Something I Read - King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

I highly recommend this book, which traces the involvement of King Leopold and the Belgians in the Congo. It is an almost unbearable story, prompting questions about humanity's capacity for sadism and, if one really wants to tackle the insoluble, the problem of cruelty and what function it can possibly serve, if we are to believe in a Darwinian view of history and the world.

Before the appalling tale of depravity gets under way, there is a bit of grim comedy associated with King Leopold's marriage, which was allegedly not even consummated until Britain's Queen Victoria and her husband Albert explained to the couple what they needed to do.

Grimmer still, yet from this distance also faintly comic, is the death of the couple's resultant son, who "fell into a pond, caught pneumonia and died". The child's mother, Marie Henriette then "found solace with her beloved horses ... befriended the minister of war, and at manoeuvres, to the astonishment of military attachés, he sometimes invited her to lead cavalry charges."

More cruel humour arises from the fate of the king's younger sister, who married Maximilian Hapsburg and went mad following her husband's execution by rebels in Mexico:

"She became convinced that an organ grinder on the street was a Mexican colonel in disguise, and that spies of every sort were trying to poison her. As a precaution she ate only oranges and nuts, checking the peels and shells for signs of tampering. She made her coachman stop at Rome's Trevi fountain so that she could fill a crystal pitcher with water, certain not to be poisoned. In her hotel suite she kept a small charcoal stove and, tied to table legs, several chickens, to be slaughtered and cooked only in her sight. With her obedient staff in despair, her rooms slowly filled with feathers and chicken droppings."

Once we plunge into the horror of King Leopold's administration of the Congo, there is no more humour though - indeed, barely a glimmer of light. What there is comes from learning about the amazing Edmund Dene Morel who, as Hochschild says, "Brought face to face with evil ... does not turn away." Better still he doesn't join in, as so many others seem to have done, but fights against the atrocities that are being carried out against his fellow humans, courageously and for the rest of his life.

I could go into detail about what exactly happened in the Congo, but I prefer to emulate the interpreters a friend of mine took to interview women who'd been raped during the Bosnian war. To my friend's great annoyance, the interpreters listened and listened and then turned to her, saying, "These people have been through terrible experiences and seen terrible things, and you would not want to hear about them."

What I will do is include this photograph of a detail of the statue of King Leopold facing the sea at Ostend. Someone, alluding to a widespread and dreadful practice of the king's administration in the Congo, has gone to quite a lot of trouble to cut off the African figure on the left's hand:

But it isn't actually that I think no-one should want to hear about these things that prevents me from going into detail. I just think Hochschild tells it better than I can. The book is a terrible and sobering revelation and, while I don't think it is perfect, (see below - I agree with most of the points the reviewer from the LRB makes), I still think it is very, very well worth reading.

Further reading:

An Outpost of Progress by Joseph Conrad. A haunting story.

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Review of the book from the LRB - 1999

Arch-Appropriator

Dan Jacobson

• King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Central Africa by Adam Hochschild
  Macmillan, 366 pp, £22.50, April 1999, ISBN 0 333 66126 5

Leopold II is best known as the founder and owner of the ill-famed Congo Free State. To most English-speaking readers his name evokes ‘Red Rubber’ and a world of plunder and atrocity: the Congo Reform Association which campaigned against his ruthless exploitation of the Free State has left behind it a notion of an aged, snow-bearded Satan who used black slavery to get money, and money to buy the favours of young girls.

The quotation is from Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated, published more than thirty years ago. Many stories deserve retelling for each generation; and the tale of Leopold’s duplicity, lubriciousness and greed, and of the cruelties and depredations with which his hirelings in the Congo Free State fed his appetites and their own, is certainly one of them. Adam Hochschild has taken most of the material for his new book from published sources; but about that I have no inclination to complain. Far from it. The findings of specialist historians have constantly to be ‘translated’ for the benefit of general readers, and Hochschild has done a valuable job in combining a biography of Leopold with a coherent, comprehensible account of how he realised his dream of a vast and ultimately profitable empire in the middle of Africa. Imagine a pathologically avaricious fraudster who is also a monomaniac, a man who never loses sight of his single aim yet never declares it, and you will be on the way to understanding something of Leopold’s character. You will also have a sense of the difficulties facing a writer who seeks to follow his devious footsteps. Hochschild compares the scale of the ‘holocaust’ produced by Leopold’s reign in the Congo with those for which Hitler and Stalin were responsible; if he is to be compared with either of them, I would say that he resembled Stalin rather than Hitler in always cloaking his intentions and deeds with an appearance of public benignity, of fatherly concern for his people, whether at home or in his great colonial possession.

Unfortunately the book has faults which run almost as deep as its merits. Hochschild’s naive zeal for cliché (news ‘flashed over the telegraph wires’, someone’s ‘hurt pride’ is ‘like an open wound’, society women are ‘bejewelled’ and generals ‘bemedalled’) is accompanied by lunges into a general metaphoric confusion (‘In Europe, the thirst for African land had become nearly palpable ... Stanley had ignited the great African land rush, but even he felt uneasy about the greed in the air’). Then there is his insistence that what happened in the Congo between about 1880 and 1910 has long been forgotten, even suppressed. Well, it hasn’t. The fact that he himself has been able to rely so heavily on published sources, some new, some old, in itself reveals how dubious the claim is. Anyone with the least interest in the ‘scramble for Africa’ knows that something terrible and protracted took place in the Congo basin at that time; and so, too, vaguely yet more vividly perhaps, do the ‘millions of readers’ (Hochschild’s phrase) who have encountered the place and period through ‘the most widely printed short novel in the English language’ – Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Hochschild devotes an inconclusive chapter to discussing yet another possible ‘original’ for Mr Kurtz (his candidate is an unsavoury murderer and would-be man of science by the name of Léon Rom); but dismisses the informative power of the novel by baldly asserting that European and American readers have ‘cast it loose from its historical moorings’ – and then producing himself as star witness for his case. When he read it as an undergraduate, he tells us, he ‘mentally filed away the book as fiction not fact’. So what did he imagine those chained porters, those dying ‘black shadows of disease and emaciation’, to be – decor?

This is not the only place in the book where Hochschild’s assertions tell us more about him than about his subject. He rebukes the Victorians for their overweening contempt for African society and culture, but it never occurs to him that his attitude to the Victorians might be tainted by an analogous philistinism and incomprehension. He refers slightingly to ‘European maps’ of the period which showed the interior of Africa as ‘blank’ – as if there were African maps or Moghul maps or Chinese maps which did any better. He displays a properly enlightened scorn for the claims of 19th-century explorers to have ‘discovered’ major features of the African continent when the people living at varying distances from them had always known them to be there. But when Livingstone, say, ‘discovered’ the Victoria Falls to be situated approximately at latitude 18°S and longitude 28°E, he forever changed them as a mental and social fact, and hence as a physical fact too. (Go to the Falls today and you will see what I mean: the waters cascade as majestically as ever; but they are surrounded by huge tourist hotels, by bungee-jumpers, para-gliders, helicopter flights and booze-cruises.) He writes disapprovingly of Henry Stanley’s ‘act of appropriation’ in ‘forever measuring and tabulating ... temperatures, miles travelled, lake depths, latitude, longitude and altitude ... almost as if he were a surveyor mapping the continent for its prospective owners’; yet feels no moral misgivings in ‘appropriating’ the findings of such men, and others like them, whenever it suits his narrative to do so. You want to know the height of the drop from Kinshasa to sea-level? How many millions of square miles the Congo River drains? What its hydroelectric potential might be? How much longer than the Rhine is the Kasai River? Why the flow of water at the mouth of the Congo does not vary seasonally? This book will unblushingly tell you.

Newton said that he saw as far as he did because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Here we have the spectacle of someone standing on the shoulders of giants and kicking them for their pains. It might be argued that this is no less than Stanley deserves, for he was an unscrupulous brute: a flogger, a killer, a liar, a suitable instrument in every way for someone as machiavellian as Leopold. But the counter-example of the equally obsessed Livingstone shows that there were other, less violent ways in which an explorer could go about his task. Both Stanley and Livingstone succeeded in mapping great tracts of Africa. It is childish to suppose that we are now entitled to look down on the private ambitions and public expectations which drove them to be ‘forever measuring and tabulating’; or that in writing about them (and about the culture from which they emerged) our first concern should be to show ourselves as members of a different, ‘non-appropriative’ species.

