He turns a quarter of his face towards me. ‘G?’ he repeats. ‘What’s G?’
He has a faraway look, dreaming of being in the final of Pop Idol.
I show him the shoe and point out the letter G next to the shoe size. ‘What does this mean?’ I ask him.
He shrugs, puzzled by how it got there. ‘Dunno,’ he says.
‘A letter with the size normally denotes the fitting,’ I persist. ‘I want to know if this is a broad fitting.’
He repeats the phrase as though he has never heard it before. ‘Broad fi’in’?’
I point to my feet. ‘Big feet,’ I say, giving away more than I want to. ‘Long, but also wide.’
He looks down at my feet and then back up at the shoes, struggling to make the connection. Then he starts to walk away.
‘Is there a manager in this shop?’ I call out.
The boy stops and gives me another of his quarter-turns. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Me.’
I’ve been out for two hours and this is the first word I’ve uttered that anybody has recognised. Manager. I make a mental note to try it more often.
After which I decide to console myself with a steak in a French restaurant in Charlotte Street. ‘A T-bone,’ I say.
The waitress stares at me. ‘A T-bone,’ I repeat. I could help her out by making a T with my fingers, but why should I? This is a steakhouse. T-bone is on the menu. And I am still in England, home of English, whatever nationality the restaurant. ‘T-bone,’ I say a third time, showing my teeth.
‘Ah, you want D-bone!’
And then there’s the problem with camomile tea. She has never heard of it. ‘Camomeeel,’ I say. Bingo. Ah, camomeeel! But if I can work out that my camomile is her camomeeel, why can’t she work out that her camomeeel is my camomile? No quid pro quo, you see. That’s why I am become a stranger in my own land, no one’s trying. Scalpel, nurse.
Friendly Banking
I am being attacked by my own phone. Correction: I’m being attacked by my bank, but they’re doing it through my phone. They ring me up and then ask me to identify myself.
‘I’m who you rang,’ I tell them.
‘Yes, but how do we know that?’
‘Because you rang me.’
‘But what if it’s not you? What if you’re your son? Or your father?’
‘It’s a chance you take,’ I tell them. ‘How do I know, for example, that you’re who you say you are?’
They want to know my date of birth and my mother’s maiden name. At my age I am likely to have forgotten both. And anyway, since they ring me every day to ask me, there’s a better chance that they’ll know than that I will.
‘Dostoevsky,’ I say. ‘I think my mother’s maiden name was Dostoevsky. What’s yours?’
The bank won’t tell me its mother’s maiden name. I have to trust the bank. Given that they’ve been taking my money for forty years, know my phone number, know my voice, know my credit details, know how pissed off I always am when they ring, you’d think that by now they’d trust me. The trouble is they don’t know it is me. It might be my father or my son who’s pissed off. I might be impersonating myself. I might even be my own burglar.
Actually, that’s not right. It isn’t me they say they don’t know, they say it’s my address. Yes, they write to me and ring me here, but that apparently isn’t enough. They need further proof.
‘Why do you need further proof?’ I ask them. ‘Further proof against what?’
‘Terrorism.’ Government regulations, post Osama bin Laden, say that banks must ascertain for absolutely certain that people live where they say they live, otherwise they could be terrorists laundering money. If Osama bin Laden is himself having trouble managing his funds at present, that’s the reason – they aren’t sure where he resides. And when they ring him to ask his mother’s maiden name, he puts the phone down. Which, I suppose they’d argue, is proof the system’s working.
Recently I suggested to the bank that if they wanted to be sure I lived where I said I live they should send someone round to check. Let him even interest me, if he wished, in the bank’s latest offers and inducements. New cards, new borrowing arrangements, carpets, whatever. Good idea. John, he was called. Hi, John, welcome to my home. But it appeared that finding me here still wasn’t conclusive proof. What if I was my son, sleeping over? What if I had just let myself in through a window? I showed him my photograph. ‘Me,’ I said. He wasn’t convinced. If it was me, how come I was smiling?
