Rite of Passage

They shouldn’t have been indoors on this wet afternoon, lounging in the big, frayed armchairs in the Day Room, bored, and chucking paper darts into the air. It was a school rule that, on Sunday afternoons, boarders must be out of doors, walking in the woods or exercising in the playing fields from two p.m. until four-thirty.

But, then, Rex was always breaking the rules. Just thirteen, he’d already established a certain notoriety among the teaching staff. And on this gloomy October afternoon he was, as usual, doing most of the talking.

“Let’s do it today, then,” Rex said to Michael.

“Climb up the chimney? Now?”

“Why not?”

Michael hesitated. “I . . . I don’t think I’m ready for it.”

“Ready? What do you mean? How will you be any readier tomorrow, or next week, than you are now?”

“It’s just that . . . well, I want to think about it a bit first. That’s all.”

“You’re scared, you little ninny!”

“I’m not.”

“Then I dare you. I’m going anyway,” Rex said, “if I put it off another year I might be too big to crawl through the furnace. Nobody older than fourteen’s ever squeezed through it.”

Looking at the two it was hard to believe that Rex and Michael were the same age. Rex, taller, with his lank mousy hair and oafish, freckled face, already had the look of a fledgling Rugby full-back. But Michael, slightly built, with pale blue eyes and a vulnerable smile, seemed a year or more younger.

Michael didn’t like Rex but, as an easy target for the school’s bullies, he was often glad to have the bigger boy as a protector.

“You haven’t answered me, you gutless retard. Are you coming up the chimney or not?”

Michael had no choice. That was how things were most of the time. It was always Rex who beat the drum, and Michael who followed it.

“All right, then,” he ceded. “I’ll come. They say it’s filthy up there. Soot, rats and stuff. What are we going to wear?”

“Gym things.  Shorts,  a PT shirt, and gym shoes. Stop yakking and let’s do it while there’s nobody around.”

Tying his shoelaces in the locker room, Michael said, “We’ll be in dead trouble if they catch us, you know. They beat three boys for doing the chimney last term. And someone broke his back once. They had to call the fire brigade to get him down.”

“Well, they won’t catch us,” Rex said, “They must’ve been bloody morons.”

They left the house and, trying their best to look nonchalant, crossed the street and strolled through the tall gates. Even Rex looked apprehensive as they glanced up at the assembly building beyond the gravel parade ground, with its elegant, glazed cupola perched high on the roof maybe a hundred feet above them.

“It’s a long haul up there,” Rex said. “I bet you’re scared as hell.”

“Just a bit. I’ll be happier when it’s over.”

“You’re such a yellow belly. Listen, this is what they call a rite of passage. We all have to do it. It’s nothing to wet your knickers about.”  

 Michael loathed Rex’s sneering put-downs and his everlasting assertions that everyone was an idiot except himself. But he’d have given a year’s pocket money for just an ounce of that self-confidence and assertiveness. You either had it, he told himself, or you didn’t. He supposed this was something he’d got to live with.

As Rex burst through the tall main doors of the assembly building, Mr. Cranston, the senior math master, was pinning notices on the board by the entrance to the dining hall, and turned when they entered.

“What are you villains up to, indoors on a Sunday afternoon?”

Rex’s reply was instant. “Hello, Mr. Cranston, Sir. Just going for a spot of exercise in the gym.”

With forced jauntiness, and with Michael close behind him, Rex swaggered out of Cranston’s view toward the rear of the building. Beyond the deserted kitchens was the door to the cellar, in a shadowy corner under the stairs that led up to the assembly hall. In seconds Rex had heaved it open, propelled his companion forcefully down the first two steps and, with one rapid movement, sprang in behind him and closed the door.

 They stood together in the darkness while Rex groped for a switch, and suddenly they were staring down a steep wooden staircase. At the bottom, surrounded by a heap of newly-delivered coal stacked almost to the ceiling, ready for the winter, loomed the big cast-iron furnace. 

Rex whistled. “It’s a hefty bugger, but the door’s pretty small.”

Michael, his chest by now tight with fear, and his pulse racing, pulled open the heavy furnace door on its stiff hinges and looked inside.

“What do we do now?”

