eucalyptus and casuarina trees, its poinsettias and lantana, zinnias and plumbago, the banyan, the bamboo, the bougainvillea, the arum lilies. More language, defining language, language that provides a child with that other crucial dimension – what you see is expanded into what you hear.
I am trying to see
then
against the wisdoms of
now
, to look at the climactic points of the last century, to fish out what it felt like to be around at that point, if possible, and set that against the long view, the story now told, the arguments and the verdicts.
The experience of childhood presents the greatest challenge. It is in one sense crystal clear, in another sense irretrievable. It is the smell of crushed eucalyptus leaves, the crash of waves against the stone rampart of the Corniche in Alexandria, the shrapnel trophy gathered at an air raid there, the cool grip on my finger of the chameleon I have found in the garden. But it is also gone, it cannot be recovered. It is swamped, drowned out by adult knowledge. That child self is an alien; I have still some glimmer of what she saw, but her mind is unreachable: I know too much, seventy years on.
That war – The War – is packed away into books, and I read with fascination. It is history now, and not packed tidily, laid to rest, because there is nothing tidy or restful about history. The battle of Alamein has been differently fought, decade by decade. Did Montgomery simply take over plans originated by Auchinleck? Had Auchinleck intended a withdrawal of the Eighth Army to Khartoum and Palestine, if need be? The subsequent analyses chew over reputations, strategies, who said what to whom, why this happened, why that did not. Language illuminates, once more: “I am fighting a terrific battle with Rommel,” writes Montgomery, sidelining a few hundred thousand others, “. . . a terrific party and a complete slogging match.” And, for me, I hear again the Cairo chatter of 1942: so-and-so is in the bag, someone else bought it when his tank brewed up.
The battle – or battles, depending on the analysis – of Alamein turned the tide of the desert war and stopped Rommel’s advance into Egypt; that much is generally agreed. If it had not – well, at the most extreme estimate, the entire course of the war might have run differently, and possibly disastrously for the Allies. The Axis forces could have swept up through Palestine into Syria, Iran, Iraq, the oilfields there that must have been Hitler’s target. If it had not – at a purely personal level, we would have lost our home, and my father, who stayed in Cairo when my mother and I went to Palestine along with other British women and children as Rommel advanced, would have been interned. It was said that our house a few miles outside Cairo had been earmarked for Rommel’s retreat. So it would have been the German commander and his staff officers sipping gin and tonic on the veranda of an evening, instead of my parents and their friends, and diving into the large, raised concrete tank that was grandly called our swimming pool, and fraternizing with our dog, which was, conveniently, a dachshund.
I have written elsewhere of those years, of how it seemed to a nine/ten-year-old. I can still see it thus – eyes screwed up, peering backward – but the effect is refracted now by time and discussion. The language that was once normal seems archaic; the clipped upper-class diction of the day startles me – the voices of news bulletins, of old films – can that really once have been familiar? The background clamor of the Libyan campaign – the army convoys on the desert road to Alexandria, the searchlight battery in the fields near our house, the soldiers on the streets of Cairo, the talk of the next big push – is reduced now to the cold print of the books on my shelves. I can read about what happened; about what they say happened.
Keith Douglas, soldier poet who fought at Alamein and was killed in Normandy, aged twenty-four,
I am trying to see
then
against the wisdoms of
now
, to look at the climactic points of the last century, to fish out what it felt like to be around at that point, if possible, and set that against the long view, the story now told, the arguments and the verdicts.
The experience of childhood presents the greatest challenge. It is in one sense crystal clear, in another sense irretrievable. It is the smell of crushed eucalyptus leaves, the crash of waves against the stone rampart of the Corniche in Alexandria, the shrapnel trophy gathered at an air raid there, the cool grip on my finger of the chameleon I have found in the garden. But it is also gone, it cannot be recovered. It is swamped, drowned out by adult knowledge. That child self is an alien; I have still some glimmer of what she saw, but her mind is unreachable: I know too much, seventy years on.
That war – The War – is packed away into books, and I read with fascination. It is history now, and not packed tidily, laid to rest, because there is nothing tidy or restful about history. The battle of Alamein has been differently fought, decade by decade. Did Montgomery simply take over plans originated by Auchinleck? Had Auchinleck intended a withdrawal of the Eighth Army to Khartoum and Palestine, if need be? The subsequent analyses chew over reputations, strategies, who said what to whom, why this happened, why that did not. Language illuminates, once more: “I am fighting a terrific battle with Rommel,” writes Montgomery, sidelining a few hundred thousand others, “. . . a terrific party and a complete slogging match.” And, for me, I hear again the Cairo chatter of 1942: so-and-so is in the bag, someone else bought it when his tank brewed up.
The battle – or battles, depending on the analysis – of Alamein turned the tide of the desert war and stopped Rommel’s advance into Egypt; that much is generally agreed. If it had not – well, at the most extreme estimate, the entire course of the war might have run differently, and possibly disastrously for the Allies. The Axis forces could have swept up through Palestine into Syria, Iran, Iraq, the oilfields there that must have been Hitler’s target. If it had not – at a purely personal level, we would have lost our home, and my father, who stayed in Cairo when my mother and I went to Palestine along with other British women and children as Rommel advanced, would have been interned. It was said that our house a few miles outside Cairo had been earmarked for Rommel’s retreat. So it would have been the German commander and his staff officers sipping gin and tonic on the veranda of an evening, instead of my parents and their friends, and diving into the large, raised concrete tank that was grandly called our swimming pool, and fraternizing with our dog, which was, conveniently, a dachshund.
I have written elsewhere of those years, of how it seemed to a nine/ten-year-old. I can still see it thus – eyes screwed up, peering backward – but the effect is refracted now by time and discussion. The language that was once normal seems archaic; the clipped upper-class diction of the day startles me – the voices of news bulletins, of old films – can that really once have been familiar? The background clamor of the Libyan campaign – the army convoys on the desert road to Alexandria, the searchlight battery in the fields near our house, the soldiers on the streets of Cairo, the talk of the next big push – is reduced now to the cold print of the books on my shelves. I can read about what happened; about what they say happened.
Keith Douglas, soldier poet who fought at Alamein and was killed in Normandy, aged twenty-four,
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