STORYBOARD

BRITS AND YANKS -- A COMPARISON

2012-01-18T15:11:00.002-05:00

I metmy first American when I was about ten years old, growing up in my nativeEngland. It was quite a few more years before another one passed my way, and Iwas in my twenties when I met more than a couple of them together. Now, of course,living in New York, I’m surrounded by them. In fact, I actually live with one.

It’sprobably hard for an American to accept that, to the average stay-at-homeBritisher, an American is just another brand of foreigner, little different froma Moroccan or a Madagascan. They look just as foreign, they speak a quitedifferent language, and they have a very, very different culture. GeorgeBernard Shaw -- note how we say that,Bernurd (not Bernard) Shaw -- wasn’t entirely joking when he wrote of “two nations divided by a common language.”

TheBritish have a complicated view of Americans. On one hand, they have hugerespect for their attitude to democracy and freedom; they’re grateful to “TheYanks” for saving their butts in two world wars; they have a healthy respectfor their innovativeness and technological genius, and most of them appreciatethe changes the Americans have wrought in almost every aspect of publicentertainment -- especially movies, TVand jazz. And of course there’s a healthy regard for their contribution topretty much everything else in life that you can think of – space science,medicine, and the convenience (if not the delights) of fast food.

Butit has to be said that, probably because they’re envious of Americans in somany ways, the British have one or two negative attitudes, too. Many of themlook on Americans as over-indulged. They think they’re over-weight, over-paid,over-medicated, and over psycho-analyzed. I say envy is the cause of theseviews because the British are traditionally pitifully lower paid, and tend tolive much more spartan lives. They’vealways been jealous of what they see as the average American’s materialstandard of living, believing after watching countless sitcoms and movies, thatall 300 million+ Americans live in spacious homes with walk-in closets andwalk-in refrigerators, driving Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. They alsosee America as over-opinionated and over-assertive on the world stage. Thoughthey wouldn’t admit it, this, too, is almost certainly because they envyAmerica’s replacement of the British and their empire as the leading worldpower.

Thisenvy goes back a long way, but reached the British man-in-the-street in a realand understandable way during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of USsailors, soldiers and airman arrived in Britain at a time when the country wasdesperately short of almost all of life’s necessities. The average GI earned several times more thanhis British counterpart, so he had much, much more to spend in the village puband dance hall. His gabardine uniform was far smarter and form-flattering thanthe British Tommy’s baggy, ill-fitting serge ‘battle-dress.’ It’s notsurprising that the GI’s, with their romantic, movie-star accents and boxes ofnylon stockings under their arms, made wall-flowers of the local boys. For much the same reasons British officers,too, found themselves playing second fiddle to their allied comrades.

Thefirst American I ever met was a shy, self-effacing boy of my age called Lou Taylorat my posh boarding school in England in the 1940s. He was the son of adiplomat. Tall for his age, he had a slight stammer, and his hair fell over hiseyes giving him the look of a myopic sheep dog. Lou, who suddenly arrived inthe middle of a school semester, soon earned the nickname of ‘Long Island Lou.’Lou was a likeable lad, but even he was a victim of envy. He had more toysoldiers, guns and tanks and other enviable ‘stuff,’ and more food in histuck-box than any of us during stringent wartime rationing. It was Lou who gaveus our first taste of bubble-gum, home-made brownies and Hershey bars. It wasLou whose parents came down from London to the school in the country mostweekends in a chauffeur-driven car, while our parents’ cars were on wooden blocksin the garage because there was no gasoline was allowed for private use. Wenever saw our parents from one end of term to the other. So for no fault of his, this quiet Americanin miniature was a victim of exactly the same envies as his uncles in uniform.

But for all this talk of envy and resentment, it has to besaid that both peoples tend to view the other with considerable affection. TheBrits, stuffy and repressed, love the Yanks’ openness and lack of inhibition.Although they may not admit it, they’re moved by images of the Statue ofLiberty and the Empire State Building. They get a buzz out of old John Waynemovies, and the wide open spaces of the West. They don’t know there are uglystrip malls in Phoenix and El Paso, and ghettos in Washington DC. They used to lookon Alastair Cook with almost Old Testament reverence. And when their chill wetwinter sweeps in, it’s to Florida that they flock.

As for the Americans, they’d be lost without Downton Abbey and almost every Masterpiece Theater presentation, with itsplum-in-the-mouth lords and ladies, and tea parties with bone china and sterlingsilver teapots in the fussy drawing-rooms of ancestral mansions. They don’tknow that an English muffin’s really a crumpet, or that you should let teainfuse for at least five minutes andalways, always put the milk in thecup first. American tourists never see the dark, satanic mills and streets in London’sEast End and the wind-blown, rain-drenched north. To them, every Londoner liveswithin earshot of Big Ben, and Sherlock Holmes still hunts down villains in aneverlasting mist on the Yorkshire moors. And did the Americans weep any lessthan the Limeys when Diana died, or stand in the crowd outside BuckinghamPalace and cheer when Kate married Prince William?

People on both sidesof the Atlantic used to refer to the “specialrelationship” between America and Britain. They still do, but nowadays you’llhear cynics decrying it. Things have changed, they say, and America’s futurepeers are emerging in Asia and South America, specifically China, India and,later, Brazil. But the special relationship has nothing to do with GDP, importsand exports or economics. It developed not only historically and emotionally,strengthened by that shared language, but also by victorious alliances in twoworld wars, and two centuries of mutually beneficial cultural exchange.

Believe me, it’ll be a long, long timebefore Chinese and Indian movies are week-by-week fare at your local multiplex.I guarantee it.

"WE ARE AT WAR . . . "

2011-12-11T13:18:00.001-05:00

England,Sunday September 3, 1939

Outside, it was bright and warm, a typical English Septemberday. The traffic streamed down from London to the Kent beaches, amid theall-pervasive summer smells of melted tar and the exhaust of cars.

They knelt together; Margaret in a powder blue dress and amatching hat, just like the Queen Mother's, wordlessly mouthing her aves, her rosary tapping on thepew in front of her. On her left knelt David, already, at eleven, studiouslybespectacled and grave. To her right, nearest the aisle, was fidgetyChristopher, seven and a half, at one moment watching the priest and the altarboys through half-closed fingers, at another staring at the people in the rowbehind.

When Christopher closed his eyes tight he found he could stillpicture the altar clearly in his mind's eye. He could still see the sun shiningdown through colored glass on the golden candlesticks, the chalice FatherHauber was holding up for God to bless, the crystal decanters, one with deepred wine and the other with water. He could still see the flickering rows ofcandles.

Christopher always found it hard to believe this was thesame Father Hauber who came to tea once a month at their house, laughing hisbig laugh and telling stories in his funny German voice. Though the old priestreminded him and his brother of Friar Tuck, he could jump over the flower bedslike an athlete, and swing on the swing so high that his outstretched feetbrought the apples bouncing down from the tree.

Forthis is the Chalice of my Blood . . . for you and for many unto the forgiveness of sins.

Three times a little bell chimed, with long pauses between.

The Latin flowed comfortingly over the congregation. ThatChristopher didn't know what the priest was saying was unimportant. God washere. God loved us. God loved everyone. Clouds of incense rose and swirled in diagonal strips of sunlight,bearing Father Hauber's prayers to heaven.

Father Hauber held the little white disc upwards and then,with bowed heads, the congregation prayed aloud together. "Our Father, whoart in Heaven, allowed be Thy Name . . ."

Our Father, Christopher had always thought, was a prayer toFather Hauber. It had never occurred to him that it might be to God the Father,gray, bearded and stern, who was somewhere up there over the altar. And he knewit was not a supplication to his own father, who never came with them on Sundaymornings.

Dad was a Protestant, and rode his bicycle to the villagechurch at Haversham. Christopher was sadfor Protestants, and for Dad because, while they said they believed in God,they could never go to Heaven. Sister Ignatius had told him that in class.Sister Ignatius said Church of England churches weren't like real churches.

In Protestant churches there were no confessional boxes, nostations of the cross, no little boxes for Peter's Pence, no shiny domedtabernacle like a secret treasure chest with its little gold embroideredcurtain that opened miraculously when Father Hauber pulled a string. Dad wasokay but, much as they loved him, being Protestant set him a little apart.

This Sunday, Father Hauber's sermon was about peace. Peacewas the word he kept using, yet it seemed to make him angry. Christopher hadnever seen him angry before. His voice, always loud but louder than usual today,echoed through the rafters above them. He boomed about a "Gray Tide ofEvil," and something about Poland, while his flock sat silent andimmobile.

Christopher didn't know where Poland was, but he had oftenheard about it in the past few days. His mother and father talked earnestly atthe kitchen table about the "Polish Corridor," and about some peoplemarching down it. He knew what a corridor was; when he went to the Cottage Hospital to have his tonsils taken out,there had been white corridors everywhere. In his head he saw hundreds of graysoldiers tramping down those shiny corridors.

He could see that the priest’s forehead, above his big redface, was shiny [1]withperspiration. He glanced up at his mother exactly at the moment that she seemedto be brushing something from her eye. She caught Christopher’s eye for a second, and quickly turned away.

And then, in a mumbling monotone, they prayed for peace.They were half-way through the prayer when Christopher noticed a man standingjust inside the altar rail. He was short and hairy-faced, in a brown robebelted at the waist with a thick white cord. He stood quite still with hishands hanging straight down at his sides. As Christopher watched, the manambled up the steps and took up a position beside the priest.

Father Hauber stopped speaking and seemed to be listeningintently to what the man had to say, stooping toward the shorter man andcupping his ear with his hand. The conversation went on and on, while all thepeople sat still. Some stayed on their knees in positions of prayer; others hadeased themselves back onto the smooth wooden benches.

Christopher tugged at his mother's sleeve, whisperingurgently. "What are they talking about, Mum? What's the man saying tohim? What --"

But his mother put her finger to her closed lips, and thecongregation waited.

Presently, Father Hauber turned and walked down to thecommunion rail, leaving the altar boys and the man in brown standing awkwardlytogether on the top step.

The old priest cleared his throat and then, unexpectedly,spoke in a voice that was almost too hoarse to hear. "Brethren, I havesomething to tell you . . ."

The congregation craned forward to hear him better. The onehundred or more worshipers sat motionless in shocked silence, waiting in vainfor more news, for encouragement.

"It has been announced on the wireless that Britain isat war with Germany. Please go home, now. I have nothing more to tell you. Put your trust in God, and in the powerof prayer."

And then, although the mass was not really over, he rejoinedthe little group at the altar and gave the final blessing.

Benidicatvos omnipotens Deus . . .

Amen. The congregation filed down the aisle and through theopen doors into the bright street, still subdued. A little to the right of thechurch gates a black Austin police car was parked discreetly. Christopherwatched an officer climb out, cradling his blue Bobby's helmet under his arm,and walk up the steps with studied casualness and into the church.

Minutes later, watched by his waiting, bewilderedparishioners, Father Ludwig von Hauber was led gently out, carrying a large,battered suitcase. As the old man passed by Christopher on the steps he smiledat the boy, and rested a hand on his shoulder.

"Where's he going, Mum? Where are they taking OurFather?" Christopher asked.

His mother did not reply, looking away from him, apparentlypreoccupied with something else.

His elder brother answered instead. "Don't you see,Chris? Don't you see, silly?He's a German. They're going to lock him up."

"But they can't do that; they just can't!"

Slowly, the car drew away, with the priest and the officersitting side by side, like close friends in the back seat.

End

The Little Boy Who Couldn't

2011-10-06T14:14:00.000-04:00

The Sacred Heart School at Sittingbourne, a market town in southeast England, was mainly a girls’ high school, but boys -- though heavily outnumbered -- were allowed there until the age of eight. I was five, and the place seemed to be a huge sprawling castle, entirely hidden from the town by high flintstone walls. Its centerpiece was its chapel, a miniature cathedral with gray stone buttresses and a lofty spire like a sharpened pencil pointing into the sky. Inside, the air was heavy with incense and the smoke from burning votive candles, and there was a pervasive and, yes, fearful sense that a grave, gray bearded God did indeed loom in its shadowy nave.

There was an echoing gymnasium with slippery polished floors, seemingly unvaultable vaulting horses, and unclimbable climbing ropes that reached way up into the rafters. This was where, with the hall filled with folding chairs, we’d gather later to rehearse and sing Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture to welcome visiting bishops, archbishops, and, from time to time, beaming missionaries from Africa.

And then there were the gardens, with dense beds of vegetables and flower borders as far as the eye could see, tended by some lower rank of nuns than our black-veiled teachers. In blue working habits tied at the waist with string, and ungainly wooden clogs, they waded waist-high among the lupines and delphiniums, and stooped over the cabbages and carrots with their rakes and hoes. Here and there in quiet corners were little stone grottoes, with gaudy statues of the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, St. Teresa, St. Francis -- with a stone bird in his outstretched hand -- and poor Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows.

Quarry-tiled corridors threaded through the school buildings, and around the kitchens and dining hall hung the permanent, sharp smell of boiling bones and cabbage soup. Up the uncarpeted stairs above lay a linoleum-floored reception room with hard, upright wooden chairs, massive sacred pictures and ceiling-high cases of holy books. Beyond this cold, forbidding place, behind a thick hopsack curtain hanging on wooden rings, was the no-go area of the nuns’ cells and the boarders’ bedrooms.

Our classroom was mostly brown. The walls were brown, and so were the bare wood floors and ceiling. The gnarled oak desks with their little holes cut out for inkwells were brown, and the cracked varnish on the ancient wall maps had long turned golden. But the atlas of the world was predominantly red, covering Canada, most of Africa and Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Red was the color of the British Empire, on which we were so often told that, literally, the sun never set.

I can remember the names and faces of several of my classmates, but none more vividly than Michael Cummings, a frail, pop-eyed, redheaded boy with freckles. Even though I never knew him well, Michael’s vulnerable face, and a three-word sentence he uttered one day in class, has haunted me ever since. Michael, we were told in whispers, had a weak heart, and because of this he always sat in the front row of the class in a wheelchair. Instead of a desk, there was a board across the chair’s arms, on which Michael could do his work.

Michael made his indelible mark on my life at one of our early arithmetic lessons. The air in the stuffy room was heavy with concentration, and the only sound was the scraping of our slate pencils as we labored over the addition of single figures. Madame Ambrose, our only teacher, passed from desk to desk, looking down at our efforts over her gold-framed half-moon spectacles.

When Madame Ambrose reached Michael’s chair, the little boy looked up into her severe face and let out a choked, anguished wail that I have never forgotten. It embodied desperation, fear and hopelessness.

“I can’t do this!”

The boy burst into tears and no one could stop him. Madame Ambrose wheeled him out of the room and we heard his unhappy voice trailing far away down the corridors into the garden.

He came back next day, his eyes solemn and reproachful, but only a few months later he was gone. They told us he had died.

Ever since, Michael’s cri de coeur has come back to me on occasions when life has threatened to become too burdensome. It returned during two long and temporarily crippling depressive illnesses decades ago, again with a wrenching divorce, and other crises of confidence that we all endure.

Little Michael was dealt a rotten hand from birth, and had an inadequate frame with which to defend himself. I was hugely more fortunate. Even though, later, I might have said – not aloud but only in my head – “I can’t do this” during some of life’s most testing moments, I knew I’d had a fairer deal, and lucky enough to have the physical and emotional strength to face such challenges and overcome them.

But I do sometimes wonder how different my life might have been, and how I’d have coped with its problems, without that brief, involuntary lesson in life from Michael Cummings.

OVERPAID, OVERSEXED, OVER HERE

2011-08-11T15:31:00.001-04:00

In London a year or two ago I came across a revealing little booklet. Called Over There, issued during World War II to American servicemen posted to Britain.

More than a million U.S. troops were stationed in England between 1942 and the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe in June, 1944. Most of them had never been abroad before, and the aim of Over There -- according to Oxford University Press, who quite recently republished it -- was to prepare them for life in a very different country, and to try to prevent any friction between the newcomers and their British hosts.

Whoever wrote these seven pages had a remarkable grasp of simple, direct English, an impressive knowledge of psychology, and an amazing understanding of the most relevant differences between the Americans and the British. When the original leaflet was distributed, its contents created more than a few raised eyebrows across the Atlantic, because it presented an unusually frank and objective view of Britain and the British; much more telling than they could ever have written themselves. The London newspapers were fascinated; in the London Times of July 1942, there was a laudatory if tongue-in-cheek critique of the pamphlet, comparing it with the works of Irving, Emerson and Hawthorne, all of whom, of course, had tried to interpret Britain to their American readers. In the self-important language of The Times of those days, an editorial said: "None of those American authors' august expositions has the spotlit directness of this revelation of plain horse sense, and an understanding of evident truths."

To us more than sixty years on, the text of Over There may seem a trifle didactic and preachy and, with 20/20 hindsight, there is too much rah-rah breast-beating about "beating Hitler on his home ground." For example: "Hitler knows they (Britain and America) are both powerful countries, tough and resourceful. He knows that they, with other united nations, mean his crushing defeat in the end." The more likely truth is that, only a year after America had entered a war, and when Britain and its empire had been fighting alone for more than two years, Hitler must have felt the odds were strongly in his favor. At that moment the Nazis occupied pretty much all of Europe, and were already flexing their muscles in North Africa.

The pamphlet quickly gets down to business. Its first advice is to forget past history. If you're an Irish-American, it suggests, you may see the Brits as the persecutors of the Irish. Forget about the enemy Redcoats in the American Revolution, and the war of 1812, "There is no time today to fight old wars again, or bring up old grievances. We don't worry about which side our grandfathers were on during the Civil War, because it doesn't mean anything now."

It's with great tact that the author tackles the legendary reserve and -- though it doesn't say it in such terms -- the stuffiness and stand-offishness of the Brits. The thing to do, the booklet says, is not to deny these differences but to admit them openly, and try to understand them. "For instance," it says," the British are more reserved in conduct that we. On a small crowded island where forty-five million people live, each man (sic) learns to guard his privacy carefully -- and is equally careful not to invade another man's privacy.

"So if Britons sit in trains or buses without striking up a conversation with you, it doesn't mean they are being haughty or unfriendly . . . they don't speak to you because they don't want to appear intrusive or rude." Those aren’t the true reasons for the Brits' starchy aloofness, but it was a pretty good attempt.

The pamphlet takes a lot of trouble to discourage its readers from bragging or showing-off, especially about money. Saying, correctly, that American services’ pay was the highest in the world, it goes on, "The British Tommy is apt to be specially touchy about his wages and yours. Keep this in mind. Use common sense, and don't rub him up the wrong way.” This was good advice. The GI’s hosts were indeed resentful that their allies were paid tremendously more. On a more personal level they were jealous of the U.S. forces’ uniforms, which were better-cut with higher quality cloth. Dressed in their thick, hairy, poorly cut, clunky-looking battle-dress uniforms, the Tommies found themselves swept aside by the local girls in the pub, who were all over these apparently prosperous visitors who came with nylon stockings and PX goodies, and talked like Errol Flynn or Clark Gable. It’s not surprising that the British troops labeled these intruders “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”

The author tried to tell readers, many of them rookies, that for all their sissy accents and soft-spoken politeness, the British were strong and resilient, and deserved a little respect for what they’d so far endured. “Sixty thousand British civilians – men, women and children – have already died under bombs, and yet their morale is unbreakable and high. A nation doesn’t come through that if it doesn’t have plain, common guts. The British are tough, strong people, and good allies. You won’t be able to tell them much about ‘taking it’” And here comes the rah-rah again: “They are not particularly interested in taking it any more. They’re far more interested in getting together in solid friendship with us, so that we can all start dishing it out to Hitler.”

