Britical

NYC

Watching the July 4th fireworks here, the phrase “downtown Beirut” occurred to me, as it often does on this day of fervent flag-waving and cooking all your dinner outside. Two weeks later and it’s set to make a fabulous comeback. “Looks like downtown Beirut…” Heard everywhere in the Seventies, it was shorthand, used to describe any scene of in-progress urban devastation. Back then, on the news, it was always nighttime - bombs exploding, shock & awe; and in the daytime endless footage of Henry Kissinger getting on and off planes.

Either that or the latest pile of shattered, bloodied glass on Oxford Street. Which is why an “unidentified package”, even an empty paper bag on the tube in London has always had the power to empty a carriage quicker than you can say Bobby Sands. (Also perhaps why suicide bombers succeeded July 7th last year.) To say that the English have never treated the Irish kindly would be a risible understatement (although I myself have been far more than nice to at least one of them). Still, most would agree that deliberately killing civilians is at least ungentlemanly and certainly very bad form.

I thought about this today watching ABC World News - ABC, whose bizarre idea of objective journalism might one day rival the rah-rah jingoism of Fox “News” and must surely have poor Peter Jennings spinning in his grave, or at least reaching for a cigarette. On the Six o’clock BBC World News, yes, the burnt up, bandaged children, but, surprising and affecting perhaps for Americans, the worried-looking families, urban/suburban, with their fancy sunglasses and fluent English. Their cars are stuffed with people, arms and legs sticking haphazardly out all the windows, but we register also the awful pathos of the carefully hung and draped sheets - makeshift white flags. All roads out are being strafed by fighter jets.

I switched off the news tonight and imagined if back in the day, England had sent Jaguar GR.1 ’s to reduce Northern Ireland’s roads, towns, and airports to plywood and crumbling concrete - each town a mini Dresden and Belfast a vast ruin. If its citizens were driven out, shot down, their bodies set afire on the motorways. But the U.S., rightly, would never have allowed it. (Mr. Gerry Adams and his projects have, after all, always been so generously funded by the good citizens of Boston, Chicago, New York…..He has been wined, dined and feted by presidents at the White House and even, absurdly, serenaded by the likes of Barbra Streisand.) But in this case there is nary a whimper out of the White House.

Of course the circumstances, then and now, are not identical, but they are similar enough. It is stupefyingly wrong. No doubt I will be snippily instructed in some subtle moral distinction here, some situational difference. But I suspect the difference is the worst one - that of standards.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2006

Bastille Day
NYC

My father was A Bad Man. In my first year, he left us for Asia to go see an alleged sick relative (he was born in India - now Bangladesh - in 1925). Always difficult, he was maddeningly vague about his return date, and my Mother, with almost no family and pregnant with my brother, was frantic. In his Muslim view, she, a mere lapsed-Catholic atheist white woman, should perhaps not have had the temerity to ask so very many questions. But relenting, he promised to be back in oh, about two weeks, give or take. And if not then, well yes of course in time for my first Christmas and New Year’s Day Birthday.

Christmas and New Year came and went. With no word, no letter from him, and the Salvation Army trying to find him for us, and the London authorities offering to take me and my newborn brother into “care”, it was revealed he had contracted another marriage, in India.

Decades later I would learn from an interesting source that he also became (to use that ambiguous phrase) a “freedom fighter” in the Bangladesh war of independence, which war was won, partly through his efforts. Apparently he fought, helped set up the first government there, but turned down a government post. Wise decision that, since the president and several family members were later gunned down in, as they say, “a bloody coup”. My father then helped get the rest of this family out of the country to safety. (Probably exactly like The Sound of Music - but with guns and absent the tedious singing sequences.) This is not the only irony in the story.

Because before all this fighting for freedom, there was the drama with the wretched oranges. In much the same way that my father was always pestering the cat jump over his hands ( “Tump! Tump!” he would urge, and she would, poor thing), he tried terribly hard to teach me what he called “discipline”. It went like this: my Mother, in another part of the house, would hear me screaming and come running in alarm, only to find her daughter clutching at the air, inches away from a half-eaten orange. I loved oranges. My father’s favourite trick was to hand me one, wait a little, and then take it away. “What are you doing??”, she would say. His answer was always, “She must learn discipline!” It’s a bit like that old cliche, I suppose: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” Or perhaps it was just a vocabulary problem.

So it was left to my Mother to instill real discipline and good habits in her kids - and she did so with care and some humour. We were taught that “buying on the HP” (hire purchase - aka credit) was not a good thing. If we wanted something we saved until we had the money to buy it - if we still wanted it. We were taught never to turn up the chance to travel and that chocolate is good for you. We were taught to treat people as we would wish to be treated and if we didn’t, well, she would laugh, “woe betide you!” because someone called Mrs. Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By would march in, sleeves rolled up, and sort you out with her huge, “capable” forearms. At least this is how I imagined her - a large, red-faced German washerwoman hellbent on justice - but, I might have hoped, a bit more lenient about the fruit.

But my father’s efforts, insofar as achieving any level of compliance or pliancy in me, failed utterly. Probably because they were based not on fairness or logic, but power and the setting of one will against another. Predictably, I have occasionally ended up in relationships with the sorts of men who eventually throw up their hands and say (in one famous case), “Oh I don’t know what to do with you! I suppose it’s not your fault - you come from a long line of headstrong, wilful….difficult! women.” Of course to me, these things sounded not only fantastically romantic in the classical Cathy & Heathcliff style, but surely the very essence of discipline (if dismayingly suggestive of me as some sort of wayward baggage). Imagine my perplexity then when after such blatant flattery the man stomped out in a huff.

I immediately called up my Mother, whose fault it apparently all was. (I was merely expressing my genes!) I called not to cry on her shoulder but to inform her we had just received a huge compliment. Also to say thanks for all the genetics. Secretly, I thought about the courage that she, the real freedom fighter, must have had to divorce my father when one fine Spring day the following year he had finally come sauntering up to the front door in Walthamstow, genuinely shocked to find the locks changed. My father, the brave fighter, the wilful orange revoker, who didn’t stop at mere oranges but took himself away to even greater effect - and to my eternal gratitude.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2006