Outside, the rain flooded along the gutters in front of the Victorian row houses on Belmont Road. My father snored gently on those wet fall and winter Sunday afternoons, and every so often my mother, asleep and dreaming beside him on the settee, would let out what seemed like surprised little grunts. The only other sound was the sudden shifting of the coals in the fireplace.
Wide awake, my brother and I sat together on the hearth rug, the fire hot on our faces, in the safe little enclosure formed by our parents on their couch and the big, empty armchairs on either side of the fireplace. The coals glowed the colors of the rainbow, and if you looked closely you could peer into fiery caverns that would collapse from time to time, creating new fantasy scenes.
That comfortable picture in 1937, two years before Britain was at war, was the first of a whole lifetime of memories of fire, some as benign and emotionally warm as this one, while others had grimmer, even terrifying associations.
For the next dozen or so years we had annual bonfires on the fifth of November, when Britons -- for whom, of course, there’s no celebration of the fourth of July-- celebrate the burning at the stake of Guy Fawkes. Fawkes was a traitor who, in 1606, tried to blow up the Parliament building in London. Guy Fawkes Night is a subtle combination of Independence Day and Halloween. A week or two before it, children dress up at night as masked and caped conspirators, and scurry from door to door, seeking not trick-or-treat candy but ‘a penny for the Guy’ to buy fireworks. Somehow the grisly horror of burning a man alive has been lost over four hundred years. With a few invited friends, we’d gather in the first winter cold at the bottom of our garden, stuffing kerosene-soaked rags under a pile of dry tree limbs, wooden furniture from the town dump, and fruit and vegetable crates begged from the local green-grocer. Our parents watched solicitously from the shadows, coming forward to supervise the lighting of bottle rockets, Roman candles and Catherine wheels while we chattered around the flames licking around the masked, straw-filled effigy.
My first memory of a fire as an adult was in Finnish Lapland in the winter of 1951, heading south toward the end of an Arctic sledding adventure. The temperature hung around 50 degrees below zero as we followed the frozen river Teno. Gliding along the icy river late in the evening, and with the moon high, we halted at a deserted cabin on the riverbank. This, and others like it, were provided for travelers to take shelter. The snow had been blown up to the eaves of the cabin on the eastern side, but on the leeward side it was relatively easy to clear it from the doorway.
We tethered our reindeer and heaved open the door. Inside was a room measuring maybe twenty-five by thirty feet. At the far end was a fireplace of roughly hewn boulders, in front of which stood a rough pine trestle table. The walls, floor and ceiling were of dark bare wood, and there were six iron bedsteads, with neither mattresses nor blankets. Matti, our Lapp guide, led us outside and, with his sleeve, swept the snow and ice from a pile of pine logs, which we carried inside. Then in matter of seconds, with a little razor-sharp axe, and with the assured skill of an expert chef chopping shallots, Matti rapidly chipped out a fan of wafer-like slivers of bone dry resinous wood that, miraculously, caught fire as though they were doused in oil. In a few minutes the huge stone grate was aflame, making the whole cabin flicker and glow.
A year or two later, in Northern Ireland in the spring of 1952, two of my Army comrades and I had attached ourselves at weekends to the Royal Air Force mountain rescue team, which scrambled over the Mountains of Morne that really do, as the song says, ‘sweep down to the sea.’ The team was on standby to help with any emergency on the range, from an air crash to the rescue of lost or injured climbers and scramblers. The mission entailed day and night patrols, hauling stretchers over the rocky, heathery gullies, and down the steep faces. We never had to do any of these things with real accident victims, but the constant routine of rehearsal was real and exciting enough. And in this setting there is another memory of fire. Near the foothills of Slieve Donard, the highest of these hills, which rises up to nearly 3,000 feet from the sea near Newcastle, County Down, lay a ruined mansion. By now the once-proud house, commandeered by the Army as part of a training area in World War II and never reoccupied, was nothing more than a shell, and pock-marks in the brickwork showed that the place had been fired on with mortars and machine guns from time to time. Its roof had caved in, and the windows had long gone. If you looked carefully in its overgrown gardens you could see the last vestiges of expensive and exotic shrubs, and wildly overgrown pear and apple trees that some painstaking gardener had trained and trimmed on the garden’s sun-facing brick walls.
It was in this house, on its brick-strewn, earthen floors, that we set-up our base. At night, after meals of canned food -- maybe beef stew, peaches and strong tea brewed with evaporated milk and sugar -- we’d build a fire from the fallen roof beams, and sit around it, exhausted but content, smoking and drinking Irish stout, our faces flushed by the intense heat of the fire, and maybe by the brew. Beyond us, the red sandstone house glowed in the firelight, its hollow window spaces black and empty. And above it all, on moonlit nights the mountains towered through a constellation of sparks. Fifty years on, I not only see it; I can also smell the burning wood, almost like incense.
Only a few years later, in 1955, we were in Egypt on another spring night. Four of us, young officers on an off-duty desert adventure, were driving in jeeps from our camp in the Nile Delta, half way between Port Said in the north and Port Suez in the south. Our destination was a tiny fishing spot in the Red Sea called Al Qusayr, two hundred miles short of the Tropic of Cancer. The going had been good, on tarred roads as far as Suez. Then, for maybe seventy miles, oil men from the rapidly growing refineries around the port had made arrow-straight roads of flat, oiled sand that seemed to head nowhere. Now, half a century on, a narrow road hugs the coastline south, but then we made the journey a little way inland over virgin desert for more than two hundred miles.
The Eastern Desert is not at all like the romantic dunes in Lawrence of Arabia. While there are such areas, much of the territory is flat and stony. Scrubby bushes grow near the wadis, dry riverbeds down which sweeping torrents flow in the brief rainy season. Pye-dogs and tiny deer roam the area at night, and yellow, slothful lizards as big as dogs bask in the sunshine by day. On the evening before we reached our destination we camped on a beach of silver sand. The sea was shallow and warm and, with a shrimping net, we hauled fat shrimps out of the sea, to supplement our dull, tasteless K-rations.
Afterward, tired but well-fed, we drove around in the dusk around our camp site, scavenging for the bleached woody stems of camel bracken and other growth in the wadis. It took a while, but fairly soon the jeeps were piled with fuel for a fire. We felt good. Here we were, comrades together in the very center of the world. Across the sea, fifty miles east, was Saudi Arabia. Down the beach lay the beginning of the Nubian Desert and, beyond it, the Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, where the Red Sea merges into the Indian Ocean. The fire crackled and spat, and sparks flew up into a moonless sky.
We were sitting on the sand, well into our stock of warm beer, and singing -- ‘All the world am sad and dreary, everywhere I go . . .’
I gazed up at the flying sparks. What in heaven’s name was that up there above us, and had the others seen it? Lit by the fire, far, far up in the sky, it seemed, was a bearded, hooded face. Could this be God himself, Mohammed, or Moses? We’d stopped singing, rendered dumb. He was still there but, looking down, his head moved a fraction.
My neighbor broke the spell. “My God, It’s a bloody Arab!”
And so it was. For days we’d seen no one, but here was some nomad, crossing the desert alone on a camel, who’d seen the fire and ridden over to investigate. Now, still mounted, he towered above us while we sat, staring up at his impassive face.
None of us spoke. Another comrade, John Gregory, raised his hand in friendly recognition, and his response to this mystical visitation was more like that of someone meeting a stranger in his London club.
“How do you do?” John said. Without a word the man reined in his camel and rode away into the darkness.
A year after that desert crossing in Egypt, in the summer of 1955, my unit was ordered to Cyprus, then a British colony, to deal with recent outbreaks of terrorism. We set up a tented base near Nicosia, the island’s capital, and were pitched into two very different kinds of action. Sometimes we faced riots in the city’s warren of narrow, twisting streets, using batons, tear gas and water-canon. At others, with more lethal weapons, we’d patrol the Troodos Mountains, the island’s rugged backbone. Here, EOKA -- a well-armed unit led by the Greek national partisans who’d once helped the Allies drive the Germans and Italians out of Greece -- was now hiding, and harassing the British troops.
That year, in the foothills of Troodos, there was an incident in which a dozen young soldiers were burned alive. Though I never witnessed a single moment of it, I was a member of the three-man court of inquiry that followed the blaze, and re-lived it shortly afterward through the eyes of the men who escaped it alive.
The enemy wasn’t EOKA, but fire. It happened on a warm October afternoon. On a narrow single-track road through a sheer rocky gully, a convoy of the Gordon Highlanders regiment was making its way with trucks loaded with ammunition and other stores, led by an armored scout-car. The sides of the road were piled high with tinder-dry undergrowth and limbs that had fallen from the pine trees that overhung the pass. The road grew rougher and more uneven, and the scout car overturned, trapping the driver on the rocks half in and half out of the vehicle, which caught fire in seconds.
Ferret scout cars, like miniature tanks, but with wheels instead of tracks, had gas tanks that held at least forty gallons, and more in jerry cans strapped to their sides. The Ferret exploded in a ball of flame, killing the injured driver and spreading quickly to the truck behind it. Jammed nose to tail, the convoy could move neither forward nor backward, and in minutes several trucks behind the Ferret were aflame. Later, expert evidence showed that there was a gusty wind that day, and a draught of air blew up the gully, fanning the flames. Although some troops tried in vain to use the vehicles’ puny fire extinguishers, many of their comrades were suffocated in the inferno.
As the junior member of the court of inquiry, I sat with a major and a colonel at a trestle table in an echoing room at the Chief-of-Staff’s headquarters in Nicosia. We’d already visited the charred site in the Troodos foothills with technical experts, and now eye-witnesses gave evidence that was scribbled down laboriously by a clerk who had no shorthand. Young Scots, mostly boy-faced privates and junior non-coms, all of them draftees, told how their brother soldiers had huddled together, their uniforms in flames, terrified and beyond help, unable to scale the perpendicular rock wall of the pass. In the court, several of the young survivors hesitated and wept while giving their evidence, as did a gray-haired veteran staff-sergeant, whose voice cracked with emotion and remorse as he told how he tried to wrap his burning boys with blankets in a futile attempt to smother the flames.
Then came the experts; fire officers and engineers giving their opinions on how and why the vehicles caught fire; military lawyers outlining the regulations about correct distances between vehicles, even a pulmonary specialist from a nearby military hospital. In stark contrast with the soldiers, all of these spoke in a casual, matter-of-fact way, as though they were witnesses in some everyday county court case back in England, dealing with some petty larceny, or a minor driving infringement.
We deliberated late into the second night. There was some discussion about whether anyone should be blamed for the closeness of the vehicles, but in the end we ruled the case a misadventure.
There was another fire in Cyprus. A year later, I fell for a girl called Anita, whose photograph I first saw as the island’s ‘Girl of the Week’ in the Times of Cyprus. I managed to trace her and to meet her, and in a short time we were very close. She was Armenian, an alluring, dark-eyed, Mediterranean beauty, two years younger than I, and so much more exotic than the girls I’d known at home in England. When I could get away on occasional weekends, we’d meet at Greta’s Garden, a faded but still elegant hotel in a villa with apple green shutters, on the edge of the city, surrounded by an orchard of orange, lemon and fig trees, where peacocks strutted by day and cried eerily at night. But the affair, though sweet, was short-lived, for I was soon to leave the service and return to Britain. I missed her terribly after we parted on my last day, and believed I’d never see her again.
Back in London I transferred to the British Army Reserve, and spent the next eighteen months as a trainee in a public relations firm. By then I was engaged to a British girl. But, because my wealthy father-in-law forbade the marriage until I was more able to support his daughter, took a much better paid position back in Cyprus, as the press officer for the Emergency Police Force. I returned to the island without my fiancée for the year before the wedding; the mores of the day prohibited our being together there. Anyway, there was still too much violence for her to be safe, though Cyprus was by then moving toward the granting of independence. It’s not surprising that, alone, I often thought of Anita, but I was determined to keep her in the past and, though tempted, never sought her out.
But one night I had a call from police headquarters. There was a huge blaze in Nicosia. A gang of Greek Cypriot hotheads had set fire to a Turkish-owned timber yard and, since it was part of my new job to be at every incident to deal with the press, I was there in minutes.
