Extracts

The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is the incredibly exciting new book from Thomas Mullen, author of the excellent The Last Town on Earth, named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today.

In the amazingly evocative narrative, we follow the Depression-era adventures of Jason and Whit Fireson—bank robbers known as the Firefly Brothers by the press, the authorities, and an adoring public that worships their acts as heroic counterpunches thrown at a broken system.

To get a flavour of the book take a look at this video – currently featuring the US jacket and pub dates. Our version looks like this and is published in April, but don’t worry if you cant wait that long…

…We know you’ll love the book as much as we did which is why we’re giving away proof copies. Click here to find out how to get your hands on one, hot off the press or the slab, whichever you prefer.

Next month, New Books magazine, the magazine dedicated to book clubs and reading groups, is paying special attention to four of our very talented authors, debuting in Spring.

Read more about brilliant debut authors from Press Books!

Synopsis

Reading Lace: When Dreams Become Reality

Read the first chapter

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This week, Fourth Estate publishes the paperback edition of This Little Britain, in which Harry Bingham argues for Britain’s leading role in making the modern world a richer, freer, more peaceful, and more democratic place. Taking a particular interest in the many exceptional things that Britain did first, or best, or most, or were the only ones ever to do, This Little Britain focuses on oddities that have spread across the world. Today’s extract focuses on language and literature.

On Language and Literature

SHAW’S POTATO

The playwright and would-be spelling reformer George Bernard Shaw famously pointed out that, using only common English spellings, we could write the word fish as ghoti:

F: gh as in rough

I: o as in women

SH: ti as in nation

Shaw couldn’t have been trying very hard, if this was the best he could come up with. If he’d turned his attention to the other half of Britain’s national dish, he could perfectly well have come up with ghoughbteighpteau for potato:

P: gh as in hiccough

O: ough as in though

T: bt as in debt

A: eigh as in neighbour

T: pt as in pterodactyl

O: eau as in bureau

Other languages have their eccentric spellings, of course, but English is in a league of its own. French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian all spell more or less as they sound. English just isn’t like that. If you heard individual words from this paragraph and were asked to write them out, how would you know to choose more rather than moor or maw? Know rather than no? Would rather than wood? Write rather than right or rite? Or rather than oar, ore or awe? Their rather than they’re or there? You rather than ewe? Course rather than coarse? But rather than butt? In rather than inn? For rather than four, fore or even (for those acquainted with the archaic term for Scottish gypsies) faw? The answer is that, of course, you couldn’t. But nothing happens without a reason, and the strange spellings of English have their reasons too, lurking deep in the heart of Shaw’s potato.

P as in hiccough

The first point to make is that language is human. It’s fallible. Or, not to beat about the bush, it’s full of cock-ups. One such error is hiccough. The word first pops up in Elizabethan English as hickop or hikup, an adaptation of the earlier hicket or hicock. Now it’s pretty clear from all these versions that the word was onomatopoeic, a fair attempt to catch the sounds of a hiccup in letters. But no sooner had the word decided to settle down than people started to assume that a hiccup was some sort of cough. And if a hiccup was a cough, then shouldn’t it be written that way: hiccough, not hiccup? The answer was no, it shouldn’t. Not then, and not now. The error grew nevertheless, until hiccough became at least as common as hiccup. The error is rejected by most dictionaries, but is still common enough that my computer spellcheck accepts both versions. Since people not dictionaries are the ultimate appeal court in these matters, then hiccough is certainly a real enough word, a mistake that’s passed the test of time.

O as in though

Most oddities of English have little to do with straightforward errors. A bigger problem is that English is a living language, and its strangest spellings are often left as residues, like tree rings marking out past phases of growth.

English spellings largely derive from a particular period in British history, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It’s possible to be as precise as this for the simple reason that for the three hundred years or so following the Norman Conquest English had mostly disappeared as a written language. When official documents needed to be written, they’d been written in French or Latin. Thus by the time that English began to reemerge from its long hiding, it was faced with the challenge of adopting a writing system almost, as it were, from scratch.

This could easily have been a recipe for disaster. People tended to spell as they pronounced, and regional accents of the time were very varied. There are more than five hundred spellings recorded for the word through. The word she had more than sixty, including:

• Scae
• Sse
• Sche
• Shae
• Se
• Che
• Shee
• Zhee
• Sheea
• Sheh
• Shey
• Sha
• Sso
• Sco
• Scho
• Schoe
• Show
• Sho
• Shoy
• Schew
• Schw
• Shoe
• Shou
• She
• Su
• Scheo
• Sheo
• Zhe

If you were writing just for your own friends, or to conduct business locally, perhaps none of this might have mattered. But as soon as official records and legal proceedings began using English too, then this kind of variation began to matter a lot; a common approach was called for. Naturally enough, London, home to the court and the senior echelons of the national bureaucracy, became dominant in imposing its spellings, in particular through the most senior bureaucrats of them all, the Masters of Chancery. Over time, they began to stamp their authority on the chaos. Out went all those scheos and sheeas and zhes, to be replaced by she. Out went ich (and many others) to be replaced by I. Because the movers and shakers of London spoke an English drawn mostly from London and the Midlands, our spelling is based largely on those accents.

Those early bureaucrats did a good job. Fifteenth-century English spelling was increasingly systematic and rational — a typical European language. Alas, however, no sooner had the spellings been fixed than pronunciations shifted. The spelling of words like through, rough and right is a perfectly accurate guide to the way these words used to be spoken. But the language has moved on, leaving these old medieval relics behind.

T as in debt

The silent B in debt is another tree ring.

When the Masters of Chancery were working to fix the language, there was a debate between those who thought that all spellings should be phonetic, and those who wanted them to be based on sound etymology. The phonetic camp won out in most cases, but not in all. Debt has a silent B, simply because medieval scholars wanted to point out that the word has its origins in the Latin debere, to owe. So a silent B was added — and never mind the fact that the word actually came from the French dette, which never had a B anywhere near it.

This was a quirky way to justify introducing a totally needless letter, and it was based on a more than generous interpretation of etymology, but there was, at least, an etymological connection, however thin. Medieval scholars were, however, prone to finding connections to the Latin where none actually existed, so our language is littered with plenty of spellings that are unjustifiable on any level. Island doesn’t come from the Latin insula; it comes from an s-free Germanic root. (Compare modern German Eiland.) Anchor, rhyme, scythe, island, numb, ghost and many others derived their oddness from other errors fixed and perpetuated by Renaissance dictionaries.

A as in neighbour

All the problems so far mentioned fade into insignificance compared with the one identified by the A in Shaw’s potato.

Just as the Masters of Chancery were producing the first rational spelling system in English, something was going on to turn all their fine work on its head. This was the Great Vowel Shift, which did exactly what it said on the tin. Before the shift, English vowels had been much the same as their Continental neighbours. The word fine in English used to be pronounced with an ‘ee’ sound, like the Italian fino (‘fee-no’). If a fourteenth-century speaker of English had encountered a sentence like ‘I see my goat is lame — my cow too’, they’d have pronounced it approximately as: ‘Ee say mee gawt ays lahm — mee coo toe.’

This sounds odd to us, but only because we’re not used to it. At least English used its vowels in more or less the way you’d expect given its ancestry. Then, for no known reason, the vowels decided to get up from their fixed positions and wander round till they settled again in new places. The Chaucerian ‘ee’ sound became the modern ‘eye’ sound, the Chaucerian ‘ay’ became the modern ‘ee’, and so on.

The process was both strange and not strange at the same time. In some ways, nothing much could be more ordinary. Language changes. If you want a scone, do you ask for a scohne or a sconn? If you talk about dust, do you use the southern ‘uh’ sound, or the shortened Yorkshire ‘oo’ sound? If a Brummie moves to a new part of the country — Liverpool, say, or Glasgow or Cornwall — they may well start to modify their vowel sounds, almost without noticing it. The Great Vowel Shift was in a way no odder than that — and bear in mind that it took place over two centuries, or the space of five or six medieval lifetimes.

On the other hand, the process is also a little odd. Why did English change so much and its closest neighbours little or not at all? And what propelled the movement? There is no shortage of theories. Social upheavals following the Black Death is one possibility. Another is that as the French-speaking ruling class came to speak English, there was a vogue for a kind of patriotic hypercorrection of French vowel sounds. But no one knows for sure. It’s just one of those things.

The one certainty, however, is that English spellings were fixed before, during and after the shift. A word like polite (around before the shift) simply saw its pronunciation change, from something like pol-eet to the modern pol-ite. But an almost identical word — police — which entered the language after the shift reflects the Continental ‘ee’ sound of its origin. The result, of course, is that there’s no way to tell in advance how a word should be spelled, or how a spelling should be spoken. Fine for those who grow up with the language; murder for those who have to learn it.

T as in pterodactyl

The first recorded reference to a pterodactyl is in Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. In it, Lyell predicts, ‘The ptero-dactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.’Whether pterodactyls could ever have been described as flitting is open to doubt, but what’s significant here is that new words have to be coined for new uses, and that one of the biggest creators of new words is science.

Scientists are only human. They want their coinages to have a bit of class — and what could be more classy than a bit of Latin or (still better) Greek? And since the ancient Greeks were fond of their initial Ps, our language is now adorned with pterodactyls and ptomaine and psychology and many others. The trouble with these introductions, of course, is that English tongues can’t really wrap themselves around such (to us) exotic constructions. So the pronunciation tends to be anglicized, while the spelling resolutely isn’t.

O as in bureau

The final great complicating factor for English is highlighted by the final letter of Shaw’s potato. Bureau is a French word. It has entered English with its pronunciation and spelling more or less intact, but because the French match up vowel sounds and letter combinations differently from us, their words only serve to baffle and complicate our spellings.

That’s not the only problem that can arise, however. Sometimes a new word entered the language — for example, nation, another French borrowing — and English tongues weren’t able to wrap themselves around the foreign sounds. So the French pronunciation, roughly na-see-o(n), becomes corrupted to the comfortable English nay-shun. Creations like this are hideously common. Do you want to guess how many ways there are to create the sh sound in English? You might play safe and say two or three. Or perhaps go wild and suggest five or six. The correct answer is in fact thirteen, as in shed, sure, issue, mansion, passion, ignition, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperone, schedule, pshaw and fuchsia.

Potato as in

That’s now every letter of Shaw’s potato accounted for. Shaw himself so disliked the mess of spellings that he left money in his will for a prize to be awarded for the best new alphabet to take care of English spelling. The winner was a chap called Kingsley Read. As Read saw it, a big part of the problem with English spellings is that there are too few letters for the number of sounds they need to make. There are forty-eight distinct sounds in English, and only twenty-six letters to do their work. The letter A, for example, has at least four jobs to do: ay as in able, a as in at, ah as in alms and or as in all. If English is to be easy to spell, then there should be one sound to a letter, one letter to a sound. Read’s alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, is a rather beautiful creation. It looks like this:

 

(That’s the start of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in case you missed it.) Alas, however, no one ever used Read’s alphabet. No one ever used Quickscript, his later modification of it. No one has ever used Readspel, Read’s final attempt to get people on his side. And no one ever will.

In the end, weird spellings are only a problem if that’s how you choose to see them. Part of the beauty of English is that its history is visible for all to see. It’s a hybrid between Anglo-Saxon rootstock and Franco-Latinate blooms. It’s a magpie language, acquisitive and reckless. It’s a human language, strewn with errors and eccentricities. It’s a living language, with vowels and pronunciations that shift from age to age. That won’t ever change. The question really is, who’d want it to?

A WORLD OF SQUANTOS

In November 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers made landfall off Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best time of year to arrive. The New England winter was more ferocious than anything the predominantly East Anglian settlers were used to. Nor were the precedents exactly encouraging. The first British settlement in North America had disappeared without trace. The second (in Jamestown, Virginia) had survived, but only after terrible loss of life. The Pilgrim Fathers weren’t even well equipped. They were missing basic tools, and were astonishingly ignorant of both agriculture and fishing. Their prospects were lousy, and they knew it. In the words of the colony’s first governor,William Bradford:

And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?

From that hideous wilderness stepped forth a miracle. In the words of William Bradford again:

Whilst we were busied hereabout,we were interrupted, for there presented himself a savage which caused an alarm. He very boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous, where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in … He saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome’.

The ‘savage’ who emerged from the Massachusetts woods had picked up a few words of English from visiting sailors, but the miracle hadn’t yet taken place. The man who bade the settlers welcome took them to meet a second man, Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto. And Squanto spoke English; not just a few words, but fluently. Captured by British fishermen some fifteen years before, Squanto had been carried off to London, where he’d learned English and received training as a guide and interpreter, before managing to escape home again on a returning boat.

The unlikelihood of this sequence of events is simply astounding. What are the odds that a bunch of under-skilled and under-equipped Englishmen should pitch up and find perhaps the most fluent native American speaker of English anywhere on the continent? Squanto didn’t just offer a taste of home. He taught the settlers the things they needed to know. He showed them how to sow their corn seeds with little bits of chopped fish for fertilizer. He taught them how to fish and how to distinguish what was edible from what was not. It’s quite likely that Squanto saved the colony.

The story makes a point. Back then, English was a minor language, with limited projection beyond England’s own boundaries. Today, it is the world’s own language. Back then, it was the unlikelihood of finding a Squanto which made his appearance so miraculous. Today, a traveller could pitch up almost any- where — any country, any coast, any continent — and hope to find some words of English spoken, by at least some members of the local community. The miracle today is not the rarity of English, but its universality.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that English has become the world’s most commonly spoken language. It hasn’t. A billion Mandarin Chinese speakers dwarf the 350 million or so native English speakers. But that misses the point. To be a global language is to be the preferred means of communication between two parties from different language communities, and it’s here where English is exceptional. On top of the 350 million native speakers, there are perhaps another 400 million speakers in former colonies, plus a billion or so speakers — from Japanese tourists to Swedish businessman — who have simply adopted the language as the simplest means of international communication. This number is growing all the time, not least in China, which will soon have more English speakers than the combined total of all English-speaking countries. No other language remotely compares with the global significance of English. Its lead is increasing all the time.

It’s always tempting to romanticize the language’s dominance, to start muttering about Shakespeare and Chaucer, the flexible euphony of our tongue. But Shakespeare, Schmakespeare. The world speaks English because of British gunboats (and emigrants) in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth. If those Mayflower settlers had happened to speak Ubykh, a Caucasian language with eighty-one consonants and only three vowels, or perhaps Rotokas, a Papua New Guinea language with just six consonants and five vowels, then the world would quite likely be speaking those fine languages today.

Meanwhile, English is spreading in other ways too. The Oxford English Dictionary currently lists about half a million words. Its American equivalent, Webster’s, comes up with a roughly similar figure of 450,000. The two dictionaries have, however, much less of an overlap than you might guess. The OED contains more archaic or regional British terms,Webster’s more Americanisms. Putting the two dictionaries together would probably produce an expanded word count of some 750,000 words. (I say probably: no one has ever bothered to work it out.) But even this total excludes huge swaths of English. It excludes terms from the various world Englishes (Singapore English, Jamaican English, Indian English, etc.). It excludes much slang and regional dialect. It excludes acronyms, even those that are usually used as words (CIA, NATO, the EU, and so on). It excludes most flora and fauna. If all these were added in, the word count would probably reach a million. If all scientific and technical terms were added, the count might be twice that. By comparison, French has an ‘official’ dictionarybased word count of less than 100,000 words, German around 190,000.

The sheer scale of its vocabulary is one of the key reasons why other languages are fighting a hopeless battle to keep English terminology out. It is all very well for the Académie Française to invent new French terms to replace Anglo-Saxon intruders, autofinancement for cashflow, for example. But what about those million or so technical and scientific terms — bluetooth protocol, polypropylene, iPod, troposphere? Is the Académie really going to invent new terms for those and all 999,997 others? In 2004, The Economist quoted research which suggested that two-thirds of all Internet content is in English. Scientific and technical journals are also disproportionately anglophone. English isn’t just pushing other languages back, it’s eating into them too.

What of the future? There are roughly two schools of thought. The first takes Latin as its example. The break-up of the Roman Empire led to the break-up of the language. Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese litter the linguistic map, the ruined remains of a once great empire. Romanian and Portuguese speakers may both be speaking linear descendants of the same language, but the languages have long since become mutually unintelligible.

Is this the fate of English? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest it. After all, it’s already slightly misleading to speak of one single language called ‘English’. We have at the very least Indian English, American English, British English, Nigerian English, Philippines English, Canadian English, Pakistani English, Australian English, and so on. (The order of terms in that list might not be a conventional one, but it’s perfectly logical: the terms are arranged in descending order, by size of the English language community.) But this list describes broad types only. Within every genus, there is an abundance of species. Not just Scouse English, but Caribbean Scouse, Pakistani Scouse, Irish Scouse, and so forth. If you sat in a Singaporean student café, among students speaking their version of English, you probably wouldn’t understand what was being said. Perhaps the English break-up is already happening. Perhaps the rot has already set in.

Or then again, perhaps not. The counter-argument is simple: call it the eBay paradigm. In a world of highly competitive markets, eBay is rare and extraordinary in having virtually no meaningful competition. How come? Simply because eBay was the first, and as such it started out with the most buyers and the most sellers. Buyers naturally flock to the system with the most products to choose from. Sellers naturally gravitate to the outlet with the largest number of buyers. Unless eBay does something horrendous to mess up, its position is and will remain unrivalled.What’s true of beanie toys and second-hand clothes is all the more true of a universal language. If you’re an ambitious student keen to acquire a second tongue, which one does it make most sense to master? Obviously the one that gives access to the largest possible number of fellow speakers. So the larger the number of English speakers, the greater the incentive for others to learn it. Dominance feeds dominance.

There perhaps lies the real point about that Singaporean café. If you were sitting there, sipping your bandung and picking at your fish-head curry, it’s likely that your fellow diners would notice your difficulty in making sense of their conversation. So they’d probably just shift the way they spoke. From the idiosyncrasies of Singaporean youth English to something like an international Standard English. That Standard English would still be noticeably local in flavour. It would certainly be American tinted. But you’d understand it. They’d understand you. That’s the point of a universal language. It makes one world of us all: a world of Squantos.

OF COWS AND BEEF

The word Welsh derives from an Anglo-Saxon root, Wealas, which means slave or foreigner. There, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about the politics of sixth-century Britain. The incoming Angles, Jutes and Saxons had turned the native British Celts into foreigners in their own land; not quite slaves perhaps, but humiliatingly subject all the same.

Anglo-Saxon rule didn’t extend merely to land and territory; it covered language too. Although a certain amount of intermarriage must have taken place between invaders and ‘slaves’, that intermarriage was reflected hardly at all in the spoken word. Virtually no Celtic words survived the onslaught, and those that did are telling. Modern English words such as tor, crag, combe, cairn, cromlech, dolmen and loch are all Celtic, and they all describe features of the landscape which simply hadn’t existed in the flatlands from which the invaders had come. The newcomers took the words they absolutely needed and ditched the rest. Only a few dozen Celtic words survive in English today.

While the Celts always referred to their invaders as Saxons, the newcomers themselves began to call themselves Anglii, their new country Anglia, and (in due course) their language Englisc. It’s that language which we speak today. Of the hundred most commonly used words in modern English, almost all are Old English in origin, including all but one of the top twenty-five. (In order: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it, he, was, for, on, are, as, with, his, they, I, at, be, this, have, from. The Old Norse intruder in this list is they. The word the appears in this book some 5,850 times.) These twenty-five words make up about one third of all printed material in English. The top hundred words make up about a half. The first French-derived word doesn’t appear until number at seventy-six.

You can tell a lot about a society from the language it speaks. The language of the Anglii was domestic, rural, warlike, concrete. Words such as man, daughter, friend and son are Old English. So are dog, mouse, wood, swine, horse. So are plough, earth, shepherd, ox, sheep. So are love, lust, sing, night, day, sun. So are words such as so, are, words, such, as. The one linguistic invasion of real significance in those years was Christianity. As the pagan Anglo-Saxons began to convert to the new religion, new words (mostly Greek or Roman in origin) crept in to handle the new concepts: bishop, monk, nun, altar, angel, pope, apostle, psalm, school. The number of new words was small, less than 1 per cent of the existing vocabulary, but they extended the language by giving it ways of expressing new thoughts, new concepts.

With the language to do it, the Anglii began to produce a literature of their own, probably a great one. If people wanted to preserve their work, they wrote not in English but in Latin. As a consequence, most work that was written in English has been lost for ever. Fortunately, though, enough of the old literature has survived for us to get a feel of what was lost. Beowulf is the first great surviving work of literature written in English, a story of strange monsters and Dark Age realpolitik. Here, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, is the arrival of the monster Grendel at the feasting hall:

In off the moors, down through the mist-bands

God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

The bane of the race of men roamed forth,

hunting for a prey in the high hall.

Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it

until it shone above him, a sheer keep

of fortified gold. Nor was that the first time

he had scouted the grounds of Hrothgar’s dwelling —

although never in his life, before or since,

did he find harder fortune or hall-defenders.

This extract gives us the true feel of Anglo-Saxon: gritty, alliterative, forceful, direct. In Heaney’s words: ‘What I had always loved was a kind of four-squareness about the utterance … an understanding that assumes you share an awareness of the perilous nature of life and are yet capable of seeing it steadily and, when necessary, sternly. There is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet’s sense of the world.’

Warrior-like it may have been, but Anglo-Saxon almost died nevertheless — not just once, but twice. The first major threat came with the Viking invasions when, but for Alfred the Great, we might well have ended up speaking Norse, not English. The second near-death experience came with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Because the new king, William, had been hard up for cash, he’d paid for much of his help with pledges of English land. When victory came, those pledges were redeemed. All of a sudden, every position of power in England was filled by French speakers. The new noblemen spoke French. Bishops and abbots spoke French. The court spoke French. The king made a short-lived effort to learn English, then gave up and stuck to French. As an official language, English completely vanished. In its written form, its disappearance was almost total.

For centuries, a kind of linguistic apartheid reigned. English peasants continued to speak English. The court continued to speak French. But in between the top and bottom layers of society, mixing was inevitable, as Normans married English, as French babies were cared for by local women.At the level where the two societies met, the English language underwent the most rapid — and important — transformation of its life.

A torrent of new words poured in from the French, thousands of them, far more than had ever come from Norse or Celtic. The Normans brought a new kind of justice and administration to the land. Arrest, attorney, bail, bailiff, felony, fine, pardon, perjury and verdict all come from the French. They brought new concepts of chivalry: courtesy, damsel, honour, romance, tournament, chivalry. The arts, science, the domestic scene — all borrowed heavily from French words: music, paper, melody, grammar, calendar, ointment, pantry, lamp, curtain, chimney. And while the English worked the fields tending the oxen or cows, sheep, calves, deer and pigs (all English words), it was as often as not their French masters who got to eat the resulting beef, mutton, veal, venison and pork (all French ones).

On the whole, these new words didn’t replace the older English ones, they sat alongside them. That’s why the language now has so many alternatives: the fancy French model and the plainer English one. For example, the English ask sits beside the French question, interrogate, demand. The English king rubs shoulders with royal, regal, sovereign. We have English hands but do French manual work. For three hundred years such words poured over the Channel, leaving English immeasurably enriched, a different language.

It wasn’t just new words, it was new ways of writing too. Compare these two bits of verse, one French, one English.

Foy porter, honneur garder

Et pais querir, oubeir

Doubter, servir, et honnourer

Vous vueil jusques au morir

Dame sans per.

(I want to stay faithful, guard your honour / Seek peace, obey / Fear, serve and honour you / Until death / Peerless lady — Guillaume de Machaut.)

And the English one:

Summer is y-comen in,

Loude sing, cuckoo!

Groweth seed and bloweth mead

And spring’th the woode now —

                              Sing cuckoo!

Ewe bleateth after lamb,

Low’th after calfe cow.

Bullock starteth, bucke farteth.

