In My Mind's Eye Read online

  And then again, whatever the wrongs of imperialism, what harmless pleasure it could often be to a generation of Britons, however misguided, who thought that presence morally OK! It seems to me that life in an imperial hill station, for example, must have been delightfully escapist: terrific landscapes, healthy climate, lively social life among friends, sports, Gilbert and Sullivan, Sunday service in the little Gothic church and hardly a whisper, I would guess, from one year to the next that the millions of friendly indigenes, all around, did not really want you to be there (for of course, then as now, political convictions did not necessarily clash with personal relationships).

  Just a thought – but when the British, and particularly the English among them, ever get over their present condition of perpetual self-denigration, perhaps they will be able to look back at their imperial years with more pride to their apologies, and even, yes, a touch of nostalgia.

  DAY 149

  My eldest brother Gareth (1920–2007) was an eminent and scholarly professional flautist who was also, offstage as it were, a virtuoso siffleur – a whistler. He was particularly proud, he used to say, of his whistled performances of Paganini’s Perpetuum Mobile, and he whistled all his life until his embouchure was damaged by a mugger in New York and he could whistle no more.

  I am a whistler too, though not in a classical kind – I chiefly whistle to rhythmic purpose as I do my daily thousand-pace walk – and I am very much on the side of those people, now in a besmirched minority, who go about their lives with an often tuneless whistle, like errand boys of old. My heart is with them! As Disney’s seven dwarfs told us long ago, ‘When hearts are high / The time will fly / So whistle while you work!’

  I was delighted, then, to learn the other day that another putative relative of mine was an accomplished whistler. Albert Payne, otherwise known as A. Ehrlich, was an Anglo-German music publisher in Leipzig at a time when my mother, Enid Payne, was a student at the conservatoire there. ‘He played the violin very well,’ I read in a contemporary memoir, ‘but his real genius lay in whistling.’ Herr Ehrlich could perform impossible things with his whistle, it seems, and it is reported that his performance of a Spohr violin concerto, with piano accompaniment, was just marvellous to hear.

  I’m told that A. Ehrlich’s classic book Celebrated Violinists Past and Present (1897) is still in print, but it’s Celebrated Whistlers Down the Centuries that I would like to read, so perhaps I’d better write it.

  DAY 150

  On cats: I think of them a lot because I still miss my great friend Ibsen, the Norwegian Forest cat who died earlier in the year, and who must be the last of the long, long line of cats that have accompanied us all through our lives.

  They have been animals of many kinds and breeds, and when the other day it seemed that Key West, at the southern tip of Florida, might be overwhelmed by a hurricane, I thought of Hemingway’s house there, which is preserved as a museum together with descendants of his own large family of cats. I had been there, long ago, on a kind of pilgrimage. All those Hemingway animals were polydactyls – extra-toed cats – and at the time we had one, too, that I was very fond of. So I went to the house with sentimental purpose, because of all the cat kinds we have fostered down the years, Siamese and Abyssinians to plain dear moggies, Thug the big polydactyl was perhaps the nearest in my heart to Ibsen.

  Well, I watched the news all last week and was relieved to find that Key West remained unscathed, and that the Hemingway House animals still thrived; and yesterday I saw on the TV some expert discussing the descent of the extra-toed cats that Hemingway had fostered over there. And do you know? The closest in origin to the polydactyl feline, he suggested, was the Norwegian Forest cat, which had big feet to cope with northern snows.

  How marvellous! So Ibsen and Thug were cousins!

  DAY 151

  Day after day after day, although the world at large is in a condition of immense, portentous and hideously fascinating confusion, the morning news from London makes my heart sink with its tedium. The British nation is itself tottering on the brink of catastrophe, apparently unable to make up its mind about the abdication from Europe for which its electorate voted, in all ignorance, a year or two ago. It is enduring one of the most crucial challenges in all its long and magnificent history, threats to its very survival that could inspire, one might think, noble responses of oratory and debate.

  You would not know it. For weeks not a single moving phrase has reached me over my breakfast table from the BBC. All is petty squabbling among the politicians, sprinkled with childish attempts at humour, and instinct only with personal and party ambition. What petty bores they nearly all seem to be, with only a handful of ageing backbenchers apparently trying to honour the grander traditions of their chamber! For the rest, dullards all, the whole lot of them, toffs and plebs alike. The news each morning from Trump’s America is hardly more inspiring, hardly less saddening, but at least it often startles me with its effronteries. The news from Westminster, concerning the future existence of one of history’s most fascinating constructions, just makes me yawn.

  DAY 152

  The news this morning tells me that the vast community of insects, all over the world, is on its way to extinction because of the insecticides, etc., that humans have used to improve their own condition. It will perhaps be the last stage, it is said, on the route to our own demise.

