Time to Be in Earnest (31 page)

Joanna from Faber telephoned yesterday to discuss the cover for the trade paperback of
A Certain Justice
and we talked about the new Ted Hughes collection of poems,
Birthday Letters
. She promised to send a copy and it arrived this morning. It was impossible not to begin reading at once and just as impossible to stop once I’d begun. Inevitably one’s response to the poems is influenced by the joint tragedies; how could it be otherwise? I have always felt great sympathy for Ted Hughes and huge respect for the dignified silence with which he has endured years of calumny. No woman who is the mother of young children and kills herself can be sane, and this degree of mental pain has its roots far deeper than the imperfections of a marriage. Equally no one who has never had to live with a partner who is mentally ill can possibly understand what this means. Two people are in separate hells, but each intensifies the other. Those who have not experienced this contaminating misery should keep silent.

But now Ted Hughes’s thirty-five years of silence are broken. I have never found him an easy poet, but then why should he be? Poetry is like religion: sometimes the vision is immediate and almost frightening in its intensity; sometimes it is reached with difficulty, giving intimations only, and those confused and partial. Here the verse, unimpeded by a jumble of feral imagery, flows like a clear strong stream bearing the weight of pity, terror and regret. The poems are too honest to read as an attempt at justification. They may be a means of exorcism. Certainly they are a tribute of love.

I looked forward to today as I do to any day on which I am to see a daughter or a grandchild. I was invited to deliver a lecture to the Cambridge Union on “Fiction: Has It a Future?” and arranged in the morning to have lunch with Beatrice, to see her room at college and then, after the lecture, to spend the night with Clare.

It has been a bright day but exceedingly cold. There is something about the coldness of Cambridge that is peculiarly raw and I wished I’d been warmer clad. However, I bought a second scarf on my walk from the centre of the city to Trinity, and this helped. Beatrice took me to lunch at a restaurant specializing in pasta, and then I saw and admired her room and rested on her bed while she did some quiet reading before going to a lecture. When she returned she and a fellow student walked me to the Union, where the officers of the Union took me to dinner before the talk.

Both my young escorts are reading history and they asked me what it was like living in Cambridge during the war, and why was it, did I think, that my generation had been so dilatory and so reluctant to stand up to Hitler? I explained that this was very largely the result of the First World War. When my parents talked about the past, they seemed always to be dwelling on the war and on the destruction of a whole generation of young men. My generation was born under a pall of inarticulate grieving. One of my earliest Ludlow memories is of a terraced house with a photograph of a fresh-faced private, himself hardly more than a child, in the window between small Union Jacks. It was one of many such humble and poignant shrines. Then later we read the poets of the Great War, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, saw the films, particularly
All Quiet on the Western Front
, and read the war novels. We grew up
with the conviction that war in its horror, its brutality and its degradation was the greatest calamity possible and must at all costs be avoided. The words “never again,” spoken or unspoken, were ever-present.

My father, who fought in the 1914–18 war, could never really believe that Europe could allow it to happen again, not even when, on 3rd September 1939, war was declared. And even if we were to “stand up to Hitler”—a euphemism for going to war—when and how would that be possible? We had disarmed. Even if the mothers of England had been happy to see their sons slaughtered in the defence of the Rhineland or Czechoslovakia, the men and the money weren’t there. In the end we realized, as did Europe, that the confrontation was inevitable and began to re-arm. We went to war with none of the patriotic fervour or enthusiasm of 1914, but with the grim realization that this war was both inevitable and just, and would have to be seen through.

The young men thought it wrong to judge the past by the standards of the present and they are of course right. No doubt in a hundred years’ time our descendants will marvel that we were able to watch the death by starvation or the massacre of thousands on our television screens and yet did nothing to stop it. Yet what could we have done about Rwanda? Admittedly, given sufficient will, an army could have been sent to stop the killings; but what would follow? Could we permanently occupy a country and rule it? Stopping fighting is one thing; effecting reconciliation between tribes which have been hating each other for generations is less easy. I doubt whether it can ever be achieved by the intervention of a foreign power.

We talked about what it was like to live in Cambridge in the early days of the war. I can recall a series of sounds and images: the disciplined tramp of young feet as companies of airmen in training marched through the streets with flashes in their caps; the city crowded with unfamiliar people—evacuated civil servants, academics from other universities, refugees; dancing at the McGrath Ballroom with young airmen from the East Anglian fighter and bomber stations in the knowledge that the boy I danced with one Saturday might not be there the following week. His friends would just say “he couldn’t come.” I wouldn’t ask why, partly because I knew and partly because they were not there to remember death.

A particular memory is of going to work one morning at the Ministry of Food to find the lawn of Christ’s College completely covered with
sleeping and exhausted soldiers, gaunt-faced and mud-stained and still in their battle dress. They were part of the remnant of the Dunkirk evacuation. I’ll never know how and by what means they found themselves apparently dumped at this incongruous staging post.