Rex took a small flashlight out of his pocket and shone it into the black mouth of the furnace. “That’s the fire-box in there, where the coal burns. The boiler tank’s just up here, see?  People who’ve done this before say that if we clamber round the side of the tank and onto the top of it, we’ll find ourselves in the chimney. That’s where we start climbing. I’ll lead the way – take my torch and give me some light.”

While Michael focused into the furnace with the flashlight, his burlier companion climbed feet-first into the firebox, and only by breathing in and scrunching up his shoulders could he wriggle through the narrow space.

Michael followed with room to spare, and they crouched together in this tight, sooty space pondering their next move.

“I’ll climb up onto the tank first,” Rex said, “then I’ll reach down and pull you up. You’re not strong enough to do it yourself.”

A minute or two later, their eyes growing slowly more used to the dark, they stood atop the boiler tank and gazed up at the dim disk of light at the very top of the tall chimney.  From the bottom of this narrow, claustrophobic shaft they could only just distinguish the iron rungs, each set into the sooty brickwork, up which they must now climb.

“You go first,” Rex said.

“Why me?”

“So I can catch you when you fall off!” Rex let out an explosive, mocking laugh that reverberated in the chimney above them.

For the first fifty feet, climbing hand-over-hand on the rusted iron rungs, Michael’s confidence returned a little. This wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. The rungs seemed firmly set in the brick and, because it was so dark, he wasn’t unnerved by seeing how high they were. Below him he heard Rex count the number of steps under his breath.

 “Fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven . . .”

“How many rungs are there?” Michael asked, by now short of breath.

“We’re about half way.”

They climbed on, and soon the rusted iron rungs cut painfully into the soles of his feet through his thin canvas shoes.

He could actually hear his heart beat now, and the flakes of rust had made painful cuts in several of his fingers. Above him the disk of daylight was a little larger, but scarcely any of it filtered down to them in the acrid-smelling chimney. Suddenly he wanted to stop, and to tell Rex he couldn’t do this any more. It was all too much. His eyes burned, and he wanted to cry.

“ Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four.”

It couldn’t be far now. Michael was slightly encouraged, and managed to regain control. This had to be the worst part, didn’t it? He’d heard you had to crawl along a narrow beam up in the roof to reach the cupola, but it must be lighter up there. It couldn’t be as bad as this. Could it?

Michael could hear that Rex’s breathing had become labored. Could it be, he wondered, that for all his bluster Rex wasn’t as tough as he always claimed to be? Even though he wasn’t as big, Michael wondered, might he have the edge on his partner? Maybe this was going to be all right. They climbed on, and he found himself, like Rex, counting the number of each rung.

“Ninety-seven . . .ninety-eight . . .”

“Hey! Stop a minute,” Rex said.

Michael lowered his head, though he could see nothing below.

“What is it?”

“I’m knackered. I need to rest a bit. And I think we’ve come too far.”

“Too far for what?” Michael asked.

“There should be a door here, the one that leads into the roof and along the beam. Hang on a second.”

Below him, Rex grasped the rung with one hand and switched on his flashlight to examine the brickwork a few rungs down.

“Yep, here it is!”

“Good,” Michael said.

There was a long silence while Rex clambered down to the door.

“No . . . not good. Bad.”

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s a ruddy great padlock on it,” Rex said, “we can’t get in.”

Neither of them spoke. A while ago, Michael would have seized any excuse to back out of this exploit, but now, after they’d come so far and his morale had taken a turn for the better, he felt deep disappointment that they weren’t going to see it to the end.

“Isn’t there any other way?” he asked.

Rex grasped the lock and rattled it angrily.

“What a stupid question! No, there isn’t.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to piss off home. That’s what.”

Taking care not to tread on Rex’s hands, Michael followed him down. On the next few steps he tapped the brickwork with sore fingers, his ear cocked for a hollow, more metallic sound from the padlocked iron door. And there it was. He fumbled for the lock in the darkness, and his fingers closed around it. It seemed to swivel freely from left to right. Might this mean . . . could it be . . . that it wasn’t snapped shut but was just hanging there, unlocked?

He raised the padlock an inch or two, and there it was in his hand. His heart racing, he slipped it into his pocket, and shoved the iron door inwards.

“Rex! Come back up. You’re wrong.”

