Lived Experience
My mother’s partner was born in 1919 and died in 2006. As I get older, I find the life he lived more and more remarkable — in part because so much of it was ordinary for men of his generation. From a provincial background he was plucked into conflict, travelled across half the globe, then made a life in England. And that life helped me to see the world as it was to him: its peace bloodily won, its decency fragile.
He was a psychiatrist, but long before he pursued this specialism he saw service as a medical officer in a tank regiment in the Second World War, landing on D-Day fairly fresh from medical school. He had done a shortened undergraduate course and then his clinical studies in the East End during the Blitz, learning surgical techniques from veterans of the Great War and Boer War: all the younger men had been called up.
We visited France often when I was young. Once, we went back to Normandy and traced something of the route his regiment had followed as it advanced through towns reduced to rubble. He remembered above all the boredom, the fear and the sheer exhaustion of battle: the night he spent without sleep on a landing craft, offshore, waiting for his turn, the man next to him bleeding to death from a shrapnel wound. After the landing, when they had finally secured the beach, he fell asleep under an armoured vehicle and only awoke when it drove off.
My education in the 1980s and 1990s, in a typically English way, involved few encounters with living cultures other than my own. It was hard to connect the few sentences of French I learned to write at school with the foreign country we drove through, stopping for crêpes and mini-golf. And it was impossible to connect my first few trips to Spain with anything I’d learned at school, where history started with Roman villas, ended in a blur of trenches and Wilfred Owen, and barely touched the Iberian peninsula. The idea that history was also lived experience came slowly, creeping up on me as we travelled, returned, talked.
A few months before he died, I typed up as many of his memories as he could manage to dictate. He talked about the combat he’d seen as they advanced east from Normandy and he tried to patch up men thrown around inside their tanks by shell blasts. There was little he could do, barely any way even to ease their pain, and that haunted him.
As the war in Europe ended, he was posted to Burma — but he never made it. In Poona, he was intercepted by a Major who wanted to make up two pairs for whist (or so he always said). His regiment then demobbed via West Africa, from where many of the troops were drawn. Eventually, fresh from the army, he found a position as ship’s surgeon on the Paraguay Star, which sailed to and from Buenos Aires for the Blue Star Line. It was a wonderful time in his life — a world away from the grey England of rationing and rebuilding. He returned with luggage full of meat and eggs from the galley: he’d performed successful surgery on a steward after an on-board accident and found himself a great favourite among the crew.
It was during these few post-war years that he learned to love the Spanish language — and that he began to think of himself as cosmopolitan, or at least someone with a deep feeling for places that others called home. He was a shy man, but one of the great virtues of his life (as I now see it) was the degree to which he overcame the crutches of conventional-mindedness when choosing his path. His parents had been ignorant of foreign parts; the little schools he’d attended had taught Empire and glory. He had unlearned, carefully, these old lessons.
As a psychiatrist and a conversationalist, he was above all someone who didn’t judge hastily. I loved this about him. He created spaces within which you could explain yourself. When friends came to the house, he asked them how they were and what they were doing — and then he listened to their answers, and asked them to explain things further. He didn’t presume or pronounce. He took an interest in both sides of a story. He spoke slow, beautiful Spanish and played Argentine tangos from old LPs.
Eventually, for me, the Europe we visited became the idea that everything I was taught to take for granted could be seen another way: that things near and obvious to me were distant and strange to others. That learning to explain things in different ways, with different words, was the essence of understanding them with any kind of fidelity to lived experience.
He introduced me to Europe, and with it to the idea that what I didn’t know was vastly more interesting and important than what I did.
This piece was first published in the collection A Love Letter To Europe
