Where There's a Will

by John Mortimer

  15. Interesting Times

  According to a Chinese proverb, you should avoid ‘interesting times’, a piece of advice I would endorse. The trouble is that the world is never at peace, and interesting times interrupt most lives more or less disastrously.

  I was born only five years after the 1914–18 war ended and at my prep school we drew pictures of soldiers with tin hats and bloodstained bandages, graves in fields of poppies with Camel and Fokker aeroplanes machine-gunning each other in the sky. At the Armistice Day services on the football field we sang ‘Lest we forget’ and an ex-army padre would urge us to go ‘over the top’ to our common entrance exams and school certificates. Our masters still suffered from shell shock and battle fatigue and some had pieces of shrapnel lodged in their bodies, a fact which didn't improve their tempers.

  By the time I was sixteen another war had started, an event that we had long been expecting. We had heard the hysterical speeches of Hitler on the wireless and discovered that he was making yet another final demand. At one moment a senior master came into the classroom and told us that our Prime Minister had met Hitler in Munich and ‘peace in our time was assured’. After that, watching the news reels that tempered my delight in the latest Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical film, I felt sure of war in my time. I still believed that the odds on my survival were better than those against soldiers in the first war, who had a one-in-four chance only of lasting beyond the first months in the trenches.

  When I discussed my future with my father and I was finding it hard to choose between becoming a conscientious objector or a fighter pilot, he told me to ‘avoid the temptation to do anything heroic’. This was advice I took and, after bombs started falling in London, I became, as a result of various shadows about the lungs, a scriptwriter in uniform, writing propaganda (we called them documentary) films about the progress of the war for the Ministry of Information. It's true that I was doing nothing much more heroic than fire-watching on the roof of Pinewood Studios. In the morning the streets were full of broken glass. In spite of all this the time of war contains some of the happiest years I can remember. This may seem a shameful thing to admit to in a period of unparalleled horror, genocide and the destruction of entire cities, but it's true. I'm sure that during the great disasters of history, the Hundred Years War, the Black Death, the Reign of Terror or the Battle of the Somme, there were people, somewhere, quite enjoying themselves. It's not a thing to be particularly proud of.

  So, drinking with Dylan Thomas and the Scottish painters Colquhoun and MacBryde in the Swiss Pub in Soho, going without bananas, eating strange food whale steak (‘Moby Dick and Chips’) – and being so hard pressed for alcohol that communion wine, sometimes qualified with spirits (gin and altars), occasionally appeared at parties. I was falling in and out of love and living in the house of the owner of a contraceptive shop who blew up her wares and painted them jolly colours to serve as balloons at Christmas. All this seemed part of a normal and normally happy youth.

  Our situation then cannot be compared to the wantonly cruel attack on the twin towers in New York. No comparisons can possibly diminish the horror of that event. Although the Blitz may have scored as many deaths in a week as the American tragedy in a day, we were in a war and death from the air was, in those years, an everyday occurrence. New York, unlike London and Berlin, has never been the object of bombardment or occupied by an enemy, like Paris or Rome. All the same, it's worth thinking for a moment about morality in times of war and the reality of a projected ‘war against terrorism’.

  The Second World War seemed undoubtedly just. If we had lost it millions more innocent people would have been murdered in gas chambers, freedom would have become a criminal offence and there would have been a triumph of evil. The good were our allies: the Russians, who suffered huge casualties in the war against Hitler; the Americans, who for the second time came to the rescue of Europe; and, of course, the freedom fighters. All over Europe the defeated countries were heroically and secretly carrying on the fight. These rebels would, I suppose, have been called ‘terrorists’ by their occupying masters, who would torture and kill them, together with many innocent civilians, after every act of subversion. To us they were not just ‘freedom fighters' but heroes, or in many cases heroines, of the resistance. Some time ago I was talking to an elderly woman in the South of France. When she was no more than a schoolgirl in the occupied zone, she wanted to join the local resistance group. In order to qualify for entry, she had to have shot at least one German officer. So she pedalled around with a loaded revolver in the basket on her handlebars. The first officer she saw had grey hair and looked rather like her uncle, so she couldn't shoot him. The next was sitting on a fallen tree reading a book, an attitude she found appealing, so he was spared. The third, wearing a moustache and out for a run, had nothing particularly attractive about him, so she shot and killed him and was able to join the group.