He’d never said that to Rex before.

“What do you mean, you cheeky little sod?”

“It wasn’t locked. It hadn’t been snapped shut, that’s all. Everything’s all right. I’ve opened the door and I’m going in.”

 He could hear Rex heaving himself up again.

“What can you see?”

On his hands and knees inside the low doorway, Michael glanced around him. The roof-space, its apex maybe twelve feet above him, seemed like a huge barn. It was too dark to see the far end, but about sixty feet away, through a crisscross of heavy beams supporting the roof,  a dim late afternoon light glowed down from the decorative cupola that was their final destination.

“I can see the way to the top.” Michael said. “It’s easy. Nothing to it. We have to crawl along a beam to the bottom of the cupola. Then we’re nearly there. Follow me.”

They were perhaps ten feet along the beam when it struck Michael that he was a foot or two above the ceiling of the lofty assembly hall below. If one of them lost his balance, he’d hurtle through the plaster, crashing into the pew-like oak benches in the auditorium maybe thirty feet below.

He looked back to where Rex, still breathing heavily, crawled silently behind him.

“Watch it here, Rex. Keep all your weight on the beam. There’s only plaster on either side, keep your hands and feet off it, or you’ll fall through the ceiling.”

Something strange had happened in the last few minutes. Rex wasn’t giving the orders any more. Was he just exhausted, or was he in a funk? Whatever the reason, Michael knew he’d become the leader. He was giving the orders now, giving orders to Rex. And it felt good.

They took their time on the beam, inching cautiously toward the thin glow of light that shone down from the cupola on the roof. When at last they reached it they found a square, boarded platform maybe six feet across and stared up into the glazed turret above them. A knotted rope,  twice a man’s height, hung down from its center. They were only a few yards away from their goal.

“You all right?” Michael asked.

Rex nodded, but all the familiar self-assurance and the cocksure arrogance had gone.

“But I’m not going up that rope.” Rex blurted out.

“Come on, Rex, you must. You’ve just got to! You’ve come all this way . . . ”

 “Say what you like. I’m not bloody well going.”

They stood together silently in the fading light. Blackened with soot, like coal-miners emerging from a day’s shift.

“All right, then,” Michael said. “You wait here and I’ll go up. I’ll be a couple of minutes. By the time I’m back maybe you’ll have changed your mind.”

The thick rope, hanging down from the cupola, had knots tied in it, making it easy to climb the dozen or so feet to the top. Michael reached up, tensed his muscles, raised himself, and clenched his feet above the first knot. A minute or two later he was sitting on a narrow wooden sill that circled the inside of the cupola.

“Boy! You should see this,” he called down.

In the last half-hour of daylight on this overcast fall afternoon, the town of Cranbrook spread around him. Over there to the north was the town’s 15th Century church, the lights through its windows already turned on for evensong. Here, its windows black, was the main classroom block and the headmaster’s elegant Queen Anne house. The lights of cars shone on rain-wet streets. Immediately below, on the parade ground, two boys sauntered toward the door of the assembly building. Lights were going on in windows everywhere.

He’d done it, and it had been worth the effort, the sore feet, the blooded knuckles. What had Rex called it, a rite of passage?  It was too dark to see Rex down there now.

Taking a last look out the windows, he eased himself back down the rope.

“Put your torch on, Rex.”

In the flashlight’s glow he saw Rex look up sheepishly. He hadn’t moved.

“Now it’s your turn,” Michael said. “Come on, matey. You can do it.”

“But I can’t.” Rex was shivering. “I’ve . . . I think I’ve lost my nerve. I’m so frigging scared.”

Michael sat down beside him. “Listen, if you don’t do this, you won’t ever forgive yourself.”

Rex didn’t answer.

“Answer me.”

“Yes,” Rex said. “I know you’re right. But I can’t. I just can’t go on.”

“’Course you can.” Michael said. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take the rest of this in separate stages. Forget about going back over the beam or down the chimney for now. Just concentrate on going up the rope. OK?”

Michael scrambled to his feet and started up the knotted rope for a second time.

“What are you up to?” Rex asked.

“I’ll be there waiting for you. Now, up you come.”

Rex stood and, hesitantly, made his way up the rope.

