In Praise of Savagery (3 page)

One day we were sitting together in the restroom sipping vending-machine coffee from plastic cups when I asked him about his sleeves and why he never rolled them up.

‘Do you really want to know?’ he said.

I said that I did; and with this he put down his cup and beckoned me to follow him outside, into the corridor. There, after checking in both directions, he undid both cuff-buttons; then, looking me in the eye, he pulled back first one sleeve and then the other.

‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

His arms, both of them, right down to the wrist, were covered, with barely a patch of flesh to spare, in blue-green tattoos. Mostly they were of skulls and motorcycles, and skulls in Second World War-German-Army-style motorcycle helmets, and motorcyclists
with fleshless skulls for heads. There were also the logos of the old British motorcycle manufacturers surmounted by skulls, or just in the general vicinity of skulls. And, on one arm, a naked lady wreathed in a large snake.

‘Gosh!’ I said, or words to that effect.

‘I’m a Hell’s Angel,’ he said.

And thereafter he would tell me, when we were alone together, about his weekends with the Chapter, and about motorcycles and how to customise them to make them just so, and why, when a big petrol tank meant that you could ride for longer and make fewer stops, it was a good thing to replace it with a smaller one, from the point of view of just looking hardcore.

All of which made sense to me then and seemed only right and natural.

I was twenty-three years old, or thereabouts. I saw the world of work, then, as what people had to go through, to pay for what they wanted to do in their ‘real’ time, the time that mattered. And all the business reports on the television talking about the FT-100 Share Index and whatnot, and the copies of the
Financial Times
in the newsagents, and in the bookshops the shelves upon shelves of books with titles like
Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple
,
The Ten Habits of Successful Business Leaders
and
The Corporate Warrior: Your Road Map to Success
, I thought, then, that they were what people had to read because of their jobs, and what they had to put themselves through to earn their living. But that beyond these, I thought there were other things that meant more to them: I don’t know—golf, say, even, or motorcycles, or tennis or something. Now, I don’t know so much. Now, I’m not so sure. There are people, I have seen, who every day when lunchtime comes, stay at their desks. There are people who, every day when home-time comes, don’t go home, but instead stay on at work for hours. There are people who, though they have holiday allocation, don’t
take it all, or even much more than a fraction of it; and who, when they do leave the office, take with them the concerns of their company, take them on as their own and carry their work around in their heads with them, and when they talk, they talk about work, or else they constantly check mobile electronic devices for messages to do with work. There are people who earn the most extraordinary sums of money working in offices, but who do not know what their own children like to eat. There are television programmes about work, too, game-shows in which the contestants vie to be the best shopkeeper or salesman or distributor or wholesaler, and for whom the prize, should they win, is a job in an office in a provincial retail park.

I shared a taxi, years later, with a businesswoman I had been working with, a senior executive with a multinational company who had lived, for a year or two at a time, in more countries than she could remember, who regularly attended breakfast meetings before work and evening functions with business colleagues and contacts after work, and who said goodnight to her children, most nights, by telephone as the nanny tucked them in; and as we drove, by way of conversation, I asked about her husband and what he did.

‘He’s an entrepreneur,’ she said.

And indeed he seemed to be a successful one, for between them they had an expensive house in a sought-after part of London and a second home elsewhere, and several expensive cars. They both had their clothes made for them by tailors, and had all of the things and did all of the things that successful people have and do.

‘And what are his hobbies?’ I asked.

It took her a moment or two to make sense of what I had said. It seemed to be not the sort of question that she was used to being asked by the kinds of people she habitually mixed with.

‘Business is his hobby,’ she replied, at length.

‘But outside business? I mean, does he have a sport he likes, or an interest or something?’

She thought again.

‘I asked him once. I said, what would you do if you couldn’t work? If you’d earned so much money you didn’t need to. And he said, “I’d start a new company”.’

For some people, work is the thing, the main thing in life. Work is what they choose to do and where they want to be. Work is life.

But then I did not believe this to be so.

