Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of grandparenting

It’s not the first time we’ve been accompanied on a grandparenting visit by Luci and Toffe, the poodles who kindly allow us to share their home with them, in return for regular deliveries of food. 

Grandparenting visits take us to Hoyo de Manzanares, in the hills north of Madrid, to see, and help care for, two grandkids, and their overworked parents. We took Luci and Toffee on the current visit. And this is the first time that Matilda, who has now reached the advanced age of two years and two months, has felt fairly comfortable with them. 

They have, indeed, become a new source of fun for her. Well, I say ‘they’, but it’s really Toffee that has absorbed her attention. Luci’s a little older and a great deal more cautious. She’s clearly spent enough time with Matilda and her brother Elliott, who has now attained the ripe old age of six months, not to feel that they’re in any sense strangers. But she still prefers to hang back a bit, and not get too close to those strange creatures, human puppies, with their unpredictable behaviour.

Toffee knows no such reticence. “Human puppies?” she says, “Give me more of them. You can never have too many. Especially if they’re ready to play.”

Granddad enjoying a little quality time with Elliott
Toffee sees no reason why she shouldn't be involved

Well, Elliott maybe needs a little while to really get into those games. It might be helpful if, say, he knew how to walk. Matilda, on the other hand, is nearly ready for them. She’s just a trifle nervous still. After all, Toffee does rather like to think of herself as an assault poodle, despite being smaller than our cat, and maybe that colossal size, at the level of her heart and soul, despite her diminutive physical size, communicates itself to Matilda.

Even so, there was a breakthrough on this visit. On the very day of our arrival, Matilda was introduced to the sheer joy of walking Toffee on her lead. Even when she got tired – and Toffee too, since on walks her small size sometimes overwhelms her huge heart – we put Matilda in her buggy with Toffee on her lap. Joy! Matilda didn’t so much gurgle her delight as express it in sudden bursts of laughter. She laughed out loud, in fact. Or lolled, as I suppose we should say these days.

Toffee joy for Matilda

Elliott was less excited by events 
at the other end of his (shared) buggy

Both children now attend the local infant school. “At six months?” I hear you cry. Yep, the Spanish like to start them young. Matilda’s already in her second year, the last at the present school. Next year, when she’ll be a big girl of three, it’ll be time to move on to the next stage of her education, the infant/primary school. 

Her present school goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure the children have a learning experience that includes a high proportion of fun. At one point, as I’ve described before, they issued all the kids with flour and everyone got covered with the stuff, starting with the teacher. Another time, they’d brought in a huge collection of leaves for the children to play, presumably with the aim that they learn what autumn’s all about (or otoño: one of the great benefits of this kind of school to immigrant families like our own is that the kids are immersed in the language from a very young age).

After the school Halloween party
Matilda and Elliott with Mamama
(as well call grandma) and Daddy

Today, the last weekday before Halloween, the whole school was given over to the kids having fun as skeletons, ghouls, zombies or anything else monstruous enough to be associated with the eve of that great Christian festively, All Souls’ Day. It always amuses me that Halloween, this import from the US with its far more widespread attachment to Christianity than Europe generally shows, has converted a solemn festival dedicated to our dead and departed into a major children’s day of witches, undead and various ghosts, straight out of the pages of a comic strip.

Is the Bible really still as important to the American soul as Marvel comics?

The result of this active and celebratory day is that the children came back pretty exhausted. Matilda was off for a swimming lesson later, but in the meantime she needed to rest a little, to get her breath back. And what better way to do that than to have granddad read her a story (in Spanish, no less)? And how could it possibly be better than if, as well as granddad sitting on the chair to read Matilda her story, they were also accompanied by Toffee and Luci?

A quiet moment for Matilda
with Granddad, Toffee and Luci

I’m glad we brought the dogs with us this time. Their presence feels like a perfect ingredient to ensure the trip’s. A real enhancement to the grandparenting mission.

My father's war: I keep on tracking

For the centenary of my father Leonard’s birth, on 15 September, I spent some time trying to piece together his experiences in World War 2.

The way I left things then, he’d not long turned nineteen, and was living in London after having escaped Brussels, where he’d spent his childhood, just ahead of the invading army of Nazi Germany. In London, he’d witnessed the great air battles of the Blitz from the ground, while waiting to be called for service in the Royal Air Force, for which he’d volunteered. That only happened “after November 1940”, according to records of the War Office (yes, the euphemistic term “Defence Department” wasn’t yet in use).

