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KEW

Mister Sharp : Mister Softly

If what is commanded be not in the power of everyone, all the numberless exhortations in the Scriptures, and also all the promises, threatenings, expostulations, reproofs, asseverations, benedictions, and maledictions, together with all the forms of precepts, must of necessity stand coldly useless.

Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466-1536)



   It took a while to get our life back on track. The Army, of course, bless its bumbling old heart, behaved as if nothing had happened. No-one apologised; but that was to be expected. I did not think to ask for an apology or redress. I would have thought it disgraceful if I had. Our guys were still getting in the way of progress. They were still getting shot or shredded, usually when wearing brightly patterned uniforms intended to make them invisible in the fields and woods of Northern Europe, and usually whilst looking the wrong way. They did not complain, and I was intact. All that had happened to me was that I had just spent over a calendar month having my hearing tested. That was in the medical record I was eventually allowed to see. And that was really that. After it was certain that I was not going to steal the armoury keys and set off alone for London; perhaps even more important, when it was clear that no mainline newspaper editor was going to take up the story, not even Silverlight's - everyone was charming.
   This did not fool me, of course. I was to remain in the grip of considerable paranoia for years. From that month on I never again trusted anyone completely. My young wife expecting never again to hear another bomb or bullet, now needed constantly to be alert that I might annoy the authorities further by their decisions. Her anxiety was hard to bear. I did try to tell her what had happened, but this only made it worse. When she was sufficiently excited she would tell me: "I know how clever you are. You tricked the doctors, but I know you, and I know you're are mad." This was not, however, a gentle marital joke. Unfortunately, she meant it.
   My boss was clearly embarrassed when he saw me again. It was he, after all, who had first called me into his office to tell me I should 'just pop down to the Medical Centre, will you?' and almost certainly he knew then what was in store for me; but he welcomed me back sincerely. There was almost certainly nothing that he could have done. Otherwise no-one paid us any special attention. Everyone else behaved as if I had just been away on vacation. Although no-one except those immediately involved knew it at the time, the secret talks between the then Home Secretary and McGuinness and his supporters were to be repeated at intervals for the next thirty years. Only the Home Secretaries were to change from time to time.
   I should really have been lined up for a Nobel prize. If I had had my wits about me, I might have applied for a transfer to the Intelligence Corps, where that 'high intelligence and potential' that Ferguson had noticed might have been more usefully applied. The next 'responsible post' that he had recommended for me was to be instead a simple pen-pusher in the Ministry of Defence in London. I was clearly being sent right to be the top!
   First, however, it was decided that my pen should get a little sharpening. To indicate that I was now fully forgiven - to give them credit, really the best they could do - my superiors also offered me a place on what is called the Junior Division of the Staff College Course. This would be at Warminster, an aptly named small town in the middle of England's Salisbury Plain. I was to go there as soon as possible after moving to London. There I would find myself in the company of precisely ninety-nine of the fittest, some of the bravest, and even some of the brightest, of the British Army's young captains, all intended for eventual promotion to staff rank.
   Truth to tell, I was still in something like a state of shock. I was no longer bothered by Netley and the humiliation that had been intended to inflict: I was sure of this myself. The fact remained that there I had had the most vivid spiritual experience that I had ever read about in all my labours as a book-worm, whilst sanity was being subjected at the same time to the most careful clinical assessment: and they had not been found incompatible. Either fact may not be unusual: but so far as I know both have never happened before in the history of the world.
   I was preoccupied. I felt the responsibility of dealing with this knowledge to be enormous; and since I had absolutely no idea where to begin, for the time being I was simply letting the Army do what it does best: to arrange its people's lives for them. Before he had handed on my file to Colonel Ferguson for his final report, and doubtless because some of his team of psychiatrists had also had me under their microscopes, I had been seen one last time by Mr Green. "Well," had been his verdict, "you are certainly a bit of an odd-ball. But," and the last was delivered with what looked suspiciously like a regretful shake of the head, "there's absolutely nothing wrong with you."
