After five years of revisions and accretions to my huge seventeenth and eighteenth posts, I come to write a nineteenth one. The number is magical for me because, when I was a baby, as I have said many times in previous posts, I lived with my mother and father in one room in an old London house kept by Neapolitan Italians, 19 Hornsey Rise, London N19.
And so often I have returned to where the house stood, as if by sitting on the park-bench in the beautiful peace garden which may mark the site of our room, I could become whole again. The house is gone, my parents are gone, and my efforts to make contact with the remaining members of the Maccariello family, who kept the house, have come to nothing. Twice, on the phone, I have been abused and threatened by a member of that family, who would not give his name, for having had the temerity to try and contact them.
Yet I have a photo of myself as a baby, sitting on my mother's lap, surrounded by the laughing and merrymaking Italians in a dark but convivial room of their house. Why, when so many years later, I tried to meet them, did they not want to know me?
I am uneasy now with the number nineteen. It is almost twenty, but not quite. It falls short. When I lived so unhappily (but with hours of great happiness) in the Portuguese resort of Altura, I always tried to keep the bill at the restaurants, including the tip, to 19 Euros. If I got one Euro change from a 20 Euro note, I was happy. If they presented me with a bill for 21, I became angry. But why did I get upset, just like that half-Pole half-Italian on the phone?
Twenty-one could be better really. I was born on 21st August 1955. Near my twenty-first birthday, on a warm night in Oxford, I had my first sexual experience for almost two years. And the book that means most to me is the Gospel of John, and that has twenty-one chapters, and the chapter I love most is the twenty-first, where the risen Christ is cooking breakfast for his disciples on the shore when they are out fishing at night, and they glimpse him as he stands over the brazier in the light of dawn, but at first, as happened before, they do not know him. It is a scene so unearthly and yet so down-to-earth, a glimpse of what earthly harmony and heavenly peace might be like, a vision of love that speaks to us over two thousand years.
But John's book is eternally marred by his hatred of the Jews. He can never escape the hate that mixes with the love he wants to show. Life is essentially tragic. It will always go wrong.
And I begin my nineteenth post on 19th November 2021. But in order to reach a conclusion to the disordered and demanding record of the eighteen misshapen and sometimes absurdly long pieces, I should bring the number to twenty-one. Then, in another year whose number I do not yet know, an account of some radiant encounter, such as John had as he stood in the boat and said to Peter, "It is the Lord," may bring my blog to a satisfying conclusion.
And as the number on the screen countdown box has reached twenty-one, I will tell what the subject of my nineteenth post will be. No, the number of minutes is twenty. I will wait until it hits nineteen. Now it has. And I remember that other electronic device so many years ago which seemed to tell me that my grandfather was Joseph Goebbels. Can anything so fantastic possibly be true? Yes. it can.
In this post, with the box now at eighteen, and safely past the magic numbers, I will detail the process by which I came to the knowledge I have mentioned.
Seventeen now. Well, it was the late December of 2005. I had gone to Altura. Twice in the darkness I walked past the silent and mysterious house, the house that was mine, the house I could not enter. I spoke to the ambiguous people who inhabited the village, who might be friends, might be enemies. I became very upset and "disturbed", as they say. I was an official mental health case as it happens, although I had arranged to be classified as such in order to escape the dole, where you had to sign on every two weeks, which hampered my program of world travel.
I went back to Faro, where I was to catch the plane to England. It was the morning of 24th December, 2005, Christmas Eve. I was to depart that late lunchtime. In the late morning, I sat in a small cafe in the downtown of Faro. It was called the Snack-Bar da Baixa. And suddenly one of the multiple blocks that had affected my memories of my childhood was cleared.
The memories horrified me. They were of my mother and the man who brought me up engaged in international smuggling. I believed them both to be my parents then and for many years afterwards. I was a child alone with them in the car and then on the Channel ferry. And I remembered the terrible anxiety as we approached England. I remembered my mother saying, again and again, "Now remember, son, whatever you do don't look at the customers!" (That was her way of referring to the customs officials.)
And I remembered the three of us walking through the Nothing to Declare corridor, and how I held my mother's hand, and prayed that she could protect me from the danger that threatened us if we were caught by the men who stood so silently on either side.
And then, even worse, I remembered that, once, when we were approaching the channel port in northern France, they received some sort of message and decided that it would be better to enter by another port. And I remembered that they drove all night far across the coast of France until we reached what was probably St Malo. And I remembered I could not sleep because of the anxiety I felt for myself and for them.
(One of the many people who have been doubtful about my claims once suggested to me that my memories of the international smuggling were false memory. I know this is not so and for the following reason. Very late in her long life, I raised the question with the last-surviving of my mother's sisters, Eva, and she admitted that my mother and the man who brought me up had indulged in smuggling and said it was always a case of port which was disguised as crockery. This aunt (she was a half-aunt really, except that there is no such thing as a half-aunt, someone is either your aunt or she is not) was the only one of the half-sisters who habitually told comic stories, which was something she had in common with my mother. Now she pictured Mum sniffing at the crate that contained the concealed wine and saying ecstatically, "Que rica loiça!," "What magnificent crockery!"
My aunt went on to say that the port was purely for private consumption, but I remembered my mother and the man who brought me up being notably abstemious in their consumption of alcohol, and I think that in this part of her account my aunt was lying. She may well also have been lying when she said the smuggled goods were always only port wine.)
Now I sat transfixed in the snack bar, coffee long finished. I was fifty years old, and up to that time, for almost all my adult years, had been almost entirely unable to remember anything about my childhood. My memories began at the age of eighteen when I went to Oxford. Almost everything before that had been blocked out.
But in the years after 2005, more was to come back to me, and I was to discover something of my strange background. My mother and the man who brought me up were both dead by the time I sat in the snack-bar. They had died in 2002 and 2004. I was in a state of mental distress because my mother, whom I loved, had left her house to someone I believed then to be a stranger. In fact he appears to be my half-brother. My father was still alive in 2005 and for some years to come, but I did not know this, for I did not even know he existed, still believing Arthur Ernest Hills Junior to be my biological father.
But I already knew that everything was not as it seemed to be. I was by now fully aware that my mother had spoken Neapolitan Italian better than Portuguese, even though she was supposed to be entirely a Portuguese. And I had been told by three old women that my mother had told them at about the time of my birth that the father of my father had been a Pole or perhaps a German, even though he was supposed to be entirely from Kent.
As I moved towards England, more memories began flooding on me, and more strange ideas about these mysterious ancestors, all dead - as I believed then - began to develop as my state of agitation became more intense. I was focusing particularly on our holiday in Italy when I was about ten, which had followed another in Germany and Austria the previous year (usually we went to Portugal). After leaving Italy we had entered Switzerland and stopped in a small town and they went to visit a bank and locked me in the car. They were gone a long time and I began to panic alone. I was enormously relieved when they finally returned and I experienced my mother's love.