The booklet points out that comparisons are often invidious, and not a good idea; that England is smaller than North Carolina or Iowa, and that bragging about bigness – of buildings, mountains, family farms in places such as Texas and yes, money, wouldn’t go down in battered, small-scale Britain. The pamphlet says: “The British care little about size. For instance, London has no skyscrapers . . . they’ll point out buildings like Westminster Abbey . . . and the Tower of London, which was built almost a thousand years ago. They mean as much to the British as Mount Vernon or Lincoln’s birthplace do to us.”

And so it goes on. The GIs are warned to be sensitive to the stringent rationing of food, clothes and cigarettes and other necessities, because Britain was under siege. Few civilians were allowed gasoline, and their cars were shut up in their garages “for the duration,” on bricks or railroad ties. There’s a warning that the towns and villages will look scruffy and unkempt, and that even England’s famous gardens will be growing only vegetables. Also, that many buildings will be unpainted and in disrepair, not only because there was little manpower, but also because most industries were hell bent on making tanks, guns and other war supplies for themselves, the British Empire forces and the Russians.

A part of the book describes “The People and their Customs,” covering such important topics as “warm beer” and the “impossible” money system. And there’s a none-too-successful attempt to describe cricket, soccer and Rugby.

Naturally, there’s advice about British vocabulary and pronunciation, which includes a caution that the natives “will pronounce all the ‘a’s in banana as in ‘father.’ However funny you may think this is, you will be able to understand people who talk this way, and they will be able to understand you.”

On the last page of the pamphlet there are “Some Important Do’s and Don’ts,” most of which reiterate the points made elswhere. Noteworthy others are: “If you’re invited to eat with a family, don’t eat too much. Otherwise you may eat up their weekly rations. NEVER (actually in capitals) criticize the King and Queen. In your dealings with the British, let this be your slogan: it is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies.”

There’s one thing wrong with that mention of bananas. Because of the ever-present threat of attack by German U-boats that blockaded the British Isles, such luxuries were unknown after 1941, so people probably never mentioned them to their allied guests. I remember an American boy, a New Yorker, arriving as a pupil at my boarding school in 1942. His name was Lou Taylor, a quiet, likable boy who we nicknamed Long Island Lou, even though he came from Hoboken!

On his first day at the school, Lou brought a few bunches of bananas, and I recall the hush, and then the excitement, when they were brought into the dining hall with some ceremony by the headmaster who, with help from the head boy, peeled them and proceeded to cut them into pieces so that all the boys could taste them.

Each piece was probably less than half an inch thick, and we ate them silently, and very slowly. They were the last bananas we saw until the war ended in 1945.

oo0oo

LEAVING HOME

2011-07-02T15:12:00.000-04:00

It was Aunt Janet’s idea. A year or two earlier, at a rare family get-together -- either a wake or a wedding -- she’d insisted that my older brother David and I go to boarding school, and since she’d offered to pay the bills, nobody had argued with her. As she’d pointed out, our father, her brother Harold, could never afford to educate us privately on his bank clerk’s salary. My brother was eleven and I was eight, so wasn’t it high time? And shouldn’t we be jolly grateful to be sent to The Grange, a boarding school 70 miles away from home and 30 miles from London?

It was the second week of September 1939, ten days or so after the outbreak of the Second World War. On the first chilly autumn mornings a few days before we left home, David grew morose and silent. His eyes were red each day at breakfast, and he spent most of the time in his room and, when he came down for meals, lowered his eyes and picked at his food. Sometimes I could hear him crying through the locked bathroom door.

“This is the next-to-last lunch before school,” David told me. And in the same way he’d mark ‘the last go on the swing,’ and ‘the last walk in the garden,’ and, finally, ‘the last day at home.’

I was already a bit of a show-off, and viewed the situation differently. It seems I couldn’t stop talking about it to everyone; not only to Tom Gamble, the gardener, and Doris, the maid, but also Father Fitzgerald and the milkman, the postman, the neighbors and any passing stranger who’d listen.
“We’re going away to boarding school,” I told them. “Won’t it be fun?”

When the last day came, we drove off after lunch with Mother in the new family car, a little black Flying Standard 8 that still smelt of leather inside. Dad was at work, as usual. He’d said goodbye after breakfast, not stooping to kiss us, but shaking hands gravely before riding away to the bank on his bicycle, neither waving nor looking back.

With our luggage in the cramped trunk, we drove through Kent, past miles of sunny apple orchards and hop fields. It was market day in Maidstone, the county town, where the pungent odor of horse and cow manure wafted through the car’s open windows, mingled with the smell of gasoline. We dawdled in line with trucks carrying squealing pigs in ash-wood baskets piled four or five high, and pony traps and horse-carts loaded with flimsy crates of day-old chicks and goslings. In this bucolic setting there was nothing to show, yet, that Britain was already ten days into another world war.

Outside Maidstone the roads were clear, and we parked for tea in Westerham. Mother -- presiding over the bone china cups and dainty cucumber and cress sandwiches – tried to cheer us up and delay the pain of parting.

“Winston Churchill lives near here, boys!” she said brightly.

But we didn’t know who Churchill was. There wasn’t much reason why we should. He’d been in limbo for ten years. He wasn’t even in the cabinet, and wouldn’t become Prime Minister for another nine months. Whoever he was, we didn’t care about him. Our thoughts were elsewhere.

At around five that afternoon, seventy or eighty miles from home, we drove through the gates of the school, and stopped outside the front door of a big, red brick house. A short, paunchy, smiling man stood at the top of the steps, and trotted down to meet us, holding out a chubby hand.
“Why, it’s Mrs. Birch!” the man said. “Brodie Walker, remember?”

“I do indeed.” Mother and Walker shook hands. They’d met a few months before, when she and Aunt Janet had come to look over the school.

“And these, as anyone can see, are your two lads.” Mr. Walker said, with a self-satisfied smirk.
Mother turned to us. “Boys, this is the headmaster, Mr. Walker. Mr. Walker, this is David, and here is John.”

Beaming, Mr. Walker patted us on the head, touseling our hair. “Capital!” he said. “Come along in, and I’ll get the porter to bring in their things.”

There weren’t many things for the porter to bring in, only a suitcase each, our tuck-boxes – the little wooden chests in which we kept our private possessions -- and our new gas masks in brown cardboard boxes. The rest of the luggage, cabin trunks that wouldn’t have fitted into the car, had been sent ahead by train.

At this first encounter with Mr. Walker, David was almost frozen with apprehension. With his eyes cast down, he shuffled up the school steps while I, less aware of the wrench that parting with Mother would soon bring, raced happily behind the headmaster two steps at a time.

In front of the empty fireplace in the big drawing room, with an aspidistra in each window, and big overstuffed chairs draped with lace anti-macassars, we met Mrs. Walker, a jolly, tubby woman.
Mother exchanged social nothings with the Walkers for a few minutes, but soon it was time for her to leave. She was reluctant to make the long drive home in the darkness of the newly-imposed wartime blackout, on roads no longer lit by street lights, in a car whose headlamps were now masked to permit only the narrowest slits of light. Instead she planned to stay the night with Aunt Janet, who lived not far from the school.

Standing in the dusk by the car, my brother and I gave Mother a final hug. Suddenly it dawned on me that I wouldn’t see or speak to her again until Christmas, and I found it hard to unlock my arms and let her go.

“I want you to be very brave,” she said. “Daddy and I will write every week, and Mr. Walker says he’ll see to it that you do, too.”

She seemed so cheerful as she drove out through the gate, honking her horn in final farewell. Didn’t she have that same hot feeling around her eyes, that little involuntary quiver of the lips? Or was she just bravely hiding her feelings?

David and I were alone together. I took his hand as we walked up the steps and back into the school.
Back in the house, we followed Mr. Walker into the common room to meet the school’s dozen or so other boarders, a number of whom were the sons of Colonial Office officials, police officers and district commissioners serving in far away, exotic-sounding British territories in Africa and Asia. Everyone was friendly enough, but there was more than one scared, red-eyed boy doing his best to come to terms with the strangeness of the first few hours at boarding school.

When Mrs. Walker, who acted as the school’s matron, announced that she was taking us to see the dormitory, I expected this to be somewhere in the yet-to-be-seen upper floor of the headmaster’s house, but was surprised when, instead of leading us upstairs, she took us to the cellar where, lit by bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, three rows of four or five two-tier bunks stretched into the darkness. Mrs. Walker explained that, at least for the first few months of the war, we’d sleep in this hastily prepared place until her husband and his staff had a better idea of whether there would be bombing raids on the city.

There was something unfamiliar and stark about the freshly whitewashed walls of the slightly damp and moldy-smelling underground room, with its bunks built from unfinished pine, each with a mesh of chicken wire to support a straw mattress. But a brave attempt had been made to give this dark, windowless place a homier look. An inexpensive Persian-style carpet had been laid on the brick floor, and unframed posters of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had been stuck on the walls. Later that evening Mrs. Walker gave us each a navy blue corduroy bag about the size of a pillow, on which our initials had been embroidered, in which to carry our pajamas, slippers, dressing gowns and a few treasured possessions such as a small teddy bear, downstairs each day.

That night, after the lights were out and someone lit a candle as a night-light in a corner of the room, I lay in my bunk painfully aware that something was missing. Every night of my life until then there had always been a bedtime ritual at home. My mother would come into the bedroom, open the window and turn out the light. Then she would draw deeply on her cigarette in its tortoise-shell holder to cause enough of a glow to light up my face for her to kiss me good night. This had never struck me as an odd procedure. I had always taken it for granted, and now I craved it. But for the first time there was no cigarette, no glow, no kiss, no Mother.

Lying there, in the lower bunk with David restless in the tier above me, I wondered whether the bombers would come that night. I knew that the city of Guildford, and The Grange, were far closer to London than we had been at home. For years my grandmother and aunts had told fireside tales of how the Kaiser’s zeppelins had droned low over their house during what they called The Great War, and how the German aviators had leaned out of their gondolas and dropped their bombs by hand, smashing Grandmother’s greenhouse. But it had been a long, tiring day, and very soon I was fast asleep.
Over the next few weeks, David and I grew used to this new life away from home. Mr. Walker, the headmaster, turned out to be a warm, paternal man who, having no children of his own, treated the dozen or so boarders at the school as his own family. No bombs fell on that first night nor, oddly, on any night during our next two years at The Grange, and after a few weeks we slept upstairs in airy, well-lit dormitories.

However, all the reality of war came to us during our vacations back in rural Kent. The Spitfires and Hurricanes of the RAF often thwarted the Germans, like their fathers twenty years earlier in World War I, in their attempts to reach London, this time. They turned tail and fled home, dropping their bombs on the farms and villages that lay in their path to London along the estuary of the river Thames. The Battle of Britain was fought literally over our heads at home in July and August, 1940, when almost every day for those two months, the sky was filled with dense formations of German bombers and their fighter escorts. In one raid alone, on August 24, 1940, thirty-eight German planes were lost, and twenty-two British fighters, some of them spinning in flames into the fields and woods around us.

But there were other signs in Guildford that a war was going on. Rationing of food became so difficult that, by the time David and I moved to a bigger boarding school in 1941, every person was allowed only one ounce of cheese, four ounces of butter, one packet of dehydrated egg, and three pints of milk each week. At nighttime, volunteer air-raid wardens patrolled the streets to detect any chink of light left showing through the thick black curtains that veiled every window in the country. Signposts on roads and highways were soon taken down to confuse the enemy in the likely event of a Nazi invasion
And then there was the threat of poison gas. One morning early in October, Mr. Walker led us in a chattering, gray-uniformed crocodile along streets strewn with yellow and rust horse chestnut leaves to a public park near the center of Guildford. He’d explained at breakfast, his voice deliberately calm, that the reason for this outing was to test our gas masks in a public air raid shelter. In the concrete blockhouse under the trees in the park, a uniformed civil defense volunteer, who introduced himself as Mr. Ferritt, showed us, with the same matter-of-fact tone that Mr. Walker had used earlier that morning, how to put on and adjust our gas-masks. These were primitive black rubber affairs, each with an oval window made of some clear material. The ‘chin’ of the mask was fitted with a shiny black, perforated metal cylinder filled with some sort of filter that, he assured us, could cope with any known poison gas.

We huddled on wooden benches arranged in a square in the dimly-lit concrete chamber, wearing our gas-masks while, in the middle, Mr. Ferritt donned his own mask, struck a match and lit a canister of tear gas. A quickly growing plume of white smoke curled out of the canister.

“By now, boys” he said a minute or two later, his voice raised, yet not too distinct through the rubber mask, “this room is full of tear gas. But there’s no need to be afraid. It’ll make your eyes run a bit, and you may be a little uncomfortable, but it’s absolutely safe and won’t do you any harm. You can’t tell it’s here in the room because I’m sure all of your masks are working properly.

“Now,” Mr. Ferritt went on, “Trust me. I want you to do something. Poke two fingers between your mask and your cheek to let in some of the tear gas to prove that the masks are working properly.”
He moved around the seated square of boys to see whether everyone was following his instructions. I found the strange smell of the gas, its irritation in the back of my throat and the burning in my eyes unpleasant but tolerable. But soon there were muffled cries of fear around the room, and more than a few boys had become unnerved by the experiment. Perhaps the formulation was too strong but, whatever the reason, a number had started crying hysterically. Others were dashing around the poorly lit room, tripping over the benches and bumping into each other in a frantic search for the door.

Mr. Ferritt seemed completely paralyzed by the scene, and was unable to cope with the situation. But Mr. Walker, who had been present as an observer, wearing his own gas mask, immediately jumped up and threw open the doors at each end of the gas-filled room, shooing his charges out into the fresh air.
We gathered under a tree and watched and listened while Mr. Walker confronted Mr. Ferritt, grasping him by both shoulders, and shouting into his face. On that one occasion, he used words most of us had never heard before, and we never heard him use them again.

END

A MAN APART

2011-05-27T14:46:00.002-04:00

We called him Joe behind his back, but to his face he was Sir, or Mr. Jones. In my whole life I never met a colder, more detached man. Even now, seventy years later, I get a little catch in my chest at the very thought of him.

His name (well, I've changed it to be honest) was Frank Jones, a burly, broody, balding and remote Welshman with a Roman a centurion’s nose and a head like polished pine. He was my boarding school's deputy head, and my housemaster, and had been in charge of Crowden House as long as anyone could recall.

Joe’s very appearance instilled dread in us, striding purposefully into his Latin class in his black gown; berating us in his captain’s uniform on the drill square, or bearing down on us angrily, his whistle shrilling on the Rugby field. Boys from other houses thanked God they weren’t at Crowden, for Jones, in his late forties, was a bachelor, and ran the place like a fiefdom. His fellow housemasters had wives and children of their own, and this made life in those houses a little more like home.

Crowden, a three story, early 19^th century building with two beamed gables and lattice windows, loomed across the street from the headmaster's warm red brick Queen Anne house, the school's handsome assembly hall, and the classroom block. Years on, I see Crowden House as though I’m peering into the hinged, open front of a doll house. There are its three floors covered with mud brown linoleum, and its walls in two-tone green matte paint. Down in the gloomy hallway to the right of the front door is Mr. Jones' study. That’s the prefects' room to the left of it and, over on the right, running the depth of the house, the spartan, echoing day room, where the rest of us made friends and feuded with our foes for seven everlasting years. Behind all this lie the bare-boarded bathrooms and sports changing rooms, with their overflowing boot lockers, and black iron hooks on the walls, festooned with sweaty Rugby gear. Up on the two upper floors, above lino-covered staircases, are the five dormitories, each housing about a dozen boys who sleep in open-fronted cubicles. There are no pictures on the walls, and there’s no heating. The windows – like all windows in Britain in wartime – are draped with blackout curtains, though the windows, whatever the time of year, are always wide open at bedtime.

Life was much rougher at Crowden. Beatings were a routine, conducted either by Jones himself, or by his house captain. Punishments, usually for laughably venial sins, such as having untidy hair, or being late for chapel or a class, were meted out in increments of thirty minutes, and called detention. Anyone awarded more than ninety minutes detention in a single week would be given four strokes of the cane, while six strokes were reserved for mortal sins, such as lying or cheating.

Later in World War II, in the early 40s, when there were labor shortages at the school, we had an option of manual labor instead of detention or taking a beating. This would consist of heaving coal for the boilers, sawing logs, or working in the school’s vegetable gardens. At about the same time, a national scarcity of food forced the school to plow one or two of its sports fields to grow crops of sugar beet. After this we spent rainy fall afternoons, armed with machetes, topping and tailing beets like overgrown turnips, piled on rough trestle tables,.

Mr. Jones had rules of his own. Not until we were sixteen were we allowed to wear brown (as opposed to black) shoes, or to put our hands in our trousers pockets. Nor could we walk across the parade ground, enter the house by its front door, or ride a bicycle without permission. These were the privileges of boys in their last years at the school, and once you first exercised these dubious privileges you knew the end was in sight.

Very rarely Mr. Jones, failing to identify a culprit, penalized the entire house for some misdemeanor. One winter weekend, someone cracked a mirror in one of the bathrooms and, an hour or two after its discovery, prefects rounded up everyone to a hastily summoned assembly in the day room. The duty prefect counted heads and, when he was sure that everyone was present, turned to Joe.

Jones, his face dark with anger, invited the person responsible for the broken pane to reveal himself, and for a minute or more glowered at the silent gathering. But no one stepped forward to admit the blame, and Jones and his prefects went into a huddle outside the room. When they returned, he announced that, since no one had accepted responsibility, the whole house must pay the penalty.

That afternoon about sixty boys set off on a walk to and from the village of Hawkhurst, five miles away. Over the next hours the column of twelve to seventeen-year-old walkers, mostly in twos and threes, stretched out over the hilly course, the younger boys falling back slowly while the older ones, pulled ahead. Throughout the afternoon Jones and his prefects glided to and fro on bicycles to make sure that no one took a short cut. It was dusk and raining when the last stragglers returned to the house, and the true villain never revealed himself.

There was an incongruous and rarely seen side to Joe Jones; a trait entirely at odds with his stern everyday character. From time to time he would try his earnest best to entertain us. This alter ego sprang from a secret passion. Often, late at night, passing his study door on the way to bed we would hear high-pitched chorus of “Three little maids from school are we,” or perhaps more appropriately “Behold the Lord High Executioner.” Joe was alone in there, lost in a haze of pipe smoke, listening to his favorite music.

And once or twice a year he would invite a chosen handful of boys into his study for a recital, always of the same collection of operettas: The Mikado, The Yeoman of the Guard, and HMS Pinafore. The conversation during these gatherings was hesitant, respectful and one-sided, as we sat grouped around Joe’s ancient, wind-up phonograph. The music seemed to me tinkly and frivolous, and I confess that, ever since, I’ve had an almost phobic loathing of anything by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Evans took his passion one extraordinary step further. At the end of every summer term, the boys and masters would put on a revue, consisting of sketches and solo acts that often made fun of the life and routines of the school. And every few years, maybe once or twice in any boy’s time there, Joe and some other master, dressed as London bobbies and wielding truncheons, would sing another Gilbert and Sullivan piece, the comic duet “We’re the bold gendarmes.” Their faces were appropriately earnest, and their footwork nimble in their hob-nail boots.