   I told Ferguson, of course. I felt I had to. I wanted the facts of my experience to be entered somewhere in an official record. So, after he had finished telling me that I had finally been cleared by his efforts, I told him: "I think you ought to know: the first evening I was here, after I saw you, I had a remarkable experience in that room up there," I nodded upwards, for my luxury apartment was just above our heads. "It seemed to me to be an experience of God."
   He winced, poor man, and his left hand jerked up defensively as if to swat away a wasp. "I don't think," after a pause was all he had to say, "that we will want to make a note of that." More sensible than usual, I did not insist that he should.
Within another month or so we were in North London, in married quarters within a bleakly tidy brick and concrete estate. We had an apartment on the third floor and we bought a little Sony colour television, then a fascinating gem of a thing, a brightly shining window through which we could see visions of green forest, mountains and blue seas. We also bought me a suit. Second-hand and shiny in the seat, it was all that we could afford to fit me for the great metropolis and my daily journey to an antiseptic-smelling office in Holborn on the third floor which I shared with a morose major who would rather be sailing. Together we were responsible for deciding training budgets.
   Actually he decided everything. I wrote his letters for him, and when these were in short supply I wrote long, long treatises on the need to open up Western philosophy so that others could share my experience. Both letters and my scribble were entrusted to the typing pool. Soon, I was to discover, the letters were being typed by anyone; but transcribing my scribble into beautifully clear text became the sole responsibility of the dragon-lady who ruled it, sharp of tongue, fierce of eye; and only a little more than four foot tall.
   Always in life one meets people whose friendship is as unexpected as it is strong, and whom one would like to treasure; and then they are snatched away and never seen again. The Dragon was one of these. I have struggled to remember her name. Possibly I could find it; it must be recorded somewhere. Possibly I could find her, but now she would be very old. Normally she entered, delivered, collected, and disappeared without a word. She was not pretty, the Dragon, and as far as I know, she lived alone; but she had a power within her that allowed no-one's pity. One fateful day she appeared beside my desk with the latest of my theses in her hand, and she stopped there. This was so unusual that the major looked up from his sailing catalogue; but she ignored him. "You have," she told me emphatically, "a razor-sharp mind", as she laid before me her neatly typed translation of my last consignment of scribbled pages.
   That brought to an end my intra-mural 'Tractatus Philosophicus'. The major, outraged, muttering "razor-sharp mind" over and over again on the way, took me to see our colonel. The colonel sent me to see our general. Our general, genial enough, as it turned out, told me it was no great shakes to run an Army corps: "I thought it would be easy, once I got to the top. But it isn't. First you have to sort out everyone else's cock-ups before you can begin. And by then: it's too late!" In contrast, my own misdemeanours did not seem to worry him too much. He only decided I should leave for Warminster sooner than expected.
   Apart from the Dragon, who, until I lost sight of her finally, would continue to give me an affectionate nod on the stairs, I still knew absolutely no-one I could trust to talk to. I had grown up reading Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell, even Voltaire and Rousseau - but not Paul, or Aquinas, or Spinoza, or John XXIII.
   Perhaps unkindly, I discounted all churchmen, all religious leaders, even all religious thinkers, out of hand. Later I was to find this unfair, but at the time, and throughout this time, I was too impatient. At one time or other I had read the works of representatives of most of the major religions. They had had ample time to persuade me that their ideas were true. But I remained unconvinced. Zen. had been the most attractive. The achievement of removing the attention of the mind from the mind, the achievement of 'no-mind', which the Zen Buddhists held up to be the ultimate spiritual experience, I believed I had briefly achieved, and certainly I understood.
   But there was no room in Zen for my kind of experience. If it belonged anywhere at all, it was only in the Abrahamic-Mosaic-Islamic tradition, in those religions which speak with absolute conviction of 'our' God: not of 'mine', which is the more primitive tradition, but 'ours'. I needed to find someone who seemed to understand, with me, that these religions do not fail to convince universally - and therefore produce conflict everywhere - because they cannot be believed. It is rather because they are incomplete. No-one should need to be taught that they are true. If they were complete, it would be obvious. Obvious, that is, to anyone.
