In My Mind's Eye Page 3

  Presently, though, I ran out of national anthems (Italy? Spain? Russia? China?), and somewhere about pace five hundred I fell back upon unofficial substitutes. Now it was ‘(I’m a) Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ and ‘Colonel Bogey’, but just when things were getting a bit tawdry, another true national anthem crept into my mind and transported me elsewhere for a moment, far from our bumpy lane on this brisk Welsh morning and back to an evening function at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, long years ago.

  They were officially celebrating the two hundredth birthday of that dread monument, which had seen so many demonstrations of Prussian pomp and Nazi arrogance, and I went to the affair that evening with some distaste; but when it drew to an end and I expected a last brassy evocation of hubris, instead there stole into the dusk Haydn’s infinitely gentle arrangement of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’, surely the greatest of all national anthems, in the mellow adaptation of a string quartet.

  And so I did my final paces this morning, avoiding the puddle by the farm gates, not to a martial discipline, but to a sad and more graceful euphony.

  DAY 21

  ‘Stop the world,’ cried Anthony Newley’s smash musical of 1966, ‘I want to get off!’, and legend says he took the title from a graffito somewhere. The sentiment was common enough then, when the hydrogen bomb was maturing, and it is probably even more widely held now, when the world seems inextricably entangled in conflicts political, economic and ironically religious, not to mention just plain deranged. I meet plenty of people of my own generation, matured in decades of disillusionment, who suspect today’s state of the earth to be its most absolutely frightful ever, and who might very well agree with Mr Newley’s graffitist.

  I don’t, though. I’m prepared to stick it out. It is true that I sometimes feel, as Pope said of the vestal virgins, ‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot,’ but it’s no more than a spasm. I shan’t be here much longer anyway, and I would be ashamed to desert my family and friends – after all, the human race may merely be undergoing a temporary period of insanity, as against its usual condition of confusion. Besides, although heaven knows I have enough to worry about in my personal affairs, like nearly everyone else, I have lots to enjoy too, and lots of people to like and love.

  So, no, I don’t want to desert the old earth. The most desperate graffito you might find on my bedroom wall would only be ‘Stop the alarm clock. I don’t want to get up.’

  DAY 22

  Preoccupied as I am during my daily exercise up our lane, eyes on the ground, thinking about something else altogether, I seldom know exactly where I am on the route. Kind nature, though, has provided a key to let me know when it is time to turn around and walk home again. The lane runs parallel with the little river Dwyfor, with some woodlands in between, and unless after a rainfall the water is running very high, I hear nothing of it for the first half-mile of my bemused exercise. Then the lane leaves the woodland and the river grows closer, and for the first time I am conscious of the rush of its stream. Without a pause, I turn at once and begin my homeward march.

  This frequent little experience reminds me, oddly enough, of Swaziland, a country not in most respects much like Wales. There, long years ago, I learnt that high on a mountainside above Mbabane was a sacred glade in which the remains of all Swazi kings down the centuries had been traditionally scattered. How could I get there, I inquired, and they told me that I must follow a track up the mountain that itself clung to the course of a stream, and that – wait for it! – the moment I could no longer hear the rush of its waters, I would know I was on holy ground.

  Was I? I swear I felt, when the water fell silent, some profound unworldly influence that held me motionless there; just as, when I hear the Dwyfor near the end of our lane, I instantly turn for home. There is a difference, though. When I get home from my daily exercise I feel fine, but when I returned from the sanctuary of the Swazi kings that evening, so my notes of the time remind me, I spent the next two days inexplicably sick in bed.

  DAY 23

  I stumbled yesterday upon a tragedy. High above the sea near our home in Wales is a lonely windswept graveyard, with a small attendant church. The graveyard feels more important than the church, which is locked. It is far away from the nearest houses, but it is well mown and tended and clearly cherished; there are many new gravestones among the rows and rows of slabs and crosses undulating across the surrounding grassland. Pottering idly around it yesterday I recognized many of the family names there from homes and farms and shops near our own house. Some were in English, some in Welsh, and it seemed to me an enviable place to end up, high in those silent meadows above the sea. It was like a community still, tradesmen and seafaring people and shopkeepers and farmers and such – not so different, I thought, from the community we still are in the district all around.

  In a remote corner of the cemetery, though, I noticed a sadder kind of memorial. Within its own enclosure was a tall grey obelisk, crumbled a little. Its surrounding turf was unkempt and its inscriptions looked hard to decipher, but it was still a commanding sort of presence, separate from the unassuming ranks around it. I scrambled up there, and found that it commemorated three members of the Ward family, unknown to me and altogether distinct, I felt, from that homely society of the dead.

  The obelisk commemorated Brigadier General Thomas Ward, 1861–1949, of the famous British cavalry regiment the Queen’s Bays, and his wife Cathleen, 1887–1972, identified as a daughter of the Earl of Belmore. What a world away, I thought, from the rest of their neighbours in their burial place, and how ironically telling their position in that obelisked corner of the graveyard seemed! But then, around the other side, I found a third epitaph, to their son Lieutenant Richard Thomas Ward, Military Cross, 1924–1944, also of the Queen’s Bays, and my responses changed.