To the east of Abyssinia there lies a desolate volcanic plain, strewn with ash and tumbled black rocks, almost entirely empty of life and swept constantly by a burning salt wind. What vegetation there is grows close to the banks of the slow-flowing, mud-red Awash River, which winds its way down from the mountains, down through deep gorges and into the barren desert, where live the people known as the Danakil, who were, at one time, a murderous tribe split into two great bands, the
Adoimara
, or White Men, and the
Asaimara
, or Red Men. Among these Danakil, both Adoimara and Asaimara, a man’s status was judged, entirely, by the number of men, women and children he had killed. This he might do by any means he pleased, no matter how treacherous. When they were not killing outsiders, or engaging in feuds with surrounding tribes, the two bands of the Danakil expended their time and their energies on killing each other.

The river flows on and on through the Danakil lands for mile after mile until there rises, in the distance, a line of purple hills known as the Magenta Mountains. There is a steep and narrow pass in these mountains, and the river flows through it, pouring down into an extraordinary oasis, shut in all round by sheer precipices of black rock. Some thirty miles square, it is a place of thick forest, deep swamp and huge lakes.

This is the land of Aussa, and it was, in the 1930s, the home of a great Danakil army who owed their absolute loyalty to the Sultan of that place, whose palace lay deep within the forest.

The Sultan, in those days, was a small, intense-eyed man called Muhammad Yuya. His father, the Sultan before him, had on his deathbed called for two slaves to be brought before him, one male and one female; and he had had them both slaughtered there, in the hope of seeing, in their death-agonies, some clue or portent that might help him escape his predicament. He could not. But no doubt it passed the time.

The river flows around Aussa on three sides, looking for a way out into the desert land beyond, where at some further point, before reaching the coast at Djibouti, it disappears. No one outside Aussa ever knew where it went.

There had been attempts to discover the river’s destination, over the years; and over the years there had been a number of expeditions to Aussa, but none had ever returned alive.

An expedition, in 1875, led by the Swiss explorer and mercenary Werner Munzinger, accompanied by his wife and children, were all murdered before reaching the borders of Aussa. In 1881, two Italians, Giuseppe Giulietti and Ettore Biglieri, had mounted an expedition to cross the country to the north of Aussa to establish a new trade route. Their bodies were found lying in the desert, horribly mutilated. Three years later, fourteen armed Italian sailors had tried to cross the same land from the opposite direction. They, likewise, were all killed. And in the 1920s, a party led by two Greek animal-collectors was hacked to death, although a third Greek managed to escape, crawling away on his hands and knees in the brief space between being left for dead and the corpse-mutilators getting down to their work.

In 1933, at the age of twenty-three and not long down from Oxford, Wilfred Thesiger made a decision.

‘I will bloody well go and do it myself,’ he said.

It was, as houses on the outskirts of Harlow New Town go, a fairly normal one.

It was semi-detached, and vaguely modern in style; or what would have been considered modern sometime in the mid-1960s, when it was built. It had large double-glazed picture windows with brown frames, and a bit of dark vertical wood-cladding in some parts and off-white render in others, and it sat in a row of houses that were identical—or that would have been identical at one time, before the replacement-window and flat-roof-extension salesmen came around. Also the stone-cladding salesmen, for one of the houses nearby had pinkish and yellowish crazy-paving up its walls, for reasons best known to its owner, and also to the owners of other similar houses I had passed on the way. It was in a cul-de-sac, the house, a cul-de-sac with only half a name. I say half a name, but it was a whole name—‘Winchester’ or ‘Gatefield’ or something—but it was a name without a description—it wasn’t Winchester
Road
or Gatefield
Close
or whatever—it was just what it was without the attachment. Things were like that, round that way, when they built Harlow New Town. It was a time when people knew better, you see.

The end of the Second World War—the cities bombed to smithereens, the population subsisting on powdered egg and dripping, the biggest and most powerful empire the world had ever known vanishing—
poof!
—just like that, gone in a puff of smoke, like a magician’s party-trick. It was plain that the old ways of doing things were worn out, and that they no longer applied in the modern age.