At the end of this act, in response to a roar of amazement and admiration from the audience in the packed assembly hall, there was a look on Joe's face that all at once bespoke a spectrum of emotions: the unexpected thrill of total acceptance and appreciation, an almost infantile excitement, astonishment at his warm reception, and perhaps the realization that just for this moment he was something he could normally never be – one of us.

Only then, in my last few days at the school, after seven years that were in some ways more a sentence than a sojourn, did I ever ask myself what might be the tragic truth about this man. Even at the end, as one of his prefects, I’d never knew him at all. Was Joe Jones, with all his solemn, sullen power, a lonely, friendless man, a man apart? His only home, as far as I could see, was that dark smoky room on the ground floor of Crowden House, with its empty coal-burning grate, its framed, faded photographs of long-ago cricket and rugger teams, its cases of fusty leather-bound books, and his phonograph and records. His bedroom lay behind a locked door among the upper dormitories, and every evening, very late at night, we’d hear him labor up the stairs, fumble with his keys and close and lock the door behind him. He seemed always to dine at night across the street with the headmaster and his family and other colleagues. No friends or relatives of either gender were ever seen to call on him, and we never heard of people and places seen on the long summer recesses. What kind of life was that?

He died in the 1970s. A former head boy wrote to tell me about a memorial service in London. I didn’t go.


	oo0oo

NOT FOR SISSIES

2011-04-18T16:11:00.000-04:00

I was eighty yesterday, an average-looking old guy of medium height, with all my own hair and pretty well all my teeth.

You wouldn’t look twice at me in the street, and if you asked a passer-by for directions, you probably wouldn’t choose me. No, you’d pick someone who looked more approachable and genial or more user-friendly, as they say these days.

It’s not that I look menacing or anything. It’s just that, with my face in repose, advancing age has given me a decidedly stern and somber look. In fact, to be honest, you might take me for a curmudgeon. My mouth turns down and, with the lines on my face, you might reasonably suppose me to be bad-tempered and humorless, even sour.

Of course, the exact opposite is true, I’m nice to small children, I brake for squirrels, and feel guilty when I have to kill even a moth or an ant. I certainly couldn’t harm a mouse or a muskrat, so you might well say I’m a have-a-heart kind of person. And when it comes to humor I can be almost funny on occasions. Well, at least amusing.

They say that growing old is not for sissies. They’re right. This gruff exterior makes me sad and wistful. I know you only have my word for it but once, as a soldier, a bridegroom, a soccer dad, and even on the first rungs up the corporate ladder (something by which we foolishly tend to measure success and failure) I was – I blush to say this – pretty good looking. What happened to that dashing young captain who sits in a silver photo-frame on my wife’s writing desk?

Time happened, that’s what. Ok, we all change with age, but in varying degrees. A lot of friends who are older than I still have nice, open faces and pleasant smiles. So why don’t I?

My wife, normally a paragon of kindness, jokes about my glum appearance. She laughs aloud at the pictures in my passport and driver’s license.

“Why didn’t you smile?” she asks.

“I was smiling,” I tell her.

I really was. Inside me, I could feel that cheery upturned mouth and the warm twinkle in the eye but, somehow, when the pictures came out, all that was missing was a prison uniform, or a string of numbers hanging on a board around my neck.

My mother-in-law, a lovely old lady with a Giaconda smile and handsome dark eyes, was a fountain of wise saws and sayings. One of these was that the living’s on the inside. By that she meant that many plain pug-ugly or unprepossessing people, and things, too, are often beautiful on the inside. She applied this especially to homes in mean, run-down streets, and to homely people, but the message was clear: never take anything at face value; instead, search for the beauty within.

She was right, wasn’t she? All the same, we still go on making judgments based on external appearances. More than in most countries, we Americans put an impossibly high premium on good looks. Not so elsewhere. In my native Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, many relatively plain men and women have made it right to the top on stage and screen. They wouldn’t even have landed a walk-on part on Broadway, or in Hollywood.

Don’t laugh, but behind my fossil-like façade I still believe that, physically and mentally, I’m that young man in the silver picture frame. My wife and I published a novel a few years ago, a thriller set in exotic South East Asia. Mark Gregson, the hero (they call heroes protagonists these days), is a young ex-Army officer. In my head and heart I’m still thirty-two year old Gregson, chasing heroin traffickers through the jungle; racing up three hundred steps in pursuit of thugs; saving his lovely girlfriend from drowning and, in the nick of time, disarming a booby trap under the hood of his hired car. The flesh may well be a little weaker, but the spirit’s still willing and, yes, the living really is on the inside.

King Duncan in Macbeth knew just what he was on about when he said: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

So if you’re in your thirties, or even much older than that, kindly remember this when you pass some old geezer in the street.

Smile at him, he might be me.

oo0oo

TEK

2011-03-08T14:31:00.000-05:00

When King Farouk -- the unpopular playboy king of Egypt -- was deposed in a coup led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in the summer of 1952, Britain lost its only supporter in Egypt who tolerated the presence of British Army and RAF bases along the Suez Canal. From then on, after signing a treaty with Nasser, Britain reluctantly began a gradual withdrawal of its troops until, in 1955, the last unit had left Egyptian soil for ever.

Serving in Egypt during the winding-down and evacuation of the bases was unrewarding and demoralizing. A year after the coup, when I was twenty-two and a lieutenant in the South Staffordshire Regiment, we were sent from Germany to Egypt to relieve another battalion that had just finished a three-year stint in the Suez Canal Zone.

After the comparative comfort of a former Waffen SS barracks in green, wooded Westphalia, we in the Staffords took a dim view of being sent to live under canvas in the Egyptian desert. Besides, we realized that it wouldn’t be very long before we’d get marching orders for our own unceremonious withdrawal from Egypt, and spend the rest of the overseas tour in some other troubled part of Britain’s shrinking empire. Maybe in action against the Mau Mau in Kenya, or Chinese insurgents in Malaya.

Within weeks of receiving the order, the whole battalion -- about seven hundred strong -- traveled from Germany by train and ferry to its regimental depot at Lichfield, in the center of England. First, the unit was sent home on leave, since none of us would see our families for a few years. Then we spent a week or two at the depot, our arms sore from a battery of inoculations, while we were fitted with tropical uniforms and equipment, did training exercises and sat through lurid movies about malaria and venereal diseases.

Nowadays you can fly to Egypt in a few hours, but this leg of our journey by sea took fourteen days in an aging troopship. We steamed south from Liverpool, across the Bay of Biscay, through the Straits of Gibraltar and down the length of the Mediterranean to Port Said. Here the day temperatures were around one hundred-fifteen degrees, and for a day or two we acclimatized in a tented transit camp behind high barbed-wire fences seemingly right in the center of nearby Port Fuad. This pause was an absolute necessity for most of our troops, young draftees aged eighteen or nineteen, who had until then regarded three consecutive seventy-five degree summer days in England as a heat wave.

Our final destination was to be Tel-el-Kebir, deep in the desert some seventy miles east of Cairo. This last lap was a nightmare journey by train, in almost unbearably hot, antique passenger cars whose windows had for some unexplained reason been boarded-up. But the need for the boards soon became clear once the journey began. As the train crawled, stopping and starting through towns and villages, hostile Egyptians threw rocks at the wagons as we went by. Our armed sentries, stationed on platforms at the end of each car, had been ordered not to retaliate.

In the comparative cool of that evening we arrived at Tel-el-Kebir which, ironically, had been the scene of a British victory a century earlier against The Mad Mullah, a brutal, devious Islamic extremist leader who, in several ways, seems to have been a pre-incarnation of the late Saddam Hussain. The village of Tel-el-Kebir itself had long since become no more than a cluster of rocks in the sand, but nearby was the huge army camp that we soon learned to call Tek.

Tek was a vast storage depot for tanks, trucks, arms, ammunition, radio, telephone and other equipment. It lay like a canvas city in the desert, with a population of several thousand people from the administrative and logistical arms of the service. Around it were two seventeen-mile circles of dense barbed wire, between which lay a minefield of anti-personnel mines. Seventeen powerful World War II anti-aircraft searchlights, each in a nest of sandbags atop a twenty foot high tower, faced outwards over the sand, manned at night by Askari Scouts from Kenya.

One of our jobs, alternating with another infantry regiment, in addition to providing a stand-by force within easy reach of the whole Middle East, was to provide mobile and foot patrols to guard the perimeter of what must have been one of the biggest strategic military storage depots in the region, and worth millions and millions of dollars. Much of the equipment in Tek would have been valuable for the Egyptian forces, especially at this early stage in Egypt’s revolution, before Nasser had completed a later deal for arms purchases with the Czechs, who acted as a cover for Russia.

This was a grindingly tedious and, too often, a tragic assignment. On some nights we patrolled the perimeter in jeeps with their lights switched off, and with automatic weapons mounted on their hoods. On other nights, we lay in small, armed groups by the wire, accompanied by killer-dogs trained to tear out the throat of any intruder. Their RAF handlers assured us that the dogs would never turn on us, and they never did. But on more than one occasion I had the gut-wrenching experience of seeing what they could do to those they were trained to attack.

The awful truth about those patrols was that the men who risked and often lost their lives to break through the perimeter weren’t well-fed soldiers, but needy fellaheen, peasants. Their bodies were pitifully thin and their clothes ragged. Surely they knew about the minefield, the searchlights, the constant patrols, and those dogs? Nearly sixty years later I’m convinced that, driven by poverty, they were only there to steal and sell whatever they’d stolen. And where does that conclusion leave me and my comrades morally? Only occasionally did we shoot it out with people who seemed to be trained and well-armed, and the likelihood is that still these were simply better organized gangs of villagers.

Eighteen months in Tek were an eternity. Apart from one weekend in Cairo, our only escapes were brief liaison visits to a British fighter squadron in Jordan, and another RAF station at Habbaniyah, in Iraq. But for the non-commissioned men there was no release at all.

Our next stop wasn’t Kenya or Malaya, but much closer. On the Island of Cyprus, a group of Greek partisans, who had harassed and terrified the Germans and Italians in occupied Greece during World War II, were training Cypriot terrorists to drive the British out of Cyprus, and to unite it with Greece. I didn’t know at that time that I was about to spend four years in Cyprus, two as a soldier and two as a police officer. But, then, that’s another story.

Let's Do Lunch

2011-02-02T13:44:00.000-05:00

She was reading a book at the kitchen table when Frank came back.

“Who was it? I didn’t recognize him,” she said, without looking up.

“Vogel.”

She made a face. “Burt Vogel? That crook? You haven’t heard from him for years, what did he want?”

“Wants me to go in to New York and have lunch with him next Tuesday. He’s got a problem, needs advice.”

“What sort of advice?”

“Didn’t say.”

“You should’ve asked him,” she said, “ and why are you grinning? What’s so damn funny?”

“Well, don’t you think it’s weird? He could hardly wait to see me out the door on my sixty-fifth birthday, and now he wants my advice!”

“And you’re going, I suppose.”

“Sure I am. Why not?”

“Because the man’s a prick, that’s why. You owe him squat.”

She’d been like this for quite a while, with her snarky little put-downs, like a big sister to a kid brother. Lately she’d seemed actually to dislike him, and it made him uneasy. Frank didn’t tell her he was flattered by the invitation. Nor had he ever told her he’d felt ignored and shut out by Vogel, who’d never once called or written since he retired. This trip back to the office might be a chance to re-connect, to make up. Reconcile, was that the right word?

“I want to go if only to see how much the place has changed, meet a few friendly faces maybe, have a free lunch with the Vogel’s new management team.”

She raised one eyebrow in that way she did. “Come on, you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, remember? You’ve forgotten what the guy’s like, he’s a user. Wants something – want to bet?”

“Well, I’m going anyway.”

She seemed not to have heard him, with her head back in her book. She’d always been a big reader. In the last few months she’d been reading two or three books a week from the library in Ossining. Frank wasn’t much of a reader himself, though before he retired he’d told everyone he couldn’t wait to catch up with his reading. But somehow he’d never got around to it. One day he would.

She snapped her book shut and frowned up at him. “You’ll have to wear a suit and tie, you know. You haven’t done that for yonks, not since your mom’s funeral.”

“They don’t dress up these days,” Frank said, “not unless they’re meeting a client. But you could be right, he has visitors all the time. Maybe I should dress up a bit.”

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “You’ve been out of that place for years. You always told me you hated it . . . couldn’t wait to retire. You know what? I think you’re still scared of that jerk.”

Frank had been in his workshop in the basement when Vogel called, making a love seat for the yard. He spent more and more time down there on projects for the grandchildren, a rocking horse, a see-saw, a couple of doll-houses, a dog kennel. He was most at ease here. He could do what he wanted, when he wanted, the way he wanted. His wife knew nothing about woodwork, so she didn’t criticize him.

He heard her yell down to him after the phone rang. “Someone’s on the phone.”

“Who is it?”

“No idea. Pick it up will you?”

Vogel’s voice was friendly, almost affectionate. He said something about staffing problems. Could it possibly be that he wanted him to come back? That he’d realized over the years what a contribution his older, more experienced colleague had made – could still make? If that was it, he’d do it like a shot.

She was wrong about his hating the place. Maybe he’d complained sometimes, but over the past few years he’d yearned for the familiar routine, the challenges, the friendships. He’d even enjoyed the daily commute in the train, when he could read the paper or take a nap if he liked. True, he’d be seventy-four in a couple of months, but he had experience, more than the lot of them put together. He’d be back in the swing of it in no time.

When Frank dressed in his room on Tuesday morning his collar was a little tight, and so was the waistband of his pants. But then he put on his red suspenders and the jacket of his charcoal suit and made a rare trip into his wife’s bedroom, standing for a full minute in front of the mirror. He smiled to himself. Not bad, he thought.

Nowadays, on the few occasions when they went to the city they drove, parking the car in a fenced lot, off the West Side Highway in the mid-50s. But today he took the train from Croton-Harmon, fearful there might be some traffic holdup.

He left home a few minutes later than he’d planned, and it wasn’t until he came off Route 9 and was approaching the permit-holders’ lot that it struck him – he didn’t have a permit anymore. Hadn’t done for years. He searched for a meter, and glanced at his watch while he circled the adjacent lot. He had about four minutes, and there were no empty spaces. Soon he was driving farther and farther away from the stairway up to the station until he found a vacant meter on the farthest edge of the park. To pay, he’d have to run a good hundred yards back to the attendant’s hut, and another two hundred yards from there to the steps.

He locked the car, started to jog toward the hut and was already out of breath by the time he reached it. He almost threw the bills at the attendant and turned to lollop down the paved road past the taxi rank toward the station. Panting, with his mouth hanging open, he labored up the steep staircase. At the top he leaned against the window by the ticket booth only to see that the 10:06 was approaching Platform 2. He snatched his ticket from the agent and, wheezing now, stumbled down the other stairway to the platform, steadying himself on the hand-rail, and with a final effort leaped into the car only seconds before the doors closed. He heaved in great gulps of air and flopped back in his seat.

Through the window to his right the Hudson was gliding by. He’d brought the Times from home, but was too tense and unsettled to read. His mind was a blank while he recovered his breath and composure. He gazed out at the passing jumble of sheds and warehouses, rusting, neglected machinery, and then the Tappan Zee Bridge and later, as the line drew farther away from the river, dense trees and sudden glimpses of tidy villages with half-empty streets.

The train stopped only at 125^th Street. After that it was minutes before it rumbled through the shadowy underground passages on the last few hundred yards of track outside Grand Central, the lights in the car flashing on and off. People were already standing up, reaching for their coats.

When the train drew into the platform a sudden attack of panic gripped him in the chest. This wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t possibly go back to that place. He’d be an anachronism, a dinosaur. Vogel was nearly thirty years his junior, while most of the staff would be half his age. The daily routines had changed since he was in business. Communications were hugely more electronic. He’d never used a cell phone and knew nothing about things like i-Phones, networking and video conferencing that his young neighbors talked about incessantly. There’d be new buzzwords, unfamiliar jargon. How could he hope to catch up?

But after he walked up the slope through the archway and came out into the airy concourse he felt much better. He gazed up into the renovated galaxy in the ceiling, awed by the transfiguration that had taken place since he was a daily commuter. It was almost like a spiritual awakening. Now, in contrast with the clutter of scaffolding, the ear-shattering machine-gun fire of jackhammers and pneumatic drills, it seemed in a way like some consecrated place, with its polished marble walls and lofty, majestic windows. A cathedral, even.

He was in perfect time. More relaxed now, he emerged from the station onto the wet sidewalk of 42^nd Street under a black, overcast sky, heading up to Madison Avenue and down the few blocks to the office. There were new faces behind the security desk in the echoing entrance hall. Once they’d have hailed him by name with a grin of recognition. Today there was only a mumbled request to sign the register.

Alone in the elevator he smoothed his hair and straightened his tie. Things had changed on the 46^th floor. Gone was the Regency wallpaper he’d chosen, in harmony with a reproduction Louis XVI reception desk with its matching chairs. The style was now minimalist. A young woman seated behind a cantilevered steel and glass table smiled up at him. A tiny black bud microphone like an astronaut’s seemed to hover near her lips.

She beamed at him. “You’ll be Mr. Bradford, right?”

He nodded. “Yes. I’m seeing Mr. Vogel at eleven.”

“He’s expecting you.” She touched a button. “Mr. Bradford’s here to see Burt . . .”

The receptionist seemed to be listening for a few seconds and then turned to him.

“He’ll be a minute or two.”

The minute or two passed and the young woman turned to him again and smiled. “I’m afraid Burt’s, like, behind schedule. His assistant axed me if you’d mind waiting for a few moments. Would you like a cup of coffee or something?”

He thanked her, but declined. These days he was careful not to drink much coffee or tea, since he tended to have problems finding a bathroom when he was away from home. He’d be embarrassed if he had to leave the room while he was talking to Burt Vogel.

There were papers and magazines on the coffee table, but he was still too much on edge to read them. Instead, he stood up, hands in pockets, and paced about the reception area.

He looked up at eight spot-lit clocks on the wall, marked New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Sydney. They weren’t there in his day. It had always been Burt’s ambition to have a network of wholly-owned offices, and it looked as though he was getting there. When Frank retired, the name of the firm had been Focus Public Relations, but now it was Focus Worldwide in ultramarine neon. On another wall were framed awards and, in showcases, Oscar-like trophies, including a cluster of Silver Anvils and some awards he didn’t recognize.

Presently a handsome gray-haired woman in a black pants suit appeared through a glass door and shook his hand, introducing herself as Suzanne, Vogel’s assistant.

“I’m really sorry for the delay, Mr. Bradford. Burt’s been having a bad day, but he’ll be out very soon.”

He sat down again. The clock marked New York said twenty after eleven. The receptionist caught his eye and smiled at him reassuringly, showing faultless, seemingly incandescent teeth.

“What happened to Aleesha Brown?” he asked her.

“Aleesha? Oh, she left way back. She’s had three babies . . . brought them all in a few days ago. Cute kids.”

“So you took her place?”

The young woman laughed. “No way! There were two other girls after her. I’ve only been here a few months.”

“Like it?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Sure, like it’s a job. Know what I’m saying?”

Frank sat down again, and waited.

What the hell was Vogel up to? A few more minutes passed, and then the glass doors burst open. Burt Vogel stood, his arms raised in greeting.

“Frank Bradford, you old bastard! Good to see ya’!”

Vogel hadn’t changed much. The crew cut, the shifty eyes, the oddly pointy face. No wonder the staff called him ‘the ferret.’ He wore what Frank’s younger neighbors in Westchester would have called casual chic – an open neck under a Polo sweater, tailored chinos and loafers. He bounded forward and grasped Frank firmly by both shoulders, and Frank couldn’t help wondering whether Vogel was about to kiss him.