  Consider the dates. The old general was eighty-three, his Cathleen fifty-seven, when their brave boy Richard, in his twentieth year, was killed in action in Italy in the Second World War. Were they really so apart, after all, from the community of the dead in that quiet graveyard in the wind? Was not their sorrow the sorrow of them all – of all of us too, for that matter?

  DAY 24

  Do you remember India’s Grand Trunk Road, as Kipling described it in Kim – ‘A wonderful spectacle … a river of life … green-arched, shade-flecked … the white breadth speckled with slow-pacing folk’? Well, I saw it for myself this evening, looking along our lane to the farmyard.

  It was a jammed little cameo up there, half in shade, framed by the thick green trees of our avenue, and it seemed to be in slow, stately movement along the great highway, somewhere between Allahabad and Amritsar perhaps. There were a dominant couple of elephants, laboriously swaying, and coveys of peasants jostled along the pavements, and I could hear laughter sometimes, and see a pi-dog scurrying mischievously here and there among the dust clouds. High-wheeled wagons were edging their way through the melee; once, a small busy rickshaw darted in and out of the traffic. O I could see all the colours of India along there, and smell its smells, and hear the reedy half-tones of its music magically in the air.

  For it was five o’clock, you see. And my neighbours the Parrys were taking their Hereford cows in for milking, riding their quad bikes, with Ben the dog scampering all around. The pace was unhurried. The light flickered with floating oak leaves. The dust was hay dust. It was me really, whistling those arcane melodies, and that bustling rickshaw was only my own Honda, hurrying me home to tea from the supermarket bazaar.

  DAY 25

  I read somewhere the other day about a man who fell in love with a sheep. It sounded an unsatisfactory affair to me, but not half so unsatisfactory as being a sheep. Was there ever an animal so utterly without romance? I know Christians long ago adopted it as a very model of innocence, favoured by God himself, but living as I do in the heart of sheep country, and coming across the animals almost every day
of my life, I find the meek and mildness beloved of the hymnists depressing to a degree.

  Not least because when it is a lamb, the sheep really can be truly enchanting in its playfulness, romping joyously around with its fellows, falling off logs, suddenly dashing across the field for another communal suck at the maternal udder. Lamb of God I can well accept. Sheep of God is unimaginable. As far as I can see, the adult sheep does nothing at all but eat. It hardly ever utters that dullest of all animal cries, the baa (a sound which does not even qualify for italics, since I see that today’s Oxford Dictionary, like Dr Johnson’s in 1755, recognizes it as a word). The sheep must procreate, but one never sees it happening. No, it simply stands there among its identical fellows, silent, almost motionless, colourless, just munching, munching, munching, nibbling time away … If there were such a thing as transmigration, I would give almost anything not to be reborn as a sheep.

  On the other hand, to be a Goat! Wow! A creature born to a capital letter is Capricorn the Goat, clever, capricious, bearded, elegantly horned and hoofed, magically antic. Surely to join his peculiar company must be an ultimate ambition of the afterlife? Besides, I happen to know, by occult intelligence, that the Goat will ultimately accede to the governance of the earth, in alliance with left-handed humans.

  DAY 26

  I’ve had enough of capitalism. When I was young and easy, I thought of it, I suppose, in homely terms of biscuit makers, chocolates, Raleigh bicycles, W. H. Smith’s bookshops and paternal country bank managers. The business magnates we read about then all seemed to be enlightened employers of evangelist leanings who built model villages for their employees. I had never been to the City of London, and Wall Street meant far less to me than the Golden Road to Samarkand.

  In my adolescence, Karl Marx turned up, and I learnt, in broad terms, that capitalists were one and all villains, down to the corner newsagent. Then Hitler arrived with another set of dogmas, and by the time Stalinism had come and gone I was grown up and had reached the conclusion that, on the whole, capitalist democracy was, as Churchill apparently thought, the least bad of them all.

  I read with admiration in those days of the great British companies whose presence and influence spanned the whole world – laudable substitutes, I vaguely thought, for the subsiding British Empire. I believed the City of London, in its innumerable facets, to be an honourable expression of British values, and I was genuinely touched when, trying to pay my bill with a dollar cheque on a liner in the Persian Gulf, I was told rather snootily by the purser, ‘Oh dear me, no. On the ships of this line we prefer the pound sterling …’

  But look at British capitalism now, the basic economic system of our kingdom! I admit I know almost nothing about it. I have met very few genuine capitalists in my life, and they have all been admirable: one started a highly successful book auctioneering firm, another went in for commercial hydro-gardening, and there are half a dozen small private enterprises here around me in Wales whose style and purposes I much admire. But as a whole, from what I read about the British ruling ideology nowadays, it seems to be just one vulgar scam!

