I don’t care.
I can manage by myself thank you very much.
It occurs to me actually, yes, it’s true, and thank you very much, I mean it. I don’t need anyone, no, not I.
I’m leaving Birmingham next month and shall spend the summer with a kindly aunt in Scotland, and I shall teach Greek to some misguided idiots who would be better employed learning Useful Italian, French and Spanish. But which, alas, I am not equipped to teach anybody, thanks a thousand times to you. No, I am not blaming you, like hell I’m not.
I heard from an old school chum yesterday that you are going about saying that the classics are a load of old rope and all current teaching absolutely ropy, and that no one understands what it was all really about. Except, of course, you.
Congratulations. Oh congratulations. I’m not surprised that you’ve lost your voice—so a little bird tells me? and can’t utter!
I’ve told you, you are preposterous.
With hate. I mean it.
CONSTANCE
DEAR DOCTOR X,
I can answer your question very easily: yes, Charles Watkins did come to see me in the middle of August last. It was late one night. I think a Wednesday, but I can’t really remember, I am afraid.
Yours truly,
ROSEMARY BAINES
DEAR DOCTOR Y,
After I posted my letter—two letters, actually—I remembered something about Charles that perhaps you should know.
It is about the last war. Of course to me it is rather old hat, but almost from the start of knowing Charles really well I thought that the last war hadn’t done him much good. I once met a friend of Charles (with Charles) who said that Charles once said to him that he—that is, Charles—had decided early in the war that he wouldn’t survive it. He was in danger a lot. His friends, that is, the men he was fighting with, were all killed off around him, twice. He was the only one left alive in a group of buddies, twice. Once in North Africa and once in Italy. When he reached the end of the war he could not believe he was still alive. He had to learn how to believe that he was going to live, said this man. Whose name is Miles Bovey. I’ll put in the address for you because perhaps you should ask him. He said that Charles had a long stretch at the end of the war when he did not want to begin living. He was drinking then. So Miles said but I have never seen Charles drink more than usually. Then Charles went back to University. Charles once said something to me that I have remembered. He said that ever since the war he couldn’t believe that people really found important the things they said they found important. He said he had had to learn to “play little games.” He said Miles Bovey was “the only person who ever really understood me.” I asked him what little games and he said “the whole damned boiling.” Needless to say, I said: Love, too? I don’t remember what he said to that.
Yours sincerely,
CONSTANCE MAYNE
DEAR DOCTOR Y,
Thank you for your kind and explanatory letter. It was not possible to gather very much from Doctor X’s letter.
Yes, I suppose one could say that Charles Watkins was “not himself” that evening, but you must remember my knowledge of him to that date was confined to hearing him lecture, and some remarks about him by mutual friends.
I can’t tell you if that lecture was important to him. It was certainly important to me. I wrote him a long letter telling him it was important and why. Perhaps writing it was a mistake, but looking back I don’t regret it. We sometimes have to take the chance of embarrassing people by claiming more than they want to give—or can. My letter was a claim. Of course I knew it was. You may ask: what did I say in it? but to answer that would mean writing the same letter. Suffice it to say that I heard him lecture, and things he said started me thinking in a new way. Or experiencing in a new way. Of course not in any dramatic exterior way. I did not get an answer to my letter. I thought once or twice of writing again, in case the first letter had not reached him, but there was no reason to suppose it had not. I concluded that my letter had been tactless, or perhaps ill-timed, and that I would not hear at all from him.
But I was sitting that evening in a little Greek restaurant in Gower Street where I go fairly often. Frederick Larson was with me—the archeologist. Suddenly Charles walked in and sat down with us saying: I thought I would find you here.
This was not nearly as odd as it looks. For one thing he knew where I lived, for he had received my letter, and had been to my flat to see if I was in. When he found I was not, he walked about the adjacent streets to see if I was in a pub or a restaurant. As indeed I was.
