by John Pilger
The centre was established in 1974 and named after Anthony Nolan, then aged two, who was born in Australia and whose parents brought him to Britain in search of a bone marrow transplant. No tissue-type match was found; and Anthony died at the age of seven. The centre gets no support from the government; in 1989, a grant of £11,000 – one technician’s wages – was abolished. In the age of cutbacks, resources in this field of medicine are severely limited. One transplant costs an estimated £80,000. Last year, 341 transplants were carried out in Britain, compared with 537 in France, where the government takes all responsibility for funding. There is a smaller NHS-funded donor scheme, which is tied to the National Blood Transfusion Service; unlike the Anthony Nolan Centre, its ‘search’ for tissue-types does not extend abroad.
Linda Hartwell, manager of the Anthony Nolan Centre’s operations department told me,
We are linked to registers in the United States, Australia, France and Germany; and this will soon be conducted by computer. Owing to the hundreds of thousands of combinations of tissue-types, we constantly need to add donors to our register. At present, we urgently need new donors. We are able to tissue-type 500 new donors every week. In spite of the publicity from time to time, many people are still unaware of the form of treatment. Some believe only the dead can donate. But that’s not so. You can live and give life to someone else. It’s wonderful.
Andy Burgess, an engineer from Redhill in Surrey, literally saved the life of Lloyd Scott, an Essex fireman. Bank manager Neil Singleton gave bone marrow tissue that matched with a patient in Denmark. Sarah Furber did the same for an American girl. The centre has a large file of such stories; in the haystack there are many needles that are found.
No more than a drop of blood can start the process of saving a life; a routine blood test is enough to indicate the bone marrow type of a potential donor. If a match is found, the donor undergoes a straightforward surgical procedure lasting about an hour and a half. There is no incision, no stitching: the marrow is taken from the hip bone using hollow needles. Apart from the temporary effects of a general anaesthetic, a healthy person should suffer no after-effects. I recommend it, for the sake of those like John, for whom a ‘match’ was not found in time.fn1
July 29, 1991
* * *
fn1 As a potential donor you need to be between 18 and 40 (unless you are already on the list). By writing to, or phoning, the Anthony Nolan Centre, you will receive an information pack. After you have completed the registration form and returned it, you will be sent a simple blood sample kit. You take this to your GP, give a sample and post it back. This is where you write or phone: The Anthony Nolan Research Centre, PO Box 1767, London NW3 4YR. Telephone: (071) 284 1234.
BABY HERMES
THERE IS A scene in my favourite movie, The Blues Brothers, in which lovable muso-crooks Jake and Elwood finally reach the centre of Chicago on their ‘mission from God’. Pursued by hordes of police cars and a posse of vicious Country and Western types, the pair manage to stay ahead of the game (and play some great rhythm and blues along the way) thanks to the Bluesmobile, a 1970s former police car, which can turn cartwheels and, if necessary, fly.
On reaching Chicago, however, the Bluesmobile dies. The tyres deflate, the doors and bumpers fall off, the mighty V8 engine gives one last gasp. No matter the approaching sirens, Jake and Elwood stand, heads bowed, in tribute to a faithful friend. Behind those sunglasses there are tears.
Such a moment happened to me the other day. Having been driven at indecent speed all its life and most of mine, my thirty-year-old Baby Hermes typewriter died. Well, almost. This is a sad story with a happy ending.
First, let me describe the machine. It is about twelve inches square, light green and made of steel. Whatever has been said uncharitably about the Swiss, I maintain a respect for those mountain folk, for they made it. Moreover, it has unique features. It has every letter of the alphabet, except ‘k’, which fell off in Phnom Penh. It has both pound and dollar sign keys (an exciting innovation at the time) and an exclamation mark (unheard of in a portable). It also has a ‘Sh’ key. I don’t know what ‘Sh’ is, and this is the first time I have hit that key in thirty years. And it has a lid, like a steel trap. Getting the lid off is often impossible due to a dent received when it was thrown downstairs during a riot at Richard Nixon’s nomination in Miami in 1972.