  Who are its heroes now? Where is its morality? Any pious Quakers in those boardrooms? Any visionary philanthropists online? The money-making champions of our time all too often seem to be show-off celebrities with glittery wives, vast offshore assets, mansions in Monaco or Jamaica, dubious financial records, shaky sexual reputations, enormous vulgar yachts and an apparently complicit readiness to be pictured in the pages of Hello! magazine.

  But does the system work? you may say. Does it keep the old kingdom steady as she goes? Would Winston approve? Well, he surmised that the British Empire might last a thousand years, and he was wrong about that …

  DAY 27

  ‘Anathema’ is a good word, don’t you think? It rolls well off the tongue, it is rhythmically satisfying and its meaning is ominously indistinct. Anathema! One would hardly wish anathema to one’s worst enemy!

  Well, I wish it, here and now, to anyone who has anything to do with zoos. They call them zoological gardens nowadays, but they are really prisons – jails for living creatures utterly innocent of crime, imprisoned without trial generally far from home, with no hope of reprieve and no pretence at justice. I accept no excuses from those who run or benefit from these appalling institutions. I realize that most of them believe there is some fundamental difference of privilege between mankind and the rest of the animal kingdom – or, as some would say, that animals can have no souls. Balderdash, I would say to them.

  It’s no good telling me that zoos are necessary for the survival of endangered species. That’s like claiming that when the Tasmanian aboriginal people faced extinction, the last of them should have been locked up for preservation purposes. To my mind all the scientific research in the world cannot make up for the imprisonment of a single creature in a zoo. If vivisection is required, use human volunteers. If there aren’t any, tough.

  Nor do I excuse from my contempt people who go to zoos for pleasure, particularly those who take their children along and encourage them, licking their ice creams, to stare through the bars, over the ditches or through the prison glass at their helpless fellow creatures inside. If anything, I despise them most of all, especially when they claim that it offers their offspring ‘an educational experience’.

  For them I reserve full anathema, for it can be much more than a wish or a simple expression of dislike. Since ancient times it has been a powerful, full-blown curse, and I cast it now, with capital As and exclamation marks, on all zoos everywhere, all zoos there have ever been, and all people since the beginning of time (children excepted, of course) who have used any of these despicable places for profit or for pleasure.

  ANATHEMA upon them! ANATHEMA!

  DAY 28

  The clouds are particularly striking today. The sky is blue, the wind is gentle, the sea is calm, and I am sitting in the garden like Shakespeare’s poor old Polonius, complacently imagining camels, elephants and such drifting through heaven above me. I was not always such a sucker for clouds, though. It is only lately that I have come to consider them vital components of the natural order – not just in a scientific or climatic sense, which they self-evidently are, but as immanent contributors to the idea of things.

  The reason I used to dismiss them as mere grace notes, so to speak, was this: it was obvious to me that when they appeared in landscape paintings by even the greatest of artists, they were not as they really appeared. Obviously not, I thought. Long before your Constable or your Canaletto had completed his masterpiece, the clouds had moved on. They were, so to speak, phony accessories. This I easily confirmed because, as it happens, I have facsimile sketchbooks by both those masters, and by comparing preparatory sketches with completed works, I could confirm that the clouds in them were not, as it were, painted from the life.

  But then, I thought, this was not the clouds’ fault. Perhaps there was indeed a moment when they looked as dramatic as they did around Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral, or really did hover so languidly above Canaletto’s Grand Canal. So then I recognized them not as shams, but as collaborators. As the personality of a great conductor contributes, centuries later, to the genius of a Beethoven, so those clouds, however arbitrarily they are appended to a landscape, add to nature’s own grand work of art a grace note of human imagination.

  DAY 29

  There are many weaknesses, I admit, to the romantic temperament. On TV the other day an American woman was talking about America’s gun laws, and she very nearly converted me to her point of view. She spoke of her people as being ready always to defend themselves against evil and stand up for their freedom and their way of life, the future of their children, their pride in their past, defending their heritage if necessary by force of arms, yessir. By golly, I admired her for it. It sounded fine to me.

  She quoted, of course, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, AD 1789, part of the Bill of Rights, so I looked it up in my copy of that document and found that it s
imply says this: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’ It seems to me that the purpose of this decree was the security of the infant State itself, without a standing army, and I am fairly sure that the Founding Fathers, three centuries ago, did not foresee a society with a revolver under every pillow, let alone an automatic rifle in the wardrobe or a pink gun for women. That lady’s rhetoric fired me for a time, before I checked her references, and there’s the weakness of the romantic temperament.

  So often bad things have an alluring side to them, and it’s the allure that first attracts people like me. War is vile, but all too often I tend to concentrate upon its concomitants of courage, loyalty and sacrifice. I enjoy the swank and glory of the old British Empire, but I know very well that it was founded upon fundamental injustice. I am often entertained by the goings-on of petty criminals, and even find myself momentarily in sympathy with towering villains – wasn’t there an undeniable splendour to those ghastly Nuremberg parades, or a sort of fascination to the creepy mass demonstrations of North Korea? I have even written a little book celebrating the Second World War Japanese battleship Yamato, although I know full well that the ship was the ultimate symbol of a crazed and often horribly cruel regime.