He was young and he’d watched planes dogfighting over London. Fighter pilots were glamorous and flavour of the month. “Never in the field of human conflict,” proclaimed Winston Churchill in tribute to the pilots who’d defeated the Luftwaffe’s attacks, “was so much owed by so many to so few.” It was probably inevitable that my father would set his sights on flying fighters himself.

First, however, he had to get through basic training. That wasn’t easy. Brought up in a French-speaking environment, his English was sometimes a little stilted and eccentric. Queuing for his uniform with other recruits, he gave his build as “slender”.

The sergeant in front of him turned to the next one along. 

“Did you hear that? We’ve got a young gentleman here who’s ‘slender’. How are we going to cope with him?”

Slender in uniform
Miserable in basic training

It was the start of several hellish weeks for Leonard as, in his own account, the air force deliberately broke down his personality and then rebuilt it in its own image. The process brought him close to suicide.

There was some light relief. He registered himself as an atheist, even though in truth he was more of an agnostic. It meant he’d never be bothered about attending Sunday services. Four of his fellow recruits, however, thought they’d be clever and registered themselves as Muslim. They were woken at dawn the next day and marched out into the freezing cold where four prayer mats had been laid out.

“Mecca’s that way,” a sergeant told them, “get on with it.”

Four of the swiftest conversions to Christianity took place immediately afterwards.

It surprises me that basic training took so long, but it isn’t until 22 February 1942 that Leonard makes an entry in the RAF ‘Pilot’s Flying Logbook’ I inherited from my mother. It records initial training at a flying school near Cambridge, in a Tiger Moth, the iconic biplane still in use for training in the forties.

On 19 April, he took his first solo flight.

Then there’s another long gap, but one that’s easier to explain. The US had joined the war following the Pearl Harbor attack the previous December. Where before US support to Britain had been limited and discreet, now it was open and rapidly scaling up. Leonard was sent to the US Naval Reserve Aviation Base at Detroit. 

I wish I’d asked him about his crossing of the Atlantic, where undefeated German U-boats still prowled. At any rate, I know he made it safely.

Joane Nowiaki from Detroit

There was, inevitably, a girl in Detroit. Joane Nowiaki, a winningly appropriate name for a part of the US with a significant Polish population. She sent him a picture of herself with best wishes for Christmas and the New Year, so clearly however deep or not the relationship had been, it at least survived even his departure from Detroit.

For by the autumn of 1942, Leonard was gone. He told me he fell ill at Detroit. I don’t know what he had, but it kept him out of action for several weeks. When he asked to restart his pilot training, he was told that he was too far behind. Instead he was transferred to a course for bomber navigators.

“I was disappointed,” he told me, “but I think they were right. They realised before I did that I’d be a far better navigator than I’d ever be a pilot.”

The last entry in his ‘Pilot’s Log Book’ is dated 24 August 1942. His new ‘Flying Log Book’, for navigator training, has a first entry on 20 September. By then he was in Canada, at London, Ontario.

It was there that he and and a group of fellow airmen, returning from a training mission, decided it would be fun to bomb a car driving across a frozen lake. Not with live bombs, of course. The plane had no toilet so the men relieved themselves into cardboard cylinders. They lent out of an open door on the plane and flung urine-filled cylinders at the car, as the pilot brought them down as low as he dared. 

I suppose that’s what one might call young men pissing around. An interesting object lesson in one of the lesser-known dangers of warfare: what happens when you give young men powerful weapons to play with. Leonard was 21 at the time, and I’m sure his fellow trainees would have been of much the same age.

There is, by the way, no record in his log book of this event.

There was, of course, another woman. This was Leslie Lister. Leslie and Joane: either would have made his existence profoundly different, and denied both my brother and me ours.

Leslie Lister from London, Ontario

The front page of the log book records Leading Aircraftsman LAM Beeson’s certification as a navigator on 30 December 1942. That’s a little over two years after his service started. Is that a tribute to the care the RAF took training its personnel, even in wartime, or a sad example of British slowness in reacting to a national emergency? You decide.

In any case, training was far from over. There’s another long gap, part of it covering his return to England. In May, training starts again. He’s now with 196 Squadron. So Leonard is flying large planes, Stirling bombers, though bombing was a small element of his training. Instead, it focused on the squadron’s main task: dropping supplies to resistance groups, ferrying paratroops or towing Horsa gliders. 

