For the Time Being (26 page)

A personal view

Something very strange happened to me during the past three weeks. Unnerving, unexpected, but very strengthening indeed.

I was asked to review, in the normal course of my duties on this newspaper, four books. One was on the ghetto at Lódź, one on the building of the camp at Mauthausen, another on the ghetto in Kovno and a fourth on the eye-witness accounts of the war from citizens of the Third Reich.

At first, I demurred at the thought of this mammoth and frankly depressing task. I felt there was no good reason I should have to plough through pages of misery and distress.

I was, however, prevailed upon to do the job – I think perhaps because I had been a witness to the unthinkable and unspeakable when I was a part of the British Army which, one April afternoon in 1945, reached the gates at Bergen-Belsen.

For that reason I accepted. I worked my way through more than 1,000 pages, and then wondered where on earth to start. Who now would care? It was all so long ago. And time heals; even grief.

But then I remembered that it had taken
me
a great many years to forget that afternoon in the pine forest and heath. When I did try to speak of it a few years ago I failed, choked on distress, and unmanned myself. But I had been there and I had seen.

Who now, apart from the surviving witnesses like myself, would give a fig? Who would even bother to answer the question I posed in my review three weeks ago:
Why?

To date nearly 200 people have tried to assist me: the letters now fill a box-file, and I did my best to reply to every one.

Except for the dozen or so examples of hate mail which arrived,
as I had known they would, unsigned and with no return address – abusive, ugly, worrying. Hate still exists very strongly.

But for the rest the warmth and kindness, the anxiety to try to answer my simple question, were incredible.

I must make it clear that these letters came from all over Britain. Some from Europe; one or two, even, from Australia. A nerve had been touched. It was, as it turns out, not quite as simple as I had thought.

These letters were not only from people of my age or from people who, like me, had been witnesses themselves; they came from a much younger generation, too, who wanted to know and, more importantly, wanted their children to know.

The letters written to me were forwarded, including the hate-mail and the glossy – and well-produced – pamphlets and booklets explaining the details of the ‘Jewish conspiracy against the Gentile'. There was also the photographic, colour brochure which sets out to prove conclusively that no Jews were ever gassed at Auschwitz. That is entirely false Jewish rubbish, according to the brochure. The gas chambers were merely there to fumigate the ‘clothing of the Jews'.

So now we know. The hatred still exists. And even in the kindest letters there lurks a sad feeling of worry and anxiety. A Jew is not to be trusted. I am counselled to read my Old Testament. To read the Psalms. To understand that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.

That feeling is ever-present: but, equally, there is a feeling of distress that this hatred still exists among otherwise rational, normal, decent people who have tried to come to terms with their own doubts. Some younger writers had actually been to Dachau, Belsen, even to Auschwitz and Treblinka. Some deliberately, as a sort of pilgrimage, some just by chance, suddenly on a country lane finding themselves signposted to a familiar and dreadful name where, beyond the lush meadows, the bird song and the tree-dappled shadow, they came across horror beyond comprehension.

One reader wrote:'… although saddened and sickened by Treblinka and Auschwitz … I now feel reassured that other people, like yourself … continue to ask the same
unanswerable
questions and are having problems coming to terms with those events of fifty
years ago. Most importantly, the questions are
still being asked.'

Some people have pointed out, wrongly, that the Jews were not a race but a religion. They are a race; they wandered into history, it is thought, from India, a nomadic tribe. And as a race, a tribe, what you will, they, with millions of other outcasts, such as communists, socialists, gipsies and homosexuals, were deliberately marked down by the Nazis for total eradication.

I still ask:
Why?
And from the overwhelming response to my original question it is clear that many others do.

Some have gently chided me, some have sadly agreed with me: there is no answer to the simple question of why more than six million people, not only Jews, were systematically, methodically, determinedly and expertly put to death in a very few years. Surely it goes beyond simple ‘hate'?

Man's inhumanity to man is vile and still, to me at any rate, incomprehensible. But these letters have given me great heart, and my gratitude to their writers is limitless.

