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.