I often think about how our children and grandchildren will look at us in this regard – in our collective failure to come to terms with our past. In May 1953, Albert Speer wrote this letter, from his prison cell in Spandau, to his daughter Hilde:
To reassure you however, of the dreadful things I knew nothing. The Americans told me later that they never thought I did. Even so, I’m not entirely content to leave it at that, for I ask myself what, given my lofty position, I could have found out had I wanted to. Even then, perhaps not everything, but certainly a great deal … I saw my fate, if you like as God’s judgement – not for having infringed any laws (for my transgressions in that sense were comparatively minimal) but for the deeper guilt of having so readily and unthinkingly gone along.
Will our grandchildren judge us in the same way? They may well feel that we never asked the questions we should have asked about our past. That we lived in a state of cultural blindness. That we stood aside, we enjoyed all the wealth that trade and power brought us, without ever really considering the costs. That we so readily and unthinkingly went along.
11
Power and the Hurricane
February 2014, London to north-west Wales
A hiatus in writing. Seven months – where the unpredictable nature of life, and its challenges, has interrupted my progress. But now, at last, another journey to the west. Not to Pembrokeshire this time, but further north, to an estuary on the edge of Snowdonia. I’m desperate to return to the books. So, despite the dire winter weather forecasts, I’m filled with intense excitement as I begin to pack the car, and think about heading westwards once again this evening.
*
Adding to the anxieties of the last months, my mother had a serious fall and broke her hip in August. When she came out of hospital I spent a month looking after her at the house in Suffolk. An unfamiliar experience with someone as vigorous and independent as she is. A poignancy too. As she recovered we took little walks, every day, up the lane towards the bridge. Her arm in mine, pacing very slowly, trying to go a little further each time. The same lane where she’d helped us take our first steps as children more than forty years ago, where she’d held us as we learnt to ride our bikes. And now, with the vertiginous circles that life brings, it is she who is holding on to my arm for support. For the first time in her life, walking slowly with a stick, I realise, with a shock that she might look ‘elderly’ to someone who has never known her. She’s always been the one with energy, the one who has looked after others, who has helped her friends who are frailer, staying with them as they convalesce. Now she’s learning to be a patient; trying, not very successfully, also to be patient with herself.
Being back at the farmhouse in Suffolk is always a curious experience – simultaneously familiar and disorientating. Perhaps the same for most people going home, returning to the house where they grew up. My brother’s family now live in one part of the building, my sister’s family in the house next door – ‘the family commune’, as I sometimes refer to it. Anyway, this was the first time for many years that I’d spent a month back there, and the first time ever that I’ve done all the shopping and cooking, trying to adapt to my mother’s primarily vegetarian diet. I was surprised at my ability to put my life and work on hold; I felt a liberation in the necessity of dealing with this situation, being entirely present for somebody you love. It wasn’t difficult at all. When she was sleeping I cooked or read; when she was awake I’d go through to the downstairs room, next to the garden, which we’d turned into her temporary bedroom while she wasn’t able to use the stairs. I’d see if she wanted something to eat, or we’d talk or, if she had more energy, occasionally read something together – I remember we read the short story ‘Un Coeur Simple’ and Pereira Maintains in those days of convalescence, and marvelled at how Flaubert’s provincial Normandy village and Tabucchi’s Lisbon, from other centuries, could be so vividly evoked in this sunlit room in Suffolk.
In the evenings, after she’d gone to sleep, I’d return to the sitting room, catch up with emails, have supper with the rest of the family and chat about how ‘the patient’ was getting on. I’d often then read until the early hours, and sometimes, before going to bed, I’d open the front door and go out to the orchard to look at the August night sky, hoping for a glimpse of a shooting star from the Perseid showers common in this month. Over the last years I’ve developed a night ritual when I’m down there – at least once during my stay, regardless of the season, whether there’s frost underfoot or summer moonlight, I slowly walk around the sleeping houses. At the back of the buildings, when the river is high, you can hear the water flowing powerfully over the mill race a few hundred yards away, at other times maybe the call of an owl or the rustling of wind in the trees. But always, as I circle the houses, watching the sleeping windows, I think in turn of each person inside, and hope for their well-being. This simple action makes me go back in time to a period when our ancestors might have patrolled the fences at the edge of settlements against the dangers of the dark. But for me today it’s a time to reflect on the happiness that we have, the difficulties we face, and the fragility of everything. A kind of prayer, I suppose.
One night, just a few days after my mother’s operation, I begin my circumnavigation of the house. As I walk, in the early hours, all my energy is taken up with willing her recovery to continue, willing the pain to fade, willing her back to an active life again. I come round the end of the house by her temporary bedroom, and am surprised to see the lamp still on inside, light spilling out through the French windows over the garden. Through the glass I see she has fallen asleep with a book still open on her chest. The pages touching the fingers of her left hand. At least I think she’s sleeping. Momentarily I freeze. I watch with an intensity for signs of her breathing. After one of the longest twenty seconds of my life I see the book, and her chest, slowly rise, and then fall, as she breathes. I wait a little longer just to make sure my mind is not playing tricks on me. The entire universe now shrunk to this single act of looking, a few inches of a hand, a book, a breathing body … yes, the fall and rise continues, and now I can breathe again. Overwhelming relief. I retreat from the glass and continue my walk around the house, wondering if anybody’s ever calculated the number of breaths breathed in a lifetime. And, from watching my mother’s breathing, suddenly I’m trying to imagine her watching all of our first breaths in the hospital. The most astonishing moment of our lives that none of us are able to remember.
And I have a sense that I’ve just taken another step into a different stage of life. A rehearsal for the unthinkable end. And our own ends as well. Whatever our age, we will never be prepared. Instantly we will fall back through time. A line comes into my head, but from where I cannot now remember – ‘for, in the hour of his death, he … like all men, cried out for his mother’.1
*
The shocks continued through the late autumn. There are times in life, perhaps fewer as you get older, when you have the illusion that you can control the circumstances of your life, that you have the power to make dynamic choices. And then life humbles you, and you realise that so much of existence is not controllable. Death, love, illness, grief – these are not well behaved or predictable in any way. Before Christmas a close friend of mine had another frightening and debilitating descent into depression. Periodically she has suffered from such episodes, but the last one was almost ten years ago, and all of us close to her hoped that she’d broken this cycle. It’s incredibly hard to see somebody you love in this kind of pain, yet know the limitations of what you can do to help. To feel relatively powerless – beyond the ability to simply be there, be calm, give love.