A key event occurred on 20 July: Leonard’s first flight with Flight Sergeant (later Pilot Officer) W L Marshall as pilot. He was in the Royal Australian Air Force, seconded to the RAF in England (“they had dark blue uniforms, which went down really well with the girls,” my Dad told me, a little wryly, I felt).

Royal Australian Air Force men in 196 Squadron
(Australian War Memorial photo)
Posing in front of one of the Stirling bombers
W L Marshal is third from the right in the back row

He told me how crew selection had gone.

“They brought a bunch of us together,” my father explained, “pilots, navigators and radio operators. ‘Sort yourself into crews’, they told us. Eventually, there were just three of us left in the room. I walked over to Marshall and said, ‘it looks like we’ll be flying together’. Then we went across to the radio operator and told him the same.”

The crew worked well despite that inauspicious start. Only Leonard’s and one other completed the war without a loss.

Training flights went on into 1944. Then, on 5 February 1944, they got really serious. “No I” reads the log book entry, for his first mission, . “Low level op. – France”. They took off at 20:40, so it was the first of many night missions.

Bombing cars with urine-filled cylinders was a thing of the past. Finding girlfriends in Detroit or in London, Ontario too. It had taken over three years, but now things had become very real.

But that’s caught me right up. That’s as much as I can reconstruct of his war time life before going into action. 

The rest of the story of Leonard’s war service I’ve told before.

Maid in America

In season 2, episode 1 of The West Wing, we get a flashback to the time when Josh Bartlett, President for most of the series, is beginning his run for the White House. He tells a poorly attended meeting in his home state of New Hampshire that:

Today, for the first time in history, one in five Americans living in poverty are children. One in five children live in the most abject, dangerous, hopeless, backbreaking, gut wrenching, poverty. One in five. And they're children. 

That’s as good a reason as any to vote Democrat in the US. Because surely nothing can be so shameful as that desperate, “gut wrenching” poverty, in the world’s biggest economy. It’s true that there are twelve nations with a higher Gross Domestic Product (basically national income) per head, topped by oil and gas rich Qatar. Still at 13th, the US GDP is three and a half times the world average.

That’s at purchasing power parity, in other words taking account of variations in cost of living around the globe.

Somehow, such high income per head suggests that no one ought to be poor in the US. But they are. Boy, they are.

That’s what makes watching the Netflix series Maid so interesting. And I say “interesting” advisedly. It might even be fascinating. But for me at least, it’s hard to describe it as enjoyable for a great deal of the time. Harrowing would come a lot closer to the truth.

Margaret Qualley as Alex with Rylea Nevaeh Whittet as Maddy

It’s based on an autobiographical account by Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive. The central character, Alex, superbly played by Margaret Qualley, escapes an abusive relationship with her two-year old daughter, Maddy. To be honest, the series is worth watching just to see Rylea Nevaeh Whittet, who was then four, playing the child – her performance is outstanding.

There’s also poignancy in Margaret Qualley being the daughter of Andie MacDowell who is also her mother in the series. Mother and daughter playing mother and daughter works wonderfully well. It adds to the poignancy of watching the show.

The trouble is that Alex falls between many, many stools. The abuse didn’t leave her injured, so she didn’t feel she could go to the police. All sorts of doors to benefit payments or housing are therefore closed to her. There are forms of assistance she can get if she has a job, but without the assistance, it’s hard to find work.

Throughout the series, there’s a powerful sense of how the poverty trap, once you’re caught in it, leaves you paralysed, with few if any ways out. If nothing else, any escape requires, as a minimum, completion of a huge amount of paperwork, and for that, all sorts of criteria have to be met. Assistance is given grudgingly and made extremely difficult to obtain.

I think that’s what I found most painful to watch. The sense that you’re offered no way of breaking the cycle. That the poverty, as Bartlett says, really is “abject, dangerous, hopeless, backbreaking” and “gut wrenching”.

As the title suggest, she finds work as a ‘maid’, the euphemism for a cleaner. It’s work and it allows her to earn an income, of sorts. But even that it is minimal, and it puts her at the mercy of a great many people, whether bureaucrats, employers or clients. Stephanie Land powerfully challenges the notion that all it takes is hard work to make it in the States. As the title of her autobiography suggests, she worked extremely hard, but that left her in acute poverty.

