It has always seemed odd to me, the possibility of growing
up in a home bare of books. No doubt it
is a sorry fact of life for many children, but I’m certain that such a state of
affairs must tend to undermine their development. To be aware of books as objects, to see them
being read and enjoyed, to appreciate them as a source of information and
pleasure, these have surely to be firm foundations for education and,
ultimately, for success in the adult world.
We never had a great deal in the way of family heirlooms in
my parents’ home and the only substantial item that I can think of now is a
huge dark wooden veneered cabinet which a plate inside dated to sometime in the
1880s. It was where my father kept his
books. He had a varied collection: a set
of Dickens, Good-Bad books like Holmes and Stevenson and Winifred Holtby, some
reference books (including a Whitakers Almanac for 1948 which footnoted the
demise of the last surviving officer of the Confederate Army), an Empire Youth
Annual, a whole swathe of true-life War literature published in the 1950s,
including many daring-do tales of POW camps which I foraged my way through over
a series of school holidays, and, strangely, an Olympia Press copy of Junky.
To some extent, I regret disposing of the bulk of them after
he died. I should hate to think of my
‘library’ being torn asunder and despatched back off to the charity shops from
which so much of it once came. But he
was a terrible hoarder and, though the books were really the least of the
problem, I was faced with a major task in disposing of over 70 years of
accumulated clutter and ephemera and, caught up perhaps in a head of steam, the
vast majority of the books went off to the shops or the skips. I suppose this is what happens when any of us
die. Our things, our precious things,
that we leave behind us are sifted and shifted and divided and dumped. And that’s that.
I retained a few of his books – the Dickens, the better of
the Good-Bad, Junky and, my personal
favourite among the war memoirs, Eastern
Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean.
Posted to the British Embassy, Moscow, in the late 1930s, Maclean witnessed
the effects of the Great Terror and its consequent show-trials, including that
of Bukharin. He also travelled –
entirely innocently, he claimed – about the remoter regions of the Soviet
Union, penetrating the Caucasus and into the immensity of Central Asia, via the
ancient cities of the Silk Road and up to the Oxus, on the borders of Afghanistan. All this despite the best efforts of Russian
inertia and Communist officialdom to thwart him. During the Second World War he was one of the
original members of the Special Air Service (SAS), undertaking irregular
warfare across Cyrenaica and the Western Desert and conducting the kidnapping
of a pro-Axis Iranian general at the very pivotal point of the war, in 1942,
before Alamein and Stalingrad, when it looked very likely that the German
pincers would close upon the Middle East.
From 1943, and promoted by now to Brigadier*, he led the
British Military Mission to Yugoslavia, which was instrumental in shifting the
support of the Western Allies away from the monarchist Chetniks in favour of
Tito’s communist partisans. This shift,
with all its consequences for the Balkans, was undertaken on the basis of the
brute calculation of total war – who was killing the most Germans.
I thought it right to remind him that the Partisans were communist-led.
"Do you intend to make your home in Yugoslavia after the war?" he asked.
"No," I replied. "Neither do I," he said. "That being so, don't you
think we had better leave it to the Yugoslavs to work out their own form
of government? What concerns us most now is who is doing the most
damage to the Germans."
All in all, a good rollicking, instructive read, from a consciously
conservative perspective, illustrated with maps tracing Maclean’s journeys
about Central Asia, the Middle East and the Balkans.
I was fascinated with maps as a young child, such that I
prevailed upon my parents to give me a world atlas for Christmas when I was 7
or 8. Far less than agricultural patterns,
or desertification or charts of ethnicities, the things that piqued my interest
above all were the nation-states of the world, their flags, the names of their
capitals, their external borders and their internal administrative
boundaries. Most especially, and
possibly under the influence of The Mouse
that Roared, I was fascinated with the anomalous micro-states of the world
– Liechtenstein, Andorra, San Marino, Bhutan – and the huge, mostly blank,
spaces of at the heart of Africa and of Asia: Chad, The Congo, Kazakhstan and
Mongolia.
Beyond the bare facts of the atlas that I pored over, with
jam-sticky fingers, it wasn’t too easy in that long ago lost age before the Internet
and Wikipedia to find out much more about these far flung curiosities and
territories without going off to the library. And perhaps not even then. Now,
everything about everything is available to anyone who can muster up the energy
for a few clicks and keystrokes.
While this fingertip access to the accumulated knowledge of
the ages is to be applauded as the greatest gift of Tim Berners-Lee et al, far
outweighing all the hustling, slime and tat, that lives alongside it, it can
become burdensome too. Many is the time
that I have begun with a simple search upon a place or a person or an event and
allowed myself to be led off down winding byways of links and tangents and
associations until the whole of a wet afternoon or a dark evening has been
burned away beyond recovery. There must
be an utterly apt term for this sort of behaviour and if there isn’t then
someone should hurry up and invent it.
Wiki-browsing? Wiki-dowsing? Wiki-grazing?
Wiki-wasting?
I picked up Eastern
Approaches recently and flicked through its pages, pausing for old times’
sake to look over the maps that had entranced me thirty years before. Not long afterwards I was sitting at the
computer, filling in one of those spaces in the day when it’s too late to go
out for coffee, too early to go off down the pub and too wet to get outside and
do the very necessary work in the garden, and one thing led to another and I
wandered off on a Wiki-trek.
Somehow, those maps came to mind and I was prompted to
search on one of those strange territories that I had only ever seen delineated
in Maclean’s book, Tannu Tuva, an indeterminate sort of a state, nestled
between Siberia and Outer Mongolia, that led a peripatetic independence through
the first half of the 20th century before ‘electing’ to be absorbed
into the USSR in 1944. That was well
enough, I found out more in five minutes than I had ever known before about
this peculiar place, home to yurts and nomads and Buddhist saints at the very
heart of Asia.
Better still – wonder of the wiki – I followed an external link to a
YouTube video of an old BBC Horizon documentary, from the days before the BBC
lost its confidence and used to make decent documentaries. The Quest for Tannu Tuva follows the American physicist and Manhattan Project alumni
Richard Feynman, his obsession with
the place, his struggles to find out much about it in the pre-internet dark
ages and his sadly unsuccessful attempts to breach the bounds of the Cold War
and get there.
It is quirky and it is heart-warming and it almost, but not
quite, moved me to play the CD of Tibetan monk-chant that I allowed myself to
be pressured into buying from a friend who ran a record shop when I was too
flush with funds and which has only ever come into its own when I’ve been
hosting a party and wanted everyone to get off home.
*Maclean shared a rare distinction with Enoch Powell, both being among those very few men who began
the war as privates and ended it as brigadiers.
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