“Dunno what you’re doin’ to keep in trim, Frankie, but keep doin’ it. You're’ lookin' great! Come on in.”

They settled in armchairs, facing each other in a corner of Vogel’s office.

“So how’s business?” Frank asked.

“Pretty damn good. Mind you, it’s very different now.”

“Different?”

“Yeah, we, like, changed course a couple of times. No more of that consumer crap. Not much corporate, neither. We’re really into environmental stuff, healthcare and medical these days. A lot of product and issue-oriented public affairs stuff.”

There it was, the jargon. Well, he could cope with that.

“We – that is, you – were moving into hi-tech,” Frank said, “What happened to all that? It was big.”

Did he imagine it, or did Vogel flinch?

“Most of that went down the drain last year. All those freakin’ dot-coms. Yeah, that hit us pretty hard. We had to let quite a few people go. You probably heard about that.”

Frank said no, he hadn’t heard.

“Bad scene,” Vogel said.

Frank wondered when he’d get to the point. But then Vogel changed the subject. “It’s a long time,” he said. “Remind me. How long is it since you retired?”

“Nearly nine years.”

Vogel whistled. “Enjoyin’ it?”

“Most of the time, I guess.”

“What about the rest of the time?”

Frank had decided he wouldn’t tell Vogel he'd give anything to be back at his desk. Not yet, anyway. He’d mind what he said, with no hint of the aimlessness of his life at home, his wife’s abusiveness, his bad back, the prostate thing, the memory lapses.

“Well, I confess I get a little bit restless up there,” he said. “I don’t get quite enough to keep my mind active and, well, I do rather miss the old days at Focus.”

“Don’t think we haven’t missed you too, Frankie,” Vogel said. “They don’t make ‘em like you anymore, old pal.” He paused, leaned forward and patted Frank on the knee. “I’ll be honest, if we have a problem here it’s finding senior people with the skills you brought to the place – energy, creativity, loyalty, integrity. Trouble is, everyone’s been promoted too goddamn fast. It’s the Peter Principle run amok. They’ve no real experience, you see. No precedents to apply to other clients’ problems. What we need is more experienced people.”

“Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

Vogel’s face brightened. “Yeah, you guessed it. I was broodin’ over this at home last week and I had an idea. In fact I nearly called you.”

He was sure of it. Burt Vogel was going to ask him for help. Maybe full-time, or at least as a consultant of some kind. Frank’s tension of the last hour or two had dissolved and given way to a surge of self-assurance.

“Tell me more about your idea.”

Vogel leaned back in his chair. “Ok, listen. I’ll cut the bullshit. Fact is, we’ve lost a whole bunch of good people. A lot of them have done well and moved up the totem pole. Here’s the idea – how about we hatch a plan to win ‘em back?”

“How?” Frank asked.

“Good question. S’pose we had a party,” Vogel said, “in some cool night spot we’d take over for the night. We’d ask the lot of ‘em, knowing the ones who hate our guts wouldn’t turn up anyway.”

“I get it,” Frank said, “you’d finish up with Focus alumni at every level who still had a residual good feeling about us.”

“Right!” Vogel said. “There’ll be a few who are just plain curious, but what the hell? We’ll give ‘em all a great time, lots to eat and drink, disco and stuff. Hey, we could screen some great nostalgic video, too!”

“And then, I guess, you’ll say a few well-chosen words.”

Vogel shook his head. “Nah! They’ll see what we’re up to – I’ll just make it a quickie. The real recruiting bit comes after everyone’s gone home, see? We’ll make our people really work the room, sure. But, a few days after the party’s over we’ll sit round the table and compare notes. Then we can draw up a list of people and approach ‘em one-on-one. Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey. Geddit?”

“Sounds great,” Frank said. “So what’s the next step?”

Vogel grinned. “Aha! This is where you come in.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Think about it, old buddy. Who knows more than you about the history of this outfit?”

Wasn’t it a certainty by now? In a minute or two Vogel would invite him to run his recruiting beano. Wasn’t planning and running events one of his specialties? It was worth a few grand. And, as well as that, he’d get a foot back in the door at Focus. Why didn’t Vogel just come out with it and pop the question?

“Ok, Burt, tell me what you want me to do?”

Vogel was talking faster. “You were here for nearly thirty years, and you’re a good judge of character. I bet you could put together a list of workmates as long as your arm,” he said, “and what I’d really like is a list like that, underlining the names of the ones you personally think were hot operators, real pro’s. Will you do that for me?”

Was this all? Just a measly list of names of former employees to ask to a damn party? Couldn’t he have asked for this in a five-minute phone call, instead of dragging him all the way into New York?

He wanted to say ‘No! Stick it, I owe you nothing. Find some other poor stiff you’ve unloaded a few days after his sixty-fifth birthday.’

But he didn’t. He said, “Glad to,” and hated himself for it.

“Jeez, you're a real pal,” Vogel said, “I knew you’d do it!” Then he added, “When would be a good time of the year to do it?”

“To do what?”

“The party, of course”.

“Let me think about that,” Frank said.

Vogel’s secretary stood in the doorway and caught her boss’s eye.

“What's up, Suze?” Vogel asked.

Suzanne made a barely perceptible hitch of her head that said, ‘may we talk?’

Vogel excused himself and joined her in the doorway. A whispered conversation followed, at the end of which Frank distinctly heard Vogel say "No problem, tell ‘em I'll be there.”

Vogel sat down again.

“Shit! Gotta problem, Frankie . . . client in real trouble . . . wants me right now in his office on Fifth. Some kind of flap at the FDA.”

He patted Frank’s knee again. “I’m real sorry, I hoped we could have a good lunch at Giovanni’s. Just you and me together, so’s we could catch up a bit.”

He snapped his fingers. “Hey, tell you what, let's do lunch some other time. Give Suze a call and she'll fix it up. Ok?”

Vogel was pulling on his raincoat and heading for the door, calling instructions to Suzanne. His mind was already somewhere else. Seconds later he was gone, leaving Frank stunned, standing in the middle of the room.

He didn’t fix the lunch date with Suzanne, who was all over him with apologies. Instead he nodded a friendly enough goodbye and sat down for a minute or two in the reception area, where the pert young woman had gone to lunch and been replaced by someone else. He had to admit it, he’d been a ninny. It was all a big mistake. His wife had been right about Vogel, he was a user and a jerk, and of course Frank had always known that stuff about free lunches.

But what to do now? Frank weighed his options. The first was to have a bite at Grand Central and go home to face a battery of monologues peppered with sneering questions like ‘well, what did I tell you?’ – or ‘why don’t you listen to me?’ But when the second option slipped into his mind he couldn’t suppress a little chuckle, though the receptionist didn’t seem to notice. He’d play hooky – have a few hours on the loose in Manhattan! There might not be free lunches but there were certainly free afternoons. Hell, he was retired wasn’t he? He’d go to a movie at two o’clock in the afternoon – take in one of the great independent pictures they never showed at their glitzy, plastic MovieMax at home.

Frank opened his newspaper and searched the listings in the Arts section. This was going to be fun! He’d buy himself a damn great bag of popcorn drenched in butter without her nagging him about cholesterol. Why hadn’t he treated himself to a day in the city before, letting his hair down, meeting old pals? A whole new way of life was opening up to him.

Sure, he’d dredge up some names of former colleagues for Vogel’s dumb list. But it would also be a great way to start checking out a list of long lost buddies.

He had his umbrella ready as he pushed through the glass doors onto the Street, but when he stood on the sidewalk he peered up into the afternoon sky.

The clouds were clearing, and the sun was coming out.

ooo0ooo

Man in the Mirror

2010-10-16T14:28:00.002-04:00

He died fifty-one years ago, yet I see him every day. Each morning, all I need to do is look in the bathroom mirror, and there he is.

“Morning, Dad,” I’ll say as our eyes meet, though usually under my breath, for fear that Lynn, my wife, will take these mutterings as an early indication of approaching dementia.

Even though he was maybe two inches taller than I, and had straight hair and a mustache, we still looked alike and, now that I’m nearly ten years older than he was when he died, I know that we share many quirky mannerisms. Yet in other ways we were about as different as anyone could be.

Sadly, it was years after he’d gone that I really began to realize what an unusual and lovable man he was. Perhaps, before his sudden death at the age of seventy, I wrongly evaluated people in terms of their material success. Now, I hope, I’m older and maybe even a little wiser, because by those criteria my father wouldn’t have measured up. Like their ancestors, doctors and surgeons for generations, his two brothers became professionals, Bill a doctor and Frank a lawyer. But after his stint at a boarding school in Somerset, my father didn’t go on to college; instead he became a clerk in a rural branch of the Westminster Bank, and spent the rest of his working life in small country towns.

He was the most extraordinary mix of seemingly incompatible traits. On one hand he was warm and kind and generous, yet at the same time he was wracked by anxiety about money, and an irrational fear of being burgled. While he was fervent in his attempt to nurture my brother David and me, and to see to it that we were well-informed, he was one of the least tactile people I’ve ever known. I don’t think he ever hugged us, and he certainly never kissed us. From my early teens I addressed him as ‘Sir,’ and whenever we met or parted -- even later when I might have been overseas for a year or two -- we only shook hands.

But for all his apparent remoteness, he was capable of making us laugh, bursting spontaneously into song and verse, or posing some silly riddle from his own early childhood in the 1890’s.

“What kind of noise annoys an oyster?” he’d ask.

“We don’t know, Dad. What noise annoys an oyster.”

“Why?” he’d say, “a noisy noise annoys an oyster.”

When you’re five or six that’s pretty funny, but sometimes his verses were a little too macabre for our mother, who thought we were a trifle young for some of them. In a solemn voice he’d recite:

“Oh dear Mama, what is that mess?

It looks like strawberry jam.

Hush, hush, my dears, ‘tis your Papa,

run over by a tram.”

My father had three brothers, and a sister, Janet. All four boys were in the army in World War I, and three survived. Arthur, the youngest, a shy, fragile youth, died in the trenches in Flanders, while Frank and Bill served nearby in France. Bill won the Military Cross patching up the wounded under enemy fire during the Battle of The Somme. My father, Harold, caught a chunk of shrapnel in the stomach, and after being shipped home to hospital, finished the war running a prison camp in Belgium. He must have been the most benevolent commandant, for our house was full of strange artifacts that German prisoners had made for him out of brass shell-cases: ashtrays, a dinner-gong that hung in an oak frame, and a pipe tobacco jar with a lid, all with ‘Kapt. H. Birch’ engraved on them.

Father was fifty when, in 1939, the second World War broke out. He became an air raid warden, and my mother a volunteer ambulance driver. We lived in a village on the estuary of the river Thames, along which the German bombers came and went during their raids on London. Our county, Kent, was the stage on which much of the Battle of Britain was played, and it bristled with searchlights and anti-aircraft batteries. My father’s job as a warden was fairly leisurely. He and other older villagers prowled the streets and farm buildings to check that windows were blacked-out, and to watch for fires from incendiary bombs. My mother, on the other hand, found herself carrying hundreds of casualties after air attacks on the fighter and bomber bases dotted around the surrounding countryside.

One moonless night there was an incident that typified the clown in my father, and at the same time, his serious-mindedness. For an hour or so, after hearing strange sounds in an apple orchard, he crawled on hands and knees, believing himself to be stalking a German parachutist. When he at last threw himself, unarmed, on his prey, it turned out to be a startled sheep, much to the later amusement of his fellow wardens in the village pub.

Father was an inveterate walker, and as teenagers on our long summer vacations from boarding school, David and I would stroll with him between the tall hazel-wood hedgerows in the narrow lanes around the village. He called these excursions ‘informative walks’ and, as patriarch turned pedagogue, would quiz us about which river flowed through what city, dates of the reigns of English kings and queens, quotations from Shakespeare, and even Latin common nouns, most of which I still remember more nearly seventy years later.

There was one poignant scenario near the end of my father’s working life about which my mother didn’t tell me until he was dead. It revealed one chronic cause of anxiety that I realize we shared during our lives – a hell that, for lack of a better word, I will call job anxiety. For years, as far back as I can remember, he was the Number 2 at his bank in the little market town of Sittingbourne. And one day in the Thirties he was short-listed for a post as Number 1 of a bigger branch, and summoned to London.

He was almost shaking with fear when he boarded the train for London to attend an 11:00 a.m. interview at the Westminster Bank headquarters. Eleven o’clock passed, then twelve, and he had still not been called. At two he was sent out to lunch, and it wasn’t until nearly four p.m. that the interview began. By that time he was in such a state that he was barely coherent. He didn’t get the job.

I’m retired now, and have two children, thousands of miles away with on two different continents with their own families. Sometimes I wonder whether, forty-odd years from now, in the distant, impossible-to-imagine 2050’s, my son will ever look into his shaving-mirror and see and speak to me. If he and his sister remember me even a fraction as fondly as I do my father, that’ll be just fine by me.

oo0oo

A Man's Gotta Do . . .

2010-09-14T13:14:00.001-04:00

Devon rhymes with heaven, and for good reason. The English county of Devonshire is all green grass, chocolate-box cottages and fishermen’s coves, wedged between three equally beautiful counties: Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset. Together, these make up the farthest corner of England -- a paradisical peninsula jutting into the Celtic Sea, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

When an Englishman thinks of Devonshire, cider and clotted cream come to mind, and wild Exmoor, where buzzards swoop overhead, and red deer and wild ponies roam free. The very last thing anyone would associate with Devon would be the Stafford Furniture Company, Limited.

In the 1970s, the town council of Barnstaple voted quietly for the creation of an industrial park to be tucked in a woody area on the edge of the town. This would result in jobs, and in increased business and tax income, they claimed. It would be good for Barnstaple. The local weekly paper gave the story supportive splash headlines, and not a letter was written to the editor; and not a voice raised in protest. Barnstaple’s people weren’t like that. Not at that point, anyway.

Barnstaple’s elders kept a wary eye on the kinds of plant that set up shop in their industrial park. The newcomers tended to be environmentally friendly -- which was not a phrase much used in England at that time. There was a manufacturer of duvets, for whom an environmental crisis could be nothing more serious than a cloud of goose feathers accidentally leaked into the atmosphere. There were two household furniture factories that made couches and armchairs out of local oak and imported hardwoods. Another made window shades, and others produced balls of twine, cardboard boxes, and a brand of confectionery very similar to Twinkies.

And then along came Jack Stafford, a tall, lean man in his early thirties who had bushy black eyebrows, and who, had he chosen to be an actor, would have made a perfect hero in a Bronte or Dickens movie. Jack was a furniture designer who had recently won several awards from Britain’s prestigious Design Council. However, his furniture was not comfy couches and chairs for peoples’ homes. His business was contract furniture, and his specialty was stacking chairs, for use in conference rooms, hospitals and other public places. He’d been so successful that his firm had recently been bought by the Thomas Tilling Group, a conglomerate active in everything from life insurance and laboratory glassware to engineering. Stafford’s small workshop in Norfolk could no longer cope with the demand, and Tilling agreed to invest in a new plant elsewhere.

When Stafford’s planning application reached the town council, the burghers of Barnstaple read it with care. They looked at artfully lit photographs of his award-winning chairs, and another that showed his impressive gold-plated trophy from the Design Council. The recent acquisition by the respected Thomas Tilling Group was noted, and the application was accepted.

At that time I was a public relations consultant to several Tilling Group companies, including Stafford Furniture. Jack Stafford and I drove down to Devon to see how the new building, on a site on the edge of Barnstaple Bay, was progressing. For me, the main aim of this trip was to gather enough information to write a proposal for organizing and publicizing the official opening of the plant about a year later.

At one point we passed a rectangular building, out of which several pipes snaked toward the bay.

“What’s that going to be?” I asked.

“That? Oh, it’ll be the water treatment plant.”

“What’s it going to treat, exactly?”

Jack seemed unconcerned. “It takes the gunk out of the water we use in the plating process.”

“What kind of gunk?”

“Chromium and cadmium. They’re deadly poisons, of course. We use them to put the chrome on our chairs. The treatment plant will filter it out, so by the time it gets into the bay it’ll be as clean as a whistle.”

That sounded ohttps://www.google.com/accounts/RP?c=CPDnvvropuqU2gEQ9eC68aaf9cY9&hl=enk to me, and my mind switched elsewhere.

The plant began what they called ‘pilot production’ about three months before the official opening ceremony planned for April 1971. A few days after the first shiny chrome-plated chairs came off the assembly line, Jack Stafford called me in my office in London.

“Bit of a fuss going on in Devon, John,” he said.

“Really? “ I said.

“There are people demonstrating at the gate.”

“Demonstrating? What about?”

“Some of the townspeople are in a bit of a tizzy about the plating plant. They’ve heard about the chrome and cadmium. They think our treated water could kill the fish in the bay, and find its way into the town’s water supply.”

“What’s your reaction to that, Jack?” I asked.

“It’s piffle,” he said. “Absolute bosh! That water’s as pure as the driven snow. Why? A baby could drink it."

In a day or so we’d fixed a press conference, at which the plant manager and I met the demonstrators and the local media. Armed with documents from the firm of consultants certifying the purity of the water, we took reporters on a guided tour of the plant. On the next day the noisy, banner-waving crowd was gone from the factory gates and, later in the week, stories appeared in the local paper and broadcast media assuring Barnstaple’s citizens that they had nothing to fear.

For the next few months all was quiet. Then, one day in the spring, Jack Stafford and his board of directors converged on the town’s best hotel in readiness for the opening ceremony. Later in the day came Sir Geoffrey Eley, the chairman of the Thomas Tilling Group and others of his ilk, together with Jeremy Thorpe, the popular Member of Parliament for Devon North. With my press releases, photographs, lists of invitees, name tabs and other PR paraphernalia after weeks of preparatory work, I was there checking and counter-checking, phoning and fussing.

That evening, as we all relaxed in the hotel bar enjoying pre-dinner drinks, I heard what seemed to be raised voices in the street outside the hotel. I looked out the window, where about thirty people were gathering, unfurling banners on which the word ‘Poison’ seemed to be prominent.

“They’re back,” I whispered to Jack.

“Who are?”

“The demonstrators.”

Stafford and I slipped out of the bar and into the street, where a slightly belligerent man with a red, round face asked me, “Is that Stafford bloke in there?”

“He’s right here.” I said.

Stafford strolled up to the man, for all the world like Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. But he held out his hand. “How do you do,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, you can shut down that bloody factory for a start!” the man said.

An argument began about the efficacy of the water treatment plant, at the end of which Stafford said, “Listen, my good man, I thought we cleared this up once and for all last year. Tell me, what do we have to do to convince you this water’s perfectly safe?”

The man thought for a moment, and his colleagues craned to hear his answer.

“There’s only one thing,” he said. “If you can get one of them high-ups to drink some of that water himself, in front of the newspapers and that. Then we’ll believe ya’”

“Bargain,” said Stafford, and they shook hands again.

Who’d impress them most, Jack and I wondered. We doubted Sir Geoffrey Eley would do it. Who better, we agreed, than their own, likeable Member of Parliament?

Back in the bar I sidled up to Jeremy Thorpe and put the question to him.

With a sly grin he said. “Why not? But there’s one condition.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“That you drink it first,” said the MP for Devon North.

