Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  Barnaby might be dog food, but Midsomer Murders goes on and on forever. Detective Sergeant Simon St. John Siskin-Spliff knows he has passed his inspector’s exams with a brilliant dissertation on the latrines of the pre-Bentham Newgates and Bridewells, and he looks forward to a long, long, long career in Causton C.I.D. At fifty-four years of age he’s a mere chicken, even if he’s a bantam. I told you, there are no jobs for the two-metres-tall types these days.

  UNELECTED POWER

  When I was a child in Catholic primary school in Australia, we were taught about something then called the G.N.P. — the Gross National Product. My nun teachers were superlative, but more than merely that: they never pulled their punches when dealing with unpleasant subjects or facts.

  The G.N.P., we were told, represented the goods and services of a nation, its total output in terms of work. But (and we could tell that a big “but” was coming!) there was one kind of citizen who never contributed a brass razoo to the G.N.P.: the civil or public servant. According to Sister Immaculata, this slug was a paper-pushing parasite “working” (we could hear the ironic quotes plainly) for the government.

  Sister Immaculata proceeded to cull the sheep from the goats by informing us that doctors, nurses and teachers were classified as public servants, but since they produced good health and learning, did not fall within the definition of a paper-pushing parasite. We must always be careful, said she, to categorize correctly any public servants who might stray into our purlieus, as stray they were bound to. Once we had done that, we were at liberty to give any slugs of paper-pushing parasite as hard a time as they were certain to give us.

  What, I still wonder, had some paper-pushing parasite done to Sister Immaculata? She was young and beautiful, so perhaps he raped her? Or perhaps, as sometimes chances, he decided that tormenting her family for a few months would keep him entertained? I’ll never know. All I do know is that Sister Immaculata, a wonderfully skilled teacher with the gift of making her pupils adore her, hated public servants, and passed on the germ of that hatred to her pupils. All it needed to sprout was contact with one horrible public servant, and what human being has not suffered that? In justice to Sister Immaculata, I should add that her calling the public servant a parasite led on to a fascinating lesson on parasites, from the liver fluke to the immense, stinking flower of the Rafflesia. What a splendid education we used to receive back then — and from a human being rather than a machine. Give-and-take between student and teacher.

  Nowadays I can give Sister Immaculata’s paper-pushing parasites their proper name: bureaucrats, from the French “bureau” meaning a lockable desk. Hmm … Lockable, eh? That conjures up an image of furtive secrecy — a public servant, yes, but the contents of his desk must not be available to the public his function says he serves.

  Following my nose, I was awed to find that the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Eighth Edition lists only three adjectives to describe a bureaucrat: “inflexible” — “insensitive” — and “oppressive” — wow! Someone who edits the Concise OED has been savaged by a bureaucrat! Left, I suspect, de-fleshed to the bone. Here I am, hardly embarked upon this essay, and I am discovering that the whole non-bureaucratic world loathes the bureaucrat!

  He is furtive and secretive, therefore he locks his output away in a desk that is the root of his name. And he is inflexible, insensitive and oppressive. The perfect tool for a dictator in government — but also, in himself, the perfect dictator.

  Before I go into the history of the bureaucrat and discuss his work as well as his work habits (I use the masculine gender in a generic sense, as “Man” is the name of the species), here seems an appropriate place to regale my readers with three of my many encounters with bureaucrats. All three concern a less well known but immensely important branch of the sub-species: the diplomat, a public servant of his country placed in a foreign country to look after the interests not only of his country, but also of its citizens.

  A junior bureaucrat of the American State Department once gave me a really bad time — a genuine interrogation that had me shaking and in tears. I was twenty-seven years old and had developed my armor plating, but this turd of a man could have ripped apart the armor plating on a dreadnought. The reason he gave for his sadism was a bus trip I made from Venice to Athens; the bus traveled through the then Titoan Yugoslavia. Lack of money dictated my route, nothing else. I was trying to find my brother’s body. The wounds he opened up! Even now, forty-four years later, I flinch. Why was he interested? I was applying for a green card to work at the Yale School of Internal Medicine. Had the interview not been so hard on the heels of Carl’s death, I would have survived it better, but people like that man have no yardstick whereby to measure other people’s pain. I remember his name still, but will not write it. The verdict of my old age is that he was a hen-pecked husband.