Which brings me back to the arch-appropriator, Leopold. What emerges convincingly from Hochschild’s account of him is that he was as dislikable a human specimen as could be found; the portrait presented here is enough to make one warm to his great British rival in the south, Cecil Rhodes. At least Rhodes lived in Africa, and in his own fashion came to love those parts of the continent he knew – and not only because he wished to dominate them. Rhodes also put himself in mortal danger at least twice in his life: once at the end of the ‘Matabele Rebellion’ in present-day Zimbabwe, and once when he incarcerated himself in the town of Kimberley just as it was about to be besieged by the Boers. Leopold, on the other hand, never set foot in Africa, apart from a few brief visits to Egypt during his youth. His imperial ambitions remained abstract and indiscriminate throughout his life; so did his notion of the countries he coveted – not to speak of their unfortunate inhabitants, to whose sufferings he always remained totally indifferent. As a young man he had dreamed of ‘purchasing a small kingdom in Abyssinia for 30,000 francs’; also of buying parts of the Nile Delta; the Argentine province of Entre Rios; the whole of Fiji (‘one should not let such a fine prey escape’); bits of Formosa; the Canary Isles; a 99-year lease on the Philippines. Many years later he was investing in railways and buying small parcels of land in mainland China, while eyeing various other ‘cutlets’ that might become available to him there. As these samples of his language reveal, he did not hide from himself or his closest subordinates that his intentions were focused nakedly and unwaveringly on power, and on the spoils of power, never anything else.

In public, of course, he was another person. Some of Hochschild’s most biting pages are devoted to exploring the gap between his protestations and his deeds. No one ever presented himself as possessed of higher motives than Leopold II, or claimed to offer his services to the cause of human betterment in a more selfless spirit. Nor did anyone enter the ‘scramble for Africa’ in quite so oblique a fashion. In 1876 he called a grand conference of African explorers, geographers, missionaries, businessmen and anti-slavers to come together in Brussels; he did not chair the conference but made sure that it would set up an International African Association (of which he was elected chairman) along with various ‘national committees’. None of the latter ever met; the International Committee convened just once, a year later, re-elected Leopold, and disappeared. Not long afterwards, Henry Stanley, more celebrated than ever after crossing the African continent via the Congo River, was in Leopold’s employ – or rather, in the employ of yet another body with another fine name, the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo. That Committee in turn gave way to the International Association of the Congo which, according to an article anonymously contributed by Leopold to the London Times, was a sort of ‘Society of the Red Cross; it has been formed with the noble aim of rendering lasting and disinterested services to the cause of progress’. His instructions to Stanley struck a different note, however. Stanley was to go back to the Congo and make ‘treaties’ with all the native chiefs he came across. ‘The treaties,’ the King wrote, ‘must be as brief as possible and give us everything.’

Treaties in hand, Leopold’s agents then persuaded the President of the United States to give diplomatic recognition to an entity which had a flag to fly – a gold star on a blue field – but no recognisable name. (The American declaration of recognition actually referred to it by two different titles.) To one audience Leopold declared that he was setting up ‘a confederation of free negro republics’ in the Congo, and to another that his aim was to establish a group of cities on the Hanseatic model – of all unlikely precedents. These independent ‘cities’ or ‘republics’ were then magicked into a single ‘state’, which early in 1885, just nine years after the calling of Leopold’s first conference in Brussels, declared itself to be the Free State of the Congo (l’Etat Indépendant du Congo). Leopold, who had funded the entire operation, and had been the sole subscriber to the International Association in its last known form, naturally became head of state and owner of the entire property. (‘As a private citizen,’ he wrote to Stanley.) After some reflection he styled himself ‘King-Sovereign’ of his acquisition. It was, Hochschild tells us, bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined. Some years later, in return for a huge loan from a reluctant Belgian Parliament, Leopold wrote out a will in which, just like a generous private citizen disposing of his assets, he formally bequeathed it to his ‘beloved fatherland’.

Even by the standards of the day the Congo Free State was a peculiar affair; and not only because it was so much of a one-man holding. All vacant lands in the territory were declared to belong to the Crown; naturally the Crown itself decided which lands were vacant. No attempt was made to develop the colony in any way that did not bear directly on the brutal business of extorting ivory and (subsequently) wild rubber from the desperate indigènes. These activities were carried out on a commission basis by the administrators of the state, or by concessionary companies in which the state usually held a substantial share. As if the act of turning officials into profiteers was not in itself sufficient encouragement to cruelty and recklessness, the African population was denied the right to handle money. Instead they were paid in kind – cloth, beads, rations – or in lengths of brass rods which were declared to be a form of currency appropriate for them. The Africans thus had every motive to withhold their labour, if they could, and Leopold’s agents to obtain it by the cheapest means open to them: by way of raids, press-gangs, floggings, the taking of hostages (women and children especially), the destruction of villages and cultivated fields, the wholesale murder and mutilation of those who attempted to flee from or rebel against the regime. To such effect were these policies carried out that Hochschild’s sources estimate that 25 years after the coming into existence of the Free State, its population had dropped by some ten million – i.e. to a half of what it had originally been. Readers may or may not be sceptical about the accuracy of this figure, which depends largely on guesswork as to the size of the Congo’s population before colonisation, together with an acceptance at face-value of the figures yielded by the first formal Belgian census. What is certain is that by 1908, when Leopold finally surrendered his territory to the Belgian state, disease, starvation and mass killings had resulted in the virtual denudation, humanly speaking, of immense stretches of Central Africa. That the territory’s natural resources of ivory and wild rubber had also been wiped out goes without saying.

Contrary to his original intention, Leopold was forced to hand over the Congo to his ‘beloved fatherland’ before his death, not after it. By then the true nature of his reign had been exposed to the world by a handful of courageous and extraordinarily effective campaigners. Of these E.D. Morel of the Congo Reform Society and Roger Casement, first British consul to the Congo Free State, are much the most famous. Hochschild also writes generously of the labours of several other, less well-known campaigners, among them two pioneering, eccentric American blacks, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard. The intensity of international opprobrium heaped on their king was just one of the factors which led the Belgian Parliament to insist on annexing his empire. For bestowing on Parliament this enforced ‘donation’ (Leopold’s term for it), he demanded – and got – many millions of francs. He also made sure that the massive Congolese profits he was already holding were transferred into a series of secretive, interlocking foundations, trusts and limited companies of which he maintained control.

He died less than two years later. On his death-bed he married Caroline Lacroix, the most enduring of the innumerable mistresses and call-girls with whom he had indulged himself over the years. Some time previously he had done as much as was permitted under Belgian law to disinherit his three daughters, of whom only the despised youngest was available to pay her last respects to her dying papa. (Their mother, who had hated him quite as much he hated her, had long predeceased him.) Given the King’s wealth and cunning, his vindictiveness and habits of secrecy, it is not surprising that many years passed before his estate was finally unravelled by the country’s Parliament and legal institutions. He had spent huge sums on the aggrandisement of parts of Brussels and Ostend, and on his palace at Laeken, and these remain, as he had intended them to be, Europe’s most visible monuments to him. In Africa the present-day borders of the Congo, established by incessant diplomatic manoeuvring on Leopold’s part and campaigning in the field by his agents, must be considered his most significant memorial. I would not like to guess which will last longer – the borders in Africa or the buildings in Belgium.

The rulers of the Congo today can either struggle to overcome the past or choose to remain its home-grown accomplices and perpetuators. Having opened with a quotation from Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated, I might as well end with one too. The ‘system’ he speaks of was Leopold’s: but how would one distinguish it from Mobutu’s or Kabila’s?

The Congolese system was too viciously wasteful, too recklessly short-term in its conception, to deserve even the term of exploitation. It was no more than a prolonged raid for plunder.

What's Wrong with Brussels (Sprouts)

Nothing, in my view - there is absolutely nothing wrong with Brussels sprouts.

However, this afternoon, when I showed a bloke I know my new find, purple Brussels sprouts, he wrinkled up his nose.

Apparently, he hates all forms of Brussels sprout, regardless of their colour.

I tried to tell him how lovely they can be, and he told me his daughter said the same, but he wasn't budging.

"It might be the way my mother cooked them that put me off," he admitted eventually.

"How was that?" I asked.

"She boiled them till the saucepan went soft", he explained.

Something I Read - The Dry by Jane Harper

I picked The Dry up to read on a plane journey. I chose it because I was pleased to see a best seller with an Australian setting. The story is supposed to take place in an unnamed Victorian town at the height of summer during a long drought.

A man who spent his childhood in the town - but has moved away to Melbourne to work as an investigator of financial crime in the police force - returns for the funeral of his childhood friend. Soon it becomes clear that the friend's death is not what it seems and the man must stay on to solve a crime. Meanwhile, in the background, is the memory of the death of another school friend long ago.