The yard was in a maze of narrow streets in the old walled city, and before I reached the site I could hear the roar of the fire, and see the sparks flying above the rooftops. Turning a corner into a cul-de-sac, I stared into a wall of flame that licked up into the night sky. Unable to reach the fire from that point, the firemen had backed their vehicles out, driven round and attacked it from another flank. Presently, the flames on the edge of the burning yard died down a little, enabling me to see more clearly to the other side of the blaze. There were four fire engines, their ladders fully extended, and crews towered over the inferno with their hoses. A crowd had gathered, and my heart leapt when I saw that, among them, in the floodlights and the brilliance of the fire itself, was Anita. A tall dark, young man stood beside her, his arm round her shoulders. She was looking out over the flames, her face composed but somehow distant, as though her thoughts were lost in the fire. At that moment, all my memories of her flooded back, and it was all I could do to keep from calling out to her.
But I was silent, and never saw her again.
And then there was fire in India, every bit as deadly as the blaze that raced up that mountainside in Cyprus.
Fourteen years ago, my wife and I were in Varanasi, an Indian city so ancient that it was already two thousand five hundred years old when Buddha preached there in 530 BC. Despite that connection with Buddhism, Varanasi, on the banks of the sacred river Ganges, is predominantly Hindu, and believers come here from all over India. For the healthy, it’s the center of kasha, or divine light, where people come to pray, to cleanse and purify themselves, and begin life anew. The city’s inhabitants can experience this every day, and take part in a daily drama on the ghats, huge stone staircases, more than seventy of which sweep down to the water for the length of the city.
On the ghats, loin-clothed men and sari-clad women come down for the ritual washing of their bodies, heedless of the impertinent eyes of foreign tourists. Others wash their clothes, kneading them on the rocks, beside other locals and visitors who stand, partly immersed in the holy Ganges, their lips moving in silent prayer.
Known as ‘The City of Light,’ Varanasi has another, darker aspect for which it might more aptly be called ‘The City of Life and Death.’ Nearly two thousand bodies burn every week on the ghats, in full view of passers-by. Hindus – there are eight hundred million of them in India and Nepal -- believe that coming to Varanasi to die brings instant release from the torment of everlasting reincarnation, and forgiveness of their sins. This is granted even to those unfortunates who, if their relatives cannot afford enough logs to finish the cremation, are heaved, partly-burned into the river.
We’d been told that the best time to experience the ritual panoply of Varanasi is at sunrise. The phone in our hotel room shrilled at 5 a.m., and we showered quickly, pulled on yesterday’s clothes, gulped down a cup of coffee and walked with our guide through still dark streets, already milling with people. Everyone seemed to be going in the same direction through the narrow, twisting alleys, heading for the Ganges. We reached the ghats a little before dawn. Already there were scores of rowboats on the river where thousands of candles, each buoyed up by a lotus leaf, bobbed and flickered around them on the water. With other travelers, we boarded a boat and paid the oarsman a few rupees for candles, and nursed their flames while he rowed us out some fifty yards from the riverbank. There, after we’d floated our little lotus lanterns off on the water, the boatman heaved on his oars and we glided upstream.
To one side, across the mile-wide river, the sun rose misty-gold, more like a full moon over the purple horizon, casting its swelling light on the crumbling sandstone buildings on the waterside: palaces; pavilions and temples. We passed the bathers, who seemed to say little to each other. Some were unashamedly naked, and more intent with the ritual pouring of the water over their bodies than taking a morning bath. At another ghat, the washing of clothes seemed to be a much more social affair, where women chatted and laughed together, helping each other fold their still wet garments, stacking piles of bed sheets, and what seemed to be tablecloths. Could these, we wondered, be for our own hotel?
Close by, we drifted past a ‘burning’ ghat. Hindus are cremated before sunset on the day they die, so blazing pyres are rarely seen early. At the back of the site stood a smoke-blackened temple, one of a thousand temples in this city of a more than a million souls. Alongside the building was a massive stack of logs that dwarfed the low caste workers -- untouchables – demolishing several smoldering black mounds. From each of these they dragged out the bones that even the six hundred fifty pounds of timber used for each body can never destroy: the skull, hip bones and femurs. Traditionally, the skulls are cracked open, to allow the spirit to leave, after which the remains and ash are raked into the river where, not a hundred yards downstream, people drink the water, wash themselves and their clothes, and even brush their teeth.
Earlier that week, farther north and over the border in Khatmandu, we’d seen a funeral party, strangely cheerful, chanting, threading its way through the crowd with the yellow-shrouded corpse shoulder high, tossing coins to children along the route to the cremation site. Both here in Nepal, and also in Varanasi, people who are near death, and who come from afar, lodge nearby. Sometimes the sick and aged wait for months or even years to die, but all are aflame within an hour or two of death. By the Bagmati river in Khatmandu, we watched the flames lap round shrouded bodies on several elevated platforms that extend over the riverbank, making it easier to sweep the remains into the water. The air was redolent of wood smoke, and the acrid odor of burning flesh.
Finally, year after year, there was my own slow-burning ceremonial of autumn fires in my garden at home in England where, under a towering tree, the smoke curled over a pile of crisp fallen oak and chestnut leaves, rose prunings, tomato and bean plants, and dead summer flowers.
In those days, about thirty years ago, a fragrant mist hung for days over our Surrey house and garden, heralding the frosts and the coming of winter. To me this was the purging of my little patch, a pleasing preparation for the cold, dormant months, ready for a new beginning in the spring; a perennial round of ashes to ashes.
Nowadays, as here in America, such fires are taboo and, through I accept the reason why, that was a ritual whose passing I regret.
oo0oo
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Sunday, May 30, 2010
The Visitors
The staff had cleared the big table in the Mess dining room and – as they did every day – polished it until it shone like a new car. Presently, the three white-coated Germans came out into the drawing room and quietly closed the tall mahogany doors behind them.
It was late autumn, around three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in 1952. Out of uniform, I sat alone by the fireplace, reading Friday’s Daily Telegraph, and looked up when Jürgen, the chief steward, stepped forward a little and was waiting to speak.
He was tall, built like a blockhouse, with cornflower blue eyes and blond hair cropped like a Junker. It was easy to imagine him in his black uniform and jackboots, and I hadn’t been surprised when he’d once told me that, promoted from the ranks on the Eastern Front, he'd been a troop commander in an SS Panzer squadron. He added that he’d been wounded and taken prisoner. At Stalingrad he’d said, as an afterthought. They all said that. We rarely met a veteran who admitted he’d fought the British or the Americans.
“Everything all right, Jürgen?”
“Alles in ordnung, sir. We would like to go now, please.”
It felt strange. This man was in his late thirties, a veteran of the Wehrmacht, while I, at twenty-one, had been commissioned only months ago, and had yet to hear a shot fired in anger. But according to the unwritten rules of victory and defeat, he now had to ask me for permission to leave. I thanked him and said they could go and, almost like a drill movement, the group turned in unison and left the room.
The Mess was always deserted on Sunday afternoons. A few of the majors drank heavily during lunch, and took a nap. Younger officers jogged through the frosty cabbage fields in the countryside not far from our barracks, or cycled along the bank of the river Weser, past the stark silhouettes of coal mines that seemed deserted. Some took a trolley car and strolled through the city of Minden, or watched a local game of soccer. Others wrote letters home.
I was about to go back to my quarters across the street when the front door bell jangled beyond the green baize kitchen door. Since the staff had gone, I went out into the hallway and opened the door. Two frail, elderly people, a man and a woman, stood holding hands on the doorstep. The man took off his fur hat and made a slight, deferential bow.
He spoke in German. “Good afternoon, sir. I must apologize for this intrusion.”
We shook hands.
“That’s all right,” I said, “what can we do for you?”
“My name is Helmut Krieg, and this is my wife, Resi.”
He turned to the woman, and back to me. “It’s . . . well, you see, Resi was born in this house and lived here until she went to the university. We live far away and, as you can see, we are old now. My wife has not seen the house for nearly fifty years, and we wonder whether we might see inside it once more.”
Krieg spoke hesitantly, in the softer, less gutteral hochdeutsch, the southern dialect of Bavaria. It sounded much more agreeable than the one we were used to hearing in Westphalia. He was clearly an educated man, and with my school-boy German I could just follow what he was saying, but doubted I could maintain a conversation for long.
“I’m afraid my German isn’t very good,” I said, “Do you or your wife speak English?”
Krieg smiled for the first time. “Jawohl!” he said. “Me, my English is not very good, but Resi still teaches English at the University of Munich.”
His wife, a sparrow of a woman with sad, anxious eyes, had said nothing, but now spoke in almost accentless English.
“Let me tell you something, so you will understand,” she said earnestly. “My family lived in this house for generations. Helmut was a judge, and the mayor of Minden. Mutti died in the 1890s when I was a girl, but he lived until 1912. A few years before, Helmut and I had married and settled in Munich, where I was teaching. I was their only child, but we could not maintain this house, and so we sold it. It was sad, because I loved it and was so very happy here, but what could we do? It was so beautiful, but ever since, for many, years Helmut has promised to bring me back to see it once more.”
We weren’t allowed to let unauthorized Germans enter Army premises, but I was sure they were what they claimed to be. Anyway, what could be secret about an officers’ mess? How could I refuse them?
“I’ll be glad to show you around.” I said. “Come on in.”
Resi had seemed apprehensive and ill at ease until then, but now her big, expressive eyes had brightened with the excitement of a little girl.
She turned to her husband and said in German “There, I told you! And you said it wouldn’t be possible!”
The man smiled. “I also told you, my dear, that it is often not a good thing to go back. It could be strange and different after all these years.”
I took their hats and coats, hung them by the door, and we walked into the drawing room. To them, I thought, the room would seem more like a gentleman’s club than her parents’ living-room. Resi took in the big leather armchairs and couches, the paintings that depicted battles in which the regiment had fought, and portraits of long dead generals. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of the young, newly crowned queen, and her husband, who wore the dress uniform of the Royal Navy. Resi looked up at this and turned away. Her face was anxious again.
Now they stood, apparently waiting for me to move on, and I eased open the big dining room doors and ushered them in.
The room was some forty feet long, and almost as wide. It, too, had a somber masculinity about it. No woman had been involved in its design and furnishing. The carved wooden table, already set for dinner, could seat fifty people. Pictures much like those in the other room adorned the walls between high casement windows with heavy burgundy curtains. Cris-crossed in front of the unused fireplace were our regimental colors, two unfurled, gold-staffed Union Jacks embroidered with the names of past victories from the two World Wars, the Boer War, Crimea, Waterloo.
Resi turned to me. “I would like to see the ballroom, please?”
Ballroom? There was no ballroom, what did she mean? “We . . .we don’t have a ballroom,” I said.
“Of course you do,” the old woman said, smiling, “There is a beautiful ballroom through here! I will show you.”
She stepped ahead of us toward a double door, made of mahogany like the others, but even taller and wider. There was a tarnished brass key in the lock, which she tried to turn vainly. Beside her, I drew the door-handle toward me, and turned the key only with difficulty.
We went in. The room was two stories high, with an elaborate gilt minstrels’ gallery. Dark evergreen trees in the garden outside shut out the dying afternoon light through its grimy, undraped windows. One wall was stacked with wooden crates of Army stores, another with blankets. A rusty bicycle with a buckled wheel lay on the once polished floors of inlaid oak. Up in the lofty ceiling hung the shattered remains of six crystal chandeliers.
Resi’s mouth was open, yet at first I didn’t realize that the sudden anguished wail was hers. The cry seemed to fill the great room. She had turned and was stumbling back through the dining room, and her husband and I followed.
“She is very upset,” he said. “I warned her many times that everything might be different. How could she think otherwise?”
Back in the hallway she had draped her overcoat over her shoulders and was leaning on the half open door, sobbing like a child. Her husband hurried forward and took both her hands tenderly, but she snatched them away, grabbed her coat, and ran down the steps and the pathway toward the street.
Helmut turned to me as he made for the door and grasped my hand. “You have been so kind, and I am sorry this has happened.”
We shook hands and he was gone.
Through the glass of the now-closed door I could hear her screaming, until the sound of a passing trolley car drowned her voice.
* * *
It was late autumn, around three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in 1952. Out of uniform, I sat alone by the fireplace, reading Friday’s Daily Telegraph, and looked up when Jürgen, the chief steward, stepped forward a little and was waiting to speak.
He was tall, built like a blockhouse, with cornflower blue eyes and blond hair cropped like a Junker. It was easy to imagine him in his black uniform and jackboots, and I hadn’t been surprised when he’d once told me that, promoted from the ranks on the Eastern Front, he'd been a troop commander in an SS Panzer squadron. He added that he’d been wounded and taken prisoner. At Stalingrad he’d said, as an afterthought. They all said that. We rarely met a veteran who admitted he’d fought the British or the Americans.