                 Merry sing, cuckoo! (Anon)

The French verse is smooth, melodious, liquid. It is clever writing. Its themes are courtly love, honour and chivalry; its principal sound effect coming from that smoothly repeated soft rhyme. The English verse is the exact opposite. It’s earthy, lusty and crude. It talks about animals and farts. It’s a language at home in the fields, not the court. It uses rhyme, but does so not in a smooth and flowing way like the French, but in a way designed to make the most of the natural swing and rhythm of spoken English. That old Anglo-Saxon taste for alliteration is still there (calf / cow, bullock / buck). This is a language that enjoys its own sound effects; the one thing it won’t do is stay polite and well mannered.

The point isn’t that one form of writing is better than the other. The point is that English writers suddenly faced a huge expansion in their choice of how to write. They could be lusty, earthy, crude, jaunty. Or they could be Latinate, posh, abstract, clever. Or, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, they could mix and match, moving from the earthy to the sublime and back again. That expressive richness has been the language’s greatest resource, and it has been core to the achievements of its greatest writers.

That choice of how to write is still with us today. Britain’s two best-known poets of recent times have been Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Here is Ted Hughes, writing about a ewe having problems giving birth:

I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill

And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen

Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap

Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,

Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,

Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the

slippery Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof …

This is Anglo-Saxon in modern clothes. Hughes is earthy, concrete, in-yer-face. He uses compound nouns, alliteration and thumping stresses. It’s verse that lives in the fields, and raises two fingers to the court.

Here, in contrast, is the way Philip Larkin writes about animals — in his case, retired racehorses.

Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps

Two dozen distances sufficed

To fable them: faint afternoons

Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,

Whereby their names were artificed

To inlay faded, classic Junes …

This is pure French. The language is Latinate, high-flown, smooth and elegant; a language comfortable with the Royal Enclosure, not the dung and straw of the stable yard.

In short, English became — and remained — a language in which you could swear like a German, or seduce like a Frenchman. You could make war using one vocabulary, and philosophize with another. No other European language has that suppleness, that blend of Germanic directness and Latinate elegance. If our literary tradition is as great as any in the world, then that greatness owes much to the language that gave it birth.

HALF-CHEWED LATIN

It began with the Black Death.

In Bristol, where it struck first in 1348, some 45 per cent of the population died. Across the country, the death toll was lower, but still vast. As the country fell dying, the only growth industry was that of burial, and since priests were constantly in contact with the sick and dying, the death rate among the clergy probably exceeded even that of the general population. In January 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells wrote, ‘Priests cannot be found for love nor money … to visit the sick and administer the last sacraments.’ Since those last sacraments would have been viewed as of vital importance in Catholic England, the problem was a serious one. Dreadful times bring drastic remedies. The bishop went on to say that, in the absence of a priest, it would be proper for the dying to confess their sins to a lay person or even (steady on!) ‘to a woman if no man is available’.

Perhaps it was this new DIY approach to dying which fostered new ways of thinking, or perhaps it was simply the collision between hard times and a complacent Church. At all events, the age produced its revolutionary, an Oxford scholar named John Wyclif. Wyclif began to compare the Church he saw around him with the words of scripture, and he found the Church wanting. He wrote, ‘Were there a hundred popes and all the friars turned to cardinals, their opinions on faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are founded on scripture itself.’

Logically, then, if scripture was so important, it should be available to everyone — and available in English, not Latin. In our own secular times, it’s hard to get overexcited by such a suggestion, but in a world where it was not altogether clear whether Church or state exerted more power,Wyclif ’s proposal was revolutionary, a clear threat to the status quo.

Wyclif didn’t just talk about what ought to be done, he made sure that it was done. A group of scholars, working in line with Wyclif ’s doctrines, began to translate the Bible. It was by no means the first time in European history that a vernacular translation had been produced, but it was the first time that a complete translation had been produced by serious scholars working in explicit defiance of Church doctrine. To offer a contemporary analogy, it was as if Wyclif and his fellows were seeking to introduce the freedoms of the Internet to a society that had long known only state-owned media. The English language was the battering ram. The result, one day, would be the Protestant Reformation itself.

Yet for all Wyclif ’s thundering denunciations of the Church, those first attempts at translation were oddly timorous. It was just as if, when it came to the point, the translators didn’t quite have the nerve to leave the original text behind. Here, for instance, is a chunk taken from the first psalm.

Blisful the man, that went not awei in the counseil of unpitouse, and in the wei off sinful stod not; and in the chayer of pestilence sat not, But in the lawe of the Lord his wil; and in the lawe of hym he shal sweteli thenke dai and nygt.

Even putting aside the archaic spellings, this text reads more like half-chewed Latin than proper English. But it was a start. Its authors must have recognized the weakness of that early version, because no sooner had the first translation been finished than a new and better one was begun. Those translations were transcribed by hand, then disseminated by wandering Lollard preachers. (Lollard, from the Middle Dutch word meaning ‘a babbler of nonsense’, came to be applied pejoratively to all Wyclif ’s followers, who then came to embrace the term enthusiastically.)

In a land where books were rare and precious, where the language of salvation had always been incomprehensible to the vast bulk of the population, those Bibles must have been the most extraordinary experience: liberating, poetic, exciting, inspiring. Many parish priests, indeed, would have understood next to nothing of the Latin that they had so solemnly intoned in church. With Wyclif ’s new Bibles, weavers and housewives were suddenly being let into knowledge of God’s word itself, secrets that had previously been the property of only a tiny handful.

Inevitably, of course, the movement was suppressed.Wyclif ’s manuscripts were burned and the Lollards themselves arrested, often killed. But just as today the tide of technology tends to favour the Internet over those seeking to erect barriers against it, so too did the invention of the printing press shift things decisively in favour of revolution.Wyclif ’s translations had had to be copied, slowly and painfully, by hand. Those that came after him in England and (particularly) Germany could churn out copies by the thousand. Costs fell, print runs increased. By 1526, William Tyndale, heavily influenced by Martin Luther, printed three thousand copies of his English language New Testament, then sold each copy for as little as four shillings. The authorities could no more track down and burn each copy than they could order trees to hold their leaves in autumn. An English-speaking God had finally, decisively arrived.

As far as British exceptionalism is concerned the story ends there. An Englishman, John Wyclif, inaugurated a movement that would lead to the most important development in the Christian Church since the split between Catholic and Orthodox. That movement then shifted its centre of gravity eastwards to Germany, and England played no more than a secondary role in what followed. Yet to end the story at that point leaves off, at least from a literary point of view, its conclusion.

As we know, Henry VIII broke with Rome and, on his death, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, converted the English Church into a genuinely Protestant one, something it had not been during Henry’s reign. During the six-year reign of Edward VI, around sixty new versions of the Bible were released.More followed under Elizabeth, then James. Compared with the old days, this was liberation indeed, but a troubling one all the same. It was all very well to write the gospels in the language of ploughboys, but the translations couldn’t all be equally good. Which ones were right, which wrong? It was time to set up a committee.

The committee in question was a bureaucrats’ daydream. Fifty-four translators were appointed, split across six working groups, who toiled away for six years. The results were fed into yet another committee, a review committee, comprising scholars from Oxford, Cambridge and London. The review panel spent nine months in honing their texts. The result of their labours, the Authorised Version of the Bible (or the King James Bible), could have been a bureaucratic disaster, a hotchpotch of muddle and compromise. It was nothing of the sort. It has become, deservedly, one of the great monuments of English.

The secret of its success was a simple one. All the committees, but most especially the final review committee, paid close attention to what would sound good when read aloud. Furthermore, keeping to their mandate of making scriptures accessible, the translators stuck to a honed-down lexicon of just eight thousand words. (Shakespeare, by contrast, uses some twenty thousand.) The result was grand, spare, sonorous and easy to understand. Here, for example, are the famous words from John’s Gospel, given in some of the major versions of the Bible up to this point:

AN ANGLO-SAXON VERSION (995): ‘God lufode middan-eard swa, dat he seade his an-cennedan sunu, dat nan ne forweorde de on hine gely ac habbe dat ece lif.’

WYCLIF (1380): ‘For god loued so the world; that he gaf his oon bigetun sone, that eche man that bileueth in him perisch not: but haue euerlastynge liif.’

TYNDALE (1534): ‘For God so loveth the worlde, that he hath geven his only sonne, that none that beleve in him, shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe.’

KING JAMES (1611): ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Sonne: that whosoever beleeveth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.’

Among these different versions, Wyclif ’s words, with their strange spellings and disconcerting rhythms, seem to us like ancient history. The Anglo-Saxon is ancient history. Tyndale’s version rings out almost as clear and modern as the King James version. But it is only in its final appearance that these lines find their feet; meaning, rhythm and weight coming together in perfect balance.

That Bible in that version is one of the great monuments of our, or any, literature. It, every bit as much as Shakespeare, has shaped the language we use today.Whether we are fruitful and multiply or are at our last gasp, whether we serve two masters or cast our pearls before swine, whether we live by bread alone or off the fat of the land that flows with milk and honey, then in this den of thieves (for by their fruit shall we know them) we are quoting the Bible. If we have ears to hear, if nation should rise against nation, if we pass by on the other side, if we kick against the pricks, if we are full of good works or a law unto ourselves, if we say, ‘Doctor, heal thyself,’ and if we take up our beds and walk (doubtless escorting the poor whom we have always with us), if we are present in spirit, if we suffer fools gladly, if we cry ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’ then (be of good cheer) we are quoting the Bible. In short, where two or three are gathered together, we can but find that we live, move and have our being in the world that Wyclif, Tyndale and the King James translators created.

The influence of that Bible lies in far more than just a couple of hundred famous phrases. As I was writing this chapter, I happened to pick up a copy of my third novel, The Sons of Adam, where I came across the following sentence: ‘Tom would be happy if all the kings of the earth had been turned overnight into ordinary people: shoe-shine boys, oil-riggers, commercial travellers, bums.’ That phrase ‘the kings of the earth’ is straight from the Authorised Version (Revelation 6:15 if you care to check) and it isn’t standard English today. ‘All the kings in the world’ would be more normal, or perhaps even ‘Every king on the planet’. But I had wanted a grander phrase than that, something to point up a contrast with the ‘ordinary people’ that followed. I’ve probably never read the relevant bit of Revelation and I certainly didn’t consciously reach for the language of King James, yet because I was after something sonorous, grand and spare, my subconscious took me there anyway — just as thousands of other writers have been led, wittingly or unwittingly, to the exact same source. That’s influence. That’s greatness.

Congratulations to James Lever, whose satirical novel, Me Cheeta: The Autobiography, has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize! The moving and hilarious novel follows the story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the big screen, on a behind-the-scenes romp through the golden years of Hollywood. To celebrate, Fifth Estate is posting up the first chapter as an extract. Enjoy! 

Inimitable Rex!

On my last day in motion pictures I found myself at the top of a monkey-puzzle tree in England, helping to settle a wager between that marvellous light comedian and wit Rex Harrison and his wife, the actress Rachel Roberts, and thinking, This is gonna look great in the obituaries, isn’t it? Fell out of a fucking tree.

This was in ’66, during a day off from filming my supposed comeback picture, Fox’s disastrous megaflop Doctor Dolittle, with Dickie Attenborough and Rex. We were in the grounds of some stately home in the charming village of Castle Combe in County Wiltshire, some time after a heavy lunch.

Rex was convinced that the tree would puzzle me. Rachel thought I’d be able to work it out. Arriving at the terms of the bet had not been easy. How exactly was I to demonstrate my mastery of this cryptic plant?

‘You ought to let it start at the top, and then it’s got an incentive to climb down,’ said Lady Combe. Servants were ordered to fetch a ladder. She was delighted at the success of her party. ‘This is exciting. Is it always so much fun with you film folk?’

‘Now then, Cheeta,’ said Rachel, holding a pack of cigarettes very close to my face. ‘You see these Player’s? They’ll be waiting at the bottom for you. You understand? Yummy cigarettes. Don’t you dare let me down.’

‘Darling, I’ve just had rather a splendid idea,’ said Rex. ‘Why don’t we forget the money? If the monkey makes it you can sleep with Burton, if he’ll have you, and if it doesn’t, then I can divorce you but you have to promise not to kill yourself.’

‘Getting windy, Rex?’

‘Au contraire, my sweet. Let’s call it two thousand.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Lady Combe. ‘Is something the matter?’

‘Yes,’ said Rex. ‘Your cellar is atrocious.’

Rex and I had had a number of differences on set, but nothing you wouldn’t expect to see between a couple of stars pushing a script in different directions. Far from being the coward and sadist Rachel frequently described him as, Rex was, somewhere beneath the caustic exterior he had designed to conceal his vulnerabilities, a good man and a very special human being. Nonetheless I’d been upset to have every one of my off-the-cuff contributions vetoed. This interminable ‘Talk to the Animals’ song had already taken us a week. Perhaps I was a little rusty — I’d not worked in pictures for almost twenty years — but Rex had nixed every one of the backflips or handstands I’d been trying to liven it up with. So I was pretty keen to get this tree climbed. Plus I wanted the cigarettes — and, anyway, I wasn’t about to be outwitted by a tree.

The French call them ‘monkey’s despair’. From a distance, each limb had appeared invitingly fuzzy, furred like a pipe-cleaner, or Rex’s arteries, but as soon as I grasped it I discovered that the thing was made entirely out of horrible spiky triangular leaves, more like scales. Unfortunately, Rachel had already ordered the ladder to be removed and I could do nothing but cling to the crown of the tree, slapping my head with one hand and communicating via some screaming, which required little translation, that I was perfectly happy to let Rex have the money.

‘Don’t make such a fuss, Cheeta! It’s just getting adjusted,’ Rachel assured the little crowd, as I tried cautiously to inch down that torture-chamber of a tree for her. But it really was impossible. The French were right. The English name had led me to believe that the tree would be no more than some mildly diverting brainteaser, the chimpanzee equivalent of the Sunday crossword — but this was a ‘puzzle’ only in the sense that being violently assaulted by a plant is, yeah, a somewhat puzzling experience. Fucking typical English understatement.

‘I rather think,’ Rex commented, ‘you owe me two thousand pounds.’

‘Don’t go off half-cocked, darling, like you always do … It’s only been up there a minute.’

Jesus, was that all?

‘Don’t be absurd, you drunken bitch. It’s stuck.’

‘You’re not welching me out of this one, Rexy-boy,’ I heard Rachel say. ‘I never expected it to start climbing right away. You just hold your damn horses.’

‘Now, Rachel, please, it’s perfectly clear the poor animal’s in distress,’ I heard another voice interject. Oh, brilliant: Dickie. ‘The pair of you should be ashamed. Lady Combe, can we please please please get that ladder back up? This is quite frightful!’

‘You touch that ladder, Lady Whatsyourface,’ Rex said, ‘and I promise you, there’ll be tears before bedtime. Nobody touch that bloody ladder! My pathetic shell of a wife is making a point. Dickie, do piss off and stop blubbering.’

‘Thank you, darling,’ said Rachel.

‘You’re welcome, darling,’ said Rex.

They weren’t all that much fun to be around, Rex and Rachel, it does have to be said. I’d never liked the goddamn English anyway, with their razor-wire elocution, their total lack of humour and their godawful pedantic spelling. I clung on, cheeping in distress and swaying eighty feet above the ground. This had all begun a week ago, as we were embarking on Rex’s endless song, which I don’t think he believed in any longer. He regularly punctuated ‘Talk to the Animals’ with violent outbursts of animal-related abuse. He was failing to cope with the toupeemunching goat, the parrot that kept shouting ‘Cut,’ and the general incompetence of the inexperienced English animals, and he was beginning to take it out on me. ‘I don’t mind the bloody ducks and the sheep,’ he’d complained, after we’d abandoned shooting for the day again, ‘so much as this monkey trying to upstage me all the time.’

This was distressing to hear. I’d been lucky to get the job after two decades of stage work and it was important to keep my costar happy. I accepted Rachel’s half-offered cigarette and demonstrated one of my old standbys, the amusingly raffish side-ofmouth exhalation. But Rex was unappeased.

‘And now it’s pinching your fags,’ he said, ‘or did you do that deliberately? Is it that time of the afternoon already?’

‘What an absolutely irresistible charmer you are,my sweet,’ said Rachel. ‘I was just thinking how much it resembled you, though it’s still got all its own hair, hasn’t it? I expect it can still get it up, too.’

From this point onwards, Rachel began to refer to me as Little Rexy — ‘Ooh, look! Little Rexy’s smelling his own poo!’ — and would then make references to my superior intellect, charm, personal appearance, talent, virility and odour, which of course were the last things the universally despised, impotent, alcoholic, cruel, vain, brittle, snobbish and mephitic but still, under that carapace of protective acerbity, very gentle and insecure human being Rex needed to have rubbed in.

Meanwhile, he was oscillating between this rather threatening fantasy of buttonholing various exotic creatures on obscure subjects and straightforward abuse of animals. ‘If this unspeakable fucking shit of a goat touches my hairpiece again, I’ll rip its throat out,’ he’d say, in his inimitably crusty manner, and then he’d be off again, wearing his ‘gentle’ face, with his unlikely plan to set up a multi-species salon —

 

I’d expatiate on Plato with a platypus

On sex I would talk man to manta ray

I’d discuss dialectical materialism with a micro-organism

I’d enquire of an echidna if Picasso were passé …

 

and on and on. I mean, this song of Rex’s was endless —

 

Oh, how I yearn to yack with yaks in Yakkish

Or interrogate a fruitbat about Freud

I’d like to natter with some gnats in Gnattish

I’d harangue orang-utans about the Void …

 

Ostensibly a beautiful dream, it missed the point. Nothing needs to be said. There is no need for humanity to put its love for animals into words, no need for further explanation or apology.We understand each other perfectly. And, besides, Rex’s idea raised the nightmarish possibility of animals having to participate in the sort of ‘sophisticated’ discussions the unbelievable Chaplin used to host in Beverly Hills, with unfortunate fauna being hounded for their opinions on the latest Eugene O’Neill, etc. Jesus, that poor fruitbat, I thought. If Rex got on to Freud, he’d be there all night, hearing about how bizarre it was that so many of Rex’s girlfriends had killed themselves, or tried to: I saw Rex touring the remaining forests of the planet fretting to unwary wildebeest at the waterhole about, for instance, his failure to call an ambulance when his lover Carole Landis killed herself with Seconal because he wanted to keep the affair quiet. Then rounding on some warthogs and screaming that they were shits who didn’t have half the money or talent he did.

Belatedly I understood the full horror of the situation. It had been my co-star Rex who had made the suggestion that I accompany the other leads to Combe Hall. It was he who had floated the swattable second-serve of a notion to Rachel that ‘If the monkey’s so much cleverer than I am, then surely it should be able to climb that tree …’

Or was I being paranoid? Ask Carole Landis if I was being paranoid. Oh, what larks!

I heard Dickie snivelling eighty feet below (‘This is all very upsetting!’) and Rex cleverly setting up his mentally ill wife to take the blame (‘Satisfied darling? Shall we bring it down yet?’). I swayed above them all on the boneless branches that bit my hands and feet and looked out over the pretty fields of County Wiltshire. I watched the shadows of low, flat-bottomed clouds pass across the rain-spoiled wheat, like paranoid fantasies through Veronica Lake’s vodka-sodden mind, and saw them dissolve into a grey mass, becoming a black line at the horizon, reminding me of an unfortunate snake I once knew. England — where chimps meant tea. Somewhere out there was Jane, if she was still alive, tough as old boots, crow-footed but trim, and ferocious about the rents. Maybe Lady Combe was Jane? And Boy, too, who’d ended up in England. He was probably somewhere across the fields — a parttime film producer with his hand between the thighs of the bit he was taking down to see Ma in the MG.

I once knew a man who did talk to the animals. All he’d ever needed was a single word.

Well, in attempting to inch closer to the trunk where the branches were thicker, I jabbed my palm, lost my grip, tried again and grasped nothing. I fell. Ho-hum. Death. I had no business being here anyway. You hear a lot of crap on the Discovery Channel, these days, about animals making a comeback. Take it from me: don’t bother, you can’t ever come back. It was a terrible movie and I wasn’t any good in it. I descended and bumped into my first ever memory on the way: Stroheim! Hadn’t thought about him in years!

I carried on plummeting through the tree’s interior and, though I had no say in it,my fall was broken by several instinctive grabs, not so painful at speed. It must have looked pretty good, I imagine, as I looped at lightning pace in three or four swings through the branches to land on my feet — ta-dah! — by the pack of Player’s. The audience in the garden was startled into the first real applause I’d heard in a long time. I, of course, looked nonchalant and helped myself to a cigarette. What do you think about that, Rex?

He looked like a guy who’d just lost two thousand ‘quid’, to utilize a little Limey-speak. But he was only a weakling and a bully and a near-murderer, scumbag, self-pitier, miser, liar, ass and oaf on the outside — who isn’t? Somewhere on the inside there was a decent human being. Oh, all right: Rex Harrison was an absolutely irredeemable cunt who tried to murder me — but still, you have to try to forgive people, no matter what. Otherwise we’d be back in the jungle.

I forgive you, Rex.

Anyway, I was unsurprised and quite relieved when I found out that evening that they didn’t need me any more. Rex had had a word. And that, folks, was the end of that.

Ever wondered what it would be like to work in a war zone? This week’s extract comes from Sandstealers, Ben Brown’s masterly thriller set in the world of adrenalin-addicted war correspondents on the frontline of modern warfare. Brown is a BBC war correspondent and presenter. For the last two decades, he’s reported on most of the world’s major conflicts, including both Iraq wars, the civil war in Chechnya and the break up of Yugoslavia. This is his first novel.

Post-Liberation Iraq, August 2004

Danny Lowenstein had a premonition he would die that day.

It wasn’t unusual for him to foresee his own death: such thoughts went with the territory. The main thing was not to take them too seriously, otherwise he’d never get out of bed in the morning.

He cursed the sun, which had barely been born into Iraq’s morning sky. Already a sapping heat was rising from the tarmac and soon the temperature would hit a grotesque 50 degrees Celsius. He daren’t translate it into Fahrenheit. As he stood at the petrol station, the road to Iskandariya shimmered ahead of him. Danny wondered if the surface might evaporate before his eyes. For now he was still fresh.He had sprayed himself with so much deodorant it almost choked him, but his skin felt good beneath the linen shirt he’d bought at Heathrow and his favourite pair of chinos. They were the pseudo-military sort, with extra pockets on the thighs which bulged with a notepad, assorted pens, a small Dictaphone — another terminal purchase — his US passport and press accreditation, some scrunched-up dollar bills and chewing gum for when the day started to drag him under.

Danny knew that, before long, the same skin that was now so pleasantly clean and dry would be soaked in sweat. Little streams would crawl down the valley between his shoulder blades towards his waist, where they’d meet his tightly buckled belt and form an irritating reservoir. The fresh clothes would start to cling to him like cloying dishcloths.His rigorous dawn shower back at the hotel would be redundant and he’d wonder why he’d bothered to make the effort at all: he might as well have just put back on what he’d worn the day before. By dusk, he’d be drained of whatever energy he’d woken up with.

‘God, sometimes I hate this country,’ he told Mohammed, who was only half listening.

‘Don’t say bad things, Mr Daniel. I think you would miss us.’

‘I’d miss you, Mohammed, of course I would, but not a whole lot else.’

‘There is not another story like it, not anywhere in the world. You told me so yourself.’

‘Yeah, I know, our Vietnam and all that. But Heaven help your country if that’s all you’ve become — a story. The thing is, I’m just so …’

‘Tired?’

‘No, not tired. Exhausted. Sorry if I’m kind of grumpy.’

‘Woman trouble?’

‘You could say. And this heat, and this war and this … I mean, just take a look around us.’

He waved towards the sprawling strip of charmless shops just beyond them, many selling satellite dishes, fridges and all the other consumer electricals that had flooded in after liberation. Snapped power cables drooped down around them mockingly. On the road ahead, battered cars jostled one another amid a cacophony of horns, most of them unheeded. It seemed to Danny that the traffic, like everything else, was getting worse.