But his unconventional arrival matched the general oddness of his manner. At first both Frederick and I thought he was drunk. Then, that it might be marijuana, or worse. Then Frederick began pressing him to eat and, clued by this, I realised that his clothes had that peculiarly unconvincingly grubby stale look that grubby clothes get when they are obviously clothes that are usually kept clean. Because he is not the kind of person one would ever expect to wear clothes that have been slept in, this stopped me from seeing at first that everything he wore had a rubbing of grime, and that he had grime marks on his hands. And he had a stale tired smell.
At first he kept refusing food, or rather, seeming not to hear when he was offered it. Then he began eating some rolls on the table, and Frederick simply ordered some food for him, without asking him again, and when it came we could see he was ravenous. He was talking in a disconnected sort of way all the time. I don’t really know what about. It made sense while he talked. He was chatting away as if we were both very old friends and able to pick up all his references to people and places. The thing that made this less extraordinary was that both of us indeed felt we were old friends, for we had talked of him a great deal. He was making references to some voyage he was thinking of making, and even seemed to think we would be with him. Of course by then we had understood he was not at all “himself”—as you put it.
When the meal was over we asked him back to my flat. The three of us walked. It was not more than a couple of hundred yards. In my flat he did not sit down. He was restless and walked about all the time, examining objects very carefully, examining the surfaces of walls, and so on. But I got the impression that he had forgotten or lost interest in the thing he had just examined so carefully by the time he put it down. This went on for two or three hours. He was talking about getting out of the trap, getting out of prison, of escaping—that kind of talk. And it did not seem as odd to us as perhaps you may think it should, because our own thoughts were running on similar lines—or it sounded like that, but I am sure you have often found that one may talk for hours—indeed for days, or a lifetime, with a friend, and then discover that the words you use stand for very different things.
I have no way of knowing how real to Charles that night were the prisons, the nets, the cages, the traps that he talked about. If you can call so disconnected and rambling a stream of words “talking.” But I and Frederick Larson have very definite meanings for such words. But Charles? I can’t say. Once when Charles was out of the room (he suddenly noticed his hands were dirty and went to wash them) we discussed whether or not to call a doctor, but decided not. He did not seem to us unable to look after himself. Perhaps we did wrong—after all, there was the evidence of his grimy clothes, and his obvious need for food, and the general strain and exhaustion. But I am one who does not believe that other people’s crises should be cut short, or blanked out with drugs, or forced sleep, or a pretence that there is no crisis, or that if there is a crisis, it should be concealed or masked or made light of. I am sure that other people, and they would be those that a doctor might consider responsible, would have arranged for a doctor to come and take Charles into custody—forgive me for putting it like that. But his state of mind—as far as I could judge it—seemed not unlike my own at times in my life which I have found most illuminating and valuable.
And then, too, I wanted to go on listening to him.
While his remarks may have been
scattered, there was an inner logic to them, a thread, which sounded at first like a repetition of certain words or ideas. Sometimes it seemed as if the sound, and not the meaning of a word or syllable in a sentence, gave birth to the next sentence or word. When this happened it gave the impression of superficiality, of being “scatty” or demented. But we have perhaps to begin to think of the relation of the sound of a word with its meaning. Of course poets do this, all the time. Do doctors? Sounds, the function of sounds in speech … we have no way yet of knowing—have we?—how a verbal current may match an inner reality, sounds expressing a condition? But perhaps this sort of thought is not found useful by you.
At about midnight it was clear that the framework of ordinary life was going to make a pressure for Charles. For without it, he would not have made a move. Frederick had to go home. His decision to go brought to Charles’ notice that it was in fact midnight. He went with Frederick. It was an automatic going. He might just as well have stayed. In the street, he said to Frederick: “I’ll see you next time round.” And walked off. And that was all we knew of Charles until I got a letter from Doctor X at your hospital.
I hope that this rather inadequate account of that evening may be of assistance. I am sorry he is so ill. I have it in me to envy him. There is a good deal in my life that I would be very happy to forget. May I visit him perhaps? I would like to, if it would be helpful.
