On the Heroism of Mortals Read online

  “I’ll not put up with this,” he said grandly and as he stood up unsteadily, he extended his hand to Jill to help her do the same.

  They approached me together, Jill clinging to her brave cavalier. I ignored her and extended my hand in front of me to stop his chest. He felt the hardness of my hand; he felt my anger. “What have you done to my grandfather’s hat?”

  “She’s mad,” Jill said.

  The heavily ribbed hatband was gone altogether, revealing brown wool cloth of a slightly lighter brown. The crease was covered with stickers and, worst of all the other indignities suffered by my grandfather’s hat, my son had taken an orange felt-tip pen and inflicted on it a few words that would be enough to change things between us forever, “Running away from the Nazis”. Was this all he had taken from the story? The courage it took to survive Nazism was lost on him and was no part of his life. For him that period was history, and history is the past with which we have no emotional connection.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

  Geoffrey giggled at the absurdity of it all. “I was telling Jill how we all descend from a hat. That’s right, Mum? A hat.”

  I was now suspended between anger and exhaustion. Unfortunately I was unable to release the anger. That might have saved our relationship. I was lost for words, and there seemed to be no fixed point on which I could start to explain the sacrilege of his act and how important that mean little object was. It was made of wool, cardboard, leather and grosgrain ribbon, but it was a world of ideas that has been lost, of sacrifices made, of loves ignored for the greater good, of suffering and of hopelessness. And out of that my grandfather had created his life anew in a foreign land and given it all he had.

  “Clearly your generation doesn’t have the imagination to empathise with the suffering of others.” I knew, as soon as I said it, that “your generation” was an unfortunate choice of words – for me, that is; they put me in a weak position. I’ve always known that when speaking to the younger generation you must never moralise. I’ve managed this with my own students, but with my son it was next to impossible.

  I stared at him – I must have glowered.

  He coolly enjoyed the silence, and at one stage he briefly ceased to return my stare in order to share a knowing smile with his girlfriend. He then waited in relaxed silence for a moment of his own choosing. If we’ve given our children anything, it’s self-confidence. They have it in such abundance, they hardly know it.

  It’s possible that what I took for self-confidence was actually his ability to hide his weakness behind a knowing exterior – bravado, also known as dramatic effect. We do forget what it’s like to be young. At what seemed precisely the right moment, he started to speak in a world-weary drawl, as an overworked employer might with a recalcitrant employee. “Look, Mum, we’d had a hard day and we needed to let off a bit of steam. Exams are coming up and we’re under pressure, you know. I suppose it’s difficult for you to remember. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.” Jill looked up at him, admiring of his magnanimity. “It’s a hat, Mum. People are more important than things,” said the young man who had campaigned remorselessly for us to buy him a 4x4. “Your grandfather, I’m sure, was much more than a hat – a cheap one at that.”

  I knew that I too had to dissemble – to hide my anger and hurt. “That’s okay. It is, as you say, just a hat, a cheap hat now too delicate to wear. But it was the only thing my grandfather left me, and it was, for him, the most important.”

  He had his chance. He and Jill could have walked past me while wishing me good night, and then gone off to the pub to discuss the whole affair with renewed hilarity. That would have been the proper hedonistic thing to do, but Geoffrey also wanted to win the argument – which argument he was not quite sure, but he wanted to win it anyway. “Have you ever asked yourself,” he spoke deliberately, as though it were his onerous duty to reveal to me what everyone else would have found obvious, “why your grandfather only left you an old hat. I’m sure he softened the blow with all kinds of explanations. Auntie Sarah got a Toni del Renzio.”

  “You know who Toni del Renzio was, do you?” I was speaking contemptuously to my own son. We let these things happen to us without realising that the way back may be very difficult.

  “No, and I don’t care. Better than an old hat.”

  “So value is purely monetary, even if you don’t know why an object has value. It’s simply enough that the market gives it value – that the general consensus does.”

  “That’s about it. You’ve got it in one, Mum. Well done!”

  “Even if, as was the case, the artist in question doesn’t give a damn about any of that shit?”

  “Right again. And I’d be much more envious if it had been a Salvador Dali.”

  “Who everyone has heard of. So that is it? That’s all it is.”

  “Listen, Mum, I’ve got just two things to say here: you’re a snob, and obsessed with values – European values – that are dead. And secondly, I don’t care about art. It makes no sense. The surrealists, for Christ’s sake!”

  “So why do you care if one of Sarah’s children is going to inherit such a painting?” I asked.

  “Because it’s worth money,” he seemed angry at my obtuseness, and Jill failed to suppress a giggle.

  “I think you should know that my grandfather was the person dearest to me in my life,” I said and purposefully refrained from saying “your great-grandfather”.

  “Really? You know, Mum, you just live in the past. Dad and I are alive: what about us?”

  “Better to live in the past than only in the present, because you can’t understand the present without understanding the past.”

  “That’s a cliché, Mum.”