The plot is pretty good and consequently I did read to the end, to find out what happened. I was disappointed though as the characters are very sketchy and thin, and the writer doesn't seem to really know Australia - or at least country Australia. To take just one of many examples, farmers are described as "the farmers" as if they were "the cattle" and reportedly say to each other, "It'll rain soon", which farmers in Australia in a drought never do. They have learned the hard way.

More importantly, most Australian country towns are rather beautiful, if they are as old as this one is supposed to be - but there is not a glimpse of an architectural detail, no hint of what an Australian country town looks like in the book. Nor is there more than the barest hint of what Australia smells like, (it is, in the nicest possible way, a smelly place - that is, it is easily evoked by smell, especially in summer: of heat, of dust, of distant sheep, of the bush; but the only smell mentioned is "eucalyptus" [what kind of Pommie nonsense is that - we call it gum, don't you know] and it is referred to as a "tang", which seems far too sharp and lemony to me; gums are almost smoky in their scent.

I. may be expecting too much depth from a best seller - but detective novels are meant to be a solid literary form, not just potboilers. On a stylistic level, The Dry doesn't match up to many competing contemporary crime novels; the writing is hackneyed and the characterisation and description lacks any depth.

I don't suppose most people pick up the book to find out what rural society is like in Australia but, for those who might, I'd recommend The Idea of Perfection, Kate Grenville's wonderful, funny, poignant evocation of small town life instead. That is a really good book. The Dry is a thin entertainment. The most intriguing thing about it is the choice of Whitlam for a character's name.

A Question that Needed to Be Asked

There is a comedian on BBC Radio 4 who my brother and I would listen to whenever he appeared - were he to have read out the instructions on assembling a piece of flat pack furniture, we would have tuned in.

The comedian's name is John Finnemore and today I found on Radio 4 Extra that his very first sketch series, which I'd not heard - or indeed heard of - before, is being repeated. Sadly, I suspect my brother never heard it. He would have particularly loved Finnemore's attempt to tackle the really big question of the modern age, a question that only he has been brave enough to raise publicly, so far as I know:

Words and Phrases of an Abhorrent Variety

I am reading a book called How to Sit (stop sniggering) in one of my occasional doomed attempts to stop being so inclined to get worked up about things that don't really matter. The book recommends sitting, observing your breathing and saying to yourself, "My body is mindfulness itself", but I fall at the first hurdle, as I keep realising I'm saying to myself, "My body is mindlessness itself", which is probably more truthful than the authorised version and sends me off into distracted amusement, from whence my mind wanders back into its usual frenzied paths.

My latest object of frenzied seething is a phrase I never heard until at most 18 months ago. Now it is everywhere - people say it to me in conversation, they write it in emails, it appears in articles and, to my mind, it adds absolutely nothing to the content of any of those forms of communication.

The phrase I'm referring to is "Here's the thing."

The thing? What thing? Where? Here? Where is here?

The thing about "here's the thing" is - or rather "here's the thing" about "here's the thing - that I have never seen it preface anything positive and nice. In my experience, no-one ever says something like, "Here's the thing - I'd love to help you", "Here's the thing - I'd like to invite you round to tea". No, "Here's the thing", goes with, "I'd love to help you, but I'm afraid I cannot", "I'd like to invite you round to tea, but I'm not going to."

I think, in fact, "Here's the thing" is a holding pattern phrase for when someone is scrabbling around in their mind for an excuse for not doing something they perhaps ought to. Or have I got it wrong - is the phrase less unpleasant in its meaning than I've been imagining? I'm never ever going to start using it but could it be that "the thing" in "here's the thing" (and my inability to grasp the meaning of that principal noun is part of my objection to the phrase, as every single time I encounter it my mind gets stuck on trying to work out what "the thing" means)  is just shorthand for the now outmoded (hurray) cliche, "Elephant in the room"?

Quaking No More

I suppose it is not a coincidence that when an idea begins to beset you, you see echoes of it everywhere you look. Certainly, following my repeated epiphanies about modern life and the importance of kindness as a major element in everything that is done in a society, I seem to see reflections of this preoccupation wherever I look.

For instance, I picked up the 20 April, 2017 London Review of Books yesterday and began to read an article in it, written by James Meek. I thought the article was going to be about Poland. It was, in a way, but it was more about Europe - and more still about the way business is done these days across the globe.

In the article, Meek examines the decision by Cadbury's to send all the jobs in Somerdale - a town just east of Bristol that was set up by the company for its employees in 1923 - to Poland. To explore this subject, Meek has to go back to the past and explain how things were done in earlier days.

He begins, in fact, with the original decision to move to Somerdale, which was made almost one hundred years ago. Like the Cadbury company's other famous move, to Bournville, and Joseph Rowntree's production shift from York to Haxby, the move to Somerdale was not a matter of

"mere efficiency and tech upgrades ... The Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree families were successful capitalist industrialists, but they were also Quakers, bound to care for the welfare of their employees. In the high Victorian age it was still possible to see a potential harmony between Quaker ideals of simplicity, temperance, pacifism and charity and the handsome profits made by Quaker companies like Barclay's and Lloyd's banks ... for decades the Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree families seemed to achieve a particularly successful synthesis of profitable capitalism and private, paternalistic welfare. At Haxby Road, Bournville and later Somerdale, there was subsidised housing, healthcare and sports facilities ... The Quaker chocolate magnates wanted their factories to be handsome as well as functional. They wanted them to be surrounded by green spaces. They cared how their works appeared to God, their workers, their peers and their neighbours. Their ideology of practical, aesthetic social justice, formed at the confluence of fundamentalist Protestantism, capitalism, socialism and the Victorian fascination with an idealised medieval England, was both contradictory and, to many contemporaries, inspiring."

Sadly, Meek goes on to say that not only did prosperity encourage Cadbury's Quaker leaders to abandon some of their observances, leading in the end to the flotation of Cadbury-Fry on the stock market in 1962, which resulted in the business no longer being a Quaker venture, but also that, in a peculiar way, the enterprise's moral elements contained the seeds of their own destruction - or at least the moral elements were first admired and then separated from their religious underpinnings and taken up by politicians, leading to a depersonalisation, once individual conscience was no longer involved:

"As much as worldly success, however it was the success of their ideals that sped the decline of the crusading wing of Quaker capitalism. Many of the liberal and socialist ideas the Rowntrees, Cadburys and Fry campaigned for, and tried to implement on a small scale, were taken up by the unions, by the Labour movement, and eventually implemented by the state. This was good and necessary, but had its downside. The counterpart to the great privatisation of the British economy of the past forty years is the great nationalisation of culture that occurred much earlier, when swathes of life that had been covered patchily, erratically, unfairly and archaically by religion, private employers, local custom, charities, local committees of worthies and the unreliable benevolence of the rich - education, healthcare, pensions, safety at work, women and children's rights - began to be provided universally by government. It was a triumph. But it also marked a critical stage in the depersonalisation of institutional culture. It made it easier for companies whose owners have no interest in the cultural weight of the enterprises they control - who see such ideas as history, place, community, aesthetics and paternalism and outmoded obstacles to efficiency - to act as if they operate in a space outside culture, even as their decisions radically transform it."

Meek goes on to outline how Cadbury's is now run with an eye on absolutely nothing but profit and the aim of increasing that further and further. He mentions a non-executive director who left Cadbury with £40 million in pay, pension and cashed in shares, after the company was swallowed up by a multinational, and he describes how the decision to move the Somerdale operation was taken when "the board was coming under fierce pressure from Cadbury's big shareholders, particularly the hedge fund partner Nelson Peltz and his Qatar sovereign wealth fund investors, to deliver fatter returns on their investment". He goes into far more detail than I will here (the article is worth reading for that added detail, if you have the time) and admits that:

"in this case, the EU had let the people of Keynsham [the town closest to Somerdale] down badly. 'How many billion pounds did it cost us?' Radford [the Unite union representative at Somerdale] asked of the new factory in Skarbimierz [the place in Poland it was shifted to], 'Because it's in the middle of nowhere. They had to do all the roads, all the infrastructure, and that was all paid for through our donations.' ... In the end, by one route or another, much of the money came from the EU, and although the biggest share would have come from Germany, as the EU's biggest net donor, the next largest would have come from Britain ... not only did the EU pay for much of the infrastructure that enabled Cadbury to shut down its English factory and move it to Poland; it signed off on a massive financial inducement for Cadbury to go.'"

Meek himself would have liked the Remain vote to win in the EU referendum but recognises that these kinds of transactions give the EU a very bad name.