“Everything all right, Jürgen?”
“Alles in ordnung, sir. We would like to go now, please.”
It felt strange. This man was in his late thirties, a veteran of the Wehrmacht, while I, at twenty-one, had been commissioned only months ago, and had yet to hear a shot fired in anger. But according to the unwritten rules of victory and defeat, he now had to ask me for permission to leave. I thanked him and said they could go and, almost like a drill movement, the group turned in unison and left the room.
The Mess was always deserted on Sunday afternoons. A few of the majors drank heavily during lunch, and took a nap. Younger officers jogged through the frosty cabbage fields in the countryside not far from our barracks, or cycled along the bank of the river Weser, past the stark silhouettes of coal mines that seemed deserted. Some took a trolley car and strolled through the city of Minden, or watched a local game of soccer. Others wrote letters home.
I was about to go back to my quarters across the street when the front door bell jangled beyond the green baize kitchen door. Since the staff had gone, I went out into the hallway and opened the door. Two frail, elderly people, a man and a woman, stood holding hands on the doorstep. The man took off his fur hat and made a slight, deferential bow.
He spoke in German. “Good afternoon, sir. I must apologize for this intrusion.”
We shook hands.
“That’s all right,” I said, “what can we do for you?”
“My name is Helmut Krieg, and this is my wife, Resi.”
He turned to the woman, and back to me. “It’s . . . well, you see, Resi was born in this house and lived here until she went to the university. We live far away and, as you can see, we are old now. My wife has not seen the house for nearly fifty years, and we wonder whether we might see inside it once more.”
Krieg spoke hesitantly, in the softer, less gutteral hochdeutsch, the southern dialect of Bavaria. It sounded much more agreeable than the one we were used to hearing in Westphalia. He was clearly an educated man, and with my school-boy German I could just follow what he was saying, but doubted I could maintain a conversation for long.
“I’m afraid my German isn’t very good,” I said, “Do you or your wife speak English?”
Krieg smiled for the first time. “Jawohl!” he said. “Me, my English is not very good, but Resi still teaches English at the University of Munich.”
His wife, a sparrow of a woman with sad, anxious eyes, had said nothing, but now spoke in almost accentless English.
“Let me tell you something, so you will understand,” she said earnestly. “My family lived in this house for generations. Helmut was a judge, and the mayor of Minden. Mutti died in the 1890s when I was a girl, but he lived until 1912. A few years before, Helmut and I had married and settled in Munich, where I was teaching. I was their only child, but we could not maintain this house, and so we sold it. It was sad, because I loved it and was so very happy here, but what could we do? It was so beautiful, but ever since, for many, years Helmut has promised to bring me back to see it once more.”
We weren’t allowed to let unauthorized Germans enter Army premises, but I was sure they were what they claimed to be. Anyway, what could be secret about an officers’ mess? How could I refuse them?
“I’ll be glad to show you around.” I said. “Come on in.”
Resi had seemed apprehensive and ill at ease until then, but now her big, expressive eyes had brightened with the excitement of a little girl.
She turned to her husband and said in German “There, I told you! And you said it wouldn’t be possible!”
The man smiled. “I also told you, my dear, that it is often not a good thing to go back. It could be strange and different after all these years.”
I took their hats and coats, hung them by the door, and we walked into the drawing room. To them, I thought, the room would seem more like a gentleman’s club than her parents’ living-room. Resi took in the big leather armchairs and couches, the paintings that depicted battles in which the regiment had fought, and portraits of long dead generals. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of the young, newly crowned queen, and her husband, who wore the dress uniform of the Royal Navy. Resi looked up at this and turned away. Her face was anxious again.
Now they stood, apparently waiting for me to move on, and I eased open the big dining room doors and ushered them in.
The room was some forty feet long, and almost as wide. It, too, had a somber masculinity about it. No woman had been involved in its design and furnishing. The carved wooden table, already set for dinner, could seat fifty people. Pictures much like those in the other room adorned the walls between high casement windows with heavy burgundy curtains. Cris-crossed in front of the unused fireplace were our regimental colors, two unfurled, gold-staffed Union Jacks embroidered with the names of past victories from the two World Wars, the Boer War, Crimea, Waterloo.
Resi turned to me. “I would like to see the ballroom, please?”
Ballroom? There was no ballroom, what did she mean? “We . . .we don’t have a ballroom,” I said.
“Of course you do,” the old woman said, smiling, “There is a beautiful ballroom through here! I will show you.”
She stepped ahead of us toward a double door, made of mahogany like the others, but even taller and wider. There was a tarnished brass key in the lock, which she tried to turn vainly. Beside her, I drew the door-handle toward me, and turned the key only with difficulty.
We went in. The room was two stories high, with an elaborate gilt minstrels’ gallery. Dark evergreen trees in the garden outside shut out the dying afternoon light through its grimy, undraped windows. One wall was stacked with wooden crates of Army stores, another with blankets. A rusty bicycle with a buckled wheel lay on the once polished floors of inlaid oak. Up in the lofty ceiling hung the shattered remains of six crystal chandeliers.
Resi’s mouth was open, yet at first I didn’t realize that the sudden anguished wail was hers. The cry seemed to fill the great room. She had turned and was stumbling back through the dining room, and her husband and I followed.
“She is very upset,” he said. “I warned her many times that everything might be different. How could she think otherwise?”
Back in the hallway she had draped her overcoat over her shoulders and was leaning on the half open door, sobbing like a child. Her husband hurried forward and took both her hands tenderly, but she snatched them away, grabbed her coat, and ran down the steps and the pathway toward the street.
Helmut turned to me as he made for the door and grasped my hand. “You have been so kind, and I am sorry this has happened.”
We shook hands and he was gone.
Through the glass of the now-closed door I could hear her screaming, until the sound of a passing trolley car drowned her voice.
* * *
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
SNATCH
Every time I look back on that night nearly fifty years ago – and I often do – I still feel a pang of shame about our brief, violent act. And I see the startled, fearful eyes of the little girls, huddled in their nightdresses, trying to hide behind their mother. I hear the woman’s screams as we left the house and, when we drove away, the engines of our trucks reverberating against the walls in the narrow, unlit street.
It was December, 1955, in the island of Cyprus, then a British colony. For years, the Greek Cypriots had dreamed of Enosis – union with Greece – and breaking away from British rule. But while the island’s population of around half a million was seventy percent Greek-speaking, the remaining thirty percent were Turkish speakers, and bitterly opposed to the idea. Historically, Greece and Turkey have always shared a mutual antipathy, and since Cyprus is forty miles from Turkey and at least four hundred miles from mainland Greece, Britain’s support of a status quo made good sense.
But that year, being a part of Greece had become more than a romantic dream, and in the summer there were sudden outbreaks of violence. Young British soldiers died or were wounded in drive-by shootings and bomb attacks, and in ambushes on mountain roads. Some had been shot in off-limits bars in Nicosia, the capital. These were the early rumblings of what turned into an ugly, four-year terrorist action that few Americans know about, and the violence quickly flared out of control.
My battalion was flown into the island from Egypt that summer, followed by others from Britain and the Middle East. Not long after we arrived, the British Institute, a cultural and arts center in the middle of Nicosia, was gutted by petrol bombs, and police stations were attacked and destroyed. The death toll was rising, and there were riots on the streets.
Throughout the year, the word EOKA was daubed on walls, the name of a newly-formed group led by George Grivas, a Greek partisan who, with an underground force, had caused havoc among the German and Italian troops in Axis-occupied Greece a dozen years earlier. Now Grivas was training a local force against us in the island’s rugged Troodos mountain range. The locals dubbed EOKA national heroes, patriots and freedom fighters, but to us they were terrorists.
Then another set of initials began appearing on walls all over the colony – AKEL, a Communist group. This was two or three years after the peak of McCarthyism in America, and six years before the building of the Berlin Wall. In December, wary of what could well be an emerging red menace, the Governor of Cyprus secretly ordered the immediate arrest and imprisonment of one hundred forty members of AKEL. The colonial police’s Special Branch knew exactly where they lived, though EOKA and Grivas were invisible.
The first we knew of this was when, one afternoon, as the fifteen youngest officers in the South Staffordshire Regiment – and similar groups in other infantry and police units posted around the island – were summoned to a briefing. We sat around Major Richard Dick Stuckey, one of our company commanders, on a rocky hillside in our camp by the road to Nicosia Airport. Each of us was given a detainee’s name and his address. Our orders were to pick six men from our platoons and, with a jeep and a light truck, to make an armed snatch of our AKEL member that night from his home. The raid would be simultaneous, at precisely three a.m.
Before we dispersed, we all synchronized our watches and, an hour or so later I took my second-in-command, Sergeant Murtagh, on hasty daylight reconnaissance patrol of our snatch site, in a village called Ayios Dhométeos, a few miles from Nicosia. The home was a single-story place in a contiguous row of about half a dozen others, in a street that was only wide enough for one vehicle to pass through. Without pausing as we passed it in our jeep, we checked out the door, a crude assembly of unpainted vertical boards, and agreed that, if we had to break in, it wouldn’t be a problem. We turned at the bottom of the street and again up the lane behind the house, deciding where we’d position two men to cover the dwelling’s rear. Finally, we checked the route to a point about five miles away, where the area’s prisoners would be collected in a police compound before being driven to the detention center.
I was woken by my batman at two a.m. with a mug of tea. Cyprus can be cold at night in the winter, and outside a chilly half moon hung bright in a sky, pulsing with stars. Walking down the slope from my quarters through the sleeping camp, I could see little groups of soldiers heading silently for the armory. Farther down, in the vehicle park, the engines of two dozen vehicles were already running. A few minutes later we inspected weapons, loaded them, and boarded a jeep and a light truck. Our group, like the others, was made up of a sergeant and two corporals, each with a sub-machine gun, and three privates with rifles, one of whom also toted a hefty axe.
The column moved off, and the sentries hailed us as we passed through the raised barrier at the guardhouse. With a number of groups we turned east onto the main road toward the city, while others headed west to their targets. Ayios Dhométeos was only a few miles from the camp and, as we approached it we turned off our headlights, driving in the moonlight. Just before the turning into the narrow street we parked under trees by the side of the road. We had, of course, done a "dry run" on the previous afternoon, so only needed to mutter a few last-minute instructions to send the corporal and rifleman to cover the rear of the house. I led the four others round the corner and down the lane. Our canvas shoes made no sound as we approached, and when we reached the house next door, we stopped. Knowing what to do, the two men detailed to cover the entrance crept across the street to their positions.
The remaining rifleman and I stood with our backs to the wall beside the door, while Sgt. Murtagh did the same on the other side. We’d been told by Stuckey at the briefing that, since there was no evidence that AKEL had used any violence against the British, we were to break the door open only if we deemed it necessary.
I picked up a rock in the road and beat on the door with it, shouting “Anikse tin porta,” ‘open up’ in Greek.
No light came on in the house.
I struck the door again.
“Anikse tin porta!”
Lights flickered on in two other homes nearby.
“Anikse –“
Nothing.
I turned to the rifleman. “Give me the axe.”
I raised the axe above my head; ready to smash it down on the timbers around the latch with all the strength I could muster. But at that moment a faint light shone from under the door, and we heard a heavy scraping, as though someone on the other side were drawing back a bolt or a bar. I lowered the axe and drew my revolver while, behind me, the rifleman focused a flashlight at the point on the door level with our heads.
The door opened slowly and there, blinking into the light, was our target, Stavros Joannides, an astonished man with a bloodhound’s eyes who, when he spoke, seemed to have no teeth in his head.
Under the circumstances, what he said was remarkable. “Kalimera.” (‘Good morning.’)
He wore a striped nightshirt that hung below his knees. Beside me, Sergeant Murtagh thrust the stubby muzzle of his Sten gun into the man’s chest.
“Put up yer ‘ands!”
The man’s arms shot up. "You speak English?” I asked.
“A little,” he said.
“Bring him inside,” I told Murtagh, who marched the man backward into the house, where I patted him down to check for a weapon, but found nothing. Over his shoulder I could see through the open door of a dimly lit bedroom. A woman with long black hair sat bolt upright in the big family bed, the bedclothes pulled up to her neck. Two small girls, who might well have been twins, cowered behind her, crying hysterically.
