For the Glory

by Duncan Hamilton

  Liddell was the mentor forever at Steve Metcalf’s shoulder.6 What he heard Liddell say in the camp – ‘love your enemies’ – never left him. During Liddell’s funeral, carrying the coffin and listening to the orations, Metcalf decided to become a missionary in Japan. He later learned the language at a rate of twenty words per day. He joined the Overseas Missionary Fellowship and worked for them from 1952 until 1990, believing it to be his destiny. The boat taking him to what had once been an enemy country also took three hundred British soldiers to fight in the Korean War. ‘On our first Sunday at sea the officer in charge asked me to speak to them,’ he said. ‘I’d only recently turned twenty-five. I was still older than some of those who were in uniform. I told them about Eric. What he’d said about praying for those who despitefully use you. How he’d forgiven everyone.’ Metcalf referred to ‘the baton of forgiveness’, which he believed Liddell had passed on to him.

  In August 2005 he did so again, giving the keynote speech when internees gathered at the site of the camp to commemorate its liberation. Metcalf looked around him – at the faces he knew, which were as old as or even older than his own, and at the stone bulk of the buildings. His friend was there too – exactly as he had first seen him. His face was unmarked. His eyes were the brightest blue. He was still dressed in khaki shorts and that shirt made from a curtain. He was running in races on roads that didn’t exist. He was walking pathways that were no longer there. He was preaching beneath a tree that had been cut down an age ago. He was wearing the athletics spikes given away sixty years earlier. Liddell seemed so alive to Metcalf again that the question he had asked at his graveside – ‘Is this all that happens to honour such a Great Man?’ – had at last been answered to his satisfaction.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘This Great Man lives on.’

  In ‘An Arundel Tomb’, Philip Larkin wrote one of the most memorable lines of his – or anybody else’s – collected poetry. It is the last sentence of the last verse. ‘What will survive of us is love’.

  Eric Liddell is proof of that.

  Eileen Soper remained a spinster.7 The evidence suggests she never found – and never wanted either – anyone else to share with her the sound of that ‘lonely peewit crying’. Near the end of her life arthritis confined her to Wildings, where her precious garden gradually became an unruly tangle of unpruned trees, untrimmed hedges, unmown grass and flowers that were left to wilt or grow tall and wild. The house deteriorated around her too, becoming dilapidated and also infested with mice, which lived in her slippers and in chests of drawers. Soper had thrown nothing away. There were over three thousand empty glass jars. There were stacks of cardboard boxes and wooden pallets, which had once contained apples. There were magazines and newspapers, most of them decades old. After her death in 1990, aged eighty-five, a friend, walking into her studio, described every part of it as ‘silted up with paper, boxes, mounts’. In this impossibly cluttered but private space, only one of Soper’s possessions stood out prominently, making it impossible to ignore. It sat on her mahogany easel. Her friend thought it dominated the room ‘like some tutelary deity’. This was Liddell’s face. Of all the pictures Soper had painted and still owned – hundreds of etchings, drawings, prints and watercolours – she’d chosen to display his portrait, as though longing for those high summers in the 1920s when both of them still had a life to come and she’d watched Liddell carve E and L on that beech tree with his silver key. This is how he remained in Soper’s mind – always blond, always grey-suited, always handsomely serious. The portrait, it was later discovered, had stood on the easel ‘for several years’.

  Florence Liddell didn’t need a painting, or even a photograph, to summon him.8 She had what she called scores of ‘beautiful memories’ to sustain her. ‘We had as much happiness in our few short years together as many couples have had in a whole lifetime,’ she said, thanking God ‘for the privilege of being his wife’. He had been ‘everything to me’, she added.