  The second of my three incidents is actually the earliest in time; it happened forty-five years ago. Under-paid and over-taxed, I was living in a rather horrible rooming house in London, and was very alone. My brother, Carl, had gone off along the eastern Mediterranean intending eventually to work on a kibbutz — he admired the Jews of Israel intensely. I couldn’t afford a phone, and had no one to call anyway; there was a pay-phone in the front foyer for emergencies. I shared the room with a South African girl whom I didn’t know, but she was somewhere on the Continent that September.

  About three on a Sunday afternoon someone banged on my door and said there was a call for me on the front foyer phone — a mystery, as the only place that number was written down was in the back of my brother’s passport, where he had listed me as his next-of-kin because we were 10,000 miles from Australia.

  When I answered, a man’s voice sounded, cold and poshly accented, yet unmistakably Australian. That told me its owner had gone to the best Australian private schools and came from the upper echelons of Australian society. He asked if I had a brother, Carl? I said I did. Whereupon his cold voice told me Carl had died on the island of Crete in a drowning incident. Just like that. The posh fellow wasn’t pleased; he had been summoned to the office to deal with me, and his weekend was ruined. There was a revolution going on in Greece, the Australian Embassy was closed …

  There was no seat of any kind in the foyer. I slid down the wall until I was on my knees while the cold voice complained about the inconvenience. I began to cry — weep is too ladylike. When half of everything your mind and spirit are is amputated, you don’t weep. You cry, you howl.

  Then the voice said, “What do you want done with the body?” His exact words! When I didn’t — couldn’t — answer, he went on to badger me for an answer. I was the next-of-kin, and there was a twenty-four-hour time limit involved. I found speech, told him that my mother was Carl’s next-of-kin. He went into a rage, abused me roundly for misleading him, abused Carl for putting the wrong name in his passport as next-of-kin, and demanded my mother’s phone number. I gave it and he hung up, still fulminating.

  My mother was not a very nice person, but I couldn’t let this atrocious specimen of bureaucrat break the news of Carl’s death to her as he had to me. Still crying, I called her collect and told her. It was the hardest thing my life will ever call upon me to do, but at least it was done better than to me.

  When my father returned to the house, my mother asked him for the $8,000 necessary to fly Carl’s body home for burial. My father refused! No one else in the family could find so much so quickly, but my father had far more than that sum on hand. His reason for refusing? Carl was dead, it was a waste of money.

  So my brother was buried in an unmarked grave in an obscure corner of a Cretan cemetery, and we lost him for eight long years.

  What more could there be than that?

  Six weeks after I learned of Carl’s death, marooned in England through no fault of my own — I was to continue marooned for the next year — I had a letter from Carl.

  Apparently it was found when his belongings were packed up, and mailed to me: or else he had maile
d it himself, and it was inexplicably delayed. It was one of those blue sheets one used to buy at a post office, write inside it, fold it as was directed, lick the sticky flaps down, and drop it in a post box.

  I stood holding it in my hand for I don’t know how long before I opened it. In effect, a suicide note. I had known he was deeply depressed, and had worried about him, but I had thought his journey of exploration would lighten his mood. Exactly how, having rescued two women from drowning, he had managed to orchestrate his own death, I do not know. He wasn’t alone, his best friend was there and participated in the rescue, but Carl never came back. Nor did he drown. He was found by the U.S. Air Force floating face-up fifteen miles out to sea.

  Reading his words six weeks too late, I understood that his mood hadn’t improved; his determination to end his life was quite unshaken. To him, there was nothing in the world worth living for.