   This was the goal. It would not be extravagant to call it the grail. There is a tidy industry today churning out books, some of them historically respectable, about the medieval search for the Grail, but in my own view it was never anything historical, material - or genealogical. It is not anything that anyone could ever find 'out there'. The Grail has to be within us.
   I suppose that I must have spent much of the next year - it is all really a blur - in a search rather like that of John le Carré's dying head of British intelligence, and after his death the superbly portrayed George Smiley, both trawling obsessively through their endless labyrinth of files for traces of the agents of their rival Karla, the Soviet master-spy, wanting to know what they might have missed in the past. Oddly enough I had met le Carré some years before. I had been invited to his house in Somerset just as the film of his story The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had become an international success. I had been attracted by his au pair, who I had met at a party. She told me she was working for a family near Wells, and that she could invite me to dinner there. 1 I was received very kindly by him and by his very pretty wife, and I was there once or twice again.
He was ten years older than me, had considerable charm, was of course immensely clever, but I found him too much immersed in the Vietnam war, and the minutiae of US and Soviet rivalries, both combining to ensure that Britain's influence on world affairs should soon be made extinct. At the time I was too shy to try to exploit the connection; even if I had wanted it I think he found me a bit of a prig, and later it never occurred to me to ask his advice. The last time I drove to his house was only to deliver a pair of 'liberated' stainless steel Army penknives for his boys in thanks for his hospitality.
Rather like Smiley, I was now trying to review everything I had ever read before, just to see if there was anything I might have missed, any hint, any veiled suggestion, that someone might have had an experience similar to mine. Finally I found a hint of some understanding in a boastful little book by a supremely vain and bossy man called King. I lost the book, but found the man; and eventually he gave me another to replace it. Although we almost never agreed, I grew to like him enormously. Not only did he come closer than anyone I would subsequently meet to appreciate the magnitude of the problem I had set myself - and even then he underestimated it - and although supposed to be austere, autocratic, and even humourless, he treated me with a respect and affection which did much to restore my belief in myself.


Photograph  by  Douglas  Glass

   Cecil Harmsworth King often told me that he thought of himself as a newspaperman: not a journalist. This would be rather like calling Krupp a machinist; or George Washington, a farmer. His mother, Geraldine, a woman, he told me, whose lack of affection had damaged his life, was the sister of Lord Northcliffe. Originally incarnated as Alfred Charles Harmsworth in County Dublin, Northcliffe had introduced mass circulation journalism to London. By the beginning of the 20th century he was extremely rich. His nephew Cecil was therefore brought up in an environment of wealth, privilege and effortless social connections. His school was Winchester and from there onto the natural escalator to Christ Church College, Oxford. He believed he was born to rule, an image of himself which never departed.
   But in 1937 Cecil was a mere advertising director of one of his uncle's papers when he formed a most unlikely partnership with a 'real' journalist, Hugh Cudlipp.
    Cudlipp was the youngest son of a Cardiff travelling salesman, Willie, who was mostly hard up. He left Gladstone Elementary School in a deprived part of Cardiff at 14 to make tea and run errands for the Penarth News, which had a circulation of 3,000. The chemistry between the two was immediate. When Cecil was made a senior director, he chose Cudlipp as his new editor. At the age of 23 Cudlipp became the youngest chief editor in Fleet Street. Between them King and Cudlipp turned their paper into the world's biggest selling daily. In 1967 the Daily Mirror's circulation reached a world record of 5,282,137 copies, and by 1963 King was chairman of the International Printing Corporation (IPC), then the biggest publishing empire in the world. His influence was enormous. He himself believed that criticism of Churchill's government by his main British daily, the Mirror, had caused that government's collapse after the war. He could meet anyone, at his own request: and he often did.
   His own downfall must therefore have surprised him more than anyone. It was certainly most painful, not least because the leader of the palace guards - his fellow directors - who decided he must go was his nearest colleague and oldest friend, Hugh Cudlipp. Rather like me, I suppose, but on a considerably grander scale, in 1968 King had decided that the then Labour government must go. He had written a front page article for the Mirror with the headline: "Enough is enough". He also wrote the headline. He then signed the article. It was he, however, who was forced by his other directors to resign.