I don't want to get into that argument right now. My current preoccupation is with improving the way humans behave towards each other more generally. In that context, what strikes me most about Meek's story is the desire for profit at any cost, with no thought for moral or social consequences, and the role in events of shadowy figures divorced entirely from the people their decisions affect - hedge fund partners, wealth fund investors. The passage that resonates above all, the one that contains the kernel of where we have gone wrong, I think, is this one:

"It [where "it" is the shift of a sense of duty and moral responsibility for the care of workers from individual businesses and business people to the impersonal entity that is government] made it easier for companies whose owners have no interest in the cultural weight of the enterprises they control - who see such ideas as history, place, community, aesthetics and paternalism as outmoded obstacles to efficiency - to act as if they operate in a space outside culture, even as their decisions radically transform it."

It seems to me that we very, very urgently need a worldwide movement that mirrors the erstwhile "crusading wing of Quaker capitalism" and a reintroduction (or, in most cases, just an introduction) of the attitude of that group's members among business leaders everywhere:

"They cared how their works appeared to God, their workers, their peers and their neighbours. Their ideology of practical, aesthetic social justice, formed at the confluence of fundamentalist Protestantism, capitalism, socialism and the Victorian fascination with an idealised medieval England, was both contradictory and, to many contemporaries, inspiring."

The fascination with an idealised medieval England could probably be left out of the recipe, but in other respects I think we could do worse. It is absolutely wrong that the lives of many blameless people in Britain have been profoundly altered - and not for the better - by a combination of a "lumbering supranational bureaucracy" and the greed of wealthy investors in Qatar. Unless there is a radical change in perspective and philosophy, so that wealth is not admired or regarded as a mark of success unless it is accompanied by a strong and incontestable commitment social justice, European civilisation - or whatever tattered remnants remain of it - is doomed.

Helping People

Howard Jacobson was on Point of View on Radio 4, talking about Manchester and the night when a young man blew himself up there, killing and injuring lots of people. I was driving through Hertfordshire, listening to him. This is what he was saying:

"When I heard of taxi drivers offering their services gratis on the night of the atrocity, ferrying parents and children home from the event, helping the distraught search for missing friends, I thought of my late father, who drove a black cab in Manchester for many years and would have acted in exactly the same spirit. He saw his taxi as something between a fire engine, an ambulance, a police car and an advice centre. Had I offered to admire his finely evolved sense of social responsibility, he'd have accused me of using unnecessarily long words. He was someone who just liked helping people out. Being useful defined him as a man. In this he was of his time but also of his place. It isn't to sentimentalise Mancunians to say, well, that they have a finely evolved sense of social responsibility. Put more simply, they seem nicer up there than down south. There isn't that angry scramble to make money and get ahead that you feel in London. It isn't dog eat dog; it's dog help dog."

I didn't hear much after that, as I managed to hit a bollard and my tyre immediately went completely flat. I parked outside a shop. It was a Sunday evening and I was in a very small town where no one was around and very little appeared to be open.

I knew that in theory my insurance company was supposed to supply me with roadside assistance but when I rang them, after I recovered from the shock of discovering that, as I'm insured in Belgium, I had the choice of talking either in Flemish or French, but not English, (derr, Zoe, what did you expect - it is not a trilingual but a bilingual country) and after me and the woman at the other end of the line had negotiated our way through whether I had a trailer - as I didn't recognise the word, she had to go through a long explanation about a thing you pull behind the car sometimes, if you need to load up rubbish or furniture; ditto with the concept of a roof rack, another piece of vocabulary I've never needed until now - it became clear from her questions about whether there was a hotel nearby, (no), and whether I had a credit card on me, should I actually manage to find a hotel nearby with an empty room, that I might be in for a long, long wait.

But at that moment I noticed movement outside my window. A very young man was gesticulating, in what I thought was probably a friendly manner, through the glass. Ignoring childhood strictures about not talking to strangers, I wound down the window. He grinned at me. "Would you like some help" he asked.

He then proceeded to change my tyre for me while his girlfriend told me how they'd met in the air scouts and how she'd just finished her GCSEs and he'd done them last year and was now working as a mechanic, (or possibly a trainee mechanic). The only way I was of any assistance was in accessing the internet to locate where my spare tyre actually was - I didn't even know I had one - and how to retrieve it. His explanation, as I thanked him over and over again, was simple. "I like helping people", he said.

I got his girlfriend to give me an address and I posted them each a box of Belgian chocolates, which unfortunately arrived in England during the recent heatwave. I hope they reached my benefactors and were not too ruined. It seemed a very small gesture, compared to what he in particular had done for me. Which was:

a. to prove that Jacobson is wrong about the South of England, which contains people as 'dog help dog' as anywhere in the North

b. to cheer me up about the state of Britain, (perhaps even the world), by demonstrating that it contains people who like helping people so much that they go out of their way on a Sunday evening, wasting quite a lot of time and energy, when they could just whizz on home

c. to inspire me to lead a life that is a great deal less selfish

A week after that I flew back to Australia to see my mother. On my first day home I persuaded myself to go to the fruit and vegetable market, even though I didn't feel much like doing so. Thank heavens I did. For it turned out it would be my very last opportunity to encounter another beacon of kindness, a shop assistant called Robyn, who has worked there for years and who I have loved since the first moment I saw her. That day was her very last day working - "It's my legs", she explained, "I am 71 and they just hurt with all the standing - but I am a bit nervous as I'll miss all the people I meet".

Robyn has cheered me up with her warmth and sympathetic nature for years and years, but what I hadn't realised until I went there the other day is that I am not the only person she has been cheering. There were hordes of people lining up to say goodbye to her, some in tears, all sad to see her going. By just standing at a till and being friendly and interested, Robyn has been improving the existences of dozens and dozens of people over several decades.

I may be a bit slow on the uptake, but I think possibly the universe is trying to tell me something important with these small reminders - something about how making a community and a good society can be the work of individuals, each of us using kindness, warmth and generosity as the building blocks. You don't have to go to Manchester to find these qualities but, instead of some of the things that education, the media, practically every outside influence currently puts emphasis on, these are the elements we all need to cultivate within ourselves.

Me especially.

Something I Read - Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Fates and Furies is the third novel Lauren Groff has had published. I was a bit dubious when I saw that the author of Girl on a Train had supplied the main enthusiastic quote on the cover but I decided to give it a try regardless. I'd enjoyed the audio book of Arcadia, after all, even if I might never have actually completed it if I'd been reading it (that is one of the interesting things about audio - you can put up with a lot more from a book when you are not actually making the effort to drag your eye across those weird little spidery black shapes on the page, but instead getting through it while driving or cleaning the bathroom or ironing).

Well Fates and Furies turned out to be a hundred times better than Girl on a Train. Lauren Groff is a much better writer than the normal best seller hack, avoiding annoyingly repetitive prose or cliched phrases or any of the dull pedestrian tropes that are the meat of chick lit and so forth. All the same, for my taste, she is overly fond of the lyrical. Here is an example of the kind of thing I mean:

...nearly everyone began grinning back, so that on this spangled early evening with the sun shining through the windows in gold streams and the treetops rustling in the wind and the streets full of congregating relieved people, Lotto sparked upwellings of inexplicable glee in dozens of chests, lightening the already buoyant mood of the room in one swift wave. 

That said, Groff has a rich imagination and, although she chooses to set the entire action of the book in the same kind of absurdly privileged territory inhabited by the characters in A Little Life and despite the fact that her two main characters are preposterous, she does have the ability to draw you in and entertain you and keep you moving along with the plot - which has a clever mirrored kind of structure so that the end and the beginning in a peculiar way almost meet.

On the down side, she is quite solemn. Mind you, what the book lacks in humour - I only noticed one joke and it was not a new or terribly funny one:

'You're a pathological truth teller,' Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn't sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying - 

it certainly makes up for with masses of sex, which probably sells better.

While I'm griping I should point out that there is a rather large chunk of the book where the author appears to be exorcising her desire to be a playwright and I found that a bit tedious.  In addition - and more importantly for me -  while Groff is an imaginative writer and a reasonable, if rather gushing, stylist, I did not feel that the book had any wisdom to impart. I do recognise that it is refreshingly ambitious and sprawling when compared to the preciousness of Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes, but at the end I had not gained a new perspective on existence or understanding of the human species. Maybe I ask too much - as I take Middlemarch and Anna Karenina as my benchmarks, inevitably I am often disappointed. And I know some might say that Dickens, who I love, also created more than his fair share of preposterous characters, not to mention gush. However, he also had the ability to show things in an entirely new light and to be extremely funny, (the Veneerings' dinner party springs to mind as just one example). I should point out that Groff does attempt to give her novel a bit of intellectual credibility by larding it with references to classical Greek texts, from which I assume we are supposed to draw parallels. However, this seemed to me to be a superficial attempt at burnishing something that doesn't have much depth, rather than a genuinely successful deepening of the work.

