by Jan Morris
Not until now! Here and now I offer contemporary English a new word, and declare my admiration for an entity that has, down the centuries, so generously absorbed additions, changes and new inflexions into its ancient and ever flexible self. All the same, I wish youngish English or anglicized persons, if I ask them how they are, would not now say ‘Good, thank you,’ as Americans do. I am not inquiring about their moral condition, only their state of health.
DAY 10
In the street today I almost bumped into a sort of miniature woman – not a very small one, not a dwarf, but a four-year-old, perhaps, with all the attributes of a grown-up. She wore spectacles, which helped the illusion, and a sweetly floral summer frock and sandals, and she moved politely out of my way to let me pass. But here’s the creepy thing: her smile was altogether the smile of an adult – which is to say, it was switched on and switched off almost automatically, the very abrogation of innocence. I have sometimes noticed this among children in China, but never before in Wales.
DAY 11
Years ago, early in a wandering life, I devised something called the Smile Test, by which to measure something of the character of a city and its people. It involved smiling resolutely at strangers I met in the street and analysing their responses. Long ago, for instance, I determined that the responses of passing pedestrians in Vancouver accurately assessed that city’s innate characteristics of exceptional decency but inhibiting uncertainty. Generalizations are dangerous and impertinent, I know, but there we are, it was my trade.
Now that my travelling days are limited and I more seldom leave Wales, I more often employ the Smile Test to explore the national characteristics of that puzzling ethnic community, the English. I am half English myself, and have devoted much of my career to commemorating the historical exploits of what we used to call Britain and is now tentatively known as the United Kingdom, but I am prouder of my Welsh 50 per cent, and having lived in Wales for more than seventy years, long ago came to regard the myriad English tourists from over our border as more or less foreigners.
And what does the test tell me of them? That there is now no such thing as an English character. So powerful and unmistakeable used it to be that one could tell an Englishman, as they used to say, a mile (1,609.34 metres) away, but it was a people’s character moulded by a long triumphant history, by a functional class system, by the instincts of imperialism and by generations of national confidence. Peer or pauper, man or woman, Eton or comprehensive, English people were proud of being English and used to being respected.
Try the Smile Test now as a middle-aged, obviously English couple approach us down the promenade. We turn the smile on and wait for a passing response. There is none. Not a flicker of a response. Their eyes are resolutely averted. They look, if not actually scared, at least suspicious. It is as though they never expect the best, only the worst, as though if we are not actually going to harm them, we might be laughing at them. Far from responding de haut en bas, as the world used to expect of them, or with the confident fraternity that we might look for today, or even with their once-famous national humour, they look as though they have been reprimanded by destiny. Perhaps they have?
‘Cheer up, we’re friends!’ I always feel like telling them as we pass, but they don’t look round, so I go on my way whistling, notwithstanding.
DAY 12
My vicarious friend Alberto Manguel (I have never met him, except by mail) has become director of the National Library of Argentina, in succession to the great Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was blind during his tenure, which must surely have restricted his contemporary reading, but nobody can be more widely read in literature old and new than Manguel, who has not only written books about the very practice of reading, but possesses a magnificent private library of his own.
I cannot help wondering, though, if he can ever feel the same about the millions of books now in his care at the Biblioteca Nacional and the thousands that belong to him at home. For myself, I have rarely used books in public libraries, extravagantly preferring always to buy my own, and this means that my relationship with them is genuinely emotional, even, at a pinch, physical. ‘Ah, your very best friends are here, I see,’ said a perceptive old Welsh guest of ours, passing among my own bookshelves at the end of a dinner party, and he had a point. I dearly love the feel and intimate presence of my books, the look of them, the smell of them and, above all, their lingering associations (there is hardly a volume in my collection that does not have a memory attached to it, if not in an actual letter, postcard or newspaper cutting, then at least in a blurred emotion). Now that I am ancient, pottering among such old acquaintances is one of my redemptive pleasures.
Surely dear Alberto’s pride and loyalty must be torn between the vast impersonal stock of associates that are his public responsibility and all those myriad friends awaiting him after supper at home? But no, he is wiser than I am, and cleverer, and he knows it is the Word that counts.
DAY 13
My car having gone in for servicing, I have been lent a very elaborate Renault, and fiddling about with its innumerable switches, wondering how the petrol goes in or the windows open, confused by its various bleeps and flashing warnings, it has occurred to me how quickly technology becomes old-fashioned, and how ungainly it soon seems to one of my temperament.
There are many people I know, all over the world, who are enthralled by the lost magic of steam, but what a messy sort of djinn that was! The dirt of it! The noise! The smoke! How miserable, the spectacle of those grimy firemen forever shovelling coal into the fireboxes! Even the gleam of brass failed to give beauty to the hulking great shapes of the steam locomotives, and to my mind there was something really rather comical about the spectacle of all those trucks and carriages trundling one after the other across a landscape behind a puffing engine, forlornly hooting sometimes – and occasionally, I have learnt from picture books of my childhood, sticking a kind of net out to catch mail bags waiting for it on the side of the track!