   King certainly did not mind making enemies. But, as seems frequently to be the case for owners of newspaper, especially of lots of them, King was not as much admired by his fellow professionals as he would probably have wished. Almost without exception, people who knew Cudlipp remember him with admiration and affection. He was obviously an attractive character: lively, resourceful, irreverent and humorous, as well as a very able popular newspaperman. King seems to have been exactly the opposite: remote, patronising, self-important, no journalist, and not much of a businessman either. 2 Others have simply called him megalomaniac. The last charge is probably the most fair. After his self-destructive failure to remove the government by his block-busting propaganda, he had attempted to form an alternative 'emergency government', to be composed of the most noble, courageous and best minds in the country, all, quite naturally, hand-picked by himself. The most noble, courageous, and the best minds in the country listened to him for less than an hour, then all fled, muttering fearfully to one another about treason. Probably that is what it would have been.
   But none of this was known to me when I was invited to his gloriously beautiful old mansion by the Thames at Kew. I simply wanted to talk. I had somehow found a way to send him one of the shorter of the Dragon's neatly typed tracts. This had produced a telephone number. The telephone was answered by his second wife, Ruth Railton, who told me how to get there. "Ignore all the signs," she told me.
   With the benefit of hindsight, I can say now that they were both pretty dotty. But they were gloriously dotty in a very old-fashioned, dignified and honourable way. Cecil clearly adored Ruth. Ruth adored Cecil. Ruth was only in her twenties when, virtually alone, she began the construction of the National Youth Orchestra. That took some courage. So did taking on such a monstrous basket-case as King is supposed to have been. He told me: "She found me in pieces, and has put me together again." An odd contradiction from a supposed megalomaniac. And Ruth's devotion to her man has earned her another poisoned epitaph: "Unfortunately for everyone in their orbit, underneath a superficially sweet surface, bubbled malevolence matched by energy, cunning and zeal."3 Beware, in other words, other musicians.
   I think the truth is a lot simpler, and far easier to understand. There is no contradiction. They were both extremely able. They had both great - but not extreme - self-belief, most curiously combined in Cecil's case with sadness, over sixty years old, that his mother had not loved him more; and they had both found sincere love for each other. With all of this, however, they both had an absolute hatred, better would be a fearful loathing, of mediocrity: and they found mediocrity all around them. They felt that England was being betrayed, not so much by the real agents of the real Karlas, stealing its precious industrial and military secrets, but by every act of piddling dishonesty, every dismal failure of vigilance and integrity, every cheap betrayal of the public's trust by virtually everyone - so it seemed to them - in politics and business. This poisoning of the public's infinitely precious own integrity - so it seemed to them - could only be prevented by the appearance of a spectacular new champion of honesty and courage: preferably one with an active private line to God.
   "Which is why," said Cecil, "we invited you here."
   "But you mustn't take me for a fool," I told him. I had been in the room no more than ten minutes.
   I was to learn that it was his habit, whilst he was speaking, to stroke the upper wings of his armchair. Since they were covered in light blue velvet, this habit of his had worn away the pile in two vertical streaks. It gave both him and his chair a look of shabby comfort in front of the tall windows of that very grand house beside the Thames. Originally part of the demesne of Hampton Palace, designed for William III by Christopher Wren, Cecil told me he had found it a wreck and offered the Crown Agents a deal: he would restore it in return for a life-long lease. The stroking stopped whilst he replied: "You wouldn't be here, if that's what I thought you were."
   But we were at cross-purposes from the start. It was Cecil who pronounced the fateful formula: "You have received the direct apprehension of God", and who told me I must urgently read the spiritual work of a medieval monk, called The Cloud of Unknowing. Later I found it in the London Library, but read only part of it, being afraid of confusing my own and others' thoughts. It was also at this meeting that Cecil opened his hands to me to say very gravely and formally: "Now I am entirely at your disposal."
   It was a valuable offer. Despite his fall from grace, Mr King, as I actually always addressed him, still had considerable influence - and wealth. He had been, after all, a director of the Bank of England, and both before he died, and far more seriously afterwards, Ruth earned a great deal of spiteful obloquy by refusing to hand over control of it to his family.