Daily Telegraph,
5 September 1991

This was by no means the end of it. I was asked to speak to senior pupils at a number of public schools: it was always the history master who invited me, never the headmaster. I went to Tonbridge and gave a talk to the sixth-formers. I had never spoken before to anyone in detail about the subject. I found it so upsetting that afterwards I was forced to decline my host's invitation to sherry in the senior common room and fled instantly back to London. I couldn't go through that again. However, in 1992 the Board of Deputies of British Jews prevailed on me to address a meeting on a Sunday in May at the Adelphi Theatre, where the Polish-Jewish Ex-Servicemen's Association was commemorating the Warsaw uprising. I was the only
goy
in the whole house. Craven with fear at saying the wrong thing, I tried not to be influenced by the hate-mail I had received. When we had parked the car, even the policeman was bloody. ‘What are you doing with this lot?' he asked.

I realized I must stop this meddling, so I pulled in my horns and went back to the typewriter.

Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity
in English
by Geoffrey Hughes (Blackwell)

A quick look at the index of this erudite and splendidly researched book lifted my heart: surely I had found the ideal Christmas gift for that ephemeral creature, the Man Who Has Everything. This, I thought smugly, will keep him glued to its pages for days. He will snigger and whistle and boast from Club Dining Room to Club Bar and eventually become the Club Bore, thanks to these heavily detailed pages on the art and the derivation of – and indeed the reasons for – swearing.

But I was wrong. This is no lightweight piece of amusing froth. It is a very serious work indeed, by Geoffrey Hughes, a Professor of History of the English Language from Witwatersrand University, and it has as much fun going for it as an open grave. But it is quite fascinating.

If the word ‘bum' causes you to wince with distaste, do not read the Professor's book. For ‘bum' is as pure as spring-water in comparison with some, almost all, of the heartier words it requires you to consider.

Swearing, many will say, is reprehensible, unnecessary and vulgar, but others will have it differently. ‘Swearing', a scholar has said, ‘is as necessary to a human as hissing is to a cat.' And with this I cannot disagree. A long stint in the armed forces dented a great deal of my prudish armour as a young man. I rapidly learned to survive by my oaths – the pepper and salt, paprika and chilli, of barrack-room intellect. But in genteel life swearing is deplored; and for many years those of higher birth and breeding have bidden their young to wash out their mouths with soap and water at the unthinking fall of an oath. Ladies and Gentlemen simply
don't
, we are assured.

Geoffrey Hughes says the worst expletives he ever heard in his own decent bourgeois background were uttered by his betters and elders and they usually amounted to nothing much stronger than ‘bloody fool' or ‘bastard!' It was only during his national service that he came across the unprintable ‘four-letter words'. He makes up for that lost time in his scholarly book.

We dive straight into derivations – Old English, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English – and are left in little doubt about what the words mean, where they originated and how they were used. Sometimes, naturally, one is desperate for a translator. Not all of us can cope with Chaucer, for example, without a crib:
'Thow mortherere of the heysoge on the braunche/That brought the forth, thow rewthelessglotoun!/Lyve thow soleyn wormes corupcioun!'
In fact no real swearword is concealed in this diatribe from a merlin against a cuckoo. But there is a good deal of stuff, later, which is as hard to understand and far more bawdy. Chaucer did call a spade, so to speak, a spade.

So the Man Who Has Everything might not be exactly overwhelmed to find this book in his Christmas stocking. He would, on the other hand – and if he had the patience to batter his way through the dense prose (pretty humourless and as dry as a ship's biscuit) – be modestly amused to discover that the simple word ‘Drat!', used often in my early days by a deeply respectable matron, actually means ‘Curse!', loud and clear; that ‘By Golly!' derives from the negro slaves in America, who adapted ‘By God!'; and that ‘bludger' is quite the worst word one can use to an Australian.