On top of these difficulties, there’s the ex-partner with whom she also has to contend. That involves lawyers, who are either far too expensive, or of limited value.

Not all of the difficulties are external, of course. There is a brutal honesty to the story and, without wanting to give any spoilers, I can tell you that there were many occasions when I shouted out “why the heck did she do that? All she had to do was” ... something else. But that some of the injuries are self-inflicted doesn’t reduce my compassion for her, especially as I couldn’t help feeling that had she been living more easily, in more comfort and above all, more security, she probably wouldn’t have inflicted them on herself.

At the risk of issuing a slight spoiler, let me tell you – in case everything I’ve said so far sounds too bleak to tempt you to watch the show – that the writer now has a bestseller to her name, with a highly successful TV series made from it. So you can probably guess that Maid didn’t leave me feeling suicidal.

But it did give me a powerful insight into that strange paradox: how does a nation as wealthy as the United States have an appallingly high number of people living in the most abject poverty?

And, worst of all, why are so few people getting serious about doing anything much about it?

Retired or just tired again

Retirement, they say, is a time of quiet relaxation and restful contemplation of life. I’ve discovered, however, that it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I’m just tired. That’s because I’m not sure I’ve ever been busier than I am now. It doesn’t matter that most of the things we do are for pleasure. They’re just as exhausting.

Take walking, for instance. That seems to be our main form of exercise these days. It takes me back to my schooldays, when one of my main pastimes was walking on Dartmoor. Moor walking, we called it, and I’ve never done more walking.

These days I’m not quite up to the distances I did then. It’s one thing to be seventeen, another to be four times that age. Sadly, it doesn’t give you four times the energy. Where once I walked 25 or 30, these days I’m doing well to manage 15 or 16, and even that’s a cheat: the 25 or 30 were miles, in England, the 15 or 16 are kilometres, in Spain.

Still, it keeps me in form. I know that because afterwards my feet hurt, my back feels bent out of shape and my legs are stiff. As a good Puritan Englishman, I know that if it hurts that much, it must be doing me good.

We’ve just got back from four days of hiking in the spectacular mountains of North Eastern Spain. Not the Pyrenees. The mountains we visited are rather lower, though you could have fooled my legs.

Caves are great

So are strangely eroded rock faces

Clouds can do curious things too

Water can be impressive...

... especially in lakes

Walking in glorious landscape was the principal, certainly the ostensible, reason for the trip. We got plenty of that. But to be honest, just being with the group was pleasure enough. That’s down to the organiser, Javi as he’s known (pronounce that initial J like the final sound in ‘loch’ and the V as a B, and you won’t be far off). You may remember him. He’s skilled at bringing together people, most of whom are a delight to know.

Javi, our intrepid leader

And the team (most of it)
It was the company that made the trip

What’s more, almost all were Spanish. The four days with them constituted a serious immersion course. We’re immigrants keen on assimilation, so it was great to get that boost to the slow progress we’re making in learning the language. 

Are you familiar with Murphy’s Law? The general principle that if something can possibly go wrong, it will? If, for instance, you drop a piece of bread on the floor, it’s bound to fall buttered side down. There’s a great story about all that.

“Just what is Murphy’s Law?” a schoolkid asks a teacher at a dining table.

“I’ll show you,” says the teacher. 

He quickly butters a slice of bread and throws it across the room. It falls to the floor. But it falls butter side up, not down.

“Now that,” says the teacher, “is Murphy’s Law.”

Murphy’s law hit us when our coach boke down. That was the coach that got us to the lovely province of Soria in the first place, and then took us each day to the start of our walks. As far as the walking was concerned, that didn’t matter, since there are plenty of great hikes and we went for one close to where the coach had failed. 

The far bigger problem was that this was the day of our great lunch, the one booked in a restaurant famous for its lamb stew. Since the hotel where we were staying didn’t enjoy or, sadly, deserve the same high reputation for its cooking, we really didn’t want to miss that meal.

Fortunately, this is Spain, and such problems are merely small flaws in the bountiful tapestry of life, whose splendid colours and joyful patterns minor inconveniences only underline. Eventually, another coach showed up and took us to the restaurant. We were late, but ‘late’ is a concept that needs careful interpretation in Spain.