   My own feeling is that this was entirely according to his wishes. In my presence he once told Dame Ruth: "I met Roy the other day. 'What are you doing now?' I asked him. He told me he was settling money on his children. Don't do that, I told him: you'll ruin them." 4 How often those who have enjoyed inherited privilege and position all their life manage to convince themselves that neither of these have contributed to their own success. Perhaps they are right. Clearly Cecil thought so.
   But this magnificent open-handed offer was also not meant. When he asked me what I wanted to do, I told him that I needed to study. This was rejected with a contemptuous shrug. This was not their intention. They both thought that I must be already inspired sufficiently and, rather like that other mysterious commoner, Jeanne d'Arc, champion of the French against their English and Burgundian despoilers, I was expected to lead a similar English revolt against the army of cheats, crooks, and gangsters, and their greed, their cowardice, and their dishonesty - all of which they both believed could be swept away by some new King Arthur, another bloody Parzifal. 5
   Ruth's own idea of persuading of this possibility I found very sweet, but also only equally absurd. She sent me a copy of the 1814 picture of the Duke of Wellington, the one by Goya with slightly too much white of eye, and told me how much I resembled him. I did not think so. The owner and occupier of Number One, London, on the south-east side of Hyde Park, would have to wait a while before I challenged his place in history books.
"No, no; study will do no good. You will only fall into the hands of all those dreadful, dusty professors," Ruth continued from one side; and Cecil from the other: "You only need to ask for guidance in your prayers, and you will receive it."
   Oh dear, oh dear. They were grievously disappointed that on my second visit I did not arrive, armoured in gleaming black steel and mounted on a white stallion. The setting at Kew would have been perfect: beside the Thames, the pennants of Hampton Court place catching the sun. "Rally to me, free men and free women of England; the hour of your deliverance has come." And so on. Or Lenin with his worker's cap clenched in his left hand: "You have nothing to lose but your chains!"
   But to all their demands for me to begin immediate action, I could only explain that first I must know what to say. Since I did not know what to say it was precisely this that I needed to learn.
   It was not bold enough for them. Although I disappointed them, they did not especially disappoint me. They were both kind and interested. That was what I needed, and for what I was grateful. Dame Ruth put me in touch with a gentle priest called Geoffrey Boulton, whom I visited more often. "But just don't," he would only beg me in turn, "become one of those terrible charismatics!" Which was ironic, because this seemed to be precisely what the Kings wanted me to become.
   Cecil continued to write to me regularly for well over a year: until well after I had finally left the Army and had found a refuge in the Hebrides; and after he and Ruth had left the Pavilion at Kew, and found a new home in Dublin, also called by them by the same name. Patiently he answered every one of my increasingly obscure essays with a letter of his own in his curiously stretched-out writing, and endlessly repeating that I could only learn more of my mission through prayer. It was in vain I tried to tell him - and actually I was trying to instruct him - that I simply did not believe it would, or could, work like that.
   However it may have been interpreted by my mind, I felt most strongly that this is not a personal God that we have to learn to understand. God is simply not there to supply answers or instructions. This is the great and most damaging mistake. This creates all the divisions and the hatred within mankind.
   I liked Cecil. He tried to give me his best advice. He was also capable of contradiction. "Centuries ago" he told me at our first meeting, "you would have been regarded as holy, and whole schools would have been created around you. Today you are more likely to be mocked and ignored."
   This, it seemed to me, was the greater wisdom. The other option in my view was no better than running about screaming that I had been made a messenger of God. And he knew this too. In his Commonplace Book, a collection of quotations that he put together for his own children in his last years, in fact whilst he was still writing to me, one of the earliest is by Søren Kierkegaard, that gloomy Dane, a favourite of his: "... the word of God cannot be heard in the world today. And if it is blazoned forth with noise so that it can be heard amidst of all other noise, then it is no longer the word of God. Therefore create silence." 6

And so to Warminster:

   As always happens, in my experience, in any selection process which is intended to produce people who are alike, the result was a range of every kind of personalities. There is always the loud gang, the high, the low, the flashy, the vulgar, the quiet and - in this particular case - the deadly. The group that survives the selection may be smaller, but the range of personalities expands, as it were, to fill the space.