All the same, as I think I mentioned, the novel was entertaining and enjoyable, what I suppose might be called "a good read".  However, I think it will turn out to be almost completely forgettable, like many good reads. It lacked any real resonance for me, I was never persuaded to care about the main characters or to see that they mattered in any way - or even really existed. Oddly, the reason I didn't really believe they existed may also have been the reason they were entertaining - their family backgrounds and lives were ludicrously dramatic. Just as when in the past I have got drawn into soap operas, I didn't believe the events for a minute but did find them grotesquely fascinating, so I didn't believe anything about the novel but I went along, cheerfully, for the ride.

Sadly, as with soap operas, I emerged unenriched. But how solemn of me to demand enrichment. Groff is clever and imaginative and energetic and better than a lot of others in her chosen field.

Deckcheyrie

I once wrote a post about how no apartment should ever be built without a balcony. It turns out that Heath Robinson invented a solution called a deckcheyrie for flats that were not provided with a balcony to begin with. For some reason, his picture of the contraption is not included in my copy of How to Live in a Flat. This is what he offers there instead - not as complex or colourful but still an outdoor option:

The article in The Spectator that accompanies the picture of the deckcheyrie is worth a read.

Ties that Bind

Driving near Ypres yesterday, we listened to a podcast from Intelligence Squared. It was called "Europe on the Edge". One of the speakers was Professor Paul Collier, who I think advocates a new approach to helping refugees - namely, giving incentives to businesses to move to areas bordering countries from which large numbers of refugees are fleeing, creating jobs there so that the people who are refugees do not need to deal with people smugglers and all the dangers that that entails, nor to go miles from their own homelands to seek a living, losing any sense of belonging, forsaking the familiar et cetera.

Under his plan, Professor Collier(1) believes refugees can be given the opportunity to set up productive lives near to where they come from, avoiding the culture shock that both they and the receiving communities tend to experience when they move out of their own sphere. In addition, when and if things improve in the places that the refugees have fled from, they are able return to their own homes without much disruption.

Anyway, on the podcast Professor Collier started to talk about community and a shared sense of responsibility. He argued that a willingness to help others depends on shared identity, citing studies and polls to support his proposition. In amongst all this, he made some remarks about the middle classes and the recent tendency he says he has identified among them to walk away from community responsibility. These remarks struck me as providing an interesting perspective on the story I told about my uncle yesterday and on the circumstances that may have contributed to the Grenfell Tower being badly maintained due to penny pinching.

Here is what the professor said:

"I'll just focus on the English working class - I think the English working class now is more or less where it has always been. I think what has walked is the English middle class, which has decided that it doesn't really want to be English. It has walked away from a shared identity with ordinary people. I think this is particularly pronounced in London, I'm afraid. I grew up in Sheffield. I grew up in an environment where I was surrounded by Scots. Left, right and across the road, all Scots - and it never occurred to any of us that we were not the same identity. They were Scottish and I was English but we were all British, we'd just fought a war together. And because of that there was a strong willingness on the part of the fortunate to redistribute to the less fortunate - because there was a shared identity. And I think that that has gradually corroded.

Here is an uncomfortable piece of statistical evidence: across Europe, the higher the proportion of immigrants in the population, the lower the willingness of those above median income to make tax transfers below median income ... what that means is that people below median income, ordinary people, have a perfectly rational reason to fear that immigration will weaken the sense of shared bonds and that the middle class will just run off and go and do its own thing."

Reading this now, I see that it could be seen as completely racist. It certainly does seem to suggest  diversity is not the unadulterated good it is usually thought to be. Statistics, of course, are just statistics, and the experience of Australia seems to undermine the argument that a society cannot cohere if it is made up of many different migrants. Perhaps the situation is different in new world countries or perhaps the very closely managed - some would say cruelly and unkindly managed - approach to immigration in Australia has prevented a sense of cultural alienation. I don't know. I am though fascinated by the way Western society seems to be changing and becoming generally more turbulent and polarised and every time I read or hear a theory, I like to try to think about it with an open mind. And I recognise above all that, since the financial crisis and the absence of any punitive action against those who caused it, the social contract has been seriously damaged and nobody seems to address that.


1. I haven't read his work, but I have the impression that his arguments run roughly along those lines, although it is more than possible I've got the whole thing completely wrong.

How to Be Rich

Since the Grenfell Tower inferno, I've been thinking a lot about my favourite uncle. This may seem odd, given that he was a wealthy landowner, a man whose father had been a brilliant stockbroker and also a brilliant art collector - the family owned a Pissarro, a Manet, a Sickert and various other marvellous paintings, all bought at a time when their creators were just starting out. The house these paintings were kept in was a sprawling Victorian mansion, set on a hill and surrounded by beautifully planted parkland. After the death of his older brother in the Second World War, all this had come to my uncle, making him a very rich man.

But as far as my uncle was concerned wealth brought with it responsibilities. He did not loll about in luxury, spurning the community in which he lived. Instead, he was involved in everything to do with his local village, serving in a variety of unpaid roles on committees, school boards and as a church warden. He was deeply concerned about the countryside and its preservation, particularly the disappearance of hedgerows. He provided houses for each of the people who worked for him. He threw parties that enlivened the social life of the area. He was generous and open and interested in the little world in which he lived.

So when he noticed in about 1980 that house prices in the village were rising enormously because people from London were buying houses there and commuting daily to the city, he didn't just shrug his shoulders and mutter something about market forces. Instead, he became worried about the children of the villagers who could no longer afford to live in what was their home.  "Something should be done", he thought - or rather, "I should do something". He turned the problem over in his mind and before long he came up with an idea. He went to the council and made a proposal. The council called a meeting at which the proposal was to be put.

It seemed such a good idea - not to mention generous. My uncle was offering to give to the village a large - and very valuable - field. It was in a perfect position, just across from the village post office. It would be an ideal place to build community housing so that the village's new generation would no longer be driven out by rising costs.

I was staying when the council meeting took place. My uncle had explained what was happening to me and he set off down the drive in an enthusiastic frame of mind. He was looking forward to discussing exactly what sorts of dwellings would be best suited to the setting and how many buildings it might be possible to provide.

An hour and a half later my uncle returned, a changed man. The meeting had been the best attended of any in the village's recent history. There was barely a person from among the village's new population who had not made the time to come along. But the reason for the high turn out was not enthusiasm for the project. In fact, my uncle's offer was rejected outright. The people who had gathered in the village hall that evening regarded it as an absolutely outrageous proposition and turned it down point blank. It would have been legitimate to want to know about the design of the buildings and to seek assurances that they would be in keeping with the rest of the village but the problem did not lie with details of that kind. It was the principle the newcomers baulked at. Community housing would bring down the value of their homes and there was no way in the world that they were going to be having that.

Perhaps the rot had set in earlier than that meeting. I do remember that, a year or so before, my uncle's junior gardener had married and my uncle had built a house for the couple, but instead of being pleased the gardener's new wife had regarded this as patronising, since the house was nowhere near as big as my uncle's own. I thought she was just a difficult woman, but she may have been a harbinger of a change in attitudes. The more likely explanation though, I think, was the shift from Macmillan's brand of Toryism to Thatcher's, in which the concept of the triple bottom line was swept away and replaced by the idea that the only important thing was the right of the individual to elbow their way ahead, with no thought for kindness or taking others into account.

It is unfashionable now to suggest that a system that includes the rich as anything other than hated rapacious monsters can ever be a good thing. However, I suspect that the cliche about the poor always being with us can as easily be refashioned to apply to the rich. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is an argument that would take far too long to go into; what I do believe though is that, while the rich remain among us, we need to recreate in them - and in all of us, to some extent - that instinctive sense of duty and responsibility to others that was, until the night of his rejection at the local village council meeting, a dominant part of my uncle's approach to life. If noblesse oblige was still a flourishing concept, I doubt that the disaster at Grenfell Tower - caused, we are led to believe, by lack of care and penny pinching on the part of a very rich council - would ever have happened. If a greater sense of care and responsibility for the people we live amongst can replace narrow self-interest as a central value in modern society we may help to prevent similar horrors from occurring in the future. Surely it's worth a try.

Australian Problems

I was in England last week and on three occasions found myself obliged to step into long grass - see pictures, (each of which I took as a delaying device and an attempt to steady my nerves before taking the plunge). While my UK companions waded in unflinchingly, without a trace of hesitation, I had to steel myself. Try as I might, I could not entirely suppress my fear that there would be snakes hidden somewhere within the lush growth. I wonder if anyone else from Australia has the same problem when far from home?