‘You know, I remember the day I got my first visa for this place: 19th April 1990. I’d never wanted anything so much. Now? Two Gulf wars and a fucked-up occupation later, I don’t think I’d care if I never came back.’

Mohammed stood next to him and surveyed the scene, not with Danny’s weariness but the alert eyes of an intelligence officer: scrutinising faces, analysing cars, studying young policemen behind their sandbags — were they really police, or insurgents in impeccable disguise? Nothing was as it seemed.

A teenage pump attendant slid in the nozzle.

‘Can’t believe you forgot to fill up last night,’ said Danny.

‘I told you, it was Farrah’s birthday.’

Danny felt bad.He should have sent her a present.He’d remembered with all Mohammed’s other kids.

‘But even so, I mean, for fuck’s sake.’

Danny hated it when things went wrong. It made him feel the whole story, the whole day, might be cursed. He glanced at his watch. They were already running late for the rendezvous with Abu Mukhtar, and he was uneasy.

‘How long till we get there?’

‘Twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.’

‘I hope you can find this al-Talha, or whatever they call it. It’s not even on the map.’

‘No problem — we ask people.’

As a rule, Danny liked to have a ‘chase car’, a second vehicle following behind, which could rescue them if they broke down in the badlands. Today, Saad, who usually drove it, was sick with an upset stomach — or claimed he was. Either way, it meant they were travelling alone.

First the chase car, then the petrol. Bad omens, thought Danny.

Mohammed’s hawkish eyes continued their search for anything that was different or out of place. It was how he lived these days, even in his own street in Karada — always watching.

‘You are sure you want to go there?’ Mohammed asked Danny for at least the third time. ‘You’re risking your life, you know.’

‘Sure I’m sure. I risk it whenever I leave Baghdad — or the hotel, for that matter. Sometimes I feel so damned incarcerated.’

‘No, no! Liberated!’

Mohammed was a fervent supporter of the invasion and endearing in his optimism. Just look at it like this, he’d insist: we’re an abused child, and abused children can be ungrateful. They need time, and a little love from their foster parents.You Americans, you must stay however long you want! Danny would reply that he didn’t see them as ‘his’ Americans at all.

‘At least when the old man was in charge I could walk the streets, day or night, without being bundled into a car and decapitated on the Internet,’ said Danny.

‘So why have we come here?’

‘Because I guess it’s worth the risk. I have cast-iron guarantees.’

Now it was Mohammed’s turn to be cynical.‘You know what they say about such guarantees in my country? The cast iron is always full of bullet holes. I don’t want to die.’

‘Me neither, you idiot.’

Danny put an affectionate arm around him.

‘You are a single man,’ said Mohammed. ‘Me, I have a wife and five children.Nothing can happen to me.’Mohammed had got into the habit of kissing each member of his family whenever he left home, in case he never returned.

‘And nothing will,my friend, nothing will.’

‘Maybe you should have some children of your own, Mr Daniel.’

Children! Why was it people were always telling him to have them? Didn’t they realise a free-wheeling, fast-moving war correspondent like him couldn’t be weighed down by a family? And anyway, who the hell would want to be his son or daughter? What kind of burden would it be to have a father who might come home one day in a coffin? It didn’t mean Danny disliked kids — actually he rather enjoyed them. But other people’s, not his own.Danny thought about the happy moments he’d shared at Mohammed’s home. His last visit there had been a journey to an Iraq that was desperate to retain the appearance of normality. In his garden, Mohammed had barbecued masgouf, the delicious fishy smoke of it wafting around him as his wife Sabeen sprinkled it with lemon juice. Soon she had the table sagging under a relentless supply of her other favourite dishes: fasolada soup, baba ghanoush, eggplant salad, falafel, pitta and houmous, all washed down with a bottle of ferocious arak. Before they ate,Mohammed had sat on a red plastic garden chair while, one by one, his offspring piled on top of him until the legs buckled and they all toppled on to the grass in a hopeless, giggling heap.

Danny had entertained all five children, especially Farrah — six years old, the youngest and cutest. Under a lemon tree, he’d held her hands and swung her round so that she flew like a plane, horizontal and in dizzying circles. She’d screamed in ecstasy, and everyone applauded but now, in his anxiety about the trip to al- Talha, he had forgotten little Farrah’s birthday. It was something else to trouble him. Danny liked to lavish gifts on Mohammed and his family. Every time he flew into Baghdad, he’d bring back copies of the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, which Mohammed devoured. He was a former paediatrician who’d trained at Great Ormond Street. He’d only given up medicine because the foreign press paid him ten times what he’d been earning in his hospital, and he needed the money. Another triumph for the occupation, Danny told anyone who’d listen.

The first thing people noticed about Mohammed was his unfortunate resemblance to the fallen dictator: fatter and older, but with the same darting eyes and the signature moustache.When a bounty was put on Saddam’s head, strangers would come up to him and laugh: ‘Americans, we’ve found him.We claim our reward! Death to the despot!’Mohammed would smile along with them, but the joke became tiresome and he felt he deserved more respect.

Now he wandered away from the petrol pump, his pot belly wobbling affably. He struck up casual conversations with a couple of shopkeepers and idle, jobless men who gossiped and fiddled with their worry beads. He was trying to get a feel for the area ahead and to pick up anything they might have heard about Abu Mukhtar and his boys. Of course it might only put them in more danger, tipping off hungry wolves that tasty meat was on its way. In Iraq, there were pros and cons to every move you made and death lurked around every corner. A couple of dirty street children hawked trayloads of cigarettes and fizzy drinks. Kids like these had been known to pass word that ‘foreigners’ were about, and Mohammed kept an eye on them.

Beside them a goat sniffed its way through a heap of rubbish. Lamp posts lay broken and some plastic bags were caught up in fencing, ensnared like fleeing prisoners. A burnt-out vehicle was nearby, charred and cannibalised, and a pool of stagnant water stretched across the street. It smelt as if, on closer inspection, it might well turn out to be an open sewer.

Danny climbed back into the Pajero and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looked as worn out as he felt. Grey was advancing rapidly around his temples and wrinkles had multiplied around his eyes. He could almost hear the whispered questions from the twenty-somethings of the Baghdad press corps, people half his age, another generation: was Lowenstein really still the ‘operator’ that he had been, or just another ‘veteran’ past his sell-by date? Oh sure, he’d won a Pulitzer, but that was years ago, wasn’t it? I mean, Bosnia — who even remembers what that war was all about? The doubts weighed down on him. He felt a rookie insecurity, the same draining need to prove himself as when he’d first hit the road a quarter of a century earlier.

He could have shared the Abu Mukhtar interview and all its dangers with his fellow Junkies, but in Danny’s book you had to get away from the crowd to stand out from it, even if the ‘crowd’ included your oldest friends. Of course it could be a trap, and his general rule in Iraq was never to make appointments with people he didn’t know. On the other hand, these days the concept of a clandestine rendezvous with any kind of insurgent leader — even a middle-ranking one — was intoxicating. Abu Mukhtar wasn’t a celebrity terrorist like al Zarqawi; in fact, hardly anyone beyond the cognoscenti of US army intelligence would have heard of him. Even so, according to Asmat Mahmoud, Mukhtar had passionate opinions he wanted to pass on to the world. Danny could write it hard, with plenty of topspin to tickle the fancy of even the most blasé, battle-weary, war-numbed reader. My God, he thought, if I’m bored of it all, what must they be? Mukhtar’s views, however mundane, would ultimately be processed into front-page news. In his head, he had already written the story’s most important line: ‘… told me in a secret and dangerous meeting, deep inside the bandit country of Iskandariya, south of Baghdad …’ It was just a case of filling in the rest.He would sell it easily to his old paper, the New York Times, or perhaps turn it into a wider, more rambling piece for Rolling Stone magazine or Vanity Fair. And it would make at least a couple of pages in the memoirs he was struggling to complete.

Still, the premonition returned.Mohammed had reawakened it.

‘So, Mr Daniel, we go on?’

Why did he have to keep asking? Danny was already queasy with uncertainty. Even now he could call it off, he only had to say the word. He remembered all the moments in his career when he had faced dilemmas such as this, and each time he had picked the harder road. He remembered the twenty-somethings too. He couldn’t afford to relax and he certainly couldn’t afford to put down roots or have children. Danny breathed in deeply.

‘Absolutely, we go on!’

‘No problem!’ Mohammed smiled unconvincingly, a chubby Saddam-smile.

‘You’re a good guy, the very best.’

A few hundred yards away, men in a rusting white-and-orange taxi studied them both through binoculars with a hatred that was entirely sure of itself, and open to nothing so frail as doubt.

 

It is another two miles before the turnoff on to a narrower road. Danny wonders if it is one of the insurgent ‘rat runs’, as the Americans like to call them: a phrase, he has noted in one recent piece, that implies the enemy will be destroyed — just as soon as someone can come up with the right kind of pest control.

The wheels blow up a dust cloud.

Quiet roads. Danny seems to have spent a career travelling along them, wondering what they have in store for him: the story of a lifetime, or the end of a lifetime.A small, mangy dog emerges from nowhere and starts to cross in front of them. It is limping badly.

‘Watch out!’ Danny screams at Mohammed,who is driving hard and fast and doesn’t see it till the last minute. His attempt to avoid the wretched animal is too half-hearted. There is a thud and slight crunch, and they carry on.

‘Did you really have to do that?’ Danny can’t bring himself to look back at the body, yet another corpse in a country overflowing with them. Has life here got so cheap that it’s not even worth the casual movement of a wrist to save a life? It’s more bad karma, another jinx on his day. First the chase car, then the petrol, now the dog.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he mutters to himself.

The undercarriage scrapes some chunks of rock and now it’s Mohammed’s turn to curse aloud, though with incomprehensible Arabic expletives.Danny notices another car up ahead. It is a Toyota, red with a distinctive white roof. Shock smacks him hard around the face. He knows this car, he’d know it from a mile away. Two people: the journalist inside, someone else — the driver — kneeling on the ground, changing a tyre. There is very little time to think. Has Asmat Mahmoud flogged the same story twice? Is the enigmatic Abu Mukhtar actually just some media tart?

‘I don’t believe it — they’ve crashed our fucking interview!’

Danny’s first inclination is to drive straight on, but he can’t ignore them. He leans from his passenger window and talks to the other journalist. The words are venomous, the anger mutual. Danny’s foul mood has just got much,much worse, but after he has said his piece, he manages to calm himself.

‘Anyhow, I’m pushing on,’ he says, drawing a line under the argument. ‘How’s everything up there? Okay?’

The question is carefully calibrated. With this perfunctory request, Danny makes it clear he’s not interested in striking some last-minute bargain on the story, he’s merely seeking reassurance on what lies ahead.

His fellow Junkie says nothing, responding with … with what, exactly? Some vague movement of affirmation, or is it merely the absence of something — a prohibitive hand or a piercing cry that says: Jesus Christ no, Danny! We’ve just been shot at! Don’t go up there, don’t go another yard!

Whatever it is or isn’t, the biggest mistake of Danny’s distinguished career is to take it as a yes. Before any further complications can spoil his story, he turns to Mohammed: ‘Jalah, jalah!’ And obediently,Mohammed speeds away.

Still, Danny’s head is dizzy with doubt. In his younger days, he was never afflicted by the curse of hesitation. The life he led then was charmed: bullet-proof, blast-proof, death-proof. Shit happens, but not to me. Friends died, fallen soldiers on the battlefield, until it seemed he’d attended more funerals than weddings, but somehow it was always them who fell, and always him at the lectern in the home-town church, delivering the Bible readings and moving eulogies, the well-judged words of comfort for the grieving parents or partner, the final tears as the coffin was eased into the earth. Danny seemed agreeably immune to death, as though it were a ritual for him to observe rather than take part in. Chechnya showed him that. Against all the odds, he had survived it, though not entirely unscathed. Death had touched him there, laid its chilly fingers upon his face as he stood by and watched a good friend’s life drain away. He’d always expected that one day the gods would punish him. Perhaps part of him thought they should.

Yet now, as they regain speed, he feels the rush of the warm air on his face from the open window, the scent of eucalyptus trees, and there it is once more: the hit, the buzz, the drug. He might as well have rammed a needle in his vein.No, I’m not tired, he thinks, not exhausted, not settling down. And by the way, I’m not finished yet either.

Nearby, an Iraqi shepherd boy wanders aimlessly with his scrawny, filthy sheep. A few of them have broken away from the flock and are running around the road in panic. Like some reporters, it occurs to Danny: terrified of getting separated from the pack.

And then it is only them, on this the loneliest of roads.No more sheep or shepherd boys. The words of his Hostile Environments instructors at Walsingham, where the rolling Norfolk countryside had been transformed into a war-zone training ground, come back to him: ‘Just ask yourself, where are all the people? If they’ve smelt danger, so should you. And if there’s no oncoming traffic, you should wonder why.’

The story is sucking him in, though, as it always has. It’s just a little further on, down the road and over the bridge. It’s always just a little further on.

Only about half a mile now. Swallow hard, Danny boy, breathe deep. Relax! Enjoy!

 

As they come round the bend he sees, a few hundred yards on, the rusting oil drums spread across the narrow road. Clustered around them are the insurgents, six in all, different-coloured kafiyehs wrapped around their faces: orange, red and black. Fat sunglasses cover their eyes. They are armed with a menacing assortment of pistols and AK47s.

Mohammed stamps on the brakes.

‘Who are they?’

‘Don’t worry; just a poxy roadblock.’ Danny wants to make them both feel better.He’s a connoisseur of roadblocks, from Sarajevo to Somalia to Sierra Leone — the well-organised, polite ones; the drunken, chaotic ones; the downright dangerous ones, manned, or rather boyed, by 11-year-old African kids, sky-high on weed,with manic eyes that say killing a white man can be quite fun when you’re bored out of your mind.

‘Roadblocks, I could write the book on them,’ he sighs.

When the first shot is fired, he realises of course that he could not. The bullet blows out a front tyre and one side of the Pajero lurches down on to the road, like a horse gone lame. Danny’s desperate hope is that the men in kafiyehs are just trying to scare them.‘Shit. Don’t they understand we’re only here because their own leader wants to talk to us?’

He sees another of the men raise his Kalashnikov, aiming higher now, straight at them. It’s gone wrong so quickly, too quickly, and yet in slow motion too.

‘Oh fuck! Reverse,Mohammed. Let’s get out of here now. Now, I said!’

The driver’s corpulent body will not move. Terror has paralysed him and for once he disobeys his master’s voice.

‘Reverse, Mohammed. Will you do as you’re told and fucking well reverse?’

As Danny shouts, a burst of fire hits the windscreen. Instinctively, he ducks as he has done before — all those times when death has, arbitrarily, turned its attentions elsewhere.

He is about to bark more orders when he sees that Mohammed is thrust back against his headrest, blood spreading out evenly in two distinct patches on an otherwise spotless white dishadasha: one around the middle of his sternum and the other a little to the left. The eyes — Saddam’s eyes, as everyone used to joke — are wider than Danny has ever seen on any man’s face before, peeled back and accusing. The mouth is open, as if it meant to say one last thing.

‘Oh shit no, sweet Lord, no! Fuck, no; oh fuck me, no!’ Daniel L. Lowenstein, master of reportage, reduced to a rhythm of profanities. He has slipped from his seat into the footwell, curling up there like a foetus clinging to the womb. Rationally, he knows this is no strategy. Part of the survival lore they’d drummed into him at Walsingham was the fact that bullets can cut through the chassis of a car almost as easily as they penetrate human skin. Between bursts of automatic fire he can hear the insurgents’ bloodcurdling cries of ‘Allahu Akhbar!’

If only there were some peace and quiet, thinks Danny. If only he had stopped to talk to the occupants of the Toyota rather than launch into an argument. If only he’d never come down this road.

If only he’d been warned of what lay ahead. If only he’d listened to his premonition and Mohammed’s unspoken fear. If only he’d taken no notice of the worthless assurances of Asmat Mahmoud in Baghdad. If only he’d ‘settled down’, as he’d been urged to, had children and stayed at home with them — a happy brood of little Daniels and Daniellas. If only he’d never become a war reporter. If only he’d never become any kind of reporter …

The shooting and shouting stop for a while — a minute, maybe only 30 seconds — but to Danny, it’s an eternity. He can make no use of it, for now he’s as crippled by fear and indecision as Mohammed was. Poor Mohammed. Five children without a father, a wife without a husband, a reporter without a friend. Nothing can happen to me. Farrah flies more rings around the lemon tree, Sabeen garnishes the masgouf. Danny cannot bring himself to look at him again.

Instead he stares at the scraped plastic and mud marks on the bottom of the passenger door. Mud from his lucky boots, bought from Silvermans on Mile End Road before the first Gulf War in 1991. He’s survived that and every subsequent hellhole he’s ever been in, so how could he ever trade them in for another pair, even when they’ve walked across mass graves, through refugee camps riven with disease, not to mention putrid, Third-World hospitals? God alone knew what dangerous microbes inhabited those wornout rubber treads, but every time the cab delivered him safely back to his apartment, he would lovingly put the boots back in their box, ready for the next time, certain they had kept him alive. Some worship the cross, Danny worshipped his lucky boots. They’d still be on his feet when his body was discovered — even though, if he were dead, it would surely represent their catastrophic failure. Not so lucky now, his friends would chuckle callously, as they stood at the boot-end of his body to identify it.

The car door is opened so that Danny, pressed hard against it, tumbles out. There’s a another gratuitous chorus of ‘Allahu Akhbar’, so familiar from al-Qaeda snuff videos just before they execute the hostage. He cannot bear to look, but finally allows his eyes to meet those of the two gunmen screaming at him loudest. One has unwrapped his kafiyeh, careless now whether he shows himself, and this alone spreads an extra layer of dread over Danny.

The young man’s face tells no special story. He is like so many Iraqis Danny has met down the years: bearded, brooding and with fingers welded to his weapon.He is unusually tall, and a scar across his forehead distinguishes him. It is a gruesome burn that makes him look as if he’s been branded. He shoves the barrel of his Kalashnikov just below Danny’s nostrils, the ring of grey metal hot upon his skin.

‘Please, you don’t understand — Abu Mukhtar, your leader, Mukhtar — I’ve come to see him. Al sahaf. Interview? Asmat Mahmoud arranged it — you know, big politician, Baghdad?’

Another ‘if only’. If only he had learnt better Arabic. He’s spent enough years of his life here, but lazily relied on Mohammed, and now his doctor-cum-driver-cum-translator-cum-friend is no good to him, staring manically at the shattered windscreen. Then — a gift from the heavens. The one with the scar and the muzzle of his gun in Danny’s face is muttering something in English.

‘You people. So stupid. You come in one car and we shoot. You come in another car and we shoot again.’

‘Great! You speak English. Oh, thank you, thank you so much. Now listen, I need to explain. You don’t understand …’

‘No talk.’

‘But you see, I’m a journalist and …’

‘We know who you are.’

‘Good. That’s really good to hear. So I’m a journalist and I’m here to see —’

‘No talk!’

Danny decides his best hope is to co-operate. A surge of optimism. They know him. They know English. They must be reasonably intelligent. Shooting Mohammed was a blunder — some trigger-happy idiot who’ll have to be disciplined. They won’t make the same mistake again, or else there’ll be hell to pay with Abu Mukhtar, not to mention Asmat Mahmoud, Danny’s gold-plated, copper-bottomed contact.

Anyway, Danny has been this close before and every time it’s been the prizes that have come his way rather than the wooden box and the grave that no one can ever quite find the time to visit.Near escapes run through his mind: the mock execution by Serbs on the road to Vukovar; the mob who wanted to set fire to him on a street corner in Kigali, as if he were some heretic to be burnt at the stake. And Chechnya, of course. Always Chechnya.

Now, as then, he is terrified, but it would show disrespect to death not to be: total, all-consuming fear is the price you pay if you want to claim the prize. Inevitably, hours or even days of captivity lie before him, but in due course will come the negotiated release. The mighty Abu Mukhtar, embarrassed by his overzealous foot soldiers, will apologise profusely and beg forgiveness.

The crack of a rifle butt on his head snaps him from these reveries. He mutters again about Abu Mukhtar, but now it’s more of a low groan than a statement. Either they don’t understand what he’s saying or they’re not interested.

The leader gestures with his Kalashnikov, jerking it upwards to show he wants the infidel up and away from the car. There is, thinks Danny, something alien about the clarity with which people like him see the world.

As he obeys, he looks again at the small mountain of Mohammed’s slumped paunch, the patches of blood on his pristine white gown now merged into one. His progress is not quick enough for his captors; the tall one with the scar and another gunman grab his arms with such force he worries they’ll rip them from their sockets. He should yell out in agony as they drag him away, but his fear leaves him silent, a quiet hero. They search the deep pockets of his chinos, and when they find the passport they study it briefly before hurling it aside. It spins through the air and lands at an angle in the sand. It feels as though they have discarded his identity. In that moment, Daniel Leon Lowenstein, born 17th June 1955, has ceased to exist.

A hood is thrown over his head, the dazzling sunlight of the Iraqi day switched off. It is some sort of hessian sack, Danny guesses, rough and scratchy against his skin, and with a musty smell that pollutes his nostrils. It reminds him of a farmyard. The hessian brushes against his lower lip and then his tongue, so that he can taste it too.

His assailants frogmarch him, screaming at him all the while and lashing out with kicks when he fails to respond to their unfathomable commands. Like a drunk in the dark, Danny stumbles, his balance and bearings lost, guided by the shoving and poking of their guns.

The easy flat of the road beneath his feet is becoming more unpredictable, a landscape now of ragged rock. He’s being taken further from the car, from the reassurance of everything he’s ever known.

The hood has ramped up his fear. He is dizzy, one moment feverishly hot, the next perishingly cold.His chest is compressed, a dead weight pushing down on it, like a cardiac arrest. Lower down, there is only slush and mush, Edwin’s curry from the night before. He has lost control of his bowels. Rewinding back to infancy, or spooling onwards to senility, his sphincter widens. He tries to clench his buttocks, but then surrenders. The first trickle of shit starts to ooze into his boxer shorts. He is beyond embarrassment. Nausea is rising up through him and he needs to vomit, but nothing emerges, merely the foretaste of it in his throat. He remembers the toilets when he’s been embedded with the army, the ones marked ‘D & V’, set apart, as if for lepers, to accommodate troops afflicted with diarrhoea and vomiting.

Just as his body will no longer obey him, neither will his mind. The committed atheist who has spent a lifetime scorning religion is now praying with holy zeal: Please, oh Lord, I promise I will always worship you. I have sinned but am ready to repent. Oh merciful Lord, just get me out of here. Right now, and I mean right fucking now! I’ll never set foot in a war zone again, or get on another plane, or write another story, so help me God. Amen.

But he knows that this time there’ll be no last-minute reprieve, no scoop, no prize. Instead of the award ceremony, there’ll be the funeral.He has pushed his luck one story too far, taken one chance too many, and he wishes more than anything he’s ever wished for that he could step back into that refreshing, effervescent hotel shower and start this day again.

Deprived of sight, all Danny can see are his alternative futures. Will it be the one that lasts for just a few more seconds, with a cursory bullet to the back of his hooded, anonymous head; one more death among so many in the catastrophe of Iraq? Or will it drag on for weeks, with the perpetual terror of incarceration in a cage, broken only by video appearances, paraded bowed and broken, begging for his life? And will it end, as it has for so many others,with a screaming madman’s knife hacking at his neck, captured in Technicolor? Images flash before him: Nick Berg being slaughtered by al-Zarqawi in person; the four American contractors, shot, burnt, mutilated, and their remains hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

This time he’s not reporting the story, he is the story. Other journalists will circle over his carcass. He pictures it — cold, blue and flabby — lying on a slab in a mortuary full of flies. The morgue is familiar to him; he’s been there countless times in Baghdad, Grozny, Gaza, Mogadishu — all the visits blend into one. He has counted more corpses than any man should have to — hundreds, probably thousands, of them, and now he can add one more. It’s wearing the clothes he put on that morning, when he was getting dressed to die, including those lucky, lucky boots.

