Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  It’s a bit of a platitude now, but you see that the last military act of World War II was also the first political act of the peace that followed – or rather of that uncertain state between peace and war we call the Cold War. The Russians could go no farther, and Tokyo did not become the Berlin of the Far East, quarrelled over by the major powers.

  At the time of the armistice, a Japanese report stated simply, ‘The whole city of Hiroshima was destroyed instantly by a single bomb.’

  Is that what we’ve had to face ever since, or the savagery and hate which conjured up the bomb in the first place?

  Do you know what we did when we heard the news from Hiroshima? ‘Fucking great!’ we said. We rejoiced. They had it coming to them. That’s what we thought.

  A third bomb would have been ready from 15th August onwards. Even on the 13th August, the day before the Japanese surrender, the war was still very much in progress. The Soviets were advancing across Manchuria, American naval and air attacks were carried out against Tokyo and Kyushu, and I was jumping from a boat into four feet of water with a 22–set on my back. A Japanese war party was opposing their government’s attempts to terminate the struggle. In the Japanese cabinet itself, fierce dissension raged; only the concession by the Allies that the Emperor Hirohito could retain the throne decided the Japanese to sue for peace, and not to fight on despite the bombs.

  Hirohito himself said, ‘I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer. A continuation of the war will bring death to tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of persons.’

  So it was all over, and we were supposed to become ordinary people again.

  Forty years on, and consciences are still troubled about this dramatic conclusion to the biggest show of the century. They are mainly post-bellum consciences. At the time, peace at any price was the cry. Britain had been at war for six years.

  You may think this is special pleading, but, if the war had continued in the East, it would have entailed many more fire-bombings of Japanese cities and most probably an invasion by sea of the Japanese mainland. Losses on both sides would have been formidably high.

  Earl Mountbatten and Commander Slim, on the British side, inherited large parts of what had been the ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’, where 128 million people awaited rehabilitation after the war’s end. Among them, spread over a wide area, 750,000 Japanese were still at large, often prepared to fight on till death (some who never heard the news of the surrender were still on standby twenty years later). Some 125,000 Allied prisoners-of-war were also awaiting rescue from death by starvation or torture.

  As for the Americans, whom all good followers of CND are supposed to mistrust, it was different in 1945. Grave responsibilities faced them. There were already signs that the Soviet Union would turn at any moment from untrustworthy ally into enemy, and might be disposed to sweep westwards through an incapacitated Europe when it was denied Japan. It was foreseen that, in the coming winter of 1945–46, millions of Europeans would die of starvation if America did not promptly shoulder the responsibility for feeding them – a responsibility it would hardly have been possible to undertake if the war in the East were still raging.

  On every count, the sudden armistice procured by the two A-bombs was a life-saver all round the globe. Not least to those of us on Operation Zipper. To this day, I believe that most of our lives were saved by Little Boy and its sinister companion. Many men who survived the war in the East will carry that same belief with them to the grave.

  After the Japanese surrender came the immense task of putting things back in the boxes where they belonged. 26 Indian Div was part of that mopping up operation. We put to sea from Madras and, on the 4th of October 1945, islands loomed out of the fog before us. We had crossed the line. Ahead of us lay Sumatra, and a peace that was not peace.

  Perhaps there’s no such thing as peace. There’s too much hate and savagery. You know how much of those emotions we meet with in the ranks. Don’t we generate hate to keep our morale up?

  All this explains why I had to have a very deep change of heart before I went on my first Ban the Bomb march to Aldermaston. I had to suppress my emotional response to the bomb and allow my intellect to win. My intellect told me that it was insane to drop nuclear bombs on anyone. Even the Russians. (Sorry!)

  But you see really my stand regarding the bomb was about something else, deep down in that part of us which construes its own version of reality. The hatred of authority came into it. Ever since my schooldays, I have hated authority. They rule by force, whether with canes or nuclear arms. It’s an Us or Them situation. I’m always the underdog. As the Far East experience wore off, I began more and more to interpret the country’s nuclear policy as an excuse for authoritarianism. Something against which to revolt.