I haven’t yet entirely freed myself of the Anglo-Saxon definition of ‘morning’ as ending at 12:00 noon (“12 pm” as it’s often called these days, a curious usage since “pm” means after 12:00). In Spain, “morning” seems to mean “up to the time when I have lunch”. Now a lot of Americans regard 12:00 as the appropriate time for lunch (some even start earlier), and many in England would go for a time around 1:00. Spanish restaurants don’t even open that early. I once tried to book a table at 1:30 in a restaurant that claimed to open then, only to be asked whether we could make it 2:00 instead.

Still, even the Spanish reckon the morning’s over, and lunchtime well and truly arrived, by 2:00. Certainly by 2:30. So showing up at 3:30 rather pushed the definition to its limits. Or beyond.

It also meant that we finished lunch at just before 7:00. Again, I know that I’m only applying alien (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) habits here, but that I feel is beginning to stray into what I would call dinner time. 

Long table for the long lunch

Of course, to the Spanish, that’s far too early for dinner. But it would pose a different existential question: with lunch ending so late, how would we get time for a siesta before bedtime?

Besides, we still had a duty to perform that day. Like last year, we had to collect sloes to make the traditional drink of Patxarán, which involves steeping the fruit in aniseed liquor. It was getting dark. So we had to be quick with the sloes.

Quick sloe hunt

No one felt like dinner that evening, so instead there was a group singalong. I have to say that my sons, always delightfully supportive to their poor father, long ago made it clear to me that I was completely wrong to think I sang badly. The truth was far worse than that. 

I had a term’s singing classes at school. At the beginning of the following term, I turned into one of the longer corridors in the school and spotted my singing teacher appearing at the other end. I’ve never seen anyone execute so smooth, graceful or rapid an about-turn and disappear back up the side corridor he’d emerged from. 

I got the message.

So I didn’t stay for the sing-song, fine though the voices were. Instead I wrote my first draft of this post. And then turned in. I knew next day was going to be the toughest of the lot. One of those walks where you struggle uphill for ages, only to find yourself at the bottom of the steepest climb of all. In this case, a fine little peak with a good scramble over rocks at the top.

Top of the world (well, locally at least)

Still. I felt at the top of the world when I got there. The wonderful views, in excellent company, took my breath away. Just like getting there left me breathless.

Ah, the joys of quiet retirement.

Faerie friend’s breakthrough

It’s a great pleasure to count Clarissa Pattern among my friends. Not that we’ve actually met or anything. I mean, not met in the old-fashioned sense of being in the same place at the same time and, say, shaking hands or having a conversation face to face. Instead, we’ve met and conversed on-line, Facebooking and messengering (not to be confused with mere messaging) in this Facebook age.

It worked too. We read each other’s writings. Multiple times, as we submitted successive drafts to each other. Reading and re-reading the same material slightly modified may sound deadly dull, but it’s wonderful to see how writing evolves and takes more consistency over time.

More wonderful still, though, is when a friend like Clarissa breaks through and gets a book out there. Well, many of us can get a book out. What makes hers a breakthrough is that it’s more than a book, it’s a good book.

Clarissa Pattern with her book
Airy Nothing

Now I’m not a Young Adult (the capital letters are de rigueur, as we literary people like to say). An adult, for sure, since I reckon 68 qualifies for the word. But young would be pushing it, unless being seventeen four times over counts.

Even so, I’ve read plenty of Young Adult books since becoming an old adult (no caps, notice – none are needed for such as reach these ages). 

Actually, re-reading those words, I probably haven’t read above a dozen. They just feel like plenty. More than plenty, indeed. In some cases, just one is more than plenty and more than I can stomach.

A lot of them follow an old, banal track. A teenager lives in a world inhabited by all sorts of fantastical creatures, some of them evil and horrific, others good but not always effectual. Writers of YA fiction, as we like to call it in the trade, tend to be equal-opportunity creatives these days, offering the main role pretty much as often (in my experience) to a girl as to a boy. As often as not, he or she has a quest to undertake, usually involving finding something – a gem, a mirror, a sword – or destroying something – a ring, a horn, a sword.  They generally undertake the quest unaided, since the forces of good aren’t that forceful, or the evil lord – or lady, see comment about equal opportunities above – has often neutralised their power in some diabolical way.

This means it’s clear from the outset that the quest is hopeless. There’s no way our hero can pull it off. Which is unfortunate because if the quest fails, the whole world will be (delete as applicable):

• plunged into perpetual darkness
• consumed by fire
• devastated by pestilence
• all of the above

Which is why it’s so extraordinary that, against all the odds, and to everyone surprise bar the reader’s, the hero does, after all, pull it off triumphantly.