We were in a living room, where a low-powered electric light revealed a few basic items of furniture: easy chairs round a stone fireplace, a threadbare rug, a few toys here and there, and a table that seemed to have been set for breakfast on the evening before. A loom stood in one corner. The place looked more like the house of the Three Bears than that of a political activist who was dangerous enough to be imprisoned.
Murtagh had stepped back a little, though his Sten was still slung at the ready, pointed toward Joannides, who stood staring at us, shivering in his skimpy nightshirt. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands.
“I’m going to search your house,” I said.
I left him with Murtagh and, with the rifleman, made a quick tour of the house. There were only three rooms, the living room, the bedroom and a kitchen. We began with the kitchen that, because it also served as bathroom, laundry room and storage space, was almost the size of the living room. The soldier and I pulled open closet doors and drawers, rummaged inside them, lifted the wooden lid of a wood-burning copper used for boiling clothes, peered in the oven, and looked around a cramped root cellar under a trap door.
We’d searched scores of houses of EOKA suspects in the months before. There were weapons, ammunition and documents hidden in a number of them, and we’d arrested their owners. But here there wasn’t a scrap of evidence. When we searched the bedroom, the woman was still in bed with the children, who had lapsed into silence. I called out to Joannides, who told his wife to wait in a corner of the room with the children while we searched the bed. There were several boxes and battered suitcases under it, but nothing significant in them. One of the frightened children had wet the bed, and we pummeled the thin mattress with no result.
Apart from clothes, a large wardrobe in the room seemed to contain stacks of never-unwrapped bed linens and blankets, probably wedding gifts from years ago. When we were done, I gestured to the woman and the girls to get back into bed, and it was only then that I noticed the only evidence that this family was different from most other Greek Cypriots. There, on the bedroom wall, instead of the usual image of Archbishop Makarios, was a framed photograph of Nikita Krushchev, and Nikolay Bulganin – incongruous partners to the crucifix on the opposite wall of the room.
There was nothing in the living room. There was only one other place to look.
“Where’s the toilet?” I asked the man.
“In the yard.”
I left the rifleman with Murtagh and went outside, where the two soldiers detailed to cover the back of the house lurked in the shadows. The privy was a small hut like a sentry box built over a pit and here, too, we drew a blank. Earlier we’d searched some of these more thoroughly, an activity that involved prodding the noisome contents of the trench with long bamboo canes. Fortunately, we had only a few minutes left, and I was glad to give the procedure a miss.
It was time to go.
“We’re going to take you away,” I told Joannides, “and I have to tell you that anything you say may be used in evidence.”
The man seemed perfectly calm.
“I have some questions,” he said.
“No questions,” I said. “ The sergeant here will accompany you while you pack some things. You’re allowed to bring two cases of clothing and washing things, essential medicines, a bible, no food and no other books.”
“How long do you think – ” he began.
“You ‘eard what the officer said,” Murtagh said.
The wife seemed agitated, and asked her husband what sounded like a question, to which he replied quietly. His answer caused her to let out a piercing scream, and this started the children crying again. The sound of their anguish and its volume intensified during the few minutes it took our prisoner to collect his things together.
I was unmarried then and, looking back, I find it incredible that I gave the man no opportunity to embrace his wife and children at that last moment. He had taken the arrest well so far, and it was hard to credit that this allegedly dangerous troublemaker was so mild and dispassionate.
It wasn’t Joannides who needed restraint as we led him to the door; it was his wife. Leaving her two little girls screaming uncontrollably on the bed, she staggered toward us and locked her arms tight round her husband’s body, clinging to him with unbelievable strength. So strong was her grasp on him that, struggling to get her man and his baggage through the door, we were forced to wrench her from him, taking care nor to break her thrashing arms with the sudden final slam of the door. The man said nothing during the six or seven minutes drive to the compound where he was united with his fellow detainees.
I never saw him again, but this isn’t quite the end of the story. Something remarkable and almost laughable happened within a month or two of the mass arrest and imprisonment of nearly 150 members of AKEL. The British Government discovered to its extreme embarrassment that AKEL, while it sympathized with other Greek Cypriots in their wish for union with Greece, treated the right-wing terrorist leader George Grivas with derision, and denounced violence as a means to achieve it. All but a handful of the Communist detainees were returned to their homes in a fleet of buses manned by the Cyprus Police Force.
Oddly, there seems to be no record of the snatch and its outcome in Her Majesty’s archives.
oo0oo
It was December, 1955, in the island of Cyprus, then a British colony. For years, the Greek Cypriots had dreamed of Enosis – union with Greece – and breaking away from British rule. But while the island’s population of around half a million was seventy percent Greek-speaking, the remaining thirty percent were Turkish speakers, and bitterly opposed to the idea. Historically, Greece and Turkey have always shared a mutual antipathy, and since Cyprus is forty miles from Turkey and at least four hundred miles from mainland Greece, Britain’s support of a status quo made good sense.
But that year, being a part of Greece had become more than a romantic dream, and in the summer there were sudden outbreaks of violence. Young British soldiers died or were wounded in drive-by shootings and bomb attacks, and in ambushes on mountain roads. Some had been shot in off-limits bars in Nicosia, the capital. These were the early rumblings of what turned into an ugly, four-year terrorist action that few Americans know about, and the violence quickly flared out of control.
My battalion was flown into the island from Egypt that summer, followed by others from Britain and the Middle East. Not long after we arrived, the British Institute, a cultural and arts center in the middle of Nicosia, was gutted by petrol bombs, and police stations were attacked and destroyed. The death toll was rising, and there were riots on the streets.
Throughout the year, the word EOKA was daubed on walls, the name of a newly-formed group led by George Grivas, a Greek partisan who, with an underground force, had caused havoc among the German and Italian troops in Axis-occupied Greece a dozen years earlier. Now Grivas was training a local force against us in the island’s rugged Troodos mountain range. The locals dubbed EOKA national heroes, patriots and freedom fighters, but to us they were terrorists.
Then another set of initials began appearing on walls all over the colony – AKEL, a Communist group. This was two or three years after the peak of McCarthyism in America, and six years before the building of the Berlin Wall. In December, wary of what could well be an emerging red menace, the Governor of Cyprus secretly ordered the immediate arrest and imprisonment of one hundred forty members of AKEL. The colonial police’s Special Branch knew exactly where they lived, though EOKA and Grivas were invisible.
The first we knew of this was when, one afternoon, as the fifteen youngest officers in the South Staffordshire Regiment – and similar groups in other infantry and police units posted around the island – were summoned to a briefing. We sat around Major Richard Dick Stuckey, one of our company commanders, on a rocky hillside in our camp by the road to Nicosia Airport. Each of us was given a detainee’s name and his address. Our orders were to pick six men from our platoons and, with a jeep and a light truck, to make an armed snatch of our AKEL member that night from his home. The raid would be simultaneous, at precisely three a.m.
Before we dispersed, we all synchronized our watches and, an hour or so later I took my second-in-command, Sergeant Murtagh, on hasty daylight reconnaissance patrol of our snatch site, in a village called Ayios Dhométeos, a few miles from Nicosia. The home was a single-story place in a contiguous row of about half a dozen others, in a street that was only wide enough for one vehicle to pass through. Without pausing as we passed it in our jeep, we checked out the door, a crude assembly of unpainted vertical boards, and agreed that, if we had to break in, it wouldn’t be a problem. We turned at the bottom of the street and again up the lane behind the house, deciding where we’d position two men to cover the dwelling’s rear. Finally, we checked the route to a point about five miles away, where the area’s prisoners would be collected in a police compound before being driven to the detention center.
I was woken by my batman at two a.m. with a mug of tea. Cyprus can be cold at night in the winter, and outside a chilly half moon hung bright in a sky, pulsing with stars. Walking down the slope from my quarters through the sleeping camp, I could see little groups of soldiers heading silently for the armory. Farther down, in the vehicle park, the engines of two dozen vehicles were already running. A few minutes later we inspected weapons, loaded them, and boarded a jeep and a light truck. Our group, like the others, was made up of a sergeant and two corporals, each with a sub-machine gun, and three privates with rifles, one of whom also toted a hefty axe.
The column moved off, and the sentries hailed us as we passed through the raised barrier at the guardhouse. With a number of groups we turned east onto the main road toward the city, while others headed west to their targets. Ayios Dhométeos was only a few miles from the camp and, as we approached it we turned off our headlights, driving in the moonlight. Just before the turning into the narrow street we parked under trees by the side of the road. We had, of course, done a "dry run" on the previous afternoon, so only needed to mutter a few last-minute instructions to send the corporal and rifleman to cover the rear of the house. I led the four others round the corner and down the lane. Our canvas shoes made no sound as we approached, and when we reached the house next door, we stopped. Knowing what to do, the two men detailed to cover the entrance crept across the street to their positions.
The remaining rifleman and I stood with our backs to the wall beside the door, while Sgt. Murtagh did the same on the other side. We’d been told by Stuckey at the briefing that, since there was no evidence that AKEL had used any violence against the British, we were to break the door open only if we deemed it necessary.
I picked up a rock in the road and beat on the door with it, shouting “Anikse tin porta,” ‘open up’ in Greek.
No light came on in the house.
I struck the door again.
“Anikse tin porta!”
Lights flickered on in two other homes nearby.
“Anikse –“
Nothing.
I turned to the rifleman. “Give me the axe.”
I raised the axe above my head; ready to smash it down on the timbers around the latch with all the strength I could muster. But at that moment a faint light shone from under the door, and we heard a heavy scraping, as though someone on the other side were drawing back a bolt or a bar. I lowered the axe and drew my revolver while, behind me, the rifleman focused a flashlight at the point on the door level with our heads.
The door opened slowly and there, blinking into the light, was our target, Stavros Joannides, an astonished man with a bloodhound’s eyes who, when he spoke, seemed to have no teeth in his head.
Under the circumstances, what he said was remarkable. “Kalimera.” (‘Good morning.’)
He wore a striped nightshirt that hung below his knees. Beside me, Sergeant Murtagh thrust the stubby muzzle of his Sten gun into the man’s chest.
“Put up yer ‘ands!”
The man’s arms shot up. "You speak English?” I asked.
“A little,” he said.
“Bring him inside,” I told Murtagh, who marched the man backward into the house, where I patted him down to check for a weapon, but found nothing. Over his shoulder I could see through the open door of a dimly lit bedroom. A woman with long black hair sat bolt upright in the big family bed, the bedclothes pulled up to her neck. Two small girls, who might well have been twins, cowered behind her, crying hysterically.
We were in a living room, where a low-powered electric light revealed a few basic items of furniture: easy chairs round a stone fireplace, a threadbare rug, a few toys here and there, and a table that seemed to have been set for breakfast on the evening before. A loom stood in one corner. The place looked more like the house of the Three Bears than that of a political activist who was dangerous enough to be imprisoned.
Murtagh had stepped back a little, though his Sten was still slung at the ready, pointed toward Joannides, who stood staring at us, shivering in his skimpy nightshirt. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands.
“I’m going to search your house,” I said.
I left him with Murtagh and, with the rifleman, made a quick tour of the house. There were only three rooms, the living room, the bedroom and a kitchen. We began with the kitchen that, because it also served as bathroom, laundry room and storage space, was almost the size of the living room. The soldier and I pulled open closet doors and drawers, rummaged inside them, lifted the wooden lid of a wood-burning copper used for boiling clothes, peered in the oven, and looked around a cramped root cellar under a trap door.
We’d searched scores of houses of EOKA suspects in the months before. There were weapons, ammunition and documents hidden in a number of them, and we’d arrested their owners. But here there wasn’t a scrap of evidence. When we searched the bedroom, the woman was still in bed with the children, who had lapsed into silence. I called out to Joannides, who told his wife to wait in a corner of the room with the children while we searched the bed. There were several boxes and battered suitcases under it, but nothing significant in them. One of the frightened children had wet the bed, and we pummeled the thin mattress with no result.
Apart from clothes, a large wardrobe in the room seemed to contain stacks of never-unwrapped bed linens and blankets, probably wedding gifts from years ago. When we were done, I gestured to the woman and the girls to get back into bed, and it was only then that I noticed the only evidence that this family was different from most other Greek Cypriots. There, on the bedroom wall, instead of the usual image of Archbishop Makarios, was a framed photograph of Nikita Krushchev, and Nikolay Bulganin – incongruous partners to the crucifix on the opposite wall of the room.