In the morning I slipped out and bought an elegant crystal goblet from the nearby Dartington Glass Works, and half an hour later, the Right Honorable Jeremy Thorpe, Jack Stafford, a foreman and I stood together, alone, around a faucet in the water treatment plant.

The water ran clear and clean. I raised the goblet to my lips. It was flat, and utterly tasteless. I refilled the glass and passed it to the others.

“Not a vintage year, I ‘d say,” Thorpe said dryly.

Three hours later the band played, Sir Geoffrey Eley cut the ceremonial tape, and the VIP party meandered through the plant under the watchful eyes of the reporters and TV cameras. At the water treatment plant, true to his word, Jeremy Thorpe drank a convincing amount of the water. Then, inviting an unbiased witness to join him, he poured himself another glass, carried it to the front of the building, raised his goblet to the crowd, and downed the entire contents. Smiling broadly, the Right Honorable Member made a little bow.

The demonstrators had watched silently among the public on their tiered benches, waiting for the show, their banners furled but ready. Slowly, a ripple of applause from the audience swelled into cheers.

And we never heard from them again.

oo0oo

Lucy, Soapy and Dogs

2010-08-16T09:11:00.004-04:00

It’s taken more than three-quarters of my life to realize that the best teachers and professors in my life were the ones who taught not from their heads but from their hearts.

I enjoyed languages, and Latin, French and German came fairly easily. I also felt comfortable enough with biology, chemistry, geography and history. The people who taught these were competent enough, but what I learned about art, music and English literature has lived with me forever, simply because these were taught with a transparent passion for their subject matter.

But math? Forget it. Mr. Griffin, the math master, taught only from his head. As a result I'm arithmetically challenged. I count on my fingers under restaurant tables to work out how much to tip. I can’t read a balance sheet to save my life, and making change is always a puzzle. You’ll find more on this shortcoming in this blog, in a piece entitled “Count Me Out.”

At the time I thought I was a dunce at math because I was plain dumb, and later that maybe it was to do with being a right-brain person. But now I’m convinced it was because Mr. Griffin, our fast-talking Welsh math master, was all brain and no heart. Gray-haired, short and irascible, he galloped through his lessons, scrawling illegible equations and proofs on the board, laboring under the wrong assumption that everyone in the class was keeping up with him. At almost every lesson he lost his temper, shouting and hurling sticks of blackboard chalk into his bewildered audience. It was only then that he displayed any passion or emotion. Griffin died halfway through my time at the school, and for me the only sad thing about his demise was that although his successor – Mr. Hawkins – was patient and paternal, it was too late to start again. By then the die was cast.
World War II was raging for the first few years of my days at Cranbrook, a boarding school in South East England. Most of the masters were either too old to be in the armed services, or had some physical or other reason not to be in uniform. Oddly, there was not a single woman on the teaching staff. It seems it occurred to no one then that a woman might be capable of explaining the difference between an equilateral and an isosceles triangle to a bunch of fourteen-year-olds.
Mr. Lockett was one of the masters whose love of his subjects – art, fine arts and workshop – endeared him to his students. He was a gangling, bony man with hugely thick horn-rimmed glasses who we nicknamed ‘Lucy’, after the character Lucy Lockett in a nursery rhyme. He was a Communist and also a conscientious objector, but never preached about his politics or pacifism. He was impassioned about art in all its forms. In his painting and drawing classes we inherited his love of the Post-Impressionists and Surrealists. It’s no wonder that visitors touring the art room on the annual Parents’ Day were puzzled to find the pervasive influences of Cezanne, Matisse and Dali in our own efforts displayed on the art room walls.
But it was Lucy Lockett’s fine art classes that affected me for life. He'd amassed what seemed to be hundreds of color postcards of paintings. They ranged from the nativities and crucifixions from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, the Romantics, the Realists, Dada, and contemporary work that included Kandinsky, Klee, Ben Shahn and Homer Winslow.

With a contraption called an epidiascope, Lockett projected these images on the whitewashed walls of the art room. So profound was his knowledge that he held us spellbound while he explained the artist’s intent, the focus and symmetry of each picture, its balance and the minutiae of the painter’s life and environment. Sometimes we’d discuss a single picture for the entire forty-five minute period, while over a month we’d study, say, the Florentines, the Pre-Raphaelites or the Cubists. So, through the history of art, with Lucy’s help, we dissected the astonishing detail of Vermeer’s interiors, recognized the social messages in Daumier’s grim portrayals of peasants at work, witnessed Van Gogh’s craziness creeping into his pictures, and the threat of Nazism looming over the German painters of the 30s. We weren't only learning about pictures hanging on walls in dusty galleries, but also about the artists themselves, history, psychology, religion, human nature, and life itself.

It was Lockett who brought bags of broken Lucite into the workshop, fragments of the cockpit covers of enemy and friendly fighters and bombers that plunged from time to time into the farmland and woods around the school. These we cut and polished, fashioning them into useful objects – letter-openers, signet rings, paperweights and napkin holders. Later, we carved figures of humans and animals that bore an almost passing resemblance to pieces from Lockett's treasured collection of Japanese netsuke, exquisite miniature ivory sculptures.

And then there was Mr.Hudson, the music master who also, like every one else – except the late Mr. Griffin – had had a nickname. ‘Hudson’s Washing Soap’ was the best-known brand of laundry powder, and so he was labeled ‘Soapy’. A darkly handsome man with a perennial five-o’clock shadow, he played seventy-eight-speed records on an ancient phonograph. Much like Lucy Lockett and his artists, Soapy Hudson knew his composers and their lives as though they were members of his own family.

In the 1940s, the world’s greatest composers were believed to be Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Brahms. Soapy Hudson taught us their names in order of birth with an impossible-to-forget mnemonic – Please Bring Half a Hundredweight, Mother, Because Sister Wants Bananas.
These nine, and many others’ works, were played again and again during my seven years at Cranbrook. We became so familiar with the great symphonies that we could hum along with them. We felt we’d been there when Beethoven was composing his ninth and final symphony, angrily pressing his ear to the lid of the piano in a vain attempt to hear the notes, even though by then he’d been stone deaf for seven years. We all but heard Schumann, a chronic manic-depressive, whistling softly to himself, facing the wall in his favorite coffee shop before his early death in an asylum. We felt for lonely Brahms, a lifelong bachelor who, even when well off, lived in a rented room in Vienna. He rose every day at five a.m., brewed himself cup after cup of pungent black coffee from a samovar, and smoked equally strong cheroots. How, Hudson asked us, could such a man write music that was so heartfelt, so romantic? But he never told us about Brahms’ curiously profound relationship with Clara Schumann for thirty years after her husband, Robert Schumann’s death.

And then there was ‘Dogs’ Saunders, who taught English Literature. Larger than life, he was as different from Lucy Lockett and Soapy Hudson as chalk is from cheese. Since he had fought in several campaigns in the trenches in World War I, he was probably in his sixties, as much as thirty years older than his arty and musical counterparts.

Throughout the Twenties and Thirties, before his blondish hair had grayed, earlier student generations had called him ‘Sandy.’ But by the 1940s, because he could be ferocious at times, and actually bared his teeth when he was upset, he had become ‘Dogs.’ Yet it didn’t take us long to discover that his bark was worse than his bite.

Dogs Saunders was florid-faced, gravel-voiced, and corpulent, and had an oddly distinctive walk. Seeing him hurrying to a class, or heading down the village street for one of his all too frequent visits to the bar of the George Hotel, even on the calmest summer day he walked as though he were wading into a strong wind. Besides teaching English lit., he was also the school’s deputy headmaster, and the commanding officer of its highly active wartime unit of the OTC, the Officers’ Training Corps.

Dogs’ classes focused almost entirely on three playwrights, whom he called ‘The Three S’s: Shakespeare, Sheridan and Shaw. These weren’t remotely representative of the whole compass of English letters but, luckily, two other masters more than capably handled the real gamut from Chaucer, through Milton and Wordsworth, to Joyce and Woolf. There are ample reasons why Saunders belonged up there with the two other memorable teachers; he had an abiding and infectious passion for Shakespeare, and taught it superbly, if idiosyncratically. As a student himself, he must have studied the plays and sonnets with almost the same labored devotion with which an Imam learns the Koran. For me, a thorough grounding in Shakespeare turned out to be a perfect foundation for a later, broader study of English. Like Lucy Lockett and his postcards, Dogs unveiled insights that formed the beginnings of an early understanding of human personality and behavior.

It certainly wasn't the major’s ability to read aloud that endeared us to Shakespeare's plays. In fact, he read them terribly badly, with a total absence of feeling for the words. His reading of Richard III's impassioned plea for "a horse . . . my kingdom for a horse . . ." had all the fire and pathos of someone reading a telephone book. And when he read the lines of Ophelia and Cordelia – two of the Bard’s most tragic and feminine characters, he made no attempt to alter or soften his voice. His pitch and key were no different from his voice for Hamlet and Lear.
Where was the magic, then, the fascination, the thrill? Strangely, Dogs’ monotonous tone didn't matter. It was his self-interruptions, his asides and translations of the language that made him the wizard he was. There seemed to be nothing he didn't know about the characters, their motivations, the different facets of their personalities and the actual construction of the plays. But for him, when seeing As You Like It on the stage, we’d never have known that melancholy and philosophical Jaques (whom Dogs correctly pronounced ‘Jaqueez’ and not Jacques) was there to inject some gravity and reflectiveness into what would otherwise have been little more than a saccharine Harlequin romance. In the same way he explained comic relief, showing how the bawdy nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the wisecracking grave digger in Hamlet and the lewd Porter in Macbeth were inserted at exactly the right point in the plays to offset these tragedies’ stark horror. Here was one of our first lessons in the craftsmanship of writing.
There was no doubt that Saunders’ favorite play was Henry V. He was, after all, a bemedaled, battle proven veteran who profoundly believed that King and Country came before all else. Henry V is an enactment of war, courage and loyalty to the Crown, and probably the most patriotic play ever written, so it’s not surprising that the old man became watery-eyed, and his voice sometimes cracked when he read Henry’s rousing speeches. Is it too fanciful to believe that, in his mind, he was not a spectator at Agincourt, but back at war in France himself? Instead of the chaos of Henry’s battlefield in France, was he hearing the chatter of German machine-gun fire at Ypres, or on the Somme, the sudden bursts of flares in the night sky, the silence before the charge? Could he see and hear the writhing, unattended wounded, or smell the first pungent whiff of poison gas?

Dogs could become fiercely loquacious whenever anyone dared suggest that the superhuman outpourings of Shakespeare, a mere glove maker’s son and a grammar school boy, were written by someone else. He scoffed at the suggestion that more worldly, university-educated men such as Bacon, Marlowe, an earl or two or even the well-educated and studious King James I might have been responsible. He took the side of the ‘Stratfordians,’ who were equally dismissive of the theory, but whose case these days holds as little water as that of the Flat Earth Society, or the Creationists. Even then, half a century ago, I found his rebuttals over-defensive and unconvincing.

Dogs’ other playwrights – both Irishmen , Sheridan and Shaw – received short shrift compared with Shakespeare. But during our study of two of Sheridan’s plays, The School for Scandal and The Rivals, he seemed to become a different person altogether. The sheer zest of these two Regency comedies, with their racy tales about marital infidelity, fraud and mistaken identity, seemed to bring him beaming out of his shell. He was tickled by the very names of the characters such as Lady Sneerwell and Mrs. Candour in School for Scandal, and Lydia Languish and verbally-inept Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals, and he positively chortled at their antics.

When it came to Shaw, the major unexpectedly revealed his true political colors. Who would have thought that this dyed-in-the-wool, stiff upper-lip Englishman was not a staunch Conservative but instead leaned somewhat to the left? There was no hint of this when we were immersed in Saint Joan, but when we got to Pygmalion there was no doubt he was a latent lefty. Unlike My Fair Lady, Shaw’s play is almost a political tract, a parody of the idle rich, an attack on class distinction and a billboard for the cause of feminism. Dogs made no secret, at least in the classroom, that he, too, was a champion of the working man and woman.
Lucy, Soapy and Dogs were three men with uniquely different personalities and beliefs. They shared their passions and played a part in making me whatever I‘ve become. In their way they were the lions of my boyhood – a pride of pedagogues.

----

DUTY DOG

2010-07-23T11:31:00.002-04:00

It wasn’t a lot of fun being duty officer. On call during weekday nights or whole weekends, he'd spend his evenings sitting alone at a desk in the adjutant’s office, and sleeping near a phone, fully-dressed, on a camp bed in a room that was as cozy and commodious as a broom closet. No wonder the duty officer was nicknamed "duty dog."

On a quiet night it was fairly straightforward. You might handle an occasional phone call from brigade headquarters, or deal with a minor fire caused by a drunken soldier falling asleep while smoking in bed. At worst you’d have to confront an abusive street-walker causing a scene at the barrack gate, complaining she’d been wronged by one of the troops.

Among the duty officer’s routines was keeping the sentries on their toes. Once every night, some time between midnight and six in the morning, we’d make a surprise visit to the eight soldiers who, woken while snatching a nap in the guard house between turns on sentry duty, would tumble out under the dim yellow lights, yawning and tousled, their weapons ready for inspection.

An even less popular function as duty dog was accompanying the duty sergeant-major to the cookhouse, to inspect the mens’ meals and invite complaints. The food was terrible, yet this routine of asking for complaints had been a tradition in the British Army since long before the battle of Waterloo, and both officers and men knew it was a pointless exercise. But it did give even the most lowly soldier an opportunity for a joke at a junior officer’s expense. The duty officer would approach each table and ask “any complaints?” Normally, old soldiers, knowing the score, would grin and shake their heads, but from time to time some barrack-room commedian would grin and say “Well, since you asked, Sir, the caviar’s not too fresh today.” The sergeant-major would growl something on the lines of: “That’s enough from you, you cheeky bugger!” and we’d pass on.

But some nights there were real dramas. One of my first spells as duty officer was at Ballykinlar camp in Northern Ireland, a remote spot where the Mountains of Morne really do sweep down to the sea as they say in the song. I had a call from a corporal’s wife in the batallion’s married quarters. Her husband was away on a posting somewhere, and she was bellowing with pain, calling for a breast pump. I was a few weeks short of my twenty-first birthday, and had no idea what a breast-pump was, nor why she’d ever ask for such a thing, but her need was clearly desperate, and I dispatched a driver the twenty or thirty miles to the nearest hospital. Meanwhile, her voice growing more hysterical, the unhappy woman called me every few minutes until the mysterious gadget arrived.

In a more poignant episode in the British Zone in occupied Germany, I had a phone call from the adjutant at our regimental depot back in England.
“Tricky job, John,” he said. “Corporal Randall’s mother’s died. Heart attack. ‘Fraid you’ll have to see the chap and give him the bad news.”

It was about seven in the evening on a Friday night, and the camp was deserted. I went down to Randall’s barrack room, where I found a lone soldier lying on his bed, reading a newspaper.

“Seen Corporal Randall?”

The man jumped up and shuffled to attention.“They’re all out, sir. It’s pay day, see?”

“All right,” I said. “When he gets back, tell him to see the duty officer, will you?”

It was past midnight when there was a knock at the door of my room.

“I’m Randall, sir. You wanted to see me?”

“Yes, I said. “Come inside for a moment.”

There were several hundred men in the battalion, and we’d never seen each other before. He entered a little hesitantly, removing his beret. I offered him a seat, clearing my tunic and belt from the only chair in the cramped little room.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Randall.”

I held out an open pack of cigarettes. He took one and I lit it for him.

“Bad news, sir?”

“Yes. I . . . I had a call from the depot tonight.” I told him. “It seems your mother was taken ill. They asked me to tell you she . . . she died this afternoon. I’m very sorry.”

Randall said nothing. He lowered his eyes and took a deep drag on his cigarette. When he looked up his eyes were wet with tears.

“She ‘ad one of them attacks before, See? We was always afraid she might ‘ave another one.”

We talked for a while about his family, and then he stood up, preparing to leave. A little self-consciously I put an arm round his shoulder. “Listen, it’s late,” I said. “Try to get some sleep, and tomorrow we’ll make out a travel warrant and send you home. OK?”

The next morning, just as I was going off-duty, I had another call from England.
“Morning, John,” the adjutant said. “I say . . . awfully embarrassing thing . . . turns out it wasn’t Randall’s mother who died.” I found it hard to hide my incredulity.

“Well, who was it?”

“It’s an odd business. Seems it was his girl-friend’s mother. Not quite the same thing, what? Awfully, sorry, old boy.”

It was just before seven in the morning, and I sent someone to fetch Randall. Again, he knocked on the door.

“I hardly know how to tell you this,” I said.

But to my astonishment, he actually grinned when I told him the true story.
“I didn’t like her a lot, to tell the truth,” he said. “And she’d have been a flippin’ awful mother-in-law.”

There was a genuinely tragic incident a year or two later, when I was duty officer in Cyprus. This time my visitor was another corporal, but unlike Randall – who’d been a fresh-faced draftee of about twenty – this man, with two rows of campaign medals on his chest, was a sun-shriveled veteran in his late forties, or older.
Corporal Benson was an armorer in one of the rifle companies. Each company had its own armory, where its weapons and ammunition were stored. The armories were stone buildings without windows, whose doors, like those in stables, were in two halves, so that the top section could be opened independently. Each armorer slept in his own dingy store room.

Benson was shaking with emotion when he came to see me. As he told it, a few evenings earlier he’d been sitting alone, naked on his bed doing something to himself that it’s impossible to define with any delicacy. While he was engaged in this solitary act, and unaware that he had an audience, some of his comrades had apparently peered into his shadowy quarters and taken a snapshot of him.

“They took a picture of you?”

“They did, sir.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“They’re showing pictures of me doin’ it. Around the canteen.”

“Have you seen these pictures? Actually seen them?”

“Well, no, sir. Not the pictures themselves.”

“Tell me this,” I said. “Did you see a flash go off when they took the pictures?”
Benson thought for a moment. “No. There wasn’t no flash. But I did look up and see them there.”

“Did you see the camera?”

“No, Sir. Can’t say I did.”

As I had done with Randall, I offered the man a cigarette. I weighed-up the story in my mind. The armories were dark inside and, by his account, Corporal Benson had been all of twenty feet from the doorway. Without a flash bulb it would have been impossible – absolutely impossible – to take a picture. I was convinced that he was being fooled by his comrades, and I told him so.

We talked for a while, and slowly Benson seemed to become as sure as I was that, embarrassing though his situation was, he’d been the victim of a mean practical joke, and no photographs were really being passed round to shame him further. He returned to his armory relaxed and encouraged. Or so I supposed.

But back in his room, Benson took a revolver, inserted a single round in the drum, stuck the weapon in his mouth, and killed himself.

At the subsequent inquiry it turned out that there had, indeed, been no photographs. But even now, about 60 years later, I can still see the anguish in Benson’s tired old eyes, and I can’t help asking myself what else I might have said to him, and what further comfort I might have offered.

. . .

PORTRAITS OF FIRE

2010-05-30T15:41:00.004-04:00

Outside, the rain flooded along the gutters in front of the Victorian row houses on Belmont Road. My father snored gently on those wet fall and winter Sunday afternoons, and every so often my mother, asleep and dreaming beside him on the settee, would let out what seemed like surprised little grunts. The only other sound was the sudden shifting of the coals in the fireplace.

Wide awake, my brother and I sat together on the hearth rug, the fire hot on our faces, in the safe little enclosure formed by our parents on their couch and the big, empty armchairs on either side of the fireplace. The coals glowed the colors of the rainbow, and if you looked closely you could peer into fiery caverns that would collapse from time to time, creating new fantasy scenes.

