The second, much shorter and more banal, had been dispatched exactly a year before Florence finally saw it: ‘Glorious weather. Winter activities begin. Good start teaching.’
The third was the most precious. It was the one Liddell had composed on the afternoon of his death, dictating the contents to an unknown typist because he was too weak to pen a sentence. Even his ‘signature’ was typed. The ribbon of the typewriter was short of ink and the vowel keys in particular needed cleaning. Each line was out of kilter – as if the typist wasn’t a professional – but nonetheless without mistakes. The contents would only make absolute sense to Florence in the weeks to come when Liddell’s fellow internees, now repatriated, wrote to her about the final month of his life. ‘Was carrying too much responsibility,’ he said. ‘Slight nervous breakdown. Am much better after month’s rest in hospital.’ He then told Florence about the doctors’ diagnosis, the suggestion of switching to the bakery – ‘a good change’, he predicted – and the arrival of one of her letters. He went on about ‘comfort parcels’, a forthcoming camp wedding – ‘wish you could enter into the celebration’, he said – as well as the fact that Joyce Stranks had been a ‘great help’ in passing on news to him. The last sentence sent ‘special love’ to her and to the children.
There were fresh tears for Florence that day. ‘I couldn’t believe it, really,’ she said, remembering both the upset of reading the messages and the consolation of hearing his voice within them. She put the envelope away, thinking she’d never receive another word her husband had written in camp.
She was wrong.
Late in 1945 Florence was sent a parcel of her husband’s belongings which included his Edinburgh University blazer, the colour drained from it. There were also two small slips of plain paper, which Liddell had kept beside his hospital bed during his last hours. Each was torn a little and had once been folded, as if he’d slipped them into a pocket. After reading them in the camp, A. P. Cullen was convinced Liddell had experienced a ‘premonition of his death’.64
On the first sheet the handwriting, in faint pencil, is neat and fairly orderly. On the second the handwriting is unusually large. The words tumble across it in a confusion of lines, scarred with false starts and crossings-out. The difference between these two pieces of paper is so apparent that you understand Liddell’s mind suffered as much as the body near his end. Florence realized this without needing to be told. The enormous difficulty Liddell had coordinating his movements and holding the pencil is clearly evident. The writing on that first sheet is very faint and almost indecipherable. It contains sketchy prompt notes for a sermon he is intending to give about confronting and conquering everyday fears.
Too weak to write, Eric Liddell dictated his final Red Cross messages to a friend.
The second sheet is essentially a collection of verses from two hymns, ‘Abide With Me’ and ‘Be Still, My Soul’. Liddell’s memory is incapable of recalling either of them faithfully and his hand isn’t able to scribble fast or legibly enough the words he wants to leave behind. ‘O Lord,’ he says, as if knowing death is close, ‘the darkness deepens.’ The rest is a semi-ramble, seldom coherent or whole, that foreshadows what’s to come for him. His mind is shutting down and switching off, no longer brimful of what only recently it could summon at will.
One line nevertheless stands out, as though Liddell forced it on to the page with a last gasp of thought and effort. The short sentence, and the cream-coloured slip of paper on which it was written, is more than seventy years old now. Time has chafed it, making the edges ragged, and exposure to light has faded the once-dark press of pencil-lead. But this simplest of phrases, slanting across the top left-hand corner of the final page, calls out to whoever sees it because the four words Liddell found from somewhere read like a farewell promise to his family and the last expression of his unbreakable faith.
‘All will be well,’ he says.
And so it proved.
EPILOGUE
What Will Survive of Us Is Love
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
THE DAUGHTER ERIC Liddell never met is sitting on a smoke-grey sofa staring intently at two photographs of her father.1 Another photograph of him hangs on the wall directly beside the front window of her sixteenth-floor apartment. Beyond it Lake Ontario is a sheet of blue glass, barely rippled. In the way-off distance the sails of boats, like small flakes of white chalk, move slowly across the calm-still water in search of a half-breath of wind that never comes.