He sees the funeral too.Who will come? The Junkies, of course; his adopted family, addicted to their work, their drugs and each other. Rachel inconsolable, yet still so fuckable in her sleek black dress. Becky, for once not laughing. Edwin and Kaps, his brothers in arms. Others will be there too — the media glitterati, and some of the Great and the Good who have admired his work: politicians, editors, novelists. There will be generous obituaries, mini hagiographies. Failures and excesses will be discreetly airbrushed out; there’ll be no mention of his many sins. All in all, his death will be an ego trip. Too bad he won’t be able to enjoy it.

Rough hands force him down on to his knees. A rifle butt smashes his mouth. The shock of it reminds him of his boyhood: Lukas hitting him, Camille watching.He tastes his own blood, sour and sickly. His tongue discovers a couple of uprooted teeth and briefly probes the holes they’ve left behind.

The final act. One more collective shout of ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ from his kidnappers, a kind of choral harmony to signal that the time has come. The hood is ripped from his head but he cannot look; his eyes are screwed shut.

The end of a gun is shoved into the nape of his neck. The trickle of faeces becomes a torrent now, running down his legs. Danny is shaking so hard it looks, perversely, as if he’s laughing. There are no more memories or predictions, no more thoughts — rational or otherwise. No more hypocritical prayers. His kneeling, hooded body is heaving backwards and forwards with such convulsions that he barely hears the trigger.

This week’s extract comes from Jenni Mills’ pacy literary thriller, The Buried Circle. A gripping blend of fact and fiction, The Buried Circle is centered on the village of Avebury – one of the most mysterious places in the English countryside. Historically, Avebury has been a place well-known for its ancient standing stones, crop circles and burial mounds. In this compelling novel, we find that all is not as it seems in this sleepy country village…1942

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he says. The Insect King. ‘It’s only a mask.’

Eyes like a fly, elephant’s trunk that’s long, rubbery . . .

‘It’s only a mask,’ he says again.

‘I know it’s a mask,’ I says, braver than I feel. But there’s masks and masks. I’ve seen masks. I’ve seen what happens in the moonlight in the Manor gardens.

‘Frannie . . .’ It’s only a whisper, so I’m not sure if it came out of his mouth or out of my head. He’s at me now, pressing himself against me, and I’m feeling all the bits of him, long gropy fingers and the hard poky bits. There’s a glow in the sky, something burning near the railway yards, searchlights over Swindon, the banshee howl of the warning, and the anti-aircraft batteries have started up.

‘Take it off,’ he says.

‘The mask?’

‘Your fucking robe.’ At least, I think he says robe.

‘Coat.’

‘Whichever.’

‘A bit nippy for that.’ I’m trying to keep it calm, trying to be funny, pretend I’m in control, because this isn’t what I meant to happen. He gives me a push, quite hard, and I’m up against the stone. It’s cold against my back, like moonlight, and scratching at me like fingers through the thin material of my coat. There’s really nowhere to go now.

I would be afraid, but I won’t let myself. You can’t let them have everything. You can’t let them have your fear. You got to keep a bit of yourself. I’m going to put my bit where it’s safe, a long way away from here.

Beech trees, black against a silver sky. Somewhere else the real moonlight is pouring down. Bombers’ moon. A killing moon. Planes like fat blowflies trekking high above the Marlborough Downs. I take myself away, as far as I can, trying not to feel the burning down there, fingers, hands, other things, feels like there’s lots of them all at once, wanting a piece.

A voice whispering again, Frannie, Frannie. It’s terrible dark. There’s a smell of rubber, thick and choking. Hard to breathe. An awful slick, oily smell of rubber . . .

CHAPTER 1

Lammas, 2005

‘I don’t want to do it,’ I said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. The shots will be fantastic.You’ll love it.Unless you’d like us to use someone else on the series?’

The usual blackmail. If you’re experienced enough to do the job, you can say no. If you’re not quite twenty-five, and desperate to claw a foothold in television, you’ll do anything. I made one last pathetic attempt to get him to change his mind.‘Seriously, Steve, I’ve never filmed like this before. I’m not properly trained. If this was the BBC, the hazard-assessment form would have it flagged up as a major risk.’

‘There’s a harness, Indy. You’ll be strapped in.’

‘My legs’ll be dangling.’

‘What’s happened to your balls?’

‘My balls, if I had any, would be dangling too.’

 

So, my legs are dangling. My non-existent testicles are dangling. My bum, perched on the edge of the open helicopter door, has gone entirely numb. Below me is — well, if I were a proper cameraman I’d be better at judging these things, but I’d say a good six or seven hundred feet of nothing. Below that is hard Wiltshire chalk, with a skimpy dressing of ripening barley. The helicopter’s shadow races across it, a tiny black insect dwarfed by the bigger shadows of the clouds.

Steve, crouched behind me, taps me on the shoulder. I turn my head towards him, very, very carefully, in case even this simple movement unbalances me and I go tumbling out to become another shadow on the chalk. He’s saying something, but the wind and the noise of the rotors snatch his voice away. He makes cupping motions with his hands by his ears.

He wants me to put the earphones on so I can hear him — he’s wearing a set with a microphone attached. Like I have, too, only mine are round my neck and not on my ears yet, and to put them on I’m going to have to let go of my death-grip on the door frame.

With both hands.

I send a signal from brain to fingers to unprise themselves. Nothing happens. Fingers know better than brain what’s sensible. They’re going to stay firmly locked onto something solid, thank you very much, until someone hauls me back safely into the interior of the helicopter and there’s no more of this dangling.

Steve taps me on the shoulder again. Maybe if I try just one hand at a time?

My left thumb, fractionally more adventurous than the rest of my hand, comes free. Right. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Clear proof it is possible to move and not fall out of the helicopter. In fact, now my thumb’s no longer involved, the fingers are really not doing that much to secure me, so I might manage to let go altogether that side . . .

Very good, Indy, but one hand doesn’t seem to be much help getting the headset onto my ears. All I’ve achieved is to get my hair into my eyes. Should have tied it back more securely. The headset has knocked the pins outs. I can’t see. Perfect moment for the helicopter to bank and drop down towards Pewsey Vale.

Oh, God, I’m going to fall out . . .

Steve’s hands gripping my ribs, hot breath in my ear. ‘Let GO!’ he yells, practically rupturing my eardrum. The shock loosens the other hand. ‘I’ve GOT you.’ His arm snakes round my waist. ‘Now put the fucking headset on.’

‘OK.’ Not that he can hear me until I do. I could spout a stream of hangover-distilled vitriol and the wind would whip it straight out of my mouth into nowhere. ‘I hate you, you spotty little toilet-mouth. I despise the fact you walked straight out of a media-studies degree and into a job as a producer just because your father was a foreign correspondent for ITN, while I’ve had to spend two years hoovering the coke off the edit-suite floor. I loathe that you get to tell me what to do, although I’m the more experienced of the two of us and you’re far and away the biggest twerp I’ve yet met in my admittedly not extensive media career. In fact, right now, because you made me do this horrible, scary thing, I’d be delighted if you leaned over too far and tipped yourself out of the bloody aircraft.’

Of course, I never would say it, don’t really mean it (not all of it, anyway), but imagining it has made me feel a whole lot better. I fumble the headset off my neck and onto my ears, using it as a kind of Alice band to keep my hair off my face.

‘Everything OK back there?’ Ed, the pilot, his voice tinny through the earphones.

‘Marvellous.’

‘Fine.’ Steve and I speak at the same time, both of us lying through our gritted teeth. He wants Ed to think we bear some resemblance to a professional TV crew; I want the man I slept with last night not to notice I’m a gibbering wreck.

Steve — the man I didn’t sleep with — retracts his arm.

‘Comfortable now?’ Comfortable doesn’t seem to be in it, but I feel more secure, and can admit it would be pretty difficult to fall out. Tough webbing straps are digging into my shoulders. They join in a deep V at the waist, meeting the belt that circles my middle and the strap that comes up from the groin. I’m very glad indeed, now I come to think of it, that I don’t have testicles, though to be truthful, life would be less painful without breasts.Wrapped in layers against the wind chill, even though it’s August — a duvet jacket I borrowed from Ed over two fleeces, and thermal long johns under my jeans — I could still use more padding under the chafing straps.

‘Ready for the camera?’ asks Steve.

‘No.’

‘Look, you’d feel more balanced if you rested a foot on the strut. That’s what most cameramen do.’

‘Steve, I’m not most cameramen. I’m not six foot three. I’d have to be leaning right out of the helicopter for my leg to reach. You saw me try when we were still on the ground.’ I’m taller than scrawny little Steve, but that’s not enough — though it might have something to do with why we haven’t hit it off on this series. The main trouble is that Steve considers himself an expert. He’s been aerial filming more often than I have — which means he’s been out exactly once, and that must have been with a cameraman who had legs long enough to span the Severn Crossing.

‘Well, whatever.’ His real concern is how steady the shot will be.We both know we should have hired a footrest to screw to the helicopter’s landing skids, but it would have cost too much. ‘Now, can we please get a bloody move on? The budget only runs to two hours’ filming up here.’

Budget is, as usual, to blame for everything. The only job my limited experience (and lack of famous father — any father, for that matter) qualifies me for is assistant producer/researcher/camera/dogsbody at Cheapskate Productions, a.k.a. Mannix TV, who are making an entire series (working title: The Call of the Weird) on the televisual equivalent of about two and a half p. Today we are filming episode four, ‘Signs in the Fields’, which is about Wiltshire’s world-famous crop circles, after Stonehenge the county’s main tourist attraction. In fact, one year a farmer with crop circles in his field took more money from visitors than the ticket office at Stonehenge.

It took some doing to screw enough money for aerial filming out of the digital channel that commissioned the series, but crop circles can’t be fully appreciated from ground level. As it is, most of the programme will be made up of interviews in the back bar of the Barge Inn, on the Kennet and Avon canal and right in the heart of cropcircle country, with avid cerealogists, as crop-circle investigators are called. They will tell us (I know because as the series’ researcher I’ve already spent several hours listening to their theories) that only aliens could be responsible for such intricate and portentous patterns. It is simply not possible that such a primitive civilization as our own could have produced them. How could they have been made by humans? they ask, plaintively and rhetorically.

Well, I know the answer to that too. You need a thirty-foot surveyor’s tape, a smallish wooden plank, and a plastic lawn roller, obtainable from any good garden centre. I watched John do it, one moonlit May night in 1998, with a group of his friends who call themselves the Barley Collective. I was supposed to be the lookout but I was laughing so much that an alien mothership could have landed behind and I wouldn’t have noticed. The bizarre thing is that since people like John came out in the 1990s to admit they trample out the crop circles — gigantic art installations, the way John sees them — more people than ever have become convinced they can’t possibly be man-made. Apparently there’s a sociological term for it, John says, something to do with disconfirmation leading to strengthened belief, an idea that also lies at the heart of most religion. I gently put it to one of the cerealogists at the Barge that I’d seen it done, and he almost punched me.

Our time aloft this afternoon is limited, thank God, so limited I doubt we’ll achieve half of what Steve plans. He can’t afford to hire a proper cameraman — or a proper camera-mount, for that matter. Any minute now he’s going to thrust into my unwilling hands a DVC — digital video cam — secured only by a cat’s cradle of bungee cords. Financial constraints also dictated the choice of aircraft. We’re crammed into the back of a helicopter operated by 4XC, the CropCircleCruiseCompany, proprietor a wild Canadian called Luke, chief pilot his best friend Ed, with whom I made the enormous mistake of getting off with last night. Also in the helicopter are five paying passengers, three Americans and a Dutch couple, enjoying one of the aforementioned CropCircleCruises over Mystic Wiltshire. That way Steve hired flying time at a cheaper rate.

If I live, I’ll light a candle to the Goddess.

‘Crop circle coming up at two o’clock.’ Ed’s voice in the headphones. The helicopter lurches as three blond heads, a black ponytail and a bald spot all lean to the right to get a good look.

‘Jesus Christ, will you take the fucking camera off me, or we’ll miss it,’ snaps Steve, pushing the DVC in its sagging net towards me.

‘Relax,’ says Ed. ‘We’ll catch it on the way back.’ Almost as crazy as his friend Luke, who was drinking tequila shots last night in the pub, but fortunately more sober, and he seems to know what he’s doing. More than I can say for my esteemed director. For a moment I can feel sorry for Steve, trying to live up to his father, the famous name a curse tied to his inexperienced neck. I caught his expression while Ed and Luke were strapping me in, back on the ground. He looked like a little boy splashing in the bay, suddenly realizing that’s a big grey fin circling the lilo. Under other circumstances, this should have been fun, but he’s terrified we’ll fail to come back with any usable footage.

‘The best circles aren’t here, anyway, they’re at Alton Barnes,’ adds Ed, levelling the chopper. All I can see of him, if I twist in my harness, is the back of his neck, dark brown hair sticking out under his headset and over his collar. Hair into which I laced my fingers last night. I close my eyes with the embarrassment of it: what was I thinking? And if I’d known he was married . . . ‘I’m going to head north first, to fly over Avebury for these guys.’

My stomach lurches, my gut contracting with the scary falling feeling of coming home.

 

Avebury: state of mind as much as a landscape. The place my family came from, where my grandmother was born and brought up — until the old serpent entered Eden, as Frannie used to say. A place I never lived in, apart from a few weeks one long-ago summer, but entering the high banks that enclose stone circle and village has always felt, in some strange way, like coming home.

Below us, the summer fields are gold, ochre, tawny, separated by knotty threads of green hedgerow. I’m getting used to the dangling now; it’s almost — but only almost — exhilarating. We fly over the Kennet and Avon canal, a brown ribbon winding away into the afternoon heat haze, little matchbox barges meandering along it, while the helicopter gains height to rise over the escarpment. I can see the long, double-ridged scar of the Wansdyke, an ancient Saxon boundary, bisecting the Downs, then the land folds and drops away and already there’s the ridiculous pudding that is Silbury Hill jutting out of the fog in the distance, so unmistakably not a natural feature that you can understand why CropCircleCruiseCompany makes money out of people convinced it was plonked there by aliens.

I bring the camera viewfinder up to my eye, and Steve’s hand grips my shoulder, helping to steady me while I get used to the weight.

‘Looks fabulous on the monitor,’ comes his tinny voice, breathless with relief. ‘We couldn’t be luckier with the weather, could we? Shame about the haze — makes the horizon a bit murky.’

‘Can you give me a white balance?’ I say, and he leans over me, inhumanly unworried by the yawning void, holding a piece of white paper in front of the lens. I make a quick adjustment, set the focus to infinity, and film the ground like a gold and green carpet being pulled away beneath us. Slowly tilt up to reveal Silbury and the whole damn distant shebang, humps, bumps, ridges and secrets you can only see from above, fading into a wash of pale umber that then shades into an overhead blue so intense it hums. Through the lens, height, motion and scariness are pared down to beautiful. OK, I’m a bit ropy still on the technicals (did I remember to set the toggle switch to daylight?) but this is what I’m good at, composing a picture: colour, angle, geometry.

Euphoria unexpectedly fills me, and I can even admit the sex last night was good; not to be repeated, but maybe forgivable. Guilt sneaks back with the memory of his fingers strapping me into the harness, and I enjoyed that too — why do I get myself into these scrapes? I should have made it clear before breakfast: I don’t do married men, full stop, after a nasty experience with a tutor at college — but there wasn’t time for conversation.

The helicopter loses height as we fly towards West Kennet Long Barrow — ‘Just like a big vulva,’ says one of the passengers, the American woman, as I tilt down so it fills the frame — and then banks to the right, so my lovely shot ends abruptly in the clouds. I can hear the gnashing of Steve’s teeth because we’ve missed a close-up. We cross the A4 — ‘The old Roman road,’ calls Ed — and come over the green shoulder of the hill. A sigh comes out of me. There, at last, the first white tooth of the Avenue. I hadn’t even noticed I was holding my breath. The rotors are saying it: home, home, home. The image in the viewfinder is blurry, the wind pricking water into my eyes. England’s full of little exiles, and one of them happened at Avebury, for my grandmother, sixty-something years ago. One of them happened there for me, too, in 1989, so both of us were, in our own way, expelled from Eden.

Get in the van, Indy.

Now As far as blood relations go, Frannie is all I have. Grandfather, mystery man: not only did I never know him but neither did his daughter, born at the end of the Second World War after he was killed in action.Mother: well, best not to go there, but let’s just say she died, abroad, when I was in my early teens, having left me with my grandmother when I was eight. Father: itinerant Icelandic hippie my mother met in a backpacker’s hostel in Delhi, and never saw again. That was how I came to be called India. Could have been worse — Mum had been doing the world trip and I might have ended up with any name from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.

We’re almost there, following the Avenue as it marches up the hillside. From above, the double row of stones looks tiny, but at ground level most are taller than a person. A single figure is walking between them, a dog racing ahead, then wheeling back to jump at the legs of its owner.

‘This must be the way they would pro-cess,’ comes a Dutch accent, female, in my headphones, separating the syllables. ‘Up from the Romans’ road, led by their priestess . . .’

Only a few thousand years out, not to mention one or two other errors, like there were no roads, unless you count the Ridgeway. And as for priestesses — well, I wouldn’t mind betting the boys were in charge back then, with the Neolithic equivalent of Steve leading the party. I swing the camera round — ‘Great shot,’ breathes Steve, watching the image on the monitor wedged behind the seats — and pan along the course of the reconstructed Avenue, as we approach the village.

If Silbury Hill is an upturned pudding through the camera lens, Avebury is a bowl, an almost perfect circle of grassy banks and a deep ditch, surrounding a vast incomplete ring of stones. Five thousand years or so ago, those banks would have been gleaming white chalk, enclosing an outer circle of more than a hundred megaliths, with two separate inner circles, north and south, and more scattered sarsens within.Half the stones are missing now, like rotted teeth, some replaced with concrete stumps. Two roads meet near the middle, cutting the circle into quarters, and the village straggles along the east—west axis, a scatter of cottages half in and half out of the circle.

‘This is Avebury,’ calls Ed, moving up a notch into archaeologicaltour- guide mode. He told me, last night, he’s doing a part-time MA in landscape archaeology with a view to getting into aerial survey. ‘Similar age to Stonehenge, but bigger — biggest stone circle in Europe.’

‘It’s like a giant crop circle, isn’t it?’ says one of the Americans. ‘D’ya think it coulda been, like, a signal to the aliens?’

Ed grunts in a way that could be roughly translated as For Chrissake, beam me up, Scotty. Down below, dots of colour between the stones mushroom into people as the camera zooms in. There’s a gathering over by Stone 78 — the Bonking Stone, so-called because it’s conveniently flat — probably a handfasting. Someone is beating a small drum, arms moving rhythmically and flamboyantly, the sound inaudible above the noise of the rotors. I zoom in further, but it isn’t John.

‘We’ll make a couple of circuits,’ says Ed. ‘I’ll go in as low as I can but the National Trust run the place and they don’t like us doing this. Ready? Hang onto your hats.’ The helicopter suddenly banks steeply, throwing me forward. The camera tries to tear itself out of my hands and I feel like I’m about to be diced by the webbing straps. There’s a dizzy glimpse of wheeling megaliths between my legs.

No. No. ‘Hold on. We can’t do this.’

‘Won’t take long, Indy. The Trust won’t have time to identify us. Tell ’em you bought the footage in. You and Steve can slo-mo the film and it’ll look gorgeous . . .’

I don’t care about the Trust or the fact we’re filming without a permit.We’re going round the circle widdershins. Anti-clockwise. The bad way.

Always respect the stones, girl. Sunwise, that’s the way you goes round the circle.

‘Can we go the other way?’

‘What?’

‘The other direction, I mean. Clockwise.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Steve, witheringly. ‘You’re on the left side of the ’copter.We have to go anti-clockwise, or you’ll be pointing the camera at the fucking sky.’

He’s right, of course. And if I press the point Ed will think I’ve gone barmy. The passengers don’t seem to be concerned that we’re going widdershins.And they’re all probably right — what does it matter if we go the wrong way round?

Except — I never have.

Call me superstitious, but it’s the way I was brought up. Respect the stones, girl, they go sunwise, so should you . . .

 But, as with everything on this production, it seems I have no choice. Widdershins it is. I point the camera away from my dangling feet, and hit the record button.

 

The helicopter banks away as a dark green Land Rover with the National Trust’s acorn-and-oak-leaves logo on the side comes tearing up the Manor driveway. We managed three circuits and some great pictures, though I say it myself. Hard to go wrong, really, on a day like this — aerial shots always look fab and Ed takes the helicopter round at perfect height and speed.

‘Can we head back over Silbury again?’ asks Steve.

‘No way,’ says Ed, gaining height so rapidly that I’m becoming dizzy.

‘They’d follow along the road, and I don’t want them to identify the helicopter. Some of our work comes from the Trust and English Heritage. You’ve only got about fifty minutes left for the crop circles, anyway, unless you want to pay for another hour?’

‘Fifty minutes?’ squawks Steve. ‘We’ve been filming less than half an hour and I paid up front for two.’

‘Factor in fly-back and landing. Every minute we’re in the air counts.’

‘Oh, great. Now he tells me.’

You have to feel sorry for him. Under all that effing and blinding, Steve hasn’t a clue how the real world turns. He thinks people ought to feel honoured and privileged to be part of his amazing groundbreaking (ha ha) TV production. I ignore the bickering in my headset, and crane my head to look back at Avebury, disappearing behind us.

You’re like the rest of us, our kid, said John to me once, in his flat Brummie voice. Yo-yos. Once Avebury has hold of your string, you have to keep coming back. He’ll be in his cottage on the A4 below, smiling that twisted smile, crushing his roll-up in the ashtray. Look at Frannie. He’s right. After decades of exile, my grandmother sold up the terraced house in Chippenham, where I’d grown up with her, and moved back to Avebury. I thought she was mad. Not how John sees it.He knows why I do my damnedest to resist the pull of Avebury. Her life, Indy. Don’t fret. You need a massage. Or a healing. Drop in and I’ll do your feet.

The Marlborough Downs slide by beneath, a golden landscape sliced by chalky white trackways and dark green hedgerows. Pale grey sarsen stones lie in drifts like grubby sheep. High as we are, the camera lens makes the ground look close enough to tap with a toe. I imagine myself tossing the camera to Steve, jumping down, hiking back to Avebury . . . It doesn’t help that I feel guilty about Frannie because, in spite of what John says, I haven’t been back, not since Christmas, and I was away again to London on Boxing Day. Could you stay another night? she said, her eyes full of hope. I couldn’t.

Television’s full of wannabes jostling to fill any vacancy. The job at Mannix represents the first time I’ve had anything more long-term than a three-month contract, apart from a set of rip-off merchants in Leeds who took me on for twelve months’ work experience, paying expenses only. (Not much in the way of those while I slept on people’s floors and once or twice in the back of the cameraman’s car.) No wonder I have to grit my teeth, listening to Wonderboy Steve wrangle over how much it will cost to charter the ’copter for an extra hour. I told him last week we ought to have three hours in the air, not two. But he has the senior job and the mansion flat in Hammersmith, while I’ve the commute from Hades every morning, sharing a bedroom in SW17 with two Australian girls doing the London leg of their roundthe- world tour . . .

‘Indy!’ Mein Führer is about to issue his orders, now he’s told the pilot what’s what. ‘Is that OK with you?’

‘Is what OK with me?’

‘Weren’t you listening?’

‘Of course I was. What I meant was, you’re the director. I do what you ask me.’

‘Fine. Then do it.’ Mmm.Maybe I should have been listening. Never mind, I can wing it.

The ’copter is banking again steeply. ‘It’s an ankh,’ says one of the American men, pointing at something below. ‘These guys built the Pyramids, you know.’

