broad gold band gleaming against the brushed-silk sheen, long coats with shiny buttons even up the deep cuffed sleeves, black shoes, and white gloves. I hadn't looked up at the canopy above me. The hotel was Claridges, once the headquarters of General de Gaulle in London, now the headquarters of pop-stars, and their popsies, and Russian billionaires, and theirs.
   "Can you please let me use your phone?" I asked him.
   "Are you a guest here, sir?" he asked me politely. It was not his lapels which were uncommonly wide. They were wide to match his shoulders.
   "No. But I have an appointment with Lord Longford, and I'm late."
   At once his left arm swept out a path towards the door, whilst his right beckoned one of the coachmen to take his place. "In that case, sir: if you will just come inside, I am sure we can accommodate you."
   A minute later Longford's secretary was unconcerned. "Oh, he won't mind, you know. He'll just wait for you. He's like that."
   Inside the Gay Hussar a tall gaunt man stood up, smiled, and held out his hand: "How do you do," he said. He had a pleasant cultured voice, with no trace of Irish. We sat at one of the small tables on the left-hand side of the long room, far away from the door. He had already taken the seat against the wall, but a mirror above his head allowed me to survey much of the rest of the room. We must have both been early; we were almost alone.
   If good physics needs really solid periods of time, metaphysics, which must contain physics, should need great vast unexplored continents of time. Unless, of course, you have a very good idea of the right direction. I had the idea.
    But I was too frightened to take even one more step. For the next year and more King would urge me to seek guidance through prayer. I had convinced him - it would be unfair to say that he had convinced himself, although that of course was true as well - that I had had a direct apprehension of God. I did not know that he would continue to write to me. I felt that I had failed to impress him: that he had decided that I was merely a foolish young man who had had received this truly miraculous visitation - 'once in very few hundred years', he told me - but who then did not know what to do, but would even refuse his advice.
But what I had obviously failed to convey to King was its power. I had failed to tell him of its awful, shocking, humbling, frightening, crashing weight. This had been no gentle murmur; no confidential whisper or encouraging caress. It had been more like running a car so hard into a wall that the metal folds around you, opens up and enters your flesh - and will not let go. I feel it now, forty years on. This is what I knew of prayer. It was not an experience I wanted very soon again. Very simply, and honestly, I thought that if I did experience it again - I might die. You do not experiment with a force like that. It is not another helping of pudding.
   So now, before I left for my next posting -to Germany again, to the British Army of the Rhine, supposedly still helping to prevent the Warsaw Pact from over-running Europe - what I needed was a good metaphysicist, and, this man, Peter Stanford Francis Aungier Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, Baron Longford of Cowley, Frank to his friends, was the nearest I could find. Unlike King, he had written extensively about Christian spirituality. I hoped he would have some advice for me.
   It would be too much to hope that he would be impartial as well. His father had been killed in the debacle of Gallipoli. Brought up an Irish Protestant, just as many of the original United Irishmen had been, together with his wife Elizabeth he became an enthusiastic convert to Catholicism in his early twenties. Then he had been an Oxford don, an Oxford primary school teacher; then in quick succession Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and then a Minister of Civil Aviation.
   But both of these were political sops aimed at bringing him, a noble earl and Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, into any pre-war government. But when war with Germany appeared unavoidable, he had flown to Ireland to attempt to persuade the Irish leader, De Valera, to let the British Navy use the neutral Irish ports. De Valera refused. Although the eventual cost of British, and later American, lives whose bombed and torpedoed ships were refused entry to those ports would be painful, he was not wrong to refuse. From its bases in France the Luftwaffe would have promptly mercilessly bombed a defenceless Ireland, and might easily have invaded as well. Britain would have found impossible to prevent the first, and possibly the second. Britain, in the last analysis, would have been the loser.
