The Illusion of Safety behind the Sea
The Britain of my childhood was an extraordinarily safe place, or at least so it felt to me. The protecting sea was at the end of every road. “Abroad” was impossibly different and chaotic and to be avoided. I wept, as a seven-year-old child, when I discovered that to visit St. Peter’s Cathedral (which I had read about in an encyclopedia and immediately wished to see), I would have to go to Italy, a foreign country. I could not imagine myself having to do such a thing. The same encyclopedia, charmingly dated, presented a picture of a distant world of great heat or great cold, uncomfortable, inconvenient, and smelly, if picturesque, in which people lived rather worrying lives from which I was completely protected.
In my grandfather’s house, a living museum of Edwardian England, there were many elaborate brass knickknacks from India, which he delighted in bringing out to show his grandchildren. But these only helped to emphasize the distance between there and here. To me, back then, Indians were people in black-and-white pictures, viewed by the fireside as the kettle whispered on the fireside hob my grandfather still maintained in his dark, Victorian living room, and the chiming clock ticked slowly in the corner, as it always had and as I thought it always would.
The Chinese, also, were creatures a million miles away, picturesque and improbably distant. They were like Mr. Lee Hsing, maker of the model junk (a kind of Chinese ship) that my father brought back in 1930 from the Royal Navy’s now-forgotten Wei Hai Wei naval station. I have always imagined Mr. Lee in pigtail, trailing moustaches, mandarin robe, and conical hat. I have Mr. Lee’s business card still (“Carpenter, Painter and Sculptor, Manufacturer of High Grade Furniture and Toys, Model Junks of Ningpo and Native styles Made to Order”), jaundiced and creased in the hold of the junk, whose red sails long ago crumbled away, a memento of a lost world separated from us by so much violence and upheaval that it is beyond my imagination to conceive of it—not least because I have been many times to modern China and grieved in that devastated, stripped, concrete-blighted land for the loss of so much of its past, in return for such a horrible present.
Of all our many homes, as my father followed the navy around the coast and when—beached at last—he sought something else to do, I was fondest of a modest house in the admiral-infested village of Alverstoke, just across the crowded water from Portsmouth. A small park separated us from the seashore, where I watched ocean liners, epitomizing our wealth, and men-of-war, symbolizing our power, hurrying in and out of Portsmouth and Southampton among brisk and lively waves. At night or in thick fog, their enormous sirens moaned across the vast distance, the most evocative sound in the world. I have never, before or since, felt so perfectly secure.
It is almost impossible to express the sense of ordered peace that lingered about the quiet shaded gardens and the roads without traffic, where my parents were happy to let me and my brother wander unsupervised all day, in a confident, solid world where leather, wood, and brass had not been replaced by plastic and chrome, and a thing had to be heavy and British to be good. Even the money in our pockets was reassuring: royalist, ornate, and weighty pennies, sixpences, shillings, and half-crowns with elaborate coats of arms and inscriptions in Latin, many of those coins older even than my grandfather. So were the enormous Victorian fortresses crouching on the hills behind the city, once one of the most heavily fortified on the planet.
My bicycles and toys were robust machines made in England by English workers. Dark green buses with conductors wearing peaked caps would bear us past a favorite toyshop—and the war memorial—to the Gosport Ferry, from which we could view Her Majesty’s still substantial navy at rest as we made our way to the enormous department store where, amid the perfectly preserved accents and manners of the 1930s, my mother made her modest purchases and took me and my brother, neatly brushed and tamed, for tea, éclairs, and cream horns served by frilly waitresses. Incredibly, we often passed the then-famous “Mudlarks,” a gang of small boys from the slums, no older than I was, who dived and scrabbled, near-naked, in the harbor mud and slime for brown pennies flung to them by passersby.