Now, on the plane, I began to believe that they had arranged to pick up Nazi gold while in Germany where my real paternal ancestry lay, got hold of it the following year in Italy, and then deposited it in a Swiss bank. But how was I to get the gold? I had no idea what the small town was, what the bank was. I knew they were in Switzerland.
(It was the third of the three old women who had suggested to me that my grandfather might have been German rather than Polish, while the first two had not mentioned this possibility. I cannot remember exactly when she made the suggestion, but it was shortly before the time of the visit to the Algarve and the sudden access of memory. I immediately believed the German origin to be more likely, because both myself and my mother were strongly interested in and attached to things German and had no interest in Poland. I think it is possible that, around the time I was almost eighteen, she had planted the idea in my mind that I was partly German without my knowing this had happened. She could be very subtle in that way.
When I had only the evidence of the first two old women, and not that of the third, I had become totally desperate during a long walk around outer West London to know who my ostensibly Polish grandfather had been and had written - for the second time since losing contact with him about twenty years before - to the man who had brought me up and whom I still believed to be my father, Arthur Ernest Hills. The first time, he had sent back a letter so cruelly insulting that it had deeply shocked a friend to whom I showed it. It had shaken me as well and I had left the old man alone a long time. This second letter was somewhat briefer and a little less grim, but it said, "If you have no descendants, you do not need roots. You are a full stop."
This brief note, written quite shortly before the death of Arthur Ernest Hills, finished off by saying that the idea that his father had been a Pole was "nonsense.")
As we neared my own country, I remembered Mum and the fact that she was so fluent in Neapolitan Italian. Could she have arrived in Portugal from Italy during the war and been adopted by a Portuguese family as their own? There were a few strange Italian connections and names in the remote rural region that she was ostensibly from. Could a colony of Italians have arrived there and passed themselves off as Portuguese? But she had been very attached to the man who appeared to be her father, who had been the very image of a Portuguese peasant, and she could tell childhood stories about the five women who were ostensibly her sisters. Both these facts suggested that she had really grown up in that remote rural region and was really Portuguese.
And then I thought about the man whom I still believed to be my father, and about the man, whom I had known, who had seemed to be his father, and whom the first of the three old women had insisted was my real grandfather, even though he was apparently of Polish origin and not English as I had always supposed. How come the background of these two men seemed to be so firmly rooted in England and Scotland (Arthur's mother had ostensibly been an Edinburgh woman)? But the family had apparently been broken up by the poor law when my ostensible father had been about seven and he had said in some tapes he had made for me before I stopped seeing him that he could remember nothing about his first seven years. This seemed suspicious. Could those first seven years have been spent in Germany? But how had he been inserted into the English and Scottish family? He had told stories about an uncle Fred who drove a van and who had given him a toy parrot which was the last souvenir he had of his childhood until his own son, Chris Hills, destroyed it. And I had met an aunt Connie in Gillingham, who was apparently Fred's sister, during my own childhood. These facts suggested an English background.
I had spent the whole plane journey in a state of almost frantic anxiety, puzzlement and grief, and when I reached Heathrow decided to get a hugely expensive taxi to my flat in Clapham through the dark afternoon, so that I could reach the comfort of my home as soon as possible.
Regular readers of my blog will remember that I once had four male friends whom I thought were close. Mentions of them in this blog go back to the very first post I wrote, and indeed these days they move frequently like jagged ghosts through my mind, and this applies also to Bill Hicks, with whom I am still on terms. The first of these to come into this post is the most ambiguous, the most impressive, and the most evil of the four, Mark Casserley. He was the one on whom I depended the most.
Mark had come to me one dark night. It was towards the Christmas of 1989. He attended a writers' group of which I had long been a member, made up mainly of elderly people whom I had thought were my friends, but from whose company I was eventually to be thrown out, with him conniving. He seemed most sympathetic and civilised at this first meeting. His mother had recently died, he had had to move out of his father's house, he was living as a lodger in the house of an unsympathetic man in Putney, and he had come to us for Christmas comfort. Or so it seemed.
After the meeting, and with the old people dispersing to their homes, I invited Mark to come with me to a nearby pub. As we sat there, he seemed to share so many cultural interests with me and to understand so much of my own personal life that I had the strange sensation that I had always known him, that he had not just entered my life on that dark night.
I hastened to become his close friend. And, with his great practicality, and his intellectual gifts, he began to take over my life. But the sensation that I had always known him never once returned. Instead I was confronted with the endless mystery of this character which on that first occasion had seemed so readily to open itself. He did everything for me, with no payment expected and little unwillingness, but never showed me the slightest affection. And as the years went on this began increasingly to disturb me. And as my dependence on him became more and more, and his contempt for my helplessness more readily apparent, eventually my attitude towards him crystallised into hatred.
But the years were long when Mark was my boon companion. Sometimes I would be lying luxuriously in bed, and Mark would be in the sitting-room hoovering, or in the kitchen, performing some other task. My bedroom door would be firmly shut against him. I did not wish to see him at his work, or learn how to use the hoover. It was enough for me that he was taking care of everything, as my mother had once done.
One day in particular comes back to me. It was a Christmas Day. This was probably at some date in the mid-1990s, my diaries are gone for those years, so I shall never know the exact year. In those days I dreaded being alone on Christmas Day and of course the transport is off In London. At that time, Mark shared a grim terraced house in Morden with some friends, they had gone back to their families for the season, and, although it was a very long way to walk there, I offered to do this so that I should not be alone.
In the late morning I set out, and the way was long along the long winding road that leads past the Northern Line tube stations - Clapham South, Balham, Tooting Broadway, Tooting Bec, Colliers Wood - but quite a lot of people were about and many of the foreign shops were open, so I trudged on and stayed cheerful. At last I arrived at Morden, he gave me lunch, and then, in sheer exhaustion I fell asleep on his sofa while he played Sibelius Symphonies Two and Three on his CD, or it might have been Three and Four. He told me the exact numbers of the symphonies when I woke up but I cannot be sure of them now. But I think it was Symphonies Two and Three. No 4 is the harshest and most disturbing of the Sibelius Symphonies, while the third is an optimistic work building to a climax of triumphant power and No 2 has a hard, marching, impenetrable joy. And Mark was a person of almost unyielding determination, always keen to put his best foot forward. These haunting works wove their way most memorably through my dreams and I never saw or really knew the silent person who sat listening to them.
Finally I awoke, it was already dark, he was there, and he gave me the simple and filling type of supper at which he excelled. And quite soon after that it was time to start on the long journey once again, and he offered to come with me part of the way, and in the end he walked with me as far as Clapham South. From there it was quite an easy stretch to my flat, so I didn't suffer. How grateful I was to him for what seemed that selfless gesture!