Overheard

Walking from Grantchester to Cambridge on the weekend, I saw a little boy with large, boxy spectacles, a pudding bowl haircut and a sweetly impish face. He was sitting on a bench, swinging his legs. There was a man beside him, smoking a cigarette and looking faintly uncomfortable.

As I drew near, the boy turned to the man.

"So why did you marry her?" he asked.

The man's eyes met mine for an instant and then he looked away.

"Because she was your mother," he said, eventually.

The boy looked thoughtful, maybe even puzzled. I didn't blame him. It wasn't much of an answer.

But, when you think about it, it wasn't an easy question, particularly if, as I suspect, the boy's father was no longer married to the boy's mother. "Because I loved her"?, "Because I thought I loved her"?

"Do you want an ice cream?" might have been the best answer, I reckon. But that speaks volumes about my cowardly approach to parenting.

Words and Music

There was a session devoted to my brother at the Sydney Writers' Festival the other day. The organisers asked if I'd be part of it; I couldn't but I sent this along:

"A few details you might like, to round the picture people have of Marko:

1. he noticed clothes (there are a couple of outfits I'm particularly fond of because he admired them - "I do like that jacket, sis"; "Oh that dress is lovely" - quite unusual in a man) but he also had some sweetly old-fashioned ideas about them. A senior ABC person gave an address to staff the other day & Marko told me he was very shocked she was only wearing a cardigan: "She should have worn a good suit"; he was staying with us in Vienna and on the day he was leaving he came downstairs in a smart jacket and tie. When my husband asked him what had made him dress so smartly, he explained that he would be crossing a border and he thought you should always dress smartly when crossing borders. He is probably right, but it seemed somehow endearing.

The other thing to note is that he was interested in all things cultural, not just so-called "high culture". While he might not go so far as my daughter's friend who, at the end of an English literature degree at Cambridge, said "Well that was all very interesting but I still haven't read anything I've enjoyed as much as the Harry Potter series", he did like Harry Potter and much else besides. An illustration of this was a rather ludicrous scene not long before he died where he insisted I look up the Wikipedia synopsis of the final episode of the current series of a BBC thriller series called Line of Duty and read it to him, as he wouldn't have time to watch the episode now. As nurses and doctors milled around checking drip lines and blood pressure and asking him to scale his pain etc, I read this complicated thing out to him, with my mother beside me, the pair of us interrupting the flow with questions - "What, so Roz is a baddy?", "Oh yes, a real baddy"; "So she tampered with the jumper?", "Yes, she smeared DNA on it".

Another illustration came from a young cousin writing to say how sorry he was to hear of Marko's death - "I remember very clearly Marko coming to the Old Rectory when I was 14 or 15 and being surprised how much interest he had in us and in the music we were into; he had an eclectic taste, which we shared and 20 years later I still have some of his music on my hard drive."

I have so many stories I could tell you. He was so loveable

Interestingly, I've just been talking to the mother of that young cousin and she tells me that he had given the bowdlerised version of his experience of Marko, who actually had a more profound influence on him than he had described. While talking to our young cousin about a piece of music they both enjoyed listening to, my brother said, "Those lyrics - have you listened closely to them? They are so brilliant", and with that small comment Mark made his younger relative realise that he had always been too stoned to even notice that there were any lyrics. Since that day, that whole extra dimension of the songs he listens to has been opened up for him.

A win for my bro and his love of language. He would have been very pleased to hear that extra bit of the story.

Once More with Flemish

in the interests of cultural equality, I present the Flemish approach to confirmation cards, which looks to be as daft as that of the French speaking population:

Totally off subject, would this be a good Christmas present for that person you can never think of a present for:

Or perhaps not?

Mixed Messages

In Europe, it is the season of the first communion. For card companies, this is one more opportunity to make a spot of dough. There are whole stands at the newsagent's devoted to first communion cards now. Whether they deliver the kind of message first communioners might be expecting, I really do not know:

My favourite - what has a googly eyed puppy in a pink ribbed cup got to do with initiation into the faith?

No idea what a light sabre has to do with Christianity

A snowman with a carrot for a nose welcomes you to the church family

Or a giraffe in a casquette

Congratulations, you are now super cool

The giraffe theme must have a significance that, as a non-Catholic, I don't know about - I'm sure giraffes were never mentioned in the bits of the Bible we were told about at Church of England school

I think this is the Disney version of Tinkerbell, in which case is the message, "Congrats on your first communion, but hey dude, do you actually believe in fairies?"

I suppose at least the idea of goodness and the idea of something beyond the earthly is being referred to here

Is this one intended for a boy or a girl - is it saying, "you're a hot chick now" or "you can now officially pull hot chicks"?

A cool dude, riding in the clouds

Now you can become a hot rod car driver? Or you'll receive an animated car as a free gift, along with eternal life?

Coming home late at night you see a lot of girls dressed like this by the side of the Bois de la Cambre end of Avenue Louise in Brussels, admittedly generally sans balloons

Noise cancelling headphones so you never ever have to listen to the priest droning on again?

This is the closest any of them get to spirituality, but even it is more sort of new-wave-hippy-whale-song in its drift than anything specifically to do with the Christian religion

I am mystified, but, as I believe religion's role is to acknowledge and bow down before mystery, perhaps that is exactly as it should be. 

What if I Don't Want To?

As I was leaving a shop this morning, a charity mugger yelled out that I'd dropped something . I glanced back, but could see nothing there.

"Your smile", he explained, sketching an upward curve in front of his face.

I stared at him, hoping to emulate Paddington Bear and one of his hard stares.

"Come on", the young man persisted, "why aren't you smiling?"

I have always hated this kind of hectoring nonsense, the cries of "Cheer up, it may never happen" that greet you if you appear in public looking less than ecstatic.

"Because my brother just died", I said.

The look on his face helped me understand at last what is meant by a silver lining. In fact, if I hadn't exercised great restraint, it might even have made me smile.

Afterwards

In the aftermath of a death, all sorts of relatives and individuals who regard themselves as having had central roles in the life of the deceased emerge to stake their claims. After my experience of these kinds of interventions in the time since my brother's death, I am left with a question I have not yet found an answer for: can you battle a monster without becoming a monster yourself?

Lessons in Comprehension

I had forgotten these poems by Philip Hodgins. They are bleakly cheering. He was a great poet.

"You're moving fast and yet you're going nowhere."

Two months ago I didn't understand those words;  having spent the last weeks of my brother's life in the hospital with him, I do.

Ignorance is bliss.

Battery Factory Blessing

"Right", the husband said, "your radio needs a new battery. I think it's time we went to the Battery Factory again."

I could tell what he was hoping to do, but it was a risky strategy. He was hoping to cheer me up, and he was right - this outing might do the trick, but only if things at the Battery Factory had remained unchanged.  As it had been some years since we'd visited, that seemed unlikely.

But it was worth a try - and better than sitting at home moping. So I climbed into the car beside the husband and off we went to Fyshwick, the original and the best when it comes to Canberra's light industrial zones.

On the way, we passed the river flats where they cultivate lawn that can be laid ready-grown in bare new gardens. The person in charge thinks he has a sense of humour and regularly puts up signs that are punny rather than funny. His latest, I noticed, read thus: "Putin some seed today and very soon it will be coming up Trumps." This is the first topical one I've seen from him; although never what you'd call a fan, I think I liked it better before he decided to add in a side order of international politics.

The car turned off the river road and onto the Battery Factory street. I felt nervous. The husband parked. I suggested I might just stay in the car.

"Don't be ridiculous", the husband said. I got out and trudged up the bitumen slope to the glass-fronted showroom, the husband leading the way, radio under his arms.

Disappointment. We were greeted by two unfamiliar men. They told us the battery the radio needed was no longer available. But then, through the door that led into the showroom, I glimpsed the figure we had been hoping to see. It was Robert, the man who I think runs the Battery Factory, a man of such good temper and genuine helpfulness that it is worthwhile finding any possible reason to visit the Battery Factory just for the pleasure of doing business with him.

Unfortunately, Robert was busy. He was helping another customer. That customer would not want to let him go, I was certain - you never do want to end a conversation with Robert.  And we were supposed to be getting back to my mother; we hadn't got hours and hours to spend.

"Robert?" said one of the two who were convinced that there was nothing to be done for us or our radio, "Yeah, he might think of something, I guess. When he's finished, we could ask him."

We all stood around, watching the conversation in the showroom take its course. Then Robert farewelled his customer and came over to join us.