There was nothing in the living room. There was only one other place to look.
“Where’s the toilet?” I asked the man.
“In the yard.”
I left the rifleman with Murtagh and went outside, where the two soldiers detailed to cover the back of the house lurked in the shadows. The privy was a small hut like a sentry box built over a pit and here, too, we drew a blank. Earlier we’d searched some of these more thoroughly, an activity that involved prodding the noisome contents of the trench with long bamboo canes. Fortunately, we had only a few minutes left, and I was glad to give the procedure a miss.
It was time to go.
“We’re going to take you away,” I told Joannides, “and I have to tell you that anything you say may be used in evidence.”
The man seemed perfectly calm.
“I have some questions,” he said.
“No questions,” I said. “ The sergeant here will accompany you while you pack some things. You’re allowed to bring two cases of clothing and washing things, essential medicines, a bible, no food and no other books.”
“How long do you think – ” he began.
“You ‘eard what the officer said,” Murtagh said.
The wife seemed agitated, and asked her husband what sounded like a question, to which he replied quietly. His answer caused her to let out a piercing scream, and this started the children crying again. The sound of their anguish and its volume intensified during the few minutes it took our prisoner to collect his things together.
I was unmarried then and, looking back, I find it incredible that I gave the man no opportunity to embrace his wife and children at that last moment. He had taken the arrest well so far, and it was hard to credit that this allegedly dangerous troublemaker was so mild and dispassionate.
It wasn’t Joannides who needed restraint as we led him to the door; it was his wife. Leaving her two little girls screaming uncontrollably on the bed, she staggered toward us and locked her arms tight round her husband’s body, clinging to him with unbelievable strength. So strong was her grasp on him that, struggling to get her man and his baggage through the door, we were forced to wrench her from him, taking care nor to break her thrashing arms with the sudden final slam of the door. The man said nothing during the six or seven minutes drive to the compound where he was united with his fellow detainees.
I never saw him again, but this isn’t quite the end of the story. Something remarkable and almost laughable happened within a month or two of the mass arrest and imprisonment of nearly 150 members of AKEL. The British Government discovered to its extreme embarrassment that AKEL, while it sympathized with other Greek Cypriots in their wish for union with Greece, treated the right-wing terrorist leader George Grivas with derision, and denounced violence as a means to achieve it. All but a handful of the Communist detainees were returned to their homes in a fleet of buses manned by the Cyprus Police Force.
Oddly, there seems to be no record of the snatch and its outcome in Her Majesty’s archives.
oo0oo
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
BLOCK
“I’ll never do it in time. Never!”
Huddling in her old raincoat, Lavinia Smoot whimpered in the back of the bus while it lurched from stop to stop down Second Avenue in a deluge of November rain.
It had seemed such a good idea at the time. When the fall program arrived in the mail from the Y, she and her friend Marcie Nagel were atwitter with excitement at the prospect of passing a dozen winter evenings with people of like mind. Creatives, they called them nowadays; people who knew, as she and Marcie did, that they had untapped talents that needed only to be set free, and honed by constructive criticism.
The first session, called The Emerging Muse, was riveting. Penelope Raintree, the facilitator, had been so inspiring, so full of wisdom. “We all have it in us,” she reminded her class. “In the weeks ahead we must allow it to flow out. Bring your latest work in progress, and read it aloud to the class.”
For most of the opening session Penny Raintree – she asked them all to call her Penny – had gone into a none-too-lucid explanation of some of the finer points of the poet’s craft. She dealt with the strict confines of the heroic couplet and the Spenserian stanza, the whimsy of the limerick, and the scrupulous economy of haiku. Lavinia took notes with a well-sharpened pencil.
The second session was less easy. Baring her soul to strangers was something for which Jefferson High in Lima, Ohio, and forty-three years in the stock department at Bloomingdales had not prepared her. After an agonizing Sunday crouched over her Remington portable, with a faded ribbon and a letter ‘e’ that jammed repeatedly, she read the first poem she had written in five decades. It was a wistful verse that recalled the view of corn fields from her bedroom window when she was a child.
Her poem, Field of Dreams, received a kind if hesitant reception from the class. Not, she had to admit, quite as enthusiastic as that given to the man who preceded her, a bearded, retired Navy veteran who, in a thunderous voice, read the first sixteen verses of an epic poem about the sinking of a German battleship in the North Atlantic.
It was even harder for Lavinia to accept that her friend Marcie’s contribution was much better received than hers. She wasn’t envious; of course not. Marcie had written several quite witty verses recalling how her sister Ruthie dropped an ice cream into the orchestra from the mezzanine during her first visit to the Met. Penny had called it “cute.” Mrs. Lukaszewski, a woman with strangely blue hair, who claimed to have once worked at Ladies’ Home Journal, said it was “mirth-provoking.” Even the old sailor, Captain Wetherspoon, volunteered that it was “interesting.”
Walking to the bus on the way home, Lavinia and Marcie agreed that the evening had been fun, and congratulated each other warmly on their efforts.
“You were so professional,” Lavinia said, “you ought to be on the radio!”
“Oh, but your poem was so . . . well . . . so vivid,” said Marcie, “I loved the bit about the corn ‘standing in rigid ranks of green.’ ”
They parted with a sisterly air kiss at the corner of Second Avenue and 15th Street. In her apartment, Lavinia turned on the heater, made herself a cup of decaf, and flopped into bed. Pulling up the covers she reflected that creative writing was both rejuvenating and good for the soul. She wouldn’t think yet about what to write next week. There were seven whole days before the next session. Penny had said, “Just leave it to your subconscious, and don’t try to force it. Let inspiration creep into your soul.”
During the weekend, and early in the following week, other matters occupied Lavinia’s mind. For one thing, there was the holiday surge of work at the store, keeping her at her desk until at least six. Then there was her argument with Con Ed about the electricity bill, letters to write and bills to pay. Lavinia told herself not to worry, there was plenty of time. Penny Raintree had said there was nothing like a deadline to make the creative juices flow. She hoped that was true, because in no time it was Wednesday morning.
During the day at work she grew increasingly anxious. She hadn’t even thought of a topic yet! Time was running out. By that evening on the bus going home she was beside herself. As soon as she closed her door she warmed a can of soup, sat at her typewriter, rolled a sheet of paper into the machine and stared at it. Two hours and a box of Ritz crackers later, Lavinia had something akin to snow-blindness, and only five screwed-up balls of paper to show for it.
She’d read about writer’s block often enough in her eagerly awaited issues of Writers Digest, and this must be it. An hour later, at 10 p.m., it was the same. She rose and paced about the living room. Where could she find a hint, the merest seed of creativity? She searched her bookshelf for inspiration. Here was The World Book, and useful guides to life such as How To Clean Almost Anything, a dozen or two paperback novels and several books of poetry.
That was when the insidious thought came to her. Suppose she were to find the work of some minor poet, copy it out and claim it as her own. Nobody would be hurt, and it would rid her of this embarrassing situation.
No, she couldn’t do it. It would be against every rule she lived by. Worse, it might well require her to tell a lie. She glanced through the books: Eliot, Wordsworth, Pound, Whitman. But wait. Here was a book of 1920s British poetry. She took it down and leafed through its yellowed pages. Some of the writers she’s heard of, John Masefield, Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare. Others she hadn’t. Who else knew of W.J.Turner, for heaven’s sake?
Uneasily, but with a parallel feeling of relief, Lavinia Smoot began to type.
#
At class that week Ms. Raintree invited the old sailor, Captain Wetherspoon, to open the session, and he obliged with a surprisingly romantic and brief paean to seagulls. The class clearly liked it. Two others followed with pastoral pieces evoking fall in Central Park, and snow in Vermont. Mrs. Lukaszewski read an arresting comic verse about a visit to the dentist, and Marcie came up with a few undistinguished lines about her cat, which had a crushingly cool reception. And then it was Lavinia’s turn.
She’d hardly heard the earlier speakers’ readings. This was partly because her heart was beating so loudly, and also because she was wondering whether, after all, she should keep her stolen verse in the shopping bag at her feet, and make some excuse for not having written anything this week. ‘I had the ‘flu,’ perhaps, or maybe something more dramatic such as ‘My aunt Emily died in Tampa.’ But, of course, her friend Marcie would know these were untrue. Marcie could always tell what was untrue, and that was another problem.
Everyone was looking at Lavinia. With no choice she reached down and drew out the poem.
I love a still conservatory
that’s full of giant, breathless palms,
azaleas, clematis and vines,
whose quietness great trees becalms
filling the air with foliage,
a curved and dreamy statuary . . .
She read the second verse and looked nervously around the table. At first there was total silence. Then Penny Raintree said in a rapturous voice “Lovely, Lavinia. Absolutely lovely!”
Others nodded in agreement. Little, spectacled Angela Perez, who looked like the doormouse in Alice, and who rarely had much to say for herself, said: “It has such wonderful imagery. Where did you find such inspiration?”
Lavinia swallowed. She knew she was about to compound her lie, but there was no way out. “Oh, I . . . yes, well, I went to the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn, and it just came to me.”
On the way home Marcie was quiet. Was she angry about something? When she broke her silence she said, “I didn’t know you went to the Botanical Gardens.”
Lavinia averted her eyes. “Oh, yes. Didn’t I tell you?”
She hadn’t thought for years of the saying she’d learned at school:
“Tell a lie to your mother,
and no matter how you try, brother,
you’ll find you’ve got to tell another.”
And another, and another. They walked a little farther, and Marcie said, frowning, “So what are you going to do for an encore?”
That was something else Lavinia hadn’t thought about.
oo0oo
Huddling in her old raincoat, Lavinia Smoot whimpered in the back of the bus while it lurched from stop to stop down Second Avenue in a deluge of November rain.
It had seemed such a good idea at the time. When the fall program arrived in the mail from the Y, she and her friend Marcie Nagel were atwitter with excitement at the prospect of passing a dozen winter evenings with people of like mind. Creatives, they called them nowadays; people who knew, as she and Marcie did, that they had untapped talents that needed only to be set free, and honed by constructive criticism.
The first session, called The Emerging Muse, was riveting. Penelope Raintree, the facilitator, had been so inspiring, so full of wisdom. “We all have it in us,” she reminded her class. “In the weeks ahead we must allow it to flow out. Bring your latest work in progress, and read it aloud to the class.”
For most of the opening session Penny Raintree – she asked them all to call her Penny – had gone into a none-too-lucid explanation of some of the finer points of the poet’s craft. She dealt with the strict confines of the heroic couplet and the Spenserian stanza, the whimsy of the limerick, and the scrupulous economy of haiku. Lavinia took notes with a well-sharpened pencil.
The second session was less easy. Baring her soul to strangers was something for which Jefferson High in Lima, Ohio, and forty-three years in the stock department at Bloomingdales had not prepared her. After an agonizing Sunday crouched over her Remington portable, with a faded ribbon and a letter ‘e’ that jammed repeatedly, she read the first poem she had written in five decades. It was a wistful verse that recalled the view of corn fields from her bedroom window when she was a child.
Her poem, Field of Dreams, received a kind if hesitant reception from the class. Not, she had to admit, quite as enthusiastic as that given to the man who preceded her, a bearded, retired Navy veteran who, in a thunderous voice, read the first sixteen verses of an epic poem about the sinking of a German battleship in the North Atlantic.
It was even harder for Lavinia to accept that her friend Marcie’s contribution was much better received than hers. She wasn’t envious; of course not. Marcie had written several quite witty verses recalling how her sister Ruthie dropped an ice cream into the orchestra from the mezzanine during her first visit to the Met. Penny had called it “cute.” Mrs. Lukaszewski, a woman with strangely blue hair, who claimed to have once worked at Ladies’ Home Journal, said it was “mirth-provoking.” Even the old sailor, Captain Wetherspoon, volunteered that it was “interesting.”
Walking to the bus on the way home, Lavinia and Marcie agreed that the evening had been fun, and congratulated each other warmly on their efforts.
“You were so professional,” Lavinia said, “you ought to be on the radio!”
“Oh, but your poem was so . . . well . . . so vivid,” said Marcie, “I loved the bit about the corn ‘standing in rigid ranks of green.’ ”
They parted with a sisterly air kiss at the corner of Second Avenue and 15th Street. In her apartment, Lavinia turned on the heater, made herself a cup of decaf, and flopped into bed. Pulling up the covers she reflected that creative writing was both rejuvenating and good for the soul. She wouldn’t think yet about what to write next week. There were seven whole days before the next session. Penny had said, “Just leave it to your subconscious, and don’t try to force it. Let inspiration creep into your soul.”