Sometimes Mark would say strange things to me. Once he said, "Like all military types, you´re good at intelligence." And, although I have never had anything to do with the military, I think it is possible I have the same mindset in a civilian context. And another time he said that there was something incalculable about my eyes. And it is true I tend to reveal my true character only in my writing.
I have begun to hate people suddenly many times in my life. I do not usually tell them my feelings have changed. This is how it happened with him, and to tell it I need to go back to near the start of our relationship.
Besides being passionately interested in classical music, Mark also understands electronics to a considerable degree, both theoretically and practically. Very early on in our relationship he was responsible for helping me buy a system of separates (turntable, tuner, radio, tape player, CD player), and this cemented our friendship. He set up the system for me, and any little problems that developed with it he would always come round almost immediately to sort out. I still remember those days and the joy of our friendship and the feeling of being cared for
A while after getting the separates, Mark helped me buy a word processor and trained me thoroughly in its use. The result was that I began to love this new compositional tool, which was really only a glorified typewriter, and my writing, which I composed late at night to music and while sipping a glass of Moscato, began to progress wonderfully. The years 1990 and 1991 were in many ways the happiest of my life. I had work, mostly during the evening, in a strange and fascinating second-hand bookshop in central London. I did not lack for friends and acquaintances, and soon Mark was helping me with money. I began writing a first novel, to chronicle my agreeable existence, and felt sure my work would be published. I read it to Mark page by page, endlessly stressing to him how brilliant and soulful this elegiac composition was.
In the summer of 1990 I went to see my mother in Portugal, left her in order to travel to Morocco, got stuck in Tangier for three days because I missed the ferry, and went to visit Paul Bowles, who in those days was a celebrity author. On an idle autumn Friday in London, I told someone about the experience and that person suggested I write up my visit to Bowles. I did this immediately, got the editorial say-so from Mark at the edition of one of our regular Saturday lunchtime meetings that followed the next day, and sent the piece to The Guardian on the Monday. On Wednesday afternoon, Mark was with me at my flat and we decided not to go to the meeting of PEN which was taking place that evening. Then the Guardian phoned. They had accepted the piece. I was later to discover that only about one in a thousand articles sent to them on spec was accepted.
I said at the beginning of this post that life inevitably goes wrong. This certainly seems to have been true of what triumphs I have had in my life. The Paul Bowles piece was published by The Guardian on 1st January 1991. This should have been a wonderful omen, to get my first piece printed by a national newspaper on the first day of the decade. But I was alone when the triumph came. My mother was staying with me for a while, having come over from Portugal, but she had gone to see a female friend from East London to whom I had taken a dislike. Mark and everyone else were engaged elsewhere. And I had failed to insist to The Guardian that my writing name was C.A.R. Hills and they had printed the piece under the name of Charles Hills. I was to get two other pieces published by the Guardian, had trouble with the the third one, and have never again written for that paper. There were also three pieces in the Telegraph, then never again. None of my relationships with any outlet have proved permanent.
On that New Year's Day I tried to share what joy I still felt with people over the phone. But it is difficult to share joy over the phone. And Mark's cool voice, so utterly devoid of any feeling for me, seemed to make him a particularly chilling interlocutor. Even when he had been with me when the news had first come, he had not suggested we go out to a wine bar to celebrate. That had hurt me.
It is difficult to recall exactly when my affection for Mark became tinged with dislike. But I think it may have been on that occasion. And when an emotional process begins with me, I can never stop it until a conclusion has been reached. I can often conceal it, though, then reveal it at an odd moment.
The second of the three main stages by which I came to hate him was in the spring of 2000. This was when my mother came to London and more or less told me that she had left her house to her lover and my lifelong love for her died. After she told me, at a Wednesday lunchtime, I entered two days of madness where I constantly roamed the streets of London, returning to the house periodically to abuse my Mum. On the first of these nights I rang Mark from the basement of the Piccadilly Waterstone's, where in those days there was a public phone. His reaction to my distress horrified me. He said that Flavio was looking after my mother and had a right to share in her inheritance. The cold, rational tone in which he spoke, similar to the one in which he had greeted the news of my newspaper article, alienated me in a way I had never experienced before. I never really liked him after that.
Perhaps on that night, but more likely on the following one, I met Bill Hicks by chance on the bus near our homes, shared my news, and he invited me back to his flat, where he showed the sympathy and understanding for my situation that I regarded as proper. From that time, although Mark was officially still my best friend, and continued to do everything for me, Bill really fulfilled that function, and this equally ambiguous person largely took the place of my mother in my affections over long years.
The time when I would really hate Mark began in late 2005, shortly before the period of which I am mainly speaking. In the spring and early summer of that year I had gone on an extended tour of the Far East and Australia, to complete the world journey of which I had dreamed for so many years. On returning from that trip, and now having visited the five continents and sailed the seven seas without accomplishing any great change in myself, I fell into ever increasing depression and withdrawal from the world.
I have never liked television, and have only intermittently owned a telly during my life, but in order to alleviate my misery Mark suggested I should try having a television again. I clutched at this emotional straw. In his usual all-encompassing way, he came with me to a sales warehouse in south London, helped me choose a set and bring it home in a taxi, and set it up for me in my living-room.
It was almost six o'clock, and in joy and hope I suggested we share a drink and watch the News together. But Mark had lately become disgusted by my lack of hygiene, and this had probably become worse because of my depression. He said he had to go, and my slightly desperate persuasion had no effect. I watched the News alone, could not bear to pour myself a drink, and knew I hated him.
Christmas Eve was a few weeks after that. I had given Mark no hint of my new feelings. He was totally in charge of all the electronic equipment in my flat - television, system of separates, word processor - or so it seemed.
On my way back from the Algarve to my flat I think I phoned Mark several times. Perhaps it was once from Faro Airport, once from Heathrow, once when I reached home. Ever since I was young, I have been passionately interested in W. Somerset Maugham. Several times Mark mentioned to me that Radio Four was broadcasting a feature programme about Maugham between three and four that afternoon. I think I may partly have got the taxi precisely so that I could reach the flat before the programme began at three, and I know I managed to do that.
I turned the radio on a little before the appointed hour. Reception was perfect. Just as the programme started, heavy interference began, and I could not hear a word of what was said. I was bitterly disappointed, and phoned Mark again. He did not seem worried. It was just interference, he said, and would soon pass off. But it did not. All through the hour the loud noise continued from under which I could just hear indistinguishable voices. I turned the radio off and on again and again in order to try and hear something. I may have phoned Mark again, I don't know. Four o'clock came, and immediately the programme was over the interference stopped and reception became perfectly normal again.
Mark continued to be his usual imperturbable self. It was just an accident, he said, and nothing to worry about. People always say this sort of thing when something strange happens which they cannot explain and which seems not directly to affect them. They just want to clear the matter from their mind and yours and get a puzzled person on his way.
