Later on, Mark became an academic, lecturing at University College London for more than twenty years. He was a classicist who embodied the Socratic challenge that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, both for himself and everyone he came into contact with. Not only was he a loved teacher, but a wonderful conversationalist too – rigorous but also gently ironic, wise and humorous. A fitting intellectual companion for his loved Athenian sceptic, who he would often talk about as if he was an entirely living presence. Curiously (perhaps out of loyalty to the Socratic oral tradition), he never published anything. He was always busy in the department, and as well as his seminars and lectures he was also admissions tutor and responsible for pastoral care of the students in the faculty as well. Younger colleagues who published papers ‘willy-nilly’ (a phrase he often used) were objects of gentle mockery, as were some in authority who seemed to believe there was a correlation between the quality of the teaching in a faculty and the quantity of papers published.
But as I got older, especially when I reached university, I began to find his opposition to publishing rather strange. One day, when I was home, and after he had decided to take early retirement from UCL, I challenged him about this. Why didn’t he write? We were in a pub in the nearby village and I said, because his passion for Socrates was so strong, and obviously there were many things that the Athenian could teach our world – why not communicate these things to a younger audience? I think he was surprised by the question. In my mind now I can see him vividly, head tilted slightly to one side, taking another cigarette out of the packet (Consulate, with the green and white trim), as if this would help with the answer. He had a curious way of tapping the cigarette gently on the packet three times before lighting it, and then he said, ‘Well, I might just do that. After all, I’ll have the time now.’ Within a year he was dead.
But his qualities and beliefs live on in my mind. He was highly reflective, vigorously intellectual, a left-wing Catholic who admired liberation theology greatly. And as a father a gentle inspiration, loving, funny, wise. A dream of a father. He never quite understood my obsession with football as a boy, but in the summer we’d play cricket, which was more his game, and he’d teach me how to spin the ball. Inevitably, when I hit adolescence, we had our clashes, but nothing different from most sons and fathers.
Thirty years after his death I still think of him on most days – he is simply a part of my life. At times of difficulty I talk to him and try to hear that voice I trusted more than any other, try to hear what he would do in my place. And sometimes I can still hear myself, as an angry teenager, taunting him for being ‘too liberal’, ‘too wishy-washy’, too forgiving. He was very keen about ‘not writing people off just because you don’t share the same political label’, trying to find something good in everyone – which really tested my patience in the early 1980s, the heyday of Thatcherism. Though I used to remind him that his Christian tolerance did not extend to ‘Mrs T’ as he called her. I think ‘loathe’ would be the right word for his feelings. As a serious Catholic he was particularly incensed by her misappropriation of the words of St Francis of Assisi, on becoming prime minister, ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony … where there is despair, may we bring hope.’fn1
When we were growing up there was little we didn’t talk about in the family, often around the kitchen table that was at the heart of the house. Supper times were particularly long and lively affairs, with animated discussions buzzing, us children struggling to compete with adult voices, often using volume to compensate for the knowledge we did not yet possess. And it was fascinating to see our parents arguing passionately, especially about religion – Mark Catholic, Corinne atheist, with occasional forays into agnosticism. Sometimes we felt like the umpire observing two particularly well-matched tennis players, as the arguments pinged back and forth across the table. We learnt that you could disagree strongly on quite fundamental things but still love and respect each other. And we were always encouraged to talk, to express ourselves, especially if we were worried about something. Openness was very important.
‘And yet and yet’ (as he would often say to introduce a dissenting view), there was one way in which Mark was a closed book: he would hardly ever speak about Korea – not to Corinne, not to us, not to anyone. And yet this had been an experience which had shaped him as a young man. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say misshaped him, because he emerged from his time in Korea with what we would recognise today as post-traumatic stress disorder, though those words did not exist then, nor any medical support to deal with the devastation of what he’d been through. When he returned to England to take up his scholarship at Oxford he had a severe breakdown in his first term, most of which he later said he’d spent ‘staring at walls’, utterly contemptuous of the supposedly bright young things all around him who he found vacuous and disconnected from the realities of the world that he’d seen. He left soon afterwards, and then spent a couple of years doing various odd jobs in London like driving delivery vans, but not settling at anything. It took him years to gradually put the pieces of his life back together, to begin to connect with people again, to learn to trust. Though perhaps Korea always remained a darkness on the edge of his consciousness, the shadow of which he could never quite escape, even in the much happier years that followed.
There were only three things about Korea that we learned from him:
He would describe how remarkable the experience of his faith was in that context – Catholic soldiers would be given a grid reference and a time, and at that point and moment a priest would arrive in a jeep, put a wooden cross on the bonnet and start to say Mass. He remembered the soldiers kneeling in the mud to receive the Eucharist. He told us that in this context, when you didn’t know if you would still be alive the next day, Catholicism became a vital part of his life.
He told us about the experience of being with his platoon one day, coming up a hill, and then being bombed by American planes, and how that had affected his attitude to the American military ever since. I remember as a child puzzling over the meaning of those words ‘friendly fire’.
There were two tips for mountain walking, gleaned from his time in the Korean hills. During rests on Welsh walking holidays he would explain that if you lie with your boots raised, the blood circulates more and prevents the feet from getting heavy. Secondly, most accidents on mountains happen when you’re coming downhill, so it’s always best to do gentle zigzags when descending.
Oh yes, and then there was the phrase that he’d learnt that became a family joke because it was always used when we’d taken a wrong turning on a journey, or wasted a large amount of time on something. At these moments he’d always come out with: ‘Well, remember – time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.’
Anyway, my general feeling growing up was that, although it was a little strange, given his openness about most things, my father’s silence about Korea was understandable. It was part of his protectiveness, a desire to shield us from knowledge that we didn’t need to know, about a brutal war that had done him serious mental and emotional damage. Over recent years I’d been beginning to think more about the meaning of that silence, and then I read, in America, in the first week of September 2001, Susan Griffin’s astonishing work about men, war and silence, A Chorus of Stones. A book so raw that it’s taken a lot of time for me to come to terms with it. This is surely what Kafka meant when he wrote: ‘I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us … We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply,1 like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone … A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’