  And another persuader. I had a grudge against England. It let me down. I fought for this fucking country and it paid me off in pennies. I came back here from the East pretty well destitute, and have had to fend for myself as an underdog ever since. Let’s face it, all this history over which I sweat, year in, year out, brings no reward, in terms of money or respect. It didn’t even bring me you – you came to me through CND, where many of those with some grudge or other against their country find refuge. Some of them long to see the bomb dropped on Mrs Thatcher.

  Hatred of authority, grudge against England. Emotive reasons for screaming Ban the Bomb and singing We Shall Overcome. How wonderful to have the pigs grab you up by your duffel coat and dump you in their van. Through the veins goes pure cleansing hatred. Very cathartic.

  So I was as keen a marcher as anyone. It made me feel good. And I pulled women. I’m funny, I know. Can’t resist a female body, can’t establish a lasting relationship. Some fundamental mistrust driving me …

  Shit. Anyhow, I also made pals like Ron Mallock. A good drinking friend. And met you.

  When you took me to Greenham Common to see the women living rough and laying siege to the base, I became even more emotionally devoted to the cause. That was just before Christmas 1983. The women sang that carol – ‘Peace on Earth and Mercy mild’ – as they rattled the wire. They wore their kind of informal uniform, wrapped up against the cold in woollen hats, bright scarves, heavy coats, striped leg-warmers, and boots. They didn’t use make-up. They had something going between them: they were a tribe. They lived in those improvised tents among the trees and bracken, some with kids. Camp fires smouldered among the leafless trees, the smoke filtering up towards a clouded sky. We saw one woman pull up her clothes and shit among the ferns, careless of who might be looking. They were a tribe. I understood; it was their Burma.

  And they were laying siege to an RAF camp. The RAF! In my schooldays, the heroes of the Battle of Britain, the country’s saviours … All that forgotten by a new generation. What a reversal. This is that fatal phenomenon at the heart of the sodding world, enantiodromia, the incessant and inevitable turning of all things into their opposites.

  The women didn’t want me around the Common. They only tolerated me because they knew you and respected you. You’d been with them. You were one of them.

  They had a cause. And to prove it helicopters roared overhead, photographing them, and police guarded the perimeter, and troops waited inside the perimeter. And we stumbled across a posse of mounted police, sitting silent on their horses in a straggling copse of silver birch, awaiting word over their intercoms to charge.

  I felt in my bones the women were right. That whatever the pros and cons of the international situation, nuclear weapons were too obscene ever to be used. Someone had to speak up against them – and of course it would have to be the underdogs, who would die in their hundreds of thousands if the weapons were unleashed.

  How those women moved me! That day I was whole-hearted. Remember how we clutched each other. Here at last was a spirit that would vanquish war. All your feminism made sense then. Laughing, I quoted to you the old poet of my youth, William Westlake:

  Those men forget
who pray for arms to cease

  War but enacts the mischief sown in Peace.

  It seemed then, in that encampment already half at war, that Westlake was talking through his hat.

  That day I was whole-hearted. Just to be whole-hearted filled me with energy. Perhaps you remember how we screwed in the back of the van, clothes and boots still on. God, I enjoyed that. Somehow love and revenge were all mixed up in my fucking head.

  We’ve had such good times. Don’t leave me now. Please. I need you. Forget ideology, remember me.

  … It’s four in the sodding morning. Another glass of whisky and perhaps I’ll finish this – whatever it is. I know nothing about life, nothing. I’m as ignorant as the day I was born.

  Lucy. I no longer feel as I did that day at Greenham Common. Useless to camouflage the fact. You know I had that amazing revelation on the night of the full moon, November last year in Dorset. In a few short weeks, it has changed my life. I told you about it, or tried to.