He looked very slightly older than last time I'd seen him, there was a little more grey in his hair, but he hadn't changed, not really - his face was as kind as ever, his expression as reassuring. "Now how can I help you?" he asked, and we felt that he genuinely wanted to know.

All four of us clustered round him with the radio, like kindergarten children clamouring for the attention of their favourite teacher. We interrupted each other, eager to explain about how the radio was an old one and we didn't think the battery that was designed for it was available any more.

Robert listened to us calmly and then took the radio and looked it over. He explained that his men were right, the battery we'd used for it was no longer available, but we didn't need to worry because, with a little bit of soldering, we could solve the problem and still have a radio that worked like new.

I was on the point of telling Robert that it didn't really matter whether the radio ever worked again - the point of our outing had merely been to benefit from his presence. Luckily, my telephone rang and I went outside before I went too far.

I didn't see Robert again after that, but that didn't matter. He was there and I'd seen him and he'd restored my belief that people can be good and kind and nice, (something that had faltered considerably after the death of my brother, due to various encounters surrounding funeral arrangements et cetera that I will not go into here).

As I wound up my telephone conversation, the husband appeared with my radio. Apparently, Robert had got out a soldering iron, found a bit of suitable wire and a new battery connection and converted the radio to a new type of battery, without any thought of being paid.

All of which is by way of saying that, if you live in Canberra and you feel in need of your spirits being raised, pop out to the Battery Factory in Fyshwick and talk to Robert. It is always a trip worth taking. And if you are part of Robert's family, you are very lucky indeed.

Vrij Lopen

To cheer me up, my husband is making me breakfast. I thought he was making toast but then I saw that he was eating a slice of bread and butter and vegemite. I asked if the toaster wasn't working and he explained that it was fine but that, while waiting for it to do its job, he thought he'd indulge in a bit of nostalgia. It turns out he got vegemite sandwiches in his lunchbox every single school day of his youth.

"There was a chap who'd come back from Europe", he tells me, "I don't know if his family was with Foreign Affairs, or what they were, but I remember envying him and admiring his family's sophistication because he sometimes got triangles of Vache Qui Rit as well."

How things have changed. I remember a childcare worker confiding that the contents of the lunch boxes I prepared were some of the healthiest she'd ever seen. I had an idea such things were being scrutinised and my impression was that my children would be treated with more respect if the authorities approved of what I gave them. The fact that there was nothing at all among the provisions I supplied that they actually wanted to eat was completely beside the point.

Oh dear, now the vegemite sandwich boy has started criticising my shopping choices. What he objects to is this picture on the box of free range eggs I bought:

He says I should have explained I wanted eggs from free range chickens.

My Brother, My Friend

On 11 May, my brother died. Although I do not normally make speeches, I felt I owed it to him - and to my mother - to pay tribute to him at his funeral a couple of days ago. Since then, some people have asked for a copy of what I said, and so I am putting the text here for those who want it. If you don't feel like reading such a long thing, the gist is that I loved my brother enormously and will always miss him. He was a wonderfully generous brother and human being and, by great good fortune, he met a woman called Mary Ellen Field who matched his generosity with an abundance of her own.

"I'd like to start by apologising. This will not be a very good eulogy, when compared to our family's usual standards. The problem is that up until now Mark Colvin has been our eulogiser-in-chief, and he set a very high bar. For both our father and our stepfather, he did the job brilliantly, evoking each of them with a vividness that almost made you believe they were still among us. How nice it would be if I could do the same for him.

For those who don't know, by the way, I am Mark Colvin's sister. This does mean that, on the subject of Mark Colvin, I can at least claim to be that much derided thing, an expert. My mother would be the greatest expert on him here today - or indeed anywhere on the planet. My cousins, Jamie and Belinda, who, to our great joy, have flown out from England to be with us to farewell Mark, were both born before me, so they might be able to argue that they also have the edge. However, despite missing out on his first four years, as the next sister in line to him, I reckon I did have quite a lot of experience of Mark Colvin - although possibly not the Mark Colvin who has been celebrated in the media since his death.

Yes, I am his sister. And apparently there is a thing called sibling rivalry. Well I wouldn't know. It is said, I admit, that Marko expressed initial disappointment that I wasn't a boy – the story goes that while being read a Christmas story the evening after my birth, (I was born near Christmas) he piped up each time the male pronoun was used, saying, “Him, not her - they laid him in a manger”, “He, not she – he was wrapped in swaddling clothes” etc (I mentioned this to someone in Marko's hospital room the other day and Marko smiled gently, commenting, “Ah, family stories, aren't they always the best')?  In any case, if there was any truth to the story, the whole thing took place before I was aware of anything much, and by the time I was noticing stuff, Marko seems to have decided that we were going to be friends forever. We have been ever since.

Our relationship consisted almost exclusively of laughing together, sharing stupid jokes, a love of Molesworth, EL Wisty, Shelley Berman, New Yorker cartoons, deriving amusement from the tormenting of parents and grandparents – in this regard, there was one recurrent idiocy that we shared with our cousins Jamie and Belinda, with whom we spent such a lot of time as children. It involved insisting to our grandmother that the man who took the parking fees in the car park at Winchester - a sensationally unattractive person who always wore a very grubby raincoat and was therefore known to us as “the mackintosh man” - was desperately in love with her; this for some reason was something that totally maddened granny, which of course gave us all great joy. 

However, our absolute all time favourite torment routine, something we never really abandoned even in adulthood, was teasing our mother with a rendition of a Fairy Liquid advertisement ubiquitous in our childhoods; “Mummy”, one of us would say, in a sickly voice, “Mummy”, the other would chime in, repeating this tag team repetition, until finally our mother could stand it no more and would reply, reluctantly, often impatiently, presumably having resigned herself to the fact that we were never going to give up. “Yes?” she would say, and after a lot of giggling, we would ask her, “Mummy why are your hands so soft”, breaking immediately afterwards into a saccharine rendition of one of the most saccharine jingles ever penned, which I will spare you. 

We also made up routines for long car journeys, dialogues between characters we invented randomly. For some reason, the pair we reverted to most frequently were Nigel and Daphne, a couple of what would now be called Sloanes who loved nothing better than discussing their social calendars. I have no idea why we found this so amusing but it passed the time extremely well. “Nigel, are you going to Lady Northumberland's ball next week?” “Daphne, I'd love to, but I'm going to the Hambledon Hunt Hunt Ball that evening and I simply can't get out of it.” 

I realise as I remember these things that one of the worst aspects of losing my brother is not being able to have the opportunity to make him laugh again. How I would love to tell him about Mary Ellen Field having received not one but two letters of condolence following his death - charming, kind, beautifully written letters, both of them from convicted phone hackers serving time in one or other of Her Majesty's jails. He would have laughed and laughed at that, as he would if he'd heard about how one of his closest friends told herself she must pull herself together and get out of the house the day after his death. She had barely gone through the gate when the local real estate agent greeted her, unleashing a downpour of tears, most of which landed on the unsuspecting woman's shoulder.  “A real estate agent, of all people,” his friend said afterwards. Yes, Mark would have found the idea of blubbing on a real estate agent wonderfully absurd. 

But actually there was more to our relationship than laughter – there was also huge generosity, although I'm ashamed to say it was always from him to me. After a brief hiccup when he was so battered by his experience at prep school that his affection for me was replaced almost exclusively by the response “Stick a beetroot in your cakehole” if I ever attempted to speak to him, I was amazed one morning as we were walking down Victoria Street in London, near Westminster School, the place that restored him after his five horrible years at Summerfields. All of a sudden, Mark vanished, and before I could work out where he'd gone he reappeared, emerging from a sweet-shop doorway. He handed me a small white paper bag containing a quarter of sherbet lemons. He'd decided he'd give me a present, just out of the blue, for no reason, simply because he felt like doing it. 

There were many other similar occasions, but another that especially stays with me was an afternoon when he returned to our house at 68 Limerston Street and handed me a brand new book. It was the first ever Paddington Bear novel, when Peggy Fortnum was his illustrator. “I thought this looked as if it might be something you'd like", he told me. It was astonishingly thoughtful and perfectly chosen. I am still grateful for the hours of pleasure he gave me with that unprovoked gesture, as I went on to read and enjoy every one of those early Paddington books. 

Marko's generosity continued beyond our childhood - and so did my disgraceful bludging. It is astonishing to remember but there was a time when Sydney had not yet become a place full of hipster cafes, and if you wanted brunch on Saturday you had the choice of a milk bar or fending for yourself. This was the early seventies. I was 17 or 18, working as a motorbike courier, Marko was living in Coogee and I think possibly already at Double Jay or possibly still a cadet. Anyway, on the first morning of each weekend he used to buy a steak and a tin of mushrooms and cook the steak and then add the mushrooms to the pan. By some coincidence, I would usually drop in at around the same time and rather wearily he would share what he had intended to be a meal for one. 