But to me the fact that the interference began exactly at three and ended exactly at four, so that the whole Maugham programme was blocked out but nothing else, indicates that the radio must have been deliberately jammed. I once asked Bill how this could have been done, and he said that it would best have been achieved by someone standing outside in the street with an interference generator perhaps in a rucksack. I never went into Albion Avenue during the hour the interference continued, but the street with its many council flats on either side would have been dark and empty during the hour, and someone perhaps taking a certain amount of cover would have been unlikely to be noticed by anyone.
I have said that, up to this point, Mark was in full charge of all the electronics in my flat, including the radio, which was part of the system of separates. He wanted me to hear that Maugham programme because he thought it would calm me down and he had no interest in my being in an alarmed state. On one of the phone calls during that day he arranged to come round to see me on the early evening of 27th December when he said he would listen to my worries, which I had not really explained in detail, and we would surely be able to clear them up.
It follows from all this that Mark was not responsible for the jamming and that someone else was. That person was now in charge of the electronics in my flat, and that person wanted me eventually to know that this was the fact. Now who could this have been? This question brings me to the second of my four ambiguous friends, the half-Croat Stephen Cviic, a man once very handsome, now ageing, whose grandfather, like mine, had been fiendishly connected to the Nazi past, and with whose immediate family (the grandfather was long dead) I was due to take lunch that Christmas Day.
I first met Stephen (there should be an acute accent at the end of his surname, but I cannot be bothered with Slav orthography) when we both worked as desk editors at the BBC Monitoring Service, which is located at the mansion of Caversham Park, outside Reading. And thereby hangs a tale of my nineteenth months at the service, which I will tell briefly, in order to introduce my relationship with Steve.
I was editing the transcripts of foreign broadcasts in Part One, which was the Former Soviet Union, an area about which I knew nothing. Steve was in Part Four, which covered the rest of the world from the other three parts, including Latin America, in which he was already a specialist - he was later to be the BBC Correspondent in Brazil. I knew French, Spanish and Portuguese, so I should really perhaps have been in Part Four as well, although the man who ran it was particularly irascible, so perhaps in Part Four I would not have lasted even as long as I did. last. I was also the only one of the seven trainees who started at the same time to be on temporary contracts, and perhaps if I had had full employment rights again I would have been dismissed quite quickly, and in fact one of the six in permanent employment, a would-be upper-class Greek, who presented problems analogous to mine, was let go before I was.
All the parts had pretty strict supervisors in fact (the Monitoring Service was a mixture of modern political correctness with old-fashioned BBC oppression), and the Soviet-style clones in Part One were in general particularly nasty, although, to balance this there were also a few slightly disaffected and more pleasant ones
I was initially trained by a medium-rank employee, the Libyan Mohamed El-Doufani, a malevolent cripple in a wheelchair, and I was quickly aware that he had taken a great dislike to me, and I was later to discover, in circumstances I shall shortly relate, that during the training he was obsessively writing on scraps of paper, "Kill Hills! Kill Hills!" (I am a Jew, and I believe he suspected that).
However, his hatred of me proved useful when I came to walk out of the BBC eighteen months later. Here is the story. In the latter part of my time at the service, I was preparing to buy my ex-council flat, something which would have been impossible while I had been happily on the dole. The fact that I owned the flat was later to be of great importance to me. For instance, when I went to prison for a considerable period, the flat could not be taken from me, whereas I would have lost it if I had still been a tenant. Also, soon after I came out of prison, I skipped my licence by going abroad, the flat was sold by my power-of-attorney Bill Hicks, and I was able to spend almost five years swanning about Europe, Israel and Palestine before returning to prison when the resources from the sale of the flat were almost exhausted.
And, back then in 1994, now I had the flat under my belt, it seemed the time had come to bring my hated association with the Monitoring Service to an end.
The contract was signed on Friday 15th March 1994. On the Sunday, in the late afternoon, I was alone in the office, because the others, including Mohamed, who had been particularly unpleasant that time, had gone home, while I must stay because I had arrived quite late from London. I had no intention of doing any work now I was unsupervised. It was cold, dark and still. The hour I left the office might be noticed. I was wondering what to do. So I wrote an email to my line manager. She was a dried-up BBC spinster in early middle-age. So I accused her of being anal-retentive.
On the Monday, when I arrived innocently at the office, all hell broke loose. I was to last for about a month after that, a time of endless emails whizzing back and forth with almost nobody talking face to face, a time when, according to my Scottish friend Lewis McLeod, who worked in Part Three (Far East)I was suffering a nervous breakdown. The final showdown came on 19th April 1994. In the morning, I went to the toilet and Mohamed was just coming out, an altercation developed, and I abused him in words I do not exactly remember. When I returned to my desk, the line manager (her exact title was Duty Editor) approached me and said that I had abused Mohamed racially. This was untrue, and I said so. But she insisted it was true and demanded that I apologise.
"Oh, just fuck off," I said.
"I ask you to retract that statement," this goggle-eyed woman said.
"No, fuck off again."
Now the authorities in Part One were keen for a disciplinary hearing to be held, which might well lead to my being summarily sacked. At that point, the fifth of my five contracts still had five weeks to run. If I went back on the dole after my contract had expired, I could get straight back on the payments, which now include a contribution towards the mortgage on the flat. But if I were summarily sacked, the process of getting money would be long and complex. But one of my friends at the service stepped in.
This was Jenny Norton of Part One, a very beautiful young woman who was also a Russian expert. She either went, or was summoned, to Mike Butcher, who was the manager in charge of all the parts. At this meeting Mohamed's obsessive hatred for me came out and also the fact that he had been writing down his wish to kill me when he was training me. Jenny also detailed the general atmosphere of persecution I had suffered in Part One and what she kindly said were my sincere efforts to fit in there and do a good job. Mike Butcher already knew about all this apparently.
Jenny now met me privately in the main lobby of the service. She told me at that meeting about Mohamed's scribblings. It was common knowledge, it seemed, but had been kept from me. I had already indicated that I wished to leave immediately but for the five weeks of my contract to run and to receive payment for them. Jenny said that Butcher was sympathetic to me, did not wish the disciplinary hearing to be held, and was favourable to the terms I had mentioned. I agreed that it was much better the hearing not go ahead, but said it must do so if my terms were not agreed.
A bit later, I was called in to see Butcher. He was very friendly, quickly agreed to the settlement I had proposed, and apologised to me for the fact that the Monitoring Service had not been able to give me the conditions where I could perform at my best. I could leave now at whatever point in the day I wished. He said he hoped I would find another job in which I could fully use my talents. I said I intended never to get a full-time job again. He thought this would be impossible in the circumstances. There he showed a lack of knowledge of the world. I was to manage pretty well in the years that were to come, although there were a few dangerous and even desperate corners.