  She didn't tell me more about her underground activities, but had she lobbed a bomb into a café which contained a handful of enemy officers and their girlfriends, together with a number of innocent customers, and blown up the lot of them, she would still have been greeted as a heroine of the resistance, which, to us, she undoubtedly was.

  Most people in the West, certainly everyone in Israel, would agree that the Palestinian suicide bombers, who kill women and children, are terrorists. Not many people remember when Palestine, as the land of Israel was once called, was in that obscure state, a British Protectorate. Were the Jewish members of the Stern Gang, those who hanged a British sergeant with piano wire or organized the bomb in the King David Hotel with murderous results (the organization in which Prime Minister Begin started his political career), ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘terrorists’? What, looking at the matter from an entirely neutral standpoint, would we call them now?

  A terrorist, the dictionary tells us, is ‘one who favours or uses terror-inspiring methods of governing or of coercing government or community’. This would certainly cover Russian activities in Chechnya and Israeli invasions into Palestinian territory, killing innocent men, women and children and even employees of the United Nations, in a prolonged attempt to fight ruthless terrorism with ruthless terrorism. The word ‘terrorist’ could certainly have been applied to Nelson Mandela before his trial. If it means the calculated mass killing of civilians to obtain an end, it must be applied to the destruction of Hamburg and Düsseldorf and, of course, to the dropping of H-bombs. So all these activities can be defined as ‘terrorism’ if they are committed by an enemy or ‘freedom-fighting’ if by a friend. If so, the conception of a ‘war’ against it calls for the most careful thought.

  Of the old, violent anarchist groups it was said that they always contained one pathological killer, one selfless idealist and one police spy. It was difficult, at first glance, to tell which was which, but the idealist was always the most dangerous. A ‘war against terrorism' is an impracticable conception if it means fighting terrorism with terrorism. The feelings on both sides are not that they are taking part in some evil and criminal act but risking their lives heroically for what they consider to be a just cause. You could understandably reduce terrorism by improving security and increasing the number of police spies, but it can only finally be reduced by removing the number of just causes. ANC terrorism was pointless after the end of apartheid. Terrorism in Israel will stop only when a just solution has been agreed to and the occupied territories handed back. Terrorism has existed in Ireland since Elizabeth I sent the Earl of Essex out in an unsatisfactory attempt to quell the rebels. However, since former terrorists have become government ministers in Northern Ireland, some progress has been made and sometimes the signs are hopeful. Long ago I defended a Protestant terrorist, we'll call him Ian, who was charged with gun-running under the cover of a chemist shop in Hammersmith. I remember the case vividly because of the remarkable dialogue with the police superintendent.

  SUPERINTENDENT: Well, Ian, where's the gun?

  IAN: Su
re the only gun I've got is between my legs and it gets me into constant trouble with my wife, Noreen.

  The case proceeded and Ian was given a fairly lenient term of imprisonment by an Old Bailey judge who probably favoured the Protestant cause.

  Dissolve to Waterstone's bookshop in Belfast many years later. I am signing books and an extremely respectable-looking middle-aged lady in a twin set and pearls comes up and asks me to sign a book for her two sons, who are both now practising as lawyers in Northern Ireland. She also tells me that they have a very nice home near the Mountains of Mourne. Then she says suddenly and to my considerable surprise, ‘Ian died ten years ago.’

  ‘Ian?’

  ‘Yes. Surely you remember him? You defended him about the guns run through the chemist shop in Hammersmith.’

  So she was Noreen, who once gave Ian trouble about the gun between his legs.

  It was only a small light at the end of one dark tunnel and it would be ridiculous to suppose that all the terrorists or the freedom fighters, whatever you call them, will end up with sons who are respectable barristers with lovely homes in the Mountains of Mourne.