“There you are! That was pretty easy, wasn’t it?”

The two sat together on the sill, their legs swinging in the space below. By now much of the detail of the view through the windows had faded into the darkness, but the streetlights and the glowing windows all round them still made it a sight to see.

“How’s that for a view, then?” Michael asked.

“Bloody marvelous!” Rex said. And he smiled a little.

They were half way along the beam on the way back to the chimney when Rex, crawling behind him, said, “The torch is going out. The batteries are dying.”

There was a hint of panic in his voice.  

“No problem,” Michael said. “If we take our time, we can do it all by feel. How are you doing back there?”

“All right,” Rex said, and added ‘Thank you.’” Michael couldn’t remember him ever saying those words before.

“Good. Turn off that torch. We may need whatever’s left in it on the way down.”

When they got to the iron door that led down to the chimney Michael stopped, leaning against the lintel.

“This is the last bit, Rex. Take a few deep breaths. We’re in no hurry, and it’ll be a lot easier going down.”

For the first time in his life, Michael felt the thrill of having complete control. Of being in charge. Carefully he pivoted on the beam to reposition himself feet first in the doorway. “I’m swiveling round here, Rex. You’ll have to do the same – and keep your arms and legs off that ceiling, all right?”

Michael slipped the padlock from his pocket and passed it through the doorway.

“Don’t close it. Just hang it up the way it was before.”

And now they were going down, down until the dim yellow glow of light through the furnace door grew closer and closer. They were home.

As Michael turned to go up the cellar steps, Rex caught his arm.

“Hang on, Michael. What are you going to say to them?”

“Say to who, about what?”

“About . . . hell, you know what.”

 “No,” Michael said, slowly. “I don’t know. Tell me.”

Rex nodded toward the ceiling. “What are you going to tell everyone up there about . . . you know what I’m trying to say.”

“Then say it, Rex. What mustn’t I tell them?”

Defeated, Rex swallowed hard. “Damn you, Michael -- about me chickening out. What else?”

“Me? I’m not going to say a word. I’ll bet if it’d been me you’d never have dreamt of telling everyone. Not for a second, would you now?”

Rex looked down at his feet. “No, ‘course I wouldn’t.”

“Well, then, nor would I.”

Together, they walked up the stairs to the hallway, and back into the light.

The Assembly Hall at Cranbrook

School – note the cupola on the roof.

The chimney can just be seen

Through the tree branches at left.

WEIRD WORDS ABOUT WINE

_{Is the wine trade trying to pull the wool over our eyes? Some time ago an article in The New York Times began, “With a few sniffs and a couple of swishes of the tongue, a wine connoisseur can distinguish the gentle floral notes of a Nuits-St.Georges, say, or the subtle berry and chocolate overtones of a Charmes-Chambertin . . .”}

_{Really? Now, I know that experienced tasters really can distinguish one  Burgundy vintage from another but, seriously, what’s all this stuff about a wine tasting or smelling like chocolate?  Supposing a dozen people like you and me were given a glass of any red wine at the a blindfold tasting. For how many of us do you suppose chocolate would spring to mind?}

_{But wait,  there’s more. There seems to be a growing habit of this giving of ludicrous descriptions of the aromas and tastes of wine. Here are a few recent examples. I’ve just received a catalogue from a classy wine club that describes a Pinot Noir as having a nose that’s “rich with red cherry . . . smoky saddle leather and hints of cocoa.”}

        _{Then there’s an article on Italian wines again in the New York Times, in which a critic compares the nose of one vintage with “aromas of tobacco, tar and (again) leather.”  Or how about this?  In a display card in an upscale wine store on Columbus Avenue a few weeks ago, an elegant little display card touted a Cabinet Sauvignon from Australia as having “a balance of aromas of raspberry jam and chocolate, with a hint of eucalyptus. Yes, it really did say raspberry jam!}

_{Among the most ridiculous comparisons a short while ago was in a whole-page newspaper advertisement from one of the biggest wine merchants in the North East. They included -- I swear this -- pepper, wood, scorched earth, stones, gravel, and even “hints of meat.”}