  “That’s what I hate about you, Geoffrey, you make me talk in clichés.”

  “Nice! A mother telling her son she hates him.”

  “I didn’t say I hate you. I said one thing about you I hate. Aren’t we all a bit like that? It’s clear from this conversation that there are things about me that you find contemptible, to say the least.”

  “Not contemptible, Mrs Henderson, not contemptible. We just don’t quite understand why you’re so upset,” Jill unwisely butted in. Her intention was to smooth things over and bring the conversation to an end, but she alienated both of us. She didn’t know that I preferred to be addressed as Professor Szlos. He looked at her darkly to intimate that her silence would be preferred. Family business.

  “Right again, Mum, I do find things contemptible about you. You’re not part of our world or even our family. Dad and I do things together. We laugh at you, you know, and your obsessions – your quaint politics, ‘save the whale’ crap and that stupid hat. Get a life, Mum.”

  “Loosen up!” Jill hazarded, still unaware of the risks involved.

  “I have a life,” I said. “A very good life, thank you very much,” although that last statement did require a little bravado on my part. Each generation carried its mask. I felt in that moment that my life had been a series of wasted energies, but to have revealed that would have lost me the argument. “You can have political beliefs and still have a sense of humour, you know. You can care about humanity as a whole, and still care about that restricted humanity that is your friends and relations. In fact, one without the other makes no sense. And friends and family are all you’re left with, really, because we can change so little beyond that.”

  “How sad for you that you’re left with us.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant. Family and friends are the most important thing, but they will not benefit if you and they don’t engage with the world beyond. That was the essential idea that your great-grandfather carried across the channel – he and many others. They were fleeing oppression and not looking for utopia, just for safety, and they had learned many things. He passed them on to me, and I have held them dear. If I haven’t passed them on to you, then I, most probably, am at fault.”

  He winced at that one, and so d
id I, because I’d used one of the basest parental tricks, but a very effective one. They left after that, muttering a few slightly conciliatory remarks I cannot remember. He was unhappy with the conversation, because he had not achieved what he wanted. He hadn’t flattened me. He hadn’t made me cry or supplicate like a desperate mother. He found me cold perhaps – too rational. We all have our own natures, I suppose, and the manner of his leaving sealed the rift for me. When the door closed, I realised that the son I had loved was no longer the son I had loved. I had always been aware of our differences, of course, but now I felt that I didn’t know him and, worse and more strangely, I felt that I didn’t want to know him – the pursuit of that ideal would only lead to a further deterioration in our relationship. Perhaps a detachment of this kind is inevitable when children grow up – to a greater or lesser extent – but in our case, the rupture was dramatic and irreversible.

  Geoffrey is not entirely in the wrong, of course. Perhaps I am aloof, and aloofness triggers a desire to rebel. He wanted to shock me out of it. I see that now, and that’s not an entirely mistaken desire in a young man, but it has to be accompanied by something else – a worldview that isn’t entirely based on personal satisfaction. It made me think about those post-war years when, for so long, it appeared that society would simply continue to progress in an unbroken line. Increasing affluence passes through two stages: first it liberates people from the drudgery of survival and they are even freer to think beyond themselves and open up their minds to new ideas; second it becomes an end in itself, making people feel self-important – surely such wealth means superiority – and closes off their minds to new ideas and challenges. My generation, which straddles those two stages, is responsible for the degradation of our values. We started by attacking our parents not without reason, but we did so with arrogance and self-righteousness. We should at least have held to the values we proclaimed so loudly, or at least, we shouldn’t have reneged on them no sooner had we reached the age in which the reins of power were passed our way. Small wonder then that our children were born cynics; they only had to observe the inconsistencies of their parents.

  Generations are different countries, but they cohabit the same physical space – dividing almost every household. They may speak the same language – or almost – but the philosophical parameters through which they filter that language are different. Moreover the distinctions are gradated, because generations are gradated, and this gradation is exacerbated by people who are brought up by very young or very old parents or, like myself, are primarily influenced by grandparents. Of course the distinctions between countries are not discrete either. Intermarriage, migration and shifting borders mean that countries are never eternal entities. But generations are like countries in that the cultural difference is about the same: some continuity and some discontinuity. In this chaos, it is only possible to discern trends over fairly long periods – decades at least.

  There is currently a stench of the thirties. It is not only the financial crisis, because miserably more than a whiff of chauvinism and xenophobia predated it. But the financial crisis will undoubtedly make things worse. My son Geoffrey will not be able to avoid political choices forever, and which way he will go is unfortunately beyond my comprehension. What is clear is that whatever influences may bear down on him, they will not come from this home or from our family history. He is lost to me, but I cannot wholly despair of him.

  As history repeats itself, some will go to the right and some will go to the left. Many lessons will have to be learnt from scratch. That is a tragedy, but it is one we should expect if we take a glance at history. Yet I believe – no, I should say that I hope – that this new generation will eventually discover an internationalism, an intellectual openness and, above all, a compassionate humanity even more evolved than the ones my grandfather brought over here with his hat. That would be progress, if progress there be.