   Even so, when Hitler's death was announced in 1946, De Valera called personally the German ambassador in Dublin to express his regret. Even those who had thought themselves beyond astonishment, found this act astonishing. Ireland was not only protected from attack by its declared neutrality, but by British and American lives as well. This exaggerated, even hysterical, hatred of Britain was to become the most un-Christian feature of the Ireland that he helped create.
   In 1947, as the first British minister for occupied Germany, Longford is credited with ensuring that the German people did not starve - and he did this by diverting food supplies that were meant originally for Britain. By this time he was not insignificant. He had been a First Lord of the Admiralty; Leader of the House of Lords; twice Lord Privy Seal. He had a first-class Oxford honours degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; a beautiful and very clever wife; they had eight children. He had written a Life of Jesus, another of Francis of Assisi, another of De Valera. He wrote a lot. He was also a successful publisher.
   With all of this, Frank should have been treated as both a saint and a sage. Instead of which he was widely regarded as a fool. He was not incapable of resenting this. When one prime minister told him that he judged his mental age at 12, Frank replied that he thought the same of the other's judgement. As a riposte it was more of the kind that cabbies shout: "And up yours too, mate!"- rather than the exquisite, slow-acting poison that Christ Church dons are supposed to exchange. Still, it showed that he was capable of a little ordinary human irritation.
   But that was the problem: Frank never wanted to show so much ordinary humanity. It would be a failure of the character he was working to perfect. He believed in the power of forgiveness. "To understand all," he would tell me towards the end of our talk, "is to forgive all". Which I thought as daft as Jonathan Swift's mockery of distilling sunbeams out of cucumbers in the Academy of Lagado (Chapter V).
   Frank knew that he was clever. But his most closely guarded hope and deepest secret, was all too obvious. He wanted to be known far more as a saint than a sage. Thanks to his remarkable success in pursuing the most publicly loathed people in order to tell them that he had forgiven them, everyone knew that everyone - except possibly Frank - knew his secret. And that was why he was regarded so widely as a fool.
   It was unfair. After I had ordered a lemon sole (I had always wanted to know what it looked like), and whilst he murmured to the waiter about the wine, I studied him. An odd cove; and not much as I expected: thinning hair; long fingers; long face; altogether almost skeletal. His voice was his best feature: a very English aristocratic voice, but very clear, not over-blown. No showing-off; no side.
   I had got to him in much the same way as I had to Cecil. I had sent him the same text, typed by the Dragon; and the invitation to have lunch with him had arrived by return. The next time I would meet him, many years later, shortly before he died, would be in the dining room of the House of Lords: which is really very grand. It would make a wonderful brothel - and is, I suppose, almost there; most of its occupants are whores already. 'Visit the Whores of Parliament!' I always wanted to stand in Westminster Square outside and sell foreign tourists T-shirts with that slogan on them.
   But this could not be said of Frank. He had never sold himself, and for this alone I could forgive him his vanity. But I also found, quite instinctively, that I liked him. He, too, would turn out to be no use to me. But this was not - at least not directly - because he was reluctant to help. Instead it was because he was to find it necessary to try to convince me that I might be wrong in supposing that I was an ordinary person who had received a wonderful spiritual insight that many other ordinary persons must have had - but which, for a many obvious reasons they were unable or were too afraid to announce.
   He did not object to me describing myself as ordinary. Without any false humility, he would almost certainly said it of himself. But his explanation was far simpler. There was no-one else - at least, there was no-one currently alive - who might combine their experience with mine. If there was, he would know. He was sure. It was his expertise. His gaze as he told me this was careful, gentle, almost tender.
   My lemon sole was the faint outline of a thin flat fish on a plate in a thin puddle of creamy white sauce. It was delicious. I poked at it gloomily. For the first time I had a sense of isolation. My first real defeat. In the mirror behind him I could see the room was filling up. It was now half-full. Although he was one of the best known figures in London, no-one paid us the least attention.