I returned to my desk and sent Jenny a jubilant email with the strapline, "Saved at the last minute by a very cruel butcher."
Of course I did not ask for work (you were expected to request another task immediately you had finished editing any item or had returned to your desk). But I had one more job to perform before I could leave. This was a bit difficult, because I was a bit poor at using even the old-fashioned computers we had in those days. I knew how to send an email to one person but not to the whole of Part One. But I called in another friend, I think not Jenny, to held me send the elegant general farewell I had quickly composed. It mentioned that Mohamed had lied when he said |I had abused him racially, and I said I thought it was a pity he would stoop so low.as to lie in order to incriminate me. There was general consternation in the office when this email was received, and Mohamed seemed to be making a mad dash in his direction, but was restrained by the spinster.
I rose to my feet. went over to Jenny, and said I was about to go. This sassy young lady said she would accompany me to the gates and we walked out together with what may have been a sarcastic comment from said spinster. We went out of the ancient building, towards the grounds where there were graves of three boys who had died there when the place had been an inter-war public school. We went past the hostel where I had often stayed to avoid the journey to and from and approached the magnificent gates of the mansion where King Charles I had been briefly imprisoned. Fine decorative urns surmounted this approach to grandeur and suffering. I looked back once at Caversham Park, Jenny gave me a kiss, and I almost ran all the way down the road to Reading Station.
I have looked up Mohamed on the Internet from the days I finally became able to use a Windows computer, and he was long at the BBC, but has apparently now retired, and is specialising as a commentator on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He may be only slightly more biased that the UN Secretary General, a Portuguese, and my own ancestry is partly from there - and that country is only on the other side of the Mediterranean from North Africa - and partly probably from Greece - even nearer - and, as a Jew, partly from the south-eastern side of the Mediterranean, which, of course, is not a million miles from Libya. So it would hardly have made sense for me to have abused Mohamed racially. But the BBC would not have understood that. To them, I would be a white and he a black. It was certainly better for me the hearing was not held, and it also could have done much damage to Part One and the BBC. My mortgage service, which including payment protector insurance for innocent loss of employment, tried to find out later under what circumstances I had left, but the corporation remained shtumm.
So my time in Part One, with the grim young Englishman known as Watchman, and the hideous young Scotswoman Morven (to whom I once wished Merry Christmas in May), was really a bit of a breeze, and of course I met Steve. He was like a young Greek god, except that his chest did not live up to his strong legs, a disproportion which is often the case with fine-looking men about whom there is something wrong. But he was certainly large, beautiful and stern-looking enough in his mid-twenties to kindle my fantasies. He used often to wear a rich yellow woollen jumper to work, and he was later to show me a photograph of himself sporting it and emerging from a very green bush with a most innocent and serene expression. Which Greek God was he? Apollo? No, hardly that. Pan? Pan of the cloven hoof half-hidden? Nearer. Not quite, though. No, he isn't a god. But I fooled myself he was.
Steve came of actual and BBC aristocracy on both sides. His mother, Celia, a person with whom my relations were always faintly awkward, is (if she is still alive, I do not know) of the old English family of Antrobus. His paternal background is more exotic, more mysterious and more unacceptable if generally known. Steve told me in 2006, when out intimacy was at its height, both that his paternal grandfather was the leading furniture manufacturer in the former Yugoslavia during the inter-war period and that he had been a member of the Ustase, the wartime Croatian government which outdid even the Nazis themselves in its persecution of the Jews. This grandfather went to Paris after the war and died there, according to Steve, in 1948. The subject of the Ustase is not in general well-served by Wikipedia or the Internet and I have been unable to find anyone called Cviic as associated with it. I think it is probable that Steve's surname, like mine, is an assumed one. But possibly not.
The son of the fascist, the Christopher Cviic I knew (born in 1930, original Christian name Crsto, usually known in England as Chris, the surname comes out as something like "Sveech") remained in the former Yugoslavia after the war, and was able to leave it by a ruse in the late 1950s to come to work in England at the BBC. There he met Celia, who was already, I believe, a producer, and they married, and had two children, Stephen and Antonia. Chris, a large and avuncular figure, progressed marvellously in Britain and became a respected expert on his home region, publishing in Encounter, becoming editor of The World Today, and even, in later years, advising the retired Mrs Thatcher. The family lived in a large house in Wimbledon and were devout members of the local Roman Catholic church, full of musical, religious and other good works. They used to entertain lavishly at their house (for instance, a marquee was put up in the back garden for an event to mark Stephen's thirtieth birthday), they did their best to welcome me on many more private occasions, and perhaps it was my own fault that I never liked them.
Stephen was a boy chorister, attended the Jesuit school Wimbledon College, and New College, Oxford, where he read English. Possibly he had another job before entering the BBC, but I do not know what it was. He seemed when I first knew him to be a person of exceptional promise (although innocent in a way that would-be reporters are not supposed to be) and likely to progress well within the corporation. For a time this was indeed so. But then his progress stopped and he entered a time of troubles. I believe that, as I write now in late 2024, he may have recovered his equilibrium. But I do not know this. It is about eleven years since I was last in touch with him and all my information is from the Internet. I have no idea whether he is likely to see what I am writing. For a long time I was reluctant to go on with my blog because I did not want to write possibly hurtful things about him. But now I want to tell the truth.
How did our friendship begin? I contrived it. At the Monitoring Service my daily routine did not coincide with his, but there was a way to become more intimate with him. Quite a number of those who worked at the service lived in London and travelled back and forth each day, and many of these had cars. It was the custom that those who had private vehicles would offer lifts to those who had not. Because we all lived so widely spaced out over London, often the lift saved no more time than relying on public transport. But it worked out cheaper. And there was the comfort of having company on the way to and from the grinding tasks of the service. Many took advantage of the arrangement.
Having taken a series of unsatisfactory lifts from an Iranian lady, who dropped me somewhere near Paddington, from which the journey home in those days was complex, I proposed to Steve, whom I knew very slightly, that he give me lifts in the morning and he agreed. The journey with him, although mainly south of the river, was hardly easier than with the Iranian. He was coming from Wimbledon and passed through a traffic junction at Putney. This was some way south of the station. I was coming from Clapham, needed to get a bus to Clapham Junction, a train to Putney, and then walk. The steely young gentleman made it clear to me that he would not wait if I failed to turn up on time.
In order to arrive the Monitoring Service at the appointed time (I forget what this was) it was necessary to get up at roughly half-past-five. Sometimes I could not make it. Often I was not lucky with the bus. Then I might be running desperately through the long tunnel at Clapham Junction to get to Platform 6, which was right at the end, and be rapidly ascending the stairs as the train to Putney was pulling out. Then I might be forced to give up hope of reaching Steve and catch the slow train to Reading which went through fourteen or fifteen stations before reaching its goal. The last before Reading was Earley, and I used to joke that is certainly was early when I was there.
