Preface
We old men – and, yes, I do mean men – are much given to claiming special knowledge of this or that. We may or may not occasionally have some justification. There is one subject, however, that we do all know about, and that is old age itself.
Is there anything to be gained by passing on what I am learning? I suppose other old people may be interested in making comparisons. However, I am more concerned with the young. It is they, for the most part, who have to put up with us old ones, and maybe it will help if they can learn a little about what we are thinking and feeling. And they will know a little more about what to expect themselves some day, if they live long enough.
How old is old? The allotted span used to be three score years and ten, “or four score with good health”. In very recent times, for people with access to modern medicine, good health has become increasingly common, so it seems reasonable now to set the first mark at eighty. That accords with my own experience. I didn’t feel old in my seventies, but as soon as I entered the extra decade, just three years ago, I did imagine that I had moved into a new phase. I am an old man now.
Is there anything to be gained by passing on what I am learning? I suppose other old people may be interested in making comparisons. However, I am more concerned with the young. It is they, for the most part, who have to put up with us old ones, and maybe it will help if they can learn a little about what we are thinking and feeling. And they will know a little more about what to expect themselves some day, if they live long enough.
How old is old? The allotted span used to be three score years and ten, “or four score with good health”. In very recent times, for people with access to modern medicine, good health has become increasingly common, so it seems reasonable now to set the first mark at eighty. That accords with my own experience. I didn’t feel old in my seventies, but as soon as I entered the extra decade, just three years ago, I did imagine that I had moved into a new phase. I am an old man now.
Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death
The quotation is from Dr Johnson. I didn’t take it from the original, but found it in John Wain’s biography. It comes from one of the Idler essays, supposedly a more light-hearted collection than the earlier Rambler ones! To a younger reader it may seem a sombre thought, but the very point I want to make is that to me it is no longer a gloomy one. It is simply something that I am constantly aware of. In a way it is what old age is all about. Old age and dying are inseparable features of life. This comes into everything we do – our travel plans, the books we choose to read, house improvements, financial plans, and just about every aspect of daily life. I remember an old aunt of mine buying a new carpet. “I didn’t get a very expensive one,” she said, “just good enough to see me out”. A typically lowland Scots slant on the matter.
For my present purpose I am, of course, concentrating on death that comes at its proper time. Like everyone else who has seen out their full span, I have known more than enough deaths that have come too early. One in particular, that of my own first wife, taught me all there is to know about what it is to be the survivor, having watched helplessly as her light went out, and faced the devastating reality that nothing could bring her back.
No doubt we all have our own conceptions of death. Mine is a very simple one. It will be the end – in my case of a life that began with the union of two gametes in January 1927, in the dark, cold depths of a Scottish winter. I can make nothing of ideas of life after death, of an immortal soul, or of another (“spirit”) world. If people want to embrace such concepts, let them. But to me they seem to be no more than the ultimate in wishful thinking.
I have never been afraid of death, but I do hope that it won’t come in one of its worse forms, like the slow mental deterioration my mother endured, the cancers that killed my father and my brother, or the way my wife died from leukaemia. I’d much rather go to sleep one evening, and just not wake up. The genetic indicators are against me, and dementia is already knocking at the door, but you never know your luck.
The best death I ever heard of happened in Cyprus. There was a man in his late sixties, known to everybody as “Mouskos”. He had been Secretary for Agriculture. Because of this connection, he took a real interest in the Forestry College, of which I was the Principal, and we saw him frequently when he came to visit his father, who lived in a very small village just down the hill from our bigger one. This father was a remarkable man in his nineties, whose pride and joy was his apple orchard. One day he had climbed up into a tree to do some pruning and, apparently without warning, fell out of it, dead. If only we could all look forward to something similar! Mouskos inherited the orchard. He too must be gone by now, but I doubt if he ended his days as happily as his father.
When I was about 65 I consulted a doctor, who was young and perhaps not very wise, about some aches and pains. He said: “You’re going to have a lot of trouble with this arthritis, in your eighties”. He has been right, but only in part. My knees are increasingly dysfunctional, but unlike other victims of arthritis I have known, I get no pain worth mentioning. Every time I go for a check up, I can give an ever lengthening list of joints that are causing some trouble. The main concentration is from the knees down, while my arms and hands have so far got off lightly, and my hip joints, touch wood, seem to be unaffected. To set against my reduced mobility, I am always assured that I look young for my years, and that my heart and lungs show no sign of decay.