And not much less laughable, it seems to me, is my Renault, so determined to be modern, so cluttered with switches and symbols, things to press and warning lights to look out for. But never mind, I tell myself, the internal combustion engine will soon be as obsolete as those dirty old steam mechanisms, and the next generation’s cars, already just around the corner, will all be electric – elegant, quiet, cool and clean.
Unless, of course, they are nuclear, and even then their detritus merely has to be buried for a couple of centuries to lose its evil potency.
DAY 14
Ah, what the sun can do! I sat in a seaside café this morning, a morning of sunshine at last, and watched the holiday crowds swarm by outside. Yesterday, after long hours of rain and cloud, they looked, en masse, not just unhealthily fat, but corporately morose. It was as though they had brought with them, from some despondent homeland, an inherited lack of hope. Even the children looked bored. Their parents seemed to be counting the hours till the train home, while the occasional grandmothers were mostly dressed as if for some sort of neighbourhood protest concerning unsafe traffic crossings, perhaps, or waste collections.
But look at them now, now that the sun shines! One and all, they are transformed! They laugh merrily back at me through my café window! Those grannies are not in greens and greys now, but dazzling in primary colours, while the mums and dads seem miraculously to have lost weight, in their sudden baseball caps, shorts, sandals and winsomely provocative cottons. As for the children, boys and girls, all of whom now seem to be more or less five years old, they are uniformly enchanting and bursting with health, as though they have spent all their lives in fairyland!
Could it be so? Of course not, bless their hearts. The change is only in me, all curmudgeonly prejudice banished by the genial sun and seeing, over my cappuccino, only the best in the morning world.
DAY 15
Is this the start of Alzheimer’s? I had a sleepless night last night, but as I turned this way and that, switched the radio on and off
, tried my best to clear my mind into emptiness, I knew perfectly well just what it was that was keeping me awake. It was –
Well, what was it? There’s the rub. Today the cause of my insomnia has gone clean out of my mind. Absolutely evident last night, utterly blank this morning. Is this a first inkling of that wretched condition we all read about, or is it simply what we used to call Old Age? Long ago the writer Elspeth Huxley, who spent some of her later years near us in Wales, told me that a queer thing had happened to her: now and then she simply could not recall perfectly ordinary English words and had to look them up in a thesaurus. She died in 1997, but now I wonder how she later got on with the spelling of them. I find myself that sometimes the spelling of some absolutely familiar and ordinary word gets so muddled in my mind that, like Elspeth with her thesaurus, I am obliged to reach for my Shorter Oxford …
One of my oldest friends in life, one of the kindest and cleverest, was faced in his last decade by a far more terrible challenge. He was as quick and kindly as ever, but his beloved loving wife of many years suddenly and inexplicably declined to recognize him – not only that, but she also took a violent dislike to him. That was more than old age, wasn’t it? That was the inexplicable evil of Alzheimer’s at its worst, and if I were not an agnostic it would make me seriously doubt the existence of a merciful God.
In the meantime …
DAY 16
I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the Emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. There he died, ten years later, and his exile has gone into legend and into art – Turner’s commemoration of his fate is as poignantly dramatic as The Fighting Temeraire. Ovid wrote prodigiously during his banishment, and although his work was mostly sad and often complaining, as a remote member of the same fraternity I find it hard to commiserate with him. There are worse predicaments, it seems to me, than enforced residence in a house on the Black Sea writing lyric poetry for the rest of your life.
Tomis is now the hefty Romanian port of Constant¸a, not a bad sort of place at all, with a big nineteenth-century statue of Ovid in a square named for him, but my own Tomis is our garden yard at Llanystumdwy, Wales. It is Elizabeth’s domain: she created it and attends it still. I just laze about in it thinking up compositions, Ovidlike. It is a patch of gravel overlooked on three sides by a tangled mass of trees and bushes: a fir or two, a horse chestnut, rhododendrons, bushes of camellia interspersed with blackberry brambles, shrubs I don’t know the names of, primroses, bluebells and snowdrops when the season allows, miscellaneous weeds here and there that Elizabeth heroically resists. The whole ensemble is presided over by a splendid old sycamore, dominating the skyline.
I must not make it sound too grand. There is nothing grand about it. It is essentially homely, and its fascination for me is that it is not just home for us, but for a myriad of other creatures! Half a century ago I bought a wonderful book, The Living House by George Ordish, which told me that at that time his house probably accommodated two hundred residential spiders, besides miscellaneous colonies of beetles, fleas, moths, cockroaches and flies. I love to think about the livestock similarly living, eating, fighting, procreating and dying in and around the yard all around me, as I laze there in the sunshine and Elizabeth deals with weeds.
Not long ago there was certainly more of it, but the shifting ecology has robbed us of the grass snakes, glowworms and occasional lizards that used to frequent the place – even the toads seem scarcer. Never mind, butterflies visit me as I laze, bees and wasps buzz around, beetles and caterpillars make for the gravel, sometimes a handsome dragonfly comes up from the river or a robin hops in. A sudden scuffle in the bushes means that a clumsy squirrel or two are in there – and yes, there they are leaping erratically from branch to branch. More often a crow or a blackbird swoops or cackles among the trees, and a wood pigeon monotonously serenades its mate. Sometimes coveys of seagulls from Cardigan Bay pass overhead, on their way to a promising harvesting somewhere. Our owls are still asleep, I suppose, but I like to think of them anyway, there in the dark of the woods.
