Two years time, give or take a day, and I’m fifty.
Which is the extreme old age of youth, or else the extreme youth of old age. Whatever.
But one of the things that makes me think I’m moving towards the old age of something, rather than the youth of anything, is that I’ve just realised that it’s loosening my tongue, and – what’s worse – that I’ve given up caring about the fact.
When I was younger, I’d hear all the old people come out with the most extraordinary things – things you aren’t meant even to think these days, much less come out with in polite company. But actually, I’m beginning to see the point of it now. Beginning to see the attraction, as it were.
Anyway, the theme of my ‘blog’ today (‘Blog?’ Ah, you see: I am still sort of modern, still sort of ‘of today’ or sort of ‘down wiv da kidz,’ as I believe the term is, m’lud. I’m not completely there yet. But give me time).
But anyway, my theme for today is revenge.
And you will forgive me, I hope, when I tell you that what follows is mostly lifted, verbatim, from a forthcoming book of mine, which goes by the name of In Praise of Savagery.
Age. The old brain-rot sets in, you see. Can’t come up with anything new.
What was I talking about?
Oh yes. I remember.
A while back I was reading a book called Quartered Safe Out Here, by George Macdonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman books. The book is a memoir of his military service in the East, during the Second World War; and there comes a point, about halfway through, where he describes how he felt when, in fierce close combat around an enemy bunker, he shot and killed a man, shortly after one of his own comrades was himself shot down:
“I turned to see a Jap racing across in front of the bunker, a sword flourished above his head. He was going like Jesse Owens, screaming his head off, right across my front; I just had sense enough to take a split second, traversing my aim with him before I fired; he gave a convulsive leap, and I felt a jolt of delight – I’d hit the bastard!”
“A jolt of delight:” the phrase stops you dead in your tracks.
He returns to the same incident again, a few pages on:
“Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred, and still do…but seeing Gale go down sparked something which I felt in the instant when I hung on my aim at the Jap with the sword, because I wanted to be sure. The joy of hitting him was the strongest emotion I felt that day.”
There was once an extraordinarily prolific mass murderer, in England, by the name of Harold Shipman. This Shipman was a doctor, and it was his habit, and his pleasure, to kill off the elderly and vulnerable amongst his patients, for their inheritances and also for other reasons best known to himself. Over the years he managed to finish off well over two hundred people. Eventually, he was caught; and when he was caught, this Doctor Shipman, he showed not the slightest concern or remorse. Instead, he showed peevish irritation at those who had caught him, and annoyance that they had the audacity to ask him to explain himself; and, frankly, he was having none of it. Eventually, when it became apparent to him that he was going to have to spend the rest of his life in prison, and that he would be expected to conform to all of the accompanying rules and regulations, he ripped up his bedsheets, tied one end to the bars of his cell window, and hung himself, dead.
And bloody good riddance to him, you might say: and a shame he didn’t do it sooner; and more of a shame still that the law didn’t do it for him, at a time and in a place set down by the court, whether he liked it or not.
And so you – or at least I – might expect anyone of sound mind to say.
So it was that the then-Home Secretary, a man by the name of David Blunkett, when asked for his response to the news of Shipman’s death, told journalists: “You wake up and you receive a phone call telling you that Shipman has topped himself…Then you have to think for a minute . . . is it too early to open a bottle?”
A perfectly natural and uncontroversial point of view, you might think: but not a bit of it, apparently. Instead, Blunkett found himself at the centre of an absolute storm of condemnation, with pretty much the whole of the political and media establishment lining up to give him a good kicking for his ‘shameful irresponsibility’, for owning up to feeling anything other than concern at the death of a mass-murderer, and demanding that he resign forthwith.
When it comes to retribution, some of us are Hamlet, endlessly agonizing and debating over it, while some are more Laertes, driven viscerally towards it.
I know which side I fall down on.
“But let him come,” says Laertes, “It warms the very sickness in my heart/ That I shall live and tell him to his teeth/ ‘Thus didest thou’”.
I know how you feel, mate: I understand.
It’s the way I am. But it may not be the way you are.
People are different, I think: innately so and perhaps unalterably so.
I have read of research that says that identical twins are extraordinarily alike in just about any way you can measure, and that this is so whether they are raised together or apart, even when each is unaware of the other’s existence. And it says that unrelated children raised together as brothers and sisters turn out no more similar in personality-tests than they would if they had never even met – no matter what kind of upbringing they had. Or so they say.
And they also say that you can tell a lot about a man’s character and intelligence by the kinds of music he listens to. According to a study at the California Institute of Technology, devotees of Beethoven and, surprisingly, Heavy Metal, are right up there at the brainbox end of the spectrum, while the fans of R&B, chart dance music, and someone called Lil’ Wayne, apparently, are way down at the other. Me, I find myself greatly comforted by the moral wisdom of Country & Western ballads, and increasingly so as I become older. Songs like ‘Coward of the County’, for example, by Kenny Rogers, which teaches us that while, on the whole, it is a very bad thing to go around committing acts of violence for no particular reason, or for reasons base and dishonourable, and while it is a way of life that may see you ending your days in prison, leaving the care of your ten-year-old son, should you have one, to your brother, with the injunction that this child should never, at any cost, even think of doing the things you done; yet nevertheless there are some offences so rank and gross that they cry out to heaven for vengeance, and in these instances the only right and proper course of action for the wronged party is to seek immediate physical redress, irrespective of the odds, and irrespective of the harm that may befall him in the process. “Sometimes”, as the song sagely observes, “You got to fight to be a man.”
Here ends my sermon.
Warwick Cairns is an author, he lives in Windsor, Berkshire,
He has just signed a contract for his new book “In Praise of Savagery”: the true story of a journey into uncharted land inhabited by murderous tribal warriors and ruled over by a bloodthirsty sultan – and the man, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who lived to tell the tale. And the story of Warwick’s journey, fifty years later, to a mud hut in Africa to visit him at the end of his life.
More about Warwick Cairns can be found here
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