As a forester, I am an inveterate planner, but now I have run into a major difficulty. The key date is missing. In theory it could be anything between today and about 2035, but family history suggests that sometime in the next five years, or maybe ten, is most probable. Even this range of probabilities is only a guess, and not much use for serious planning. I can’t stop trying to arrange my future, but now I call it stochastic or contingency planning, the hoped-for contingency being that I am still there to put a plan into effect.
I ask myself what would I really like to do with my remaining time. I’ll come back to this major question in Chapter 4. I think that part of the answer might be to become migratory, and spend some of my time in each of my two homes. Neither is really mine. In Scotland I rely on the kindness of my oldest son and my daughter-in-law, and in Java all our property is legally my Indonesian wife’s. But will my deteriorating knees allow me to travel, supposing there is no cure for them? I should find out better in 2012, when I have the beginnings of a plan to make another trip to Europe – if I’m still alive and mobile enough to do so.
I am in Java now partly because I like it – for a long list of reasons, starting with the climate we have up here in the hills – and partly in fulfilment of a promise to my wife, that if she stuck with me (in England, Nepal and Sri Lanka, as it turned out) until I retired, I would live in her country for the rest of my days. She accepts the migratory idea, however, and I also think that if I could somehow plan that the last migration was northwards, she would join me in Scotland for a while.
I even try to plan for her old age, as she is a lot younger than me, but in the end I have to accept that she will do things, with help from our children, her own way. Quite unlike me in this respect, she is content that “the Lord will provide”. And after all, she can claim that He always has done so, so far.
I have acquired an unusual stock of memories. I lived for the first 20½ years of my life in Scotland – the reason for this well remembered number is that it was the minimum age for entering the Colonial Forest Service. Then I worked in Tanganyika Territory, Scotland, Uganda, Papua New Guinea, Cyprus, Cameroon, Somalia (briefly), Indonesia, England, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, before retiring to Indonesia. I also travelled quite a lot in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and India.
What kind of things do I remember? I have been to see a good many of the places that draw people from far away. One or two have left particularly vivid impressions. Petra in Jordan takes pride of place. I have been there twice, once long ago, when it was out of the way and had relatively few visitors, and once more recently, when many coach loads were arriving daily. Surprisingly, the second visit was the more memorable of the two, partly because new excavations had revealed more of the site, and partly because I had acquired at least a little more knowledge of what I was looking at.
This second visit also illustrated other features of the memory system. My archaeologist second son was with the party, and our travels had taken us to see some of his own efforts to dig up the past – a much older past than Petra’s. The personal touch must have done something, and no doubt some little incidents helped, such as a ritually buried skull being uncovered just as we arrived at a related site, by one of the archaeologists then at work. There was also the many-layered comedy of an officious tour guide telling my son not to climb on the ancient buildings, when this at least locally well known archaeologist was actually examining the experimental replica of a stone-age house, which he himself had had built. My heightened perceptions of all that desert country have even left a clear picture of a very modern creation, a guest house designed by a most remarkable architect, who had used “free forms”, local materials, and candle light, to outstanding effect.
In a more general way, what I remember best out of all these years are often tiny incidents, that may have been over in a minute or two. For instance, I once opened my front door in Cyprus on a fine summer evening, to find a very large brown owl standing on the doormat. It looked at me, and then, with no undue haste, took off on its completely silent wings. Unforgettable.
A clearly remembered sequence comes from a visit to the forests of the Sierra Nevada, in California. I was duly impressed by the redwood trees, and even more by the sugar pines with their immensely tall, clear, cylindrical stems. The picture that really sticks, however, is of a little family of chipmunks, unafraid of humans, that were playing around a fallen log, foraging for pine seeds. I am not very fond of the word “cute”, but if ever it has seemed right, it was in its application, by my American guide, to these little animals.