Here I should explain that in the world of technology, I am an alien. I have only just mastered a banker’s card. My fax is in the local sweet shop. The owner, Mr Mohammed Afzal, rings me when a fax arrives; we are a smooth team. The truth is I have an affection for ancient belongings and am inclined to venerate them. If belongings define the person, this is a bit worrying. My own Bluesmobile, for example, has been described as the ‘last of the sit-up-and-beg cars’ by one of its regular passengers; and while I concede it is a Zephyr of rust, a Zephyr it is. But I digress.
The other day, having completed the ritual shaking in order to get my typewriter’s lid off, everything came off: the back, the sides, the roller. Every screw popped. This had never happened before.
It had not happened at the Allenby Bridge crossing between Jordan and Israel when an Israeli customs official, having cheerfully snapped each of my cigars and squeezed my toothpaste, ordered me to ‘open that!’ When I couldn’t, and he couldn’t, he picked it up and threw it down on the floor. If he suspected it of being a dangerous device, this was eccentric behaviour. Still, it worked; the lid came off, and not a screw stirred.
The Baby Hermes has survived many such incidents. Since I paid £12 for it in Aden – it was marked down from £15 as a ‘superseded model’ – it has sat in my shoulder bag as I have made my way to places of instability and war. Eric Piper, the photographer and dear friend with whom I worked for many years, claimed it saved our skins in El Salvador.
Our car had been stopped by government troops at the foot of the Guazapa volcano. This was not uncommon and always unpleasant. With our legs and arms spread against the car, a jackboot amused himself by slamming the door on Eric’s fingers, while another searched the car.
‘What is this?’ enquired Jackboot No. 2.
‘A typewriter,’ I replied.
‘This?’ he laughed. ‘Open it!’
Eric, who knew the problem of the lid, said, ‘Christ, he’ll go crazy.’
When I failed to open it, both jackboots tried and failed. One of them pounded it with his fist, as I have done on occasions. Such was the diversion caused by the mugging of my Baby Hermes, not to mention the general derision arising from the fact that this was the sole equipment of a foreign correspondent, that Eric had time to slip $50 into the palm of Jackboot No. 1; and we were on our way.
I lost it only once: in Shanghai. It was returned to me anonymously two days later in Peking, polished, with my missing laundry attached.
In Mali, in a place called Kayes, said to be the hottest on earth, it was taken hostage by Monsieur Lamez. A bulbous, stone-like figure with almost nothing to say, he was one of six Europeans left behind when the French abandoned this regional centre of their west African empire. He owned the only hotel. In the early morning, between six and seven, Monsieur Lamez would talk to his monkeys. At dusk, he would sit facing his great prison gate and stare through the bars at nothing. When it was time for me to leave, Monsieur Lamez charged me ten times the tariff posted on his wall. I objected, put the correct amount on his desk and left.
When I returned to my room to collect my things, it was empty. The Baby Hermes was missing. ‘I have put it in with the monkeys,’ said Monsieur Lamez. ‘When you wish to pay me what I ask, you will get it back.’ It was true: the Baby Hermes was nestling in the straw of the monkey cage, with a monkey urinating close by. The mad Lamez laughed. ‘Is my offer not reasonable?’ he said. I thanked him for his reasonableness, and paid up.
My friend A. U. M. Fakhruddin loved the Baby Hermes, especially the sound it made: the marvellous resonance, as the key hit the page. (Remingtons sound simila
r, but not as urgent.) In 1970, Fakhruddin was cultural editor of Chitrali, a mass circulation weekly in what was then Dacca. I knew him during the Bengali liberation period that led to the demise of West Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh.