   It is a friendly, cosy, comfortable place, the Gay Hussar. Of course it is dated by its name. All hussars were gay once. They had no use for stable-boys except to expect them to comb, water, feed, and bed their horses - but not themselves. For over thirty years it has been one of London's famous restaurants, popular with journalist and politicians. But this is more for its atmosphere than its toe-curling cuisine. It was not grand and not even big. You could scarcely call it luxurious. But you had the feeling that if you kicked your shoes off, a waiter would bring you a pair of slippers.
   Being fundamentally kind, as well as entirely without side, Longford sensed my dismay. "There may be more to come," he told me with his most encouraging smile. He was just as bad as King. Why did they always think of wanting more and getting more from prayer, like a drunk looking for a bottle, an addict, for another needle?
   I have enough, I told him. The problem is to use it. They really did not understand. Until it begins to wear out, the brain appears capable of remembering everything: every moment, minute, and hour to which it has given its attention in a lifetime. But almost all of this experience is what Samuel Becket so painfully describes in Waiting for Godot. Nothing happens. According to Becket, this whole wondrous apparatus of the human mind, a million years in making, is - apart from the occasional kick of sexual ecstasy, the wonderful joy of love and the visceral jolt of fear - fit for nothing except to register the silence of a vast, chaotic and empty universe. And yet again there are some events that can so shock this system, that everything that happens before or after it becomes even less significant. It can be a bad experience: a loss so painful, so damaging, disabling, and meaningless that death is no longer to be feared. And it can be so good: so uplifting, affirming, enchanting, and seeming to be full of meaningful that life is not feared. The first of these is called a trauma; the second, an enlightenment
   He was turning his bread-roll with nervous fingers. Frank had spent virtually all his life confusing people. Was he really wise? Or was he really a fool? Now he was talking about souls. The soul was possessed by everyone, and was the best part of everyone. It was damaged when people committed crimes. But he believed in the power of forgiveness. Redemption was possible for anyone's soul. The opportunity had only to be offered to them. It had to be offered, whatever their crime, with forgiveness.
   Preoccupied with my own thoughts I realised that he was telling me a story. Soon after hostilities ended he had flown to Germany to find out what was happening. Many of the almost unbelievable facts about the horrors of Nazism were just beginning to surface. As far south as Austria, every city and virtually every town had been bombed to rubble by the USAF and RAF. Eastwards there was desolation up to Moscow. Hamburg was destroyed - and Dresden finally. "Are we become beasts?" asked Churchill, horrified, when he was shown the results of the Dresden raids. And Essen, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hanover, Berlin - north of Munich all the major cities were ruins. Germany's strength was finally exhausted. And the German people now expected retribution from the West as well as from the East.
   His plane had scarcely rolled to a halt when the side door was opened, and Frank took his first deep breath of damp, cold air. He knew what he must do! An official reception party waiting for him anxiously by the terminal building. They knew that his report to the British parliament could do them a great deal of good, or leave them starving. "I sprang forward, my arms out," he demonstrated, suddenly and most alarmingly resembling a scarecrow, causing several heads to turn, "to show them, you know, that I came in a spirit of peace and good-will - and they hadn't put the stairway in place to the ground, and I fell ten feet, and damaged my face, quite badly."
   Like any good raconteur, he neither frowned nor smiled at this. It was not clear what I was supposed to do. I winced and I said ouch. But you could not help liking the man who told such a story against himself. You could, however, be annoyed. I already realised that he must have made an effort to overcome his natural dislike of men in uniform. In 1939 he had volunteered for the Territorial Army only to be invalided out a year later in a state of nervous prostration. Whereas King could easily imagine a messenger of God telling his followers: "Think not that I am come to send peace on Earth. I came, not to send peace, but a sword" .¹ Matthew 10:34. This would have been hard for Frank to understand. It is indeed hard for anyone to understand literally. In his world there was never any need for violence. People only did wrong when they lost their way. Having been found again - as he could only try to show by example - they could be redeemed.