_{Ok, I’ll go along with some berry and flower-like flavors, and maybe a New York store’s recent use of “apple and citrus.” But chocolate again?  Gravel? Smoky saddle leather?  Scorched earth? Tar? Tobacco? Raspberry jam?  And now meat? Get real!}

          _{I love wine, though I certainly wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur. I’m retired, and being an oenophile costs money, which isn’t as abundant as it used to be. Nowadays, I rarely spend much more than twelve dollars on a fairly ordinare Chardonnay or Merlot, but I did get some education in wine during my working days. A few times I found myself a guest of individuals who thought nothing of spending several hundred dollars of their employer’s or someone else's money for a single bottle of claret at Le Cirque, or the sadly defunct Lutèce, or other upper-crust Manhattan eateries. I confess that, to this member of the bourgeoisie, a $300 bottle of wine at Morton’s had little more character or distinction to me than one costing $28 at some more reasonably priced place.}  And when it comes to retail prices, there are some perfectly drinkable reds that retail at half that price from Chile and Argentina.

_{A few weeks ago the New York Times ran an article about the 60th session in London of the Oxford and Cambridge Varsity Wine-Tasting Competition, in which eight men and eight women students from Britain and the U.S. and also from China,  Poland, the Netherlands and Brunei tasted twelve unmarked wines and were expected to identify the grape, country of origin, region, subregion and taste characteristics of each. Among the extraordinary descriptions from these experts were “coconut,” “tobacco leaf, quince, musk, and even “a horse manure character.” Oxford University were declared the winners, but the article left out what I would have thought to be the most important information of all -- how much did they get  right, and how much wrong?}

_{I read somewhere that a wine merchant in Chicago, instead of using the silly cocoa, leather and tobacco ‘winespeak,’ had started to compare his wines with famous celebrities. For example, one smooth, dark red wine (no doubt with excellent body) was apparently labeled “Naomi Campbell in Fur.” The possibilities seem endless. It wouldn’t be one bit less informative than “horse manure.”}

_{And it would surely be a lot more fun.}

                                        ooo0ooo

WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE COLORBLIND?

My parents first noticed it when I was six or seven. I’d begun to paint, and had made a few attempts at landscapes. My efforts were probably no better or worse than any other boy would do, but there was something disturbingly odd about the colors. They told me I’d painted brown trees, green-tinted skies and purple rivers.

Sometimes my mother would say “red sky at night, sailor’s delight.” What was she talking about?’ The sky looked a golden yellow to me.

         I went on painting and, in my early teens, graduated to oils on canvas. By now I was doing a better job, but the colors were still weird. In my pictures, the red-sailed Thames river barges that plied the estuary near my home had mud colored sails, or magenta smoke curling up from cottage chimneys.

There was no question, I was colorblind.

         At school I went on painting for a while, but Mr. Lockett, the art master, talked me into abandoning color and concentrating instead on pen and ink, and other black-and-white media. He also persuaded me to try my hand at clay modeling. My earliest attempt was a disaster. At fourteen, I modeled a headless, naked earth goddess, two feet high. Her stomach was somewhat distended, and her breasts larger than life. It was blatantly sexual, and looked like some kind of African fecundity fetish. My parents raised their eyebrows, and told me not to keep it in the house, or show it to neighbors or friends. But at least I’d found ways to express myself without using colors.

         Being colorblind became a more serious matter in the British Army, which had a rule that, before you can train to be an officer, you must first experience life as a private soldier. For six months, my comrades and I endured endless drill parades, kit inspections, rifle and bayonet practice, physical training and route marches, cleaning latrines, and futile practices such as polishing coal and whitewashing rocks.

         One day, when we were on the rifle range, lying on our bellies, legs splayed, squinting into the sights, Colonel Martin, the one-eyed veteran who commanded the training battalion of the Royal West Kent Regiment, passed by on a tour of the unit. At that moment we were firing at targets several hundred yards away, in the shape of Russian soldiers. The colonel strolled up behind me and tapped the heel of my boot with his swagger stick.

         “What’s your name, lad?”

         “Birch, sir.”

         “All right, Birch. Let’s see how good you are. See that red triangle on the chest of target 3?”

         I hesitated.

  “You can’t see it, man? You colorblind or something?”

  “Yes, sir, I said.”

The colonel grunted and moved on.

