But the time of the world was up, when the blood-letting came among these trees. Apart from the matter of revolution, the emotional sensuousness that was matched to a hundred years of romanticism and repression burst into a slaughterhouse. The music of Sibelius and Mahler led straight into the trenches. They didn’t see it then, but we can see it now. Truth (for what it was worth) hauled the uniformed masses over the top by the scruff of the neck and the grip of the genitals. We haven’t finished here yet, nor in any way understood it.
What happened indeed to the peace one was supposed to find in the middle of a wood? I walked in the direction I had come, hoping it would take me to the car, though by keeping a straight line I would obviously reach some lane or other, and escape from this verdant spirit-haunt.
But it is impossible to escape from Elgar—whether or not one is in Aveluy Wood. He is a real artist, a man of complete conscience, England’s greatest composer certainly, for he not only sent the men into the trenches but greeted them when they came out. He beat in the other ranks with the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, and nodded the commissioned officers in to the Introduction and Aleggro for Strings. When they returned he met those broken men with the infinite sadness and pity of the Violincello Concerto in E minor. This work contains the broken bones of Edwardian glory and an attempt at semi-jovial rebirth, never taken seriously, as if he could not get over the fact that his most enduring work was to be built on a million corpses.
He wants to be gay in the second movement, but the Angel of Mons is too much in the ascendant. There is a crater under his heels which he edges warily away from. In the third section his tetric phrases meander through the ranks of his million ghosts. In his bucolic English way he expresses sorrow and regret that the world had gone the way it did—even though he may have been in some small way responsible.
But finally the energy overcomes him and he says: ‘I am an artist and so can’t be to blame. If I set your subconscious to music, much as I might with any poet’s words, then I am only being myself as an artist.’
The vibrant yet wistful strength of the body slowly rises. As a composer his best works show him to be a man of the people, but of the whole people. As an artist he tried to unify—that was his purpose—as any artist’s must be. That was his wish, and I suppose at various times of his life, particularly before 1914, he thought that he might even be succeeding. But like any artist, part of him was blind, and it wasn’t till 1918 that he saw how wrong he had been, and that some disaster had occurred which had smashed his beloved England for a long time to come. So his concerto is a work of sadness, regret, and hope. The broken body of England was dragging itself back through the mud of Passchendaele. It still haunts the resurrected woods of the Somme.
History, meantime, goes on. We love Mahler, we crave to hear Sibelius. They are artists, after all. And bourgeois capitalism is cured of its worst rampages of war because the Bomb, an effective weapon of peace, threatens not only people with total destruction, but all property, and no nation can bring itself to risk such a price. Property is God, and this age-old enemy of the people turns out at last to be its final safeguard, behind which we can go on enjoying the works of our favourite artists and try to live.
Walking through the cemetery of Gommecourt and the vast collection of graveyards around Ypres, where tens of thousands rest under crosses or the occasional Star of David, the feeling is one of bewilderment and pity that brings tears like a wall of salt up to the eyes. When there are too many people in the world the dead take up less space than the living. Even those who hate war have their idea of a just war, a war that people in the future will no doubt pronounce to have been as stupid as the rest.
I was lost, and began to wonder if I would ever get out. No longer amused at my lack of orientation, I stopped and lit a cigarette. There had been too many murders here in Aveluy Wood, too many state-sanctioned, church-blessed killings, too much confused death, too many mistakes—society’s mincing-machine for its unwanted energy and talent.
Yet I knew there could be many surprises in the journey after death, especially for a soldier. The killing in the Great War was on so massive a scale that a decent number of corpses could be collected into cemeteries and put under the soil, a final resting place as far as we know. Many dead of the Napoleonic Wars, however, went through a different fate, as I was reminded on reading the following paragraph from The Observer of November 18th, 1822:
‘It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighbourhood of Leipsig, Austerlitz, Waterloo and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped from the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granulary state. In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.’
I was alive, so through the treetops of Aveluy Wood took a healthy line on the sun—still easterly in the sky—and walked till I came to a lane. Using a map, I soon reached the open, glad to be away from trees that had smelled so many corpses they seemed almost human.
47
A photograph of my Uncle Frederick, which he had taken before 1914 and which blended neatly with the older man I came to know, shows an acute and ironic expression, a face both forceful and sensitive, with thin down-curving lips which could not have boded too well for anyone who became emotionally involved with him, nor indeed for the man who actually wore such a face.
He was about thirty when the Great War began, a small man like his father, but handsome and well educated, with dark hair and brown eyes, the eldest and most cultured son of the family. He was gifted in his trade of lace-designer, and travelled in it a good deal before 1914. Finding it difficult to sell his patterns in Nottingham, or being dissatisfied with the prices offered, he went to London, and bought a second-class return ticket for £5 11s 8d to the German textile town of Chemnitz, hoping for better luck. The 700-mile journey took thirty-five hours, and on arrival he set to work making appointments.