  I am not surprised, used as I am to witnessing in my own garden, in my own minute patch of the globe, the gradual disappearance of fellow beings. The glow-worms have gone, and most of the dragonflies, and the lizards and the slow-worms and the grass snakes, the frogs and the toads and the hedgehogs and most of the caterpillars and many of the fish in our river. Like the steam train, they have gone the way of progress – human progress, that is. If I were God, I might be disappointed, I suppose, with the way things seem to be going, but perhaps I might think, Well, that’s progress, that’s those clever humans for you, winners are winners.

  I would most certainly not approve, though, of the heedless manner in which, in small things as in big, our master species treats the lesser kinds en route to our common extermination. For example, if I decided to intervene, I would forbid the killing or chasing of any creatures purely for pleasure. I would stop local councils mowing the grass verges of roads, where insects live, just for tidiness. I would sneer at the pernickety artificialness of so many gardens, which banish every last suggestion of wildness, including slugs. I would step in to control the miserable overbreeding of cats and dogs, creating so many freaks for prize money or profit. And, above all, I would abolish all those institutions, the world over, by which Homo sapiens sentences its less advanced colleagues to life for imprisonment, research, exhibition and entertainment purposes.

  But then if I were God, I would say to Myself, contemplating such enormities, who have I made, what have I done? Shall I start again?

  DAY 153

  Today, my friends, I woke up despondent after a bad night, with thoughts about the miseries of nonagenarianism. A reader I met in the street yesterday had complained I’d got some dates wrong, and he had hit a nerve in me. What’s the use of trying, I asked myself? Didn’t the Bible say something about three score years and ten? Perhaps the euthanasians were right. It was a grey drizzly morning, that reader had depressed me, and I felt I had reached the age of pointlessness.

  But lo! Look! The sun comes out, and after a quick breakfast I sit down at my desk to switch the computer on; and after exercising my fingers like a pianist, as I always do as a matter of form, I find myself settling down with all the old delight to the day’s composition. What shall I write about today, dear friends? Good or bad, virile or senile, there’s no life like the writer’s life. Bugger that pedant! Love and laughs to everyone – JAN.

  DAY 154

  For the first time in my life I was taken up the mountain railway yesterday to the top of our neighbouring peak Snowdon, Yr Wyddfa, the highest in Wales or England. I enjoyed the experience immensely,
but not in the way I expected. The line is closing for the winter, ours was the very last train on the timetable, and the whole venerable apparatus of the railway, which was built by Swiss engineers in 1864, was jam-packed with such a jostling, eager, multi-age, multi-race crowd, drawn here from the four corners of the earth, that I was irresistibly reminded of the Grand Trunk Road in India, as Kipling immortalized it in Kim – a river of life, ‘all the world coming and going’ …

  The journey up was familiar enough to me, but still magnificent in its scale and landscape – and for my money more marvellous in its bare green grasslands than the snow wastes of your more famous Alpine funiculars. But whereas when I have wandered Yr Wyddfa alone I have felt myself to be in an empty world, whenever I looked out of the window from that train, somewhere down there, laboriously plodding up tracks, widely scattered across all flanks of the mountain, even scudding down it on bikes, were the thousands of other people who were with us on Snowdon that morning.

  Then we reached the end of the line and tumbled out into a mist, and into a strange huge chamber which is actually a café but seemed to me that morning a kind of grand cauldron – a river of life indeed, not flowing exactly, but jammed higgledy-piggledy wherever there was space, a cheerful, amazed demonstration of humanity, eating sandwiches and rolls, with plastic cups of coffee, everyone talking at once, and laughing, and swapping encouragements or commiserations. And as I sat there myself, squeezed there with my own sausage roll, while some kind friend passed me a coffee over the heads of my neighbours, I had a sort of vision, rather as Kim did when he set eyes on that broad and smiling river …

  For near the ceiling of the room, which itself remains something of a dream to me, there was a long window, and through it I could see dim, burly human figures clambering here and there in the mist. In fact, they were climbing the last few feet to the summit of Snowdon, to the cairn of stones at the very top, but they looked to me like initiates on some mystic mission, to achieve an ultimate destination before themselves fading into the fog.

  So I felt a little mystic myself, as I started on the last of my sausage roll; but then a loudspeaker warned us that the final train was about to leave for the journey back to reality, so I gobbled it down, fast.

  DAY 155

  Patriotism is a problem, is it not? It can be so awful, but so noble too. I have been looking for patriotic music to illustrate a radio programme I’m working on, and the range of it is daunting, from boasting ‘We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too’ to building a new Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. The other day, though, searching American sources, I came across a recording by an elderly former marine of verse four of the US national anthem. He had thought it more Christianly proper than the usual first verse, I suppose because verse one seems to suggest that America’s victories are purely secular, whereas verse four suggests that God Himself must preside over the triumphs of the Star-Spangled Banner.

  As a Welsh agnostic, it was, of course, none of my business, but I rather agreed with this view, and I took to the old boy who presented it, so I popped my recording of his performance on to the Web and sent it to good liberal friends in America, hoping it might cheer them up at a time of national dejection. They acknowledged it, but notably without enthusiasm, probably because that venerable marine was performing at a meeting of a very right-wing political organization of which they understandably disapproved.

