Thinking Again Read online

  We were briefly living in London then. I didn’t know much about cars, and what I felt about the look of them was chiefly obtained during my walks of those days, which generally consisted of a stroll up and down Harley Street, the street of the doctors. Their consulting rooms were lined with the newest automobiles of the day, and as I surveyed them all in passing I determined that the ones I liked the best were some machines called BMWs, in those days nearly as new to England as they were to me. ‘Ah well,’ thought I, ‘but think of the cost!’ Soon afterwards I was taking a taxi in one of the English cathedral cities, I forget which, and I happened to mention to the driver that I was considering buying a new car. What would he get, I asked him, if he were me? ‘Funny you should ask,’ he said. ‘I had the Bishop in the back of the cab the other day, and he told me he’d just bought a lovely car himself. It was a make that was new to him, and it was new to me too. It was something called a BMW.’

  BMW! Susceptible as I was, and am, to celestial commands, I went away and eventually bought one for myself, and I agreed with the Bishop. A lovely car it was, and we drove it with great pleasure, at home and abroad, until we decided we needed something more familial, so to speak, and traded it in for Volkswagen buses, and then, as middle age approached, I abandoned them too for my first boy racer, a Honda Civic Type R, which has been my dear friend ever since.

  Nowadays my daily exercise often takes me along the promenade of our neighbouring seaside town, which in season is lined always with cars of every make – nearly all, it seems to me, virtually brand new. This is a good period, I think, for external automobile design. Most of these machines look elegant and discreet, and not at all vulgar. They represent the last generation of internal combustion cars, perhaps, before electricity and robotism take over, and this morning as I walked along the prom I asked myself which I considered the most elegant, discreet yet tough of them all.

  Guess what! Yes, you said it, a BMW – the Bishop’s choice! But I had no regrets, all the same, as I drove the old Type R, with an adolescent blast of its exhaust, up the hill and home.

  DAY 13

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  It’s Easter Sunday today, and for once the churches and chapels are full of faithful Christians celebrating the resurrection of their Lord. I am a sympathetic agnostic, and I rejoice with them, but I cannot help noting that this particular Easter Day, 2018, falls also on All Fools’ Day.

  I love and respect most of the Christian story, so full of kindness and sweet detail, pity and courage, children and animals and happy examples, but I just cannot accept the tale of Christ’s resurrection from the dead either as fact or as moral motivation. To my mind it weakens the grandeur of one of the noblest monuments of literature, whether fact or fable, and offers us no inspirational exemplar.

  It is hardly more persuasive, I think, than the famous April Fools’ Day hoax which very nearly persuaded us (me included) that spaghetti grew on trees, or the tale that the astronomer Patrick Moore spun in 1976 about the forthcoming alignment of two planets – it would so alter the gravitational pull, he suggested, that everyone would be momentarily lighter at 9.47 a.m. that day (one woman reported that she and eleven friends had tried it and had all been gently elevated from their chairs and wafted around the room).

  But the story of the Resurrection is, of course, more than a mere deception. It is, in my ignorant judgement, an unworthy fictional appendix to a magnificent work of art and morality, and may God forgive me if I am wrong.

  DAY 14

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  Most of the symptoms of extreme old age I take in my stride as being tiresomely normal, but there is one that is, perhaps, peculiar to my calling. It is an honest confusion in the memory between fact and fiction, and it has cropped up lately concerning two things that I believe happened to me during the years of the 1940s, when I spent much time pottering around the territories of the old Soviet Union.

  In the first memory I was going somewhere out of Moscow by train in the company of an assigned travel guide, whom I assumed to be an agent of the KGB. It was night-time in winter, the passing landscape was deep in snow, and as we stood together in the corridor I noticed through the window a solitary muffled young woman hurrying wildly up a lane.

  ‘Who d’you suppose she’s running away from?’ I remarked to my companion, who replied at once, ‘Probably from the secret police.’ I realized then that she was tricking me into the belief that she was ideologically sympathetic, when she was really all too ready to ensnare me in some bad intention towards the State.