Yours sincerely,
ROSEMARY BAINES
DEAR DOCTOR X,
I am of course only too happy to help in any way possible.
I knew Charles Watkins off and on during our schooldays. We were at different schools. When the war started we both found ourselves in North Africa. Charles saw more fighting there than I did. I was in Intelligence and at that stage less active. We met from time to time, but then I went to Yugoslavia and he went to Italy. Yes he had a hard time in the war, but more in the sense that he had a steady hard slog right through it, infantry, and then tanks. We did not see each other until the end of the war. In 1945 we met again and spent some months together. We both found ourselves pretty well shaken up and needed the company of a person who understood this. Personally I do not believe that people are “changed” by stress. In my experience certain characteristics get emphasized, or brought out. In this sense I did not find Charles Watkins “changed” by the war. But he was certainly ill after it. I would like to see Charles if it is possible. I think his C.O. may help you. He was Major General Brent-Hampstead of Little Gilstead, Devon.
Yours sincerely,
MILES BOVEY
DEAR DOCTOR X,
Charles Watkins served under me for four years. He was satisfactory in every way, responsible and steady. He refused a commission for some time although I brought pressure to bear, because of friends he did not want to separate from. Understandable, but I was glad when he changed his mind, towards the end of the war. That was during the Italian affair. He ended up a lieutenant, I believe, but we are talking of twenty-five years ago. I am sorry to hear he is not too fit.
Yours truly,
PHILIP BRENT-HAMPSTEAD
DOCTOR Y: I’d like you to try something else, Professor. I’d like you to sit down and let yourself relax and try writing down anything that comes to you.
PATIENT: What sort of thing?
DOCTOR Y: Anything. Anything that might give us a lead in.
PATIENT: Ariadne’s thread.
DOCTOR Y: Exactly so. But let’s hope there is no Minotaur.
PATIENT: But perhaps he would turn out to be an old friend, too?
DOCTOR Y: Who knows? Well, will you try? A typewriter? A tape-recorder? I hear you are a very fine lecturer.
PATIENT: What a lot of talents I have that I know nothing about.
Patient’s time is up at the end of this month. See no reason why he should not be transferred as previously discussed to the North Catchment.
DOCTOR x.
As patient is very tractable and amenable and co-operative and willing to assist with other patients I suggest this improvement should be consolidated by further stay here in present conditions. There is a precedent for an extension for another three weeks.
DOCTOR Y.
DEAR DOCTOR X,
Thank you for your letter. I am so glad that my husband is so much better. Does he remember me and his family yet?
Yours sincerely,
FELICITY WATKINS
PATIENT: Yes, I am trying, but I don’t know what to write about.
DOCTOR Y: How about the war?
PATIENT: Which war?
DOCTOR Y: YOU were in the last war, in the army, in North Africa and in Italy. You were under a Major General Brent-Hampstead. You had a friend called Miles Bovey.
PATIENT: Miles. Miloš? Miloš, yes, I do think I … but he is dead.
DOCTOR Y: I can assure you that he is not.
PATIENT: They all of them were killed, in one way and another.
DOCTOR Y: I’d like to read about it. Will you try?
The briefing was in the C.O.’s tent. I did not know until I got there what to expect. I had been told that I had been chosen for a special mission, but not what the mission was. I certainly had no idea that it was in Yugoslavia.
The Allies had been supporting Michailovitch. There had been rumours for some months that Michailovitch was supporting Hitler and that Tito was the real opposition—which we should be giving all the aid we could. But Tito was a communist. Little was known about him. And things in Yugoslavia were confused, with ancient provincial and religious feuds being settled under the cover of the Tito-Michailovitch struggle.