That comfortable picture in 1937, two years before Britain was at war, was the first of a whole lifetime of memories of fire, some as benign and emotionally warm as this one, while others had grimmer, even terrifying associations.
For the next dozen or so years we had annual bonfires on the fifth of November, when Britons -- for whom, of course, there’s no celebration of the fourth of July-- celebrate the burning at the stake of Guy Fawkes. Fawkes was a traitor who, in 1606, tried to blow up the Parliament building in London. Guy Fawkes Night is a subtle combination of Independence Day and Halloween. A week or two before it, children dress up at night as masked and caped conspirators, and scurry from door to door, seeking not trick-or-treat candy but ‘a penny for the Guy’ to buy fireworks. Somehow the grisly horror of burning a man alive has been lost over four hundred years. With a few invited friends, we’d gather in the first winter cold at the bottom of our garden, stuffing kerosene-soaked rags under a pile of dry tree limbs, wooden furniture from the town dump, and fruit and vegetable crates begged from the local green-grocer. Our parents watched solicitously from the shadows, coming forward to supervise the lighting of bottle rockets, Roman candles and Catherine wheels while we chattered around the flames licking around the masked, straw-filled effigy.

My first memory of a fire as an adult was in Finnish Lapland in the winter of 1951, heading south toward the end of an Arctic sledding adventure. The temperature hung around 50 degrees below zero as we followed the frozen river Teno. Gliding along the icy river late in the evening, and with the moon high, we halted at a deserted cabin on the riverbank. This, and others like it, were provided for travelers to take shelter. The snow had been blown up to the eaves of the cabin on the eastern side, but on the leeward side it was relatively easy to clear it from the doorway.
We tethered our reindeer and heaved open the door. Inside was a room measuring maybe twenty-five by thirty feet. At the far end was a fireplace of roughly hewn boulders, in front of which stood a rough pine trestle table. The walls, floor and ceiling were of dark bare wood, and there were six iron bedsteads, with neither mattresses nor blankets. Matti, our Lapp guide, led us outside and, with his sleeve, swept the snow and ice from a pile of pine logs, which we carried inside. Then in matter of seconds, with a little razor-sharp axe, and with the assured skill of an expert chef chopping shallots, Matti rapidly chipped out a fan of wafer-like slivers of bone dry resinous wood that, miraculously, caught fire as though they were doused in oil. In a few minutes the huge stone grate was aflame, making the whole cabin flicker and glow.

A year or two later, in Northern Ireland in the spring of 1952, two of my Army comrades and I had attached ourselves at weekends to the Royal Air Force mountain rescue team, which scrambled over the Mountains of Morne that really do, as the song says, ‘sweep down to the sea.’ The team was on standby to help with any emergency on the range, from an air crash to the rescue of lost or injured climbers and scramblers. The mission entailed day and night patrols, hauling stretchers over the rocky, heathery gullies, and down the steep faces. We never had to do any of these things with real accident victims, but the constant routine of rehearsal was real and exciting enough. And in this setting there is another memory of fire. Near the foothills of Slieve Donard, the highest of these hills, which rises up to nearly 3,000 feet from the sea near Newcastle, County Down, lay a ruined mansion. By now the once-proud house, commandeered by the Army as part of a training area in World War II and never reoccupied, was nothing more than a shell, and pock-marks in the brickwork showed that the place had been fired on with mortars and machine guns from time to time. Its roof had caved in, and the windows had long gone. If you looked carefully in its overgrown gardens you could see the last vestiges of expensive and exotic shrubs, and wildly overgrown pear and apple trees that some painstaking gardener had trained and trimmed on the garden’s sun-facing brick walls.
It was in this house, on its brick-strewn, earthen floors, that we set-up our base. At night, after meals of canned food -- maybe beef stew, peaches and strong tea brewed with evaporated milk and sugar -- we’d build a fire from the fallen roof beams, and sit around it, exhausted but content, smoking and drinking Irish stout, our faces flushed by the intense heat of the fire, and maybe by the brew. Beyond us, the red sandstone house glowed in the firelight, its hollow window spaces black and empty. And above it all, on moonlit nights the mountains towered through a constellation of sparks. Fifty years on, I not only see it; I can also smell the burning wood, almost like incense.

Only a few years later, in 1955, we were in Egypt on another spring night. Four of us, young officers on an off-duty desert adventure, were driving in jeeps from our camp in the Nile Delta, half way between Port Said in the north and Port Suez in the south. Our destination was a tiny fishing spot in the Red Sea called Al Qusayr, two hundred miles short of the Tropic of Cancer. The going had been good, on tarred roads as far as Suez. Then, for maybe seventy miles, oil men from the rapidly growing refineries around the port had made arrow-straight roads of flat, oiled sand that seemed to head nowhere. Now, half a century on, a narrow road hugs the coastline south, but then we made the journey a little way inland over virgin desert for more than two hundred miles.
The Eastern Desert is not at all like the romantic dunes in Lawrence of Arabia. While there are such areas, much of the territory is flat and stony. Scrubby bushes grow near the wadis, dry riverbeds down which sweeping torrents flow in the brief rainy season. Pye-dogs and tiny deer roam the area at night, and yellow, slothful lizards as big as dogs bask in the sunshine by day. On the evening before we reached our destination we camped on a beach of silver sand. The sea was shallow and warm and, with a shrimping net, we hauled fat shrimps out of the sea, to supplement our dull, tasteless K-rations.

Afterward, tired but well-fed, we drove around in the dusk around our camp site, scavenging for the bleached woody stems of camel bracken and other growth in the wadis. It took a while, but fairly soon the jeeps were piled with fuel for a fire. We felt good. Here we were, comrades together in the very center of the world. Across the sea, fifty miles east, was Saudi Arabia. Down the beach lay the beginning of the Nubian Desert and, beyond it, the Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, where the Red Sea merges into the Indian Ocean. The fire crackled and spat, and sparks flew up into a moonless sky.

We were sitting on the sand, well into our stock of warm beer, and singing -- ‘All the world am sad and dreary, everywhere I go . . .’
I gazed up at the flying sparks. What in heaven’s name was that up there above us, and had the others seen it? Lit by the fire, far, far up in the sky, it seemed, was a bearded, hooded face. Could this be God himself, Mohammed, or Moses? We’d stopped singing, rendered dumb. He was still there but, looking down, his head moved a fraction.

My neighbor broke the spell. “My God, It’s a bloody Arab!”
And so it was. For days we’d seen no one, but here was some nomad, crossing the desert alone on a camel, who’d seen the fire and ridden over to investigate. Now, still mounted, he towered above us while we sat, staring up at his impassive face.
None of us spoke. Another comrade, John Gregory, raised his hand in friendly recognition, and his response to this mystical visitation was more like that of someone meeting a stranger in his London club.

“How do you do?” John said. Without a word the man reined in his camel and rode away into the darkness.

A year after that desert crossing in Egypt, in the summer of 1955, my unit was ordered to Cyprus, then a British colony, to deal with recent outbreaks of terrorism. We set up a tented base near Nicosia, the island’s capital, and were pitched into two very different kinds of action. Sometimes we faced riots in the city’s warren of narrow, twisting streets, using batons, tear gas and water-canon. At others, with more lethal weapons, we’d patrol the Troodos Mountains, the island’s rugged backbone. Here, EOKA -- a well-armed unit led by the Greek national partisans who’d once helped the Allies drive the Germans and Italians out of Greece -- was now hiding, and harassing the British troops.

That year, in the foothills of Troodos, there was an incident in which a dozen young soldiers were burned alive. Though I never witnessed a single moment of it, I was a member of the three-man court of inquiry that followed the blaze, and re-lived it shortly afterward through the eyes of the men who escaped it alive.
The enemy wasn’t EOKA, but fire. It happened on a warm October afternoon. On a narrow single-track road through a sheer rocky gully, a convoy of the Gordon Highlanders regiment was making its way with trucks loaded with ammunition and other stores, led by an armored scout-car. The sides of the road were piled high with tinder-dry undergrowth and limbs that had fallen from the pine trees that overhung the pass. The road grew rougher and more uneven, and the scout car overturned, trapping the driver on the rocks half in and half out of the vehicle, which caught fire in seconds.

Ferret scout cars, like miniature tanks, but with wheels instead of tracks, had gas tanks that held at least forty gallons, and more in jerry cans strapped to their sides. The Ferret exploded in a ball of flame, killing the injured driver and spreading quickly to the truck behind it. Jammed nose to tail, the convoy could move neither forward nor backward, and in minutes several trucks behind the Ferret were aflame. Later, expert evidence showed that there was a gusty wind that day, and a draught of air blew up the gully, fanning the flames. Although some troops tried in vain to use the vehicles’ puny fire extinguishers, many of their comrades were suffocated in the inferno.

As the junior member of the court of inquiry, I sat with a major and a colonel at a trestle table in an echoing room at the Chief-of-Staff’s headquarters in Nicosia. We’d already visited the charred site in the Troodos foothills with technical experts, and now eye-witnesses gave evidence that was scribbled down laboriously by a clerk who had no shorthand. Young Scots, mostly boy-faced privates and junior non-coms, all of them draftees, told how their brother soldiers had huddled together, their uniforms in flames, terrified and beyond help, unable to scale the perpendicular rock wall of the pass. In the court, several of the young survivors hesitated and wept while giving their evidence, as did a gray-haired veteran staff-sergeant, whose voice cracked with emotion and remorse as he told how he tried to wrap his burning boys with blankets in a futile attempt to smother the flames.
Then came the experts; fire officers and engineers giving their opinions on how and why the vehicles caught fire; military lawyers outlining the regulations about correct distances between vehicles, even a pulmonary specialist from a nearby military hospital. In stark contrast with the soldiers, all of these spoke in a casual, matter-of-fact way, as though they were witnesses in some everyday county court case back in England, dealing with some petty larceny, or a minor driving infringement.

We deliberated late into the second night. There was some discussion about whether anyone should be blamed for the closeness of the vehicles, but in the end we ruled the case a misadventure.

There was another fire in Cyprus. A year later, I fell for a girl called Anita, whose photograph I first saw as the island’s ‘Girl of the Week’ in the Times of Cyprus. I managed to trace her and to meet her, and in a short time we were very close. She was Armenian, an alluring, dark-eyed, Mediterranean beauty, two years younger than I, and so much more exotic than the girls I’d known at home in England. When I could get away on occasional weekends, we’d meet at Greta’s Garden, a faded but still elegant hotel in a villa with apple green shutters, on the edge of the city, surrounded by an orchard of orange, lemon and fig trees, where peacocks strutted by day and cried eerily at night. But the affair, though sweet, was short-lived, for I was soon to leave the service and return to Britain. I missed her terribly after we parted on my last day, and believed I’d never see her again.

Back in London I transferred to the British Army Reserve, and spent the next eighteen months as a trainee in a public relations firm. By then I was engaged to a British girl. But, because my wealthy father-in-law forbade the marriage until I was more able to support his daughter, took a much better paid position back in Cyprus, as the press officer for the Emergency Police Force. I returned to the island without my fiancée for the year before the wedding; the mores of the day prohibited our being together there. Anyway, there was still too much violence for her to be safe, though Cyprus was by then moving toward the granting of independence. It’s not surprising that, alone, I often thought of Anita, but I was determined to keep her in the past and, though tempted, never sought her out.
But one night I had a call from police headquarters. There was a huge blaze in Nicosia. A gang of Greek Cypriot hotheads had set fire to a Turkish-owned timber yard and, since it was part of my new job to be at every incident to deal with the press, I was there in minutes.

The yard was in a maze of narrow streets in the old walled city, and before I reached the site I could hear the roar of the fire, and see the sparks flying above the rooftops. Turning a corner into a cul-de-sac, I stared into a wall of flame that licked up into the night sky. Unable to reach the fire from that point, the firemen had backed their vehicles out, driven round and attacked it from another flank. Presently, the flames on the edge of the burning yard died down a little, enabling me to see more clearly to the other side of the blaze. There were four fire engines, their ladders fully extended, and crews towered over the inferno with their hoses. A crowd had gathered, and my heart leapt when I saw that, among them, in the floodlights and the brilliance of the fire itself, was Anita. A tall dark, young man stood beside her, his arm round her shoulders. She was looking out over the flames, her face composed but somehow distant, as though her thoughts were lost in the fire. At that moment, all my memories of her flooded back, and it was all I could do to keep from calling out to her.
But I was silent, and never saw her again.

And then there was fire in India, every bit as deadly as the blaze that raced up that mountainside in Cyprus.
Fourteen years ago, my wife and I were in Varanasi, an Indian city so ancient that it was already two thousand five hundred years old when Buddha preached there in 530 BC. Despite that connection with Buddhism, Varanasi, on the banks of the sacred river Ganges, is predominantly Hindu, and believers come here from all over India. For the healthy, it’s the center of kasha, or divine light, where people come to pray, to cleanse and purify themselves, and begin life anew. The city’s inhabitants can experience this every day, and take part in a daily drama on the ghats, huge stone staircases, more than seventy of which sweep down to the water for the length of the city.

On the ghats, loin-clothed men and sari-clad women come down for the ritual washing of their bodies, heedless of the impertinent eyes of foreign tourists. Others wash their clothes, kneading them on the rocks, beside other locals and visitors who stand, partly immersed in the holy Ganges, their lips moving in silent prayer.
Known as ‘The City of Light,’ Varanasi has another, darker aspect for which it might more aptly be called ‘The City of Life and Death.’ Nearly two thousand bodies burn every week on the ghats, in full view of passers-by. Hindus – there are eight hundred million of them in India and Nepal -- believe that coming to Varanasi to die brings instant release from the torment of everlasting reincarnation, and forgiveness of their sins. This is granted even to those unfortunates who, if their relatives cannot afford enough logs to finish the cremation, are heaved, partly-burned into the river.

We’d been told that the best time to experience the ritual panoply of Varanasi is at sunrise. The phone in our hotel room shrilled at 5 a.m., and we showered quickly, pulled on yesterday’s clothes, gulped down a cup of coffee and walked with our guide through still dark streets, already milling with people. Everyone seemed to be going in the same direction through the narrow, twisting alleys, heading for the Ganges. We reached the ghats a little before dawn. Already there were scores of rowboats on the river where thousands of candles, each buoyed up by a lotus leaf, bobbed and flickered around them on the water. With other travelers, we boarded a boat and paid the oarsman a few rupees for candles, and nursed their flames while he rowed us out some fifty yards from the riverbank. There, after we’d floated our little lotus lanterns off on the water, the boatman heaved on his oars and we glided upstream.

To one side, across the mile-wide river, the sun rose misty-gold, more like a full moon over the purple horizon, casting its swelling light on the crumbling sandstone buildings on the waterside: palaces; pavilions and temples. We passed the bathers, who seemed to say little to each other. Some were unashamedly naked, and more intent with the ritual pouring of the water over their bodies than taking a morning bath. At another ghat, the washing of clothes seemed to be a much more social affair, where women chatted and laughed together, helping each other fold their still wet garments, stacking piles of bed sheets, and what seemed to be tablecloths. Could these, we wondered, be for our own hotel?
Close by, we drifted past a ‘burning’ ghat. Hindus are cremated before sunset on the day they die, so blazing pyres are rarely seen early. At the back of the site stood a smoke-blackened temple, one of a thousand temples in this city of a more than a million souls. Alongside the building was a massive stack of logs that dwarfed the low caste workers -- untouchables – demolishing several smoldering black mounds. From each of these they dragged out the bones that even the six hundred fifty pounds of timber used for each body can never destroy: the skull, hip bones and femurs. Traditionally, the skulls are cracked open, to allow the spirit to leave, after which the remains and ash are raked into the river where, not a hundred yards downstream, people drink the water, wash themselves and their clothes, and even brush their teeth.

Earlier that week, farther north and over the border in Khatmandu, we’d seen a funeral party, strangely cheerful, chanting, threading its way through the crowd with the yellow-shrouded corpse shoulder high, tossing coins to children along the route to the cremation site. Both here in Nepal, and also in Varanasi, people who are near death, and who come from afar, lodge nearby. Sometimes the sick and aged wait for months or even years to die, but all are aflame within an hour or two of death. By the Bagmati river in Khatmandu, we watched the flames lap round shrouded bodies on several elevated platforms that extend over the riverbank, making it easier to sweep the remains into the water. The air was redolent of wood smoke, and the acrid odor of burning flesh.

Finally, year after year, there was my own slow-burning ceremonial of autumn fires in my garden at home in England where, under a towering tree, the smoke curled over a pile of crisp fallen oak and chestnut leaves, rose prunings, tomato and bean plants, and dead summer flowers.

In those days, about thirty years ago, a fragrant mist hung for days over our Surrey house and garden, heralding the frosts and the coming of winter. To me this was the purging of my little patch, a pleasing preparation for the cold, dormant months, ready for a new beginning in the spring; a perennial round of ashes to ashes.

Nowadays, as here in America, such fires are taboo and, through I accept the reason why, that was a ritual whose passing I regret.

oo0oo

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The Visitors

2010-05-30T11:20:00.004-04:00

The staff had cleared the big table in the Mess dining room and – as they did every day – polished it until it shone like a new car. Presently, the three white-coated Germans came out into the drawing room and quietly closed the tall mahogany doors behind them.

It was late autumn, around three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in 1952. Out of uniform, I sat alone by the fireplace, reading Friday’s Daily Telegraph, and looked up when Jürgen, the chief steward, stepped forward a little and was waiting to speak.

He was tall, built like a blockhouse, with cornflower blue eyes and blond hair cropped like a Junker. It was easy to imagine him in his black uniform and jackboots, and I hadn’t been surprised when he’d once told me that, promoted from the ranks on the Eastern Front, he'd been a troop commander in an SS Panzer squadron. He added that he’d been wounded and taken prisoner. At Stalingrad he’d said, as an afterthought. They all said that. We rarely met a veteran who admitted he’d fought the British or the Americans.

“Everything all right, Jürgen?”

“Alles in ordnung, sir. We would like to go now, please.”

It felt strange. This man was in his late thirties, a veteran of the Wehrmacht, while I, at twenty-one, had been commissioned only months ago, and had yet to hear a shot fired in anger. But according to the unwritten rules of victory and defeat, he now had to ask me for permission to leave. I thanked him and said they could go and, almost like a drill movement, the group turned in unison and left the room.
The Mess was always deserted on Sunday afternoons. A few of the majors drank heavily during lunch, and took a nap. Younger officers jogged through the frosty cabbage fields in the countryside not far from our barracks, or cycled along the bank of the river Weser, past the stark silhouettes of coal mines that seemed deserted. Some took a trolley car and strolled through the city of Minden, or watched a local game of soccer. Others wrote letters home.

I was about to go back to my quarters across the street when the front door bell jangled beyond the green baize kitchen door. Since the staff had gone, I went out into the hallway and opened the door. Two frail, elderly people, a man and a woman, stood holding hands on the doorstep. The man took off his fur hat and made a slight, deferential bow.

He spoke in German. “Good afternoon, sir. I must apologize for this intrusion.”

We shook hands.

“That’s all right,” I said, “what can we do for you?”

“My name is Helmut Krieg, and this is my wife, Resi.”

He turned to the woman, and back to me. “It’s . . . well, you see, Resi was born in this house and lived here until she went to the university. We live far away and, as you can see, we are old now. My wife has not seen the house for nearly fifty years, and we wonder whether we might see inside it once more.”