Sometimes there was a slight delay in the train to Putney, but I caught it anyway in the hope of reaching Steve, and I ran all the way from the station to the appointed junction, but I might arrive five minutes after the appointed time, and the young gentleman would already have passed, driving so carefully in his little bubble car. Then, after waiting a few minutes in desperate hope, I would have to retrieve my steps to Putney Station, get a train to Richmond, and join the slow train to Reading one stop ahead of normal. I would arrive pretty late at the Monitoring Service and have long hours to be there. But sometimes I would stay at the hostel so that it would not be necessary to repeat my performance the following morning. My Scottish friend Lewis used to say that you only needed three things to stay at the hostel: a spare pair of pants, deodorant and an alarm clock. I always had these and often my much-loved word-processor as well, with which I was writing the first novel on which all my vain hopes reposed.
But if I was in London, and got up heroically when the alarm-clock sounded, and the bus and the train came smoothly, then what joy it was to be standing in the semi-darkness at the impersonal junction and see Steve's car approaching, wave to him, and with great relief climb in and begin to talk. It felt great to be with him and I often wondered whether I was in love. But I would often stare with a sort of fascinated repulsion at the dark hairs on his hand I could see as he gripped the wheel. He was so fair yet the hairs on his hands were dark. At such moments I knew I did not love him but despised him.
But there was one way in which I proved useful. He was interested in Latin America and already knew excellent Spanish. But he was at that time switching his interest to Brazil, for which country he had conceived a sentimental schwaermerei, so he needed to learn Portuguese as quickly as he could. I myself had been studying the language for many years and, although my practical knowledge was still limited, certain points I had clearly understood. Steve was particularly puzzled about what would be the translation of the English word "it" when used as an object pronoun. One morning, sitting in his car, I was able to explain that, in Portuguese, the object pronouns, which often consist only of a single vowel, are generally felt to be so weak that, if there is no absolute need to use them, they are simply omitted. The answer for the translation of "it" is that there isn't one. Steve was delighted to learn this simple but recherché fact, and it bound him to me. He pressed me for ever more details during our morning journeys and sometimes I was able to answer.
But his attitude to Portugal was typical of those in England, and other European countries who are interested in Brazil. They try to pretend Portugal does not exist. The rest of the Portuguese-speaking world doesn't either. Portugal in particular is beneath contempt. It had no part in the making of Brazil. The language spoken there is something radically different. Brazil is not an outlier linguistically speaking among the Portuguese-speaking countries but the norm for the language. Such attitudes, ignorant, parochial and ahistorical, are the despair of those who know Portugal and once loved it.
Steve was an annoying example of the species. With his large, serious eyes fixed on mine, he would gleefully tell me the latest example he had heard of the piada sobre português, the jokes Brazilians tell about the Portuguese. He would remark gleefully that the Brazilians must be the only people who joke about their former colonisers. At one point I was foolish enough to tell him the slang word the Portuguese often use to refer to themselves, "portuga", or simply "tuga". After this he never used the word "Portugal" but always referred to "Portuga-land". He never seemed to reflect on how I, as someone of Portuguese ancestry, might be feeling about this. And I never told him either. In fact, seething as I was, I joined in with mockery of my mother's country, as I then supposed it entirely to be. I wanted him as my lover, and anything that pleased him was my desire.
If I had had any sense, I would have realised that Steve would never be what I almost wanted. I wasted so many years on him and have resented it ever since. And, even in those days, I did not enjoy the bliss of being in the car with him alone for very long. In later days, he often also picked up his close friend Riad, quite an aggressive young Arab (I forget from which country) who also worked in Part Four and who mouthed off a lot about Israel. I took quite a dislike to Riad and, pretending ignorance of how he was spelled, often used to joke to Steve that he had been aptly named after the capital of Saudi Arabia. Steve took my dislike of the Arab with total indifference and never tried to defend him to me. Of course, he himself was too wise to say anything about Israel. There was an impassivity about him, a feeling of being above the fray of humanity, which went with his beauty, innocence and harshness.
Well, anyway, by the end of the my time at the Monitoring Service, I had succeeded in establishing myself to a certain extent with Steve, though I still did not know him well. I had already established my nickname for him - Bambi - although I never used it to his face. And certainly, when he used to go for his ten-minute cat-nap in the lobby of the service at lunchtime he looked a veritable Bambi indeed. I used to marvel that he would always wake after exactly then minutes and then be ready for the afternoon's work. I saw him sleeping there on my last day, a picture of beauty. I did not dare to wake him, although there was a possibility I would not see him again. He told me on a later occasion that he had been entirely unaware of the dramatic events that led to my exit. I can well believe it. The whole thing would have been of little concern to him.
But quite soon in the lonely and undirected time that followed my exit from the Monitoring Service (I wrote in my 1994 diary, long since lost, that a certain day was like a parabola, with melancholy at its beginning to end, so many days were like that), I contacted Steve, proposing we meet, and slightly to my surprise he agreed. And from there we slipped into what became close friendship on his side and hopeless attraction on mine. I seem to remember that he made a triumphant tour of Brazil at this period, with his now finely-honed Portuguese, and on his return he showed me several photographs of very handsome men, and the third or fourth was of himself in the guise of a back-packer, feet firmly apart and heavy pack lightly borne, and really I do not think I have ever seen an image of a lovelier guy.
My friendship with Steve meant being welcomed to his family home and meeting his circle of friends. The large house in Wimbledon was that of typical English intellectuals: plenty of books, shabby but good furniture, a musty air. I remember being entertained in the garden by Steve's parents and Chris learnedly discoursing on the Ausgleich, which had set up the Habsburg dual monarchy in 1867. Celia sang in a small, sweet voice. Steve's large but pretty sister Antonia, also a singer, was pleasant, and had an eccentric boyfriend whom the family tried without success to like. Steve himself surprisingly lacked a girlfriend, despite his great eligibility. People used jokingly to refer to the family as the Honda Civics. Steve's friends were conventional and successful, making careers in the diplomatic service or merchant banking. I once went to an amateur chamber concert which Bambi and some others gave at St Mary's Church, Putney, and the whole thing could almost have come out of Victorian times.
In 1997 Steve was appointed as the BBC correspondent in Brazil. He was to be away for three years and would not be returning to Britain often during this time. The inevitable big farewell party for family and friends was called, at a pub or restaurant in Wimbledon. Just before he was about to go from me, I impulsively planted a kiss on his cheek. He seemed a little surprised. I think he was strangely pleased.