   A number had already had combat experience. Apart from Northern Ireland, the Army still had personnel scattered all over the globe, engaged in overt and covert operations in jungle, desert, mountains, snow and ice. Others, like me, had never fired a shot in anger, never been shot at by bullet, rocket, or shell, never seen their comrades shredded and certainly never known a wound themselves. Despite the title of the course, there were also young and old, for some of these 'young captains' were actually commissioned from the ranks who had known all this and far more. We were treated exactly alike by the DS: the Directing Staff. That means we were all afforded a certain degree of formal courtesy, but we were also never allowed to forget that we were still only novices in the art of war.
   We knew - if only, as in my case, just barely - how to handle weapons, and, in theory, at least, how to fight a tactical battle. All the infantry and armour officers had plenty of experience of this. But most of us knew next to nothing yet of the real craft of war: its strategy, supply, and its management. To fight a war, you need fighters. Obvious. Far more important, but less obvious, is that to win a war it is not enough to have people who can both kill and die. Nations may make killers of its youngsters before they have beards. They may have carried a Kalashnikov before their voices break. They may have slit throats, tortured, raped, murdered children and massacred before they have beards. These practices of terror - just like the Pentagon's own tactics of 'Shock and Awe' - will clear the land of enemies: but they will never leave peace.
   For peace to appear two principal conditions must prevail: all those who know only how to kill must be removed, by any means; all those who remain must learn a far more difficult employment than killing. Sadly it would be hard today to find a task as easy as taking life. The housewife has her grinder and liquidiser. She only needs to switch them on to whiz ingredients to paste; the equivalent for the modern soldier is the range of weapons which can do much the same to an enemy either singly or in groups. Almost all are childishly simple to use.
   The alternative to killing is an art that a few cultures have never learnt. Indeed, there are cultures within modern cities in which a person's insecurity - the person being usually, of course, male - is so great that he will murder anyone who he feels has 'dissed` him. Learning to argue a point of disagreement, and to enjoy arguing the point, rather than simply killing the other or frightening him to silence is the minimum requirement for peace. The next step, the minimum for democracy, is to understand that the argument is not another kind of battle, in which one must emerge triumphant. The argument is the means by which both combine their knowledge, experience, and intelligence to find agreement at a level at which the points over which they disagree are not important. This may seem higher or lower than that of their own perspective. The fact which both must accept is that this level will certainly exist. Here is where peace resides.
   The course itself soon became routine. There were lectures; demonstrations; more bangs. The Army is never content without a vast store of things which go bang, whump, crash, smack, crackle, thud, or roar with various degrees of lethality. There were endless group discussions; essays; presentations. So far away from London, although sometimes I drove home at weekends, the days began to merge pleasantly together.
I soon found myself spending much of my leisure with two Scotsmen. Since to them I was a Southerner, a Sassenach, this in itself was unusual. Even more unusual was that, although both of them were about my age, both had already known all the dangers of warfare that I had missed. One was a strikingly handsome dark-haired young man called Nightingale. He was lean, perpetually cheerful, intelligent, resourceful, and tough. He had just finished a tour with the SAS, and there was that air about him of total physical and mental confidence that has survived the toughest training in the world.
   The other, a captain in a Scotch regiment, seemed in contrast almost shy. But this modesty concealed the same kind of assurance on a far quieter level. He was shorter and stocky, with greyish eyes and already thinning blond hair. Unlike Nightingale, who would stand out at once in any company, he was almost deliberately unobtrusive. His name was Jay. It would really have been more appropriate if their names had been reversed: the quiet Jay being called Nightingale, and Nightingale, the noisy one, being Jay.
   It became the habit for the three of us to go for a run every day in late afternoon after work. This was not very strenuous for them. Dusk would be gathering as we pounded in step along the smooth concrete roads that surrounded the School. They served to carry heavy vehicles, tracked armour, and guns, up the smooth, but fragile slopes of Salisbury Plain on which stand the still mysterious structures of Stonehenge and of the even greater but less well-known circle at Avebury. These were only a short drive away, but the purpose of this exercise was just to work up a sweat before dinner.