  Nothing more happened. We arrived at our destination, wherever it was, and parted amicably – but the little episode was engraved in my mind as illustrative of the place and the time, and obviously I wrote about it.

  Or did I? I can find no evidence at all, in all my books and travel articles, in all my notes and jottings, that it ever happened at all. Nor can I find any corroboration for another little Russian episode of my life, which happened in old Leningrad forty or fifty years ago. I had made the acquaintance, in a café, I think, of a youngish Russian who had been a pilot in the Red Air Force, and who struck me as a fine and soldierly sort of fellow. He lived nearby, and invited me to his flat to have a drink. Well, I thought, everything’s grist to my mill, so I happily accepted and we walked together to a middle-sized residential block, the sort of respectable place the bourgeoisie would have occupied before the Revolution.

  It had gone down in the world since then, and as we went up the stairs I looked through a half-opened door into what was evidently his bedroom. I found that he hadn’t even made his bed. That citizen of stately Leningrad, that officer and Russian gentleman, hadn’t bothered to make his bed. The very phrase went into my mind as a kind of theme for Stalin’s Russia, and I stored it in my mind, as writers do, and later used it in an essay.

  Or did I? I can find no written evidence of the phrase or, indeed, the episode among all the thousands of words I wrote about travelling in that lost place and age. Like the woman on the Russian train, the officer in the noblest of Russian cities seems to have vanished, somewhere between fact and fiction, among the grey murky symbolisms of the Cold War.

  DAY 15

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  A marvellous day today, so we dropped everything and drove into the mountains to have lunch at the Pen-y-Gwryd inn – the legendary PYG beloved of mountaineers around the world, which stands on the very flank of Snowdon and has been an intermittent haunt of mine for sixty years or more. Today is a holiday, so the roads were jam-packed with cars and buses, and every lane and track we passed was full of hikers, climbers, picnickers and burbling infants. I loved it all – it seemed to me a sort of anti-inferno, portrayed by some mighty laughing artist sharing and portraying an uproarious festival of humanity.

  But for me, all the same, the best moment of our ride into the mountains must have been the conception of some very different artist. It occurred when we rounded a sudden bend and discovered in a shadowy glimpse a family of wild goats – six or seven of them, young and old, silent, quivering and dappled among the trees. Just for a moment I saw them as an altogether separate revelation, portrayed by some genius of profounder temperament, before we hastened by to PYG. (Where I didn’t get the Guinness I was looking forward to – because of some bureaucratic cock-up, their alcohol licence had temporarily expired.)

  O tempora, o mores!

  DAY 16

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  Here’s an odd and unimportant little fancy for you. It concerns introductions to books.

  In 1866, William Dean Howells, later to be popularly known as the Dean of American Letters, wrote a big two-volume book about Venice. He was in his thirtieth year, and when twenty-odd years later he published a new edition of the work, unsurprisingly he found much of it outdated. He decided, though, not to revise it, and this is how he explained himself in his new introduction:

 
; The book is distinctly a youthful book, for good as well as for ill. I might mend it; but I am afraid I should mar it if I meddled with it. I know its faults as I know the sins of my youth, and I hope to be forgiven in what it seems to be too late to undo.

  Nearly a century later, in 1960, I too wrote a big book about Venice, and like Howells, years later I found it impossible to bring it up to date for a new edition. This is how I excused myself, more gushingly than he did!

  I cannot pretend that I feel about Venice as I felt when I originally wrote this book, and so I find that I cannot really revise it … It is Venice seen through young eyes, responsive above all to the stimuli of youth … I hope this record of old ecstasies will still find its responses among my readers, and especially among those who, coming to the Serenissima fresh, young and exuberant as I did, will recognize their own pleasures in these pages, and see a little of themselves in me.