This August afternoon is hot and drowsy, the sky cloudless, and Maureen Liddell has arranged an English high tea: cakes and scones, cucumber sandwiches and cups of Earl Grey.
For the past eighteen months I’ve spent day after day in libraries and archives, straining my roaming eyes over tiny print and dark, smudgy newspaper pictures that look as if the printer rolled too much ink on to the block. I’ve turned countless pages of faded foolscap documents and also the dusty, ribbon-tied minute-books of long-ago meetings, which were typed on clunking machines or written with a nibbed pen. I’ve held the gold medal Liddell won in Paris in the well of my hand, astonished at its feathery lightness. I’ve stood in front of the oil that Eileen Soper painted of him, tucked into the east stairway of Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery.
In a journey of over 20,000 miles I’ve also seen the way in which landscapes so integral to Liddell have changed since his day. Powderhall Stadium, where he sharpened his speed beside the flat-capped Tom McKerchar, is a spread of modern brick housing. The rooftops of George Square are overlooked by the domed tower and the crescent moon of Edinburgh’s Central Mosque, emphasizing that city’s religious diversity. And, of course, there is Guang-Wen Street, where I found the canvas market stalls and the high-rise offices standing where wooden shanties and mud tracks once stood before them. I’ve spoken to survivors of the camp – internees, aged between eighty and ninety-nine, for whom Weifang will always be Weihsien. Whatever each has done since liberation – and wherever it carried them as a consequence – those days in the camp have gone with them, a pale shadow ever present across blameless lives.
Everything has led me here, the place where Liddell planned to settle at the end of the war. Home for the daughters he never saw again after 1941 – as well as for the daughter he never saw at all – lies along that section of the Go train-line stretching westwards from Toronto. Only a handful of stops separate Patricia, Heather and Maureen.
Months before, during that warm, smoggy morning in Shandong Province, I’d felt a sense of unreality about being in China. The past seemed more tangible to me than the present because I’d been immersed in it for so long; and, at first, I found it difficult to relate one to the other because the two were so different from each other. In Weifang I mentally dropped a photograph of the kao liang fields and the bell tower over the glass, steel and neon around me. In Toronto, experiencing that same feeling again, I think about the colour studio portrait of the Liddell family without its father. Maureen is a baby, wrapped in a white woollen shawl and cradled in Florence’s left arm. Patricia and Heather are dressed identically in those Sunday-smart, high-collared frocks. It scarcely seems possible to me that ‘the girls’, as Florence referred to them in her letters, long ago became mothers and then grandmothers. The baby in her white shawl is now wearing a white shirt and a pair of fawn slacks, her dark hair cut short. She is pouring the Earl Grey. The photo, once fresh from the developing tray, is history.
The girls: (from the left) Patricia, Maureen and Heather.
I tell Maureen what those once in Weihsien had told me: that, after her father’s sudden death, the internees spoke especially of her. About the fact that she’d never see him or hear his voice. About the fact that whatever she’d learn about his life would come second-hand from anecdotes, newspaper clippings and pictures stuck into albums. About the fact that his loss would profoundly affect her when she was old enough to comprehend it properly. However hazy and indistinct, Patricia and Heather would at least retain scr
aps of him – a cycle ride in Tientsin; his face at their bedside or at the breakfast table; even the last, dim sight of him during that farewell on the Nitta Maru. For Maureen, there would only ever be blanks where memories should be, each filled with lost possibilities. Weihsien had worried about her.
She nods, acknowledging the perceptiveness of strangers. She will talk about it in a minute.
First, she shows me the photographs she particularly likes. She hunts out the picture of her father wearing her mother’s hat at the wedding of a friend. She then finds the one in which he attempts to tickle her in the garden as she playfully pretends to escape. ‘You know,’ she says in her Canadian accent, ‘I look at these and know how good the relationship was between them; how much each so obviously loved the other. You think of missionaries as serious and stuffy. My parents were never like that. They had a lot of fun and humour in them.’ She smiles – the sort of wide smile her parents gave to the camera on those fine days in 1934.
