Читать книгу Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy - Rod Liddle - Страница 11

For death remembered should be like a mirror,

Who tells us life’s but breath, to trust it error.

William Shakespeare

Butterflies are always following me, everywhere I go.

Mariah Carey

The last thing I remember my mother ever saying to me was, ‘Rod, I’m frightened.’ She had terminal cancer, and what she was afraid of, reasonably enough, was dying imminently. She knew she was close to death, and so did I, and so did my dad and so did the doctors and nurses who attended to her in this harrowing room in the hospital in Cardiff. The room knew too. There was something about the room: its scrubbed beige implacability, its suffocating warmth, its watchfulness – somehow, in a way I can’t explain, its connivance, a connivance in the unending procession of death which it witnessed, the room from which nobody leaves alive, and with its terrible and pointless clinical appurtenances. She said this thing to me while I was sat at her bedside holding her hand, just ‘Rod, I’m frightened,’ and, emaciated and frequently delirious though she was, whacked out on the morphine and eaten away by the cancer, this brief and entirely rational admission seemed shocking, staggering even.

It was the first time it had been said aloud, the first time the death thing, the possibility of the death thing, had been admitted in the five years since the cancer – once supposedly eradicated – had made its inevitable triumphant return. The cancer she had first noticed on that pleasant afternoon in Wales, as we walked along the footpath, twelve years before. For the final three years of her life there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever about what the outcome would be, my father and I were assured; there would be no remission, there was nothing anyone could do, no drugs, no surgery: that, I’m afraid, they all said, sadly, shaking their heads, is that, sorry. Three years of quite explicitly terminal illness, but never admitted between us in the presence of my mum, even though of course she had been told the same thing by the surgeons. Never admitted, as if it were some kind of dirty secret, something shameful and pornographic. So when she said this thing about being frightened, I didn’t know what to do, how to respond. It was a sentence of ghostly clarity, it had a kind of supernatural force, as if it came from beyond her, and it left me speechless. The mantra had been the same for the last three years – Mum, you’re going to be fine.

That’s what we said. We chivvied her along, we patted and reassured and cheered and lied. And she lied back. We knew and she knew she was going to die soon – but the pretence was nonetheless kept up, all the way through; it was a kind of agreement. And so that’s what I said to her then, at the bedside, or words to that effect. ‘You’re going to be fine. Mum, don’t worry, you’ll get over this.’ You know the sort of thing? The sort of thing you say? Such a vapid and evasive lie when she wanted something better.

Only a few weeks before, she had collapsed at home and lay on the kitchen floor, paralysed. The doctor was called, along with an ambulance. ‘How are you feeling today, Margaret?’ the doctor enquired as she was being hoisted by three blokes onto a stretcher. ‘Lovely, thank you, doctor,’ she replied. ‘Lovely.’ There was no intended irony. Lovely. Top of the world. Never been better.

I remember plenty of times with my mum and dad when such reflexive or habitual stoicism seemed surreal, or idiotic. The refusal to admit to pain or distress in such extreme circumstances does not strike me as commendable – or, for that matter, useful. It is self-abnegation to the point of lunacy, isn’t it? But the last thing you wanted to do if you were my mother, or my father, or a good proportion of that generation which spent its golden years of youth cowering in a tube station from the V2s or on a boat somewhere, trying to kill Krauts, was to make a fuss. The notion that your palpable distress was of significance to anyone else, or even noticed by anyone else, was anathema, and indeed rather embarrassing. You soldiered on, you didn’t moan, you made the best of things, put a smile on your face – all that stiff-upper-lip bollocks you hear about from the Second World War: the corner shop with its sign saying ‘Still open for business!’ despite the fact that, consequent to the previous night’s air raid, the shop no longer existed; the milkman delivering his wares to a non-existent street; the searing fires, the rubble, the dust, the dead bodies and the vision of your own imminent death fizzing away, just beyond the edge of your eyesight. Against such a daily backdrop your own concerns, your upheavals, your petty miseries, your hardships, counted for less than nothing. There is something almost fascistic, as well as wholly glorious, in the extent to which personal concerns were put aside – there’s a war to be won, others are suffering more than me, and so on. Oh, for sure, it was not entirely like that during the war years – there were strikes, there was looting, there was an anger that the rich had it much easier and still thronged in the Café Royal of an evening getting pissed and eating rather nicer food than everyone else. But rancour was not the dominant state of mind, or does not seem to have been; mostly, people really did just get on with stuff and kept the complaints to a minimum. There was an awareness that the thing they were in, this war, was bigger than any individual.