But that was the high point of our relationship. It is not really true that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Rather it allows the heart to adjust to the absence of the loved one. Those years between 1997 and 2000 were traumatic for us both. For me they brought the alienation from my mother that went with her leaving her house to someone else. She was the source of the loving feelings in my life, and after she betrayed me, as I saw it, the happy-go-lucky character which was mainly dominant in my earlier years gave way to the darker personality people experience now. As for Steve, during the second year in Brazil he experienced a severe emotional crisis comparable to mine. He never told me what this was and I still do not know. But, when he returned to England, his love of Brazil was gone and he also was a darker person. The wonderful backpacker photo would never be possible again.
But emotional changes take time to play out, and for a while his career seemed to progress. Back in Britain, he began training as a television reporter. By chance, he was in New York on Nine-Eleven and was among those who broke the news to the British public on television. I didn't have a telly at that time, and anyway I was in Portugal dealing with my mother's illness, but my Scottish friend Lewis, whom I still knew at that time, told me that Bambi had cut a most magnificent figure broadcasting the terrible news.
But quite soon after this, without explanation or warning, Steve gave up his career as a reporter. He took up much more routine work editing and processing News. But he began complaining that he disliked the world view that he was forced to propagate. Soon he gave this up also and left the BBC.
It was the same story with his accommodation. When he arrived back in England, his parents helped him buy a large Victorian house near Clapham Junction. This was only about fifteen minutes ride by bus from my flat, so it should have brought us closer. But it did not. I remember it as a slightly gloomy house. I never saw the upstairs or the basement, only the ground floor. At first Steve shared the house, and perhaps there were large parties, although I do not remember much specific jollity. There was one dinner party for four, at which I rather shone. By the time of which I am speaking now, the Christmas Day of 2005, Steve was living in the house alone. Later still he was to return to Wimbledon and his parents, and how the Elspeth Road house was disposed of I do not know.
In the early years of the Millennium I used often to visit him at the house and sometimes we went for a walk. There was a little pathway running on the edge of Clapham Common and near the main road and he used to become rather sentimental about it and call it something like "the pathway of paradise." I was often in a poor mood in those days and the pathway did not seem at all special to me. This little piece of nature mysticism annoyed me in fact. I could not imagine the fine, rather cruel young man I had first known indulging in anything like that.
And truly he was moving further and further from paradise, as I was. But he knew what had happened to me and I did not know what had happened to him. There could be no real sympathy between us now.
After he left the BBC, Steve had two plans about what to do with his life. One was to develop his career as a classical singer. For this, he had a good voice, reasonable taste and a fine presence, but it was too late to start out as a musician and progress beyond purely local engagements. His other plan was that eternal stand-by of the English middle-classes, to write a novel. This was to be a panoramic account of the life of Brazil. I knew he would get nowhere with this, and warned him, as he attempted to read the book to me and gain my interest, that he faced failure. He made every point in consecutive sentences not twice but three times. Embedded in the book was the story of a young English musician adrift in Brazil which was actually quite charming, and if he had stuck to this guy, his book might just have been published. I told him this and begged him to stick to the story that might have appealed. But he was determined to tell the tale of a black evangelical pastor and his church and several other worthy and unconnected subjects and the book kept switching from one to another in the dullest possible way.
There is nothing so unsexy as a handsome man labouring at fiction. By late 2005 he was paying therapists to cure his depression and reposing the most unrealistic hopes on their efforts. Often, around the rim of his toilet, there were little stains of shit.
But on that feast day, he was back to personal magnificence. He had just taken part in a Christmas morning concert somewhere north of the river and one of his fellow participants was invited to lunch. They arrived at my council estate in a most magnificent car, possibly a Rolls-Royce, I am not good with cars. It was hired for the occasion and may have been chauffeur-driven, again I do not remember. The friend was a camp young man who was good on keyboards. He was to entertain us on the piano during the day. I did not take to him, again do not remember his name, nor anything of his performance or conversation. The magnificent car did not attract me. I thought of the sweet little bubble car in which Bambi used to drive me to the Monitoring Service. I dislike unnecessary ostentation. And, as my love for him was slowly dying, he could do rather little I liked now.
I remember nothing of our arrival at the house, and my further memories of that day begin at the family lunch (the four Honda Civics, the camp young man, myself, and possibly Antonia's boyfriend, who impressed me so little I cannot usually recall whether he was present at any occasion). Big lunches usually make me feel nervous and and act as a prompt to say the wrong thing. As I have said many times in this blog, I had four close friends in those days, who usually treated me in quite a distant manner, which I usually put down to their being English gentlemen. But in the state of puzzlement and paranoia I was now in, I was beginning to suspect that all four were spies for different powers and that was why I got so little real friendship from them. A little previous, I think, I had been for one of my regular Monday night evenings at Bill Hicks' flat, and I had raised the matter of spies, and he had said that London was "swarming with them". Anyway, I suddenly found myself asking, apropos of nothing, whether the company thought there were many spies in London.
This question, coming the midst of all their pleasantries, seemed to cause general consternation. I can still remember the look of puzzlement and contemptuous irony on the camp young man's face. The elder Hondas were most curious to know why I had raised the subject, and possibly I mentioned the conversation with Bill. I think Chris Cviic finally rounded off the subject by saying that, though there probably were some spies in London, he and his family did not know any, and possibly, even then, given that he was quite a prominent figure in British political life, I found this a curious assertion.
From there, and by a mechanism I cannot now remember, the conversation moved swiftly on to the subject of racism. I had long been troubled by the coming to Britain of so many foreigners (although - and I did not know it at the time - I was entirely one myself) and, although public discussion of the subject was taboo, I tended to discuss my feelings in private with Steve. It is possible that he had shared what he knew about my attitudes with his parents. And, as it happened, I had a rather unusual connection with the issue of racism which would interest those concerned with current affairs.
A few years before I had written a column for the magazine Prospect called "Clapham Omnibus", about my disordered life in an around the South London council estate where I had lived for many years. Prospect was mainly a political magazine, closely aligned with New Labour, but the founding editor, David Goodhart, wanted also to publish a few items of a more light, personal and edgy character, and it was to this end that, having already published a few separate pieces by me, he had commissioned my column. Thirteen editions were eventually published before Clapham Omnibus was dropped, and it attracted a good deal of favourable comment but no commendations in print.
My relationship with Goodhart was ambivalent. According to Jason Cowley, who also wrote for the magazine, Goodhart appreciated the quality of my writing but viewed me rather contemptuously as "a literary saddie." The way he treated me would certainly support the idea that this Old Etonian did not consider me a person of great consequence. He had taken about a year to publish the first article he accepted, would often not include my column in the magazine without warning me first, edit it extensively without consultation, and eventually dropped it without bothering to tell me it had gone.