The chipmunk is a very small kind of squirrel, and if I recall another encounter with a different kind of squirrel it may be at some risk of over-representing them in my set of memories, but here it is. I was with my first wife, June, on a visit to Schönbrunn, the old imperial palace on the outskirts of Vienna. We were passing one of the small religious shrines in the park, when I saw something moving inside it. The shrine had no wall on the front side, but only vertical iron bars. On the altar there was a little red squirrel, eating an acorn – they are said not to be able to digest acorns, but that is certainly what this one was chewing. It obviously realized that it was safe inside the bars, and scarcely bothered to look in our direction, so we stood and watched it, at very close range, for ten minutes or so. What grabbed our attention was its neat, tiny forepaws, rather like minute human hands, and its dexterity in manipulating the nut with them. But even apart from this detail, it was an extraordinarily beautiful little creature, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed indeed. The only thing that I can recall from inside the gorgeous palace is the emperor’s austere sleeping arrangements, based on a very ordinary single-sized iron bedstead.
It is said that some children prefer big toys, and others small ones. I was definitely in the second camp, and in my case at least the preference carried over into my adult life, which is probably why little squirrels came to take precedence over big elephants, giraffes, lions, etc. On at least one occasion it extended from the animal world into the plant one. I was on the visit to Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden that has always been obligatory on my home leaves, and went to see a new cold greenhouse that had been put up to hold alpines or rock plants, perhaps those that were thought too delicate or too valuable to plant out in the open. I was brought to a halt by a single potted plant, which the gardeners had evidently recognized as something special, and had put on view in isolation, in quite a wide space on the shelf. It was a daffodil from Iceland, no more than a quarter of the size of an ordinary daffodil. It was like the work of some supreme jeweller, perfect in every tiny detail. The only near-adequate word that came to mind was exquisite.
I feel guilty because people don’t figure in my memories as much as I think they ought to, as fellow humans. It is almost like having a mild retroactive form of autism. I know that if I met almost any of those that I once knew well, even if they were miraculously preserved as they had been decades ago, I wouldn’t recognize them, or be able to attach names to faces.
Even my grandmother, parents, brother, and first wife would be only partial exceptions, their appearance still familiar, however, from the old photographs. There are a few people, in addition to family members, who are well remembered for the parts they played in my life – about half a dozen schoolteachers, two or three university teachers, Professor Anderson from my few years on the Edinburgh University staff, the Instructors at the Cyprus Forestry College, and above all, that most remarkable forester, Ober-Professor Walter Bitterlich of Salzburg. But even in their cases, they are remembered in terms of what they said and did, rather than as people to whom I had any sort of personal attachment. It is a little difficult to explain what I mean, but to take the extreme case of my own mother, I know that as a small child I must have been bonded to her with excessive closeness, but now I remember her from a later period, for her intellectual and moral virtues, and as an influence on how I have tried to live. I try to picture her also as she must have been even earlier than my first memories. One old photograph in particular captures her beauty, and I am sure it went with great good humour and vivacity. A mother to be proud of.
As to the women closest to me in my adult life, there are two relevant stories that I have often told. On our honeymoon in 1953, June and I were visiting St Paul de Vence, in the hills above Nice, when we were accosted by a gypsy woman who proposed to tell my fortune. I refused, and she eventually desisted from her importunities and went off, calling something to me in her very strong Provençal accent. June was much amused, and translated it as: “There will be two women in your life!”. I met the second one, Theresia, in Samarinda, in Borneo, towards the end of June’s life, and maintained an innocent relationship with her until some eight months after June died, when I married her. It is that first meeting that has left a picture in the mind, of a striking young woman opening a door, to tell me that the people I was looking for were not at home. Her striking appearance owed much, but by no means everything, to the way she was dressed, in two towels, a very large one wrapped round her, and the other piled up like a turban on her hair, which she had just been washing, after her afternoon shower. In all the ways that matter, the gypsy has been exactly right.
For all that, I have not been able to resist wondering, occasionally, how my life might have gone if it had taken the other way at one or two of its forks. Most obviously, suppose June had recovered from leukaemia, which I think she might have done a few years later, with the great advances that have been made in that branch of medicine. Or of course she might never have contracted it at all. She would have joined me in Oxford and, I should think, made a name for herself in post-colonial studies, with the added confidence supplied by her own African experiences.
Theresia and her two children would have become a fading memory, possibly never even visited or seen again, and quite likely I would never have known Nepal or Sri Lanka, and certainly not everyday life in Java. By the way, I have now lived here for thirteen years – which is longer than my stay in any other home. And I have been married to Theresia for longer than I was to June.
Eventually, June would almost certainly have wanted us to retire to her beloved France, and I certainly would not have resisted.