Hell, you know all about the Second World War: your TV channels are full of it, there is a seemingly insatiable public desire to squeeze every last detail out of its now desiccated entrails. Turn on your TV on any night of the week and I’ll wager that Hitler will be making an appearance somewhere, shouting at lots of people or making his famous camp little salute, or doing that jaunty dance he did when he was really happy. Adolf is by some margin Great Britain’s favourite character from history, for his madness, his comedy value, his dire threat, his convenient embodiment of untrammelled, Continental, evil.

Other countries, and especially the poor Germans, are puzzled by our perpetual gloating, our revelling in the immense, hideous tragedy of World War II, sixty-nine years after it ended. Indeed, after sixty-nine years of unremitting national decline, they would quietly point out. They suspect that we are so interested, so avid for stories of heroism, because we won. And that’s partly correct; but it’s much more than that. I think we look back on the war with fondness, and even envy, because the British people then are thought to have behaved, by and large, in an exemplary manner; there was selflessness, sacrifice, resilience and, of course, a berserk sort of stoicism. I think we enjoy thinking of ourselves behaving in an exemplary manner. It matters little as to whether that exemplary behaviour, back in those grim days, was sort of the only option available. Whatever, that modest predisposition somehow stuck with the generation that endured it all.

They did not speak much of the war, my mother and father, but its deprivations undoubtedly shaped them. I heard a little from my mother about being evacuated, and how her family’s house in Bermondsey was flattened and they were resettled in the rather more pleasant East Dulwich – something which, my mother said, ensured that her own father retained forever a soft spot for Hermann Goering and his brave pilots. From my father there was very little, although he once told me how he and most of the crew on his MTB much preferred Germans to Belgians, and Belgians to the ghastly French – as I mentioned back at the start of this book.

But the war lies deep within the minds of all those who lived through it; in the case of my mother and father, as in many others of that generation, it manifested itself as a refusal to make a fuss, to become upset or inflamed, to complain, to whine – not least because since the war there has not been so very much to whine about, all things considered. Perhaps it made them too quiescent and undemanding of others, but that’s a pleasant contrast to how we are now, the generation that followed them. I mean, with the best will in the world, you wouldn’t call us ‘stoic’, would you? You wouldn’t accuse us of being slow to complain, of being resilient, of subordinating our own inconveniences for the greater benefit of others, would you? These are generalisations, of course; I’m sure it is true that my parents’ generation had its percentage of whining halfwits, just as today some of us may show a little reserve, and dignity, and fortitude. What I mean is that these are not the things that immediately come to mind when you think of how we are now. Something different comes to mind.

Take one of our big concerns these days, now that we no longer have the V2s raining down, or the shadow of the Bomb hovering above us: obesity. Being very, very, fat. That is what gets us worked up today.

You may remember the newspapers being full of a story about a girl in South Wales who had to have the front of her house knocked down because she was too fat to get downstairs, or indeed shift her enormous arse out of bed. They had pictures of this poor lass, and she was indeed fucking gargantuan, like a crude cartoon of a very fat person, an enormous sallow mound of blubber and e-numbers and carbohydrates and compacted shit. The earliest reports put her weight at sixty-three stone, although this was later revised down to a svelte fifty-five stone. Obviously one felt sorry for her, lying there as the demolition men and the paramedics went about their work – but the thing that grated was the constant insistence from her friends and from herself that she wouldn’t have got this fat if she had been helped