The column had made me feel more unhappy than triumphant, but I went on for some time sending him new possible items, and these he never acknowledged. I think as my final effort, I dispatched one expressing, in as tactful and self-effacing a manner as I possibly could, my misgivings about the racial situation in Britain, and particularly about the presence of so many black people. This was met by the usual silence, but only a few months later he himself published an article of considerable historic consequence which for the first time opened up the hitherto taboo subject of race relations. He had to pretend that the subject was mainly important for its impact on social security payments and suchlike matters rather than having anything to do with nationality or identity, but the importance of his piece for allowing people to suddenly discuss the subject of race was profound.
This new freedom, relative as it was (for not even Nigel Farage has ever dared suggest that his campaign has anything to do with the survival of the English), came to me like a breath of fresh air in a miasma. For many years, as I wandered round the area of the Larkhall Estate and the Wandsworth Road, I had seen two sets of scenes. The first was of a gaggle of schoolchildren being led around by their teachers. If there were twenty children, seventeen might be blacks, Indians, Chinese or Arabs, two of southern European appearance, and perhaps one possibly English. The other scene, which I also saw many times, was of some English old person who had lived many years on the estate walking with infinite care and courage towards the waiting ambulance from the home to which they would never return. In the year 1999, I counted nine deaths of elderly residents I knew, most of them celebrated with one of the traditional council estate send-offs in the squares which I had been familiar with since moving onto the Larkhall Estate in 1979. They too were soon to die out.
In those years it seemed to me that I was witnessing nothing less than the replacement of one population with another in my native city, an event of immense historical significance. I used to wonder how any English person could go on living their life and going about their normal business when such a terrible change was happening. I thought they should be tearing their hair out. But not only did they behave normally, but they almost all obeyed the unspoken convention that they should not by a single word notice what was happening. And I, despite my endless ruminations and inner protest, did exactly the same. I was once given lunch by Jason Cowley near Victoria Station, he almost immediately asked me what was most on my mind, and I said I dared not tell him. He will have known what it was, but quickly dropped the subject. It was true that there was one spiky old woman on the estate, who, every time I met her, would say ironically, "Is this London?" I shared my feelings with her, but not with anyone else. She was written off as a terrible racist. I was not. I knew I had to keep my counsel.
Now, as I write many years later (it is 26th February 2025), I think that so many features of the country I see around me - the persistent low productivity, the reluctance of the young to work, the deathly stillness of the once bustling London streets - are due to a deep collective depression the English feel that, after an initial period of resistance, they lacked the courage to challenge their coming extinction with even a single word.
On that Christmas Day in 2005, it was once again the elder Honda who led the discussion on racism. I think the company in general talked about my own contributions to Prospect, the intervention of Goodhart, the situation as it existed then. Then Chris Cviic summed up: "Yes, it has become possible to talk about the race situation now. It has even become quite fashionable to be a little bit of a racist." And then came the punch-line: "But if you are a serious racist, then there is no future for you."
I sank into depression when I heard those final words. I wanted desperately to succeed as a professional author, and I had already come some way towards fulfilling this dream. But I had never achieved a book contract for a literary work. Why was this? Did those who controlled the gate to success - the publishers, the agents, the journalists - suspect that |I was a racist? And was I one? I certainly treated everyone the same. I admired the English and felt at ease with the European foreigners. My dislike of all the rest was ultimately based on their colour. And, if that did not make me a serious racist, then what would? I suppose, if I actively discriminated against people.
To write well you must be honest. If you tell a lie, it will somehow be evident in the prose. Your real attitude to the world will come through in everything you write. To write was my vocation. But, if what Christopher Cviic said was true, then there was no future for me there. And so it has proved. As I sit at the library computer now, almost twenty years later, I am totally forgotten.
All I write now is this blog. All my literary contacts are gone. But I enjoy complete mental freedom. I have a few friends but, if Putin were to nuke London and I were to have escaped beforehand, I would not worry about the fate of those people. I once had friends whom I loved and general ideas to which I was attached. All that remains of friends and attachments is my loyalty to my own people as a Jew.
Now the Cviic family gave me that they seemed to be so expert at offering that day. It was almost three o'clock when lunch ended. For many years I had tired to hear the Queen's speech on the television. I expressed my wish to do so on on that occasion. The reaction of the Honda Civics, including the camp young man, surprised me. They seemed to find my desire to hear our sovereign share her thoughts almost hilariously infra dig. I had clearly marked myself out as a social inferior by having this extraordinary wish. However, they said there was a back sitting-room with a television where I could watch the Queen. They would not join me. I think they took me to the cold, dark room, evidently little used, and turned the television on, because in those days I was absurdly terrified of using a remote control and there were perhaps no buttons I could push as I had always done.
The Queen came on as I sat alone. My loyalty to England, which for many years still existed, was centred on the Royal Family, because there was no other aspect of the modern country which I could approve. I used to think that if the Royals were ever abolished, I would want to leave. But in truth the Queen was almost as chilly as the room. I sat there in depression for the fifteen minutes.
After she finished, and I succeeded in turning the television off, I sat there for a while, not wanting to return to people I now regarded as my persecutors. But quite soon, with a cheerful clatter, they all came in, the Honda Civics, the camp young man (and I think now the boyfriend was not present, because I cannot imagine him participating in the scene I am about to describe). I quickly became animated, and they already were. We discussed our favourite music, I think, and I began singing a song I loved, a song of Marlene Dietrich about the Berlin she had left and the fact that she still had a suitcase there which meant that, one day, she must return:
Ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin
Deswegen muss ich naechstens wieder hin
Die Seligkeiten vergangener Zeiten
Sind alle noch in meinem kleinen Koffer d'rin
Immediately, almost as if at a hidden signal, the whole company, including myself, went into a rendition of Lili Marleen in German. We all knew all the words, although I cannot remember ever learning them. We sang all the verses in a rapt stillness. I remember Christopher Cviic sitting on the sofa singing softly. We brought the song to an end and then we were still.
What did this curious scene mean? I think it meant that the Civics and the camp young man, at least with a part of themselves, were secret Nazis, and that I had been brought up, without knowing it, to be one. But they could never admit it, except in circumstances of the utmost intimacy. They were pillars of the establishment. Chris had worked, perhaps was still working, at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. Celia gave the most elite of singing lessons. Antonia worked at the Francis Holland School. Steve had been at the BBC and even announced Nine-Eleven on the telly. They could be Conservatives of course. Chris had advised Margaret Thatcher. But Nazis? They could only hint at it in a dark and private room, when someone sang one old German song, speaking of nostalgia and commitment, and they immediately responded with another, of loyalty and defiance.
Do I have any other evidence that the Cviic family were Nazis, beyond the singing of a German song which, during the Second World War, was equally popular in its English version? Well, not very much, I admit. The evidence I do have relates to Christopher's childhood and youth, information I have been able to glean from the obituaries that appeared of him, for we never discussed the matter ourselves.