  Florence once confessed: ‘I’d always felt that if anything happened to Eric my world would collapse completely – and my faith and everything else.’ But she knew dwelling overmuch on her sadness would only multiply it, so she put it aside and pressed on for the sake of Patricia, Heather and Maureen. Thinking of it, ‘the girls’ remember a mother who never raised her voice and never raised her hand; who educated them with planned visits to galleries, museums and exhibitions; and who would tell them ‘your father would be so proud of you’. They can still hear her playing the piano, especially Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, her favourite, and ‘The Sweet By-and-By’. They still see her making clothes or mending them, saving cents to accrue dollars that paid for dancing lessons, piano lessons and summer camp.

  The words each uses to describe their mother – ‘optimistic, caringly compassionate, faithful, selfless, resilient’ – could be used to describe their father too. And the qualities that had attracted him to her so long ago and in another country were apparent more than ever after his death. She became all her husband had known her to be – and more besides. Florence was a woman made of tough fibres, remarkably and resourcefully strong in heart and head. She subsequently tried to live ‘more like he lived’, she said.

  In the days after Liddell’s death, her own mother had remarked disconsolately, ‘Well Florence, I guess we’re just two old widows together now.’ Florence disagreed. She wasn’t old; her thirty-fourth birthday was six months away. She didn’t want to be shut for ever in the same house as her mother either. The bereaved are sick with many griefs, which fill up rooms, and there is a commonality about the process of clearing them. Florence went through each of these – denial and anger, which were brief; depression and loneliness, which lingered; reflection and acceptance and then reconstruction, which led her into a future far different from the one she had envisaged. She disguised the worst of her agonizing behind a front of fortitude and grace and she busied herself with those practicalities that the dead always leave the living to sort and tidy. There was a £10,000 insurance policy to settle. There was a lost will to locate. There was copious correspondence to be answered. There was a memorial service to attend in Toronto and others to read about in Edinburgh and Glasgow, which were conducted in her absence. While her trauma was fresh, Florence admitted, ‘My brain still feels rather fuzzy and numbed when it comes to thinking about business matters.’ She forced herself to think about them nonetheless. She set and fixed her household budget. She found herself a nursing post at Toronto General Hospital to earn a wage and went back to university to gain more qualifications. Eventually she found an apartment – three rooms and a shared kitchen only a couple of miles from her former home. ‘You might as well have the plague as three children when it comes to house hunting,’ she had said, remembering the difficulty of securing a tenancy.

  Three months of the summer immediately following Liddell’s death were spent in a rented cabin cottage at Port Albert on Lake Huron. The cottage was of Thoreau-like simplicity and proved restorative. This was her Walden Pond. She settled on the land the way Thoreau had settled on his own for the purpose of finding ‘only the essential facts of life’. With her daughters she found a necessary solitude there – no telephone, no newspaper, no demands, no well-meaning callers. She could think and plan and prepare. At Port Albert, Florence started again. She would still talk about him. She would still drape his university blazer over her shoulders like a cape to be closer to him. Sometimes she would still feel his presence around her too, always believing she’d see him ‘right there – if only I could turn my head a fraction quicker’.

  In every end there are the threads of a new beginning.

  In 1951 she married again. Murray Hall was a cousin. His wife, stricken with terminal cancer, asked Florence to support her at home and also look after him and their three children, aged between twelve and seventeen. Looking back on it, ‘the girls’ are convinced the request was about more than practical nursing. It was also a piece of match-making from a patient wh
o, aware of her mortality, wanted to be sure that her husband and her family would be cared for after her death. For the sake of this second marriage, Florence put away her first. The photographs and small treasures from it were placed in a trunk and carried into the basement. She became Mrs Hall of the 300-acre Jersey Farm and had a fourth child, christened Jeannie, in 1955. She was widowed for the second time in 1969.

  In the second half of her life the woman who’d faced so much with such equanimity was confronted with another misery. She was diagnosed with Cushing Syndrome, a rare hormonal disorder that occurs when the body secretes too much cortisol into the bloodstream. It causes obesity, high blood pressure and extreme fatigue. The skin can bruise easily. Florence suffered each of these complaints, coping with the condition as phlegmatically as she had everything else.

  She’d assumed the only landmarks to come in her life would be more grandchildren, never thinking the past would be recreated in front of her.