  I saw then that all my years I had somehow been mistaken. I’m too tired to go into it, and in any case why should it matter to you? It concerns only me, my little dot of consciousness which, I’m well aware, is of such small consequence to anyone but its possessor.

  But the result was – still is, the process still goes on – a complete revision of everything I have lived. Christ, that’s about sixty years of life and still I’m not tired of pursuing some phantom of perfection, of trying to make myself … complete, perfect?… No, make myself into something I can’t clearly see until I get there. But a person who lives and breathes truth … (Don’t laugh.)

  For all its miseries, I have lived life so passionately. You’ve felt it, or you’d not have cared, for you too have passion – and not just sexual passion. Your job is the manipulation of human bodies, trying to make them better.

  I’ve been like that, but all the time I have operated under a bad misconstruction. A self-inflicted misconstruction, set up in self-defence by the unhappy child I once was.

  It has warped my emotional life. I am now rethinking the habits of a lifetime. That includes my attitude to England and authority. I never wanted authority. So why should I hate those who want and get it? They are in a different category from me, just as bank clerks are. Let them get on with it; why waste my time in hatred?

  England, too. It’s as neutral as the jungles I fought in. It’s an abstraction, largely, apart from the physical land area. To hate it is to admit to a hatred of one’s parents – and that was at the bottom of all my problems.

  The Bomb was my parent. It once gave me life. It was my father. Some such distortion had taken place in my psyche.

  And for the first time I have been seeing that the idea of unilateral disarmament is an emotional fantasy. Any country that disarms itself voluntarily – as Czechoslovakia was persuaded to do by Britain and France in 1938 – writes itself out of history. It is overcome, because it has given up its will to live. There’s a Darwinian logic which operates. We cannot give up our arms. We must negotiate the arms away from a position of strength. (God, but you’ll laugh at that.) The disarmament negotiations now in progress, hellish though they may be, have a grasp on reality that unilateralism doesn’t. It is realistic to haggle and argue and threaten and orate; that keeps the hate and savagery within barriers. Dropping your trousers to the enemy doesn’t.

  I’ll put it simply in other terms. All my life I have had to fight for my inner identity and existence; unilateralism is not part of my make-up. I’m an old soldier. I actually would rather die than give in.

  And I’d rather face the truth about myself, however shabby it may seem to others, than deceive you. I want you. I will still come to meetings with you and Ron, because I consider that the pressure CND exerts on governments to get on with negotiations is valuable (as long as it never gains its true objective!); but you will know now that it is just intellect moving me, and not emotionalism any more.

  Here’s where I’d better stop. If you don’t show up next Saturday, I’ll understand.

  Your storm-tossed

  Joseph.

  Clement dropped the letter on the blanket and began to weep. Again Joseph was saying that he had misunderstood and misconstructed his own story. What exactly he meant by that, Clement could not yet comprehend. Some of his tears were for his own lack of comprehension.

  13

  When Clement awoke next morning, Sheila had already left the bedroom. He could see that the sun beyond the curtains had resumed its unexpected reign over Rawlinson Road. Making a mental check of his anatomy, he discovered that he was in moderate good health; the pain in his left leg and the slight tremor in his right forearm were distractions of long standing, and not to be considered.

  It was Sunday – a week since they left the madhouse in Boston.

  He dressed and came downstairs slowly, seeming to float in the dimness, for Sheila had drawn the curtains over the long window on the landing in order to keep out the heat, creating unfocused semi-shadows on the striped wallpaper. From Sheila’s room came the steady click of her word-processor: Kerinth was being reborn and he did not disturb her. His mind was still full of yesterday’s worrying experience.

  As he was about to descend to the hall, a sound at the front door attracted his attention. Accelerating his step, he was in time to see a glint of daylight and fingers at the letterbox, as a piece of paper was pushed through. The paper dropped to the doormat. Even as he hastened forward to pick it up, Clement recognized it as a copy of the vindictive review of War Lord of Kerinth, cut from the Guardian, which had greeted them on their return from Boston.