Krieg spoke hesitantly, in the softer, less gutteral hochdeutsch, the southern dialect of Bavaria. It sounded much more agreeable than the one we were used to hearing in Westphalia. He was clearly an educated man, and with my school-boy German I could just follow what he was saying, but doubted I could maintain a conversation for long.

“I’m afraid my German isn’t very good,” I said, “Do you or your wife speak English?”

Krieg smiled for the first time. “Jawohl!” he said. “Me, my English is not very good, but Resi still teaches English at the University of Munich.”

His wife, a sparrow of a woman with sad, anxious eyes, had said nothing, but now spoke in almost accentless English.

“Let me tell you something, so you will understand,” she said earnestly. “My family lived in this house for generations. Helmut was a judge, and the mayor of Minden. Mutti died in the 1890s when I was a girl, but he lived until 1912. A few years before, Helmut and I had married and settled in Munich, where I was teaching. I was their only child, but we could not maintain this house, and so we sold it. It was sad, because I loved it and was so very happy here, but what could we do? It was so beautiful, but ever since, for many, years Helmut has promised to bring me back to see it once more.”

We weren’t allowed to let unauthorized Germans enter Army premises, but I was sure they were what they claimed to be. Anyway, what could be secret about an officers’ mess? How could I refuse them?

“I’ll be glad to show you around.” I said. “Come on in.”

Resi had seemed apprehensive and ill at ease until then, but now her big, expressive eyes had brightened with the excitement of a little girl.
She turned to her husband and said in German “There, I told you! And you said it wouldn’t be possible!”

The man smiled. “I also told you, my dear, that it is often not a good thing to go back. It could be strange and different after all these years.”

I took their hats and coats, hung them by the door, and we walked into the drawing room. To them, I thought, the room would seem more like a gentleman’s club than her parents’ living-room. Resi took in the big leather armchairs and couches, the paintings that depicted battles in which the regiment had fought, and portraits of long dead generals. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of the young, newly crowned queen, and her husband, who wore the dress uniform of the Royal Navy. Resi looked up at this and turned away. Her face was anxious again.

Now they stood, apparently waiting for me to move on, and I eased open the big dining room doors and ushered them in.

The room was some forty feet long, and almost as wide. It, too, had a somber masculinity about it. No woman had been involved in its design and furnishing. The carved wooden table, already set for dinner, could seat fifty people. Pictures much like those in the other room adorned the walls between high casement windows with heavy burgundy curtains. Cris-crossed in front of the unused fireplace were our regimental colors, two unfurled, gold-staffed Union Jacks embroidered with the names of past victories from the two World Wars, the Boer War, Crimea, Waterloo.
Resi turned to me. “I would like to see the ballroom, please?”

Ballroom? There was no ballroom, what did she mean? “We . . .we don’t have a ballroom,” I said.

“Of course you do,” the old woman said, smiling, “There is a beautiful ballroom through here! I will show you.”

She stepped ahead of us toward a double door, made of mahogany like the others, but even taller and wider. There was a tarnished brass key in the lock, which she tried to turn vainly. Beside her, I drew the door-handle toward me, and turned the key only with difficulty.

We went in. The room was two stories high, with an elaborate gilt minstrels’ gallery. Dark evergreen trees in the garden outside shut out the dying afternoon light through its grimy, undraped windows. One wall was stacked with wooden crates of Army stores, another with blankets. A rusty bicycle with a buckled wheel lay on the once polished floors of inlaid oak. Up in the lofty ceiling hung the shattered remains of six crystal chandeliers.

Resi’s mouth was open, yet at first I didn’t realize that the sudden anguished wail was hers. The cry seemed to fill the great room. She had turned and was stumbling back through the dining room, and her husband and I followed.

“She is very upset,” he said. “I warned her many times that everything might be different. How could she think otherwise?”

Back in the hallway she had draped her overcoat over her shoulders and was leaning on the half open door, sobbing like a child. Her husband hurried forward and took both her hands tenderly, but she snatched them away, grabbed her coat, and ran down the steps and the pathway toward the street.

Helmut turned to me as he made for the door and grasped my hand. “You have been so kind, and I am sorry this has happened.”

We shook hands and he was gone.

Through the glass of the now-closed door I could hear her screaming, until the sound of a passing trolley car drowned her voice.

* * *

SNATCH

2010-04-14T14:43:00.001-04:00

Every time I look back on that night nearly fifty years ago – and I often do – I still feel a pang of shame about our brief, violent act. And I see the startled, fearful eyes of the little girls, huddled in their nightdresses, trying to hide behind their mother. I hear the woman’s screams as we left the house and, when we drove away, the engines of our trucks reverberating against the walls in the narrow, unlit street.

It was December, 1955, in the island of Cyprus, then a British colony. For years, the Greek Cypriots had dreamed of Enosis – union with Greece – and breaking away from British rule. But while the island’s population of around half a million was seventy percent Greek-speaking, the remaining thirty percent were Turkish speakers, and bitterly opposed to the idea. Historically, Greece and Turkey have always shared a mutual antipathy, and since Cyprus is forty miles from Turkey and at least four hundred miles from mainland Greece, Britain’s support of a status quo made good sense.

But that year, being a part of Greece had become more than a romantic dream, and in the summer there were sudden outbreaks of violence. Young British soldiers died or were wounded in drive-by shootings and bomb attacks, and in ambushes on mountain roads. Some had been shot in off-limits bars in Nicosia, the capital. These were the early rumblings of what turned into an ugly, four-year terrorist action that few Americans know about, and the violence quickly flared out of control.
My battalion was flown into the island from Egypt that summer, followed by others from Britain and the Middle East. Not long after we arrived, the British Institute, a cultural and arts center in the middle of Nicosia, was gutted by petrol bombs, and police stations were attacked and destroyed. The death toll was rising, and there were riots on the streets.

Throughout the year, the word EOKA was daubed on walls, the name of a newly-formed group led by George Grivas, a Greek partisan who, with an underground force, had caused havoc among the German and Italian troops in Axis-occupied Greece a dozen years earlier. Now Grivas was training a local force against us in the island’s rugged Troodos mountain range. The locals dubbed EOKA national heroes, patriots and freedom fighters, but to us they were terrorists.

Then another set of initials began appearing on walls all over the colony – AKEL, a Communist group. This was two or three years after the peak of McCarthyism in America, and six years before the building of the Berlin Wall. In December, wary of what could well be an emerging red menace, the Governor of Cyprus secretly ordered the immediate arrest and imprisonment of one hundred forty members of AKEL. The colonial police’s Special Branch knew exactly where they lived, though EOKA and Grivas were invisible.

The first we knew of this was when, one afternoon, as the fifteen youngest officers in the South Staffordshire Regiment – and similar groups in other infantry and police units posted around the island – were summoned to a briefing. We sat around Major Richard Dick Stuckey, one of our company commanders, on a rocky hillside in our camp by the road to Nicosia Airport. Each of us was given a detainee’s name and his address. Our orders were to pick six men from our platoons and, with a jeep and a light truck, to make an armed snatch of our AKEL member that night from his home. The raid would be simultaneous, at precisely three a.m.

Before we dispersed, we all synchronized our watches and, an hour or so later I took my second-in-command, Sergeant Murtagh, on hasty daylight reconnaissance patrol of our snatch site, in a village called Ayios Dhométeos, a few miles from Nicosia. The home was a single-story place in a contiguous row of about half a dozen others, in a street that was only wide enough for one vehicle to pass through. Without pausing as we passed it in our jeep, we checked out the door, a crude assembly of unpainted vertical boards, and agreed that, if we had to break in, it wouldn’t be a problem. We turned at the bottom of the street and again up the lane behind the house, deciding where we’d position two men to cover the dwelling’s rear. Finally, we checked the route to a point about five miles away, where the area’s prisoners would be collected in a police compound before being driven to the detention center.

I was woken by my batman at two a.m. with a mug of tea. Cyprus can be cold at night in the winter, and outside a chilly half moon hung bright in a sky, pulsing with stars. Walking down the slope from my quarters through the sleeping camp, I could see little groups of soldiers heading silently for the armory. Farther down, in the vehicle park, the engines of two dozen vehicles were already running. A few minutes later we inspected weapons, loaded them, and boarded a jeep and a light truck. Our group, like the others, was made up of a sergeant and two corporals, each with a sub-machine gun, and three privates with rifles, one of whom also toted a hefty axe.

The column moved off, and the sentries hailed us as we passed through the raised barrier at the guardhouse. With a number of groups we turned east onto the main road toward the city, while others headed west to their targets. Ayios Dhométeos was only a few miles from the camp and, as we approached it we turned off our headlights, driving in the moonlight. Just before the turning into the narrow street we parked under trees by the side of the road. We had, of course, done a "dry run" on the previous afternoon, so only needed to mutter a few last-minute instructions to send the corporal and rifleman to cover the rear of the house. I led the four others round the corner and down the lane. Our canvas shoes made no sound as we approached, and when we reached the house next door, we stopped. Knowing what to do, the two men detailed to cover the entrance crept across the street to their positions.

The remaining rifleman and I stood with our backs to the wall beside the door, while Sgt. Murtagh did the same on the other side. We’d been told by Stuckey at the briefing that, since there was no evidence that AKEL had used any violence against the British, we were to break the door open only if we deemed it necessary.
I picked up a rock in the road and beat on the door with it, shouting “Anikse tin porta,” ‘open up’ in Greek.

No light came on in the house.

I struck the door again.

“Anikse tin porta!”

Lights flickered on in two other homes nearby.

“Anikse –“

Nothing.

I turned to the rifleman. “Give me the axe.”

I raised the axe above my head; ready to smash it down on the timbers around the latch with all the strength I could muster. But at that moment a faint light shone from under the door, and we heard a heavy scraping, as though someone on the other side were drawing back a bolt or a bar. I lowered the axe and drew my revolver while, behind me, the rifleman focused a flashlight at the point on the door level with our heads.

The door opened slowly and there, blinking into the light, was our target, Stavros Joannides, an astonished man with a bloodhound’s eyes who, when he spoke, seemed to have no teeth in his head.

Under the circumstances, what he said was remarkable. “Kalimera.” (‘Good morning.’)

He wore a striped nightshirt that hung below his knees. Beside me, Sergeant Murtagh thrust the stubby muzzle of his Sten gun into the man’s chest.

“Put up yer ‘ands!”

The man’s arms shot up. "You speak English?” I asked.

“A little,” he said.

“Bring him inside,” I told Murtagh, who marched the man backward into the house, where I patted him down to check for a weapon, but found nothing. Over his shoulder I could see through the open door of a dimly lit bedroom. A woman with long black hair sat bolt upright in the big family bed, the bedclothes pulled up to her neck. Two small girls, who might well have been twins, cowered behind her, crying hysterically.

We were in a living room, where a low-powered electric light revealed a few basic items of furniture: easy chairs round a stone fireplace, a threadbare rug, a few toys here and there, and a table that seemed to have been set for breakfast on the evening before. A loom stood in one corner. The place looked more like the house of the Three Bears than that of a political activist who was dangerous enough to be imprisoned.

Murtagh had stepped back a little, though his Sten was still slung at the ready, pointed toward Joannides, who stood staring at us, shivering in his skimpy nightshirt. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands.
“I’m going to search your house,” I said.

I left him with Murtagh and, with the rifleman, made a quick tour of the house. There were only three rooms, the living room, the bedroom and a kitchen. We began with the kitchen that, because it also served as bathroom, laundry room and storage space, was almost the size of the living room. The soldier and I pulled open closet doors and drawers, rummaged inside them, lifted the wooden lid of a wood-burning copper used for boiling clothes, peered in the oven, and looked around a cramped root cellar under a trap door.

We’d searched scores of houses of EOKA suspects in the months before. There were weapons, ammunition and documents hidden in a number of them, and we’d arrested their owners. But here there wasn’t a scrap of evidence. When we searched the bedroom, the woman was still in bed with the children, who had lapsed into silence. I called out to Joannides, who told his wife to wait in a corner of the room with the children while we searched the bed. There were several boxes and battered suitcases under it, but nothing significant in them. One of the frightened children had wet the bed, and we pummeled the thin mattress with no result.

Apart from clothes, a large wardrobe in the room seemed to contain stacks of never-unwrapped bed linens and blankets, probably wedding gifts from years ago. When we were done, I gestured to the woman and the girls to get back into bed, and it was only then that I noticed the only evidence that this family was different from most other Greek Cypriots. There, on the bedroom wall, instead of the usual image of Archbishop Makarios, was a framed photograph of Nikita Krushchev, and Nikolay Bulganin – incongruous partners to the crucifix on the opposite wall of the room.
There was nothing in the living room. There was only one other place to look.

“Where’s the toilet?” I asked the man.

“In the yard.”

I left the rifleman with Murtagh and went outside, where the two soldiers detailed to cover the back of the house lurked in the shadows. The privy was a small hut like a sentry box built over a pit and here, too, we drew a blank. Earlier we’d searched some of these more thoroughly, an activity that involved prodding the noisome contents of the trench with long bamboo canes. Fortunately, we had only a few minutes left, and I was glad to give the procedure a miss.
It was time to go.

“We’re going to take you away,” I told Joannides, “and I have to tell you that anything you say may be used in evidence.”

The man seemed perfectly calm.

“I have some questions,” he said.

“No questions,” I said. “ The sergeant here will accompany you while you pack some things. You’re allowed to bring two cases of clothing and washing things, essential medicines, a bible, no food and no other books.”

“How long do you think – ” he began.

“You ‘eard what the officer said,” Murtagh said.

The wife seemed agitated, and asked her husband what sounded like a question, to which he replied quietly. His answer caused her to let out a piercing scream, and this started the children crying again. The sound of their anguish and its volume intensified during the few minutes it took our prisoner to collect his things together.

I was unmarried then and, looking back, I find it incredible that I gave the man no opportunity to embrace his wife and children at that last moment. He had taken the arrest well so far, and it was hard to credit that this allegedly dangerous troublemaker was so mild and dispassionate.

It wasn’t Joannides who needed restraint as we led him to the door; it was his wife. Leaving her two little girls screaming uncontrollably on the bed, she staggered toward us and locked her arms tight round her husband’s body, clinging to him with unbelievable strength. So strong was her grasp on him that, struggling to get her man and his baggage through the door, we were forced to wrench her from him, taking care nor to break her thrashing arms with the sudden final slam of the door. The man said nothing during the six or seven minutes drive to the compound where he was united with his fellow detainees.

I never saw him again, but this isn’t quite the end of the story. Something remarkable and almost laughable happened within a month or two of the mass arrest and imprisonment of nearly 150 members of AKEL. The British Government discovered to its extreme embarrassment that AKEL, while it sympathized with other Greek Cypriots in their wish for union with Greece, treated the right-wing terrorist leader George Grivas with derision, and denounced violence as a means to achieve it. All but a handful of the Communist detainees were returned to their homes in a fleet of buses manned by the Cyprus Police Force.

Oddly, there seems to be no record of the snatch and its outcome in Her Majesty’s archives.

oo0oo

BLOCK

2010-02-09T12:12:00.001-05:00

“I’ll never do it in time. Never!”

Huddling in her old raincoat, Lavinia Smoot whimpered in the back of the bus while it lurched from stop to stop down Second Avenue in a deluge of November rain.

It had seemed such a good idea at the time. When the fall program arrived in the mail from the Y, she and her friend Marcie Nagel were atwitter with excitement at the prospect of passing a dozen winter evenings with people of like mind. Creatives, they called them nowadays; people who knew, as she and Marcie did, that they had untapped talents that needed only to be set free, and honed by constructive criticism.

The first session, called The Emerging Muse, was riveting. Penelope Raintree, the facilitator, had been so inspiring, so full of wisdom. “We all have it in us,” she reminded her class. “In the weeks ahead we must allow it to flow out. Bring your latest work in progress, and read it aloud to the class.”

For most of the opening session Penny Raintree – she asked them all to call her Penny – had gone into a none-too-lucid explanation of some of the finer points of the poet’s craft. She dealt with the strict confines of the heroic couplet and the Spenserian stanza, the whimsy of the limerick, and the scrupulous economy of haiku. Lavinia took notes with a well-sharpened pencil.

The second session was less easy. Baring her soul to strangers was something for which Jefferson High in Lima, Ohio, and forty-three years in the stock department at Bloomingdales had not prepared her. After an agonizing Sunday crouched over her Remington portable, with a faded ribbon and a letter ‘e’ that jammed repeatedly, she read the first poem she had written in five decades. It was a wistful verse that recalled the view of corn fields from her bedroom window when she was a child.

Her poem, Field of Dreams, received a kind if hesitant reception from the class. Not, she had to admit, quite as enthusiastic as that given to the man who preceded her, a bearded, retired Navy veteran who, in a thunderous voice, read the first sixteen verses of an epic poem about the sinking of a German battleship in the North Atlantic.

It was even harder for Lavinia to accept that her friend Marcie’s contribution was much better received than hers. She wasn’t envious; of course not. Marcie had written several quite witty verses recalling how her sister Ruthie dropped an ice cream into the orchestra from the mezzanine during her first visit to the Met. Penny had called it “cute.” Mrs. Lukaszewski, a woman with strangely blue hair, who claimed to have once worked at Ladies’ Home Journal, said it was “mirth-provoking.” Even the old sailor, Captain Wetherspoon, volunteered that it was “interesting.”

Walking to the bus on the way home, Lavinia and Marcie agreed that the evening had been fun, and congratulated each other warmly on their efforts.

“You were so professional,” Lavinia said, “you ought to be on the radio!”
“Oh, but your poem was so . . . well . . . so vivid,” said Marcie, “I loved the bit about the corn ‘standing in rigid ranks of green.’ ”

They parted with a sisterly air kiss at the corner of Second Avenue and 15th Street. In her apartment, Lavinia turned on the heater, made herself a cup of decaf, and flopped into bed. Pulling up the covers she reflected that creative writing was both rejuvenating and good for the soul. She wouldn’t think yet about what to write next week. There were seven whole days before the next session. Penny had said, “Just leave it to your subconscious, and don’t try to force it. Let inspiration creep into your soul.”

During the weekend, and early in the following week, other matters occupied Lavinia’s mind. For one thing, there was the holiday surge of work at the store, keeping her at her desk until at least six. Then there was her argument with Con Ed about the electricity bill, letters to write and bills to pay. Lavinia told herself not to worry, there was plenty of time. Penny Raintree had said there was nothing like a deadline to make the creative juices flow. She hoped that was true, because in no time it was Wednesday morning.

During the day at work she grew increasingly anxious. She hadn’t even thought of a topic yet! Time was running out. By that evening on the bus going home she was beside herself. As soon as she closed her door she warmed a can of soup, sat at her typewriter, rolled a sheet of paper into the machine and stared at it. Two hours and a box of Ritz crackers later, Lavinia had something akin to snow-blindness, and only five screwed-up balls of paper to show for it.

She’d read about writer’s block often enough in her eagerly awaited issues of Writers Digest, and this must be it. An hour later, at 10 p.m., it was the same. She rose and paced about the living room. Where could she find a hint, the merest seed of creativity? She searched her bookshelf for inspiration. Here was The World Book, and useful guides to life such as How To Clean Almost Anything, a dozen or two paperback novels and several books of poetry.

That was when the insidious thought came to her. Suppose she were to find the work of some minor poet, copy it out and claim it as her own. Nobody would be hurt, and it would rid her of this embarrassing situation.