Really?

The crop circle is lovely, intricate, a series of different-sized circles centred on a long, stave-like axis — nothing like an ankh, as it happens. Inside each big circle are little circles of standing barley. It looks like a radial lay, the crop flattened from the inside of the circle outwards, which some cerealogists will tell you can only be produced by the down-thrust of a hovering UFO’s engine. We’re coming in fast towards it, the helicopter dropping down and down. Damn, the light’s changed. And I’m going to get flare off the sun — but I suppose that’s what Steve wants. Makes it look nuclear-spooky.

The sun goes behind a cloud.

‘Shit,’ explodes my headset. ‘Pull out. Ed, you’ll have to go again.’

I told you, Steve, but you wouldn’t listen,would you? Filming always takes longer than you think.

The helicopter rises in a stomach-emptying corkscrew.‘You still want the run into the sun, Steve?’ asks Ed. ‘It’ll be out again in a second.’ Even through the headphones, his voice is a turn-on. There’s something unbearably attractive about men and machines and competence. He told me last night that piloting a plane is a technical exercise, but flying a helicopter’s an art form. I grit my teeth and remind myself that he’s married; I don’t do married men.

‘Fine,’ says Steve. ‘But lower, this time, right? I want to feel we’re just above the barley.’

‘Can’t go in too low at this speed or we could get yaw.’

None of this means anything. I should have been listening earlier. ‘Don’t we need a shot from higher up?’ I ask.

‘I told you, we’ll do the low shots first. Low as you possibly can, Ed.’ The ’copter starts its run-in again, skimming the tops of some trees and dipping down towards the barley. ‘Wooo!’ yells one of the Americans. ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning!’

It is a great shot, though, because it feels like we’re in the UFO coming in to land. The crop circle unrolls around us, immense, foreboding, the sun winking at the edge of inflated cumulus clouds as we lift again.

‘There,’ I say, pretty pleased with myself, if I’m honest. That looked professional.

‘We have to do it again,’ says Steve.

‘You’re joking. What was wrong with that?’

‘Too high.’

‘Oh, come on. Any lower and my foot’ll be scraping the ground.’

‘The shot will only work if we’re really low. Let’s go for another approach.’

‘Steve, I’m not happy about going much lower.’ Ed sounds uncertain. ‘You can get some tricky air currents round these fields at low level, not always predictable.’

‘Aw, come on,’ says the Apocalypse Now junkie. ‘Let’s do it.We ain’t scared, are we, guys?’ There’s an embarrassed silence. One of the women shifts a little in her seat. ‘Just a couple of feet lower,’ wheedles Steve. ‘I want that Gladiator shot, skimming the ears of corn. You can do it. I’ve directed moves like this before, and it’s always been fine with other pilots.’ I’m sure this is an out-and-out lie: Steve’s a shameless bullshitter and, if you ask me, they didn’t use a helicopter for the Gladiator shot.

‘O-kaaay.’ Never let it be said that Ed is afraid to rise to a challenge, as I remember all too well from last night. He swings the helicopter round, and we start to drop towards the crop circle.

The shot is not so good, whatever Steve thinks. We’re so close to the ground on this pass that we’re losing all sense of the shape we’re flying over. The viewfinder makes it appear we’re travelling much faster. I tilt up to get the flare effect on the sun again, but this time the exposure’s wrong and it looks like an explosion.

‘Slow down!’ yells Steve. ‘You’re fucking it up.’ For once someone else is getting the blame instead of me. But, suddenly, we are going slower, in a horrible, stuttery kind of motion that doesn’t feel right at all. It feels like the tail of the helicopter is trying to pull away, and we’re zigzagging over the flattened barley, coming closer and closer to the ground.

Nobody apart from me seems to think anything’s wrong. The Americans are whooping, and Steve’s yelling: ‘Keep it STEADY, for Christ’s sake!’ But there’s no way I can keep this shot steady, the bungee cords bouncing and the hiccuping motion threatening to pull the camera out of my arms altogether. I take my eye from the viewfinder, and twist round in the webbing straps to tell him so. Behind me, Steve is shaking his head furiously, staring at the monitor, oblivious to everything but the picture. I twist the other way, towards the front. Ed’s shoulders are knotted and writhing under his T-shirt. I remember the feel of those shoulders moving under my fingers, but this time it’s different. He’s fighting the controls. Shit, something is wrong. The note of the engine is rising to a howl. The tail seems to be trying to wrench itself right off. The helicopter is slewing sideways over the barley like a dragonfly with a torn wing. We’re going to crash.

‘Going to be bumpy,’ yells Ed. ‘Brace!’

Now we’re starting to spin. The rotors seem to be getting louder in my head — thoom, thhooom, THHHOOMMM, until everything else is drowned in the noise of beating air and beating blood and vibrating metal. God, the camera. If that comes loose when we crash it’ll bounce around in here like a lethal beachball. I wrap my arms round it, and try to fold myself and it into a foetal curl but the straps won’t let me and everything is shaking so much, the spin dizzying, like being sucked into a whirlpool. How long is this going to take, how high off the ground are we can only be a matter of five or ten feet at most we’re still going too fast what happens when we come down will it blow like in the films the helicopter always explodes in a fireball I don’t want to—

The helicopter hits the ground, bounces, metal tearing with an awful howl, my stomach tries to jump out through my throat, then we hit earth again and the whole thing rolls over and I’m being tumbled backwards, the camera flying out of my arms OW its whipping lead catching me on the ear and I feel sick with pain, someone’s shouting FUCK FUCK FUCK in an American accent and there’s so much noise, grinding, shrieking, smashing glass—

and the sledgehammer shatters the windscreen, my mother calling no no no, blood between my fingers—

All my fault.We shouldn’t have flown widdershins round Avebury. I should have made them take out the right-hand door, and we would have flown sunwise—

And I’d have been underneath the helicopter now, as we grind over the crushed barley and the hard dry chalk, and the metal skin on the right-hand side crumples like paper—

And we stop.

Silence. Blessed silence. Nothing. It’s all stopped, apart from a humming note that must be my ears, and the odd creak and sigh and tick of settling metal. I wait for the sound of running feet through the barley, of some sign there’s someone else alive somewhere, but nothing happens, as I hang in my straps, the helicopter suspended between worlds. I’m holding my breath waiting for the real one to rush back in.

‘Goddamn.’ It’s one of the Americans, his voice a croak. ‘You OK, Ruth?’ Then Ruth starts sobbing and the world is back with a bang, the others going Jeez that was close Didya see how we got caught in like a vortex? and Was it the forcefield of the crop circle that brought us down? and Ed’s voice saying Is everyone all right, take it easy, we’re on our side, be careful how you unbuckle and there’s a groan of shifting metal and everything sways sickeningly and something falls off outside and he shouts I said be careful you fat fuck stop panicking you’ll all be able to climb out through the side door there’s plenty of time it’s only in the movies that they blow up we came in really slowly hit the ground with hardly any force.

Steve is uncharacteristically quiet.

He wasn’t belted in, crouched at the back of the helicopter behind me, watching the shots unroll on the monitor. I twist in my webbing straps to see if he’s OK.

He’s lying on his back staring up at me, on the stoved-in wall of the helicopter. It looks like he’s reaching out one hand to catch the camera, which has landed beside him, its eye pointed towards him and the red light still winking, the black plastic rim of the lens smeared with thick red.Colour, angle, geometry: all fit perfectly, all come together to centre the shot on the ugly dent in the side of his forehead.

This week’s extract is taken from Rosie Lovell’s recently published cookbook, Spooning With Rosie.  Five years ago Rosie opened her deli in the heart of Brixton market. Nestled among the salted fish, yams and sounds of reggae it has become an intimate, eclectic place full of welcoming people, good music and food made with love. Spooning With Rosie teems with favourite recipes and stories from it’s young author’s life. Today’s extract features three breakfast recipes.

Pancetta & Quail’s Egg Tart

Makes 6 squares

I think I snitched this from a magazine, because it looks so beautiful and clever and is actually very simple to make on a Saturday morning in the deli. There are two ways my trusty customers devour this: either they grab a slice on the run, as if from a pizza stand, or they eat a square with a spinach and olive salad, more as a brunch. It’s a versatile tart. I’ve also made it for a light supper, along with a good Sunday night film, because it’s easy-peasy.

The quail’s eggs are just so lovable for their dinkiness. Being made of pancetta and these mini eggs means that the tart needs a little preplanning. Chinese supermarkets sell quail’s eggs, as do good butchers and niche delis. Smoked pancetta is also sold at good delis, preserved along with herbs and peppercorns. So it’s the kind of thing to cook if you know in advance that you are having a sleepover or want to impress a guest. Slice it into squares, if you are all on the run first thing, as I do in the deli. Regarding the puff pastry, I prefer the readyrolled kind, but the thicker slabs are more widely available. It depends what you can get your hands on.

• 250g puff pastry (defrosting bought ready-rolled puff pastry will take 11?2 hours)  
• some plain flour for rolling
• 10 thin slices of smoked pancetta
• 6 cherry tomatoes
• a little full-fat milk for glazing
• 6 quail’s eggs

Preheat your oven to 160°C/Gas 2. Ideally, you will have bought ready-rolled pastry. If not, roll out the pastry slab on a floured surface so that it is big enough to cover a baking tray that measures about 20 x 30cm. Spread the pastry out over the baking tray so that it comes right up to the edges. Lay the pancetta on the pastry, leaving a couple of centimetres clear all the way round which you should then incise with a sharp knife so that the pastry can rise around the pancetta to form a crust. Slice the cherry tomatoes in half and lay them on top of the pancetta, cut side up. Using your fingers (or a pastry brush if you have one), wipe a little milk around the pastry edge to help it brown. Place the tart in the oven for 10 minutes, or until the edges are puffing up around the pancetta and browning just a little. (You may need to further incise the pastry to release so that it can puff, after it’s been in the oven for 5 minutes.)

Remove the tart from the oven and carefully crack the quail’s eggs evenly over the pancetta layer (the shells have much more give than our more familiar brittle chicken shells). Return to the oven for just long enough for the eggs to solidify, which will be 4 or 5 minutes. The pancetta should now be getting crisp and dark too. It is a matter of a few minutes, though, so keep a close eye on the oven.

When the tart is ready, slice it into 6 pieces with a sharp knife. It is at its best when the yolks are still soft in the middle, and ooze out over the pancetta in your hands.

Cinnamon Toast

Makes 6 slices

My brother Olly and I loved The Pooh Cook Book when we were little. The wording was great; all about ‘Smackerels, Elevenses and Teas’. I love those weird made-up words. Alice (my beautiful partner in crime) and I use ‘melge’, which really means to mix, and mush and marinade, but it’s our own more onomatopoeic version.

Mum amazingly let us make a mess and get enthusiastic about cooking even at this level. I hope I do the same with my children, as we definitely had a good time beating butter, licking bowls and watching cakes rise through tinted oven glass. This cinnamon toast is a classic. All you need to do is make a flavoured butter and lather it over what you have to hand, bagels, buns, toast, whatever. The butter keeps for ages in the fridge, so if you make a big batch, you have midnight feasts covered too.

• 150g unsalted butter
• 100g golden caster sugar
• 35g ground cinnamon
• brown bread for toasting

Leave the butter out for a few hours at room temperature, to soften in a large mixing bowl. Then gradually cream in the sugar and cinnamon with a sturdy fork until it is a homogeneous paste. Alternatively, you can whiz it all up by using the pulse mode of a blender, if you have one. Decant the butter into a small pudding basin, toast your toast, and lather on the sweet, flavoured butter.

Creamy Scrambled Eggs with Chilli Jam

For 2

This comes originally from the little deli I first worked in, in Rotherhithe. It was set right by the Thames, and was a dream world of fun with fellow delistress Lulu, fantastic evenings of cooking and dancing. She taught me how to woo in an apron. These creamy eggs were a best-seller there, and are in my shop too. It’s so cherished that on a Saturday morning it’s pretty much all we make. The chilli jam surprises everyone, as the sweet spiciness works just right with the velvety eggs. I use Tracklements, but if pushed, sweet chilli sauce would do. It’s the ultimate hangover cure according to my oldest girlfriend, Doctor Helen, combined with a feisty Fentiman’s ginger beer, a macchiato, and a sparkling water, all consumed in unison by those in the know. Sometimes I make it mid-afternoon for a snack too.

• 6 medium free-range Eggs
• 200ml single cream
• a generous pinch of Maldon sea salt
• 1 ciabatta loaf butter for the ciabatta
• 4 fine slices of prosciutto
• 2 tablespoons chilli jam
• freshly ground black pepper

Crack the eggs into a microwaveable bowl. Lightly beat them with the cream and salt, so that there are still some defined yellow and white bits. Slice the ciabatta and place under a low grill, dough side up, in order to crisp up and lightly brown. Place the eggs in the microwave for 1 minute.With a fork, scrape around the edges of the bowl and break up any firmer bits. Return it to the microwave for another minute and repeat the process. It may need a further 20 seconds. Be careful not to overcook the eggs. They should be creamy and delicious and lightly risen, which, remarkably, the microwave is perfect for. They continue cooking once they are removed from the bowl, so if in doubt, do slightly undercook them.

If you do not own or prefer not to use a microwave, making them old-school style is great too. For this, melt a little extra butter in a medium pan. Beat together the eggs, cream and salt while the butter is slowly warming. Add this to the pan, and continually stir with a flat-ended wooden spoon to keep pulling up the cooked layers of egg that are created at the bottom of the pan.When the eggs are still pretty liquid but forming enticing sunny lumps, remove from the heat to sit for a few minutes. Just as with the microwave method, the eggs will continue cooking even when removed from the heat. And so, by removing them early, this is how to get them perfectly creamy and not overdone.

Once removed from the grill, lather the ciabatta with butter, arrange on two plates with the prosciutto and chilli jam, and divide the eggs between the plates. Scrunch over a hefty dose of ground black pepper for seriously perfect eggs.

This week’s extract comes from Janice Y. K. Lee’s acclaimed debut novel, The Piano Teacher. Picked by the Richard and Judy book club as a summer read, The Piano Teacher is a compelling and engrossing tale of two love affairs set against the backdrop of mid-century Hong Kong.

May 1952

It started as an accident. The small Herend rabbit had fallen into Claire’s handbag. It had been on the piano and she had been gathering up the sheet music at the end of the lesson when she knocked it off. It fell off the doily (a doily! On the Steinway!) and into her large leather bag. What had happened after that was perplexing, even to her. Locket had been staring down at the keyboard, and hadn’t noticed. And then, Claire had just . . . left. It wasn’t until she was downstairs and waiting for the bus that she grasped what she had done. And then it had been too late. She went home and buried the expensive porcelain figurine under her sweaters. 

Claire and her husband had moved to Hong Kong nine months ago, transferred by the government, which had posted Martin in the Department of Water Services. Churchill had ended rationing and things were starting to return to normal when they had received news of the posting. She had never dreamed of leaving England before.

Martin was an engineer, overseeing the building of the Tai Lam Cheung reservoir, so that there wouldn’t need to be so much rationing when the rains ebbed, as they did every several years. It was to hold four and a half billion gallons of water when full. Claire almost couldn’t imagine such a number, but Martin said it was barely enough for the people of Hong Kong, and he was sure that by the time they had finished, they’d have to build another. ‘More work for me,’ he said cheerfully. He was analysing the topography of the hills so that they could install catch-drains for when the rain came. The English government did so much for the colonies, Claire knew. They made their lives much better, but the locals rarely appreciated it. Her mother had warned her about the Chinese before she left — an unscrupulous, conniving people, who would surely try to take advantage of her innocence and goodwill.

 

Coming over, she had noticed it for days, the increasing wetness in the air, even more than usual. The sea breezes were stronger and the sun’s rays more powerful when they broke through cloud. When the P&O Canton had finally pulled into Hong Kong harbour in August, she had really felt she was in the tropics, hair frizzing up in curls, face always slightly damp and oily, the constant moisture under her arms and behind her knees. When she had stepped out of her cabin, the heat had assailed her like a physical blow, until she managed to find shade and fan herself.

There had been seven stops along the month-long journey, but after a few grimy hours spent in Algiers and Port Said, Claire had decided to stay on board rather than encounter more frightening peoples and customs. She had never imagined such sights. In Algiers, she had seen a man kiss a donkey and she couldn’t discern whether the high odour was coming from one or the other, and in Egypt the markets were the very definition of unhygienic — a fishmonger gutting a fish had licked the knife clean with his tongue.

She had enquired as to whether the ship’s provisions were procured locally, at these markets, and the answer had been most unsatisfactory. An uncle had died from food poisoning in India, making her cautious. She kept to herself, and sustained herself mostly on the beef tea they dispensed in the late morning on the sun deck. The menus, which were distributed every day, were mundane: turnips, potatoes, things that could be stored in the hold, with meat and salads the first few days after port. Martin promenaded on the deck every morning for exercise, and tried to get her to join him, to no avail. She preferred to sit in a deck-chair, wearing a large-brimmed hat and wrap herself in one of the ship’s scratchy wool blankets, face shaded from the omnipresent sun.

There had been a scandal on the ship. A woman, going to meet her fiancé in Hong Kong, had spent one too many moonlit nights on the deck with another gentleman, and had disembarked in the Philippines with her new man, leaving only a letter for her intended. Liesl, the girlfriend to whom the woman had entrusted the letter, grew visibly more nervous as the date of arrival drew near. Men joked that she could take Sarah’s place, but she wasn’t having any of that. Liesl was a serious young woman, who was joining her sister and brother-in-law in Hong Kong, where she intended to educate Unfortunate Chinese Girls in Art: when she held forth about it, it was always with capital letters in Claire’s mind.

Before disembarking, Claire separated out all of her thin cotton dresses and skirts; she could tell that was all she would be wearing for a while. They had arrived to a big party on the dock, with paper streamers and shouting vendors selling fresh fruit juice and soymilk drinks and garish flower arrangements to the people waiting. Groups of revellers had already opened champagne and were toasting the arrival of their friends and family.

‘We pop the corks as soon as we see the ship on the horizon,’ a man explained to his girl, as he escorted her away. ‘It’s a big party. We’ve been here for hours.’

Claire watched Liesl go down the gangplank, looking very nervous, and then she disappeared into the throng. Claire and Martin went down next, treading on the soft, humid wood, luggage behind them, carried by two scantily clad young Chinese boys who had materialized out of nowhere.

Martin had an old schoolfriend, John, who worked at Dodwell’s, one of the trading firms, and had promised to greet the ship. He came with two friends and offered the new arrivals freshly squeezed guava drinks. Claire pretended to sip hers as her mother had warned her about the cholera that was rampant in these parts. The men were bachelors and very pleasant. John, Nigel, Leslie. They explained they all lived together in a mess — there were many, known by their companies’ names, Dodwell’s Mess, Jardine’s Mess, et cetera, and they assured Claire and Martin that Dodwell’s threw the best parties around.

They accompanied them to the government-approved hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, where a Chinese man with a long queue, dirty white tunic and shockingly long fingernails showed them to their room. They made an arrangement to meet for tiffin the next day and the men departed, leaving Martin and Claire sitting on the bed, exhausted and staring at one another. They didn’t know each other very well. They had been married barely four months.

She had accepted Martin’s proposal to escape the dark interior of her house, her bitter mother railing against everything, getting worse, it seemed, with her advancing age, and an uninspiring job as a filing girl in an insurance company. Martin was older, in his forties, and had never had luck with women. The first time he had kissed her, she had had to stifle the urge to wipe her mouth. He was like a cow, slow and steady. And kind. She knew this. She was grateful for it.

She had not had many chances with men. Her parents stayed at home all the time, so she had as well. When she had started seeing Martin — he was the older brother of one of the girls at work — she had had dinner at restaurants, drunk a cocktail at a hotel bar, and seen other young women and men talking, laughing, with an assurance she could not fathom. They had opinions about politics; they had read books she had never heard of and seen foreign films and talked about them with such confidence. She was enthralled and not a little intimidated. And then Martin had come to her, serious: his job was taking him to the Orient, and would she come with him? She was not so attracted to him, but who was she to be choosy? she thought, hearing the voice of her mother. She let him kiss her and nodded yes.

 

Claire had started to draw a bath in their hotel room when another knock on the door revealed a small Chinese woman, an amah, she was called, who started to unpack their suitcases until Martin shooed her away.

And that was how they had arrived in Hong Kong, which was like nothing Claire had imagined. Apart from the usual colonial haunts — all hush and genteel, potted palms and polished wood in whitewashed buildings — it was loud and crowded and dirty and bustling. The buildings were right next to each other and often had clothing hung out to dry on bamboo poles. There were garish vertical signs hung on every one, advertising massage parlours, pubs and hair salons. Someone had told her that opium dens still existed in back alleys. There was often refuse on the street, sometimes even human filth, and there was a pungent, peppery odour that was oddly clingy, attaching itself to your very skin until you went home for a good scrub.

There were all sorts of people. The local women carried their babies in a sort of back sling. Sikhs served as uniformed security guards — you saw them dozing off on wooden stools outside the banks, turbaned heads hanging heavily above their chests, rifles held loosely between their knees. The Indians had been brought over by the British, of course. Pakistanis ran carpet stores, Portuguese were doctors and Jews ran the dairy farms and other large businesses. There were British businessmen and American bankers, White Russian aristocrats and Peruvian entrepreneurs — all peculiarly well-travelled and sophisticated — and, of course, there were the Chinese, quite different in Hong Kong from the ones in China, she was told.

To her surprise, she didn’t detest Hong Kong, as her mother had told her she would — she found the streets busy and distracting, so very different from Croydon, and filled with people and shops and goods she had never seen before. She liked to sample the local bakery goods, the pineapple buns and yellow egg tarts, and sometimes wandered outside Central, where she would quickly find herself in unfamiliar surroundings, where she might be the only non-Chinese around. The fruit stalls were heaped with not only oranges and bananas, still luxuries in post-war England, but spiky, strange-looking fruits she came to try and like: starfruit, durian, lychee. She would buy a dollar’s worth and be handed a small, waxy brown bag and she would eat the fruit slowly as she walked. There were small stalls made of crudely nailed wood and corrugated tin, which housed small speciality enterprises: this one sold chops, the stone stamps the Chinese used in place of signatures, this one made only keys, this one had a chair that was rented for half-days by a street dentist and a barber.

The locals ate on the street in tiny restaurants called daipaidong, and she had seen three workmen in dirty singlets and trousers crouched over a plate containing a whole fish, spitting out the bones at their feet. One had seen her watching them, and deliberately picked up the fish’s eyeball with his chopsticks, raised it up to her, smiling, before he ate it.

Claire hadn’t met many Chinese people before, but the ones she had seen in the big towns in England had been serving in restaurants or ironing clothes. There were many of those types in Hong Kong, of course, but what had been eye-opening was the sight of the affluent Chinese, the ones who seemed English in all but their skin colour. It had been quite something to see a Chinese step out of a Rolls-Royce, as she had one day when she was waiting on the steps of the Gloucester Hotel, or in business suits, having lunch with British men who talked to them as if they were the same. She hadn’t known that such a world existed. And then, with Locket, she was thrust into this world.

 

After a few months settling in, finding a flat and furnishing it, Claire had put the word out that she was looking for a job giving piano lessons, ‘as a lark’, was how she put it — something to fill the day, but the truth was, they could really use the extra money. She had played the piano most of her life and was primarily self-taught, but she didn’t think it would matter. Amelia, an acquaintance she had met at a sewing circle, said she would ask around.

She rang a few days later.

‘There’s a Chinese family, the Chens. They run everything in town. Apparently, they’re looking for a piano teacher for their daughter, and they’d prefer an Englishwoman. What do you think?’

‘A Chinese family?’ Claire said. ‘I hadn’t thought about that possibility. Aren’t there any English families looking?’

‘No,’ Amelia said. ‘Not that I’ve been able to ascertain.’