Journalism is a Bengali tradition. Bengali reporters are among the most tirelessly inquisitive news-gatherers in the world. Their reports have a purple eloquence whose origins might be part-Raj and part-Tagore, the Bengali Byron. They are incorrigible romantics; and brave. Chitrali had shouted ‘Joi Bangla!’ (free Bengal) at the Punjabi occupiers, and its leading lights, like Fakhruddin, lived in constant fear of arrest, and worse. He sometimes hid in my hotel room, where I would return to find him gently tinkering on the Baby Hermes. I wanted to give it to him. The last word I had from him was a page in the roller on which he had typed this from Hamlet’s soliloquy:
Whether’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
On the day the Baby Hermes collapsed, I was bereft. So, I’m sure, was Daisy (my cat) who sleeps in the lid as I work. I took it to Dave Smith and Don Large, who run S & L Typewriters in Raynes Park, south London, and whose fine craftsmanship keeps antiques like mine on the road. ‘You realise,’ said Dave with due solemnity, ‘unless we can find another like it, its days are numbered.’ I asked him to spare nothing in his search, though I could feel a major life change coming on.
For some years, I have listened to my friends and colleagues who have long been computerised. Until recently, they sounded like Moonies or Scientologists, devoted to their new cult. ‘It’s so easy,’ they say. ‘You’ll never want to go back to (chortle) that.’ I would point out that the occasional word had been written before Alan Sugar claimed Thatcherite sainthood by selling lots of Amstrads. But my resistance is fragile. My entry into the New Age is imminent; I have consulted a computer doctor who is used to dealing with technological primitives. Also, he runs a rhythm and blues band. Jake and Elwood would surely approve.
Stop press: Dave and Don have found another Baby Hermes, circa 1960. Its best parts have been transplanted to mine, which has been completely restored. The lid, though, still won’t come off without a thump. Some things are just timeless.
August 21, 1992
VIII
ON THE ROAD
TWO RUSSIAS
I FIRST WENT to Russia almost thirty years ago, going overland from Brest, along empty rutted roads through Minsk and Smolensk. This was the ‘age of shadows’, as the scientist Valentyn Turchin described it to me. I returned on several occasions and met many dissidents who were not protected to some extent by fame abroad. I met musicians, actors, miners, Volga Germans, Tartars, trade unionists and Christians. They shared an abiding bravery. During the mid-1970s, shortly after Leonid Brezhnev had signed the Helsinki agreement ‘to respect human rights and fundamental freedom’, there was a brief period of tolerating dissidents, if tolerance it was. By 1977 this was past.
To meet Vladimir and Maria Slepak I had to leave my hotel at dawn, before the KGB shift took up position on their stairs. They lived just off Gorky Street; after a withering climb by torchlight to Apartment 77, I was greeted by Vladimir’s great bearded head, beaming from the door ajar. He and Maria were scientists. Vladimir came from a family of devoted communists and was named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. They both served short prison terms for ‘anti-Soviet activities’. It was clear they had been singled out because of the help they had given others and specifically for Vladimir’s work as an adviser to the beleaguered committee set up to monitor the Soviet commitment at Helsinki on human rights.
The day before I met them their telephone had been disconnected and their flat raided, and books and letters, even writing paper, confiscated. ‘What is bizarre’, said Maria, ‘is that those of us who call on the state not to break laws guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution are known as law breakers!’
As all their files had been taken away, they now drew on formidable memories. Case after case of discrimination, wrongful imprisonment and torture came out of their heads. ‘I run through the list every morning so I won’t forget it,’ said Maria. ‘It is very tiring.’ That morning they had been trying to find writing paper to put down what they could remember of Vladimir Klebanov’s case. He was a miner in the Ukraine, who had refused to demand overtime from his men and to send them down pits when he believed that safety regulations were being ignored. He had been imprisoned for ‘slandering the Soviet State’. His crime was that he had objected to twelve deaths and 700 injuries at one colliery and he had tried to form a free trade union. The Slepaks believed he had been moved to a mental hospital. ‘He is now an “untouchable”,’ said Vladimir. ‘If we try to find out about him, the authorities will say he doesn’t exist.’ Maria nodded. ‘But we shall find him,’ she said.
They gave me lunch, apologising for the stale bread and cheese, which was all they had. I contributed a bottle of brandy. ‘Oh my God, what will happen to the lists up here?’ said Maria, tapping her head. We parted as old friends, and on the way out I got a taste of what they had to go through every time they entered and left their home. At the bottom of the stairs was a pack of KGB men. They all had apparent curvature of the spine, and an air of studied sullenness. They stared, blew cigarette smoke in my face and lunged at my briefcase. One of them cleared his throat in my path.