The Lingering Trappings of Imperial and Industrial Greatness
I lived at the very end of an era that is now as distant and gone as the Lost City of Atlantis. There were modern things about it, but in general it was a very old civilization. London in the 1950s was modern in an old-fashioned way, really a city of the 1920s and 1930s full of smart electric gadgets and Art Deco design, a relic of the times when we had last been the center of great world empire and a leader among nations. The rest of the country was still more or less Edwardian, in many cases Victorian, shaped by the Industrial Revolution and full of soot and steam.
Steam railway locomotives were things of great beauty—accidental works of art, deliberately built in a patriotic spirit, painted in somber but delicious shades of green, panting like tired dragons, displaying their tremendous inward strength during pauses at junctions, as they released deafening, hundred-foot high columns of steam. Best of all, on a winter evening, was the sight of one of these machines coming into the station, its surrounding cloud of steam pink and orange and gold with the reflection of the great fire within. I always stood back, almost afraid it might leap at me or bite.
Sometimes, on quiet gray summer holiday afternoons—and they were astonishingly quiet in the days before constant traffic and the piping of rock music through loudspeakers—I would slip down to a particular station at a set time, buy a platform ticket, and wait for the romantically-named Atlantic Coast Express to whirl past at 80 miles an hour. This was ours—our invention, our majesty on wheels.
Seen at speed, passing through our soft, intimate landscape, surprisingly small yet packed with force and strength, these locomotives perfectly captured our image of ourselves as a country. The engines that took me home from school in those days had resounding patriotic names—named for Royal Air Force squadrons that had fought in the Battle of Britain or for famous ships of the enormous Merchant Navy we then had. Nowadays their unlovely diesel or electric successors are afflicted with sad, bureaucratic nomenclatures. I recently saw one bearing the nameplate “Victim Support,” commemorating a semi-official charity that aids the growing multitude of victims of crime—crime that barely existed when I was little. How very different in every way from the Kings, Castles, and Squadrons of my childhood—and from one particular engine called “Winston Churchill,” the locomotive that headed the great man’s funeral train.
This engine was one of the very few to survive the seemingly gleeful mass destruction—in the course of an extraordinarily short time—of all of these picturesque locomotives. The sudden disappearance of steam from British railways left the air of the cities much clearer and cleaner, and so allowed us to see more clearly how much we had declined. No wonder we took refuge in the belief that our decay and diminished power had been the price of glory.
CHAPTER 5
Britain’s Pseudo-Religion and the Cult of Winston Churchill
“For I will not trust in my bow; it is not my sword that shall help me.”
(THE 44TH PSALM)
Now we come to the very heart of the cult that enthralled us all, especially children. On thousands of walls hung the reproduction of our national deity—the famous Yousuf Karsh photograph of the truculent warrior glowering in a monochrome twilight. We all believed (was it true?) that Karsh had achieved this effect by unkindly snatching the Havana cigar from Sir Winston’s lips and recording the resulting expression. My Devon preparatory school displayed a different portrait—this time in color, including the famous cigar, probably a lithograph of a once-famous 1942 painting of the Great Man by Arthur Pan—adorned with a quotation that well summed up the battle we thought we had just triumphantly won. “We are all of us defending a cause…the cause of freedom and justice; of the weak against the strong; of law against violence, mercy and tolerance against brutality and iron-bound tyranny.” Alas, I now find that this reproduction was originally sold in thousa
nds to raise money for Mrs. Churchill’s “Aid for Russia” fund, money that presumably ended up in the hands of Joseph Stalin’s lawless, merciless, intolerant, brutal, and iron-bound tyranny.