This alternative story would have had some considerable attractions, but I am in no doubt that, on balance, life has done very well by me, even if it gave June a raw deal – which left me with no remnant of belief in a just or benign god, or providence. Fortunately, as it has turned out, I have been able to hold on to important parts of my old life, especially contact (although never enough) with our children and grandchildren, in whom part of her lives on.
At the same time I have built up a whole new and very rich experience of family life of a quite different kind. As it happens, I think that this circumstance throws some light, for my benefit, on one of the great questions of our times, the relations between the “developed” and the “developing” world, fascinating and endlessly complex as they are. But, as always, it is the direct personal contacts that matter, and I think that in having an Indonesian family as well as a Scottish one I am blessed far beyond my deserts.
My son Matthew has been particularly helpful in seeking out for my delectation a great many of the old cinema classics that are now available on DVD. I missed many of them when I was spending my days in remote parts of Africa. And of course he has thrown in, for good measure, some of the more recent masterpieces from France, China, Japan, and Mexico, or wherever, that I would never have found on my own.
I promise myself that on any further visits to Europe I’ll take any opportunity – and even make opportunities – to visit some of the main art galleries. I did go to the Scottish National one on my last visit "home". The National Portrait gallery in London is another target, as one of my lifelong interests has been in biography. And I hope a plan concocted with my French daughter-in-law, Marianne, will come off some day – to see a few things in and around Paris, with particular mention of the collection of Toulouse-Lautrec prints in the Bibliothèque Nationale. There are a few individual pictures that I would go to a lot of trouble to see, the latest addition to the list being one of the portraits of Dr Johnson by his friend Joshua Reynolds, which comes across with astonishing force even as an illustration in Wain’s biography. It is noted there as being in the Tate, which is in any case yet another target for a visit.
I have begun to think of myself as something of a dix-huitièmiste, if only at the lowest conceivable level. I got this rather pretentious term from Wain. One would suppose that he had taken it from a French source, although it is not in my edition of the compendious Harrap dictionary. I have been taking a renewed interest in Burns, as well as Johnson (and therefore Boswell), and also Adam Smith and David Hume. This last I have gone back to in a rather limited way, because eighteenth-century philosophy is doubly hard going – but at least his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is perfectly readable. My near-idolatry of Jane Austen goes back a long way, while Fielding’s Tom Jones is also an old favourite. And I ought, for example, to look into Swift and Defoe again, as well as some of the “Augustan” poets, who were out of fashion when I was at school.
I am sadly lacking in knowledge of the key French sources. I read Rousseau’s Confessions once, but didn’t like it. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with Voltaire – Leonard Woolf solved that problem by taking the entire works with him to Ceylon. The great encyclopaedias of Diderot or Buffon must be heavy going indeed, however enlightening they are.
I should also try to learn something more of Goethe, mainly an eighteenth-century man, I think. Although I can struggle through German prose, it would have to be in English. I did once get around to mail-ordering a book of his poems, but was put out when I found that it didn’t include the only two that I already knew – Kennst du das Land …, and Röslein auf der Heide.
As for other eighteenth century achievements, I have long been convinced, for instance, that Cook was by far the greatest navigator of them all (and that his contemporary Bougainville is but a pale shadow by comparison). I once set out to read Beaglehole’s edition of the Cook journals, but was thwarted by the first volume having gone astray from the Nicosia British Council Library. Maybe I should try again somehow, but it would be asking a lot of the old brain.
I am unmusical, but at least willing to go along with those who tell me that the eighteenth century wins again, and that Mozart is still the top man. This view has been reinforced by my Austrian experiences. To have suggested anything else in the Bitterlich house in Salzburg would have been blasphemy, probably leading to summary expulsion. And one of my very few memorable opera experiences has been to see and hear Die Zauberflöte in Vienna itself.
Until recently, my thoughts on how best to spend the remaining years (or months – who knows?) turned mainly to travel, but now that I have increasing difficulty in getting around, these thoughts have been reduced to planning how I am to get back to Scotland at least once more, and how I might fit into other people’s travel plans, when I can cover the ground mainly in their cars. One rather unexpected gap which I filled in last July was the Burns country around Ayr; I had already seen most of the places where he passed the later part of his life, in and around Dumfries. If everything goes favourably, I might see a little more of France, next time and perhaps southern Spain, where I now have an invitation from a lady I first met in Tanganyika in 1954, when she was one year old.
