The doors open onto a beautiful and golden late afternoon, with sunset clearly not all that far off. We clamber out, me in my polished black shoes and blue city suit—I have come here, at short notice and with no preparation, from an assignment in Jerusalem. John is better dressed for the occasion in his photographer’s bush gear, but encumbered with a gigantic early-model satellite phone (which will prove wholly useless during our entire stay) and the shiny boxes of his trade. Boys about thirteen or fourteen years old crowd around, all with beautiful high-boned Somali faces, asking, “You want bodyguard?” One, plainly a leader, has an AK – 47 with a pale-blue plastic stock. A man from the news agency has arrived to meet his load. He is the only friendly face and the only English-speaking person. “Do we want a bodyguard?” I ask him “Oh, sure,” he says. “If you don’t have guards, you’ll be dead and naked by morning.” I notice, at this point, that the sun is dipping rapidly toward the Western horizon.
John and I hire two of the boy bodyguards, using the international sign language of dollar bills. One of our protectors has an unidentifiable car with the upholstery stripped from its seats and no interior trim. (This is a form of transport that I have now grown quite used to, but that was new to me then.) The news agency man says that he is sorry he cannot help us, that his people have no space at all, but we should be able to find something in town. He waves goodbye. I have the impression he is astonished that we should have come here so totally unprepared, perhaps because I am also astonished about this. My newspaper, I think, has delusions of grandeur. When, a few days ago in Tel Aviv, I had dutifully offered to go, it had been an offer made for the sake of form, expecting to be refused, which it was. But someone has changed his mind, and here I am, trapped in Mogadishu by my own attempt to gain kudos without risk. There is going to be risk after all.
We cram ourselves into the car and lurch and jolt past the ruined arrivals terminal and into the city. There are wide avenues made of mud. There seem to be no trees, no shop fronts, no windows. There is a famine, and children not much younger than my bodyguards are dying, as I shall shortly see, in stinking huts and tents not far from me. There is still light, but it will not be for long. We call at various “hotels,” which are white-painted concrete but appallingly bleak and dingy. Only desperation would persuade me to stay in one, but even though I am in fact desperate, I cannot. They are full or boarded up or commandeered by unfriendly militias. We turn into a major avenue and are there confronted by one of the most fearsome things I have ever seen.
Drawn up in line ahead, stretching for perhaps half a mile in the level, melancholy light of the setting sun, are dozens of pick-up trucks, each with a heavy machine gun mounted on it and with eccentrically dressed men, like nightmare rock musicians—some with spectacularly tangled hair, some with black berets, all with hard, frightening faces—hunched behind the guns. These are the lawless militiamen of Mogadishu, and they are leaving town because the US Marines, in the first President George Bush’s last act before he leaves office, are coming to rescue Somalia from famine and anarchy.
Luckily these militiamen are too busy or preoccupied—or perhaps have chewed too much khat (the local intoxicating herb)—even to notice us, and they begin to roll away as we appear. They will be back in a few months, to mock the mighty power of the United States with their crude weapons and their limitless courage. They all know how to die, as we do not.
But still we have nowhere to sleep, no shelter for the night. Our child guards are bickering. They plainly have no advice or ideas. We drive, for lack of anything else to do, down street after street. Were it not for John’s reassuring presence and calm, I should by now be gibbering with fear instead of merely whimpering with apprehension. I am numb and desperate and unable to see how we are going to survive the night. My imagination, normally fertile, has tactfully shut down. If I could leave, I would leave. But there is now no way out.
Night in Mogadishu, in which we will be at the mercy of anyone who cares to threaten us, is fast approaching. And then it happens—our miracle. John sees, disappearing around a corner, a familiar back. We chase after it. He calls out, and a face turns. It is an old friend from Sarajevo. Thanks to this unbelievable coincidence, we are reluctantly given places in a compound with a German TV crew, who quite reasonably object to having to share their camel stew, water filter, and generator with these improvident Englishmen, but—having made their disapproval known—let us in. I fall asleep that night, on bare concrete, hopelessly tired after thirty-six hours of travel and panic, with the sound of gunfire and screams in the middle distance, presumably coming from the people who have not found safety.
In the next few days we toured the city and witnessed the majesty of an amphibious operation, with irritable Navy SEALS hiding in the coastal bushes and furious at being spotted and spoken to, and soldiers in landing craft yelling, “Get out of the way!” as their craft surged onto the moonlit shore, exactly where a Pentagon press officer had told the entire press corps to stand. We saw the dying, who were so familiar from TV that it was shockingly without impact, although the stench that comes with famine, and which TV does not transmit, was not so familiar. (I was struck with an absolute certainty that TV does desensitize us to horror, and I have never since believed anyone who argued otherwise.) But above all, we saw the city, still functioning in a barbaric, prehistoric way and run by clans, each controlling its little territory, the only sources of power in a land without a government.