Winston Churchill
I possessed for many years a comic-book biography of our Great Leader called “The Happy Warrior,” one of thousands of more or less idolatrous
publications that concentrated rather heavily on Mr. Churchill’s good side. I knew more about his life than I knew about the life of Christ. Winston was our savior. In fact, the generally radical and irreverent historian A. J. P. Taylor famously called him “the Saviour of his Country” in an impulsive—and uncharacteristically laudatory—footnote to his history of twentieth-century England.1
As children, echoes might have reached us of various less-than-complimentary memoirs, of suggestions that the old man’s mind was going long before he retired, but we were protected from them by our own desire to believe in his superlative greatness. We had won the war, with him at our head. We whizzed around the playgrounds with our arms outstretched, pretending to be Battle of Britain Spitfires and making machine-gun noises as we sent imaginary Germans spiraling to earth. Once again, we had no thought of what that might have been like for them, and we resisted the idea that our own side had suffered losses of its own. What, us shot down? We won the war!
On freezing evenings, in inadequately heated classrooms or workshops and our fingers dabbled with uncooperative glue, we strove to make plastic models of these aeroplanes or of equally gallant British warships—always rather less impressive and disappointingly smaller in reality than in the dramatically colored pictures on the (much too large) boxes in which these toys were misleadingly sold. The contrast between the packaging and the reality was a metaphor for the difference between what we were then taught to believe about the war and what had actually happened—but we would not find that out until much later.
I possessed a red volume called Men of Glory, a title that could not be published now, even ironically. It contained several stories of astonishing but genuine heroism, including that of a man who fought on long after he ought to have been dead (thanks to a Japanese sword-thrust) and a particularly nerve-tightening account of the struggle to remove an unexploded bomb from a claustrophobic space in a submarine. I learned later that my future wife had at the same time been studying its female equivalent, called Women of Glory. Many years later in Moscow, these titles returned to worry me when we—a group of expatriate journalists and their spouses—had been discussing the way in which the Soviets liked to use what we thought of by then as the outmoded and exaggerated word “glory” in accounts of their wartime heroes. And it came to me with a shock of memory that there had been a time when we, in prosaic, understated Britain, had done exactly the same and had not thought there was anything odd about it. The Soviet parallel would revisit me again and again to unsettle me. Here was another nation in hopeless decline, comforting itself with a long-ago battle in which it claimed to have saved the world from evil.
And then there was Sergeant Pilot Matt Braddock, the great Royal Air Force bomber ace, fervent democrat (he refused a commission), and all-around British hero. For many years—having encountered him in a book for boys called I Flew with Braddock, in which his adventures were recounted by his faithful and admiring navigator, George Bourne—I genuinely believed that this person actually lived. He now has a Wikipedia entry, almost as if he had been a real person, but I now know he never existed outside the pages of a weekly comic.
I had heard of something called “The Blitz,” in which German Nazis (they were always Nazis, a special kind of human being deserving of death) had killed our women and children by dropping bombs on their homes. I also had some extremely vague and confused ideas about the massacre of Jews by Germany and may actually have thought that we went to war to save those Jews. If so, I was not alone. Many British people now seem to think that this was our actual reason for fighting Germany, and they are surprised when it is pointed out that this was not so.
In any case, I had no doubt at all that Matt Braddock and his fellow pilots were heroic warriors as they unloaded their bombs upon the evil Nazis. In this I was at least partly right, as I now know. I lost what little physical courage I ever had on the day I crashed my motorbike into a lorry carrying pork pies. The collision (entirely my own fault) nearly removed my right foot. This is as close as I have ever come to the real experience of warfare, though as a journalist I have hung about at the edge of various conflicts doing my best to stay well away from the action. I simply do not know how bomber crews found the courage to climb into their aircraft, especially given the sort of deaths they had already seen so many of their comrades die. What I did not then grasp, and now do, is exactly what Matt Braddock’s bombs did when they reached their targets. This late discovery ended my worship of Matt Braddock and of his comrades, brave as they certainly were, and unraveled my entire faith in the whole pseudo-religion we once called, “We Won the War.”