What it turned out he needed was documentation. Paper not flesh. A bank statement, say, dated in the last three months. ‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘are you telling me that if I show you a statement from your bank, addressed to me here where you don’t believe I live and to which address you therefore have no business sending statements, all will be well? You will believe your own mail, even though you ring me every day because you’re not convinced it’s me you’re sending it to?’
Yes, he said. That should be fine.
Figure that. Figure why I didn’t tell him he was a moron and let him out through the window.
Even though it should be fine, he took a photocopy of the statement just in case. But then must have forgotten to show it to the relevant personages, because the new business he got me to agree to cannot be initiated on account of there being no proof I live where I say I live.
Yesterday I rang them before they could ring me. ‘I was born on X,’ I told them, ‘my mother’s maiden name is Y, and now I want the card you refuse to send me.’
Hilary. ‘Hello, the adviser you are dealing with today is Hilary, how can I help you?’
‘By sending me the card.’
She asked me not to be abusive.
‘Just send me the fucking card, Hilary.’
Can’t. Won’t. No trace of me at my address.
Then how come John knew where to find me, Hilary?
She is barely comprehensible. Which might be because the call centre is in Manchester and not Calcutta. She seems to be using the word experience. ‘I rely on it,’ she tells me. By which I take her to mean that she is well versed in terrorists and money launderers and knows one when she talks to one. ‘If you are relying on your experience,’ I reply, ‘it should tell you that I would never have been offered this card you won’t send me unless someone had known where to find me to offer it me in the first place. Experience, Hilary – if you’ve got it, use it.’
She told me I misunderstood her. I laughed at that. Ha! In fact I laughed twice. Ha, ha! ‘I think I understand you only too well, Hilary. You say you are experienced but you won’t call on that experience to make a common-sense decision. The card, Hilary. The card!’
But I had misunderstood her. She hadn’t said she was relying on her experience, she’d said she was relying on Experian – an, an – a credit-rating firm, evidently popular with banks. It was the spooks working for Experian who couldn’t find me.
Imagine that, my own bank – with whom I’ve been dealing for forty years or more, which knows the details of my life more intimately than I do myself, my outgoings and my incomings, my birthdays, the entire history of my financial perturbations, my mother’s maiden name, everything – my own bank is checking up on me with a credit-rating firm!
Kafka was right. They will come to our lodgings in frock coats and top hats and they will cut our throats. Though since they don’t know who lives where there is always a chance they will cut the wrong person’s.
O the Opal and the Sapphire of that Wandering Western Sea
I have Cornish longings on me. Maybe something to do with those poor Greek flower-pickers reported rescued last week from the horticultural hell of Hayle. Or BBC2’s A Seaside Parish, transmitted concurrently with its series about the National Trust. The Seaside Parish in question is Boscastle in north Cornwall, itself a National Trust village, in which, on and off, I spent twelve years of my life. What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore? Not my question, but Thomas Hardy’s, Boscastle’s p
residing ghost, and part of the reason I stayed so long.
Funny the difference words make to a place. Though it has to be said that his were not just any words. Boscastle was where Hardy met his first wife, and it was to Boscastle he returned, long after she was dead, to mourn her, find her, discover whether the bitterness that overtook their marriage was written in it all along, or could be undone in memory. The greatest poems of regret ever written. And impossible to imagine the place without him once you’ve read them – an old man faltering forward, leaves around him falling, ‘Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward / And the woman calling.’
A local Hardy scholar called Kenneth Phelps wrote an affectionate book about Hardy’s Boscastle connection – The Wormwood Cup. We sold it in a shop I helped to run, not a big seller, nothing like witches’ brooms or badgers etched on Delabole slate, but there was a steady interest. Two or three times a week Kenneth Phelps would come into the shop to see how his book was doing. He kept a small supply in his backpack so that if stocks were low he could replenish them. I was setting out to be an author myself at the time and hoped I would never be reduced to carrying my books on my back. But there is no knowing what will befall an author. I am sorry now that I felt scornful of him. It is a wonderful thing to put your life into a single book, to think about its progress every day, and to be absorbed in its subject matter to the exclusion of all else. Years later I wrote to a distinguished biographer of Hardy, querying something in his book. He wrote back saying he would have loved to help, but frankly could barely remember anything about Hardy now. He had moved on to someone else’s life. Kenneth Phelps was not like that. Day after day he retraced Hardy’s steps, the scenes of those heartbreaking poems, up the cliff, down, till he was lonely, lost. The idea of forgetting Hardy or moving on to someone else was inconceivable to him.