Road-names were part of it. For centuries, as long as roads had been around, they’d always been called Something Road, and Streets called Something Street, and so on and so forth; but no one, apparently, had ever thought to ask why. This, it was felt, would no longer do. There had been too much unnecessary adornment and frippery for far too long, the thinking went, and it was about time people started behaving rationally.

And so, in 1947, when the planners got down to work on Harlow New Town, roads called roads and streets called streets were to become things of the past. Henceforth, they would just have the functional part of the name, without the redundant descriptor (‘Yes, I can see that it’s a bloody road—you don’t have to tell me that!’).

And then there was the Town Centre itself, which was to be truly a Town Centre for the coming age. Because old-style town centres, in the pre-war world, had just happened—they’d grown up higgledy-piggledy over God knows how long, around lanes and alleyways, and were messy and crowded at the best of times; and when there were cars and delivery vans to add to the equation, they really just didn’t work any more.

It was now time to go back to the drawing-board and plan the whole thing properly, from scratch.

So Harlow New Town got an urban ring-road, for the traffic to go around, and it got the country’s first-ever pedestrian shopping precinct, all planned out by modern planners and designed
by modern architects and built—well, probably still built by blokes in flat caps and donkey-jackets with packets of Woodbines in their pockets, but at least they did it using the latest reinforced concrete this time, and put raised walkways all over the place and flat roofs throughout. Which leaked, the roofs—but this was considered a small price to pay for what was manifestly a work of progress. In the words of the great American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough.’ Or, as he put it, rather more bluntly, to clients who had the temerity to complain about their leaks, ‘That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.’

In 1951 Harlow got the country’s first-ever residential tower-block, The Lawn, as a taster of what was to come in the planned communities of the future. And as if all of that weren’t enough, to top it off they had sculptures in the parks and squares, so that Art would be for the many, not the few. Not just any sculptures, either—not long-dead generals in classic poses or things like that—but actual Henry Moores. Henry Moores are sort of roundy-shaped things, often with holes in them, and they were considered just the thing at that time—just the business for edifying the population. And the population, no doubt, after being thoroughly edified by the Henry Moores, would all go back up the stairwells of their modern high-rise flats stroking their chins thoughtfully, in order then to listen to a bit of atonal music on their Bakelite wirelesses while getting on with their basket-weaving and smoking their pipes.

It was to be a brave new world of communal solidarity and free dentures and spectacles on the National Health, a world that would see the gradual withering-away of class distinctions, private property, private schools, dirty drains and outdated traditions.

People believed in all that, then. There are still people who believe in it now.

It all depends, I think, on your view of the malleability and
perfectibility of human nature: on the one hand, the degree to which we are as we are because, until now, we’d not had enough Progress and hadn’t learnt any better; and on the other hand the degree to which we are as we are because that’s just the way we are. Back then the balance of opinion among the people who knew best was definitely coming down on the malleability and perfectibility side.

Not just in Harlow, either, but all over the place.

In 1948—a year after Harlow got going—a professor by the name of B. F. Skinner, the most influential psychologist of his generation, published a book called
Walden Two
, a utopian volume which described the wonderful life lived by the inhabitants of the ultimate ‘planned community’, a perfect town of a thousand happy, productive and creative people governed by a handful of properly qualified managers and planners, acting on the impartial advice of a small number of scientists. It was a place in which people no longer ate meals at home with their families but dined, instead, in communal canteens, not least because the ratio of volume to surface area of a large cooking-pot is more energy-efficient than that of a smaller one. Clothes no longer denoted status, since status, like poverty and violence, no longer existed—although the people did dress attractively in items carefully and strategically chosen to be beyond the fast-changing vagaries of fashion, which is a bad thing because it ‘makes perfectly good clothes worthless’ long before they are worn out. And women in this ideal community most certainly did not fill up their wardrobes with party-dresses, since these things were quite clearly impractical. The world, Skinner suggested, could be this way, and people could be this way, with just a little effort from all of us and just a little expert guidance from the likes of him. We could all be this way.