During the weekend, and early in the following week, other matters occupied Lavinia’s mind. For one thing, there was the holiday surge of work at the store, keeping her at her desk until at least six. Then there was her argument with Con Ed about the electricity bill, letters to write and bills to pay. Lavinia told herself not to worry, there was plenty of time. Penny Raintree had said there was nothing like a deadline to make the creative juices flow. She hoped that was true, because in no time it was Wednesday morning.
During the day at work she grew increasingly anxious. She hadn’t even thought of a topic yet! Time was running out. By that evening on the bus going home she was beside herself. As soon as she closed her door she warmed a can of soup, sat at her typewriter, rolled a sheet of paper into the machine and stared at it. Two hours and a box of Ritz crackers later, Lavinia had something akin to snow-blindness, and only five screwed-up balls of paper to show for it.
She’d read about writer’s block often enough in her eagerly awaited issues of Writers Digest, and this must be it. An hour later, at 10 p.m., it was the same. She rose and paced about the living room. Where could she find a hint, the merest seed of creativity? She searched her bookshelf for inspiration. Here was The World Book, and useful guides to life such as How To Clean Almost Anything, a dozen or two paperback novels and several books of poetry.
That was when the insidious thought came to her. Suppose she were to find the work of some minor poet, copy it out and claim it as her own. Nobody would be hurt, and it would rid her of this embarrassing situation.
No, she couldn’t do it. It would be against every rule she lived by. Worse, it might well require her to tell a lie. She glanced through the books: Eliot, Wordsworth, Pound, Whitman. But wait. Here was a book of 1920s British poetry. She took it down and leafed through its yellowed pages. Some of the writers she’s heard of, John Masefield, Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare. Others she hadn’t. Who else knew of W.J.Turner, for heaven’s sake?
Uneasily, but with a parallel feeling of relief, Lavinia Smoot began to type.
#
At class that week Ms. Raintree invited the old sailor, Captain Wetherspoon, to open the session, and he obliged with a surprisingly romantic and brief paean to seagulls. The class clearly liked it. Two others followed with pastoral pieces evoking fall in Central Park, and snow in Vermont. Mrs. Lukaszewski read an arresting comic verse about a visit to the dentist, and Marcie came up with a few undistinguished lines about her cat, which had a crushingly cool reception. And then it was Lavinia’s turn.
She’d hardly heard the earlier speakers’ readings. This was partly because her heart was beating so loudly, and also because she was wondering whether, after all, she should keep her stolen verse in the shopping bag at her feet, and make some excuse for not having written anything this week. ‘I had the ‘flu,’ perhaps, or maybe something more dramatic such as ‘My aunt Emily died in Tampa.’ But, of course, her friend Marcie would know these were untrue. Marcie could always tell what was untrue, and that was another problem.
Everyone was looking at Lavinia. With no choice she reached down and drew out the poem.
I love a still conservatory
that’s full of giant, breathless palms,
azaleas, clematis and vines,
whose quietness great trees becalms
filling the air with foliage,
a curved and dreamy statuary . . .
She read the second verse and looked nervously around the table. At first there was total silence. Then Penny Raintree said in a rapturous voice “Lovely, Lavinia. Absolutely lovely!”
Others nodded in agreement. Little, spectacled Angela Perez, who looked like the doormouse in Alice, and who rarely had much to say for herself, said: “It has such wonderful imagery. Where did you find such inspiration?”
Lavinia swallowed. She knew she was about to compound her lie, but there was no way out. “Oh, I . . . yes, well, I went to the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn, and it just came to me.”
On the way home Marcie was quiet. Was she angry about something? When she broke her silence she said, “I didn’t know you went to the Botanical Gardens.”
Lavinia averted her eyes. “Oh, yes. Didn’t I tell you?”
She hadn’t thought for years of the saying she’d learned at school:
“Tell a lie to your mother,
and no matter how you try, brother,
you’ll find you’ve got to tell another.”
And another, and another. They walked a little farther, and Marcie said, frowning, “So what are you going to do for an encore?”
That was something else Lavinia hadn’t thought about.
oo0oo
OUT FOR THE COUNT
They say nobody’s perfect, and I guess that’s true. We all have our little handicaps and imperfections, whether we acquire them by nurture or nature. We can be left-handed or colorblind, or have irritating habits such as laughing too loud, or biting our fingernails. And I’m no exception.
No, my problem is a constant humiliation. I’m arithmetically challenged, and can't do even the simplest addition and subtraction in my head. No, seriously. Faced with what you’d probably consider the easiest sum, my mind seizes up. I've always been mystified by this shortcoming. After all, I had a pricey private education at upper-crust British seats of learning. I learned (and then forgot) one dead language and two living ones, mastered subjects from English, history and geography to physics, chemistry and biology, and most people would be fairly happy to swap IQs with me. Both my father and brother made good livings in banking, so why am I such a mutt at math?
One time when this disability used to rear its head was whenever I was paying the check at a restaurant, with my pen poised while I calculated the tip. In those days, if you’d watched carefully, you’d have noticed that, though barely perceptibly, my knuckles were moving up and down, while my brow furrowed with the concentration of the task in hand.
I went through this embarrassing process for years until, not long ago, I discovered a little printed plastic card called a ‘tip calculator,’ that tells me fifteen and twenty percent of any sum up to one hundred dollars. With this, holding the card surreptitiously under the table, I can now sneak a look while the waiter or waitress makes out the final check. In this way I impress guests with my seemingly instant mental arithmetic. Of course, in the privacy of my own home I whip out a calculator with the best of them, and do the most basic sums without the embarrassment I’d experience using it in a restaurant, a barber’s shop or a cab. Working out a tip in a taxi is still a trial, because it’s almost always too dark in the back to read my cheat sheet.
My wife, who’s infuriatingly competent at absolutely everything, says, “It’s so easy! To work out fifteen percent of something, all you do is move the decimal point one place to the left to get ten percent. Then you just add half that number to it to get your fifteen percent.” She calls that easy?
Of course, being inflicted in this way doesn’t begin and end with calculating tips. Every day there’s a need for mental arithmetic, such as working out lengths, heights and widths in do-it-yourself jobs. And then there’s the constant problem of working out the change I should get in a store. If normal people pay $13.37 for something and hand over $20, they immediately know how much change to expect. But I don’t.
Was this inability inherited, or caused by some life experience? My very earliest memories of math at school couldn’t have been happier. In the mid-1930s, at a convent school starting at the age five, I was taught very elementary arithmetic by kindly nuns. We wrote the numbers on wood-framed slates with slate pencils that made the most excruciating scrooping sounds. Later, we moved on to two-times tables, mouthing them in unison to our smiling, nodding tutors. “Two twos are four, three twos are six, four twos are eight . . .” I still have instant recall of those tables up to twelve twelves.
But there were no kindly nuns when, only a few years later, I was sent to my first boarding school far from home. Here, a scruffy, mop-headed, sour-faced Welshman called Dai Griffin took over where they left off. Mr. Griffin – we called him ‘Dirty Dai’– galloped through multiplication and long division at a cracking pace that was fine for the brightest and most numerate of his class, but not for the rest of us. He had a thick Welsh accent, and was given to outbursts of rage, when he was liable to throw sticks of blackboard chalk around the classroom.
With Mr. Griffin, arithmetic became a fearsome ordeal, something to dread. It became even harder when we began calculations to do with money. Britain’s currency was not yet decimalized; instead we had pounds, shillings and pence. Now listen carefully, there were twenty shillings in a pound, twelve pence in a shilling, and two halfpennies (ha’pennies) or four farthings in a penny. How would you go about adding twenty-eight pounds, seven shillings and fourpence-farthing to seventeen pounds, three shillings, and eightpence-ha’penny?
Around the time when Mr. Dai Griffin was about to launch into algebra and geometry, something fortuitous happened – he died. That may sound harsh but, even if he was nice to his wife and children and kind to small animals, to us he seemed a mean-spirited monster. A master called Bob Hawkins took over our math lessons, a warm-hearted man who clearly loved his subject, made up jokes about isosceles triangles, and treated us like equals. In the next school, ‘Fuzzy’ Wheatcroft, a man of similar character to Hawkins, took us through the whole gamut of math, including trigonometry and calculus, in such a way that I actually looked forward to his lessons. Then, of course, we were using slide rules and charts, since desk-top computers were at least thirty-five years away. I thought trigonometry a futile waste of time then. Why would I ever need to know all this stuff about tangents and cotangents? I had no idea that, eight or nine years later in the British Army, I’d need it to plot targets for my 81mm mortar platoon during a bout of terrorism in the Mid-East.
I’ll bet that would have astonished the very late Dirty Dai.
oo0oo
No, my problem is a constant humiliation. I’m arithmetically challenged, and can't do even the simplest addition and subtraction in my head. No, seriously. Faced with what you’d probably consider the easiest sum, my mind seizes up. I've always been mystified by this shortcoming. After all, I had a pricey private education at upper-crust British seats of learning. I learned (and then forgot) one dead language and two living ones, mastered subjects from English, history and geography to physics, chemistry and biology, and most people would be fairly happy to swap IQs with me. Both my father and brother made good livings in banking, so why am I such a mutt at math?
One time when this disability used to rear its head was whenever I was paying the check at a restaurant, with my pen poised while I calculated the tip. In those days, if you’d watched carefully, you’d have noticed that, though barely perceptibly, my knuckles were moving up and down, while my brow furrowed with the concentration of the task in hand.
I went through this embarrassing process for years until, not long ago, I discovered a little printed plastic card called a ‘tip calculator,’ that tells me fifteen and twenty percent of any sum up to one hundred dollars. With this, holding the card surreptitiously under the table, I can now sneak a look while the waiter or waitress makes out the final check. In this way I impress guests with my seemingly instant mental arithmetic. Of course, in the privacy of my own home I whip out a calculator with the best of them, and do the most basic sums without the embarrassment I’d experience using it in a restaurant, a barber’s shop or a cab. Working out a tip in a taxi is still a trial, because it’s almost always too dark in the back to read my cheat sheet.
My wife, who’s infuriatingly competent at absolutely everything, says, “It’s so easy! To work out fifteen percent of something, all you do is move the decimal point one place to the left to get ten percent. Then you just add half that number to it to get your fifteen percent.” She calls that easy?
Of course, being inflicted in this way doesn’t begin and end with calculating tips. Every day there’s a need for mental arithmetic, such as working out lengths, heights and widths in do-it-yourself jobs. And then there’s the constant problem of working out the change I should get in a store. If normal people pay $13.37 for something and hand over $20, they immediately know how much change to expect. But I don’t.
Was this inability inherited, or caused by some life experience? My very earliest memories of math at school couldn’t have been happier. In the mid-1930s, at a convent school starting at the age five, I was taught very elementary arithmetic by kindly nuns. We wrote the numbers on wood-framed slates with slate pencils that made the most excruciating scrooping sounds. Later, we moved on to two-times tables, mouthing them in unison to our smiling, nodding tutors. “Two twos are four, three twos are six, four twos are eight . . .” I still have instant recall of those tables up to twelve twelves.
But there were no kindly nuns when, only a few years later, I was sent to my first boarding school far from home. Here, a scruffy, mop-headed, sour-faced Welshman called Dai Griffin took over where they left off. Mr. Griffin – we called him ‘Dirty Dai’– galloped through multiplication and long division at a cracking pace that was fine for the brightest and most numerate of his class, but not for the rest of us. He had a thick Welsh accent, and was given to outbursts of rage, when he was liable to throw sticks of blackboard chalk around the classroom.
With Mr. Griffin, arithmetic became a fearsome ordeal, something to dread. It became even harder when we began calculations to do with money. Britain’s currency was not yet decimalized; instead we had pounds, shillings and pence. Now listen carefully, there were twenty shillings in a pound, twelve pence in a shilling, and two halfpennies (ha’pennies) or four farthings in a penny. How would you go about adding twenty-eight pounds, seven shillings and fourpence-farthing to seventeen pounds, three shillings, and eightpence-ha’penny?