The next day I interviewed a senior editor at Pravda, who made a remark to be relished. ‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘there would be no Russian dissidents if the Western press ignored them.’ Did this mean, I asked, that if people and events could be ignored then they did not exist or they did not happen? ‘If you like,’ he replied.
On the day before I left Moscow a friend and I set out to say goodbye to the Slepaks. As we turned into the courtyard of their block of flats, two men walked straight at us. ‘Nyet,’ said one of them as we started for the stairs. We kept going. A pincer of arms shot out, spun us around and ejected us back into the courtyard. And there we stood, looking up into the vicinity of the eighth floor, hoping to catch sight of Vladimir and Maria. We were about to leave when an object fell out of the sky. It was a tin mug and taped inside it was a note, which read, ‘Good voyage to you! Please remember us.’
Shortly afterwards the Slepaks were arrested for displaying an ‘anti-Soviet’ banner on their balcony. Vladimir was given a five-year sentence of exile for ‘malicious hooliganism’ and was sent to a camp in the Buryat republic on the Mongolian border. Maria was given a three-year suspended sentence and joined him in exile. In 1982 Vladimir completed his sentence and returned to Moscow, his health impaired. In his absence both his sons had been allowed to leave the country. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he let Vladimir and Maria go. Shortly afterwards they emigrated to Israel.
In the summer of 1990 I returned to the Soviet Union with my son, Sam. The ‘age of shadows’ was no more. Almost everything seemed to have changed; it was the height of perestroika and glasnost. This was my diary:
Saturday. It is almost midnight on arrival at Leningrad. The silver twilight of one of Leningrad’s ‘white nights’ is accompanied by a silence unheard in any other large city I know. The poetess Olga Bergolts described wartime ‘white nights’ in a broadcast to the world from Radio Leningrad in 1941. ‘The silence’, she said, ‘lasts for long intervals of twenty to thirty minutes. Then the German shelling is like a mad squall of fire . . .’
It is good to be a tourist. As a journalist, too often you don’t have time for the past. I am reminded that during the 900 days of the German siege of Leningrad, perhaps a million people died, most of them from starvation. The silhouettes we pass in the half-light were witnesses; Pyotr Klodt’s four bronze horses, which were buried as the Germans reached the edge of the city, are back on their pedestals on Anichkov Bridge. Outside our hotel are the four funnels of the cruiser Aurora which fired the blank shot t
hat signalled the storming of the Winter Palace and the October Revolution. It is partly obscured by a sign: ‘Levi Jeans – Duty Free’, and in scribbled ballpoint: ‘No Russian money please’.
Sunday. It is Navy Day. Warships, bedecked with flags, stand with the Aurora against the baroque façades of Peter the Great’s city, still in the yellow that Peter ordered as a relief from the metallic sky over the Gulf of Finland. On the embankment are groups of dishevelled young men in camouflage jackets. Several are drunk and are shouting at the ships. They are veterans of the war in Afghanistan. To come upon such open, anti-state belligerence is a shock. The young men move across to the huge statue of Lenin at the Finland Station; the police eye them like cats, but leave them alone.
A fisherman watching this puts down his rod and greets me in German, then English. He was a draughtsman who has spent his retirement learning languages. ‘Soviet people have been ghosts,’ he says, ‘not wishing to see or be seen, not wishing to know, just hoping to survive. But many of us have kept faith with language. It has been our secret act.’ He produces a much-used copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. ‘With this,’ he laughs, ‘I began to learn English.’
As a teenager during the German siege he was pressed into carrying food supplies across Lake Lagoda, which became known as ‘the Road of Life’. When the spring ice could no longer withstand the weight of lorries, even horses and sleds, the city turned to its young to trek twenty miles across the ice. ‘Each step was uncertain,’ he says. ‘If you fell down, you died quickly.’