By this time we had acquired a translator, a scholarly and courteous young man whose concern for our safety was touching, given the great risks he ran himself. We became aware of this when we were stopped at a roadblock and our guide was clearly in a state of great fear, sweating visibly and trying not to tremble. Our bodyguards (who were not in the same clan as the translator) did the talking, and we were eventually waved through. When we were a safe distance away, we found out what had been going on. The guards were too interested in the white foreigners to notice that the interpreter was a member of a hated rival clan. He was quite convinced that they would identify him and shoot him. He had seen such things.
What did we see? The road surface had dissolved to mud and rubble. The sidewalks had crumbled. The buildings were all in some way damaged or defaced. There was no traffic as such. Most people were armed, with the unarmed giving way to the lightly armed and the lightly armed giving way to the heavily armed. Society had broken down into the most basic unit of trust and obligation—which in this Muslim culture, with its permissive attitude to the marriage of first cousins, was the clan.
Some sort of economy functioned. The bundles of khat leaves were delivered. Gasoline could be bought from roadside dumps. Meat could be obtained, and sorghum. Our dollars were valid without question. The powerful had satellite phones and TVs, big American or Japanese cars, electricity generators, and water filters, shielded from view behind walls twelve feet high. This was all new to me, but it would not have its full impact until a week later, when I managed to get out of that awful place.
Safely back in London, I was shown old pictures of Mogadishu as it had been a few years before. The lineaments of the great wide avenue where I saw the armed trucks were just discernible. But where I had seen mud, gangs, and wreckage, there were Italian-style pavement cafes, smart cars in orderly lines, a white-gloved policeman directing the traffic, well-dressed and prosperous people passing by, even a telephone box, and of course, modern shops and civilized-looking hotels. This was the familiar world that I was used to, and in a short time it had become the miserable urban desert in which I had rightly feared for my life. I am sure nobody ever set out to get from the one to the other. But they had done so all the same and in a very short time.
Together with the experience of Soviet society, this venture convinced me that my own civilization was infinitely precious and utterly vulnerable and that I was obliged to try to protect it. When you have seen a place from which the whole apparatus of trust, civility, and peace has been strippe
d, you are conscious as never before of the value of these things—and more curious than ever about their origins, not in wealth or power, but in the mind of man and in the better angels of his nature.
* * *
1I describe this episode more fully in my book The Broken Compass (London: Continuum Books, 2009).
CHAPTER 7
Rediscovering Faith
“If we have forgotten the Name of our God, and holden up our hands to any strange god, shall not God search it out?”
(THE 44TH PSALM)
Until I lived in Moscow and visited Mogadishu, my rediscovery of faith was mainly a matter of small things. How did it begin? I am not absolutely sure. By the time I was thirty years old, in 1981, I had achieved some material success. I was doing well in my chosen trade, journalism. That is to say, I was on the staff of a national daily newspaper, engaged in writing about a subject that interested me. I met famous and interesting people as a matter of course. I lived in a beautiful and convenient part of London, I was well paid by anyone’s standards. I could afford pleasant holidays with my girlfriend—whom I should nowadays call my “partner,” since we were not then married—on the European continent, roaming round France on trains and bicycles, exploring Germany and Italy, even venturing to Prague.
Some of these journeys, along with my daily task of writing about the inner workings of Britain’s socialist Labour movement and the increasingly unhinged strikes it kept calling, combined to destroy what remained of my teenage socialism, though I was slow to admit this to myself. I had replaced Christianity, and the Churchill cult, with an elaborate socialist worldview—because I had decided that I did not wish to believe in God or in patriotism.
The Loss of Secular Faith
Everyone I knew then seemed to have the same view. I do not think I had daily contact with any religious person—apart from the secretary on my first small-town paper—for about twenty years. I was shocked and (like Virginia Woolf) almost physically disgusted if any acquaintance turned out to believe in God. Now I was discovering that the secular faiths I held were false. I knew, rather too well, that what one believes—and does not believe—is important. I cannot imagine living without any belief of any kind. I was not capable of existing without a coherent view of the universe. But I was suppressing my loss of faith in a Godless universe, and my loss of faith in humanity’s ability to achieve justice. My life was devoted largely to pleasure and ambition.
But what were those pleasures? Two of the arts—architecture and music—move me more than any others, not because I know a great deal about them, but because I can feel their influence upon me, almost as if they were speaking to me. I am particularly fond of Philip Larkin’s line about “The trees are coming into leaf, like something almost being said,”1 because this feeling that something is almost but not quite being said seizes me when I encounter certain passages of music and certain buildings.
In my thirties I found that what was almost being said seemed to be the thing I had sought to avoid so hard a few years earlier. But I still did not know what it was. I no longer avoided churches. I recognized in the great English cathedrals and in many small parish churches the old unsettling messages. One was the inevitability and certainty of my own death, the other the undoubted fact that my despised forebears were neither crude nor ignorant, but men and women of great skill and engineering genius—a genius not contradicted or blocked by faith, but enhanced by it. The simple beauty of a hammer beam roof or a Norman chancel arch, let alone of the pillars in Durham nave, seems to be quite beyond the architects and builders of our enlightened age.