Old friends and family of my own generation are indeed thinning out rather drastically. My Finlayson grandfather had only five F2 descendants, and there are only two of us left, the other being my “young” cousin Frances, easily accessible by (free!) bus to Aberdeen. I have one surviving friend from university with whom I am still in touch (and there can’t be many others still alive). Donald insists on continuing to drive, although actually older than me, so we can probably have a jaunt somewhere interesting.
1 – Sentiments and presentiments
The quotation is from Dr Johnson. I didn’t take it from the original, but found it in John Wain’s biography. It comes from one of the Idler essays, supposedly a more light-hearted collection than the earlier Rambler ones! To a younger reader it may seem a sombre thought, but the very point I want to make is that to me it is no longer a gloomy one. It is simply something that I am constantly aware of. In a way it is what old age is all about. Old age and dying are inseparable features of life. This comes into everything we do – our travel plans, the books we choose to read, house improvements, financial plans, and just about every aspect of daily life. I remember an old aunt of mine buying a new carpet. “I didn’t get a very expensive one,” she said, “just good enough to see me out”. A typically lowland Scots slant on the matter.
For my present purpose I am, of course, concentrating on death that comes at its proper time. Like everyone else who has seen out their full span, I have known more than enough deaths that have come too early. One in particular, that of my own first wife, taught me all there is to know about what it is to be the survivor, having watched helplessly as her light went out, and faced the devastating reality that nothing could bring her back.
No doubt we all have our own conceptions of death. Mine is a very simple one. It will be the end – in my case of a life that began with the union of two gametes in January 1927, in the dark, cold depths of a Scottish winter. I can make nothing of ideas of life after death, of an immortal soul, or of another (“spirit”) world. If people want to embrace such concepts, let them. But to me they seem to be no more than the ultimate in wishful thinking.
I have never been afraid of death, but I do hope that it won’t come in one of its worse forms, like the slow mental deterioration my mother endured, the cancers that killed my father and my brother, or the way my wife died from leukaemia. I’d much rather go to sleep one evening, and just not wake up. The genetic indicators are against me, and dementia is already knocking at the door, but you never know your luck.
The best death I ever heard of happened in Cyprus. There was a man in his late sixties, known to everybody as “Mouskos”. He had been Secretary for Agriculture. Because of this connection, he took a real interest in the Forestry College, of which I was the Principal, and we saw him frequently when he came to visit his father, who lived in a very small village just down the hill from our bigger one. This father was a remarkable man in his nineties, whose pride and joy was his apple orchard. One day he had climbed up into a tree to do some pruning and, apparently without warning, fell out of it, dead. If only we could all look forward to something similar! Mouskos inherited the orchard. He too must be gone by now, but I doubt if he ended his days as happily as his father.
When I was about 65 I consulted a doctor, who was young and perhaps not very wise, about some aches and pains. He said: “You’re going to have a lot of trouble with this arthritis, in your eighties”. He has been right, but only in part. My knees are increasingly dysfunctional, but unlike other victims of arthritis I have known, I get no pain worth mentioning. Every time I go for a check up, I can give an ever lengthening list of joints that are causing some trouble. The main concentration is from the knees down, while my arms and hands have so far got off lightly, and my hip joints, touch wood, seem to be unaffected. To set against my reduced mobility, I am always assured that I look young for my years, and that my heart and lungs show no sign of decay.
As a forester, I am an inveterate planner, but now I have run into a major difficulty. The key date is missing. In theory it could be anything between today and about 2035, but family history suggests that sometime in the next five years, or maybe ten, is most probable. Even this range of probabilities is only a guess, and not much use for serious planning. I can’t stop trying to arrange my future, but now I call it stochastic or contingency planning, the hoped-for contingency being that I am still there to put a plan into effect.
I ask myself what would I really like to do with my remaining time. I’ll come back to this major question in Chapter 4. I think that part of the answer might be to become migratory, and spend some of my time in each of my two homes. Neither is really mine. In Scotland I rely on the kindness of my oldest son and my daughter-in-law, and in Java all our property is legally my Indonesian wife’s. But will my deteriorating knees allow me to travel, supposing there is no cure for them? I should find out better in 2012, when I have the beginnings of a plan to make another trip to Europe – if I’m still alive and mobile enough to do so.
