In My Mind's Eye Page 4

  But there we are. The point of my Yamato book is the infinite irony of war, and the weakness of my temperament is a tendency to get priorities confused.

  DAY 30

  The sea! The sea! There is a place on the A497, not far from my house, where motorists coming from England can see at last, as they cross a gentle mound in the road, the waters of Cardigan Bay. If there are children in the car, as likely as not it is the very first time that they have set eyes on the sea, and I love to see them as they pass, jumping up and down with excitement and crying (I love to suppose), ‘Thalassa! Thalassa!’, as did Xenophon’s Greeks when they reached the shore of their homeland at last.

  I know just how they felt, both the Greeks and the children. I have lived almost all my life beside the sea. Most of the books I have written have been about sea cities – Venice, Manhattan, Sydney, Trieste – and I always felt, writing about dear old Oxford, that the one thing it lacked was a beach. The sea itself was a sort of homeland for me, and nowadays I can hardly imagine life far from a shoreline – life without an open border, without a horizon, as it were, without that sense of wider meanings that the ocean provides (for look at the globe and you will realize that all the seas are but one ocean, interconnected throughout, with the land mass only a vast archipelago within it).

  To be honest, I have never read Xenophon, so it has ignorantly occurred to me to wonder, as I write this piece, which was the particular bit of sea that his Greeks reached that day two thousand years ago. I had always assumed that it was the Aegean, or the Ionian, or some other part of the Mediterranean that was as home to them as the Irish Sea is to me. It was not. It was the Black Sea, a long way from Athens and hardly more than a great lake, like a bigger Caspian. For a moment, I thought perhaps I was wrong in my romantic interpretations of Thalassa.

  But no, I should have known better. I looked again at my own globe, and of course there at the bottom of the Black Sea was the lesser Sea of Marmara, and at the bottom of that the fateful strait of the Dardanelles, which connected its waters, uninterrupted, not just with the Aegean or the Mediterranean, but with all the other seas everywhere on earth, even sending a drop or two, I like to suppose, together with a fraternal whisper of Xenophon, to the far waters of Cardigan Bay, which I can see from my window as I write.

  DAY 31

  Scenes of Family Life! These are a dozen events, major and minor, experienced or reported, that have just happened to us in our old age:

  (1) A daughter complained, almost in tears, that the work on her house had been wretchedly half completed.

  (2) A son reported, almost in despair, an unwelcome development in his marital affairs.

  (3) A grandson said he would like to murder the man who invented homework.

  (4) A son sent us a poster of his poetical and musical festival in the Alpujarra mountains.

  (5) A son sent us a photograph of a horned owl in his garden in Alberta.

  (6) A daughter sent us animal pictures she had taken in Kenya.

  (7) A grandson sent us underwater photographs he took in Portsmouth harbour.

  (8) A son left on the kitchen table a delicious risotto to heat up for our supper.

  (9) A (very small) granddaughter knocked on the door with a peculiar cake she had made with her own hands.

  (10) A (larger) granddaughter reported that her new school wasn’t too bad after all.

  (11) A ginger cat popped in from somewhere. Nothing to do with us.

  (12) A son popped in too, out of the dusk, just to see if we were OK.

  So it goes, the diurnal sequence, bad and good, happy and unhappy, to outlast us in all our generations.

  DAY 32

  A Touching Poem for Monday Morning

  In the north part of Wales there resided, we’re told,

  Two elderly persons who, as they grew old,

  Being tough and strong-minded, resolute ladies,

  Observing their path towards heaven or Hades,

  Said they’d still stick together, whatever it meant,

  Whatever bad fortune, or good fortune, sent.

  They’d rely upon Love, which they happened to share,

  Which went with them always, wherever they were.

  And if it should happen that one kicked the bucket,

  Why, the other would simply say ‘Bother!’

  (Not ‘F--- it!’ for both were too ladylike ever to swear …)

  DAY 33

  Years ago I happened to see across the street in an English country town an elderly widower I had known long before in Africa. He was carrying a shopping bag and was anxiously consulting what I took to be his shopping list, before stumbling shortsightedly into a nearby supermarket. I was greatly touched, because not so very long before I had known him in the strong prime of his manhood, the governor of an imperial province and master of a hundred thousand fates.

  But it was not just that I saw in him an allegory of history, symbolizing the end of an ideology and the discrediting of a tremendous conviction. No, I realized there and then that I was foreseeing a tragedy that befalls millions of us, when we are obliged to realize, like Shakespeare’s Othello, that our life’s purpose is gone. Othello’s purpose, of course, was the winning of battles, but for most of us it is nothing so finite, just the satisfaction of doing a job as well as we can do it. I once described the city of Trieste, a place I love, as having sadly lost its purpose, and a reader wrote to say that I had defined his own situation exactly, as a once busy man in retirement.