  I kept it a secret until now, except for Ric. For all my mother tormented me in every way she could, I would never have told her that, though perhaps, as the decades have worn on, I see that her destructiveness was not entirely aimed at me. Carl had a far different relationship with her, but I suspect, peering through the distorted lens of time past, that he too was tormented.

  A novelist is moved to take real family events and, having shaped them afresh, use them in a book. As I used parts of Carl’s death in The Thorn Birds. Such is the nature of the beast.

  The third incident, the third diplomat. Interesting, that these top-of-the-trees bureaucrats, “expert” in human relationships — what a load of old codswallop that is!— are the most inflexible, insensitive and oppressive of all their sub-species.

  I gather that the Australian Government stretches its funds for its diplomatic service by putting one embassy in the major of a whole group of nations, as it does with its Swedish embassy in Stockholm, also responsible for the surrounding smaller nations, including the three Baltic mini-states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

  I received an invitation to go to a book fair being held in Lithuania in February of 2005. Much to the organizers’ astonishment, I accepted, even though the function was being held at the height of an eastern Baltic winter. Why? Because I knew that prominent writers never go to these festivals in remote little nations, not major markets. It wasn’t ego that pushed me to go to Lithuania. My ego is very healthy, thank you very much, and doesn’t require such transfusions. I went to please the Lithuanians, and out of plain curiosity to visit a part of the world I hadn’t before. And, I confess, after living for fifteen years in Connecticut, U.S.A., I was homesick for real snow and ice.

  In Stockholm, the Australian ambassador for the region appears not to have owned the right kind of personality for his job, which leads one to think him a “reward” kind of appointee rather than a professional diplomat; if one is wrong, then he says little good for Australian diplomatic training.

  The book fair was a very big event for the Lithuanians who, like all eastern bloc peoples, are avid readers with a thriving publishing industry. If the Australian ambassador had done his homework on his entire sphere, he would surely have assessed the book fair rather differently than he did. Perhaps he was not a reader himself? But that is no excuse for misunderstanding what a book meant to a person of a nationality rigidly controlled by a hated overlord for almost a lifetime. Since I had been consistently published in the old USSR as well as in the new Russia, my books had been available in eastern bloc nations for many years. I was known and loved, in the Lithuanian language as well as in Russian.

  The book fair organizers did what they always did when a well-known writer came: they deputed someone to approach the Australian ambassador and inform him that his country’s most famous writer, Colleen McCullough, was attending the book fair. Their assumption was that he would do what other ambassadors did in similar circumstances: visit the book fair himself and give a reception in my honor. The Australian ambassador’s answer was curt, to give it the softest word possible under the circumstances. Colleen McCullough was not an important writer! She produced trashy bodice-rippers and was beneath literary notice, so, no, he would not be coming to the book fair and there would not be a reception in my honor.

  The poor Lithuanians were staggered when the person who had done the approaching told his story far and wide, which is what happens when indiscreet things are said to indiscreet auditors. The gossip ball rolls. And rolls, and rolls … All that was necessary was to decline gracefully, pleading pressure of work. By the time the story was repeated to me, it was everywhere.

  Not a new story, either. Something similar had happened in Paris some time before, and in other places too. In fact, I wouldn’t be bothered recounting this anecdote were it not for the shabby image of Australia these over-confident, hubristic fools inspire. I am sure the various heads of governments deemed this particular fool just wonderful, but there’s far more to the art of diplomacy than talks with heads of governments. Walk with kings, by all means, but only a fool has no common touch.

  I speak out because I am a patriot and object when those in reputed service to my country demean it.

  I had a terrific time in Lithuania, incidentally.

  Both ancient Egypt and ancient China were riddled with bureaucracy, though my ribbon for First Prize goes to Egypt; ancient China was fragmented into many small states, and compared to the Egyptian pharaohs, the Chinese emperors are late arrivals who did not rule the whole of China.