I am in Java now partly because I like it – for a long list of reasons, starting with the climate we have up here in the hills – and partly in fulfilment of a promise to my wife, that if she stuck with me (in England, Nepal and Sri Lanka, as it turned out) until I retired, I would live in her country for the rest of my days. She accepts the migratory idea, however, and I also think that if I could somehow plan that the last migration was northwards, she would join me in Scotland for a while.
I even try to plan for her old age, as she is a lot younger than me, but in the end I have to accept that she will do things, with help from our children, her own way. Quite unlike me in this respect, she is content that “the Lord will provide”. And after all, she can claim that He always has done so, so far.
2 – Memories
I have acquired an unusual stock of memories. I lived for the first 20½ years of my life in Scotland – the reason for this well remembered number is that it was the minimum age for entering the Colonial Forest Service. Then I worked in Tanganyika Territory, Scotland, Uganda, Papua New Guinea, Cyprus, Cameroon, Somalia (briefly), Indonesia, England, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, before retiring to Indonesia. I also travelled quite a lot in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and India.
What kind of things do I remember? I have been to see a good many of the places that draw people from far away. One or two have left particularly vivid impressions. Petra in Jordan takes pride of place. I have been there twice, once long ago, when it was out of the way and had relatively few visitors, and once more recently, when many coach loads were arriving daily. Surprisingly, the second visit was the more memorable of the two, partly because new excavations had revealed more of the site, and partly because I had acquired at least a little more knowledge of what I was looking at.
This second visit also illustrated other features of the memory system. My archaeologist second son was with the party, and our travels had taken us to see some of his own efforts to dig up the past – a much older past than Petra’s. The personal touch must have done something, and no doubt some little incidents helped, such as a ritually buried skull being uncovered just as we arrived at a related site, by one of the archaeologists then at work. There was also the many-layered comedy of an officious tour guide telling my son not to climb on the ancient buildings, when this at least locally well known archaeologist was actually examining the experimental replica of a stone-age house, which he himself had had built. My heightened perceptions of all that desert country have even left a clear picture of a very modern creation, a guest house designed by a most remarkable architect, who had used “free forms”, local materials, and candle light, to outstanding effect.
In a more general way, what I remember best out of all these years are often tiny incidents, that may have been over in a minute or two. For instance, I once opened my front door in Cyprus on a fine summer evening, to find a very large brown owl standing on the doormat. It looked at me, and then, with no undue haste, took off on its completely silent wings. Unforgettable.
A clearly remembered sequence comes from a visit to the forests of the Sierra Nevada, in California. I was duly impressed by the redwood trees, and even more by the sugar pines with their immensely tall, clear, cylindrical stems. The picture that really sticks, however, is of a little family of chipmunks, unafraid of humans, that were playing around a fallen log, foraging for pine seeds. I am not very fond of the word “cute”, but if ever it has seemed right, it was in its application, by my American guide, to these little animals.
The chipmunk is a very small kind of squirrel, and if I recall another encounter with a different kind of squirrel it may be at some risk of over-representing them in my set of memories, but here it is. I was with my first wife, June, on a visit to Schönbrunn, the old imperial palace on the outskirts of Vienna. We were passing one of the small religious shrines in the park, when I saw something moving inside it. The shrine had no wall on the front side, but only vertical iron bars. On the altar there was a little red squirrel, eating an acorn – they are said not to be able to digest acorns, but that is certainly what this one was chewing. It obviously realized that it was safe inside the bars, and scarcely bothered to look in our direction, so we stood and watched it, at very close range, for ten minutes or so. What grabbed our attention was its neat, tiny forepaws, rather like minute human hands, and its dexterity in manipulating the nut with them. But even apart from this detail, it was an extraordinarily beautiful little creature, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed indeed. The only thing that I can recall from inside the gorgeous palace is the emperor’s austere sleeping arrangements, based on a very ordinary single-sized iron bedstead.
It is said that some children prefer big toys, and others small ones. I was definitely in the second camp, and in my case at least the preference carried over into my adult life, which is probably why little squirrels came to take precedence over big elephants, giraffes, lions, etc. On at least one occasion it extended from the animal world into the plant one. I was on the visit to Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden that has always been obligatory on my home leaves, and went to see a new cold greenhouse that had been put up to hold alpines or rock plants, perhaps those that were thought too delicate or too valuable to plant out in the open. I was brought to a halt by a single potted plant, which the gardeners had evidently recognized as something special, and had put on view in isolation, in quite a wide space on the shelf. It was a daffodil from Iceland, no more than a quarter of the size of an ordinary daffodil. It was like the work of some supreme jeweller, perfect in every tiny detail. The only near-adequate word that came to mind was exquisite.