‘I just don’t know . . .’ Claire demurred. ‘Wouldn’t it be odd?’ She couldn’t imagine teaching a Chinese girl.

‘Does she speak English?’

‘Probably better than you or me,’ Amelia said impatiently. ‘They’re offering a very adequate fee.’ She named a large sum.

‘Well,’ Claire said slowly, ‘I suppose it couldn’t do any harm to meet them.’

 

Victor and Melody Chen lived in the Mid-Levels, in an enormous white two-storey house on May Road. There was a driveway with potted plants lining the sides. Inside, there was the quiet, efficient buzz of a household staffed with plentiful servants. Claire had taken a bus and when she arrived, she was perspiring after the walk from the road to the house.

The amah led her to a sitting room, where she found a fan blowing blessedly cool air. A houseboy adjusted the drapes so that she was properly shaded. Her blue linen skirt, just delivered from the tailor, was wrinkled and she had on a white voile blouse that was splotched with moisture. She hoped the Chens would allow her some time to compose herself. She shifted, feeling a drop of perspiration trickle down her thigh.

No such luck. Mrs Chen swooped through the door, a vision in cool pink, holding a tray of drinks. A small, exquisite woman, with hair cut just so, so that it swung in precise, geometric movements. Her shoulders were fragile and exposed in her sleeveless shift, her face a tiny oval.

‘Hello!’ she trilled. ‘Lovely to meet you. I’m Melody. Locket’s just on her way.’

‘Locket?’ Claire said, uncertain.

‘My daughter. She’s just back from school and getting changed into something more comfortable. Isn’t the heat dreadful?’ She set down the tray, which held long glasses of iced tea. ‘Have something cool, please.’

‘Your English is remarkably good,’ Claire said, as she took a glass.

‘Oh, is it?’ Melody said casually. ‘Four years at Wellesley will do that for you, I suppose.’

‘You were at university in America?’ Claire asked. She hadn’t known that Chinese went to university in America.

‘Loved every minute,’ she said. ‘Except for the horrible, horrible food. Americans think a grilled cheese sandwich is a meal! And, as you know, we Chinese take food very seriously.’

‘Is Locket going to be schooled in America?’ ‘We haven’t decided but, really, I’d rather talk to you about your education,’ Mrs Chen said.

‘Oh.’ Claire was taken aback.

‘You know,’ she continued pleasantly, ‘where you studied music, and all that.’

Claire settled back in her seat. ‘I was a serious student for a number of years. I studied with Mrs Eloise Pollock and was about to apply for a position at the Royal Academy when my family situation changed.’

Mrs Chen sat, waiting, head tilted, with one bird-like ankle crossed over the other, her knees slanted to one side.

‘And so, I was unable to continue,’ Claire said. Was she supposed to explain it in detail to this stranger? Her father had been let go from the printing company and it had been a black couple of months before he had found a new job as an insurance salesman. His pay had been erratic at best — he was not a natural salesman — and luxuries like piano lessons were unthinkable. Mrs Pollock, a very kind woman, had offered to continue her instruction at a much-reduced fee, but her mother, sensitive and pointlessly proud, had refused to even entertain the idea.

‘And what level of studies did you achieve?’

‘I was studying for my Seventh Grade examinations.’

‘Locket is a beginning student but I want her to be taught seriously, by a serious musician,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘She should pass all her examinations with distinction.’

‘Well, I’m certainly serious about music and, as for passing with distinction, that will be up to Locket,’ Claire said. ‘I did very well in my examinations.’

Locket entered the room, or rather, she bumbled into it. Where her mother was small and fine, Locket was chubby, all rounded limbs and padded cheeks. Her glossy hair was tied in a thick ponytail.

‘Hallo,’ she said. She had a distinctly English accent.

‘Locket, this is Mrs Pendleton,’ Mrs Chen said, stroking her daughter’s cheek. ‘She’s come to see if she’ll be your piano teacher so you must be very polite.’

‘Do you like the piano, Locket?’ Claire said, too slowly, she realized, for a ten-year-old child. She had no experience with children.

‘I dunno,’ Locket said. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Locket!’ her mother cried. ‘You said you wanted to learn. That’s why we bought you the new Steinway.’

‘Locket’s a pretty name,’ Claire said. ‘How did you come about it?’

‘Dunno,’ said Locket again. She reached for a glass of iced tea and drank. A small trickle wended its way down her chin. Her mother took a napkin off the silver tray and dabbed it dry.

‘Will Mr Chen be arriving soon?’ Claire asked. ‘Oh, Victor!’ Mrs Chen laughed. ‘He’s far too busy for these household matters. He’s always working.’

‘I see,’ Claire said. She was uncertain as to what came next.

‘Would you play us something?’ Mrs Chen asked. ‘We just got the piano and it would be lovely to hear it played professionally.’

‘Of course,’ Claire said, because she didn’t know what else to say. She felt as if she were being made to perform like a common entertainer — there had been something in the woman’s tone — but she couldn’t think of a gracious way to refuse.

She played a simple étude, which Mrs Chen seemed to enjoy and Locket squirmed through.

‘I think this will be fine,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘Are you available on Thursdays?’

Claire hesitated. She didn’t know whether she was going to take the job.

‘It would have to be Thursdays because Locket has lessons the other days,’ Mrs Chen said.

‘Fine,’ said Claire. ‘I accept.’

 

Locket’s mother was of a Hong Kong type. Claire saw women like her lunching at Chez Henri, laughing and gossiping with each other. They were called taitais and you could spot them at the smart clothing boutiques, trying on the latest fashions or climbing into their chauffeur-driven cars. Sometimes Mrs Chen would come home and put a slim, perfumed hand on Locket’s shoulder and comment liltingly on the music. And then, Claire couldn’t help it, she really couldn’t, she would think to herself, You people drown your daughters! Her mother had told her about how the Chinese were just a little above animals and that they would drown their daughters because they preferred sons. Once, Mrs Chen had mentioned a function at the Jockey Club that she and her husband were going to. She had been dressed up in diamonds, a flowing black dress and red, red lipstick. She had not looked like an animal.

Bruce Comstock, the head of the water office, had taken Martin and Claire to the club once, with his wife, and they had drunk pink gin while watching the horse races, the stands filled with shouting gamblers.

 

The week before the figurine fell into Claire’s handbag, she had been leaving the lesson when Victor and Melody Chen came in. It had rung five on the ornate mahogany grandfather clock that had mother-of-pearl Chinese characters inlaid all down the front of it and she had been putting her things away when they walked into the room. They were a tiny couple and they looked like porcelain dolls, with their shiny skin and coal eyes. ‘Out the door already?’ Mr Chen said drily. He was dressed nattily in a navy-blue pinstriped suit with a burgundy handkerchief peeping out of his breast pocket just so. ‘It’s five on the dot!’ He spoke English with the faintest hint of a Chinese accent.

Claire flushed. ‘I was here early. Ten minutes before four, I believe,’ she said. She took pride in her punctuality.

‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘Victor is just teasing you. Stop it!’ She swatted her husband with her little hand.

‘The English are so serious all the time,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Claire said uncertainly. ‘Locket and I spent a productive hour together.’

Locket slipped off the piano bench and under her father’s arm. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ she said shyly. She looked younger than her ten years.

He patted her shoulder. ‘How’s my little Rachmaninoff?’ he said. Locket giggled delightedly.

Mrs Chen was clattering around in her high heels. ‘Mrs Pendleton,’ she asked, ‘would you like to join us for a drink?’ She had on a suit that looked like it came out of the fashion magazines. It was almost certainly a Paris original. The jacket was made of a golden silk and buttoned smartly up the front and there was a shimmery yellow skirt underneath that flowed and draped like gossamer.

‘Oh, no,’ she answered. ‘It’s very kind of you, but I should go home and start supper.’

‘I insist,’ Mr Chen said. ‘I must hear about my little genius.’ His voice didn’t allow for any disagreement. ‘Run along now, Locket. The adults are having a conversation.’

There was a large velvet divan in the sitting room, and several chairs, upholstered in red silk, along with two matching black lacquered tables. Claire sat down in an armchair that was far more slippery than it looked. She sank too deeply into it, then had to move forward in an ungainly manner until she was perched precariously on the edge. She steadied herself with her arms.

‘How are you finding Hong Kong?’ Mr Chen said. His wife had gone into the kitchen to ask the amah to bring them drinks.

‘Quite well,’ she said. ‘It’s certainly different from England, but it’s an adventure.’ She smiled at him. He was a well-groomed man, in his well-pressed suit and red and black silk tie. Above him, there was an oil of a Chinese man dressed in robes and a black skull cap. ‘What an interesting painting,’ she remarked.

He looked up. ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘That’s Melody’s grandfather, who had a large dye factory in Shanghai. He was quite famous.’

‘Dyes?’ she said. ‘How fascinating.’

‘Yes, and her father started the First Bank of Shanghai, and did very well indeed.’ He smiled. ‘Melody comes from a family of entrepreneurs. Her family was all educated in the West, England and America.’

Mrs Chen came back into the room. She had taken off her jacket to reveal a pearly blouse underneath. ‘Claire,’ she said. ‘What will you have?’

‘Just soda water for me, please.’

‘And I’ll have a sherry,’ Mr Chen said.

‘I know!’ Mrs Chen said. She left again.

‘And your husband,’ he said. ‘He’s at a bank?’ ‘He’s at the Department of Water Services,’ she said. ‘Working on the new reservoir.’ She paused. ‘He’s heading it up.’

‘Oh, very good,’ Mr Chen said carelessly. ‘Water’s certainly important. And the English do a fair job of making sure it’s in the taps when we need it.’ He sat back and crossed one leg over the other. ‘I miss England,’ he said suddenly.

‘Oh, did you spend time there?’ Claire asked politely. ‘I was at Oxford — Balliol,’ he said, flapping his tie at her. Claire felt as if he had been waiting to tell her this fact. ‘And Melody went to Wellesley, so we’re a product of two different systems. I defend England, and Melody just loves the United States.’

‘Indeed,’ Claire murmured.

Mrs Chen came back into the room and sat down next to her husband. The amah appeared next and offered Claire a napkin. It had blue cornflowers on it.

‘These are lovely,’ she said, inspecting the embroidered linen.

‘They’re from Ireland,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘I just got them!’

‘I just bought some lovely Chinese tablecloths at the China Emporium,’ Claire said. ‘Beautiful lace cut work.’

‘You can’t compare them with the Irish ones, though,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘Very crude.’

Mr Chen viewed his wife with amusement. ‘Women!’ he said to Claire.

The amah brought in a tray of drinks.

Claire sipped at her drink and felt the gassy bubbles in her mouth. Mr Chen looked at her expectantly.

‘The Communists are a great threat,’ she said. This is what she had heard again and again at gatherings.

Mr Chen laughed. ‘Of course! And what will you and Melody do about them?’

‘Shut up, darling. Don’t tease,’ said his wife. She took a sip of her drink. Mr Chen was watching her. ‘What’s that you’re drinking, love?’

‘A little cocktail,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a long day.’ She sounded defensive.

There was a pause.

‘Locket is a good student,’ Claire said, ‘but she needs to practise more.’

‘It’s not her fault,’ Mrs Chen said breezily. ‘I’m not here to oversee her practice enough.’

Mr Chen laughed. ‘Oh, she’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she knows what she’s doing.’

Claire nodded. Parents were all the same. When she had children, she would be sure not to indulge them. She set her drink down. ‘I should be going,’ she said. ‘It’s harder to get a seat on the bus after five.’

‘Are you sure?’ Mrs Chen said. ‘Pai was getting us some biscuits.’

‘Oh, no, thank you,’ she demurred. ‘I really should be leaving.’

‘We’ll have Truesdale drive you home,’ Mr Chen offered.

‘Oh, no,’ Claire said. ‘I couldn’t put you out.’

‘Do you know him?’ Mr Chen asked.

‘He’s English.’ ‘I haven’t had the pleasure,’ Claire said.

‘Hong Kong is very small,’ Mr Chen said. ‘It’s tiresome that way.’

‘It’s no trouble at all for Truesdale,’ Mrs Chen said. ‘He’ll be going home anyway. Where do you live?’

‘Happy Valley,’ answered Claire, feeling put on the spot.

‘Oh, that’s near where he lives!’ Mrs Chen cried, delighted at the coincidence. ‘So, it’s settled.’ She called for Pai in Cantonese and told her to call the driver.

‘Chinese is such an intriguing language,’ Claire said. ‘I hope to pick some up during our time here.’

Mr Chen raised an eyebrow. ‘Cantonese,’ he said, ‘is very difficult. There are some nine different tones for one sound. It’s much more difficult than English. I picked up rudimentary English in a year, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to learn Cantonese or Mandarin or Shanghainese in twice that.’

‘Well,’ she said brightly, ‘one always hopes.’

Pai walked in and spoke. Mrs Chen nodded. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she said, ‘but the driver seems to have left already.’

‘I’ll catch the bus,’ Claire said.

Mr Chen stood up as she picked up her bag. ‘It was very nice to meet you,’ he said.

‘And you,’ she said, and walked out, feeling their eyes on her back.

 

When she got home, Martin was already there. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’re late today.’ He was in a vest and his weekend trousers, which were stained and shiny at the knees. He had a drink in his hand.

She took off her jacket and put on a pot of water to boil. ‘I was at the Chens’ house today,’ she said. ‘Locket’s parents asked me to stay for a drink.’

‘Victor Chen, is it?’ he asked, impressed. ‘He’s rather a big deal here.’

‘I gathered,’ she said. ‘He was quite something. Not at all like a Chinaman.’

‘You shouldn’t use that word, Claire,’ Martin said. ‘It’s very oldfashioned and a bit insulting.’ Claire coloured.

‘I’ve just never . . .’ She trailed off. ‘I’ve never seen Chinese people like the Chens.’

‘You are in Hong Kong,’ Martin said, not unkindly. ‘There are all types of Chinese.’

‘Where is the amah?’ she asked, wanting to change the subject.

Yu Ling came from the back when Claire called. ‘Can you help with dinner?’ Claire said. ‘I bought some meat at the market.’

Yu Ling looked at her impassively. She had a way of making Claire feel uncomfortable, but she couldn’t bring herself to sack her. She wondered how the other wives did it — they appeared to handle their servants with an easy aplomb that seemed unfamiliar and unattainable to Claire. Some even joked with them and treated them like family members, but she’d heard that was more the American influence. Her friend Cecilia had her amah brush her hair for her before she went to bed, while she sat at her dressingtable and put on cold cream.

Claire handed Yu Ling the meat she had bought on the way home. Then she went to lie down on the bed with a cold compress over her eyes. How had she got here, to this small flat on the other side of the world? She remembered her quiet childhood in Croydon, an only child sitting at her mother’s side while she mended clothes, listening to her talk. Her mother had been bitter at what life had given her, a hand-to-mouth existence, especially after the war, and her father drank too much, perhaps because of it. Claire had never imagined life being much more than that. But marrying Martin had changed it all.

But this was the thing: she herself had changed in Hong Kong. Something about the tropical climate had ripened her appearance, brought everything into harmony. Where the other English women looked as if they were about to wilt in the heat, she thrived, like a hothouse flower. Her hair had lightened in the tropical sun until it was veritably gold. She perspired lightly so that her skin looked dewy, not drenched. She had lost weight so that her body was compact, and her eyes sparkled, cornflower blue. Martin had remarked on it, how the heat seemed to suit her. When she was at the Gripps or at a dinner party, she saw that men looked at her longer than necessary, came over to talk to her, let their hands linger on her back. She was learning how to speak to people at parties, order in a restaurant with confidence. She felt as if she were finally becoming a woman, not the girl she had been when she had left England. She felt as if she were a woman coming into her own.

And then the next week, after Locket’s lesson, the porcelain rabbit had fallen into her handbag.

The week after, the phone rang and Locket leaped up to answer it, eager for any excuse to stop mangling the prelude she had been playing, and while she had been chattering away to a schoolmate, Claire saw a silk scarf lying on a chair. It was a beautiful, printed scarf, the kind women tied around their necks. She put it into her bag. A wonderful sense of calm came over her. And when Locket returned, with only a mumbled, ‘Sorry, Mrs Pendleton,’ Claire smiled instead of giving the little girl a piece of her mind.

When she got home, she went into the bedroom, locked the door and pulled out the scarf. It was an Hermès scarf, from Paris, and had pictures of zebras and lions in vivid oranges and browns. She practised tying it around her neck, and over her head, like an adventurous heiress on safari. She felt very glamorous.

The next month, after a conversation in which Mrs Chen told her she sent all her fine washing to Singapore because ‘the girls here don’t know how to do it properly and, of course, that means I have to have triple the amount of linens, what a bother’, Claire found herself walking out with two of those wonderful Irish napkins in her skirt pocket. She had Yu Ling handwash and iron them so that she and Martin could use them with dinner.

She pocketed three French cloisonné turtles after Locket had abruptly gone to the bathroom — as if the child couldn’t take care of nature’s business before Claire arrived! A pair of sterling silver salt and pepper shakers found their way into her bag as she was passing through the dining room, and an exquisite Murano perfume bottle left out in the sitting room, as if Melody Chen had dashed some scent on as she was breezing her way through the foyer on her way to a gala event, was discreetly tucked into Claire’s skirt pocket.

Another afternoon she was leaving when she heard Victor Chen in his study. He was talking loudly into the telephone and had left his door slightly ajar.

‘It’s the bloody British,’ he said, before lapsing into Cantonese. Then, ‘Can’t let them,’ and then something incomprehensible, which sounded very much like swearing. ‘They want to create unrest, digging up skeletons that should be left buried, and all for their own purposes. The Crown Collection didn’t belong to them in the first place. It’s all our history, our artefacts, that they just took for their own. How’d they have liked it if Chinese explorers had come to their country years ago and made off with all their treasures? It’s outrageous. Downing Street’s behind all of this, I can assure you. There’s no need for this right now.’ He was very agitated, and Claire found herself waiting outside, breath held, to see if she couldn’t hear anything more. She stood there until Pai appeared and looked at her questioningly. She pretended she had been studying the painting in the hallway, but she could feel Pai’s eyes on her as she walked towards the door. She let herself out and went home.

Two weeks later, when Claire went for her lesson, she found Pai gone and a new girl opening the door.

‘This is Su Mei,’ Locket told her when they entered the room. ‘She’s from China, from a farm. She just arrived. Do you want something to drink?’

The new girl was small and dark, and would have been pretty if it hadn’t been for a large black birthmark on her right cheek. She never looked up from the floor.

‘Her family didn’t want her because the mark on her face would make her hard to marry off. It’s supposedly very bad luck.’

‘Did your mother tell you that?’ Claire asked.

‘Yes,’ Locket said. She hesitated. ‘Well, I heard her say it on the telephone, and she said she got her very cheap because of it. Su Mei doesn’t know anything! She tried to go to the bathroom in the bushes outside and Ah Wing beat her and told her she was like an animal. She’s never used a tap before or had running water!’

‘I’d like a bitter lemon, please,’ Claire said, wanting to change the subject.

Locket spoke to the girl quickly. She left the room silently.

‘Pai was stealing from us,’ Locket said, eyes wide with the scandal. ‘So Mummy had to let her go. Pai cried and cried, and then she beat the floor with her fists. Mummy said she was hysterical and slapped her face to stop her crying. They had to get Mr Wong to carry Pai out. He put her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and she was hitting his back with her fists.’

‘Oh!’ Claire said, before she could stifle the cry.

Locket looked at her curiously. ‘Mummy says all servants steal.’

‘Does she now?’ Claire said. ‘How terrible. But you know, Locket, I’m not sure that’s true.’ She remembered the way Pai had looked at her when she came upon her in the hallway and her chest felt tight.

‘Where did she go?’ she asked Locket.

‘No idea,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Good riddance I say.’ Claire looked at the placid face of the girl, unruffled by conscience.

‘There must be shelters or places for people like her.’ Claire’s voice quivered. ‘She’s not on the street, is she? Does she have family in Hong Kong?’

‘Haven’t a clue.’

‘How can you not know? She lived with you!’

‘She was a maid, Mrs Pendleton.’ Locket looked at her curiously. ‘Do you know anything about your servants?’

Claire was shamed into silence. The blood rose in her cheeks. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s enough of that. Did you practise the scales?’

Locket pounded on the piano keys as Claire looked hard at the girl’s chubby fingers, trying not to blink so that the tears would not fall.

This week’s extract comes from Andrew Marr’s foreword to Tommy’s War, which was published in paperback this May. Tommy’s War presents the extraordinary diaries of Thomas Livingstone Cairns. Starting in 1913, the diaries provide a priceless record of the impression world events were making on the ordinary people throughout this turbulent chapter of history. In this piece Andrew Marr gives his perspective on the importance of Thomas Cairns’ diaries as a record of the time, and offers brilliant insight into the World War I era.  

A small man in a badly made suit, a hat jammed on his head and an empty pipe between his lips, is walking down the street towards the tram, with a small boy attached to one hand, in turn clutching a mouth organ. Around him are men in uniform, loud gossipy women on the corner, the rattle of horse-drawn carts, the smells of sulphur, oil, coal and sweat. On the walls as he passes, lurid recruiting posters urge him to join the lads in France, to fight to save his women from the Hun, or simply exclaim that his country needs him. Head down, fingering his last stiff collar, he disappears into the crowd gathering by the tram stop. The streets are shabby and the war news is terrible. There is a faint sound of the mouth organ being played. Who is he, this man? What does he do? Does he have a wife at home, her hands coarsened with heavy washing and scouring, but her bread smelling sweet? Will he soon be wearing a khaki uniform, and die choking in French mud thinking of the small boy; or will he survive this so-called Great War? Does he like cards? What does he think of Germans, and this throbbing, clattering city where he has spent his life? But he has gone, vanished into time like the millions upon millions who lived through momentous times but who were not Lloyd George, or Haig, or even Harry Lauder.

Well, by extraordinary luck and chance, he has not gone. Back from the dead, Thomas Cairns Livingstone of Rutherglen, a clerk, married to Agnes, who was often ill, and the proud father of Wee Tommy, is returned to life through handwritten diaries and drawings discovered in a house sale in Northumberland in 2005 and bought for £300. So now we know what he thought, who he was and what happened to him later. It is a story extraordinary in its ordinariness; it is good to have him back. For in general, history is owned by those who record it. Only a handful of truly powerful people were recorded by others at the time. Mostly, historians have depended on autobiographies, property records, diaries, letters, newspapers and account books. So ‘history’ has too often been that of those at the top of the pile, the politicians, writers and professional leaders; and it has been a hard task to disinter the lives of millions who left no written trace. It was not until 1937 that ‘Mass Observation’ began to accumulate the diaries and thoughts of ordinary Britons. Before that, the voices of the majority had been heard through snippets in newspapers, court reports or in rare sociological exercises, like Charles Booth’s studies of the London poor. There were a few memoirs by people further down the tree, clerks and governesses; some of the working class Suffragettes and trade unionists left written records, for instance. There was the knowledgeable mimicking of working-class and lower-middle-class life by novelists — the clerks and shopkeepers of H. G. Wells, or the miners of D. H. Lawrence. But the material was always scanty.

During the First World War there was much recording of the lives and heroism of the men at the front, who wrote letters back home. Some retold their stories much later to historians. Little by comparison was written about the home front, where, of course, the vast majority of British people were living their lives. Oral historians like Richard van Emden and Steve Humphries have done much to salvage material from those they could find who were still alive; numerous local historical societies have done the same. But the diary of Tommy Livingstone is a rare thing. Here is the Great War as it was seen by an ordinary man, no hero, living in the backstreets of Glasgow. You might call him a Scottish Pooter, except that his drawings and humour are more self-knowing. He was no special rebel, indeed no special anything. But that is the point. As with family history, the stories of plain people upend and challenge the stories told by historians. For instance, I had no idea just how near the trenches seemed until learning that my family, also from Glasgow, got laundry back from sons in the trenches every week, and sent the clean underclothes back, along with cakes, chocolate and tobacco. The fast train service made Flanders seem very close. Tommy’s story is family history, except that his immediate family has long gone and it has been returned as a family story for all of us.