Around the time when Mr. Dai Griffin was about to launch into algebra and geometry, something fortuitous happened – he died. That may sound harsh but, even if he was nice to his wife and children and kind to small animals, to us he seemed a mean-spirited monster. A master called Bob Hawkins took over our math lessons, a warm-hearted man who clearly loved his subject, made up jokes about isosceles triangles, and treated us like equals. In the next school, ‘Fuzzy’ Wheatcroft, a man of similar character to Hawkins, took us through the whole gamut of math, including trigonometry and calculus, in such a way that I actually looked forward to his lessons. Then, of course, we were using slide rules and charts, since desk-top computers were at least thirty-five years away. I thought trigonometry a futile waste of time then. Why would I ever need to know all this stuff about tangents and cotangents? I had no idea that, eight or nine years later in the British Army, I’d need it to plot targets for my 81mm mortar platoon during a bout of terrorism in the Mid-East.
I’ll bet that would have astonished the very late Dirty Dai.
oo0oo
Monday, December 7, 2009
A LETTER TO AUSTRALIA
It was still quite dark at six that morning, and there was frost on the windows when he came downstairs. He stirred the embers in the kitchen fireplace, crouching in his khaki greatcoat, and in minutes the fire was ablaze again; its light flickering on the low ceiling.
A thin blanket of snow had fallen during the night. In the yard outside, the old man filled the blackened kettle from the pump by the back door, and set it on the iron grid over the kitchen fire.
When he carried her tea upstairs on the Chinese lacquer tray his wife lay in just the same position on the pillows. Her face was gray and taut, and she gave him no sign of recognition.
He put the tray on the table and sat beside her on the bed, poured the tea, and took her hands, warming them.
"How d’you feel, then, Janet?"
She smiled. It was a detached, affectionate smile, but she said nothing.
She left the tea untouched and lay still, her eyes fixed on the patchwork quilt.
It was lighter now, but there was little to see in the room. The bed, a small night table and a narrow, painted closet. On the table was a colored photograph of an auburn-haired young woman. She stood in brilliant sunshine in front of a big, colonnaded gray stone building, dressed in a nurse’s uniform.
The old man made some comment about the cold, but Janet made no reply.
She’d never been like this before. He could tell she was fading, and inside him he knew she’d be gone before the day was over.
Without shaving on this December morning, he dressed in clothes he had worn yesterday and the day before. Down in the kitchen he took a writing pad and a stub of pencil from the drawer in the table and wrote a brief letter. The writing was clear, rounded and labored, and the words unlettered and elementary, but a blend of candor and affection compensated for whatever the note may have lacked in fluency. It assumed what was now inevitable, gave a compassionately untruthful reassurance that there had been no pain, and added that there was no need to come all the way home to Invercairn.
He folded the letter and slipped it into his pocket. It took more than thirty minutes to walk to the post office in the village. On his way through the beech wood he heard the sharp crack of shotguns, and voices calling through the trees.
He walked down the sweeping road to the wrought-iron gates at the entrance to the park. Beyond the gates, on the road to Invercairn, one or two cars passed, the sound of their wheels muffled by the snow.
Across the fields, between the road and the river, pheasants strutted, their tails rigid, and hares froze as he passed. At the water mill, icicles hung from the rotted woodwork of the wheel, like frozen stalactites.
It was warm in the post office, with the sweet smell of kerosene. Behind the counter, Lizzie McPhearson, post-mistress at Invercairn for more than forty years, was writing numbers in her ledger.
"Hamish Jackson. Look at you squinting, man. You've left your spectacles at home again!"
“Aye, I have too, Lizzie. I think I’ll forget my own head one day soon!”
He drew his own and his wife's pension money and, stooping to read his shopping list, bought a few small items: some tobacco, a new pencil, six envelopes, and an air-mail postage stamp.
"How's Janet, Hamish? Is she any better today?"
"No. She's sleeping. That's all she does now -- sleeps."
"Never you mind. Winter's nearly half-way gone. She'll soon be right as rain. And Ian Lawson's the best doctor in Aberdeenshire . . ."
The telephone rang, and Lizzie McPhearson was no longer with him.
Hamish filled the envelope, addressed, sealed and stamped it, and mailed it in the red pillar box outside.
Snow fell over the fields as he walked home. Not far from the edge of the village the big black Rolls Royce from the castle drove past, traveling in the same direction. He recognized McLeod, the chauffeur, who seemed not to notice him. As it passed, a small girl waved from the rear window.
When he reached the cottage Ian Lawson, the doctor, was waiting, his estate car parked in the yard outside the back door. A black Labrador dog crouched on the passenger seat, its nose pressed to the windscreen. It barked as the old man approached. The two men shook hands, even though they met every day.
"Hello, Hamish, how is she?"
"Nae so bad, doctor. She slept all night again. Hardly stirred. You've put something strong in them tablets."
"They'll give her some rest, and take the pain away. Shall we take a look at her?"
Hamish led the doctor up the short, steep staircase, and paused at the door, uncertain of what they might find in the cold room.
Janet was asleep. He touched her arm and she opened her eyes. Leaving her with the doctor he went down to the kitchen, putting on the kettle for the doctor to wash his hands.
Through the kitchen window he could see the shooting party from the castle leaving the wood -- four men, three women, some children, and a cluster of jumping dogs. Several loaders walked behind them, their guns under their arms, their barrels broken. Each carried a clutch of game birds.
The black iron door bell jangled in the kitchen on its coiled spiral. Then, at the door was a small boy, dressed in a blue Arran jersey, corduroys and boots.
"Hello, Master Alexander."
"Good morning, Jackson." The child's manner and self-assurance were more those of a grown man than a boy of eight.
The boy carried two cock pheasants, their limp necks tied together with coarse string.
"Grandfather says would you like a brace of pheasants? We shot them this morning."
Hamish thanked the boy, taking them.
"Jackson?"
"Alex?"
"Grandfather says Mrs. Jackson’s dying. Is she really going to die?"
Hamish paused. "Aye, Alex. I do believe she is."
The boy did not reply. Hamish looked down at him. The child stepped back a few paces, his eyes fixed on the old man. Then he turned and ran back to the shooting party, who were by now half-way up the slope to the castle. He was calling them excitedly, but Hamish could not hear the words.
The doctor was upstairs for nearly an hour. When he came down he did not, as he usually did, reach for his coat from the hook on the door. Instead, he sat down by the fireplace.
Hamish waited by the window, still in his Army coat, his hands deep in the pockets.
"We've . . . we’ve done all we can, Hamish. You were at the hospital during the operation, and here for the past few weeks. You've seen it all. We've talked about it often, haven’t we? If she was younger there'd be some hope, but you're both in your eighties . . ."
"She's going to die today, isn’t she?"
"Well . . . yes, I think it’s likely, but --" He shook his head. "-- I can’t be certain."
The doctor rested both hands on the old man's shoulders.
"I'm sorry, Hamish, but there's little we can do now."
In the yard, the dog barked again as they appeared together. The wheels spun on the snow-covered ground, and in seconds the car was gone.
Throughout the afternoon Hamish sat by the kitchen fire. From time to time he made hesitant visits to the upstairs room. Each time she was in the same position with the same expression. Her breathing was barely audible. But there was a little warmth under the blankets.
It was dark shortly after four in the afternoon. He lit the lamp and put it on the kitchen table. There were no more callers from the castle. Outside the window half an inch of snow had settled on the sill.
At seven he went back to the room, but this time there was no breathing, and no warmth. Her eyes were closed, and one arm seemed to reach toward the door of the room.
For a moment he sat beside her on the bed holding her outstretched hand, which he had done so many times during the past months, to comfort them both.
He slipped under the covers, lying with one arm across her already cold body. After months of broken, watchful nights he slept until mid-morning; waking to see the garden under heavy snow, still falling.
* * *
Six days later, on Christmas Eve, radio station 3XY forecast 90 degrees. Dressed in her uniform, Sister Christie Jackson steeped out into the already hot Australian summer sun and unlocked her mail box in Glenhuntly Road, Melbourne.
There were three Christmas cards, a Telecom reminder and a letter postmarked Invercairn, Scotland.
Her father rarely wrote, but she always looked forward to his letter at Christmas, in time for Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year.
Standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a # 67 tram, she opened the envelope. On a sheet of yellow ruled notepaper, the writing was clear, rounded and labored.
But there was no letter; not the usual end-of-year family news. There was nothing in the envelope but a hastily-written shopping list, in pencil:
pension, stamp, envelops, tobaco, pencil.
Standing among strangers at the tram stop, Christie Jackson laughed aloud.
"Oh, Dad," she said. "You silly old fool! You forgot your spectacles again!"
Still laughing, she stepped down from the tram at Prince Henry's Hospital, screwed up the note, and tossed it into a nearby trash bin.
A thin blanket of snow had fallen during the night. In the yard outside, the old man filled the blackened kettle from the pump by the back door, and set it on the iron grid over the kitchen fire.
When he carried her tea upstairs on the Chinese lacquer tray his wife lay in just the same position on the pillows. Her face was gray and taut, and she gave him no sign of recognition.
He put the tray on the table and sat beside her on the bed, poured the tea, and took her hands, warming them.
"How d’you feel, then, Janet?"
She smiled. It was a detached, affectionate smile, but she said nothing.
She left the tea untouched and lay still, her eyes fixed on the patchwork quilt.
It was lighter now, but there was little to see in the room. The bed, a small night table and a narrow, painted closet. On the table was a colored photograph of an auburn-haired young woman. She stood in brilliant sunshine in front of a big, colonnaded gray stone building, dressed in a nurse’s uniform.
The old man made some comment about the cold, but Janet made no reply.
She’d never been like this before. He could tell she was fading, and inside him he knew she’d be gone before the day was over.
Without shaving on this December morning, he dressed in clothes he had worn yesterday and the day before. Down in the kitchen he took a writing pad and a stub of pencil from the drawer in the table and wrote a brief letter. The writing was clear, rounded and labored, and the words unlettered and elementary, but a blend of candor and affection compensated for whatever the note may have lacked in fluency. It assumed what was now inevitable, gave a compassionately untruthful reassurance that there had been no pain, and added that there was no need to come all the way home to Invercairn.
He folded the letter and slipped it into his pocket. It took more than thirty minutes to walk to the post office in the village. On his way through the beech wood he heard the sharp crack of shotguns, and voices calling through the trees.
He walked down the sweeping road to the wrought-iron gates at the entrance to the park. Beyond the gates, on the road to Invercairn, one or two cars passed, the sound of their wheels muffled by the snow.
Across the fields, between the road and the river, pheasants strutted, their tails rigid, and hares froze as he passed. At the water mill, icicles hung from the rotted woodwork of the wheel, like frozen stalactites.
It was warm in the post office, with the sweet smell of kerosene. Behind the counter, Lizzie McPhearson, post-mistress at Invercairn for more than forty years, was writing numbers in her ledger.
"Hamish Jackson. Look at you squinting, man. You've left your spectacles at home again!"
“Aye, I have too, Lizzie. I think I’ll forget my own head one day soon!”
He drew his own and his wife's pension money and, stooping to read his shopping list, bought a few small items: some tobacco, a new pencil, six envelopes, and an air-mail postage stamp.
"How's Janet, Hamish? Is she any better today?"
"No. She's sleeping. That's all she does now -- sleeps."
"Never you mind. Winter's nearly half-way gone. She'll soon be right as rain. And Ian Lawson's the best doctor in Aberdeenshire . . ."
The telephone rang, and Lizzie McPhearson was no longer with him.
Hamish filled the envelope, addressed, sealed and stamped it, and mailed it in the red pillar box outside.
Snow fell over the fields as he walked home. Not far from the edge of the village the big black Rolls Royce from the castle drove past, traveling in the same direction. He recognized McLeod, the chauffeur, who seemed not to notice him. As it passed, a small girl waved from the rear window.
When he reached the cottage Ian Lawson, the doctor, was waiting, his estate car parked in the yard outside the back door. A black Labrador dog crouched on the passenger seat, its nose pressed to the windscreen. It barked as the old man approached. The two men shook hands, even though they met every day.
"Hello, Hamish, how is she?"
"Nae so bad, doctor. She slept all night again. Hardly stirred. You've put something strong in them tablets."
"They'll give her some rest, and take the pain away. Shall we take a look at her?"
Hamish led the doctor up the short, steep staircase, and paused at the door, uncertain of what they might find in the cold room.
Janet was asleep. He touched her arm and she opened her eyes. Leaving her with the doctor he went down to the kitchen, putting on the kettle for the doctor to wash his hands.