I feel guilty because people don’t figure in my memories as much as I think they ought to, as fellow humans. It is almost like having a mild retroactive form of autism. I know that if I met almost any of those that I once knew well, even if they were miraculously preserved as they had been decades ago, I wouldn’t recognize them, or be able to attach names to faces.
Even my grandmother, parents, brother, and first wife would be only partial exceptions, their appearance still familiar, however, from the old photographs. There are a few people, in addition to family members, who are well remembered for the parts they played in my life – about half a dozen schoolteachers, two or three university teachers, Professor Anderson from my few years on the Edinburgh University staff, the Instructors at the Cyprus Forestry College, and above all, that most remarkable forester, Ober-Professor Walter Bitterlich of Salzburg. But even in their cases, they are remembered in terms of what they said and did, rather than as people to whom I had any sort of personal attachment. It is a little difficult to explain what I mean, but to take the extreme case of my own mother, I know that as a small child I must have been bonded to her with excessive closeness, but now I remember her from a later period, for her intellectual and moral virtues, and as an influence on how I have tried to live. I try to picture her also as she must have been even earlier than my first memories. One old photograph in particular captures her beauty, and I am sure it went with great good humour and vivacity. A mother to be proud of.
As to the women closest to me in my adult life, there are two relevant stories that I have often told. On our honeymoon in 1953, June and I were visiting St Paul de Vence, in the hills above Nice, when we were accosted by a gypsy woman who proposed to tell my fortune. I refused, and she eventually desisted from her importunities and went off, calling something to me in her very strong Provençal accent. June was much amused, and translated it as: “There will be two women in your life!”. I met the second one, Theresia, in Samarinda, in Borneo, towards the end of June’s life, and maintained an innocent relationship with her until some eight months after June died, when I married her. It is that first meeting that has left a picture in the mind, of a striking young woman opening a door, to tell me that the people I was looking for were not at home. Her striking appearance owed much, but by no means everything, to the way she was dressed, in two towels, a very large one wrapped round her, and the other piled up like a turban on her hair, which she had just been washing, after her afternoon shower. In all the ways that matter, the gypsy has been exactly right.
3 – What might have been
I don’t like the fashion for “alternative history” – what would have happened if the Nazis had successfully invaded Britain after Dunkirk, and all similar imaginings. Come to that, I have never liked historical novels (with the one major exception of War and Peace) or any other mixture of truth, or the search for it, with fiction.For all that, I have not been able to resist wondering, occasionally, how my life might have gone if it had taken the other way at one or two of its forks. Most obviously, suppose June had recovered from leukaemia, which I think she might have done a few years later, with the great advances that have been made in that branch of medicine. Or of course she might never have contracted it at all. She would have joined me in Oxford and, I should think, made a name for herself in post-colonial studies, with the added confidence supplied by her own African experiences.
Theresia and her two children would have become a fading memory, possibly never even visited or seen again, and quite likely I would never have known Nepal or Sri Lanka, and certainly not everyday life in Java. By the way, I have now lived here for thirteen years – which is longer than my stay in any other home. And I have been married to Theresia for longer than I was to June.
Eventually, June would almost certainly have wanted us to retire to her beloved France, and I certainly would not have resisted.
This alternative story would have had some considerable attractions, but I am in no doubt that, on balance, life has done very well by me, even if it gave June a raw deal – which left me with no remnant of belief in a just or benign god, or providence. Fortunately, as it has turned out, I have been able to hold on to important parts of my old life, especially contact (although never enough) with our children and grandchildren, in whom part of her lives on.
At the same time I have built up a whole new and very rich experience of family life of a quite different kind. As it happens, I think that this circumstance throws some light, for my benefit, on one of the great questions of our times, the relations between the “developed” and the “developing” world, fascinating and endlessly complex as they are. But, as always, it is the direct personal contacts that matter, and I think that in having an Indonesian family as well as a Scottish one I am blessed far beyond my deserts.
4 – What’s left to do?