  She lived long enough to hear Allan Wells’ response to reporters’ questions after becoming the first British runner since Harold Abrahams to win the 100 metres Olympic title at Moscow’s 1980 Games. Wells was born in Liddell’s Edinburgh and raised 4 miles from Morningside Church.

  ‘Did you win for Harold Abrahams?’ he was asked afterwards.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘For Eric Liddell.’

  Then came Chariots of Fire. The anonymous, silver-haired Florence found herself nearly famous. There was a screening to attend. She ‘wept all the way through it’, she said. There were letters requiring replies. These were composed entirely in her own hand. There were television and newspaper interviews to be done. The questions were nearly all the same, her answers to them well rehearsed. Yes, she found the interest around the film ‘kinda fun’. Yes, she thought Ian Charleson’s portrayal caught the ‘spirit’ of Liddell’s personality. No, the script hadn’t quite captured him completely. The cinema version was ‘a bit too solemn’ and ‘a little too preachy’, she explained.

  One evening Florence sat on the couch at her daughter Heather’s home and watched a reel of celluloid she’d never seen before. It was Pathé’s black and white film of Liddell’s 400 metres win in Paris. She saw then what anyone can view now on YouTube. The focus on his twenty-two-year-old face. Those long fingers resting on his hips. That number – 451 – on his shirt-front. The crowd massed steeply behind him. That stare down the line and the curve of the Colombes track before the gun releases him on the race of a lifetime. His fleet feet pounding along the cinder. The spray of that cinder as he runs. His head thrown back. The snap of the tape.

  ‘She couldn’t believe what she was seeing,’ remembers Heather. Florence leaned forward on the very lip of her seat, oblivious for more than a full minute to absolutely everything except the scene played out in front of her on a 21-inch television. ‘It was as if she was there with him, sitting in the stand,’ Heather adds. As the race began, Florence was lost in the brightness of it. She even yelled, ‘Come on, honey. You can beat him. You can do it.’

  The last frame of that film shows Liddell after his triumph. He is accepting a congratulatory handshake. The image lingers, freezing him in that pose for a while – the splendour of the man he’d once been so apparent. Florence stood up and looked at it as though in that moment she was remembering every one of the yesterdays she had spent beside him. She bowed her head, raised her hands to her face and began to weep.

  In the years left to her she would reminisce about him and also re-live their courtship and marriage. She was living with Patricia, who one afternoon had to comfort her after a dream.

  In it, the Nitta Maru was slipping across the Yellow Sea again. Her husband was leaving the ship and she was attempting to chase after him. Somehow – for there were no shackles and no rope to tether her – she found her feet were rooted to the spot on which she stood. Attempting to move towards the gangway, she was unable to take a step. She was sobbing and shouting in panic, pleading with him not to leave her. ‘Don’t go,’ she was saying over and again before an abrupt, confused awakening in her own bed. ‘You were having a dream,’ said Patricia, placing her hand on her mother’s brow. ‘Don’t worry. Everything is all right now.’

  Florence died in June 1984. She had never stopped loving him.

  Shortly before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the Chinese claimed that Eric Liddell had refused repatriation from Weihsien, giving away his place instead to a pregnant woman. The Chinese further insisted that Winston Churchill was directly responsible for persuading the Japanese to offer him his freedom. None of his friends gave the story any credence; those who had lived so closely with him in the camp were adamant that a ‘secret’ of that magnitude could never have been hidden there. They saw the notion of it as a nice but idealized fantasy, designed to enhance his reputation still further. ‘He was so good anyway that no one ever has to overstate it,’ said Joe Cotterill. ‘The basic facts alone tell you everything about him.’

  You can only nod your head at that assessment.

  He was some man; and he lived some life, however briefly. Most of us don’t leave much of a mark and we disappear almost completely when the last person who remembers us dies also. But the mark he left is ineradicable. The Disciplines of the Christian Life – that collection of thoughts and quotations he wrote on his blackwood desk in Tientsin – has sold tens of thousands of copies. It sells still.