  He – Or Is It Him?

  “Maybe,” he said, his eyes wide open with the provocation that negates.

  He carved the still bleeding joint with skill, fulfilled his only domestic chore to signify his station in the house – the holder of all keys, all levers of power, all needs, all judgements, all hopes, all discernments of the past. He placed a slice – wafer thin, its lightness surely expressing the sharpness of his brain – also on her plate. The gesture – so munificent it too contained no weight – found universal delight amongst the generous profusion engendered by his loins, which he’d arranged around the table in the manner he saw fit. And then he sat down as can only sit one who sits snugly within himself, comfortably within his skin.

  “No, absolutely not,” she replied. “I am the product of a single-parent family myself.”

  “That may well be,” he laughed gently as a person might, if privy to the actual way humankind was wrought. “That’s not my point, and if I can be so bold, that’s statistically irrelevant. A family, you see, should ideally be made up of the following elements: a father,” he smiled graciously, “a mother,” he pointed to a woman with his knife after momentarily forgetting where he’d placed her in the scheme of things, “and the children of course,” he waved his inclusive hand to express all he had achieved, those silent witnesses to his paternal gifts.

  “I don’t care if I’m the only happy child of a single-parent family in the world. My case alone can prove that a child may even gain by such a situation. I do not miss my father or a father figure. I am complete, and you cannot convince me of a deprivation I have never felt.”

  “Of course, my dear,” he said through gritted teeth, “you cannot appreciate what you’ve never had.”

  “Nor can you,” it was her turn to laugh, “appreciate the closeness of my mother’s love that opened every door to a meaningful adult life, and kept those shut that lead to greed and disdain.”

  He considered her words with evident distaste. It was not just the content of what she said; it was also her methodology. He was accustomed to bludgeoning people with statistics, but she was defending herself with her exceptionalism. The powerless are more numerous, but inexplicably statistics always prefer the powerful, and provide every justification for their decisions after they have made them. She didn’t seem to care. She exuded too much self-confidence for a woman – there was surely something unnatural in that. The only specificity he found interesting was his own, and he was sure that everyone else shared that passion – for his, not theirs, of course. Outside his own specificity, he felt that the “general good” should reign, and happily the general good always coincided with what was good for the English middle classes.

  Initially uncertain about his strategy for parrying her argument, he resorted to what he knew to be a platitude – dangerous with her but it bought him time. “We English,” he said, “are a traditional people because we know the value of holding on to what has been tried and tested in the past. I’m sure your mother would agree.”

  She looked at him in surprise, and he finally caught the argument that had eluded him – a good statistical one. “Look, you may well have had an acceptable childhood,” he expounded confidently and smilingly, “and even a good education – you seem an articulate girl – but the fact is that the slightest shift in the success parameters of a child’s early life can produce huge differences in outcomes in terms of happiness and competence. Did you know, for instance, that if you’re born in August, your life chances are far lower than if you’re born in September?”

  “Statistically,” she commented, “but there will be successful people born in August and failures in September.”

  “So,” he ignored her point, “how much greater must be the disadvantage if a child grows up without a father.”

  “But what kind of father?”

  “If you’ll just let me finish my argument,” he looked at her fiercely and his wife seemed terrified by the direction the conversation was taking; “the point I’m making is also a practical one, you see. If you’re born in August, you’re always the younge
st, weakest and least mature of your class. Equally if the family doesn’t have a car…”

  “My mother’s Swedish.”

  He looked stunned and for a few seconds all the words he had constructed in his head melted into a haze, and at the same time he struggled to give form to her words. “You mean your mother had a Swedish car?” he concluded, evidently impressed.

  “No, I said that my mother is Swedish.”

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “You said what we English think – by which you mean a statistical English person, but I doubt that even the majority of English men think like you. You said my mother would probably agree with you. But she wouldn’t and anyway she’s Swedish.”

  “But I said that ages ago, and now you’ve interrupted my train of thought.”

  “Yes, I was waiting for you to finish, which took patience, as you do ramble on a bit. When you got to the part about the car, I had to interrupt, I’m sorry.”

  “But I haven’t finished my point.”

  “But you have. I’m not saying that in this unequal society, various factors don’t influence the outcomes in children’s lives, but they don’t determine them absolutely. We also make our own lives, and my mother made a family life in which I lacked absolutely nothing. Now that’s an absolute for you.”

  “Absolutely nothing?” he jeered. “I would have thought you lacked something many would consider to be of great consequence: a father.”

  “Yes, I lacked that, I suppose. And he might have added to my life – but he might just as easily have been a violent drunk.”

  “Do we know where your father came from, given how invisible he has become?” he abandoned all pretence of the gracious gentleman.

  “Yes we do. He was Irish.”

  He smiled exultantly as though to say now everything had been explained.

  “I say ‘was’ because we know nothing about what happened to him. Apparently he left when I was six months old.”