I have asked myself, what is the point of storing up more memories for my old age, when I already have more than enough memories, and probably not very much more old age? However, it is a false question. I haven’t spent my life until now in pursuit of memories, but just to live it, and there is no need to think of what’s left, in any other way than that. A better idea, it seems, is to try to fill some gaps in what I already know, about things that have interested me.
My son Matthew has been particularly helpful in seeking out for my delectation a great many of the old cinema classics that are now available on DVD. I missed many of them when I was spending my days in remote parts of Africa. And of course he has thrown in, for good measure, some of the more recent masterpieces from France, China, Japan, and Mexico, or wherever, that I would never have found on my own.
I promise myself that on any further visits to Europe I’ll take any opportunity – and even make opportunities – to visit some of the main art galleries. I did go to the Scottish National one on my last visit "home". The National Portrait gallery in London is another target, as one of my lifelong interests has been in biography. And I hope a plan concocted with my French daughter-in-law, Marianne, will come off some day – to see a few things in and around Paris, with particular mention of the collection of Toulouse-Lautrec prints in the Bibliothèque Nationale. There are a few individual pictures that I would go to a lot of trouble to see, the latest addition to the list being one of the portraits of Dr Johnson by his friend Joshua Reynolds, which comes across with astonishing force even as an illustration in Wain’s biography. It is noted there as being in the Tate, which is in any case yet another target for a visit.
I have begun to think of myself as something of a dix-huitièmiste, if only at the lowest conceivable level. I got this rather pretentious term from Wain. One would suppose that he had taken it from a French source, although it is not in my edition of the compendious Harrap dictionary. I have been taking a renewed interest in Burns, as well as Johnson (and therefore Boswell), and also Adam Smith and David Hume. This last I have gone back to in a rather limited way, because eighteenth-century philosophy is doubly hard going – but at least his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is perfectly readable. My near-idolatry of Jane Austen goes back a long way, while Fielding’s Tom Jones is also an old favourite. And I ought, for example, to look into Swift and Defoe again, as well as some of the “Augustan” poets, who were out of fashion when I was at school.
I am sadly lacking in knowledge of the key French sources. I read Rousseau’s Confessions once, but didn’t like it. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with Voltaire – Leonard Woolf solved that problem by taking the entire works with him to Ceylon. The great encyclopaedias of Diderot or Buffon must be heavy going indeed, however enlightening they are.
I should also try to learn something more of Goethe, mainly an eighteenth-century man, I think. Although I can struggle through German prose, it would have to be in English. I did once get around to mail-ordering a book of his poems, but was put out when I found that it didn’t include the only two that I already knew – Kennst du das Land …, and Röslein auf der Heide.
As for other eighteenth century achievements, I have long been convinced, for instance, that Cook was by far the greatest navigator of them all (and that his contemporary Bougainville is but a pale shadow by comparison). I once set out to read Beaglehole’s edition of the Cook journals, but was thwarted by the first volume having gone astray from the Nicosia British Council Library. Maybe I should try again somehow, but it would be asking a lot of the old brain.
I am unmusical, but at least willing to go along with those who tell me that the eighteenth century wins again, and that Mozart is still the top man. This view has been reinforced by my Austrian experiences. To have suggested anything else in the Bitterlich house in Salzburg would have been blasphemy, probably leading to summary expulsion. And one of my very few memorable opera experiences has been to see and hear Die Zauberflöte in Vienna itself.
Until recently, my thoughts on how best to spend the remaining years (or months – who knows?) turned mainly to travel, but now that I have increasing difficulty in getting around, these thoughts have been reduced to planning how I am to get back to Scotland at least once more, and how I might fit into other people’s travel plans, when I can cover the ground mainly in their cars. One rather unexpected gap which I filled in last July was the Burns country around Ayr; I had already seen most of the places where he passed the later part of his life, in and around Dumfries. If everything goes favourably, I might see a little more of France, next time and perhaps southern Spain, where I now have an invitation from a lady I first met in Tanganyika in 1954, when she was one year old.
Old friends and family of my own generation are indeed thinning out rather drastically. My Finlayson grandfather had only five F2 descendants, and there are only two of us left, the other being my “young” cousin Frances, easily accessible by (free!) bus to Aberdeen. I have one surviving friend from university with whom I am still in touch (and there can’t be many others still alive). Donald insists on continuing to drive, although actually older than me, so we can probably have a jaunt somewhere interesting.
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