  Do we not know them – the dedicated teachers without pupils, the builders without orders, the lawyer without a brief, the shopkeeper without a shop, the doctor without a patient? Of course, many of them enjoy worthwhile retirements, with family responsibilities or creative hobbies, but it seems to me that only one intangible, religious faith apart, can be relied upon to see us happily through our last years. It is Art, which is infinite in itself, which can be creative or comforting, active or passive, which comes from nowhere, which goes everywhere, which is omniscient, which is laughter and pity and puzzle and beauty, which is equally available to all of us, practitioners or recipients, and which can satisfy all our senses while the going is good.

  I do hope the ex-imperialist I saw that day went home, his chores done and his purpose fulfilled, to write another chapter of his memoirs, or at least to hear some Mozart on his wind-up gramophone.

  DAY 34

  Here’s a small device I employ for the entertainment of the nations – and myself. I am attracted by cars, and when I see an interesting one pull up beside me in a car park I jump out of my old Honda and prepare to accost the owner of the Jaguar or Aston Martin purring there beside me, or the sporty convertible still ticking over. Its owner, and even more noticeably his wife, view me with distaste as I approach them. They think I am going to remonstrate with them in some way, for selfish driving perhaps, or unauthorized parking, or show-off vulgarity, or any of a thousand possibilities of bureaucratic or politically correct interference. I can see them, as they half get out of their own car, preparing some perfectly justified retort of annoyance.

  But no. What I say to them is simply this: ‘I want your lovely car. I’ll swap you mine for it.’ You will hardly believe what happy responses this simple deceit affords – the relief of it, of course, but also the pride of ownership and the harmless and, indeed, affectionate effrontery. We part like old friends, laughing still, all of us, as my old Type R blunders its way out of the car park.

  DAY 35

  Surveys show that in Birmingham, England, 89 per cent of persons between the ages of fifty-eight and ninety suffer from ingrowing toenails.

  Well, they don’t actually, so far as I know, but you must admit that the statistic rings perfectly true, so accustomed have we become to such preposterous reports. Sometimes they are comical, sometimes they are tragic, sometimes they sound suspiciously like advertising and sometimes they are surely of political purpose. The awful thing is that however improbable they seem to be, they might
be true. Eighty-nine per cent of those persons in Birmingham may well have toenail trouble, and you and I have absolutely no way of checking.

  The things they tell us, corroborated, of course, by statistics! We are told which States, provinces, regions or age groups are happiest (in 1945, it is perhaps worth recalling, 90 per cent of New Yorkers considered themselves happy). We learn for certain which brand of toothpaste is preferred by dentists. An academic survey declares that Edward Heath was the fifth-worst British prime minister since the Second World War. What proportion of infants in Asia are likely to grow up with intestinal deficiencies? By what majority did the government retain office in the Salukistan general election? (99.5 per cent.) How long do female sand eels live, on average? (Twenty-eight years and three months.)

  Actually, I am not absolutely sure about the last one – I may be thinking of camels – but you will know what I’m trying to say. In my opinion, statistical surveys are not just a bane of our lives, but downright manipulators. Take us or leave us, they tell us, but I think they are just one more symptom of a society, or a civilization, that is losing its sense of give and take.

  Oh, the world is sometimes an old bore, I thought to myself as, mulling over these annoyances, I drove home this evening. But just then there reached me over the car radio a recording of Dianne Reeves singing, to the accompaniment of Romero Lubambo’s guitar, the bittersweet song ‘Darn That Dream’. Remember it? I loved hearing it again, was quite cheered up by it, and gave it 98.5 per cent in my inner statistics, but I dare say that if there were a poll about it in northern Nicaragua, approval would be unanimous.

  Who are you to believe?

  DAY 36

  A visitor. An elderly, bearded, well-spoken stranger came to my door carrying a sheaf of papers. He said he wanted to read me a poem he had written, so I invited him in, and he read it to me. Well, he said, what did I think of it? I said I was really no judge of poetry and I could hardly take it in first time round, but it did seem to have a sense of power to it. So he gave me a copy of it, we talked for a quarter of an hour, and he went on his way.

  This encounter has had a powerful effect on me, for he turned out to be no passing nut or charlatan, but a retired nuclear engineer who had worked in power stations for decades; and his poem, when I read it to myself, was indeed powerful, for it was a masked warning against the evils and dangers of everything nuclear. He was, it seemed, dedicating his retirement to waking the world to them, in poesy as in argument.

  Cheerfully enough, but seriously, he worked upon me. He talked to me about nuclear leaks and earth contaminations, diseased animals, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, submarines, faulty power stations, wasted tidal power, disarmament and over-armament, the purposes of war and chances of peace …

  And so on … I knew most of it already, but such was his earnest power, and so scholarly and kindly his manner, that when he went I was left in a kind of daze. I saw him to the gate, and then I sat down, read his poem again and wrote this piece.

  DAY 37

  O there’s a lot to be said for Australia! I was not always loved there, because long years ago I expressed the opinion that Sydney was … But times have changed since then, and so have I, and in writing a more mature later book I discovered how much I was under the strange spell of the place.