The years slipped by, and when I was about to “pass out” from Sandhurst, Britain’s version of West Point, I had a shock. There’d been a strict medical exam when I’d joined up, but since then they’d introduced the infallible Ishihara Test. You can’t slip past this by guessing, and I was pronounced colorblind, unable to distinguish the difference between red, green and brown. A few days later, the report came in. Attached to it was a letter couched in bloated officialese, saying that no-one who was Grade 4 colorblind could serve in a combat arm – such as an infantry regiment, armored unit, the Royal Artillery, or the Royal Engineers. My first choice was infantry, in the South Staffordshire Regiment, but had no choice but to join one of the support services that handle transportation, stores, pay, or radio and telecommunications.

This saddened me. But for this defect I’d have passed through Sandhurst high enough in the order of merit to win my first choice of regiment, yet was balked for a reason that, at the time, didn’t seem all that important. But, then, just a few days before the “passing-out” parade, we learned that General Sir Richard Gale, the army’s Director of Infantry, was coming to address us before we were commissioned. I wondered, could he intercede on my behalf? It was worth a shot.

On the day of the address I visited my college commander, Colonel Alistair Mitchell, a tank man in the Royal Horse Artillery, and told him my story. Would it be possible to have just a few minutes with the general? Mitchell was sympathetic, but not too hopeful; a rule was a rule, he said. It was irregular, but he’d do what he could. I was to report to the staff and faculty mess after the address, by which time he’d have tried to arrange a brief meeting.

General Gale, affectionately nicknamed ‘Windy’ Gale, duly gave his speech in the packed auditorium.  Predictably, it was a forceful paean to courage, loyalty and selfless fortitude. Soon afterward I walked up the steps of the mess, and asked a passing steward for Colonel Mitchell, who escorted me to a little antechamber that led off the mess drawing room, wishing me luck as he left and closed the door behind him.

I seemed to wait forever, alone in the empty room, listening to the buzz of conversation in the room next-door, and rehearsing my plea in my head. Then, at last, the door opened and there loomed Windy Gale – a paunchy, cheerful man with a handlebar mustache -- and we shook hands.

“Well, young fellow, what’s your problem? Tell me about it?”

We sat opposite one another in leather club chairs while I told him the story of the color test, and what options I’d been offered.

From time to time he nodded and shook his head, but said nothing, and asked me a battery of questions. When he’d finished he asked, “What regiment did you say you want to join?”

“The South Staffords, Sir.”

“The 38^th Foot, eh? Damn fine regiment. Did a jolly good job in Burma against the Japs!”

He fell silent for a while, and seemed to be thinking.

“Lookie here, young man. It’s really agin’ the rules for anyone who’s colorblind to be in a fighting arm. But Colonel Mitchell thinks you’re a decent chap, and that you’ve done well here.”

He stood up and held out his hand and I shook it again.

“I can’t make any promises, you know, but I’ll see what I can do. How’s that?”

I muttered my appreciation, and the general gave my shoulder a fatherly little pat. “I’ll get your details from your company commander. Good luck, laddie.”

Then he was gone.  I walked back in the dark to my quarters. It had been the briefest meeting. Would he, could he do anything?

A week or two later, while I was on leave at home, a manilla envelope arrived from the War Office, telling me I’d been commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant into the South Staffordshire Regiment, and that I was to report to their depot at Whittington Barracks, in Litchfield.

So Windy Gale had pulled it off.

It was during a prolonged anti-terrorist campaign a year or two later on the island of Cyprus that I realized there was wisdom behind the ban on colorblind officers serving in the fighting arms. After some time as a platoon commander in a rifle company in Germany, I was sent to the Support Weapons Wing in Wiltshire to attend a seven-week course on 3-inch mortars, the British version of the U.S. Army’s 81 mm mortar. Every infantry battalion had a mortar platoon armed with six mortars, which acted as the unit’s in-built artillery. The weapon can fire a ten-pound bomb nearly three thousand yards, and so high that it can reach unseen targets on the other side of villages, hills and woodland.