I simply cannot remember most of this process, though I can work out quite easily how long it was going on. I think my first acquaintance with York Minster, while I was still a student Trotskyist, probably began the process. But I was still noisily, arrogantly atheist and can remember prosing, during a visit to the old Papal Palace in Avignon, about how annoyingly hard it was to find medieval buildings that were not churches or castles. I would guess I was by then at least twenty-eight or twenty-nine.
Fear and the Last Judgment
What I can recall, very sharply indeed, is a visit to the Hotel-Dieu in Beaune, a town my girlfriend and I had gone to mainly in search of the fine food and wines of Burgundy. But we were educated travelers and strayed, guidebook in hand, into the ancient hospital. And there, worth the journey according to the Green Michelin guide, was Rogier van der Weyden’s fifteenth-century polyptych The Last Judgment.
I scoffed. Another religious painting! Couldn’t these people think of anything else to depict? Still scoffing, I peered at the naked figures fleeing toward the pit of hell, out of my usual faintly morbid interest in the alleged terrors of damnation. But this time I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open. These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation. Because they were naked, they were not imprisoned in their own age by time-bound fashions. On the contrary, their hair and, in an odd way, the set of their faces were entirely in the style of my own time. They were me and the people I knew. One of them—and I have always wondered how the painter thought of it—is actually vomiting with shock and fear at the sound of the Last Trump.
Portions of The Last Judgment by Rogier van der Weyden/Musée de I’Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune, France.
I did not have a “religious experience.” Nothing mystical or inexplicable took place—no trance, no swoon, no vision, no voices, no blaze of light. But I had a sudden, strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day, not imprisoned under thick layers of time. A large catalogue of misdeeds, ranging from the embarrassing to the appalling, replayed themselves rapidly in my head. I had absolutely no doubt that I was among the damned, if there were any damned.
And what if there were? How did I know there were not? I did not know. I could not know. Van der Weyden was still earning his fee, nearly 500 years after his death. I had simply no idea that an adult could be frightened, in broad daylight and after a good lunch, by such things. I have always enjoyed scaring myself mildly with the ghost stories of M. R. James, mainly because of the cozy, safe feeling that follows a good fictional fright. You turn the page and close the book, and the horror is safely contained. This epiphany was not like that at all.
No doubt I should be ashamed to confess that fear played a part in my return to religion. I could easily make up some other, more creditable story. But I should be even more ashamed to pretend that fear did not. I have felt proper fear, not very often but enough to know that it is an important gift that helps us to think clearly at moments of danger. I have felt it in peril on the road, when it slowed down my perception of the bucking, tearing, screaming collision into which I had hurled myself, thus enabling me to retain enough presence of mind to shut down the engine of my wrecked motorcycle and turn off the fuel tap in case it caught fire, and then to stumble, badly injured, to the relative safety of the roadside. I have felt it outside a copper mine in Africa, when the car I was in was surrounded by a crowd of enraged, impoverished people who had decided, with some justification, that I was their enemy. There, fear enabled me to stay silent and still until the danger was over, when I very much wanted to cry out in panic or do something desperate (both of which, I am sure, would have led to my death). I have felt it when Soviet soldiers fired on a crowd rather near me, and so I lay flat on my back in the filthy snow, quite untroubled by my ridiculous position because I had concluded, wisely, that being wounded would be much worse than being embarrassed.
But the most important time was when I stood in front of Rogier van der Weyden’s great altarpiece and trembled for the things of which my conscience was afraid (and is afraid). Fear is good for us and helps us to escape from great dangers. Those who do not feel it are in permanent peril because they cannot see the risks that lie at their feet.
I went away chastened, and the effect has not worn off in nearly three decades. I have been back to look at the painting since then, and it remains a great and powerful work. But it
cannot do the same thing to me twice. I am no longer shocked by the realization that I may be judged, because it has ever after been obvious to me. And once again I have concluded that embarrassment was much the lesser of the two evils I faced.
I do not think I acted immediately on this discovery. But a year or so later I faced a private moral dilemma in which fear of doing an evil thing held me back from doing it, for which I remain immeasurably glad. Without Rogier van der Weyden, I might have done that thing.
Rediscovering Christmas and Swearing Great Oaths
At about the same time, I rediscovered Christmas, which I had pretended to dislike for many years. I slipped into a carol service on a winter evening, diffident and anxious not to be seen. I knew perfectly well that I was enjoying it, though I was unwilling to admit it. A few days later, I went to another service, this time with more confidence, and actually sang. I also knew perfectly well that I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life.
I am not exactly clear now how this led in a few months to my strong desire—unexpected by me or by my friends, encouraged by my then unbelieving wife-to-be—to be married in church. I genuinely cannot remember. But I can certainly recall the way the words of the Church of England’s marriage service awakened thoughts in me that I had long suppressed. I was entering into my inheritance, as a Christian Englishman, as a man, and as a human being. It was the first properly grown-up thing that I had ever done. My adolescence, if not actually over, was at least coming to an end.
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