These were momentous times, and Glasgow in 1913—18 was a city at the edge of turmoil, seen by some as the next Bolshevik Petrograd. Yet as Auden famously pointed out while contemplating a painting of the fall of Icarus, great events take place in the middle of ordinary ones, ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. Tommy’s war is a war in a world of dull work, shortages, crying children and everyday diseases. He is not much concerned with high politics, though he has a shrewd and cynical take on government and its wartime propaganda: ‘This is SOS Week in Glasgow. Save our souls. Sink or swim. Stew or sausages. Steal or starve. Save or starve. Sew our shirts. Have your choice …’ He has a rebellious streak, but his rebellion is more directed at the hated factor, or rent-collector, than the government itself. In that, as in so much, he was pretty typical. The revolt which is remembered as ‘Red Clydeside’ was a series of disputes, starting with one over rent controls. The vast majority of Glaswegians rented their homes and when 20,000 munitions workers arrived in the city, the shortage of rooms was quickly exploited by the private landlords. Rents went up by more than a fifth. Factors were attacked by women, pelted in the street and went in fear. People refused to move or pay up. Placards reading ‘Rent Strike’ and ‘We are Fighting Landlord Huns’ went up in the windows and when, by May 1915, around 25,000 tenants were refusing to pay, ministers started to panic. Tommy, surely, would have sympathised but at the time he was much more interested in a huge rail crash at Gretna, which killed around 227 people but which has been largely forgotten by history. And this, too, is part of the appeal. The ‘story’ of those times that has been smoothed into predictability by historians is constantly disrupted by small surprises.

Tommy had no desire to be a soldier. In that, too, he was typical. After the great torrents of excited volunteers in the early days of the war, when patriotic enthusiasm had been dampened by stories of the reality of trench warfare, millions of men tried very hard not to serve their country, at least not in France or in khaki. We remember the ‘white feather’ campaigns and the famous Kitchener recruitment posters, and indeed huge citizen armies were created. But the feathers and the posters were needed because of widespread reluctance, particularly as a sense of the length and grimness of the fighting settled in people’s minds. As the war advanced, reflected in newspaper stories about victories and defeats, the pressure piled on. Like Tommy, it became impossible to be both patriotic and a quiet civilian. He is darkly humorous about his dilemma. When the Derby scheme was announced, offering men the chance of volunteering in return for a delay in being actually called up, he reports, ‘Got a love letter from Lord Derby egging me on to enlist before they make me.’ And later: ‘Recruiting sergeant up at night to assist me in making up my mind. I did not go away with him.’ Finally, on a snowy December night in 1915, he gives way: ‘Could resist no longer. Joined the army today … God save the King.’ In fact, Tommy never did have to become a soldier. For him the war is always just off-stage, as in a classical tragedy, a succession of liners and battleships being sunk, poison gas used, terrible losses reported, revolutions erupting and aircraft raiding. We must remember, this is how most people would have experienced it. And most, too, would have been more immediately concerned, as Tommy was, with the small things of life — rain, wind, coughs, shortages, chores, food and family.

As with Pepys or Boswell (admittedly, greater diarists) we enjoy the constant rub of the ordinary against the ‘historic’. Given that some historians have insisted the general public was fairly ignorant of the war it is interesting that Tommy, from his Glasgow flat, pretty accurately records each major event as it happens. Thus he is fully aware of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, even recording that it started ‘at 7.30 a.m. today’. But with 67,000 British casualties on the first day alone, a third of them killed, he quickly moves on, so that two days later, his main worry is that his young son Tommy is being teased by another boy: ‘Nice warm day. Tommy getting abused by the young microbe next door called Alec Gray. So I spoke severely to the aforesaid young microbe surnamed Gray. His ma then abuses Agnes.’ It is a moment to be compared with Pepys’ worries about the fate of a cheese during the Great Fire of London. Sometimes the juxtapositions are cheerily surreal: ‘The King doing Glasgow this week and round about. I saw him today. Agnes made plum jam at night.’ Or, from 16 March 1917: ‘Doctor up in the forenoon. Tommy has the German measles. Doctor says it is a mild case … Revolution in Russia. Czar dethroned. The Duma are in full power. The Czar and Czarina are prisoners.’ This, we all know, is how things are, the pattern of life. Great events occur. We note them. Meanwhile we have to cope with German measles, or a local lout.

Tommy is not given to rhetorical flourish or overstatement. He is a brisk, tart, dryish writer, who presents himself as put-upon and henpecked and whose drolleries are the more striking for their rarity. Yet he is, in his way, a good writer, too: he has a distinct voice and it is impossible to spend an hour with his diaries without having a clear impression of the man. No diarist who is disagreeable will keep our attention long: Tommy Livingstone is, we come to understand, a thoroughly likeable man whose love for his wife and son and growing horror at the scale of the slaughter shine through the laconic and self-mocking entries. What I find makes this book particularly touching are the illustrations, the quick pen-and-ink sketches, carefully coloured, of Tommy and the cast of characters, wife, son, recruiting sergeant, chimney-sweep, soldiers and the rest. They have a humorous immediacy and artlessness which is very winning, and go perfectly with the tone of the written diary. In the end, the best test of a book like this is whether one wants any more of it or not: I for one ended it in 1918 with a feeling of frustration. If the diaries continue to 1933, what happens next? Let us hope we find out, but meanwhile a little more about the city where Tommy lived, and the times he lived through, may be helpful. Glasgow is special, was special and always will be. I should know. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my family were solidly Glasgow. They were of a higher social class than Tommy, though they yo-yoed with the fortunes of the city itself. Various branches went from farm labourers to quarrymen to quarry owners during the great days of the Victorian expansion; the owners of floridly posh new houses — a window for every day of the year in one of them, apparently — and proud members of the middle-class clubs and societies. One was a Unionist Lord Provost, the last of his political line. Others became losers in the years of depression that followed the Great War, when a pie factory, for instance, lost its shipyard worker customers. But they all belonged to the tight, self-confident world of the Second City of the Empire, remembering its glory days when much of the world’s shipping tonnage had been built on the Clyde, and further back when the ‘tobacco lords’ who had established the wealth of the new trading city were laying out grand new squares and crescents. It was a city, like Chamberlain’s Birmingham or the ‘Cottonopolis’ of Manchester, with a very strong sense of itself and its history, utterly unconnected to the airs of the formal capital, London. My own father vividly remembers being shown by his father the sight of the Queen Mary lying half-built and silent in the yards when bad times had arrived; and the veteran soldiers, with waxed ‘Kitchener’ moustaches and empty sleeves or trouser legs pinned up, employed to brush clean the points for Glasgow’s famous trams.

His city, and that of his forebears, was based on technological experiment, audacity in business and a ready supply of cheap labour, coal, steel and water. In 1840, Glasgow was a textile town of some 250,000 people, a vast increase on the previous decades. But by 1900 she was more than three times as big, and surrounded by booming satellite towns. Iron smelting and steel-making combined with the deep estuary connected to the booming Atlantic and imperial trade routes made Glasgow a perfect industrial revolutionary capital. Steamships were built on the Clyde from mid-Victorian times but the rival yards produced competitive pressure which gave Glasgow a world lead in techniques such as screw propulsion, triple and quadruple expansion, high-pressure boilers, turbines and diesel engines. For a century, ‘Clyde-built’ was a global byword for reliability and skill — a memory which lingered on long enough for the engineer on the Starship Enterprise to be ‘Scotty’. This expertise in turn led to other engineering successes, from locomotives and machine tools to sewing machines, bicycles and cars: in the pre-1914 Glasgow of Tommy’s world, the Singer factories were world innovators and the Argyll Motor Works was turning out cars which seemed as likely to dominate world markets as anything made in America. Glasgow was an innovative, aggressive, roiling and cocky place, thick with smoke, noise, the smell of oil and the raucous boasts of chisel-faced city fathers in their stock exchange and their new, grandly built churches. Govanhill, his part of the city, around a mile south of the centre, was one of the poorer districts but far from slum-ridden. Its industry included important locomotive and iron works and its red sandstone apartments were by Edwardian standards relatively spacious as working-class housing. It boasted a fine new Carnegie Library and much admired public baths.

This is not surprising. Glasgow industry sustained a cultural and intellectual self-confidence that has been all but forgotten. Glasgow has always felt oddly American, in the heavy, steel-framed structures and the shape of its public buildings — and still does. The revival churches of ‘Greek’ Thomson are one thing, but the greatest glories of the city for anyone with a taste for the daring are the buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the nearest Britain has ever had to a Gaudí, and a man who made corners of Glasgow as exotic as Gaudí’s Barcelona. Glasgow University never achieved quite the Enlightenment status of Edinburgh but it was a close thing. Glasgow was ancient enough, dating back to a college founded in 1451, and the city had a formidable roll-call of philosophers, scientists, doctors and religious scholars. By the early twentieth century, bright Glasgow students would no more have thought of going south to Oxbridge for their learning than of sailing to Mars. Glasgow, with her Gilbert Scott spire rising high, was as exciting a university as any in the country. Then there were the great institutions, the Mitchell Library and the riotously Gothic Kelvingrove Art Gallery. The ‘Glasgow Boys’ were a school of painters unlike any group elsewhere; and they were followed by Colourists who brought the brightness of the French Fauves to the north, as no English painters of the time quite achieved. All this was going on around Tommy, a mile or two to the west, the cultural life of a city which allowed him, at least, to visit art galleries and carefully laid-out public gardens. Among the smoke and the dirt, there were bright things gleaming.

Glasgow had her own novelists, her own songs, her own orchestral and music-hall traditions, her own favoured holiday resorts, in the southern Highlands or ‘doon the watter’ on the banks of the Clyde estuary. She had her famous and excellent High School for the middle classes and distinctive political traditions. These included, sadly, a vicious sectarianism. For Glasgow was a migrants’ city. She had been little more than a large village before Atlantic trade, and then shipbuilding caused mushrooming growth; so almost every Glaswegian had come from somewhere else. Many, of course, had arrived from other parts of the Scottish lowlands, from labouring, merchant or professional families established earlier in Edinburgh, or the smaller burghs of the country. They would be overwhelmingly Presbyterian, either loyal members of the national Church of Scotland, or members of rival churches which had broken away during the great disruptions of the mid-nineteenth century. Their traditions of serious book-learning and disputation would feed many later politicians, including some of the Marxists for which Glasgow also became famous. Another great migration came from the Highlands, the ‘Teuchters’ much ridiculed by city humorists and on music-hall stages, though the mockery was intermingled with sentimental claims about Hielan’ hames and aboriginal ‘but-and-bens’ (small cottages) in songs by the likes of Harry Lauder. These Highlanders, Macleans, Camerons, MacDonalds and Campbells, were again mostly Protestant but included a sprinkling of Roman Catholics from those islands and small outcrops which had stayed with the old faith.

The third great migration, however, was Irish, mostly Catholic but including — as with Tommy’s family — Protestants who had been ‘settled’ in the north of Ireland but who had returned. Tommy’s father was from Lurgan, not far from Belfast, and he carried his sectarianism to Glasgow where he worked as a railway clerk. He joined a Loyal Orange Lodge. His views are not hard to guess. For the Protestant majority in Glasgow, of all classes, the Catholics were seen as credulous Papist peasants, ‘bog-trotters’ whose loyalty to Scotland or the Empire could never be assumed and whose priests, taking their orders from the Vatican, led them by their whisky-inflamed noses. The ‘Papes’ did not use proper lavatories, had recklessly large families which they could not feed, and were in general treated as a lesser breed. This sectarianism was as poisonous as anything expressed by apartheid-era Boers for black Africans, and just as sharp-edged as the near-identical feelings in Ireland itself. There were Orange Order marches, complete with bowler hats and gloating banners, well into the sixties. In return, the Catholic migrants forged and defended a militant identity of their own, initially based in poor enclaves such as Cowcaddens and Maryhill, with their own football club (Glasgow Celtic was founded in 1887), a disciplined church structure and increasingly assertive membership of the trade union movement. They tended to regard their Protestant fellow workers as deferential fools, dupes of the ruling order, and terminally dull.

So Glasgow was a city divided by religion, as it still is, though less violently these days. It was also, of course, a city divided by class and wealth. The great engineering and factory-owning dynasties, plus their lawyers, doctors and stockbrokers, lived in genuinely grand style in the West End. A mile or two to the east were scattered some of the foulest slums in Europe. The world is still thus divided, but while today’s hedge fund managers, city stars and footballing plutocrats live behind high walls, or in country estates, then Glasgow’s rich and poor literally rubbed shoulders in the streets, cramming the city centre where most of the business was done, and the gossip passed on. It was not the grand terraces, though, but the Glasgow slums, especially the tenement flats of the Gorbals, that have been remembered. In many ways rightly so: these were the dark and dangerous cave-dwellings of razor-wielding gangs and heroically drunken drunks. In fact, the tenement was a sensible and popular style of housing and is still used across much of Scotland. With between three and four storeys, a common stair and flatted apartments, it offered warmth and communal living with enough space for family privacy — well suited to the wet climate and long winters of the country. A good tenement is as intelligent a housing style as a terrace, or a row of semis. What made the Glasgow tenements notorious was simply lack of hygiene and intense overcrowding as the city expanded. Conditions by the mid-nineteenth century were terrible, though no different from the slums of Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds or Birmingham. Yet the large immigrant families, working in industries with terrible safety records, and against the hard-drinking, heavy-smoking culture of the Scots and Irish, resulted in child and adult mortality rates which were shocking even by Victorian and Edwardian standards.

Out of this grew a militant socialism which touches Tommy’s life at key moments, not least when he witnesses the Marxist agitator John Maclean, a man admired by Lenin and made a Communist commissar, returning in triumph from prison. Being Tommy, he is not, of course, much impressed: ‘Saw a most unholy mob of Bolsheviks in town today. It was a procession of some of our enlightened citizens welcoming home [Maclean] (from jail). He is standing for Parliament for the Gorbals. Heaven help us all!’ Most historians believe the stories of Red Clydeside have been exaggerated by later socialists with pickaxes to grind, and it is surely true that Glasgow was never really on the edge of social revolution. But at the time, it was taken very seriously: the war-leader Lloyd George was famously heckled and abused when he addressed trade unionists about letting in less well-qualified labour. Maclean, and some others, had openly opposed the war and been removed from the city to prisons in the east of Scotland. After the war was over, troops and tanks were indeed ordered north at a time when Westminster was jittery about the prospect of British Bolshevism.

Yet the biggest story of Glasgow during the war was the recruitment, maiming and deaths of huge numbers of her citizens. Scots volunteered quickly and in great numbers: Edwardian Scotland was still a comparatively militarised country, with strong regimental traditions and a general pride in the record of Scottish soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. As a result, with some crack regiments, Scotland lost a disproportionately large number of her men. By one estimate she lost 110,000 in all, a fifth of total British losses, rather than an eighth, as her size by population would have suggested. Glasgow herself lost 20,000 men, often soldiers from the slums who formed much of the Highland Light Infantry, though nearby coal-mining and rural areas suffered even more. As in England, the upper and middle classes volunteered early and were cut down early too: Glasgow University lost one in six of her graduates. The pressure on Tommy must have been intense. Yet it was quickly realised that if Britain was to fight and win a long war, she needed her mines and industries, shipyards and offices, to continue to function and a complicated system designed to keep vital workers in place was established. Armbands and badges were provided for key employees so that they would not be harassed in the streets by women bearing white feathers; other badges were produced for those (like Tommy) who had offered to fight but were not yet needed. It was a time of sidelong glances and offensive muttering about slackers and cowards: for Tommy it was a matter of some importance that ‘I have now got my khaki armlet to let folk know I have attested and await the call.’

Unlike the Second World War, this was not really a people’s war — not at least for the British, though it was for many Russians and Germans. The Zeppelin and Gotha raids and the occasional bombardments by German warships against east coast towns are recorded by Tommy but direct danger reached little of the civilian population. In this war, only around 850 civilians died in Britain, as compared to 60,000 in the later conflict. Yet the war affected Tommy and his family, and every other family, in multiple less dramatic ways. It was not simply the friends who left for the fighting, or the growing evidence that the Empire was not performing as well as people had expected. Britain herself rapidly became shabbier, duller and hungrier. Famously, Lloyd George insisted on weaker, more watery beer and introduced tough pub licensing hours to try to deal with the (very real) problem of low productivity caused by drunkenness. Tobacco, as Tommy finds, becomes harder to obtain. Unlike the later world war, this one passed mostly without rationing. Until halfway through it, the Liberal government remained wedded to small-state, free market beliefs and tried hard not to interfere too much. The result was a life of unpredictable shortages, fast rising prices and adulterated food, which provoked riots in some parts of Britain, though not Glasgow.

Yet when Tommy notes in the spring of 1917 that the Germans are trying to starve Britain he is quite right: he may not have known just how close they were coming to success. The U-boat campaigns in the Atlantic had been devastating and Britain came within weeks of having to sue for peace simply for lack of food and oil. It was only a late directive to try the convoy system which saved the day. Meanwhile government action would eventually result in rationing by 1918, while strenuous efforts were made to increase agricultural production at home. In the country, people turned back to snaring rabbits, raiding birds’ nests and growing their own vegetables but in the towns the population struggled with meagre, dull diets featuring the much-hated National Loaf, a soggy, greyish concoction which nevertheless contained more nutrition and fibre than the white loaf everyone preferred. Shortages were everywhere, from coal to clothing. To save energy, street lighting was conserved, theatres closed early and entertainment much restricted; it is notable that Tommy’s most frequent references to entertainment seem to be dubious books from the library, games of cards and walks in the park, rather than nights out in bars or at the cinema.

Women, meanwhile, got their first chance to break into male trades, whether they were the tartan-uniformed bus conductors on the Glasgow trams, or women police officers patrolling parks in search of vice, or female munitions workers. This clearly affects Tommy, as it did most traditionally minded men, though he rarely voices derision and seems to accept that the world is changing fast around him. His wife is often sick, as is his son, and he clearly has few domestic skills, but it is a small, tight, traditional family in which he does his best. Glasgow was notorious for its drunkenness and domestic violence, and indeed across Britain battered women rarely complained to the police about drunken husbands: when they did, they got little sympathy. By those admittedly low standards, Tommy seems to have been a good husband. His wife Agnes’ ill health sick was again typical. Ill health and medicines, mostly ineffective still, feature heavily in these diaries. Mortality rates, particularly in urban Scotland, were shocking. The ravages of so-called Spanish Flu, which took a huge toll of the world just after the war, are well known; but it was a time still when less exotic infections, from measles to whooping cough, killed many. Agnes struggles with mysterious internal pains, lumbago and toothache so excruciating that she talks of killing herself. That was life — sorer, rougher and more dangerous by a country mile than it is today. Tommy notes her troubles and does the heavy lifting, and the cleaning, and does not complain. He is hardly romantic or gushing in his descriptions of Agnes but that is not his style. It is eloquent that his diary suddenly ceased when she died. These were two undemonstrative people who needed and loved one another very much.

So here is a slice of Britain from below, during some of her darkest years, and seen through the prism of the empire’s Second City, and the pen of one of the countless millions who mostly went unrecorded, unsung and unremembered. The message is an individual, human one, the more moving and memorable because it does not fit neatly into a historian’s grand narrative. Here, amid the malfunctioning chimneys, boat excursions, bad food and worse news, the little domestic feuds and distant echoes of hectoring from politicians, is the story of one undistinguished, shrugging, perky, rather loveable man who just wanted to get on with his life, be kind to those around him and — if pushed — ‘do his bit for the Flag’ but please, not something too dangerous and please, not quite yet. Here clear and unmistakable is the voice of that fabled abstraction, the man on the street — not the man on the Clapham Omnibus, as it happens, but the mannie on the Kelvingrove Tram. He isn’t easily taken in. He is only a little sorry for himself. He is not noticeably religious or political. He stands aside from the great enthusiasms and lunacies around him; in his sensible, defiant ordinariness, he is almost Charlie Chaplin-esque. He is the man the rest of them are fighting for. And, luckily perhaps, I for one closed his diary realising that I liked him rather a lot.

Andrew Marr, June 2008

Today Fifth Estate begins an exciting new weekly feature: every Wednesday we will post an extract from a different book. Keep tuned in as we release free material from a diverse range of Press books titles.

Today we feature an extract from Outcasts United – the story of a refugee soccer team, a remarkable woman coach and a small southern town turned upside down by the process of refugee resettlement.In the 1990s, Clarkston, Georgia, USA, became a resettlement centre for refugees and a modern-day Ellis Island for scores of families from war zones in Liberia, Congo, Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The town also became home to Luma Mufleh, an American-educated Jordanian woman who founded a youth soccer team to help keep Clarkston’s boys off the streets. These boys named themselves the Fugees — short for refugees.

On a cool spring afternoon on a football pitch in northern Georgia, two teams of teenage boys were going through their pregame warm-up when the heavens began to shake. The pitch had been quiet save the sounds of footballs thumping against forefeet and the rustling of the balls against the nylon nets that hung from the goalposts. But as the rumble grew louder, all motion stopped as boys from both teams looked quizzically skyward. Soon a cluster of darts appeared in the gap of sky between the pine trees on the horizon and the cottony clumps of cloud vapor overhead. It was a precision flying squadron of fighter jets, performing at an air show miles away in Atlanta. The aircraft banked in close formation in the direction of the pitch and came closer, so that the boys could now make out the markings on the wings and the white helmets of the pilots in the cockpits. Then with an earthshaking roar deep enough to rattle the change in your pocket, the jets split in different directions like an exploding firework, their contrails carving the sky into giant wedges.

On the pitch below, the two groups of boys watched the spectacle with craned necks, and from different perspectives. The players of the home team—a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys from the nearby Atlanta suburbs playing with the North Atlanta Soccer Association—gestured to the sky and wore expressions of awe. The boys at the other end of the pitch were members of an allrefugee football team called the Fugees. Many had actually seen the machinery of war in action, and all had felt its awful consequences firsthand. There were Sudanese players on the team whose villages had been bombed by old Russian-made Antonov bombers flown by the Sudanese Air Force, and Liberians who’d lived through barrages of mortar fire that pierced the roofs of their neighbors’ homes, taking out whole families. As the jets flew by the pitch, several members of the Fugees flinched.

“YOU GUYS NEED to wake up!” a voice interrupted as the jets streaked into the distance. “Concentrate!”

The voice belonged to Luma Mufleh, the thirty-one-year-old founder and volunteer coach of the Fugees. Her players resumed their shooting practice, but they now seemed distracted. Their shots flew hopelessly over the goal.

“If you shoot like that, you’re going to lose,” Coach Luma said. She was speaking to a young Liberian forward named Christian Jackson. Most of the Fugees had experienced suffering of some kind or another, but Christian’s was rawer than most. A month before, he had lost three siblings and a young cousin in a fire at his family’s apartment in Clarkston, east of Atlanta. Christian escaped by jumping through an open window. The smallest of the dead children was found under a charred mattress, an odd detail to investigators. But the Reverend William B. J. K. Harris, a Liberian minister in Atlanta who reached out to the family after the fire, explained that during Liberia’s fourteen years of civil war, children were taught to take cover under their beds during the fighting, as a precaution against bullets and mortar shrapnel. For the typical American child, “under the bed” was the realm of ghosts and monsters. For a child from a war zone, it was supposed to be the safest place of all. Not long before the fire, Luma had kicked Christian Jackson off the Fugees for swearing at practice. Swearing was against her rules. She had warned him once, and then when he swore again, she told him to leave and not to come back. That was how Luma ran her team.