  At once, Clement unlocked the front door and flung it open. He ran down the steps and the path to the street. He could see the traffic trundling by on the Banbury Road. On Rawlinson Road, no one was in sight. He went out on the pavement and stared this way and that, clutching the review. He looked into next door, beyond Mrs Farrer’s pseudoacacia. Had someone just disappeared down the sideway? He was convinced that the horrible John Farrer had struck again. Why wasn’t the little bugger in church, praying forgiveness for his sins?

  His savage glare at the Farrer roses failed to wither them. Retreating to his own territory, he went slowly inside, shaking with anger, and closed the door behind him.

  There were voices in the kitchen. Two of Michelin’s friends had come round to take coffee and Maison Blanc cakes with her. They greeted Clement politely when he entered the room.

  Michelin was wearing lipstick for once. This was a detail Clement only later realized he had observed.

  He helped himself to a bowl of mixed Shreddies and All-Bran and took it out to eat at the garden table, away from the chatter of the ladies. After a little while, Michelin came out with a cup of coffee for him. He smiled at her and then made himself read the adverse review.

  ‘… What is disturbing about such fantasies is that they present arrant impossibilities as if they were fact, thus stepping up the power of the drug. In the silly world of Kerinth, a dead race comes back from a million years ago and interferes with present-day activities whenever the plot demands it.

  ‘None of the characters is surprised at this remarkable phenomenon, because the effect the author is aiming at is sedation rather than enquiry.’

  This extract contained several mistakes. Its general air of condescension was also a mistake, in Clement’s eyes. He screwed the scrap of paper up and heeled it into a flower bed, so that Sheila would not see and be disturbed by it again. The sheer malice prompting someone to push this idle squib through the door nearly made him sick.

  He imagined doing many violent things to Farrer until the savagery of his thoughts frightened him, and he resorted mentally to Mrs Emerova.

  ‘If it was that little bugger next door, what does he know about it? He’s no literary critic. Who’s he to agree or disagree with the prick in the Guardian, whoever he is?’

  ‘How do you know it is the person next door? Why so close?’

  ‘What’s that
to do with it? He’d destroy my wife’s work if he possibly could. I know her books have no stylistic excellence. She’s no Nabokov and doesn’t pretend to be, but they bring her peace of mind and happiness, and delight others, and here’s this little bit of dirt …’

  ‘Does all this hostility mask your own dislike of Sheila’s books?’

  ‘Really, you say the silliest things. I’m happy if Sheila’s happy. This little cretin next door can have no real valid opinion of his own. Who’s he to judge what the Kerinth novels are worth? He’s only a sodding little insurance agent. Don’t you agree that this was a low and vindictive thing to do?’

  ‘Mightn’t there be another way of looking at it? A friend meaning well? After all, the review goes on to say that Green Mouth is mistress of her craft, so it is possible, isn’t it, that someone else might carelessly think of it as rather a favourable review?’

  ‘Look, he hates the novels simply because they are written in the house next door. He hates them because sometimes Sheila types on a manual in her bikini by the swimming pool, and he can see her at it if he stands on a chair in their spare room and cranes his head out of the window. He hates them because there aren’t any insurance agents on Kerinth. He just hates the thought of creative activity. He even came round once to complain that the sound of the word-processor kept him awake at night. He hates them because they’ve got wrap-around picture jackets with bronzed people on not at all resembling his own little contorted frame.

  ‘He hates the novels because they are extremely successful. He hates them because you can buy them in airports all over the world, and in Papua New Guinea. Not for any literary reasons. He knows bugger all about literature. He can’t tell the difference between Tolstoi and Trotsky. He probably thinks Gorky is a Park. Who’s he, after all, to defend literary standards? All right, he’s seen Frank Delaney and Melvyn Bragg on television, but that’s as far as it goes. He takes the Reader’s Digest. Do we comment on his fancy insurance policies? Who’s he to comment on Sheila’s prose? Besides, I always check her grammar for her.