Читать книгу On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey through Ancient Italy - Peter Stothard - Страница 15

The priest said that he could meet me again in this next town along the Appian Way. Benevento’s Leproso Bridge is the most visible relic here of Spartacus’ time, lizard-like arches of low-lying stone and long grass. The only living things in the Piazza Orazio are feral cats, prowling through the polythene sheets of long-absent archaeologists. When Horace came to Beneventum on his journey to Brundisium he complained of getting nothing to eat but burnt thrushes from a burning kitchen. This abandoned piazza of deep empty pits, corrugated iron barricades and peeling dance-school posters is the town’s appropriate revenge.

My new friend is comfortable talking about Spartacus, a man whom he has somehow accepted into his own faith. There are certain pagans whom followers of Jesus Christ have long seen as honorary Christians. Spartacus finally won his place thanks to Kirk Douglas and the Hollywood money men. There was big box-office appeal in a saintly rebel who had lived just too early to be a saint. Statius had won the accolade somewhat earlier and was thus available to lead his Renaissance admirer Dante along paths through Paradise.

Horace has not been so blessed by the Church, being no sort of freedom fighter and a religious sceptic too. But before the black-eyed priest begins his explanation of all this he wants to know more about the traveller he is talking to. He does not care about newspapers or politics, about Britain or the possibilities of my notebook becoming a more permanent book. He believes in origins. Very precisely he wants to know who my father was, where I come from. He is most specific. He pauses aggressively for my reply. He throws a lump of wood at the cats and taps a long white finger on the wall while they scatter into the ditches.

Most of what we know about Horace, he begins again, comes from the poet’s tribute to his father, the good-hearted, hard-working, sometime enslaved businessman from Venusia. Eduard Fraenkel used to say the same, more severely, with the threat that any student who could not be bothered to read Horace’s sixth satire (shame on the distracted children of the 1960s) should not bother with Horace at all.

Much of our knowledge of Statius comes in the same way, an obituary poem to the man who had taught him all the Greek tricks he knew, whom he begged to come back to him in his dreams. Was my own father dead? When was he born? What was his religion? What did his obituaries say? The thirsty questioner senses another imminent pause and snaps, as though taking hurried confessions in a disaster zone, that I will be happier when I have answered.

So I do. W. M. Stothard was born in 1925 in the flat lands where Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire meet. When he died of cancer in 1997 there was no obituary in the newspapers. He was not quite good enough at cricket or cards, although he played both well when he was young. He was baptised as a Methodist and named after the Yorkshire cricketing hero Wilfred Rhodes; but he quickly lost both the Christianity and the name. For seventy years, from his mining-village birthplace to the bars of Royal Marines and ministries of defence, he answered to the name Max. A man of his age might reasonably have booked his space on the obituaries page during the war. My father set out for war when he was supposed to have been setting out as a student. He joined the Royal Navy despite all his family’s efforts to keep him at home. But he sailed away to West Africa on a ship called HMS Aberdeen. He bought red-leather knife cases and postcards of Dakar’s six-domed cathedral and never fired a hostile shot except at a basking shark. He was lucky, he said.

When he was not shooting fish or trading cans for trinkets, he studied the young science of radar, watching the many curious ways that waves behave in the air above the sea, turning solid things into numbers. He was not a radar pioneer in the sense that obituary writers would require. He was one of thousands who fiddled with diodes, quartz and wire to make radar work. That was how he spent most of the rest of his life.

He returned to England when the war was won and took a place at Nottingham University. He batted and bowled and played bridge and studied physics. He had a striped bluegreen-yellow blazer which he cheerfully bequeathed to me and which made it easier for my friends to recognise me at Oxford in the 1970s in the dark. He had a brain that other engineers described as Rolls-Royce. It was powerful but he did not like to test it beyond a purr. In 1950, the year before I was born, he joined the Marconi Company at its research laboratory in Great Baddow, Essex, on a salary of £340 per year. He worked on many and various half-forgotten, half-successful, mostly never needed air-defence systems that protected British skies during the Cold War. He reasoned through his problems in an armchair at home, spreading files marked ‘Secret’ like a fisherman’s nets. He preferred to solve technical glitches in series not in parallel. He found solutions singly. He hated to stress the machinery of his mind.

Later he became a manager and a salesman whom, in my own too simple student days, I would call an arms salesman. I accused him of complicity in the death industry and he was characteristically patient about that. He travelled many roads. He came to know thousands of fellows in the science of spotting fast-moving objects in the sky. He had space in his purring life for hundreds to be his friend. But he long did not seek the advancement that an obituary demands; and latterly, when he sought it, he did not find it.

He sometimes misunderstood people. He liked to see them as electro-machinery, as fundamentally capable of simple, selfless working. He was closed to the communications of religion or art. His favourite picture, his own spectacular, was a photograph of an oil-production platform being towed through a fiord. He listened to no music. He was especially offended by the violin and the soprano voice. His passions were for moving parts, moving balls, jet-streams in the skies over air shows. Other minds were not his pasture.

He was a pleasure-seeking materialist whose pleasures were not taken in excess and whose materialism was only a means of science. If his cancer pains brought him pictures of any past, he never mentioned them. I doubt that they did. He claimed that he had never had a dream until the diamorphine nights that kindly killed him. He had no fear of anything unknown.

Thirty years ago, when I was setting off for Oxford to study Latin and Greek, he gave me his own father’s copy of the second half of Virgil’s Aeneid. The name B. Stothard, in a firm, now faded, script, still sits inside the flyleaf. Max had no idea why that Virgil had been bought or why it had survived. It was one of only five books in our house on Great Baddow’s Rothmans estate, a freshly concreted field where all the radar engineers lived in a Marconi community of algebra and graph-paper. My father did not much care for Latin or for my studying it. But he never tried to stop me. He never closed a gate. He could easily have stopped me being here now. Without a mind full of antiquity I would not have been in Horace Square with a frowning, olive-eyed priest who continues to ask questions, more satisfied now with some small sense of my paternity, before giving his farewell guidance for the true beginning of the Spartacus Road.