I seem to remember we fell out over the National Trust. The trouble with people who love poetry is that they are liable to confuse it with the mawkishness of heritage. Myself, I found no contradiction in loving Hardy and hating the National Trust. The latter made life hell for those of us who hadn’t come to Boscastle to retire. They ran the place like an army of occupation, and if any of us stood up to them they sued. Just how many membership fees paid over by peaceable, unlitigious, nature-loving ramblers and mug-buyers got spent on fees for QCs I dread to calculate.
We went to law with them ourselves once. Against the wishes of the village, certainly against the wishes of the business community who kept the village alive, they wanted to close the harbour approaches to traffic, so that they could prettify the walk outside their own shop. That was how we read it anyway. In response to which we organised a sit-in, preventing their vehicles from entering the contested area. DON’T TRUST THE TRUST, we shouted. My slogan, I fancy. The novelist in embryo.
They won. They always win. They have all those membership fees and profits from rare-species butterfly tea towels to win with. But in the course of our quarrel I was vouchsafed a brief but terrifying glimpse into their unexamined assumptions. ‘If you think we’re going to allow the place to be trampled all over,’ the head of the whole shebang told me in a moment of temper, ‘just so that you people can sell brass candlesticks to –’ He didn’t finish. ‘To whom?’ I asked him, ignoring the ‘you people’. I knew who the ‘you people’ were. ‘To whom?’
He was a man of distinguished not to say military bearing, as befits a senior officer of an occupying power. He was not afraid to look me in the eye. ‘The wrong people,’ he spat out. And perhaps I only imagine the horsewhip.
The wrong people. There it was in a nutshell. The wrong people were coming to Cornwall in general, and to Boscastle in particular, buying brass candlesticks and wearing away the cliffs, and he intended to stop them.
Well, the wrong people get everywhere. I can’t pretend I never felt that myself in the course of being elbowed into the sea by the contents of a tenement block from Walsall, a many-headed monster in jesters’ hats and comedy Valkyrie pigtails, which had blundered into a part of the world that did not have slot machines and was unable to find its way out. But I was not a charity. I was not in trust to the nation. I sold books about Thomas Hardy – a wrong person if ever there was one – not know-your-hedgerow serviettes. So remember that the next time you’re seduced into joining. It’s not the National Trust you’ll be a member of, but the Trust for People of High Income, Supercilious Class and Maudlin Pastoral Aesthetic.
Hardy hated such idealisation of the countryside by those to whom it was a mere plaything. Real places indurate, and wound the heart. (Ask the traumatised Greek flower-pickers.) Hence Hardy’s own fraught pilgrimage to Boscastle in remorseful old age. But the village would not yield him what he wanted, would not be in actuality what it had become in fantasy. Real places never do.
Unconditionality and Murder
The letter killeth. I can see why there is urgency within the Muslim community to disown terrorism as a perversion of Islam as strictly understood. But therein lies a contradiction. For it is not difficult to show that adherence to the strictness of Islam, as indeed to the strictness of any religion, is the first step on a ladder which will take some to sanctity, but just as many, in the name of sanctity, to violence. Onward march the Christian soldiers, despite Christ’s refusal of militarism. Though the Bible teaches Jews to love the stranger, there are some Jews who find justification in the Bible not only for despising strangers but for making strangers of them where they live. And in the name of Islam, such crimes have been committed as would make the angels weep.