Through the kitchen window he could see the shooting party from the castle leaving the wood -- four men, three women, some children, and a cluster of jumping dogs. Several loaders walked behind them, their guns under their arms, their barrels broken. Each carried a clutch of game birds.
The black iron door bell jangled in the kitchen on its coiled spiral. Then, at the door was a small boy, dressed in a blue Arran jersey, corduroys and boots.
"Hello, Master Alexander."
"Good morning, Jackson." The child's manner and self-assurance were more those of a grown man than a boy of eight.
The boy carried two cock pheasants, their limp necks tied together with coarse string.
"Grandfather says would you like a brace of pheasants? We shot them this morning."
Hamish thanked the boy, taking them.
"Jackson?"
"Alex?"
"Grandfather says Mrs. Jackson’s dying. Is she really going to die?"
Hamish paused. "Aye, Alex. I do believe she is."
The boy did not reply. Hamish looked down at him. The child stepped back a few paces, his eyes fixed on the old man. Then he turned and ran back to the shooting party, who were by now half-way up the slope to the castle. He was calling them excitedly, but Hamish could not hear the words.
The doctor was upstairs for nearly an hour. When he came down he did not, as he usually did, reach for his coat from the hook on the door. Instead, he sat down by the fireplace.
Hamish waited by the window, still in his Army coat, his hands deep in the pockets.
"We've . . . we’ve done all we can, Hamish. You were at the hospital during the operation, and here for the past few weeks. You've seen it all. We've talked about it often, haven’t we? If she was younger there'd be some hope, but you're both in your eighties . . ."
"She's going to die today, isn’t she?"
"Well . . . yes, I think it’s likely, but --" He shook his head. "-- I can’t be certain."
The doctor rested both hands on the old man's shoulders.
"I'm sorry, Hamish, but there's little we can do now."
In the yard, the dog barked again as they appeared together. The wheels spun on the snow-covered ground, and in seconds the car was gone.
Throughout the afternoon Hamish sat by the kitchen fire. From time to time he made hesitant visits to the upstairs room. Each time she was in the same position with the same expression. Her breathing was barely audible. But there was a little warmth under the blankets.
It was dark shortly after four in the afternoon. He lit the lamp and put it on the kitchen table. There were no more callers from the castle. Outside the window half an inch of snow had settled on the sill.
At seven he went back to the room, but this time there was no breathing, and no warmth. Her eyes were closed, and one arm seemed to reach toward the door of the room.
For a moment he sat beside her on the bed holding her outstretched hand, which he had done so many times during the past months, to comfort them both.
He slipped under the covers, lying with one arm across her already cold body. After months of broken, watchful nights he slept until mid-morning; waking to see the garden under heavy snow, still falling.
* * *
Six days later, on Christmas Eve, radio station 3XY forecast 90 degrees. Dressed in her uniform, Sister Christie Jackson steeped out into the already hot Australian summer sun and unlocked her mail box in Glenhuntly Road, Melbourne.
There were three Christmas cards, a Telecom reminder and a letter postmarked Invercairn, Scotland.
Her father rarely wrote, but she always looked forward to his letter at Christmas, in time for Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year.
Standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a # 67 tram, she opened the envelope. On a sheet of yellow ruled notepaper, the writing was clear, rounded and labored.
But there was no letter; not the usual end-of-year family news. There was nothing in the envelope but a hastily-written shopping list, in pencil:
pension, stamp, envelops, tobaco, pencil.
Standing among strangers at the tram stop, Christie Jackson laughed aloud.
"Oh, Dad," she said. "You silly old fool! You forgot your spectacles again!"
Still laughing, she stepped down from the tram at Prince Henry's Hospital, screwed up the note, and tossed it into a nearby trash bin.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
YANKS
I met my first American when I was about twelve years old, and it was maybe four or five years more before I met another one. I was about twenty when I encountered more than one of them simultaneously. Now, of course, I’m surrounded by them. Indeed, I actually live with one here in Manhattan.
It’s probably hard for an American to accept that, to the average stay-at-home Brit, an American is just another brand of foreigner, no different from a Moroccan or a Madagascan. They look just as foreign (take a trip in the New York subway), they speak a quite different language (if you really listen), and they have a very very different culture. George Bernard Shaw -- note how we say that, Bernerd (not Bernard) Shaw -- wasn’t entirely joking when he wrote of “two nations divided by a common language.”
The British have a complicated view of Americans. On one hand they have huge respect for their attitude to freedom; they’re grateful to “The Yanks” for saving their butts in two world wars; they have a healthy respect for their innovativeness and technological genius, and most of them appreciate the changes the Americans have wrought in almost every aspect of public entertainment -- especially in movies, TV and jazz. And of course there’s a healthy regard for their contribution to pretty well everything else in life you can think of – space science, medicine, and the convenience if not the delights of (some) fast food.
But it has to be said that, mostly because they’re envious of Americans in so many ways, the British have one or two negative attitudes, too. Many of them look on Americans as over-indulged. They think they’re over-fed, over-paid, over-medicated, and over psycho-analyzed. I suggest that envy is the cause of these views because the British are traditionally pitifully underpaid, and tend to live far more Spartan lives. They’ve always been jealous of what they see as the average American’s material standard of living, believing, after watching endless TV sitcoms that all 260 million Americans live in spacious homes with walk-in closets and walk-in refrigerators, driving Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. They also see America as over-opinionated and over-assertive on the world stage. Though they wouldn’t admit it this, too, is almost certainly because the Brits are envious of America’s replacement of the British and their empire as the leading world power.
This envy goes back a long way, but reached the British man-in-the-street in a real and understandable way during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of US sailors, soldiers and airman arrived in Britain at a time when the country was desperately short of almost all of life’s necessities. The average GI earned several times more than his British counterpart. In the village pub and dance hall he had much, much more to spend. His gabardine uniform was far smarter and form-flattering than the British Tommy’s baggy, ill-fitting serge battle-dress. It’s not surprising that the GI’s, with their romantic, movie-star accents and boxes of nylon stockings under their arms, made wall-flowers of the local girls’ local boys. British officers, too, found themselves playing second fiddle to their Allied counterparts.
The first American I ever met was a shy, self-effacing boy of my age called Lou Taylor. He was the son of a diplomat. Tall for his age, he had a slight stammer, and his hair fell over his eyes giving him the look of a myopic sheepdog. Lou, who suddenly arrived at my boarding school in the middle of a term, and soon earned the nickname of ‘Long Island Lou,’ was about as nice as any one in the school, but I remember that even he was cause for envy. He had more toy guns and tanks, more enviable ‘stuff,’ and much more food in his tuck-box than any of us. It was Lou who gave us our first taste of bubble-gum, home-made brownies and Hershey bars. It was Lou whose parents came down from London to the school in the country most weekends in a chauffeur-driven car, while our parents’ cars were on wooden blocks in the garage because there was no gasoline for private use. We never saw our parents from one end of term to the other. For no fault of his, this quiet American in miniature was a victim of just the same resentments as his uncles in uniform.
But for all this talk of envy and resentment, it has to be said that both peoples tend to view the other with a degree of affection. The Brits, stuffy and repressed, love the openness and lack of inhibition of The Yanks. Although they may not admit it they get a kick when they see images of the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. They get a buzz out of old John Wayne movies, and the wide open spaces of the West. They don’t know there are ugly strip malls in Phoenix and El Paso, and ghettos in Washington DC. They used to look on the late Alastair Cook with almost Old Testament reverence. And when their chill wet winter sweeps in, it’s to sunny Florida they flock.
As for the Americans, they’d be lost without Keeping up Appearances, or Masterpiece Theater, with the latter’s plum-in-the-mouth lords and ladies, and tea parties in fussy drawing-rooms in Bath, which they pronounce Barth. They don’t know that an English muffin’s a crumpet, or that you should let tea infuse for five minutes and always, always put the milk in the cup first. American tourists never see the dark, Satanic mills in the North and the Midlands. They think every Londoner lives within earshot of Big Ben, and that there’s an everlasting mist on the Yorkshire moors. And did they weep any less than the Limeys when Princess Di died?
It’s all a matter of perception. Our attitudes and judgments about history, politics, religion, morals and, yes, about other races, are shaped not only by what we see and hear, but equally by what we don’t.
It’s probably hard for an American to accept that, to the average stay-at-home Brit, an American is just another brand of foreigner, no different from a Moroccan or a Madagascan. They look just as foreign (take a trip in the New York subway), they speak a quite different language (if you really listen), and they have a very very different culture. George Bernard Shaw -- note how we say that, Bernerd (not Bernard) Shaw -- wasn’t entirely joking when he wrote of “two nations divided by a common language.”
The British have a complicated view of Americans. On one hand they have huge respect for their attitude to freedom; they’re grateful to “The Yanks” for saving their butts in two world wars; they have a healthy respect for their innovativeness and technological genius, and most of them appreciate the changes the Americans have wrought in almost every aspect of public entertainment -- especially in movies, TV and jazz. And of course there’s a healthy regard for their contribution to pretty well everything else in life you can think of – space science, medicine, and the convenience if not the delights of (some) fast food.
But it has to be said that, mostly because they’re envious of Americans in so many ways, the British have one or two negative attitudes, too. Many of them look on Americans as over-indulged. They think they’re over-fed, over-paid, over-medicated, and over psycho-analyzed. I suggest that envy is the cause of these views because the British are traditionally pitifully underpaid, and tend to live far more Spartan lives. They’ve always been jealous of what they see as the average American’s material standard of living, believing, after watching endless TV sitcoms that all 260 million Americans live in spacious homes with walk-in closets and walk-in refrigerators, driving Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. They also see America as over-opinionated and over-assertive on the world stage. Though they wouldn’t admit it this, too, is almost certainly because the Brits are envious of America’s replacement of the British and their empire as the leading world power.
This envy goes back a long way, but reached the British man-in-the-street in a real and understandable way during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of US sailors, soldiers and airman arrived in Britain at a time when the country was desperately short of almost all of life’s necessities. The average GI earned several times more than his British counterpart. In the village pub and dance hall he had much, much more to spend. His gabardine uniform was far smarter and form-flattering than the British Tommy’s baggy, ill-fitting serge battle-dress. It’s not surprising that the GI’s, with their romantic, movie-star accents and boxes of nylon stockings under their arms, made wall-flowers of the local girls’ local boys. British officers, too, found themselves playing second fiddle to their Allied counterparts.
The first American I ever met was a shy, self-effacing boy of my age called Lou Taylor. He was the son of a diplomat. Tall for his age, he had a slight stammer, and his hair fell over his eyes giving him the look of a myopic sheepdog. Lou, who suddenly arrived at my boarding school in the middle of a term, and soon earned the nickname of ‘Long Island Lou,’ was about as nice as any one in the school, but I remember that even he was cause for envy. He had more toy guns and tanks, more enviable ‘stuff,’ and much more food in his tuck-box than any of us. It was Lou who gave us our first taste of bubble-gum, home-made brownies and Hershey bars. It was Lou whose parents came down from London to the school in the country most weekends in a chauffeur-driven car, while our parents’ cars were on wooden blocks in the garage because there was no gasoline for private use. We never saw our parents from one end of term to the other. For no fault of his, this quiet American in miniature was a victim of just the same resentments as his uncles in uniform.
But for all this talk of envy and resentment, it has to be said that both peoples tend to view the other with a degree of affection. The Brits, stuffy and repressed, love the openness and lack of inhibition of The Yanks. Although they may not admit it they get a kick when they see images of the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. They get a buzz out of old John Wayne movies, and the wide open spaces of the West. They don’t know there are ugly strip malls in Phoenix and El Paso, and ghettos in Washington DC. They used to look on the late Alastair Cook with almost Old Testament reverence. And when their chill wet winter sweeps in, it’s to sunny Florida they flock.
As for the Americans, they’d be lost without Keeping up Appearances, or Masterpiece Theater, with the latter’s plum-in-the-mouth lords and ladies, and tea parties in fussy drawing-rooms in Bath, which they pronounce Barth. They don’t know that an English muffin’s a crumpet, or that you should let tea infuse for five minutes and always, always put the milk in the cup first. American tourists never see the dark, Satanic mills in the North and the Midlands. They think every Londoner lives within earshot of Big Ben, and that there’s an everlasting mist on the Yorkshire moors. And did they weep any less than the Limeys when Princess Di died?
It’s all a matter of perception. Our attitudes and judgments about history, politics, religion, morals and, yes, about other races, are shaped not only by what we see and hear, but equally by what we don’t.
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