Immensely tedious. Unoriginal. Predictable. Turgid. Painful to finish.

Not so Clarissa’s Airy Nothing (see my review here; the book’s available on Amazon). First of all, there’s the setting. That’s London in late Elizabethan times, with Shakespeare going great guns at the Globe Theatre. Her descriptions of the city, and she’s obviously done her research though without chucking it in your face, bring the place disconcertingly to life. I swear I thought I could smell the filth in the streets, hear the noise and share the characters’ apprehension about the likely criminal intent of many of the people around them.

And who were the characters? The main one is John. That, you’ll note, is a male name. Clarissa uses male pronouns for him too. But John belongs to the in-between, and he’s certainly in between genders. Which works out well when, eventually, he turns up at the Globe Theatre and finds himself enrolled among the actors there. This was a time when women were forbidden to appear on public stages, so theatre directors like Shakespeare used boys to play women. And in his other, and greater, role as playwright, Shakespeare often has women disguise themselves as men. 

Boys playing women playing men. It’s a perfect environment for John, with his fluidity in gender.

As it’s a perfect environment in its ambivalence between what’s real and what’s conjured. We believe in the play while we watch it, and return with a bump to a different reality when it ends. As John lives between two worlds, since he’s one of those rare people who can see the faerie world as well as the real one. That other world is fickle and its help unreliable, but when he has it, whether to assist him achieve tasks or simply revealing what lies behind the surface of everyday reality, it’s invaluable.

There is a quest, but it isn’t the corny one of so many YA stories. He’s looking for the faerie queen. Does he find her? From my reading of the book, I think he does, but just as John is an ambivalent character, so Clarissa lets ambivalence drift subtly like a mist through the book, so nothing is cut and dried or simple. You’ll have to read it to decide for yourself.

In parallel with the quest is the friendship that develops between John and the street vagabond and petty thief he meets in London, Jack. A friendship that develops into more than that as the novel advances. So you increasingly wonder whether the two will finally achieve a love that gives them contentment or not – again you’ll have to read it to find out.

A far better book than many of the Young Adult novels I’ve read. This old adult certainly enjoyed it. And the pleasure was all the greater for knowing that it was the work of someone who’s become a good friend over the years.

Even though I’ve never met her. Well, not in the everyday world. We speak only in the faerie world of the internet.

Reminders

There are events that are startlingly vivid whenever they come to mind. What I was doing when I learned that John F Kennedy had been assassinated, or when planes flew into New York’s Twin Towers, for instance. Or other events that I learned with that sensation of shock.

Having made Spain my home, I’m still trying to master Spanish, a far slower process than I’d hoped. Not that Spain cares: while I’m very conscious of living here and enjoying it, Spain has reacted to my presence with no more than a few bureaucratic procedures. I’m not complaining. It’s best when nations pay you no attention, I feel, though that may be just my Jewish roots speaking.

To help my Spanish limp along, I read and listen to books in the language. Javier Marías, the latest author I’ve tried, has written several spy novels. Marías is no Le Carré, the king of the genre, but fortunately nor is he an Ian Fleming, the court fool. In the book I’m reading now, Berta Isla, he does something that Le Carré never tried (and Fleming wouldn’t even have considered). He tells the story from the point of view of Berta, the spy’s wife.

He husband, Tom Nevinson, is an Anglo-Spanish dual national, recruited into the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 as it’s popularly known. He has let her know that much and made her understand that she’s unlikely ever to learn more. So she tells us of her concerns for a husband frequently away from home, without her knowing where he is or what he’s doing. She doesn’t know when he’ll be back. She doesn’t know whether he’ll be back. 

In 1982, he’s called to London on the outbreak of the Falklands War, as she decides to refer to a conflict usually called the war of the Malvinas by Spanish speakers. She’s in torment. Has he been sent to the islands with the British task force, perhaps to listen to Spanish-language messages? Or to interpret? Or is he safely in London? She can’t know and can only follow in her trepidation the daily reports of the events in the Spanish news, at her home in Madrid.

Life rafts pulling away from the sinking Belgrano

That’s how she learns of the sinking of the cruiser Belgrano by the nuclear-powered British submarine Conqueror. Her reaction is one of horror at all that death, but also, she admits, a sense of relief. It was an Argentine ship, so her husband could not have been on it. 