Three or four years later, in London, when he was working at the ABC bureau there and I was being paid almost nothing to work for various now defunct magazines, I would sometimes go up to see him at the office they had in Portland Place.  He and I and basically everyone else in the rest of the office would head out to a restaurant run by a young Greek Cypriot. Lunch would go on for hours and usually end with complementary Metaxas all round. Much food was eaten, much rubbish was spoken and there was a nice sense of Australian good cheer. 

On those occasions, as I remember it – and admittedly the Metaxas were not brilliant for one's memory - Mark always shouted me, and always refused to accept repayment. In the same period, I let slip that I needed carpet but couldn't afford it. To my astonishment – when you don't have much money, it is always astounding to learn that anyone else has any to spare -  Marko immediately told me not to be ridiculous and gave me 250 quid.

If I wanted to self justify of course I could point out that money was not something my brother cared about. In fact I have rarely met anyone so little interested in material wealth as Mark. If you want proof of how little stuff mattered to him, you only have to look at his arrival to live permanently in Australia. Somehow- and even this I cannot quite credit, but perhaps my stepmother or some other relative did it for him – he managed to organise himself enough to get his belongings, including a rather lovely desk that had belonged to his grandfather,  packed up professionally and shipped over to Sydney. After that, however, his attention drifted. Despite nagging from his parents and various other members of the family – or perhaps because of the nagging: after all I do remember my mother having a conversation with him after he'd had a motorbike accident wherein she said, 'Well I hope you will give up riding the motorbike now”, to which he replied, 'Well I was going to until you said that” -  he never, ever managed to pick the things up from the wharf; really and truly never; in the end they were seized and used toward payment of the wharf fees he'd accrued.  I genuinely don't think he cared at all about that happening. 

But it wasn't only with money that Marko was generous; he was equally generous with those more precious commodities, his time and his knowledge. My cousin Belinda often tells the story of how, just before his finals at Oxford, she was bemoaning to him her lack of education. Despite the fact that he had so much else on his mind, Marko still found time to draw up a reading list for Belinda – she has said ever since that what he did for her that day was actually supply her with the education school never had. My daughter Lucy talks about his patience with young people. When you were with him, she says, there was never a sense that he was looking over his shoulder wishing for someone more interesting. Many people at the ABC have told me that he was extremely unusual in his openness, helpfulness, generosity and lack of any guarded competitiveness. I think actually that had he not been a journalist, he would have made a great teacher and certainly he told Mary Ellen Field that one of the things he loved best about her gift of an extra four years of life was the opportunity it gave him to mentor younger colleagues. And, since we are mentioning her, I would just like to highlight her gift and point out that she was the one and only person who matched my brother's generosity with an abundance of her own.

Marko's generosity, his total lack of hesitation about sharing what he had, was something I still admire greatly, not just because I benefited from it. It is a quality encountered very rarely and it was just a small part of a larger element in Marko's character – a trait that never left him and would be unexpected in anyone but particularly in a man of Marko's profession. It was innocence, or at least a kind of innocence - an unshakeable expectation of decency, of fair play, of loyalty in others, a tendency not to suspect low motives. As I say, this quality never completely left him and it was a great part of his charm and loveableness. However, it did make him very vulnerable to hurt.

Perhaps the best illustration of this gentle unworldliness is the story my mother tells about the first children's party she took Marko to. Marko was not a shy child. He went into the party perfectly happily, and before long my mother saw a small girl approach him. They seemed to get on, although the girl, to mum's way of thinking, looked like she was coming on a bit strong. All the same they appeared happy. Mum took her eye off proceedings. The next thing she knew, Marko was hurtling towards her, an expression of complete shock on his face. He looked at mum and then back at the girl, who had remained where he'd left her on the other side of the room. 

“That girl bit me,” he told my mother. He was clearly horrified. Before she could think what she was saying, my mother added to his horror by saying “Well, darling, go and bite her back”. 

Needless to say, Mark didn't. He was never aggressive or violent. However, he could be disappointed – and woe betide the person who disappointed him and thought they could still retain his friendship. If Marko put his trust in you or gave you his friendship and you betrayed it, perhaps because he himself was so loyal and such a good friend, he found it well nigh impossible to forgive the hurt he felt as a result. Mind you when that happened, when he did give up on someone, he didn't resort to histrionics. He didn't shout or scream or throw things. In fact, the only sign that he could no longer stand the sight of you was a dawning sense of being locked out from his affection, an intimidating withdrawal of his attention and interest. 

But even then, I was so glad to discover last week, things weren't completely irredeemable, provided you were truly sorry for the hurt you'd caused. After years of wounded silence from Marko, one of our closest relatives apologised unreservedly for something that Marko thought he'd said to him. "I love you" was Marko's immediate reply. Our relative flew over from London and they were together when Marko died.

But enough of this cloying stuff. It is also important to remember that Marko was hugely interesting company. That is why, as well as the laughs and the steak and tinned mushrooms, I will miss so much the endlessly varied conversations we had. During one of our very last, he said to me, “You and I always had so much in common” and that is true. However, once again I was the beneficiary, as Marko's brain was so enormous and so stocked with knowledge, whereas, except on very rare occasions, I was merely the interested looker on.  On any topic worth discussing he had such a rich reserve of information and reference stored away inside his head. In the last two or three days of his life alone, despite his being very, very ill, we managed to have some great discussions about among other things Taming of the Shrew and whether it is actually a sexist work - we agreed that it isn't, that it is actually all about love; Les Murray's poetry, most particularly Dog Fox Field; the rich language of observed nature that emerges again and again in Shakespeare's writing, (complete with quotations straight from memory – by Marko, naturally, not me); Memling, Van Eyk and the so-called Northern Primitives and how the only reason we tend to hear more of Michelangelo and da Vinci is that Vasari's writings pushed them to the fore; and Thomas Hardy, who my brother to the very end refused to agree contains traces of humour. 

And speaking of humour, I did manage to get one last chuckle out of him. It was very late in the piece, when he was well aware that death was not far away. If I had any doubt about that I would not have mentioned the plans being made to mark his passing. However, he knew and I knew, and so I told him I'd heard that the ABC had a strategy in place for the day of his death that was equal to that devised by the British government in the event of the death of the Queen Mother. He looked - unsurprisingly, given his utter modesty about his own significance - astonished and also gratified, in a I-must-stifle-any-tiny-scrap-of-incipient-vanity kind of way. To help in this regard, I told him that I was going to nip out immediately and look for a suitably flowery hat for him to wear from now on. He laughed, relieved that he had been rescued from the dangers of a plunge into full blown self-importance.

That was so typical. My brother was never a seeker of limelight, never a big noter. When filming, he abhorred noddies and appeared as little as humanly possible in the footage he shot. He must have known at some level that he was much loved by many, but it never made him self-important. While, like anyone he would have been gratified by the tributes that have been paid to him since his death, he would have been amazed as well. I doubt that he would have thought he deserved them. 

Speaking of tributes, I was looking through Mark's papers the other day and found something he'd written for the family of  Bahram William Dehqani-Tafti, his interpreter in Iran. Bahram was assassinated on 6 May, 1980. His death horrified Marko. His tribute to Bahram reads as follows:

"You get to know people faster in a war zone: during the three days he spent with us in Kurdistan, Bahram revealed many of his qualities: he was courageous, extremely level-headed, and at the same time sensitive to the people surrounding him. He had an enquiring mind without being inquisitive; but one of the things which struck me most forcibly was his ability to look at a problem from all directions.”

Mum felt that those words could just as well have been written about Marko himself. 

In the instant after my brother died. out of nowhere a memory from our childhood leapt into my head. It was from the very early 1960s, we were in Victoria, in a car driving along a remote and empty road. Marko and I were in the back, playing up as usual. Eventually my parents ran out of patience. They stopped the car. "If you don't behave" they told us, "we will put you out on the side of the road and leave you". 

My brother immediately grabbed the door handle, opened the door and leapt out. He began walking. I didn't see my parents' faces because I was so shocked myself. What would happen to him? Would we ever see him again? He was striding away ahead of us. He had called our parents' bluff.

My father started the car again and drove after Marko. Then ensued a ridiculous reversal of roles whereby my parents were reduced to creeping along in first gear beside their son's walking figure, begging him to get back into the car.

It was an odd thing to think of at that moment but I like to believe it was a metaphor. Marko has leapt out of the car we're all travelling in, he has shown us that what we think we are afraid of is not actually anything to be frightened of. He is striding off down the road."