  Now that we have been involved in another war, causing the deaths of many innocent civilians, you may wonder if there is any such thing as a civilized way of conducting warfare. I can think only of the far-off days when Federico da Montefeltro was born, perhaps an illegitimate child, in the year Henry V of England died. Up to the age of fifteen he got an excellent education in Mantua, learning not only Latin and Greek but horsemanship, fencing, painting, music and dancing. When he inherited his dukedom, his study in the palace was lined with portraits of his heroes, including Dante and Petrarch, Homer and Virgil, Plato, Aristotle and St Augustine. He became the patron of the greatest artists of his day, Raphael and Piero della Francesca among them. When he marched out to war, musicians played and poets read their latest works aloud. All of this makes him sound entirely different from the sort of guns for hire who appear in the novels of Freddy Forsyth, though Duke Federico of Urbino was, to put it bluntly, a mercenary.

  The city states of a disunited Italy were constantly at war. Florence fought Siena, Venice and Naples, and the Papal territories were either forging uneasy alliances or fighting each other. Duke Federico sold his military services to the highest bidder, but once bought he was a loyal and effective commander. No doubt his price went up when, in contemporary lists of the leaders whom young princes should try to emulate, Federico's name was mentioned along with those of Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Sometimes his engagements were hard-fought battles, sometimes they seem to have been more civilized occasions. At the Battle of La Molinella, at which Federico commanded the forces of Florence and Milan against the Venetians, as neither side appeared to be winning he and the other mercenary leader decided to call the whole thing off. Machiavelli wrote of it with some contempt: ‘Neither side wavered, no one fell, a few prisoners and a wounded horse being the only casualty of the encounter!’

  The positive outcome of these battles, sometimes bloody, occasionally polite, was that Federico built ‘on a rugged site of Urbino a palace which many believe to be the most beautiful in all Italy’, according to Castiglione, the author of The Courtier. In an upstairs gallery hangs the most enigmatic and chilling of all small paintings, Piero della Francesca's Flagellation.

  Piero was a great mathematician, a student of Euclid with such a perfect sense of perspective that he could draw a vase seen from four different angles at the same time. The lines of the buildings, the geometrically perfect placing of events, are mathematically satisfying – it's the subject of the picture that freezes the blood. In the distance something terrible is going on: the whipping of the near-naked Christ bound to a pillar. The men in the foreground are taking absolutely no notice of this scene. They are talking quietly together, engrossed in some plot or political machination remote from human suffering.

  Piero certainly came to Urbino and his geometry may well have had its effect on the deeply satisfying architecture at the Ducal Palace. You can stand in its courtyard and feel what a building of perfect proportions, conceived with mathematical precision on the scale of humanity, can do to banish anxiety and calm the spirit. It's undoubtedly the greatest legacy of a civilized soldier who had participated in other people's wars.

  Federico died of a fever contracted on the damp and marshy banks of the Po in a battle against the Venetians and the Pope. Although he lived by selling war like takeaway pizzas, he was said to be ‘known for his clemency’ and entitled to be called ‘the father of the miserable and protector of the afflicted’.

  I was writing this in January, a refugee from an English winter, in a garden where red, yellow and white roses were in bloom and the call to prayer from the mosque in the village echoed across the orange groves. We were in the south of Morocco, where the people are gentle, smiling, anxious to please and many of them speak French. They might be regarded by the American and European tourists who are staying away as part of the Islamic hordes who threaten the very existence of our Western civilization.

  We were almost alone in this hotel ten years ago during the Gulf War, and now it was once again a place of peace. Early in the morning an icy wind blew from the desert but by ten o'clock the sun had risen high over the trees and we were sitting by the pool with Roland. He was a Swiss dealer and collector of ancient coins who once had in his hands the first known money, pieces of gold stamped with the sign of King Croesus. Naturally the talk turned to Baghdad – in a country that was once called Mesopotamia, Roland remembered, the birthplace of our civilization, which spread to Egypt, Greece and Rome before being washed up on the shores of our small and distant island.