And this is when I discovered the most serious drawback of being unable to recognize colors. There were three kinds of mortar bombs -- the U.S. Army calls them shells -- high explosive, distinguished by a red band, white phosphorous, marked with a white band, and white and colored smoke bombs to screen troops on the move within sight of enemy positions. But it wasn’t so much those colored bands that were difficult; the hardest thing was telling the colors of signals fired with a special pistol by the company commander we were supporting. The colored fireworks told us not only when to fire, but also what to fire, and I found colored pyrotechnics especially hard to differentiate.

Fortunately, my deputy, Sergeant Murtagh, a World War II veteran, had good color vision, and all I needed to do was to turn to him and ask, “What color’s that signal?” It never failed, and I managed not to obliterate a target with high explosives when we should have been laying down a harmless smokescreen. Nonetheless, I was relieved when promoted to be second-in-command of a rifle company, when suddenly color became much less important.

People often say, “How do you see everything?” That’s a question I can’t really answer. How does everyone else see everything? But, happily, life isn’t entirely a dull monochrome thing. I get pleasure from spring and fall leaves, but I suspect they’re not as startling as they are to others. The difference is especially strong in art. However brilliant its form, nearly all Medieval art is too dark and shadowy as are most paintings by Constable, Reynolds, Turner and Corot, but many Impressionists, such as Cezanne, Monet, and Bonnard, and later painters like Van Gogh, Matisse and Utrillo, are full of excitement and light.  

It’s all a matter of degree. To mangle a popular saying about love: “Better to see half a rainbow than never to have seen at all.”

 

TOUGH ASSIGNMENT

Looking out over that calm lake at dawn, with its fishing boats and flying cranes, I found it hard to believe that this beautiful place had been the scene of the most deadly industrial accident in history.

But months earlier, on a cold winter night in December 1984, an airborne blanket of poison gas fell over a sleeping city. By dawn, one thousand seven hundred fifty men, women and children were dead.

         The city was Bhopal, in northern India. By the time the case came to court nearly two years later, almost four thousand people had died, forty were totally disabled and more than two thousand six hundred others had lasting partial disability. The agricultural chemicals plant was owned by the giant and now defunct chemical firm Union Carbide.

         Carbide’s Connecticut headquarters acted quickly. Chairman Warren Anderson pledged his company’s moral commitment to the victims and their families, and flew to India within a day or two, accompanied by some technical experts and a medical aid team, only to be arrested and sent home by the Indian government. The US and Indian Carbide companies offered nearly two million dollars in immediate emergency relief, and afterward pledged more than twenty million more in funds and services. Carbide employees and retirees voluntarily raised more than one hundred twenty thousand dollars for the relief organizations working in Bhopal.

         But UCIL, the Indian company, was less quick off the mark. While it did much to provide relief for the victims’ families, and endured national ostracism with a brave face, it was almost as though its entirely Indian management had been paralyzed with shock. In particular, it had failed to tell its side of the story adequately.  This was why, about ten months after the tragedy, some colleagues and I met Warren Anderson at a working lunch at the company’s impressive Connecticut headquarters. He was seeking help for the local directors in Bombay. As a member of a New York corporate communications firm that advised Carbide, I was assigned to fly to India to develop and implement a countrywide program to explain the situation better to the public at large, to its twenty-three thousand Indian stockholders, and the communities where it had numerous plants, five operating divisions and nine thousand employees.

Although I’d worked all over the Pacific Rim, I’d never been to India before, but within two or three days of that first meeting with Anderson I was flying to Bombay, on a solo as-long-as-it-takes assignment.  On the weekend I arrived there was a meeting at my hotel, the Taj Palace, the one that was attacked and torched by terrorists a year or two ago. The meeting was attended by the Indian Carbide company’s board of directors and the managers of their thirteen facilities based all over India.

My chief contact was UCIL’s chief executive, Vijay Gokhale, a handsome, intelligent and civilized man who’d had the misfortune to be promoted CEO only two or three months before the Bhopal catastrophe. Within hours of landing I found myself giving, at Gokhale’s request, a ‘reassuring presentation’ to this discouraged audience.