Our entertainment came from the wireless and from films. The war years produced some memorable films:
Stagecoach, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz
and
Of Mice and Men
all appeared in 1939. Queues would lengthen outside the cinemas while we waited for what we called “the big picture” to end. The performance was continuous and as the couples came out, the doorman would call “four one-and-six-pennies,” and the queue would shuffle forward. The British film industry geared itself for the propaganda war. Some early films I saw, in their banality, probably provided more comfort to the enemy than encouragement for us, but Carol Reed’s
The Way Ahead
and
This Happy Breed
, and Laurence Olivier’s
Henry V
remain in the memory. I began for the first time to watch French films with Connor:
Les Enfants du Paradis, Le Jour se Lève
. During the war, cinema was at its most creative, its most influential and its most entertaining. I have seldom gone to the cinema since with the same anticipatory pleasure.

We were comparatively safe in Cambridge. A few inadvertent bombs were dropped and there were casualties but the main thrust of the war was elsewhere. I remember climbing the Gog Magog Hills and seeing the distant red glare of the sky where London was burning, remember, too, hearing our heavy bombers leaving on their raids, seeming to lift themselves grunting into the air. There is one persistent and vivid memory. I had spent an afternoon with an elderly friend of my mother’s, visiting a relation of hers who lived in a distant village. We were returning to Cambridge by bus in the darkness when the Germans raided the East Anglian airfields. We rumbled slowly on between the low hedges and the flat landscape, hearing the crash of distant bombs and ringed by fire. It reminded me of the burning of stubble after the harvest. The blacked-out bus didn’t stop—what would have been the point?—but I remember that we all sat in absolute silence. It wasn’t the silence of fear, more the weariness of the journey and a resigned acceptance. My elderly companion slept, slumped against me. The raids weren’t close enough for there to be real danger, but I had a sensation of grinding onward inexorably through a deserted landscape that had become alien and surreal. The sights and sounds of Cambridge at war come back clearly, but the emotion is more elusive. I have no recollection of fear—not then—or, I
think, of any apprehension that the war would be lost. I suppose I felt healthy, alive, optimistic, eager for life; in other words, I felt young.

This was a golden day with weather to match: sunny, even warm, and with a clear blue sky. Jane and Peter arrived shortly after ten and we took a hurried glance at the papers before setting out for our walk. We went to Holland Park, wended our way down the most agreeable streets north of Kensington Library, then through to Hyde Park and as far as Watt’s statue of energy. I had taken some bread with me and on our return we threw pellets to the seagulls which swooped and shrieked, snatching the bread on the wing. Some of the people strolling in the sunshine round the pond must have been carrying their weight of unhappiness, but the air seemed to sing with pleasure. The old men were racing their model boats, the children chasing the pigeons, others sitting in the sunshine reading their books, the lovers strolling hand-in-hand.

We walked round the sunken garden at the Palace, now in its winter decrepitude but bringing back memories of tulips and the scents of high summer. Peter hadn’t visited it before. Walking out over the grass I hoped again that the proposed Princess Diana Memorial Garden would not be built here. There is already the sunken garden, and the great stretch of green is so important—and not only to the residents of Kensington walking their dogs. Surely some more appropriate place can be found.

Afterwards we went back to Holland Park and had an early lunch at the Belvedere; a good meal eaten in pleasant surroundings and in peace before the usual Sunday lunchtime rush. The plan was then to go on by car to the Tate. Jane demurred at first, feeling tired, but we persuaded her, after which she admitted to the prospect of pleasure.

The Tate was busy, as it always is on a Sunday afternoon, but not disagreeably so. We visited one of my favourite pictures, William Dyce’s
Pegwell Bay
. I like Victorian painting, including genre painting, and this has always appealed to me largely, I suppose, because it’s a seascape and I love the contrast of the gaunt, dark, almost ageless cliffs and the Victorian figures in the foreground. But for so peaceful and innocent a view I find it a disturbing picture, one which always induces in me the same
gentle melancholy. The painter stands underneath the cliffs looking up at the faintly discernible comet streaking across the sky, but the women are preoccupied in collecting shells, almost as if they were totally detached from the beauty around them and oblivious to the wonder in the sky. One knows that the shells would later be used to decorate boxes or photograph frames, one of the ways in which the underemployed middle-class Victorian woman managed to pass her time. The picture seems to speak of the transience and pointlessness of human life, of the brief span of our days measured against the intensity of space and time. But I love it and wish I had it on my walls.

Jane wanted to see the Bacons, so Peter and I walked through the Turner galleries. I know that Turner is a great painter—but I don’t respond to him as I do to lesser geniuses. Peter and Jane drove straight home from the gallery after dropping me in Holland Park Avenue. It has been one of those days which will remain in memory, one more to be carefully shored up against ruin.