Not long after the fire, Christian showed up at the Clarkston Community Center field where the Fugees practiced, and watched quietly from behind a chain-link fence around the playing area. Under normal circumstances, Luma might have ignored him—she gave second chances, but rarely third. But Luma summoned Christian over and told him he could rejoin the team so long as he understood that he was on probation. If he swore again at practice or during a game, he was gone for good. No exceptions. Christian said he understood. This was his first game back.

Luma shouted to her players to gather around her and gave them their positions—Christian was told to play striker, in attack—and they took the field. Forty or so parents had gathered on the home team’s touchline to cheer on their boys, and they clapped as their sons walked onto the pitch. There was no one on the Fugees’ touchline. Most of the players came from single-parent families, and their mothers or fathers—usually mothers—stayed home on weekends to look after their other children, or else worked, because weekend shifts paid more. Few had cars to allow them to travel to football matches anyway. Even at their home games, the Fugees rarely had anyone to cheer them on.

The referee summoned the Fugees to the line to go over their team and to check their boots and numbers. Luma handed him the team, and the referee wrinkled his brow.

“If I mispronounce your name, I apologize,” he said. He ticked through the names awkwardly but respectfully. When he got hung up on a syllable, the boys would politely announce their own names, then step forward to declare their jersey numbers. A few minutes later, a whistle sounded and the match began. The head coach of the North Atlanta team was a screamer. From the outset, he ran back and forth on his touchline, barking commands to his players in a hoarse bellow: “Man on! Man on!” “Drop it! Drop it!” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” His words echoed over the quiet field like a voice from a public address system. Luma paced silently on her side of the pitch and occasionally glanced over at the opposite touchline with a perturbed look on her face. She was all for instruction, but her method was to teach during practice and during the breaks. Once the whistle blew, she allowed her players to be themselves: to screw up, to take chances, and to create. All the shouting was wearing on her nerves.

When North Atlanta scored first, from a free kick, the team’s coach jumped up and down on the touchline, while across the pitch parents leaped from their folding lawn chairs in celebration: more grating noise. Luma pursed her lips in a tiny sign of disgust and kept pacing, quietly. She made a substitution in the defense but otherwise remained silent.

A few moments later, Christian Jackson shook himself free on the right side, dribbled downfield, and fired a shot into the top right corner of the net: goal. Luma betrayed no reaction other than to adjust her tattered white Smith College baseball cap and to continue pacing. The Fugees soon regained possession; they controlled the ball with crisp passes and moved into range of the goal. A Fugees forward struggled free of traffic to take a shot that flew a good twenty feet over the crossbar and into the parking lot behind the pitch, and soon after, let loose another that was wide by a similar margin. Luma paced. Meanwhile, with each of his team’s shots the North Atlanta coach shouted more instructions to his players, ever more adamantly. He was getting frustrated. If his players had followed his instructions to the word, they could’ve scored against Manchester United. But as it was, they ended the first half trailing the Fugees 3—1.

A 3—1 lead at halftime would have pleased most football coaches. But Luma was seething. Her head down, she marched angrily to a corner of the pitch, the Fugees following behind sullenly. They could tell she was unhappy. They braced themselves for what they knew was coming. Luma ordered them to sit down.

“Our team has taken nine shots and scored three goals—they’ve taken two shots and scored one,” she told them, her voice sharp and strident. “You’re outrunning them, outhustling them, outplaying them—why are you only winning three one?

“Christian,” she said, looking at the boy who sat on the grass with his arms around his knees, his eyes downcast. “This is one of your worst games. I want it to be one of your best games. I want to sit back and watch good football—do you understand?” At that moment, the voice of the North Atlanta coach—still screaming at his players—drifted down the pitch to the Fugees’ huddle. Luma pulled up and turned her narrowed gaze toward the source of the offending noise.

“See that coach?” Luma said, tilting her head in the direction of the screamer. “I want him to sit down and be quiet. That’s when you know we’ve won—when he sits down and shuts up. Got it?” “Yes, Coach,” her players replied.

When the Fugees took the field for the second half, they were transformed. They quickly scored three goals—an elegant cross, chested in with highlight-reel grace by a Sudanese forward named Attak, followed by a cannon shot from Christian from ten yards out. Moments later Christian dribbled into the box and dummied to his left, a move that left the North Atlanta goalkeeper tangled in his own limbs, before shooting to the right: another goal. The opposing coach was still yelling—“Man on! Man on!”—so the Fugees kept shooting. Another goal. And another. When the frustrated North Atlanta players started hacking away at their shins and ankles, the Fugees brushed them off and scored yet again.

At 8—2, the North Atlanta coach, hoarse now nearly to muteness, wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, quietly wandered over to his bench, and sat down, flaccid and defeated. The Fugees tried to stifle their smiles. If Luma felt any sense of satisfaction, it was difficult to discern. She remained perfectly stone-faced. The referee blew his whistle three times to signal the end of the match. The final score was 9—2 Fugees. Christian Jackson had scored five goals. The teams shook hands and the Fugees quickly ran to the bench for water and oranges, which awaited them in two white plastic grocery bags. A few moments later, the referee approached. He looked to be in his late fifties, white, with a graying mustache. He asked Luma if he could address her players. Luma hesitated. She was uncomfortable handing over her team’s attention to anyone, especially a stranger. A little warily, she summoned her team, who gathered in front of the referee some ten yards from their bench.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’d like to thank you. You played the ball the entire game, and you didn’t take any cheap shots. They got frustrated and started fouling, and you didn’t retaliate. So I’d like to commend you on your sportsmanship.” The referee paused for a moment and swallowed hard. “And that was one of the most beautiful games of football I’ve ever seen,” he said.

 

THIS WAS THE first time I’d ever seen the Fugees play. I’d shown up knowing little about the team other than that the players were refugees and the coach a woman, and that the team was based in a town called Clarkston. In a little more than a decade, the process of refugee resettlement had transformed Clarkston from a simple southern town into one of the most diverse communities in America. And yet few in Atlanta, let alone in the world beyond, had taken notice. Mention the “refugees of Clarkston” and even many Atlantans will ask first if you’re referring to those who had arrived in town from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Next, they’ll likely ask, “Where’s Clarkston?” I came away from that first game intrigued. I had just seen a group of boys from a dozen war-ravaged countries come together as a team and create improbable beauty on the football pitch. How? Their coach, an intense and quiet presence who hid beneath the brim of her Smith College baseball cap and emerged only to dole out ferocious bits of inspiration or wisdom, presented another mystery. There was a palpable sense of trust and camaraderie between the players and their coach, and an equally powerful sense of fragility in all the tension and long silences. In fact, things with the Fugees were more fragile than I could have realized that day. The team had no home ground, owing to the myopia of local politicians who felt threatened by the presence of these newcomers. The players’ private lives were an intense daily struggle to stay afloat. They and their families had fled violence and chaos and found themselves in a society with a completely different set of values and expectations. Luma herself was struggling to hold her team—and herself—together. She had volunteered—naively, as she would admit—to help these boys on the field and off, unaware of the scope and intractability of their difficulties: post-traumatic stress, poverty, parental neglect in some cases, grief, shattered confidence, and, in more than one instance, simple anger at having to live the way they did. Luma, I would learn, had no particular background in social or human-rights work. She was just a normal woman who wanted, in her own way, to make the world a better place, and who, it turned out, was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to see that mission through. Luma had vowed to come through for her players and their families or to come apart trying, and on several occasions it seemed the latter outcome was more likely.

But more than anything that day, it was the surprising kinship of these kids from different cultures, religions, and backgrounds that drew me into the story and made me want to understand and tell it. One moment in the game underscored this for me more than any other.

 

THERE WAS A player on the Fugees who was plainly less gifted at football than his teammates—a tiny defender from Afghanistan named Zubaid. In retrospect, it seems he might have been farsighted. When the football rolled his way, he would draw his foot back, swing his leg with all his might, and as often as not, miss the ball entirely, with all the awkward, unalloyed zeal of a batter swinging for the fences and whiffing. After this happened a third or fourth time, I asked Luma what the boy’s story was; his presence on the field was so awkward that it required some sort of explanation. Luma didn’t seem the least bit offended. In fact, she seemed especially proud that Zubaid was on the pitch. He had never missed a practice or one of the afternoon tutoring sessions Luma required of her players, she explained. He was on the pitch simply because by the standards she’d established for the Fugees, he deserved to be.

That was the background, but the specific image that stuck in my mind that day was this: every time the ball rolled Zubaid’s way, his teammates, faster and more agile than he was to a player, never interfered or snuck in to take it away from him. Instead, two or three members of the Fugees would drop in five or so yards behind him, just far enough out of the way so as not to seem conspicuous, to form a protective cordon between Zubaid and the goal. When he missed the ball with an ungainly swing of the leg, they were there to cover for him, but always subtly, and never in a way that demeaned him or his effort.

Eventually, late in the game, one of the North Atlanta forwards broke loose with the ball on Zubaid’s side of the pitch, and he rushed upfield to defend. He extended his leg, and the ball locked between the tops of the two players’ forefeet with a loud thwump. The ball stopped, and the North Atlanta player tumbled forward onto the turf: a perfect tackle. Much to his surprise, it seemed, Zubaid found himself alone, still standing and with possession of the ball, which he quickly passed toward a teammate in midfield. At the next break, when the ball went into touch, Zubaid was set upon by his teammates as though he’d scored the winning goal.

 

SOON AFTER THAT first game, I resolved to pull up stakes in New York and to move to Atlanta to tell the story of the Fugees. I saw a great deal of football over the next few months, but the most moving moments for me—and the most instructive and insightful—came not on the touchline but over hot cups of sugary tea, over meals of stewed cassava or beans and rice, or platters of steaming Afghan mantu, on the sofas and floors of the apartments of refugees in Clarkston. And yet I also found that the game of football itself provided a useful framework for trying to understand how this unlikely group of people had come together. Unlike basketball, baseball, or American football, games that reset after each play, football unfolds fluidly and continuously. To understand how a goal was scored, you have to work back through the action—the sequences of passes and decisions, the movement of the players away from the action who reappear unexpectedly in empty space to create or waste opportunities—all the way back to the first touch. If that goal was scored by a young refugee from Liberia, from a pass by a boy from southern Sudan, who was set up by a player from Burundi or a Kurd from Iraq—on a field in Georgia, U.S.A., no less—understanding its origins would mean following the thread of causation back in time to events that long preceded the first whistle. Relatively quickly, it became clear that the story of the Fugees was also the story of a place, and that place offered as many intriguing mysteries as the boys and their coach. Until relatively recently, Clarkston had been a homogenous, white southern town, situated on 1.1 square miles of Georgia clay about thirteen miles east of downtown Atlanta. The town’s motto spoke to its humble origins: “Small Town . . . Big Heart.” But the resettlement process, which had the effect of cramI ming perhaps a century’s worth of normal migration patterns into roughly a decade, had tested the sentiment behind Clarkston’s motto. Adding to the complication: the newcomers in Clarkston were not a homogenous linguistic or cultural group of, say, Somalis, whose appearance had transformed some small American towns like Lewiston, Maine, but a sampling of the world’s citizens from dozens of countries and ethnic groups. The local high school in Clarkston, once all white, now had students from more than fifty different countries. Cultures were colliding in Clarkston, and the result was a raw and exceptionally charged experiment in getting along.

When I first decided to write about the Fugees, I wasn’t sure how, or even if, the story of the remaking of Clarkston and the story of a refugee football team there would explicitly overlap. But about a month before I planned to leave New York to head to Clarkston to follow the Fugees, I got a clue that the stories were more intertwined than I could have realized. A dispute erupted between the mayor of Clarkston, a retired heating and plumbing contractor named Lee Swaney, and a group of young Sudanese refugees who were playing casual games of football on the only general-use field in the town park. The local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, got wind of the dispute and asked the mayor to explain his stance.

“There will be nothing but baseball down there as long as I’m mayor,” he told the paper. “Those fields weren’t made for soccer.” The mayor’s proclamation had a direct impact on the Fugees, who had recently lost their home ground after a dispute with their hosts at the local community center. Luma had hoped to relocate the Fugees to the town park—the very park from which Mayor Swaney had banned football. And so with only a few weeks to go before trials, she found herself scrambling to find her team a home.

The mayor’s decree hinted at tensions that went well beyond issues of turf management. In Clarkston, football, it seemed, meant something different from what it meant in most places. It was the international game in a town that had had its fill of international influences. The experiment in getting along, it seemed to me, was apparently very much ongoing, and the results would have relevance well beyond Clarkston. The question of how to cope with cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity—that loaded concept—is a pressing one. As the author Mary Pipher wrote about refugees who had been resettled in Nebraska in her book The Middle of Everywhere, “The refugee experience of dislocation, cultural bereavement, confusion and constant change will soon be all of our experience. As the world becomes globalized, we’ll all be searching for home.”

WHEN I THINK about Clarkston, I sometimes visualize the town as a lifeboat being lowered from a vast, multilevel passenger ship. No one aboard chose this particular vessel. Rather, they were assigned to it—the refugees by resettlement officials they never met, the townspeople by a faraway bureaucratic apparatus that decided, almost haphazardly, to put a sampling of people from all over the world in the modest little boat locals thought they had claimed for themselves. In an instant, the boat was set upon a roiling sea, its passengers left to fend for themselves. Everyone on the boat wanted the same thing: safety. But to get there, they would first have to figure out how to communicate with each other, how to organize themselves, how to allocate their resources, and which direction they should row. I imagine their heads bobbing in and out of view between the troughs and crests of the wind-whipped sea as they begin their journey. And I wonder: What will they do? What would I do in that same situation? And: Will they make it?

IT’S HARD TO know exactly where to begin the story of the Fugees. The violence that led young Grace Balegamire from Congo to Clarkston in the early twenty-first century had its origins in the 1870s, when King Leopold II of Belgium established the Free State of Congo, a corporate state that pillaged the region around the Congo River of its natural resources, terrorized the population, and gave way over time to a collection of politically unstable nations divided by ethnic tension. The tribal violence that drove Beatrice Ziaty, a Liberian refugee whose sons Jeremiah and Mandela played on the Fugees, from Monrovia to Clarkston grew ultimately from the decision of a group of Americans in the mid-nineteenth century to relocate freed slaves from the United States after emancipation, a process that created a favored and much-resented ruling tribe with little or no organic connection to the nation it ruled. The story might begin in 1998, when Slobodan Milosevic´ decided to unleash the Yugoslav army on the people of Kosovo and gave his soldiers the go-ahead to rampage through villages in Kosovo such as Kacanik, where Qendrim Bushi’s family had a small grocery store that Serb soldiers torched—though that conflict too had beginnings in age-old political and ethnic tensions in that region. Or one might start near Clemson, South Carolina, where Lee Swaney—the future mayor of Clarkston, Georgia—was born in 1939, well before integration changed the South.

For now, though, let’s begin the story amid the nineteen hills of the ancient city of Amman, Jordan, where Luma Mufleh grew up and where she learned to love a game that would create so much joy and cause so much trouble years later in a little town in Georgia, half a world away.

Aunt Elvie needs a day out. She has the last will and testament, we have the car. It’s an unspoken deal. It is worth helping her out of her seat, and then up the seven steps to the restaurant (one short step at a time, stopping for a break between each riser), to get the guilt off our shoulders. This is only the third time we have taken her out this year.

We drive to a pub that will later be thronged with the young and wannabe-young downing pints and Bacardi Breezers, but at lunchtime it is quiet, almost deathly so — there are just three couples in the place. All the men are wearing cardigans and ties, and judging by their hair the women have made slightly too much of an effort. The staff is appropriately welcoming, jolly even, and the muzak is low enough not to worry Auntie, though she would probably appreciate Shirley Bassey’s greatest hits if she could hear them.

The tables are as polished as the carpet is swirly, the horse-brasses are shining, the fire has even been lit, though on close inspection it turns out to be one of those gas-fed efforts that need no stacking or raking out. We order a shandy and a lemonade and lime. Auntie has a small sherry the colour of a mahogany commode. The menu is partly on laminated paper, partly on a blackboard proudly announcing Today’s Specials, which are, one suspects the same as yesterday’s specials.

There is home-made soup, though of what we’re not told, roast chicken or beef with ‘all the trimmings’, grilled lamb cutlets, and fillet of plaice either grilled or deep-fried with lemon. Someone has rubbed out the first and last letters from the ‘trimmings’, so what we are actually offered in the genteel delights of this suburban public house is roast beef and rimming, but I’m the only one who seems to understand, or indeed even to notice.

I toy with idea of ordering the vegetarian lasagne for a main course, but think better of it, the word ‘roast’ being a temptation too great to pass up in favour of something from a frozen catering-food supplier. My aunt peruses the menu and says how nice it all sounds, but we know she says it only to underline how much she appreciates the chance of looking at a menu at all. She has known she would order the grilled plaice since the alarm on the Teasmade went off this morning.

They make a bit of a fuss of bringing round the bread rolls, which are somehow neither white nor brown but something between the two, making much of the word warm, as in ‘Would anyone like a warm bread roll?’ Having taken a roll, I then find that the soup (vegetable, as it happens) comes with a roll on the side, so I now have two warm, neither brown nor white rolls to deal with.

The meal goes on like this, with the occasional ‘It’s always nice here, isn’t it?’ or ‘Have they changed those curtains since we were here last?’, for an interminable two hours, dawdling through pieces of plaice the size of kites and some rather good chips. The garnish is peas, of course, half a tomato and some cress. We finish with ‘home-made’ pie and custard and a crème caramel. On being asked if we are paying by credit card, my aunt pipes up snappily, ‘Cash, we don’t need any credit, thank you,’ totally misunderstanding the point of American Express.

We then take another age to get down the steps, after a fifteen-minute trip to the loo where she only powders her nose anyway, and slowly drive off home. On the way my aunt says how she wishes we could do this more often. ‘Yes, let’s,’ I say with as much enthusiasm as I can muster. ‘Yes, let’s.’

Nigel’s new book is Eating For England, a celebration of the British at Table. You can visit the book’s mobile website by texting ‘Nigel’ to 80880 – and find audio, video and more…

London, 11 p.m. He scans the bill, checking off each course, each bottle of mineral water, as carefully as if he was doing the annual stocktake. The words ‘service included’ tucked away at the bottom stick in his throat. Had it said ‘not’, life would have been so much easier.

Anyone can work out 15 per cent, even after two glasses of champagne and a bottle of Pinot Noir. Now he’s unsure of whether to tip on top of the service charge or not. He decides to add a bit extra in cash, because he doesn’t want to look mean. Everyone tips on top of the service charge, don’t they? The problem is not whether to tip, but how much.

If there was no tip included it would be easy to work out, but he has already paid 12½ per cent, so what exactly does he put down on the plate now? If he adds another 3 per cent, it is going to look as if he forgot his change; another 10 per cent and he is going to look like a fool and his money. A fiver? A tenner? Or does he risk leaving nothing? The bill does say service is included, after all. It is a fine line between flashy jerk and tight git.

‘How much shall I leave?’

‘It’s included, isn’t it?’

‘Well, yes, but I bet they don’t get all of it.’

The waiter comes to remove the coffee cups. ‘Excuse me, but do you get the service charge, or do they pocket it?’

The words that in his head seemed like those of a nice guy, who cares about the welfare of the person who has looked after him and his date, now hang in the air like a giant fart.

‘Yes, we get the service charge, sir.’

He has been the model diner all evening, and now he feels like a sniping, suspicious weevil. He has accused the waiter’s bosses of ripping off their staff, and what is more, made the waiter look like a loser for accepting the situation. What had been so sweet, in the space of one short sentence has suddenly turned sour.

He compensates by over-tipping and rushes out of the restaurant, promising himself he will get it right next time.

Paris, Brussels, Rome. 11 p.m. He pulls out her chair, she moves towards the door and he casually takes a note from his wallet and slips it on the table. The waiter clocks it, smiles, nods and picks it up as discreetly as if he were brushing a crumb from his jacket. The note was neither mean nor cringingly excessive. It was not seen by his guest, and was done in a single, effortless move. Deal done.

Nigel’s new book is Eating For England, a celebration of the British at Table. You can visit the book’s mobile website by texting ‘Nigel’ to 80880 – and find audio, video and more…

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been named winner of this year’s Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

She beat five other contenders for the women-only award. Adichie’s novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is her second work and set during the Biafran War of the 1960s, and was also selected as a Richard and Judy book this year.

Half of a Yellow Sun tells the story of people caught up in the unfolding political turmoil in west Africa, whose loyalties are acutely tested when troops advance on the dusty university town they inhabit.

If you haven’t had a chance to read the book that Judy Finnigan described as one of the best books she’d ever read, here’s a good start.

First chapter and exclusive extra materials for Half of a Yellow Sun (for non-commercial use only)

PLUS
Read masses of praise about the book from people on the Guardian blog here.

Hello again. My new novel, Notes from an Exhibition, the story of a damaged family and the mad genius mother at its heart, is published next summer.

Last week I sketched out some notes following the novel’s development. This week, as promised, I’m posting the book’s first chapter to see what you think – 7 months before it reaches the bookstores. If this whets your appetite, you’ll find a further chapter at www.galewarning.org in the revamped Latest Title section.

Free download of the first chapter of Notes from an Exhibition.

The perfect pizza oven is a work of art, heated to 500? Fahrenheit, designed to give a combination of air rolling over the top of the pizza, while the bricks underneath seal the base immediately and it becomes so crisp that when it comes out of the oven and you cut a slice, it will be completely ?rm. I’m not saying anything that has a thick base of dough topped with tomato and cheese is bad – in fact, the kids love it; it’s just not pizza.

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Rag?raditional meat sauce ? is best with fresh egg pasta, especially tagliatelle or pappardelle, but not with spaghetti, which is too thin to hold the chunks of meat. You can also serve it with short pasta, such as penne or farfalle; in fact, when the meat is minced (as in the case of beef and pork), it works better with these pastas, and also with fusilli. When you make rag?h wild boar or game, which is cooked on the bone to retain the ?avour, and then ?aked, the meat has a different consistency which will coat long pasta, such as pappardelle or tagliatelle, better. Sometimes, too, we use rag?a ?lling for ravioli.

Each region of Italy has its favourite rag?metimes you will even ?nd a mixture of veal, pork and beef all in one sauce. In Toscana, where my sous chef Federico comes from, they like to add chicken liver to pork or beef rag? Locanda we vary the rag?ording to the season: so sometimes it might be venison or kid (baby goat) ? which we get just after Christmas.

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The BBC’s Ten O’Clock News last night featured an undercover report from China on the sale of organs taken from executed prisoners. Organs from death row inmates are sold to foreigners who need transplants. China’s health ministry did not deny the practice, but said it was reviewing the system and regulations.

Quite separate from the debate over the death penalty and what crime warrants it, the practice of removing organs from the bodies of executed prisoners raises ethical questions: are these donations made voluntarily or under duress? To what extent does such organ harvesting encourage miscarriage of justice? Also – and perhaps you’re surprised that fifthestate even asks – under what conditions are the organs removed, before or after death? A witness account of one such public execution held nearly 30 years ago in 1978, given to fifthestate by writer Yiyun Li, makes it necessary to at least pose this question.

PDF of Yiyun Li’s article ‘What has That To Do With Me?’

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I know that many people feel nervous about brains – because either they make them feel squeamish or the BSE crisis has made them scared. If we look back into history, though, we can see that a very large proportion of the world’s population has been eating things like this for thousands of years.

I really believe we should eat everything from an animal; it doesn’t make sense to eat only ?llets and steaks, which make up only a small percentage. In Italy, just as I feel salumi represents the traditional food of the people, so too do the recipes for brains, kidneys and feet, since the prime cuts were for the rich people only.

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If we want to have a proper connection with our meat, we have to do everything we can to keep the tradition of good butchers’ shops alive. And I mean butchers of quality, not the ones who can’t tell you where their beef or chickens come from, or who are just trying to compete with the supermarkets by cutting their prices.

In Italy, butchers’ shops mostly still do well, because people are concerned about traceability. Just as a tomato isn’t just a tomato to an Italian, we are also very choosy about the meat we eat.

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