  To be honest, I have never read another word of Mr Howells, and so far as I know he has never read a word of mine (he died in 1920), but I have always felt oddly close to him because of those twin apologias, and from time to time I still dip with comradely pleasure into my copy of Venetian Life, fourth edition, Boston and New York, MDCCCXCII.

  DAY 17

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  A sort of fable today, from the life and with a happy moral.

  The clutch of my old car let me down a few days ago, stranding me without my telephone in a fairly busy road on the outskirts of Cricieth, our nearest town. I sat there at a loss, feeling sorry for myself and evidently showing it, for after a time the young couple in a neighbouring house, one of a row of villas, noticed me sitting there morose. On the suggestion of his wife (so I later learnt) the husband came out to offer his help, and in no time he had the Automobile Association on its way to tow my car to the nearest garage, and had me thankfully at home.

  Well, it so happened that on the day of that charity a new book of mine was published, so I thought it would be proper if I presented a properly inscribed copy to my benefactors, to commemorate the occasion. Off I went with a copy, with my message already written in it, and lo! for the life of me I could not remember which house in the row was theirs. I unsuccessfully tried four, one after the other, and in each house the occupants greeted me with mystified but amused concern, tried their best to identify which of their neighbours I needed, and expressed their regret that they couldn’t have been the ones to have rescued me that day. One after the other they laughed with me and sent me none the wiser on my way.

  Until at last I reached my fifth house, and it was the one. The husband was away at work, but the wife greeted me with infinite enthusiasm, and I produced my book, and unwrapped it for her, and read aloud to her the inscription I had written in it, thanking them both for their great kindness to a total stranger and offering the book as a token of my gratitude and true admiration.

  She listened to me in silence, but when I handed the book over to her, she burst into tears. And my moral to the little tale? Only this: that in every row of houses, almost anywhere, in any country, decent people are living, only waiting to laugh, cry and be kind.

  I only hope it’s true.

  DAY 18

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  ‘What is truth?’ asked jesting Pilate, and sweet Jesus, on this day, 12 April 2018, he might well ask. By the time you read this entry it will all be history anyway, but to me, today, the whole world seems uncertain about the truth. Some pundits say we are simply on the brink of that terrible old calamity, world war, in this case the democratic West versus the despotic East. Other authorities tell us the truth of the world’s confusion is infinitely more complex, and is entrammelled in hundreds of separate disputes, major and minor, justified or contrived, disputes peculiar to themselves or unimaginably generic, all mixed up with economics and political intelligence and infinite varieties of loyalty.

  What is truth? Pontius Pilate, it seems, did not ask the question very seriously, and I suspect many of us this morning feel rather as he did, and wish perhaps that the United Nations could deliver a reply as absolute as did the High Priests on that day of judgement long ago.

  But no, today is no day for jesting. We have no Christ among us to exemplify the truth for us all, nor even a Pontius Pilate to represent our quandaries. We must make up our own minds, and if I am anyone to go by, this morning we are floundering over our breakfasts.

  DAY 19

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  Apropos of yesterday’s hazy thoughts, here’s an addendum. Queuing for lunch at a takeaway place, I happened to notice that the woman next to me was clutching her credit card, as I was myself, in readiness to pay for our victuals. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you never know, do you, anything might happen – did you not read the news this morning’? I agreed, anything might happen, and sure enough at that moment an employee approached us and said curtly that the food counter was closed. She didn’t say why. ‘You see?’ we both exclaimed. ‘Anything can happen, and nobody says why!’

  But I had lately been re-reading the autobiography of an ancient hero of mine, General Sir William Butler (1838–1910), and I remembered then what he thought about the misty manipulators of events in his time. It was, he wrote, not wild idealists, devious diplomats or ever-ambitious politicians, let alone soldiers in the field, who pulled the wires or inexplicably closed, as it were, the food counters of his day. No, says the dear old boy (and remember, he was writing in the 1830s), in the end we always find it is the distant financier behind the scenes, the man of many millions, the controller of vast enterprises, turning some nebulous proposition into a vital question of the hour, ‘whipping the whole pack together and letting loose the dogs of war’.