One firm was impressed by his designs, and the manager took him to a meal at the opulent Stadt Gotha Hotel while they were being examined by the directors. But when they returned to the office the manager gave the designs back, regretting that his factory would be unable to use them, though hoping he would bring more in the future. This was a big dip from their first enthusiasm. He politely accepted his portfolio, but then said to the directors who had come to wish him goodbye: ‘Would you now give me back the copies you made of my drawings while I was out at the hotel?’
The atmosphere was so tense, he said, that you could have chopped it with a battle-axe. But when he repeated his sentence in even blunter English their anger at his accusation gave way to embarrassment, and then to humour when they realized he had seen through their trick. They bought his patterns, and paid him well, and he went to Chemnitz many times until the Great War put a stop to it.
He left for England only hours before war was declared. On the way from Berlin he witnessed the manoeuvres of the Imperial German Army near Magdeburg, and made a dramatic farewell to the country because the police tried to arrest him at Bremerhaven for what he had seen. The ship pulled out from the quay just as they came into view. If they had collared him he would have been interned for four years in Germany, and thus saved himself some bother in trying to avoid the war in his own country. The sea crossing was so appallingly rough that he was unable to leave his cabin.
When call-up came in 1916 he would have nothing to do with it, averring that a person who refused to get killed for his country is more patriotic than a mad keen bravo who rushes into death for it, that a man is of more value to everyone else if he stays alive. He was not alone in his reluctance to go, for in the first six months of conscription 100,000
men failed to appear for call-up, and another 750,000 hurried to claim exemption.
His wife belonged to the Christadelphian Sect and Frederick had converted to it. Assiduously studying the Bible and learning to read Hebrew, he hoped one day to become a preacher. His allegiance therefore led him to stand as a conscientious objector—an educated phrase that was unintelligible to most ordinary people, which would have been better understood as ‘a hater of war’.
Facing the tribunal of old, true-blue British dunderheads who looked upon him with a sort of patriarchal distaste and offended class unction because he was staunchly refusing the honour of being sent to fight for what they held dear, and would no doubt lavishly enjoy after many of those who had gone to do so were dead, he simply stated his religious principles and folded his arms against them with such mute and obstinate belligerence that it caused one mellower gentleman to regret that such unyielding brass could not be turned against the Germans.
Having long ago weighed up his own talent as a lace-designer and painter of pictures, Frederick quoted his profession before these men as that of artist, upon which the mellower gentleman brightly wondered why he had not joined the Artists’ Rifles when the war began, whose fine battalions did wonderfully dreadful work against the Hun.
Frederick broke his silence, though he had gritted his teeth for some minutes against doing so. ‘There wasn’t one artist in the Artists’ Rifles,’ he said sharply, and so angrily that he had to fight against his own blood to keep to the point of what he wanted to say. ‘They stopped being artists as soon as they put on a uniform. No true artist picks up a gun to kill his fellow-men. Whoever had the idea to form battalions of artists was a devil. He was anti-Christ. It was Satan’s trick, to get rid of those artists who might otherwise stay behind and make trouble—or keep a breath of sanity in this country. If any artists are still fighting they are poor deluded fools who don’t deserve their talent. In all likelihood they never had any.’
The two sides were without meeting point, and instead of being sent into the army Frederick spent two years shovelling shit—as he put it—on a farm in Lincolnshire.
‘Man chooses,’ he said, ‘though God disputes his right to it. Freedom of choice is given to everyone, and if I lived in the moderate comfort of a hayloft instead of cringing in a mud-trench in Flanders, then I betrayed no one, because everybody else could have done the same. They made the wrong choice, and it led to the biggest disaster in the history of the world, because the Second World War came out of the first, and the Jews were almost destroyed by Hitler and his lunatic pan-Germans, and by all those others who didn’t say a big No when they should have done. The only things you can say yes to in this world are love and work, and even then you’ve got to be intelligent and careful about it. God knows, I’m not made of such stuff that my life’s been all that successful, but I’ve never killed or injured anybody.’
During his agricultural life he and his companions were awakened from the hayloft opposite the house at five each morning to the tune of a bully-farmer cracking a whip below, and cursing so richly that it might have sounded picturesque if it hadn’t been aimed at them. To the farmer they were workhorses, and weak ones who did not have the necessary patriotic feeling to go and fight for their country so that he could stay behind and make a profit from it. They were scum, worse even than prisoners of war, who might at least have fair reason for being out of the fighting.
Nocturnally roaming around and into remote sheds of the farm Frederick and a friend discovered a small trunk hidden under a heap of sacks. On shaking it they rightly guessed that it contained several hundred gold sovereigns. As the Great War went on the government needed gold to pay its debts, so a law was passed that such coinage was to be handed in to the banks, who would then issue the equivalent in paper money. It was illegal to hoard such metal, though many did—so as to sell it after the war when its value would be much increased.
Next day the conscientious objectors carried the box to the farmer’s door. When he came at the jingle of it, Frederick said in his most pompous and grating tone that they expected his behaviour to improve from now on, as a reward for finding his long-lost gold. But if the farmer was not the real owner of it, then it should be taken to the police station in Louth. If he was, which seemed likely because they had found it on his property, then it should be put into a bank for safe keeping.
