Rumblings

So, following on from an evening with Messrs Amis, Gray and Morrison talking about violence and death in literature, film and in general, I've spent the day thinking and remembering.

When I was a kid, fighting was something we did a fair bit on our estate, often as play but sometimes becoming more serious. When I was 5, I refused to let the 3 year old across the road drive a pedal car that I was minding. He went around the back of his house, found a broken bottle and stabbed it in my face. I had to have three stitches in a cut just below my right eye. I've told my own kids that story hundreds of times and I don't think I've ever really understood how horrific it is.

There were other crazy incidents. When I was about 7 or 8 there was an older boy around the corner who would bully me. He and his friends once put me on the rocking horse in the park at the end of the street and rocked it so hard that I flew forward, cracking my forehead and the top of my nose on the metal mane of the horse. I remember my mam putting butter on the bruises, and I remember feeling furious and humiliated. One day when my dad was back from work and was washing his hands at the kitchen sink I saw the same lad walking past our house. I ran out of the back gate with a broom handle and whacked him across the back. I dropped the stick and ran back into our back garden with him in pursuit, brandishing my abandoned weapon. Of course my dad saw what was happening and came running out. The other lad legged it. Dad went straight round and had words with his dad and he got a leathering and never came near  me again. Even as I'm typing this I can feel myself hitting the keys with force - 'Serves you right, you bullying bastard!'- and yet I'm writing about an 11 year old getting a beating from his father. Real violence is never anything other than ugly and painful.

I was a prolific reader throughout my childhood. By the time I was 11, I'd read Tarzan, Biggles, G A Henty's historical novels, Tom Brown's Schooldays and, my favourites, Rosemary Sutcliffe's stories about the Romans in Britain. I was into chivalry, stiff upper lips and codes of honour. The Sutcliffe books caught my imagination because the characters were well drawn, the battles were brutal, and people died. At the same time, I remember watching  TV programmes compiled from newsreel footage, much of from the 2nd World War. One Wednesday I watched old film of bulldozers piling up stacks of naked, emaciated bodies. I feel choked writing this now. I was shocked and fascinated. I went through a period of struggling to get to sleep at night. Mam would come and sit by my bed while I worried out loud about the existence of God and the beginnings, and endings, of life. The real horrors began when she left and the lights were out. I'd lie in the dark, wrestling with the dilemma of who I would choose if one of my parents had to die. I was a serious and troubled boy, although on the outside I still did all the rough-and-tumble. However, I introduced a rule that I would only fight if the other guy hit me first.

I stuck with the rule until my world was shattered by the death of my dad a few months after my 13th birthday. He had a brain tumour, and in 1969 there wasn't much on offer in the way of treatment. He weighed around 6 stone when he died, at home, mam having chosen that he should be with us rather than in hospital. His head had been shaved, he couldn't speak, and it was hard to tell if he knew who I was when I went into the room to see him. I remember the guilt and horror that I felt because he looked like the people I'd seen in the newsreels, in the concentration camps. That couldn't be my dad. And now, I'm glad that he was there, at home, and that I could be with him up to the end.

After that I spent the next couple of years engineering and provoking fights. I wanted to hurt and I wanted to cry. If I couldn't get somebody else to hit me, I'd scrape and bash my head and my fists against walls. Football, a girlfriend and the codes of honour and fair play that I'd picked up from my pre-teen reading were the things that saved me. I didn't want to be a bad boy, I knew that this life was it, and I wanted to be around for as long as possible.

What does all this mean? I guess for me it means that my ordinary life has already accumulated its fair share of pain and death, and yet I am a lucky man to have lived in this country at this time in our history. Violence is part of the human animal condition, a drive which needs to be considered and understood. It is complicated and painful and I think it is important that we all know and are prepared to face up to our capacity to take part in it, whether as protagonists, protestors, bystanders or victims. It is ironic that since the Second World War so many of us in the West have been able to avoid a direct involvement in it, while at the same time we humans have managed to efficiently industrialise and commercialise the process of killing and maiming each other in large numbers. To get back to what started this post, we need artists, writers and film-makers to provoke and remind us, to get us to think about and engage with what we'd rather avoid, or deny.