Having met and talked with the worldwide managers in Danbury, and now to the earnest Indian directors that weekend, it seemed to me tragic and ironic that, in India and the many other countries where it operated, Carbide had always acted as a company that cared. A major player on the Indian sub-continent since the early 1900s, it looked after its employees and retirees well, and was a good neighbor in every country and city in which it had operations. Carbide’s people were convinced at the time, and its veterans still are, that the Bhopal disaster was caused by sabotage. How else, they asked, would it be possible to pour, at dead of night, as much as two hundred gallons of water into underground tanks of poisonous methyl isocyanate, in defiance of warning signs and color-coded faucets, causing gas to erupt and escape?  Since Anderson and his emergency experts were denied access to the Bhopal plant by the Indian Government, they could never carry out their hoped-for search for evidence.

But there was still an untold story to tell.  On the following Monday morning my new Carbide colleagues and I set to work. Over the next few weeks we produced a series of reports, each aimed at a special audience, describing what we were convinced had happened in Bhopal, the social, economic, human and other ramifications, and what action UCIL was now taking. While putting these together we trained the directors and other managers to handle interviews with newspaper reporters, and on radio and television. Oddly, what I remember most vividly of those long videotaped training sessions in a stuffy top-floor conference room was the constant squabbling and scrabbling of a flock of vultures that had settled on the flimsy iron roof directly above us.

When we were ready, we issued this new material to the media. There are no fewer than fourteen Indian languages, yet English is the lingo of government and business, and most educated Indians speak it well.  And since India is a true democracy, its media are unfettered and outspoken. While they were generally unsympathetic to Carbide after the disaster, and skeptical about the sabotage claim, the national and regional press, radio and TV gave fair space and airtime to the company’s opinions.

         Several times during the assignment, I made the four hundred fifty mile train journey between Bombay and Bhopal, to see the community and the victims and meet the few remaining Carbide managers there. It was a tough all-night journey alone. One night, after an abrupt stop, I woke and found myself staring down from the train window as two railroad workers, lit by searing arc-lights, carried a headless man away on a stretcher. He was presumably the hapless cause of the delay.

Because of the risk of a revenge attack, no one associated with Carbide was allowed to stay at any of the local hotels in Bhopal. Instead, I lodged at a company-owned guesthouse in a compound that included the company’s research laboratories, which were still operating near the now-locked and abandoned pesticide plant. The guesthouse and the laboratories were protected by dense barbed wire, patrolled day and night by armed security men with sub-machine guns. The buildings stood on the shore of a placid lake, across the water from the huge city mosque.

The job took two months. Before returning to New York I spent several days in Bhopal dealing with the overseas reporters who returned to India during the first anniversary of the disaster, to write about the city and the continuing plight of the casualties. At that time, angry crowds milled outside the barricades around the little guest house on the lake.

It was one of the toughest assignments in a career of almost forty years in corporate communications.  Fax machines and computers were uncommon even in the US at that time, and probablydidn’t exist in India. We wrestled with obsolete copying machines, typewriters and teleprinters that broke down almost daily. There were few telephone lines between Bhopal and the outside world, and those that were available were nearly fifty years old. Our telephone lines were also tapped, which made security difficult, as did the fact that the time in Bhopal was ten hours later than in Danbury and New York. Then there was the heat, the heartrending poverty, and the endless, pathetic begging on every street. Above all, there was the touching resignation of the people of India to their intolerable condition.  

         But, for all that, a movingly warm, almost affectionate relationship built up between us. These men -- and they were all men -- were in such desperate straits in a company that was now India’s public enemy. Several of them were awaiting criminal indictment, and they all so desperately needed help, encouragement and advice. When I left, they gave me a little memento, a bronze effigy of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity. It has little intrinsic value, but it’s still one of my most cherished possessions.

I returned to India a year later for another two months. This time, among other things, my mission included handling local and foreign media relations when UCIL faced criminal trial by the Indian government. It was a strange, anachronistic ritual. The law, and all the trappings of the court, from the judge himself to the barristers and solicitors and their robes and wigs, were reminiscent of nothing more than Public Television’s Rumpole of the Bailey.  Yet there was nothing laughable about the prosecutors, and the cross-examinations, nor about the sentence. UCIL was found guilty and fined four hundred and seventy million dollars. Now, twenty-eight years later, individual proceedings against a handful of directors have yet to begin.

But the most distressing thing of all is that even now, in 2012, barely any of the money has so far reached the survivors of that now distant nightmare.