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 my 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 mentally ill in order to escape the regular dole, which had required me to sign on every two weeks and would have hampered my programme of world travel.
I left that grim place and 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 catch the plane that late lunchtime. I was sitting 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 pulled open.
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 might be 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 loica!," "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 and more was to come back to me, and I was to discover more 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 terrible mental distress in general 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 thick and fast, and more and more strange ideas about these mysterious ancestors, all dead, as I thought, began to develop as my state of agitation became more intense. It was about our holiday in Italy when I was then, which had followed one in Germany and Austria when I was nine (usually we went to Portugal). We had entered Switzerland and we 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 in the car.
(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 around the time of which I now speak. 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 touch with him about twenty years before to the man I still believed to be my father, asking him whether his father had been a Pole and, if so, what was his name. The first time I had written to him, 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.")
While I was at the airport, I became convinced that I came from a family of Nazis, and that when the pair I believed to be both my parents had gone into the bank in Switzerland, they had been depositing Nazi gold on my behalf which they had collected in Italy, having fixed up the whole thing in Germany or Austria the year before. But how was I to get the gold? I had no idea what the town was, what the bank might be. I knew it was in Switzerland.
I remembered my mother 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 seemed the very image of a Portuguese peasant, and she could tell childhood stories about the five women who were ostensibly her sisters.
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 (the man'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.
I 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 very 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 day 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 one of our Saturday lunchtime meetings, and sent the piece to The Guardian on the Monday. On the Wednesday, 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, in my alarm and excitement, 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 that person 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 sadly 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 on Christmas Day.
I first met Stephen (there should really be an acute accent on the last letter 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 harassing nineteenth months at the service, which I will tell as briefly as I can, in order to introduce my relationship with Stephen.
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."
I now felt restless at my desk, and of course did not ask for work (you were expected to request another task immediately you had finished editing any item). 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 modern Windows computer, many years later, 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 Journal, 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, whichof 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 generally. 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. Good on them.
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 own fantasies. He used often to wear a rich yellow woollen jumper to work, and he was later to show me a photograph of himself wearing this and emerging from a very green bush wearing 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 apparently 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, so he escaped retribution. The subject of the Ustase is not in general well-served by Wikipedia or the Internet and I have been unable to find anyone with the name of Cviic as associated with it. The name Cviic (in English it comes out as something like "Sveech") is unusual even in Serbo-Coat terms and I think it is possible that Steve's surname, like mine, is an assumed one. I do not know this for certain, of course.
The son of the fascist, the Christopher Cviic I knew (born in 1930, original Christian name Crsto, usually known in England as Chris) 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 (she was later to be a teacher of singing), and they married, and had two children, Stephen and Antonia. Chris, a most large, avuncular and cultivated figure, progressed marvellously in Britain and eventually became a respected expert on his home region, publishing in Encounter and even, in later years, advising the retired Mrs Thatcher. The whole family lived in a large house in Wimbledon near the railway lines towards Raynes Park and were devout members of the local Roman Catholic church, full of musical, religious and other good works. They used to entertain largely and 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 on many more private occasions as their son's friend, and perhaps it was my own fault that I never liked them.
Stephen grew up in the bosom of this loving family, 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.
So how did our friendship begin? I contrived it. At the Monitoring Service our daily routines did not coincide, 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 tended to work out cheaper. And there was the comfort of having company on the way to and from the grinding work. Many took advantage of the arrangement.
So, having taken a series of unsatisfactory lifts back 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. Sometimes 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 tended to be 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 steely 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 there, 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 lovely 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, that I despised him.
But there was one way in which I proved very useful to Steve. He was interested in Latin America and, like many people in England, already knew excellent Spanish. But he was at that time switching his interest to Brazil, for which country he had conceived a sentimental schwaemerei, so he needed to learn good Portuguese as quickly as he could. I myself had been studying the language for many years and, although my practical knowledge was still quite limited, certain points I had clearly understood. Steve was particularly puzzled about what would be the translation of the English word "it" when it used as an object pronoun. One morning, sitting in his car, I was able to explain that, in Portuguese, the object pronouns are generally felt to be weak so 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 absolute delighted to learn this simple but quite recherche fact, and it bound him to me. He pressed me for more and more details during our morning journeys and quite often I was able to provide these.
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 a particularly 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 portugues, the jokes Brazilians tell about the Portuguese. 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 my lover. 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 of the traditional sort: plenty of books, rather 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, Austrian and Hungarian, in 1867. Celia sang in a small, sweet voice. Steve's large but pretty sister Antonia, also a singer, was quite pleasant, and had an eccentric boyfriend whom the family tried without success to like. Steve's friends, some of whom had been at school with him, were conventional and successful, making careers in the diplomatic service or merchant banking and suchlike. I once went to an amateur chamber concert which Steve and his coevals gave at St Mary's Church, Putney, and the whole thing could almost have come out of Victorian times in its arch and schmaltzy nature. If my friend had not been so handsome, I think his milieu would have been intolerable to me.