The farmer disliked them, but accepted his gold and treated them more reasonably afterwards. He never found out who had broken the lock of the shed where the box had been kept, though he had his suspicions. As Frederick said, delicate fingers can always be put to good use.
48
We lived in a room on Talbot Street whose four walls smelled of leaking gas, stale fat, and layers of mouldering wallpaper. My father’s thirty-year-old face was set like concrete, ready to hold back tears of humiliation that he must have been pleased to find were not there when the plain clothes police came to take him away.
From the side I saw two of him as he combed his black hair in the mirror. The face looking into the glass seemed about to smile, but that reflected from it showed the bafflement of his brown eyes, and lips that were thinner when he was unhappy. In both images his flesh was grey.
He had especially gloated over his brother Frederick’s haughty manner with creditors. Being dunned as a young man during one of his indigent phases after his release from the servitude of the Great War, Frederick stood at the door of his father’s shop on Trafalgar Street with, as my father remembered: ‘Hardly any bleddy shoes to his feet,’ shouting at a tradesman waiting hopefully on the pavement: ‘I only pay my bills quarterly! Do you understand? Quarterly!’
That night a pantechnicon was loaded to the gills by my father and the driver, Frederick looking on because his hands were too fine to lift such heavy goods and furniture on which little more than a deposit had been paid. The pantechnicon went to London where, as far as the creditors were concerned, Frederick was never heard of again, London being a long way from Nottingham in those days.
Years later, when my father was married, unemployed, and already had three kids to feed, he tried the same scheming stunt of running up bills for food that he had no hope of paying, an imitation of his elder brother which turned out to be the highest form of folly, for he lacked Frederick’s superior mobility and ways of speech when the shopkeeper asked him to pay up or get taken to court. But even when he came back from prison he was glad his brother had been able to beat the system from time to time, and often gloated over it to me.
Frederick followed his trade of lace and embroidery designer in London, and for a while he was a court embroiderer, though I ommitted to ask at what court because I suspected he was exaggerating his claim to grandeur—which might have been doing him an injustice. But there was a great slump in his trade by the middle thirties, and he was thrown as much out of work as were Burton and his sons when motor-cars finished off blacksmithery.
In 1936 he met a column of unemployed miners that had stopped to rest at some open ground before continuing their march to the middle of London. Various members of it went among the spectators with collecting boxes, gathering funds to buy food and shoes for the men. A great many police stood at various points of the concourse, not expecting purple revolution to break out there and then so much as to intimidate them into knowing their place by the time they reached the middle of London—where hosepipes were waiting for them anyway. Frederick, moved by the men’s plight, put the large sum of half a crown into a box, at which a police inspector told him brusquely to get out of the way and move on.
In a tone of congenital intransigence Frederick retorted that it was his right to give to whom he pleased. The policeman left him alone, and went after the man with the collecting box. Telling me about it fifteen years later, the incident still infuriated him more, I think, because a man in uniform had dared to accost him on any pretext whatsoever, than that the hunger-marchers had been harried.
He was widely read, and the mos
t politically radical of the family, though his radicalism was of a somewhat uncertain brand—when he allowed it to show through. Perhaps his intensive reading of the Old Testament made him so, and his experiences as a conscientious objector left him as bitter against government, British or otherwise, of past, present, and future, as any soldier who by a miracle had survived four years in the trenches.
Parting from his wife and two daughters, he came back to Nottingham in 1936. He also broke with the Christadelphian sect (after more than twenty years of it) and turned an atheist. When I first met him in 1949 I had started to think of myself as a writer. ‘A good short story,’ he advised me, ‘is what people want. It’s what editors are looking for, as well.’ To back up his point he sent me to Nottingham Central Library with lists of books to take out and read.
He was sixty-five years old, and worked at his studio desk with a skullcap on the back of his bald head. Having a thin, wax-like face, his features resembled those of Voltaire’s death-mask (a plaster copy of which hung from the wall above his desk as a measure of his admiration for that great man) if one caught him asleep or having just woken up.
Though quite prosperous for certain periods of his life, Frederick had dressed well but never really ate properly, as if that side of good comfort didn’t interest him. So he kept a frail unhealthy aspect, though he fetched more than eighty years of age.
He talked for hours on painting and art. His drawings were fine and meticulous. Now and again I would sit for him, and much of his work must still be scattered around Nottingham, for the only way he earned money at that time was by selling landscapes and doing portraits. Needing little at this part of his life made him a man of independent means, in the sense that those who have little, but which is all they need, can afford the most freedom.
An obsessional expatiator, he wanted a listener, and there was none better than an incipient writer for whom he could dip into his reminiscences and tap endless pipelines of information. He told me about a spiritual exercise by which he viewed any troublesome problem in its own utter light, and therefore went much of the way to solving. He concentrated his mind until there was nothing left in it, then went on to force this nothingness to an even greater pitch of vaccuity, so that in the blinding light of emptiness the problem suddenly reappeared with such clarity that the answer was obvious. Think of nothing, was how he put it, and think on that.
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