She hasn’t always smiled like this. Her childhood, she says, was a struggle to accept her father’s absence and a quest to get to know him. She sometimes became angry – ‘a huge rage’, she says – about the ‘monstrous space’ he’d left behind. On the edge of her teens, she quarrelled with her mother. ‘He can’t have loved you,’ she’d said to her. ‘He made you leave China without him. He made you come here with us.’ She admits now, ‘I made it difficult for her because I was growing up without him and I couldn’t understand it. I wanted him to be there.’
Liddell’s status as an Olympic champion and his career as an athlete were always less important to her than discovering the sort of man he’d been. ‘I used to ask myself, Was he a deluded Christian? Was he as good as everyone said? Then I’d think: how could he have been? He’d let us leave China. I was so confused.’
There were times when Maureen didn’t want to discuss him. ‘It was like opening a wound,’ she says. Questions that had occupied the camp internees in 1945 still occupied her nonetheless. Why hadn’t he been spared and come home? ‘It seemed especially cruel,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t understand why he had to die. I was furious with God.’
She isn’t furious any more.
All of us live incomplete lives. At our end something is always left unsaid, undone, unseen. But Liddell’s life seems scarcely half-finished. You can’t avoid thinking of the birthdays he never celebrated, the weddings he never attended, the grandchildren he never held. The world awaiting him after Weihsien would have been one of endless choice.
But Maureen grew to accept his passing. She believes it was ‘meant to be’; that somehow his premature death had a wider purpose, which the years have gradually revealed. After reaching that conclusion, everything about him became clear to her. ‘I saw the big plan for my father’s life,’ she says.
She remembers a drizzly morning in 2008. Alongside Patricia and Heather, she’d stood in front of his rose granite monument in Weifang. Each of them laid flowers and held one another in what her mother used to call the ‘magic circle’ of family. ‘I felt so close to him and, more than ever, I realised what his life had been for. It all made sense. What happened allowed him to touch so many lives as a consequence.’
First Patricia and then Heather say the same thing to me. His death will always be a part of his children’s lives; but each sees a reason for it now.
‘The number of people he’s influenced . . . well, things seem to add up, don’t they?’ says Patricia. ‘You only appreciate it when you look at each stage of his life and make the connections between them.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘I used to ask myself: how would things have turned out if the three of us and our mother had been in the camp with him? Then I understood my father would have spent less time with the other youngsters, which would have deprived them of so much. That didn’t seem fair to them. He was needed there. The stories we heard after his death prove that.’ Beside her sit big black boards made of strong card on to which she has pasted photographs of him as a missionary as well as an athlete. She uses them to illustrate the talks she gives about him.
‘My father was meant to be in that camp,’ agrees Heather. ‘His whole life was designed to either care for or to inspire people. That was hard for us to accept as children and we shed tears over it.’ On a polished table she has laid out the family’s archive for me: her mother’s letters to him; her father’s Red Cross letters in return; the full drafts of commemorative radio programmes and memorial speeches; the messages of sympathy sent to the family from friends and strangers alike; the photograph of his grave in Weihsien; and, finally, those two scraps of paper, preserved in a transparent plastic bag, on which he wrote his last words so faintly with a stubby pencil as his strength ebbed away. ‘The response to who he was and what he did goes far beyond anything we ever have imagined,’ she adds, glancing across at the accumulation of paper. ‘Slowly I began to appreciate how much he had meant to others – and how much others relied on him. That was his purpose. He belonged to everyone else in the world as well as to us. I understood we were meant to share him.’
His daughters will go on sharing him, for his story has no full stop.