Ah, but here comes our merry postman, with his morning consignment of trash. Elizabeth drops her trowel and pops off to make some coffee, and I pull myself together, stretch, send my respectful regards to Ovid and the emperor, and leave the yard to the rest of them.
DAY 17
On the matter of melody. One of my less disturbing troubles is the well-known affliction of tunes in one’s head. It is not much of an affliction in my own case because I never have tunes in there which I do not like, but sometimes even the best of them stick up there too long, like tetanus, and can be debilitating, occupying hour after hour a sizeable chunk of my brain. What is it about melodies? How is it that a simple arrangement of sounds can affect us so, to tears or laughter or obsession?
I endured such a tetanal malady recently (yes, there is such an adjective), and it was doubly obsessive because for the life of me I couldn’t remember what the tune was. I was sure it was something enormously famous and familiar, but what in God’s name was it? Showbiz or classic, First World War or the Beatles or …? For long days, perpetually hearing it in my mind, I demanded of other people if they knew it – not just friends, but even strangers I bumped into at the supermarket, to any of whom I burbled a snatch of the melody. Almost all recognized it, but only one man finally knew what it was – a theme not from an old stage show or movie tear-jerker, but from the second movement of Beethoven’s piano sonata ‘La Pathétique’. You know the one, of course you do!
How I thanked him! I almost hugged him. After all that time the sublime melody left my mind at last, and I replaced it for a month or two with ‘One Day When We Were Young’ (music by Johann Strauss II, 1885; words by Oscar Hammerstein II, 1938).
DAY 18
I have lately been the subject of a television programme, presided over by one of the best-known and best-loved professionals in the business, and the effect on me has been disastrous.
I have lived in this corner of Wales for seventy years, and my family and I are sufficiently well known. I can’t go shopping without bumping into old acquaintances, and one of the delights of Wales anyway is its organic sense of comradeship. Appearing on TV, though, seduced me into altogether different sensations. Suddenly, I felt, all those familiar people treated me in quite a new way. All of a sudden, they seemed to me actually eager to say hullo, as though my appearance on the screen beside that universally admired personality had somehow anointed me with an unction! Many of them had read books of mine, lots had been kind and helpful to me over the decades, but now it was as though they were greeting an altogether new me.
And a new me it was, alas. Not them. Me. Something of the dross of television had rubbed off on me, the tinsel magic of it and the awful distortions of celebrity. I found I was actually offended if somebody didn’t mention that TV programme (which I hadn’t even seen myself), and actually disturbed if somebody didn’t recognize me at all. Dear God, how eagerly I turned to Twitter each morning, in search of favourable comments. Never in a long life of writing books had I hungered so avidly for good reviews!
But it soon wore off. Things got back to normal, and people no longer seemed to prepare their smiles for me as I approached them down the road. The reviews petered out. The programme was forgotten, and its presiding personality moved on to other avenues of fame. In the end, I actually saw the programme myself, and what did I see?
Through the eyes of candour I saw a very old woman in yellow, shuffling.
DAY 19
Was it hallucinatory? Was it real? Am I going off my head? When I came down to breakfast the other morning there scuttled across the library floor a very small jet-black animal, smaller than a mouse, like a mole or a vole, perhaps. It vanished instantly, and I could find no trace of it under any table, bookcase, rug or carpet. Ten minutes later, when I was sitting on a sofa with my coffee, out of the corner of my eye I saw, just for a m
oment, the suggestion of another little black something down by my feet, and then … dear me, yes, for a second or two there was that small black creature again, with an obvious tail now. In a blink of my eye it was gone, somewhere into nowhere, and there has been no sign of it ever since – no scratching, no droppings, only the fleeting glimpses in my mind of that little black scuttling object. Was it real? Did I truly see it? Was it my first hallucination?
Watch this space.
DAY 20
My basic form of daily exercise is this: I walk for a thousand paces up and down the lane beside our house. It amounts to about a mile, and I supplement it, of course, with further exertions, but the thousand paces is my self-imposed basic discipline, rain, shine or earthquake.
It is sometimes a bit of a bore, but I do it at a fairly brisk march, sustained by the discipline of rhythmic breathing and by whistling, singing, humming or just imagining suitably pulsating works of music. My mental repertoire of these is wide, from ‘Men of Harlech’ to Mozart’s ‘Dies irae’, but yesterday I decided to narrow the scope to national anthems, which would surely keep my marching proud and steady.
Well, off I set, on a fine morning too, and I began at once, of course, with ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ – ‘Land of my Fathers’ – which got me going at a spanking pace. ‘God Save the Queen’ came next, to the tune that Beethoven respected, and which also supports the American ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ and Leichtenstein’s ‘Oben am jungen Rhein’. And what could be more invigorating than ‘La Marseillaise’, with the swagger of the Republican Guard? Or ‘Scotland the Brave’, to the grand swirl of the pipes?