  But dear me. When it comes to religion we simple free-thinkers can never win.

  DAY 156

  Today is a Sunday, and at a neighbouring village a chapel has been celebrating the 150 years of its existence – old age by Welsh Nonconformist standards. Of course, the congregation had a celebratory meeting this morning, and at lunchtime I came across an elderly acquaintance who had been there. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘how did it go? Many people there?’ ‘Six,’ she replied.

  I am not a worshipper of any denomination, and by and large the chapel architecture of Wales is not to my taste, but nevertheless I am saddened always by the hundreds of abandoned chapels that litter our country – Calvinist Methodist, Methodist Calvinist, Independent Welsh Calvinist Methodist, and more obscure convictions that I know nothing of. A congregation of six must be a celebration – nil is the norm.

  ‘Mind you,’ my informant went on, ‘I’m not really a chapel-goer myself. I’m an atheist.’ She was old and very Welsh, and I did not believe her. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, and she went on to tell me that she had not set foot in a chapel for years, until that very morning. ‘I’m not at all sure that there is a God,’ she said, and when I assured her that in that case she was not an atheist at all but an agnostic like me, she seemed rather relieved. She admitted that she enjoyed the music in Anglican churches, and had to agree that if there were half a dozen celebrants in her own chapel that morning, most of our neighbours, whether Methodist or Anglican, Roman Catholic or even plain pagan, seemed to be as generally decent as they always had been.

  So, obviously, was she. She had evidently gone to her chapel that morning convinced that she was some sort of hypocrite, but I am perfectly sure that Forgiveness, which in my book is a vital subsidiary of the Divine, was not in this instance required.

  DAY 157

  Right, this is the situation: it is the coldest day of the year, temperature minus 49 Fahrenheit, with a wind-chill factor of 830. The boiler has gone wrong, which means that we have no cooker or central heating, and none of the plumbers I have called are available. We are out of wood for our wood-burners, and anyway I can find no matches. The battery seems to be flat on my radio. Something has gone wrong with the television. It is starting to rain, and a stray cat is miaowing somewhere.

  All this is more or less true, or feels like it, but when at last I get the news on the radio, and hear what is happening throughout the rest of the world, goodness me, what am I complaining about?

  DAY 158

  Here’s a little private parable. Its text comes from a New Yorker cartoon by the late James Thurber concerning some not very good wine, a wine without breeding, as he called it – ‘but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption’.

  Years ago, when I was young, I accompanied, as a reporter, the first expedition ever to climb Mount Everest. It made me a minor celebrity, and when a few years later the first flights to the moon were planned, it seemed to me that I was the obvious reporter to go with them – for I assumed, of course, that they would need one. Because of Everest I was well known for my experience in such adventurous projects, I had a high opinion of my own descriptive powers, and I only awaited the call.

  Imagine the cheek of it! The sheer insolence! Think of how astronauts really are recruited, now that they go regularly into space – the infinite care with which they are chosen, the months of training and indoctrination, the scientific qualifications they need, the psychological requirements, the courage and dedication and technical skill, the sheer self-command of character!

  The call never came, and a good thing too. I was by no means unassuming, unlike Thurber’s wine, and looking back upon myself now, and marvelling at the calibre of the men and women who have since then been rocketed into space, I really cannot pardon my presumption.

  Moral: Know Thyself, for Heaven’s Sake.

  DAY 159

  For years, as I may have already told you, I have orchestrated my daily thousand-pace exercise to mental martial music of some kind – if not a stirring State anthem (‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ or ‘La Marseillaise’), at least some brisk piece of nationalist blarney like ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘(I’m a) Yankee Doodle Dandy’ or a blaring wartime specimen of my youth called ‘There’ll Always Be an England’.

  But I have lately made an extraordinary discovery: there is absolutely no category of music that cannot be marched to. No melody, however gentle or melancholy, cannot be adapted to the rhythmic tread of the parade. Try it! Try ‘Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen’, or ‘Abide with Me’, or a Brandenbu
rg Concerto, or ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’ – just fiddle around with the rhythm a bit and you will find that there is absolutely no category of music that is not adaptable to the sergeant-major’s command!

  This is a most welcome discovery for me, because to tell you the truth my repertoire of rousing marches was beginning to pall, and now my morning exercise is revivified. Only today I did my thousand paces to the music of a limpid Edwardian piece of sentimentality called ‘I Passed by Your Window’, and fine and fresh it was.

  (Now I can’t get the beat of it out of my head – ‘I passed by your window, when morning was red, the dew on the rosebud, the lark overhead, and Oh I sang softly, though no one could hear, to bid you good morning, good morning, my dear!’)

  THAT’S IT! LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, HEADS UP! EYES FRONT! GOOD MORNING, MY DEARS!!

  DAY 160