The campaign to support Tito came first from the Left, which claimed that Britain was refusing to aid Tito because he was a communist, and that this was in line with the wider strategy of trying to remain the U.S.S.R.’s ally while containing or destroying local communist movements. Finally Churchill put in his oar, had gone over the heads of the “brass” to listen to better-informed left-wing advice about Yugoslavia. It had been decided to establish liaison with Tito’s Partisans and to make them trust us, the Allies, particularly Britain, by convincing them that we would no longer support Michailovitch or any other Nazi-oriented movement. We would offer the Partisans arms, men, equipment. But it was not at that time known exactly where the Partisans were. It had been decided to parachute in groups of us, where Partisans were thought to be.
There were twenty of us in the C.O.’s tent that night. We had been chosen for a miscellany of accomplishments. But we all spoke French or German or both. We could all ski, and in civilian life could be described as athletes. Mostly we were not known to each other. I sat next to a man who during the period of training became a close friend. His name was Miles Bovey.
During the next month we were put through our paces in every way, toughened up physically, taught parachuting, taught how to use radio equipment, and given an adequate knowledge of the history of the country, with particular reference to the regional and religious conflicts which we were bound to encounter.
The final briefing saw our number reduced to twelve. Two men had been killed in parachute jumps. Another had cracked up and was in the hands of the psychiatrists. There were other casualties, trivial enough, a sprained ankle, a dislocated shoulder, but sufficient to disqualify a man for the jump and the ordeal after it.
Miles Bovey and I were to be together. We were to be dropped over the Bosnian mountains, to contact the Partisans.
The final briefing was primarily to tell us how to survive if we did not immediately contact the guerrillas. Also to instruct us in the event of our capture by the Germans or by local quisling groups. These instructions were very unsophisticated compared with what we now take for granted in the way of torture, preparations to withstand torture, drugs, psychological methods. We each were given a couple of poison pills to take in the case of extreme need. But implicit in our last briefing was the idea that we were expected to resist torture if caught, to stand up to it. The idea that human beings cannot s
tand up to torture and psychological methods and should not be expected to, had not yet become part of general knowledge. I cannot remember this idea being expressed even by implication at any time during my war service. I would not have allowed myself to hold it, and if I had heard someone else use it I would have been shocked. And yet torture had been, was being, brought to its present height of sophistication everywhere the war had spread or might spread. We were in the condition of peasants in a technological society. We still believed in the power of heroism over any odds. I do know that men continue to resist torture against impossible odds, but frightful pressures have increased compassion: every soldier now who may have to face torture has as his property the knowledge that if he cannot stand it, if he cracks, he is not a coward and a poltroon, and that no one anywhere would think him one. Progress.
I can remember very clearly my fantasies of those few days of waiting, the daydreams that are the most useful of preparations for forthcoming stress or danger. My day-dreams—or plans—might have come out of a boy’s adventure story, or Beau Geste. The sordidness, the dirty-cellar nastiness, the psychological double-twisting of modern torture would have taken me completely by surprise if I had had the bad luck to be caught.
I and Miles Bovey were dropped together on a dark and very cold night into a total darkness. We might have been falling into the desert of the sea—or upwards into the nothingness of space—instead of into mountains where, we knew, were villages, and which were full of groups of fighting men, the Partisans and their opponents, the Chetniks.
Bovey dropped first. He gave me a small nod and a smile as he jumped—it was the last human contact he had. I did not even see the white of his parachute below me as I fell into the dark. The tiny gleam from the aircraft fled into the black overhead, and I swung down and down until something black came swinging up—I missed the crown of a tall pine by a few feet and landed in a heap in a space between sharp rocks. I hurt my leg a little. It was four in the morning, and still night. It was cloudy: they had waited for a cloudy night. I did not dare call out to Miles. I piled the parachute behind a rock, where its whiteness would be hidden, and I sat on it. It was extremely cold. I sat on until the light came filtering down through high conifers. I was on the side of a mountain. It was still dark under the trees when the sky was flooded with a rosy dawn light. I saw a white glimmer high in the air about a hundred yards away and sat on without moving until I could determine that it was, as I thought, Miles’ parachute. But it could have been a layer of snow on a branch.
Briefing for a Descent Into Hell Page 20