  It was part of the Persian Empire, conquered by Alexander the Great, said Roland, who can track the course of history from the coins that may have changed hands in Babylon. I could remember only that the Hanging Gardens were one of the Seven Wonders of the World and a childhood nursery rhyme which gave the city a feeling of magic.

  How many miles to Babylon?

  Threescore miles and ten.

  Can I get there by candle-light?

  Yes, and back again.

  ‘The Persian empire was conquered by Alexander the Great,’ said Roland, who had seen coins to prove it. ‘Then Alexander married a Persian wife and divided his empire among his generals. Much later, in the time of Charlemagne, the biggest city in the world was in Mesopotamia, called Medina al Salaam, the city of peace, later known as Baghdad. It was once so glitzy and exotic that New York was known as Baghdad on the subway.’

  ‘Roland knows everything,’ I told his wife.

  ‘Not quite everything,’ she said. She was calm and beautiful – a grandmother whose banker parents were turned out of Yugoslavia by Tito and arrived, penniless, in Geneva. ‘Everything about coins and history perhaps. But not quite everything.’ She slid into the pool and swam away, as expertly as a young girl, blowing out air under water.

  At lunch by the flowering bougainvillea, with a view of the snowline on the Atlas Mountains, the waiters in long white djellabas moved quietly out of the shadows. We drank cold, pink Moroccan wine and Roland was on to his special subject, crusader coins, many of which had their crosses changed to crescents for use by the Arabs.

  ‘When a crusader lost a leg,’ he told us, ‘his followers would put a red-hot sword on the stump and rely on God to do the rest. The Arabs already had skilled surgeons who cauterized and sewed up the wounds.

  ‘Mesopotamia became part of the Ottoman Empire,’ said Roland, continuing with history as told by the money clinking in the purses and pockets of long-lost generations. ‘It was owned by the Turks. When Turkey was defeated in the 1914–18 war, the Allies carved up its possessions with quite arbitrary boundaries and placed an arbitrary king, Feisal, on the throne of Iraq. These kings ruled until a revolution led by the Baath party finally produced Saddam Hussein who was, of course, backed by America. Now politicians think we are about to fight barba
ric Muslim hordes. In fact Arabs are at the centre of civilization. They invented algebra [an Arabic word], conquered almost the whole of Spain and managed to live there perfectly happily with the Sephardic Jews.’

  Rashid, the young waiter who helps me to my seat by the pool and settles me down to write until lunchtime, has just got married. By a pure coincidence, his wife is Rashida, so Rashid and Rashida sounds like a happy opera, perhaps a little-known work by Rossini. He brought us his wedding photographs. Rashida is very young and pretty, wearing a tiara and a glittering robe for the occasion. She and Rashid gave each other ceremonial dates and sips of milk. Rashida had her hands and feet stained with henna. They knew each other in their schooldays. Rashida's mother died giving birth to her and her father left home to live in Fez with another wife. She lived with an uncle she called ‘papa’ and was clearly delighted to have a family of her own. Rashid, putting the wedding photographs away in a plastic bag, was also delighted. ‘Goodbye, celibacy,’ is what he said.

  We drove through the camels and donkey carts in the back streets of Taroudannt and climbed a perilous staircase to Rashid and Rashida's spotless apartment. The biscuits and pancakes, the tea and the coffee were laid out and the television was alight with soundless cartoons. Rashid had changed out of his white djellaba and was wearing black jeans, a black zipper jacket and very dark glasses, so that he looked like a young film director of the Jean-Luc Godard era.

  After tea we sat with Rashid (but without Rashida) and Mustapha the driver in the bar of the Hotel Taroudannt. This was a narrow courtyard with a long flowerbed in its centre, from which trees grew and numberless small tortoises stirred in perpetual motion. Rashid and Mustapha knew almost everyone who passed, most of them seemed to be their relations and all got a kiss, including a policeman. I was drinking pastis and feeling, for the moment, entirely happy. Then someone asked me to explain why the Americans and the British should wish to kill Arab women and children. It was a question I found difficult to answer.