The Cult of Noble Death
As pseudo-religions go, ours was attractive and elegant, and it contained many decent and godly elements. Its central ceremony was Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to 11th November. This invariably fell at the low point of the winter term, when the soccer fields were thick with mud the color of tea and the consistency of soup, and a leather football in the face could ruin your entire day. Rain hissed incessantly from misty skies, and the far horizons of summer shrank to a small, murky circle around the school buildings. Through foggy windows we could see only fog. Morning took hours to gain the upper hand over night. The afternoon light began to thicken into a cozy dusk soon after lunch. Feet squelched, puddles formed in doorways, and heavy dark blue raincoats (never fully dry) hung in sodden, musty clumps in the corridors. The normal daily smells of fatty mutton and stodgy puddings loitered in the brown-painted corridors all day. Christmas was too far off to illuminate the darkness.
In the very depth of this season of universal, drab-colored gloom we were marched in ranks and files down to the town war memorial, with absurd caps on our heads, for the crowning ritual of the year.
Everyone else, like us, was somberly clad, and the only color—a startling blood red—came from the artificial poppies we all wore to commemorate the flowers that bloomed among the corpses in First World War Flanders. Wreaths fashioned from the same poppies were heaped on the monument. As a vicar in austere black-and-white vestments intoned uncompromisingly Protestant prayers, we kept a silence. Then a quavering bugle blew, and we sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” a hymn that seemed to have been carved from granite much like that of the memorial itself. It was a deep evocation of everything we liked about ourselves, an indulgence in melancholy and proud self-restraint. No outsider could possibly have penetrated its English mystery or imagined that we were in fact enjoying ourselves. But we were.
At that point in my life I still imagined that I too might meet my noble, painless imagined fate in a gray ship on gray seas in some cold northern place, preferably dying at the moment of victory, therefore helping to preserve this unfathomable society from harm. I think I may have believed that my sons might one day process to a memorial and sing sad songs in my memory, standing stiffly upright as the rainwater found its way down the back of their necks.
To this day, I cannot attend or watch this event—for it still continues—without a great wrench of the heart. This was what I believed in most, what I was chiefly proud of, who I truly was. Great poets expressed it, usually but not always sentimentally. “Here dead we lie,” as A. E. Housman wrote in 1919,
because we did not choose
To shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and we were young.
And in lines that still make me shiver, Edward Thomas described the shocked Easter of 1915, when a dismayed country began to understand the size of the butcher’s bill it was then only beginning to pay
for entering so blithely into the First World War. He wrote:
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
It is only after a minute that the phrase “now far from home” has its intended effect.
Shrines—At Home and Abroad
The great cult of noble, patriotic death has its shrines everywhere, thousands and thousands of them. Some are majestic, adorned with statues of soldiers, sailors, and airmen with bowed heads standing at their corners. Some are considerable works of art. One such is the Cenotaph in Whitehall with its simple-seeming but curiously worrying inscription to “The Glorious Dead.” The most evocative—a mud-encrusted infantryman forever reading a letter from home—stands on Platform One of Paddington Station in London. This Great Western Railway Memorial is the work of the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger, who also executed the astonishing Royal Artillery Memorial in the heart of London. This is one of the very few to portray a dead soldier (his head and trunk covered by a cloak, his booted legs projecting as a real corpse’s would), an enormous and extraordinarily honest tribute to what is described in deeply incised lettering as “A Royal Fellowship of Death.” This sculpture, so strange and outlandish that almost nobody studies it, is a full-size representation in solid stone of an enormous Howitzer, trained in the general direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth, no doubt unintentionally. Nearby, the much smaller memorial of the Machine Gun Corps pointedly mocks Jagger’s heavy grandeur, with the biblical but un-Christian boast, “Saul hath slain his thousands, but David hath slain his tens of thousands,” on its plinth. This curious memorial takes the form of a statue of the young shepherd boy David, naked but for a fig leaf, gripping Goliath’s abandoned sword. On either side of him are bronze machine-guns, recreated in careful detail, hung with large bronze wreaths. Once again, the structure is so eccentric, un-Christian, and odd that few ever examine it, though millions must pass by it every year.
The Rage Against God Page 5