No, she couldn’t do it. It would be against every rule she lived by. Worse, it might well require her to tell a lie. She glanced through the books: Eliot, Wordsworth, Pound, Whitman. But wait. Here was a book of 1920s British poetry. She took it down and leafed through its yellowed pages. Some of the writers she’s heard of, John Masefield, Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare. Others she hadn’t. Who else knew of W.J.Turner, for heaven’s sake?

Uneasily, but with a parallel feeling of relief, Lavinia Smoot began to type.

#

At class that week Ms. Raintree invited the old sailor, Captain Wetherspoon, to open the session, and he obliged with a surprisingly romantic and brief paean to seagulls. The class clearly liked it. Two others followed with pastoral pieces evoking fall in Central Park, and snow in Vermont. Mrs. Lukaszewski read an arresting comic verse about a visit to the dentist, and Marcie came up with a few undistinguished lines about her cat, which had a crushingly cool reception. And then it was Lavinia’s turn.

She’d hardly heard the earlier speakers’ readings. This was partly because her heart was beating so loudly, and also because she was wondering whether, after all, she should keep her stolen verse in the shopping bag at her feet, and make some excuse for not having written anything this week. ‘I had the ‘flu,’ perhaps, or maybe something more dramatic such as ‘My aunt Emily died in Tampa.’ But, of course, her friend Marcie would know these were untrue. Marcie could always tell what was untrue, and that was another problem.

Everyone was looking at Lavinia. With no choice she reached down and drew out the poem.

I love a still conservatory
that’s full of giant, breathless palms,
azaleas, clematis and vines,
whose quietness great trees becalms
filling the air with foliage,
a curved and dreamy statuary . . .

She read the second verse and looked nervously around the table. At first there was total silence. Then Penny Raintree said in a rapturous voice “Lovely, Lavinia. Absolutely lovely!”

Others nodded in agreement. Little, spectacled Angela Perez, who looked like the doormouse in Alice, and who rarely had much to say for herself, said: “It has such wonderful imagery. Where did you find such inspiration?”

Lavinia swallowed. She knew she was about to compound her lie, but there was no way out. “Oh, I . . . yes, well, I went to the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn, and it just came to me.”

On the way home Marcie was quiet. Was she angry about something? When she broke her silence she said, “I didn’t know you went to the Botanical Gardens.”
Lavinia averted her eyes. “Oh, yes. Didn’t I tell you?”
She hadn’t thought for years of the saying she’d learned at school:

“Tell a lie to your mother,
and no matter how you try, brother,
you’ll find you’ve got to tell another.”

And another, and another. They walked a little farther, and Marcie said, frowning, “So what are you going to do for an encore?”

That was something else Lavinia hadn’t thought about.

oo0oo

OUT FOR THE COUNT

2010-02-09T11:56:00.001-05:00

They say nobody’s perfect, and I guess that’s true. We all have our little handicaps and imperfections, whether we acquire them by nurture or nature. We can be left-handed or colorblind, or have irritating habits such as laughing too loud, or biting our fingernails. And I’m no exception.

No, my problem is a constant humiliation. I’m arithmetically challenged, and can't do even the simplest addition and subtraction in my head. No, seriously. Faced with what you’d probably consider the easiest sum, my mind seizes up. I've always been mystified by this shortcoming. After all, I had a pricey private education at upper-crust British seats of learning. I learned (and then forgot) one dead language and two living ones, mastered subjects from English, history and geography to physics, chemistry and biology, and most people would be fairly happy to swap IQs with me. Both my father and brother made good livings in banking, so why am I such a mutt at math?

One time when this disability used to rear its head was whenever I was paying the check at a restaurant, with my pen poised while I calculated the tip. In those days, if you’d watched carefully, you’d have noticed that, though barely perceptibly, my knuckles were moving up and down, while my brow furrowed with the concentration of the task in hand.

I went through this embarrassing process for years until, not long ago, I discovered a little printed plastic card called a ‘tip calculator,’ that tells me fifteen and twenty percent of any sum up to one hundred dollars. With this, holding the card surreptitiously under the table, I can now sneak a look while the waiter or waitress makes out the final check. In this way I impress guests with my seemingly instant mental arithmetic. Of course, in the privacy of my own home I whip out a calculator with the best of them, and do the most basic sums without the embarrassment I’d experience using it in a restaurant, a barber’s shop or a cab. Working out a tip in a taxi is still a trial, because it’s almost always too dark in the back to read my cheat sheet.

My wife, who’s infuriatingly competent at absolutely everything, says, “It’s so easy! To work out fifteen percent of something, all you do is move the decimal point one place to the left to get ten percent. Then you just add half that number to it to get your fifteen percent.” She calls that easy?

Of course, being inflicted in this way doesn’t begin and end with calculating tips. Every day there’s a need for mental arithmetic, such as working out lengths, heights and widths in do-it-yourself jobs. And then there’s the constant problem of working out the change I should get in a store. If normal people pay $13.37 for something and hand over $20, they immediately know how much change to expect. But I don’t.

Was this inability inherited, or caused by some life experience? My very earliest memories of math at school couldn’t have been happier. In the mid-1930s, at a convent school starting at the age five, I was taught very elementary arithmetic by kindly nuns. We wrote the numbers on wood-framed slates with slate pencils that made the most excruciating scrooping sounds. Later, we moved on to two-times tables, mouthing them in unison to our smiling, nodding tutors. “Two twos are four, three twos are six, four twos are eight . . .” I still have instant recall of those tables up to twelve twelves.

But there were no kindly nuns when, only a few years later, I was sent to my first boarding school far from home. Here, a scruffy, mop-headed, sour-faced Welshman called Dai Griffin took over where they left off. Mr. Griffin – we called him ‘Dirty Dai’– galloped through multiplication and long division at a cracking pace that was fine for the brightest and most numerate of his class, but not for the rest of us. He had a thick Welsh accent, and was given to outbursts of rage, when he was liable to throw sticks of blackboard chalk around the classroom.

With Mr. Griffin, arithmetic became a fearsome ordeal, something to dread. It became even harder when we began calculations to do with money. Britain’s currency was not yet decimalized; instead we had pounds, shillings and pence. Now listen carefully, there were twenty shillings in a pound, twelve pence in a shilling, and two halfpennies (ha’pennies) or four farthings in a penny. How would you go about adding twenty-eight pounds, seven shillings and fourpence-farthing to seventeen pounds, three shillings, and eightpence-ha’penny?

Around the time when Mr. Dai Griffin was about to launch into algebra and geometry, something fortuitous happened – he died. That may sound harsh but, even if he was nice to his wife and children and kind to small animals, to us he seemed a mean-spirited monster. A master called Bob Hawkins took over our math lessons, a warm-hearted man who clearly loved his subject, made up jokes about isosceles triangles, and treated us like equals. In the next school, ‘Fuzzy’ Wheatcroft, a man of similar character to Hawkins, took us through the whole gamut of math, including trigonometry and calculus, in such a way that I actually looked forward to his lessons. Then, of course, we were using slide rules and charts, since desk-top computers were at least thirty-five years away. I thought trigonometry a futile waste of time then. Why would I ever need to know all this stuff about tangents and cotangents? I had no idea that, eight or nine years later in the British Army, I’d need it to plot targets for my 81mm mortar platoon during a bout of terrorism in the Mid-East.

I’ll bet that would have astonished the very late Dirty Dai.

oo0oo

A LETTER TO AUSTRALIA

2009-12-07T22:37:00.000-05:00

It was still quite dark at six that morning, and there was frost on the windows when he came downstairs. He stirred the embers in the kitchen fireplace, crouching in his khaki greatcoat, and in minutes the fire was ablaze again; its light flickering on the low ceiling.

A thin blanket of snow had fallen during the night. In the yard outside, the old man filled the blackened kettle from the pump by the back door, and set it on the iron grid over the kitchen fire.

When he carried her tea upstairs on the Chinese lacquer tray his wife lay in just the same position on the pillows. Her face was gray and taut, and she gave him no sign of recognition.

He put the tray on the table and sat beside her on the bed, poured the tea, and took her hands, warming them.

"How d’you feel, then, Janet?"

She smiled. It was a detached, affectionate smile, but she said nothing.

She left the tea untouched and lay still, her eyes fixed on the patchwork quilt.

It was lighter now, but there was little to see in the room. The bed, a small night table and a narrow, painted closet. On the table was a colored photograph of an auburn-haired young woman. She stood in brilliant sunshine in front of a big, colonnaded gray stone building, dressed in a nurse’s uniform.

The old man made some comment about the cold, but Janet made no reply.

She’d never been like this before. He could tell she was fading, and inside him he knew she’d be gone before the day was over.

Without shaving on this December morning, he dressed in clothes he had worn yesterday and the day before. Down in the kitchen he took a writing pad and a stub of pencil from the drawer in the table and wrote a brief letter. The writing was clear, rounded and labored, and the words unlettered and elementary, but a blend of candor and affection compensated for whatever the note may have lacked in fluency. It assumed what was now inevitable, gave a compassionately untruthful reassurance that there had been no pain, and added that there was no need to come all the way home to Invercairn.

He folded the letter and slipped it into his pocket. It took more than thirty minutes to walk to the post office in the village. On his way through the beech wood he heard the sharp crack of shotguns, and voices calling through the trees.

He walked down the sweeping road to the wrought-iron gates at the entrance to the park. Beyond the gates, on the road to Invercairn, one or two cars passed, the sound of their wheels muffled by the snow.

Across the fields, between the road and the river, pheasants strutted, their tails rigid, and hares froze as he passed. At the water mill, icicles hung from the rotted woodwork of the wheel, like frozen stalactites.

It was warm in the post office, with the sweet smell of kerosene. Behind the counter, Lizzie McPhearson, post-mistress at Invercairn for more than forty years, was writing numbers in her ledger.

"Hamish Jackson. Look at you squinting, man. You've left your spectacles at home again!"

“Aye, I have too, Lizzie. I think I’ll forget my own head one day soon!”

He drew his own and his wife's pension money and, stooping to read his shopping list, bought a few small items: some tobacco, a new pencil, six envelopes, and an air-mail postage stamp.

"How's Janet, Hamish? Is she any better today?"

"No. She's sleeping. That's all she does now -- sleeps."

"Never you mind. Winter's nearly half-way gone. She'll soon be right as rain. And Ian Lawson's the best doctor in Aberdeenshire . . ."

The telephone rang, and Lizzie McPhearson was no longer with him.

Hamish filled the envelope, addressed, sealed and stamped it, and mailed it in the red pillar box outside.

Snow fell over the fields as he walked home. Not far from the edge of the village the big black Rolls Royce from the castle drove past, traveling in the same direction. He recognized McLeod, the chauffeur, who seemed not to notice him. As it passed, a small girl waved from the rear window.

When he reached the cottage Ian Lawson, the doctor, was waiting, his estate car parked in the yard outside the back door. A black Labrador dog crouched on the passenger seat, its nose pressed to the windscreen. It barked as the old man approached. The two men shook hands, even though they met every day.

"Hello, Hamish, how is she?"

"Nae so bad, doctor. She slept all night again. Hardly stirred. You've put something strong in them tablets."

"They'll give her some rest, and take the pain away. Shall we take a look at her?"

Hamish led the doctor up the short, steep staircase, and paused at the door, uncertain of what they might find in the cold room.

Janet was asleep. He touched her arm and she opened her eyes. Leaving her with the doctor he went down to the kitchen, putting on the kettle for the doctor to wash his hands.

Through the kitchen window he could see the shooting party from the castle leaving the wood -- four men, three women, some children, and a cluster of jumping dogs. Several loaders walked behind them, their guns under their arms, their barrels broken. Each carried a clutch of game birds.

The black iron door bell jangled in the kitchen on its coiled spiral. Then, at the door was a small boy, dressed in a blue Arran jersey, corduroys and boots.

"Hello, Master Alexander."

"Good morning, Jackson." The child's manner and self-assurance were more those of a grown man than a boy of eight.

The boy carried two cock pheasants, their limp necks tied together with coarse string.

"Grandfather says would you like a brace of pheasants? We shot them this morning."

Hamish thanked the boy, taking them.

"Jackson?"

"Alex?"

"Grandfather says Mrs. Jackson’s dying. Is she really going to die?"

Hamish paused. "Aye, Alex. I do believe she is."

The boy did not reply. Hamish looked down at him. The child stepped back a few paces, his eyes fixed on the old man. Then he turned and ran back to the shooting party, who were by now half-way up the slope to the castle. He was calling them excitedly, but Hamish could not hear the words.

The doctor was upstairs for nearly an hour. When he came down he did not, as he usually did, reach for his coat from the hook on the door. Instead, he sat down by the fireplace.

Hamish waited by the window, still in his Army coat, his hands deep in the pockets.

"We've . . . we’ve done all we can, Hamish. You were at the hospital during the operation, and here for the past few weeks. You've seen it all. We've talked about it often, haven’t we? If she was younger there'd be some hope, but you're both in your eighties . . ."

"She's going to die today, isn’t she?"

"Well . . . yes, I think it’s likely, but --" He shook his head. "-- I can’t be certain."

The doctor rested both hands on the old man's shoulders.

"I'm sorry, Hamish, but there's little we can do now."

In the yard, the dog barked again as they appeared together. The wheels spun on the snow-covered ground, and in seconds the car was gone.

Throughout the afternoon Hamish sat by the kitchen fire. From time to time he made hesitant visits to the upstairs room. Each time she was in the same position with the same expression. Her breathing was barely audible. But there was a little warmth under the blankets.

It was dark shortly after four in the afternoon. He lit the lamp and put it on the kitchen table. There were no more callers from the castle. Outside the window half an inch of snow had settled on the sill.

At seven he went back to the room, but this time there was no breathing, and no warmth. Her eyes were closed, and one arm seemed to reach toward the door of the room.

For a moment he sat beside her on the bed holding her outstretched hand, which he had done so many times during the past months, to comfort them both.

He slipped under the covers, lying with one arm across her already cold body. After months of broken, watchful nights he slept until mid-morning; waking to see the garden under heavy snow, still falling.

* * *

Six days later, on Christmas Eve, radio station 3XY forecast 90 degrees. Dressed in her uniform, Sister Christie Jackson steeped out into the already hot Australian summer sun and unlocked her mail box in Glenhuntly Road, Melbourne.

There were three Christmas cards, a Telecom reminder and a letter postmarked Invercairn, Scotland.

Her father rarely wrote, but she always looked forward to his letter at Christmas, in time for Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year.

Standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a # 67 tram, she opened the envelope. On a sheet of yellow ruled notepaper, the writing was clear, rounded and labored.

But there was no letter; not the usual end-of-year family news. There was nothing in the envelope but a hastily-written shopping list, in pencil:

pension, stamp, envelops, tobaco, pencil.

Standing among strangers at the tram stop, Christie Jackson laughed aloud.

"Oh, Dad," she said. "You silly old fool! You forgot your spectacles again!"

Still laughing, she stepped down from the tram at Prince Henry's Hospital, screwed up the note, and tossed it into a nearby trash bin.

YANKS

2009-12-06T22:47:00.000-05:00

I met my first American when I was about twelve years old, and it was maybe four or five years more before I met another one. I was about twenty when I encountered more than one of them simultaneously. Now, of course, I’m surrounded by them. Indeed, I actually live with one here in Manhattan.

It’s probably hard for an American to accept that, to the average stay-at-home Brit, an American is just another brand of foreigner, no different from a Moroccan or a Madagascan. They look just as foreign (take a trip in the New York subway), they speak a quite different language (if you really listen), and they have a very very different culture. George Bernard Shaw -- note how we say that, Bernerd (not Bernard) Shaw -- wasn’t entirely joking when he wrote of “two nations divided by a common language.”

The British have a complicated view of Americans. On one hand they have huge respect for their attitude to freedom; they’re grateful to “The Yanks” for saving their butts in two world wars; they have a healthy respect for their innovativeness and technological genius, and most of them appreciate the changes the Americans have wrought in almost every aspect of public entertainment -- especially in movies, TV and jazz. And of course there’s a healthy regard for their contribution to pretty well everything else in life you can think of – space science, medicine, and the convenience if not the delights of (some) fast food.

But it has to be said that, mostly because they’re envious of Americans in so many ways, the British have one or two negative attitudes, too. Many of them look on Americans as over-indulged. They think they’re over-fed, over-paid, over-medicated, and over psycho-analyzed. I suggest that envy is the cause of these views because the British are traditionally pitifully underpaid, and tend to live far more Spartan lives. They’ve always been jealous of what they see as the average American’s material standard of living, believing, after watching endless TV sitcoms that all 260 million Americans live in spacious homes with walk-in closets and walk-in refrigerators, driving Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals. They also see America as over-opinionated and over-assertive on the world stage. Though they wouldn’t admit it this, too, is almost certainly because the Brits are envious of America’s replacement of the British and their empire as the leading world power.

This envy goes back a long way, but reached the British man-in-the-street in a real and understandable way during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of US sailors, soldiers and airman arrived in Britain at a time when the country was desperately short of almost all of life’s necessities. The average GI earned several times more than his British counterpart. In the village pub and dance hall he had much, much more to spend. His gabardine uniform was far smarter and form-flattering than the British Tommy’s baggy, ill-fitting serge battle-dress. It’s not surprising that the GI’s, with their romantic, movie-star accents and boxes of nylon stockings under their arms, made wall-flowers of the local girls’ local boys. British officers, too, found themselves playing second fiddle to their Allied counterparts.

The first American I ever met was a shy, self-effacing boy of my age called Lou Taylor. He was the son of a diplomat. Tall for his age, he had a slight stammer, and his hair fell over his eyes giving him the look of a myopic sheepdog. Lou, who suddenly arrived at my boarding school in the middle of a term, and soon earned the nickname of ‘Long Island Lou,’ was about as nice as any one in the school, but I remember that even he was cause for envy. He had more toy guns and tanks, more enviable ‘stuff,’ and much more food in his tuck-box than any of us. It was Lou who gave us our first taste of bubble-gum, home-made brownies and Hershey bars. It was Lou whose parents came down from London to the school in the country most weekends in a chauffeur-driven car, while our parents’ cars were on wooden blocks in the garage because there was no gasoline for private use. We never saw our parents from one end of term to the other. For no fault of his, this quiet American in miniature was a victim of just the same resentments as his uncles in uniform.

But for all this talk of envy and resentment, it has to be said that both peoples tend to view the other with a degree of affection. The Brits, stuffy and repressed, love the openness and lack of inhibition of The Yanks. Although they may not admit it they get a kick when they see images of the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. They get a buzz out of old John Wayne movies, and the wide open spaces of the West. They don’t know there are ugly strip malls in Phoenix and El Paso, and ghettos in Washington DC. They used to look on the late Alastair Cook with almost Old Testament reverence. And when their chill wet winter sweeps in, it’s to sunny Florida they flock.

As for the Americans, they’d be lost without Keeping up Appearances, or Masterpiece Theater, with the latter’s plum-in-the-mouth lords and ladies, and tea parties in fussy drawing-rooms in Bath, which they pronounce Barth. They don’t know that an English muffin’s a crumpet, or that you should let tea infuse for five minutes and always, always put the milk in the cup first. American tourists never see the dark, Satanic mills in the North and the Midlands. They think every Londoner lives within earshot of Big Ben, and that there’s an everlasting mist on the Yorkshire moors. And did they weep any less than the Limeys when Princess Di died?

It’s all a matter of perception. Our attitudes and judgments about history, politics, religion, morals and, yes, about other races, are shaped not only by what we see and hear, but equally by what we don’t.