  I would have quoted him to the woman in the queue, but she had gone off in a huff, packing away the evidence.

  DAY 20

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  Talk of war and rumours of wars reminds me of how many I have lived through, whether near or far, during my own nine decades on this restless planet. Oddly enough, the one that I have experienced most vividly of all was fought before I was born.

  I hardly knew my father, who died when I was eight or nine years old and already away at boarding school. His health had been broken and his life ruined by poison gas in France during the First World War – the Great War, as we used to call it – and the most vivid memory I have of him finds him fitfully asleep in bed one afternoon when I was home from school on holiday. In his dreams the war was raging still, and when I crept awestruck into his bedroom he cried out warnings, tossed and turned, moaned and coughed uncontrollably and sometimes bitterly laughed, so alive in his nightmare that I heard the guns myself, ducked to the screaming whistle of the shells, smelt the cordite and the treacherous, murderous gas …

  He died soon afterwards, when I was back at school, and I well remember the day when the headmaster gently broke the news to me. My father has never quite died for me, though. I hardly knew him, but when I think of him, I am with him still, at his side, on that day of war in Flanders.

  DAY 21

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  The most unfashionable person you can be in Britain today, and the most defamed, is a racist, but nevertheless I must admit to some twinges of the condition when I walk up our lane to the top. In fact, nowadays I seldom walk any further because of what I suppose must be classed as racist prejudice. For seventy years I have lived within the bounds of an ancient Welsh estate, long ago known as a Township, and recorded in 1352 as being inhabited by Einion ap Gruffydd and Lleuci, the daughter of Ieuan. You can’t get much more Welsh than that, and with brief intermissions the district has remained absolutely Welsh ever since – farmed by Welsh families and profoundly impregnated, one might say, with Cymreictod, the intangible state of being that is Welshness.

  Well, a few years ago a cottage not far away fell vacant. Not being rich I failed to buy it, and so pr
obably for the first time since the days of Einion ap Gruffydd it became inhabited by Sais, Saxons – not Welsh at all, but English people!

  They were nice people, polite and unobtrusive, but they were English people, and they rebuilt and developed that cottage in an English way. Doubtless without thinking about it they made it a little corner of England, washed by an English river, breathing English air. I am half English myself, and a sucker for Rupert Brooke, but nowadays, whenever I walk that way, I feel alienated. The old, old magic of the place, the ancient inheritance of Einion and Lleuci, is abruptly switched off, and at the first glimpse of the new crazy paving in the cottage garden, and the holiday caravan parked beside its bank of the river, and the ornamental city street lamp, I turn on my heel and go home to Cymreictod …

  Is that racism? It probably is, but I’m not going to apologize, even in the language of Heaven …

  DAY 22

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  I don’t know about you, but I’m not against bad language in general. It depends on the circumstances – it fondly amuses me, for instance, to hear of Churchill in bed telling an intrusive child to bugger off. There is one swear word, however, that I do find distasteful in any circumstances, and unfortunately for me it has lately unescapably proliferated, at least in Britain. I hate to use it myself, but there we are, obviously I’ve got to name it now, and here it is: FUCK, with its adjectival derivative FUCKING, when employed not to describe sexual intercourse, but as an indeterminate expletive.

  It has a long pedigree. Dr Johnson, I note, did not list it in his dictionary at all in 1755, but the Oxford Dictionary gives plenty of space to its use since the Middle Ages as a profane sort of word, extra-onomatopoeic, both the look and the sound of it representing its meaning – ugly in appearance, ugly to hear and ugly in function, a crude substitute for some more graceful and apposite profanity. And most of all I dislike the word FUCK when it comes from the mouth of a woman – seldom, I suspect, spontaneously from the heart but, as it were, out of the ideology of liberation, a crude and coarse expression of a noble cause.