You will discover a great deal within these prosaic covers: from Chaucer right up to, naturally enough, Kenneth Tynan. You will learn all about Expansionism and Xenophobia, both of which have provided an abundance of swearwords, and if you didn't know what a euphemism was, you certainly will know a few when you close the book. You may even find yourself startled to discover that a silly little song of some years ago, ‘A Tisket, A Tasket, a little yellow basket …', is
very
suspect. Basket is a euphemism for ‘bastard'. The phrase ‘little yellow basket' refers, regrettably, to a particular race.

Such a lot of interest here: perhaps, after all, it
might
be an idea
for Christmas? The index alone is worth the cover price. Nothing whatsoever is omitted; there are enough words to render unconscious for days the two per cent of the population who apparently grow faint at the uttering of the word ‘damn' on television or radio. All in alphabetical order too.

Out of all the splendid, alarming, raunchy and disgusting words listed by the excellent professor, only about a dozen are
not
euphemisms. One has to be extremely prudent: it is fair to say that we really do not know what we are talking about even when we use a very modest word like ‘drat'. But this book will go a lot of the way to making things perfectly clear.

I wonder, idly, what you have made in the past of the show title,
Oh! Calcutta!
You might be surprised to find out. But don't say I didn't warn you that thumbing through these pages may burn your fingers and dry your mouth. Upon my oath!

Daily Telegraph,
31 August 1991

Me: Stories of My Life
by Katharine Hepburn (Viking)

Hand on heart, I confess there were moments during the reading of this rather curious book when I felt, quite distinctly, that I was drowning in syrup. Suffocating in a surfeit of sweetness. However, I struggled on, as indeed I strongly advise you to do, and found I could breathe. It is wise, when sliding deeper and deeper into a fat tin of Abram Lyle's best Golden, to remember the label, with the weary (or dead?) lion on its side below a swarm of bees, and the admonishing reminder: ‘Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness.'

It will help you survive this ruthless onslaught of kindness and overwhelming good nature. For Miss Hepburn
is
strong, amazingly so, and from her emanates a natural sweetness. It will get to you in the end. If she prefers to offer a portrait of herself as a sort of Bambi-in-the-Woods, wide-eyed, tear on cheek, among the flowers, ignore it. She is far closer to a brontosaurus, or any other type of dinosaur (from the Latin, ‘terrible lizard').

By this I mean absolutely no disrespect to an enchanting, altogether astonishing, maddening woman. I merely point out that she is about as shy as a charging bull. Hardly, in fact, strokeable. Strong, determined, stubborn, tough, but under it all, like the brontosaurus itself, harmless. Unless, of course, you happen to be another brontosaurus …

Although one longs for a merciful editor to hack away at the plethora of ‘Thrilling!'s, ‘Oh! My golly's and ‘Wow!'s and the almost constant protests of'I've been so lucky!', you will swallow them easily. At the very least you will feel at the end of this book that Miss Hepburn has shared a private compartment with you on a pretty long train journey. She is telling you all she feels you can reasonably be expected to know about herself, with a scatter here
and there of little things which she feels you might only have guessed at.

All this is done with extreme good nature, bravado and utter relentlessness. She will have you trapped, a finger hooked in your buttonhole, and you will not be able to budge. You probably won't wan: to anyway.

I said this was a curious book, and so it is. I wonder, did she actually, word of honour,
write
it herself? If so, her punctuation is as disgraceful as my own. She uses dashes where, in ignorance, I use dots. Maddening. Or did she actually dictate it all? Speak it to some machine or some loyal minion (lots of them around Miss Hepburn) who dutifully typed it all down? Whatever she and her editors and minions have done, it is very well put together, and one could be quite convinced that, apart from all her wondrous gifts, she is also a nifty writer.

The book has great style; it is economical; the intense ego never becomes in the least objectionable, as it does in many other film-star books; and there is elegance in the phrasing as well as gracefulness in the manner in which she never hurts anyone. (However, it is irritating occasionally when you
know
something of the facts recounted.) If the pronoun ‘I' is heavily used, that is only right and proper in a book called, simply,
Me.