   That, at least, was the case for me. These two would scarcely get out of breath, whilst months of sitting behind a Ministry of Defence desk had put layers of fat around my lungs and heart, and I would soon begin to feel it. When we reached the height of our climb the other two would therefore often stand politely apart, waiting patiently and without comment whilst I was sick in the ditch. Then we would turn around and go back again. This time, to my relief, it was now mostly downhill.
   At various moments I learnt a little about them both. Since he was the most talkative, I learnt most about Nightingale. He enjoyed entertaining; and I have no doubt that the entire life history might have been invented for me. He was perfectly capable of this. Whether invented or not, all of it was volunteered. I told them very little about myself. It is the Army's habit to discourage personal questions. Despite the habit of especially the British media of portraying officers as middle-class butchers or upper-class twits, the modern Army mingles social classes with promiscuity. There certainly are a few butchers, of course, as well as a number of twits, but there are far more artists, writers, and poets than may be imagined. Originally officers knew everything about the others' families and background that there was to know. More recently, when the life-times they may share be measured only in months, then weeks, even minutes, it may not be necessary to know whether the other has a wife, six children and a dog, or a title with sixty thousand a year. 7
   Anyway, I never learnt if either of them had a wife - or children. I don't think they did, but I did not ask. Nightingale had a background - as he told it - not unfamiliar to readers of SAS stories. He had been at approved school as a boy; then, although tall and slim, rather than the usual muscle-bound lump, he had been a bouncer outside a Glasgow club. The usual problem that he and his mates might encounter, late at night, was called, appropriately, the Glasgow Kiss. The instigator of this familiarity would take tight hold of the other's lapels and slam his forehead, where his bone is thickest, into the nose and face of the other, where his is thinnest. To counter this Nightingale and his mates had a line of fishhooks sewn onto the underside of their lapels and wore a hefty metal box to protect their cods. The presence of both of these lines of defence would sometimes so baffle an attacker, that as he tried to get the fish-hooks out of his fingers, it was considered perfectly respectable, to give him a Kiss and kick him in the groin for dessert.
   After a few years, however, of standing in draughty doorways and being groped by gaggles of drunken girls on their way home, Nightingale became aware of the possibility of finer things in life, had joined the Army, entered the Intelligence Corps - where he had excelled - and had then also passed fit for the SAS. He had just finished a 'tour' - much of it in the Arab States - and after this course was returning to his Corps ready for more promotion.
   After dinner Nightingale would invariably join the group at the bar, and soon he would be surrounded by a gang of his friends, all loudly talking and laughing together. Jay, in contrast, was always outside this group. Often he stood against the wall, listening and smiling, even laughing at the best jokes, but always watching and observing. I did not notice at the time anything unusual in the fact that usually I stood with him.
   Another contrast was that Jay had an entirely different approach to soldiering than Nightingale. He really believed, or he wanted to believe, that we were always the good guys. He wanted to believe this - especially in Northern Ireland. Since I had left, the Army's 'war' against the IRA had become much more aggressive, just as the IRA required it to become; and at some time in the recent past Jay had used some form of pressure on a prisoner to try to find out where the next attack would occur. He never told me who it was, or what form of pressure he had used, far less whether his victim had survived it. All that was clear to me was that this weighed heavily on his conscience. He might even be considering resigning from the Army as a result.
   He was then, I would say, emotionally younger than me by several years, but in terms of experience he was far older. But I was at least six years older; he and Nightingale used to call me 'Prof'; and what he wanted from me now was reassurance that what he had done was right - and, moreover, that it would be right again if he had to do the same in the future. He needed me to tell him - someone who he knew had always been far distant from the actual stress and terrors of the real possibility that within hours another bomb might kill and cripple many people, or that another sniper might kill him or his men - that his action could be morally acceptable; that in trying to stop monstrous crimes he might not, possibly might not, become a monster himself.