   I realised that he must be uneasy in meeting me. I had told him nothing of my soldiering. Possibly he thought I was full accustomed to wading through blood like some Crusader knight. For just another peevish moment, whilst he was explaining his theory to me, I imagined he could have wished me someone he could be sure would think and speak like him: a nun or monk, or even better, as my irritation deepened, a rapist, a murderer, or a bomber of some proven record - someone with whom he could pray, to whom he could explain his own forgiveness, and so help them to be redeemed. It was not his power that did the redeeming, he was explaining, but the power of Jesus. A mere human being could only act as the channel for this power. What total bollocks, I thought.
   "But you can't do good without a good theory," I protested, just a touch impatiently. The passionate scarecrow promptly became the inquisitorial Christ Church don at a quite Oxford afternoon tutorial. He pressed himself back into his upholstered backrest. "And do you have a good theory?" he asked, even more impatiently. There was that humanity again. I liked the man, but not this saintly posturing.
   "No" I conceded. "But people don't only kill or harm because they are angry, or frightened, or greedy, or frustrated, or confused. Killing is exciting. Cruelty is exciting. Power is exciting. Being given permission to kill, particularly being told that that you are justified to kill and that there will never be any punishment for killing - from the law or because there is no law that will touch you - this is exciting. The first few occasions, ten or twenty, will be enough for many. But some people really do enjoy it. They always enjoy it. They can kill hundreds, and thousands - more. Killing can become addictive."
   "Pathological." he corrected sharply. He was mining the end of his bread-roll, rolling it into little pills. He leant forward and poured me more wine from the carafe. I thanked him for the wine, but I shook my head.
   Conviction is better. Moral sacrifice is even better. If people can only be convinced that to do what is necessary for the greater good, and to do it they must overcome their own true morality - once they are passed that stage they will do literally anything. No crime is a crime after that. This is how the SS operated. But, of course, some also do enjoy it. There is always a sexual element too. Killing is highly sexual for some, more, in fact, than any other kind of sex. Cruelty is a form of lust."
   "You seem to know a lot about it," he told me, and suddenly I realised that, with perfectly unfeigned sadness, he was commiserating with me.
"I've thought a lot about it," I retorted shortly. I did not know if I could kill anyone, certainly not in cold blood. But the mental rehearsal, Nightingale used to say, is even more important than the physical practice. This is also Zen. For the Zenist the arrow or the blade are never aimed at the mark. Consciousness must not intervene. I have a profound respect for Zen. It is perhaps experiencing the other extreme of human spirituality, of knowing that absolute unchanging and changeless depth of silence through and through, absorbing it, becoming absorbed into it.
   There are deep mysteries here, and I have not plumbed them. But Zen seems to me repeatedly to hit its mark; a mark I do not see, but know is important. It has as much to do with the confusion of what we think we know as reality as the other extreme that I had experienced. The only certainty - but here I was sure we would never agree - is that we do not know how far reality extends - or what we can explore of it. As I write this now, I am reminded of the young monk who had spent a year working for his spiritual master hoping for enlightenment and who finally summoned up the courage to ask him for direct instructions to gain enlightenment. His master grunted his agreement, took the young man's slate and wrote on it: "Attention."
   Another year passed, and the young man, finding himself no closer in his understanding, finally and fearfully went to the master again to repeat his request. This time the older man jerked the slate from his grasp, and wrote on, it in even plainer characters: "Attention! means - only - ATTENTION."    I like this story. You want an idol? I sell idols. You want more stories? I have more stories. You want to know? Learn not to know.
Our meal did not last much longer. I was encouraged to finish the wine and to have some kind of pudding, probably a creme caramel. I used to favour them. We had only shared a carafe of wine. I was sober. He had work to attend to at his office. I believed him. I had not learnt from him what I had wanted to learn: precisely the opposite. This was very hard.