I found out about the sinking at Charing Cross station in London. I’d just travelled in by train. Shocked by the headline, I bought a copy and read the article. 

The General Belgrano had a crew of rather over a thousand sailors. The majority were simple conscripts doing their obligatory national service. The final tally is that 321 of them died, plus two civilians who happened to be on board.

There’s no doubt that the Belgrano, like other units of the Argentine navy, had orders to attack the British task force. I suppose that made the ship a legitimate target. I can hardly denounce the sinking, given that I found Argentine dictatorship indefensible in invading the Falklands – or Malvinas – against the will of the local population. I don’t like military action if it can be avoided, but the only way to reverse that unwarranted resort to violence was with force, and I could hardly object to its being used. 

What turned my stomach, however, was the reaction in Britain. ‘Gotcha’ proclaimed the Murdoch newspaper, the Sun. By then, Brits were regularly referring to the Argentinians as ‘Argies’, as during the Second World War they’d referred to Germans as ‘Jerries’. But Nazi Germany had represented an existential threat to Britain. Argentina certainly didn’t.

The triumphalism of many in the media, and indeed in the population, was nauseating. Most of the dead on the Belgrano were kids. They were civilians stuffed into uniform with no option to refuse. Even if we felt the sinking was necessary, I could see no decent reaction to the killing other than grief. 

But back to Berta. There were, of course, also British ships sunk, or planes and helicopters downed. Each of those events leaves her more terrified than ever at the idea that her husband might have been in one of them. She begins to hope that he has been sent somewhere completely different, nowhere near the disputed islands. Perhaps, indeed, to Northern Ireland, which back then was still in the grip what we euphemistically referred to as the ‘troubles’. 

But then she remembers a shocking event in Northern Ireland. “I don’t know whether it was in Belfast, in Derry or in a village, a mob had attacked an English soldier and had skinned him, I’ve always hoped only once he was no longer alive”, her character tells us. It was “perhaps after 1982, but I think of it as earlier,” sha adds: the novel is set long after the event. 

I’m not sure which incident she’s referring to, but her words reminded me of the “Corporals Killings” of March 1988. That’s another of those events that have stuck in my mind and, frankly, in my throat, since I watched the TV reports nearly quarter of a century ago. 

Two young soldiers, in civilian clothes and an unmarked car, made the serious mistake of driving into an IRA funeral. When the crowd, which turned quickly into a mob, rounded on them they drew pistols and fired a shot to drive it off. That sealed their fate.

They were dragged out of the car, stripped and seriously beaten. They were then taken to a piece of waste ground where they were shot dead. A journalist, Mary Holland, witnessed the event and saw one of the soldiers being dragged by. 

He didn't cry out; just looked at us with terrified eyes, as though we were all enemies in a foreign country who wouldn't have understood what language he was speaking if he called out for help.

The only redeeming aspect of the whole event was the behaviour of a Catholic priest, Father Alec Reid, a man you might have expected to be the soldiers’ enemy, but clearly felt that doing what he could for suffering humanity mattered more. In the next decade, he contributed to the peace process that led to the Good Friday agreement for Northern Ireland in 1998. He later also worked for peace in the Spanish Basque territory.

Before the soldiers were taken to the killing ground, he went to the two bleeding men and put his arms around them. IRA men forced him away as they took them to the waste ground. He heard the shots that killed them, and ran over there.

He quickly realised that there was nothing he could do for the men anymore but administer the last rites to them, which he did. My memory is that he later drew a parallel for reporters between the two soldiers and Jesus Christ, stripped, tortured and murdered. I can’t confirm it was him, so maybe someone else spoke those words, but they struck me as particularly apt for a Christian. 

Father Alec Reid tending to one of the murdered men

What’s curious is that Father Reid, as he knelt by those dead men, had in his pocket a letter from Gerry Adams, Northern Irish leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, to John Hume, of the parliamentary wing of the Nationalist (Catholic) movement, the Social Democratic and Labour Party. The letter was a step in the process of working out a common position, which contributed massively to reaching the Good Friday Agreement. 

He was a man for peace kneeling with the victims of violence.

Two events. Both of shocking memory. But useful lessons, if only as reminders of just how appalling we can be if we don’t learn to control ourselves.

It’s quite a tribute to Javier Marías that, in a simple spy novel, he conjures up each of them, helping me with far more than just language learning.