  Valorous lives like his, which must be calculated in terms of value rather than length, encourage us to make our own lives better somehow. In his case that’s because everything he did was selfless, each kind act bespoke for someone else’s benefit. He believed entirely that those to whom ‘much is given’ are obliged to give ‘much in return’ – and should do so without complaining about it. In adhering to this, he never demanded grand happiness or great comfort for himself. He grasped only for the things that mattered to him: worthwhile work and the care of his family. He’d once – on that hot July evening in Paris – grasped for an Olympic title as well, knowing nonetheless even as he won it that the glory of gold was nothing in his world compared to the glory of God.

  It isn’t fair to say that becoming an Olympic champion counts as his least significant act; but that’s only because the feat brought him a wider audience for preaching than he would otherwise have achieved. It is fair to say, however, that the consequences of taking the medal were of far more value to him than the glint of the medal itself. He knew that whatever else he would surely have achieved as an athlete was trivial beside what he went on to achieve as a missionary, forever combining public service and private sacrifice.

  It is said that every movement and speech reveals us. What revealed him – especially his attitude towards athletic prowess versus missionary duty – was his response to a specific, long-winded question at a particularly apt moment. It came in 1932. He was in Toronto, coincidentally a stop-over for the Great Britain team which was then on its way to the Los Angeles Olympics. He could have been competing there too instead of watching his countrymen like a kerbside spectator observing a passing parade. Button-holed by a pushy interviewer, he faced a series of questions rolled colourfully into one.9 The way each of them was framed suggests the newspaperman regarded him as slightly out of his mind for choosing a career in China ahead of a career in athletics.

  ‘Are you glad you gave your life to missionary work?’ he was asked. ‘Don’t you miss the limelight, the rush, the frenzy, the cheers, the rich red wine of victory?’

  The part of Liddell’s reply that really matters is humble; and it firmly ranks his missionary responsibilities well ahead of his running. He told his inquisitor: ‘A fellow’s life counts for far more at this than the other.’

  So true, so true.

  But only Eric Henry Liddell – that stillest of souls – could have said it with such sincerity.

  Acknowledgements

  Thoughts about the Chinese philosopher Lazoi rattled around my head as soon as I thought of writing this book. You’l
l know his most celebrated quotation because repetition has (almost) turned it into a cliché. The line, from chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching, reads: ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’

  That seemed especially poignant to me at the start of For the Glory. It seems even more poignant now.

  I knew well in advance about the long roads Eric Liddell had travelled during his relatively short life. I also knew I’d have to travel them too. A journey of a thousand miles? I have one thing to say to Lazoi. You don’t know the half of it, old sport. On Eric’s trail, I went to China, the United States and Canada. I’ve also covered every compass point in England and Scotland, which was a stroll to the village post office in comparison to totting up all those overseas hours in the air, on a train and also on a boat.

  But I’ve been lucky – terribly lucky, in fact. Biography not only obliges you to get out of the house, it is also a lovely way to meet people. The company I’ve kept is proof of that; for those who were once strangers to me have since become acquaintances or, better still, friends, which has made me feel a little less guilty about constantly pestering them – for memories, photographs and documents – during the process of researching and writing and then checking and rechecking.

  I list them here, hoping no one has been missed out.

  Whoever writes about the past piles up personal debts during the accumulation of the sort of detail necessary to bring it alive again.

  Not surprisingly, the biggest I owe is to Eric and Florence’s ‘girls’: Patricia, Heather and Maureen. Each was instantly receptive to the idea of the book. Each was a tremendous supporter of the aims I expressed for it. Each showed me unfailing courtesy, kindness and a wonderful sharing spirit. I’d also like to pay tribute to Patricia’s husband Mervyn (despite his allegiance to a certain football team which I can’t bring myself to mention), and to Heather’s husband Gerry (one day I hope we’ll share a baseball diamond).