   We only talked about this once, and at the time I did not think that I was much help to him. But I felt he was in real distress, and I did my best. I told him that it seemed to me essential to know, if this were possible to be sure, that the prisoner was truly a combatant. If so, then he - or she - had chosen to take part in a terrorist war in which the advantage was with the terrorists whose enemy walked about in uniform as clearly marked as if with targets pinned to their chest and back, whose victims could include men and women and children who wanted no part in their fight and had, indeed, no interest in its purpose. If the terrorists, for their part using terror and death deliberately, whilst hiding amongst their own people and their victims, were captured, then I failed to see any real moral difference between shooting a man or woman dead or crippling them whilst they were pressing a trigger, and using any force beforehand, up to if not including death, to prevent the same actions being carried out later by their comrades.
   If combatants want the Geneva Convention to apply to them, they have only to observe the rules of war the Convention was designed to control. The terrorist who hides himself in civilian clothes must accept the risk of not being covered by these rules of war. It is not a question of courage. Both sides can be equally courageous. Or of conviction: both sides can be equally sure of their moral truths. What matters is what rules they have decided should apply to their enemies. These same rules must apply to them.
   This somewhat tortuous argument seemed to satisfy him, at least approximately, and we never discussed it again. But one evening, much later, towards the end of the course, we were standing together in a corner of the big ante-room, well away from the usual crowd around Nightingale telling a story that was soon convulsing all around him. Still smiling at Nightingale's joke, I said casually to Jay: "Isn't it strange that the three of us should like one another so much? We are so very different from each other, and we have such a very varied company to choose from?"
   "No," he looked at me carefully in his usual quiet way, always as if considering the effect of his words: "we do not; and it's not so strange at all." He lifted his chin towards the others. "You see: we are killers; they are not." Feeling my surprise he went on: "The difference is that everyone here would hesitate to do whatever needs to be done. But we would not. We would do it."
   Now he was certain that he had shocked me, and he looked as pleased as if he had just repaid his debt for my advice. I tried to appear unconcerned, but what he had just said did more than shock me. My stomach contracted. Momentarily I actually felt sick. I was not shocked by what he had said. I was shocked because he had seen what I thought I hid so well. He had seen what I believed about myself.

Comment:

   Cecil King died in 1986; Dame Ruth in 2001. Another biographer called her 'that amazing witch', but her best memorial is surely the NYO. After the Staff Course I never heard from either of my two friends again. Then, some years ago, I saw Jay's name in a report of a trial. Cecil once told me, in one of our arguments, and in his loftiest Olympian tone: "When a newspaperman is unsure, he does nothing"; to which I replied: "But when a soldier is unsure, he does something."
   Jay was returned eventually to Ulster, where he indeed 'cried havoc and let loose the dogs of war'. He placed agents in both the PIRA and the UDF , 8 then he set them to kill each other. It was indeed a vicious war. They chose the rules. He only followed them, and then did more damage to them both than anyone in twenty years. Later, in Berlin, he threatened to do the same by ignoring all the rules which the old intelligent hands supposed were all that were restraining the aggressive Russian bear. He is now, together with his Irish wife, a military attaché in one of the countries on the Pacific Rim.
   To be a killer means more than being capable committing all your force, without restraint and all at once. Six year olds can do that. It also means believing you cannot fail. You do not have to be too much older to believe this.
   The truth is that I am too cautious and slow to be a successful predator. I also need a cause more interesting than killing individuals. Few matter enough not to be replaced at once. Always at the back of mind were those pictures that had fascinated me as a child: the air photographs of vast log jams in Canada and North America: millions, immovable: but somewhere always the key, often just a single or pair of logs jammed against the bottom, strong enough to hold back the whole gigantic mass.
   It seemed to me that most societies are much like this. Instead of movement, there is stasis; instead of understanding, there is only sporadic, or violent, or grinding, always painful conflict. The law - if there is any law - can contain violence, but the mass of hatred grows and grows.
   The key in this case is almost always different peoples' belief in the certainty of their own beliefs and their equal certainty that others' are wrong. Remove this certainty, therefore, and replace it with some practical humility, and this might kill conflict itself.
   Now that would be worth one's lifetime. At the very least, it would be worth working towards it.

Colin Hannaford,

"Soldier."
18/01/05


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