  Egypt was a land mostly about ten miles wide, but it was over a thousand miles long, and had two wider bits: one was between the Nile and an anabranch and was called Ta-She; the other was the fan-shaped Delta, 150 miles wide where the Nile flowed into the Mediterranean Sea through seven mouths. Its great artery was the river, making it easy to rule as a single entity; the wind blew ships down its whole Egyptian length to the First Cataract, while the current carried ships back from the First Cataract to the Delta, a fretwork of man-made canals. There were river police as well as land police, and petty bureaucrats in every village and town. The central bureaucracy was located in Thebes when Pharaoh lived there, or in Memphis when Pharaoh lived there.

  Pharaoh literally owned Egypt, from the smallest grain of soil to the most gigantic building: serfs, wives, children, priests, the army, the navy, crops and flocks, linen and paper, and all else, belonged to Pharaoh. Egypt had a sophisticated banking system that belonged to — Pharaoh. The only item Pharaoh shared was linen; one-third of it was a perk for the priests.

  That, half a hemisphere away, the various geophysically discrete regions of China were endeavoring to do the same, should tell the readers a seminal fact: that one of the three or four primal urges in a human being consists in being paid as much as possible for doing as little as possible, and sitting down to do it. No job description is older, save only pimping.

  Bureaucrats never stand to do their work! And bureaucrats are never under-paid, because bureaucrats staff and administer the government pay departments. Bureaucrats are never short of chairs because bureaucrats staff and administer the government department that orders and sees to the delivery of chairs. There is also a small bureaucratically staffed and administered department to keep a vigilant eye on the comfort of all bureaucratic chairs, as well as make sure said comfort is graded according to the official status of the bureaucratic bottom occupying it.

  Even six thousand years ago, people hankered to have the ease and security of a government job: once hired, never fired! That is a mind-set leading to inflexibility, insensitivity, oppression — and nothing else. How can it be otherwise? Power fuels the human ego, and the knowledge that it is almost impossible to be fired endows the bureaucrat with a huge sense of power.

  I mean, why stand up in order to work? Why suffer hands callused from pushing a plough or shredded from clearing scrub? Why be at the mercy of the natural seasons? Let other, more stupid people grow the food, build the shelter, smooth out the bumps in the road! The good things in life belong to the middleman, and who is a
more quintessential middleman than the bureaucrat? If work must be done, let it be at a self-dictated pace and achieved sitting down, and if the hands have to be marked, let it be with water-soluble ink! Nowadays, mere pixels on a screen.

  The true modus vivendi of the bureaucrat emerged at one and the same time as the sub-species, and may be summarized as the compulsion to perpetuate and increase the sub-species. What starts out small must grow ever larger, preferably under the supervision of a boss the bureaucrat never sees — a pharaoh or an emperor is ideal — and doing work whose purpose is never made clear. Imagine it! You, Nh’mer, seventy-second in line of promotion in the Warehouse of the Linen, picked up a dust-bunny from the path of the High Priest of Ptah. Next day as you went to work on the west bank of the Nile at Memphis, entering between the two monoliths of Rameses II, you were told by the High Priest of Ptah that next year you will be given the task of splitting off the priestly one-third of Pharaoh’s linen. You are on your way! You, Nh’mer, will become a bureaucratic star.

  Even the Romans, who abhorred bureaucrats, couldn’t avoid being entangled in their toils, but once Christianity took over, Europe disintegrated into small principalities loosely linked by Rome in the guise of a papal Vatican. The decline in the level of education among the lower classes was so shocking that the “free” lower classes lost all hope of a bureaucratic career; a scribe class of monk arose to deal with the mountains of parchment and paper Church and State demanded. The scarcity of parchment and paper due to their cost meant they were jealously guarded, used over again once the writing faded, leading to one of my favorite words — palimpsest. That’s what it means, written on top of other writing. But between plagues like the Black Death and appalling poverty among the lowly, not much went on in the sphere of bureaucrats for some considerable time.