That written promise ‘All will be well’, which Liddell left beside his deathbed, has come true because of the sort of man he was; and also because of the example he set. His character constitutes the basis of his legacy, which is a gift that keeps on giving to whoever discovers both it and him. You see it in those who now quote his daily devotions and philosophies on Twitter. You see it in the references made about him in newspapers, in chat rooms and on blogs across the world. You see it in the stories of men and women, born decade upon decade after Liddell’s death, who labour on behalf of others because he inspired them. You see it, too, in the bricks and mortar of Edinburgh’s Eric Liddell Centre, formerly Morningside Church on ‘Holy Corner’. In its devotion to the community, the centre does today what Liddell began almost a century ago – caring, supporting, educating, inspiring. And so the ideas and ideals he espoused go on. We owe him a debt for that; though we also know Liddell would blanch at the very presumption of it and disown the credit.
Eric Liddell changed the lives of those who were close to him.
D. P. Thomson, who had described his own life in the ordained ministry as ‘a lie’ until Liddell became a part of it, continued to write, preach and teach until his death in 1974.2 He organized Liddell’s memorial fund, which preoccupied him so completely that his sister fretted over his exhausted state. Thomson remembered a ‘long argument’ over supper during which she’d rebuked him about his commitment to Liddell. ‘Was I making too much of Eric?’ was how Thomson recorded the exchange in his diary, also noting that he ‘failed to convince’ her of the merit behind his devotion. Thomson never doubted that Liddell was worth his all-consuming efforts. He called him a ‘friend and a brother’ and spoke of his ‘transparent sincerity’ and ‘deep humility’ and his ‘considerateness and self-forgetfulness’.
Annie Buchan was among those missionaries determined to see China again.3 Having returned from Weihsien both weary and sick at Christmas 1945, she was back there again in less than two years. She returned to Scotland in 1950 and died there in 1987. Whenever she was asked to describe Liddell’s final hours, she did so only after stressing he had been ‘the finest’ and the ‘most remarkable’ of men. She didn’t want the tragic manner of his death to obscure the achievements of his life.
Aubrey Grandon died in 1990.4 He was always proud – but never boastfully so – of beating Liddell in Weihsien. At a camp reunion, held after Chariots of Fire had brought Liddell alive again as an athlete, Grandon heard one of the internees, only a young child in 1944, claim that his hero ‘had never lost a race’. Grandon’s wife urged him to speak and correct the mistake. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Whenever Grandon talked about running against Liddell in that last Sports Day, he’d always concede, ‘Eric wasn’t well then.’
Even Harold Abrahams dwelt on his rival, despite the f
act that he neither saw nor spoke to him again after 1925.5 He died in 1978, well before filming on Chariots of Fire began. His preoccupation with Liddell was based on that unanswerable question from history: What if? This troubled him. He’d known, as if memorizing them, Liddell’s times over 100 yards, sometimes on appreciably slower tracks than Colombes’s in Paris, and so said aloud what others were thinking. ‘I have often wondered whether I owe my Olympic success, at least in part, to Eric’s religious beliefs. Had he run [in the 100 metres], would he have defeated me and won that Olympic title?’ Abrahams was anxious to provide evidence that would dissuade his listener from saying yes – though yes remains the logical conclusion. Liddell was the superior runner, however much Abrahams protested otherwise. As an old man, he was still protesting about it. His language was baroque, as if he thought piling up words in front of an argument would hide the cracks in its structure. ‘At this long distance from the actual event I can perhaps say, without seeming self-centred, that I believe I was, in fact, better than Eric over 100 metres – though it is equally fair to say that on the only two occasions on which I ran against him [over 220 yards and 200 metres] he defeated me.’ You can read that sentence until the next Olympics comes around without knowing why Abrahams regarded himself as ‘better’ – apart from hubris or gut instinct – since the only cold data he provides points the other way. The fact that anyone might assume Liddell would have taken gold from him, invalidating the medal he won, clearly concerned Abrahams, suggesting a complex that only a session or two on the psychiatrist’s couch might have resolved.
For the Glory Page 35