   What had I expected? I am not sure either. I was certainly hoping that he might know others who could have - might be still grappling with this problem. I might learn from them. At the time all he offered seemed to me defeatist. I should simply try to 'put your experience to work in your life.' As it was to turn out, this was the best advice, it was certainly the best meant, that I was to receive. It seemed at the time, however, too weak. Implicit in both his and King's response was the unpleasant suggestion that whatever it was that might be done with the knowledge I had a acquired, it was not likely that I was not the best person to use it.
   My last view of him was on the pavement outside the restaurant he had chosen, a thin, tall, gaunt, very gentle man; not so much of a fool as convinced the world is essentially simple; no depth; all shade; only goodness confused by reason. But it seemed to me, and it seems to me still, that there is real evil in the world. It comes from certainty without humility. As I turned at a corner and looked back, he lifted one hand to wave. He was wearing an old dark blue overcoat. One of its buttons was hanging by a thread, and because he must have missed this in buttoning it up, for it was fastened crookedly. He was easy man to like. Stuff the title. Stuff the headlines and the unpopularity and the ridicule he so determinedly courted. Stuff all that too. Frank Pakenham never sold himself.

Comment:

   So, after all, I was alone. I did not feel too much of this as a burden just then. But as I was leaving my street-corner, I was beginning to realise that I had just lost my last chance of support from two of the most influential men in London. In 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was waiting to be hanged. He was a young German Lutheran priest imprisoned by the Nazis for criticising them and their regime. Many German schools are now named after him. He was hanged on April 5th 1945. He was then 38; not a genius, but nearly. Hitler killed himself, just over three weeks later, on April 30th. He was then 66, still a genius to many of his people; his ideas and energy, and their belief in him, had laid waste to much of Poland, Russia, and Europe.
   On the April 30th 1944 Dietrich wrote to a friend:

"Religious people speak of God when human perception is (often just from laziness) at an end, or human resources fail; it is really always the Deus ex machina they call to their aid, either for the so called solving of insoluble problems or as support in human failures-always, that is to say, helping out human weakness or on the borders of human existence. Of necessity, that can only go on until men can, by their own strength push those borders a little further, so that God becomes superfluous as a Deus ex machina. I have come to be doubtful even about talking of "borders of human existence" It always seems to me that in talking thus we are only seeking to frantically to make room for God.
I should like to speak of God not on the borders of life but at its centre, therrefore not in death but in his life. On the borders it seems to me better to hold our peace and leave the problem unsolved. Belief in the Resurrection is not the solution of the problem. The church stands not where the human powers give out, on the borders, but in the centre of the village." ² Bonhoeffer, Bethge, Rowohlt, 1976, p. 120.

   Without knowing it, I had just caught up with Bonhoeffer. I still thought that completing his puzzle - to find the evidence that "God is not transcendental; that God with us in our lives, right now" - would be easy. Easy, that is, for me. Even now I can find now this confidence appalling. Had not the Witch herself angrily told me: "You cannot make the world as you want it"?

    She was speaking, of course, of my wish to serve her all her life. This was no longer possible,. But the true Samurai - which also means the true 'obsessive' of truth - serves no actual master, takes neither salt nor food, and even gives his blood, without commitment to any secular, religious, or even to any earthly cause. Now I did now want to make the world as I believe God wanted it, and I had even decided how the evidence for this - as Bonhoeffer himself, that brave and lonely warrior in his cell, might have wanted it to appear.
   It must be simple. It must be obvious. It must be evident everywhere. Anyone should be able to confirm it from their own experience. It should strongly suggest that goodness and altruism are not natural in mankind. And then the final clause: the impulse to be just, merciful, compassionate, and above all humble before creation - must come from outside to shape mankind's earth-bound ,deadly, greedy, and revengeful nature.
   That part of his appreciation being over, the good soldier then proceeds to make his plan. Unfortunately I had not the slightest idea where, to start Or how.

Colin Hannaford,

"Soldier."
30/01/05

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