  In those days of my youth, Australia was essentially a distant, ex-British, provincial kind of country. Now it is among the prodigies. Its actors and writers are known the world over. Its sportsmen are brilliant. Its armed forces are universally respected. Its TV programmes are showing at this moment in households across the world. In modern times has any nation of only 21 million souls been quite so pre-eminent?

  It is true that the Australian brush-turkey may still be encountered strolling in some provincial city streets, true too that there are blemishes to Australia’s racial record – but then, which among all the nations has the right to call that particular kettle black? (Oops, watch it, political correctness …)

  For metropolitan maturity, anyway, I draw your attention to two recent examples of official Australian savoir faire. In 2016, Australia Post, at last delivering a postcard that had been posted ten years before, politely apologized for any inconvenience caused by the delay, while a motion proposed in the distinguished upper house of the New South Wales parliament, also in 2016, described Donald Trump, at that moment the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States, as a revolting slug.

  The motion was carried unanimously.

  DAY 38

  I happened to remember this morning a crude and graphic acronym from my soldiering days: SNAFU, meaning Situation Normal: All Fucked Up. Just to confirm the contemporary truth of it, I have before me now one of the oldest and more temperate journals of the London press, and here are the news items I find spread across its domestic pages:

  An eminent gent unjustly accused of child molestation says he is going to sue the police for false arrest. Thirteen years after the event, a sex gang rape victim (as the headline puts it) appears in court to see her eight molesters convicted. Scientists have taken tissues from the tail of a mouse, turned them into eggs, implanted them in another mouse and induced her to hatch eleven babies. A banker is caught laughing on TV as he ‘pushes his face into a woman’s breasts’. A man is arrested for alleged rape after a party inside the British Houses of Parliament. A multiple bigamist is found hanged after his third wife discovers he is courting a fourth. A con man relieves a seventy-eight-year-old pensioner of her £75,000 life savings by offering her ‘a complete care package’, treating her as his grandmother and promising her a cottage in Wales.

  ‘O, the poor dear lady,’ I can hear my own late mother murmuring from the afterlife. ‘Whatever is the human race coming to?’ But you haven’t heard nothing yet, Mum. Wait till you see the world news pages! And there, strewn across all of that stately broadsheet, is a single day’s record of such depravity, misery, corruption, cruelty, greed and unkindness as would make Satan himself shudder. You might think the frightful tales of war and madness must be the worst part of it, but I myself am most sickened by the story of a captive chimpanzee, in a North Korean zoo, who has been trained to chain-smoke, gets through a pack a day, lights her own cigarettes and puffs away before enthusiastically laughing crowds of spectators.

  ‘I give up at last,’ my old mother would probably say (and just think, her only brother was killed and her husband horribly gassed in the First World War …).

  DAY 39

  It is only natural to complain of old age. I certainly do, and I grumble all too frequently about its miseries. However, senility can have advantages too. Do you remember that gifted English actor who, discovering that he was particularly adept at playing elderly parts, professed himself older than he really was – a deceit, revealed only at his death, that harmed nobody and amused all his admirers? Alas, my true age is all too obvious and known to all, but if I cannot exploit it for professional purposes, I find I am not above making personal use of it.

  Dear me, when I think about it, how shameless I am! Graciously as any duchess do I accept the open door, the helping hand, the place in line, the kindly favour, the forgiveness of ineptitude. The thing is this: I am ninety-one years old, and that’s past a Threshold. Ninety was a landmark, ninety-one the start of new privilege. Ninetys’ Rights, that’s my cause now, and this is a campaign song I’ve written for it:

  Hail the old who all know best,

  The veterans who’ve passed the test,

  Pensioners of vast experience,

  Heroes beyond all interference!

  As moon must pale beside the sun,

  So it’s the duty of every one

  To bow the knee or swiftly run,

  To open the door or cock the gun

  At the very presence of NINETY-ONE.

  Ninety-One. Ninety-One. Open the door for Ninety-One!

  (World rights: Senex and Sage, Llanystumdwy, Wales)

  DAY 40

  I like to think of myse
lf as being beyond prejudice. I don’t in the least mind people being white, black, yellow, brown – Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, atheist – posh, plebeian, boring, patronizing, impertinent – football fans, cricket bores, drug addicts, intrusive smokers, practical jokers, feminist extremists (within reason), male chauvinists (just) – thick as mutton, intolerably clever, humourless (at a pinch) or just indefinably unlikeable.

  There are times, though, I am sorry to confess, when I find myself prejudiced against obesity, and I am genuinely ashamed of it. Obesity is caused by a variety of conditions, I well know – conditions psychological and physical, inherited and environmental – but I fear I generally attribute it, a priori, to plain overeating …

  Of course, this is grossly unfair, and I suspect it sometimes goads the overweight themselves into an understandable suggestion of arrogance. They know what people like me are thinking, and I am truly sorry that we are. But there we are, my one and only Prejudice.

  But here’s a happy escape clause: the children of all the overweights I encounter seem to be, almost one and all, entirely delightful. Please, God, make the gross corpulence of our times be only a generational matter, and arrange in your mercy that all those reassuring children, when they grow up, are no more than plump, portly, broad in the beam and famously likeable.