Never mind that this is not what any of the great faiths have meant to teach. Belief itself is where the problem starts. Laced with the usual humanising laxities and compromises, belief can be an innocent affair. And a little of it, in a naughty world, can go a long way and do a fair amount of good. But once belief hardens into a dogma which allows no deviation – call it orthodoxy or call it fundamentalism – the believer enters the terrain of derangement. Purity has its attractions, but only madmen live by it.
‘Objection, evasion, cheerful mistrust, delight in mockery are signs of health,’ said Nietzsche. ‘Everything unconditional belongs to pathology.’
Freud intended a service to the Jewish people when he argued that Moses was an Egyptian. In one stroke he reminded us that neither our most significant prophet, nor the Judaism he taught, was pure. This is not against the spirit of what the Old Testament itself says of Moses – concealed in a crib of bulrushes and found by one of the Pharoah’s daughters who brings him up lovingly as her own. A little bit of somewhere else, we are to understand, was necessary to make Moses who he was. The requisite genealogy, this, for all the great men of mythology who give their names to new civilisations or beliefs. They are abandoned to shepherds, they are raised by wolves, they are discovered by alien princesses with compassion in their hearts. It is as though the founding hero, in order to be worthy to lead his people, must first be mongrelised. Thus does the mythical history of mankind give the lie to all theories of national greatness based on racial homogeneity, and to all religions insisting theirs is the one and only truth.
Everything unconditional belongs to pathology. But we would be fools to suppose that the only pathology into which our home-grown terrorists were abducted was that of the mosque. Where were they educated into this? we beat our breasts and ask. From whom did ordinary and apparently amicable Muslim boys from Yorkshire acquire this ideology of hate?
Forgive the brutality of the answer. From us! No doubt it took an induction into unconditional theology to ignite them ultimately into violence. And no doubt men more experienced in the ways of terror primed their final resolution. But what we call their disaffection – that miasma of rage and bewilderment and misinformation without which this death cult could never have taken hold of them – is the staple diet of our own left-leaning news media, no more virulent than anything the educated middle classes have been expressing for years, the received wisdom of teachers, students and
academics from one end of the country to the other. Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Kashmir, the Balkans – you name them – all proof of the corrupt Western world’s greed, degeneracy and Islamophobia. No sooner did the bombs detonate than we were chanting the litany of our sins again. We had it coming. On the letter pages of every newspaper, the same. Our fault. Our fault. And if we think it is our fault, why shouldn’t they?
Basic laws of human decency, Law One: you do not say we had it coming when it is someone else who dies. If you want to say we had it coming, say it when you die. You can accept guilt for yourself; you cannot accept it for another person.
Decency aside, the we-had-it-coming lobby are those who, like the pure religionists of hate, subscribe to a purist interpretation of events. It should be no surprise to us to learn that the suicide bombers were not from among the unlettered poor. These days we must worry a) when our children fall quiet and take to reading Holy Scripture, and b) when they go to university. Neither can now be recommended to the impressionable. Both inculcate the unconditional. Witness the historical illiteracy of those academics who nearly pulled off a boycott of Israeli universities a few months ago – determined to see only one side of a cruelly complex conflict – and remember those marches which academics and their charges could not wait to join, associating one cause about which there is to be no discussion with another, and where the faithful have been so catechised into conformity that to demur from a single atom of the rationale would be apostasy.
Afghanistan and Iraq are comparable only if you think every move the West makes is ipso facto satanical. And even the invasion of Iraq, however impetuous, brutal and misguided, was not inspired by wanton wickedness alone. As for Zionism, that mantra of universal loathing, it is an aspiration to a homeland not an ideology of hatred directed at Muslims. And if it doesn’t look that way to Muslims, that’s all the more reason why it shouldn’t be depicted irresponsibly by us. We don’t help Muslims by flattering them in their conviction of oppression. Muslim paranoia, about which as a Jew I must admit I know something, is not only brewed up on Muslim streets. We feed it with the theology of our self-disgust. Unconditional in our hatred of our own culture, we strengthen unconditionality in others. And when that many pathologies collide, it’s no wonder there’s a bang.
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