On Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday, Olivia Harrison spoke very movingly about two of the great tragedies of her life – the murder of John Lennon in 1980, and the premature death of her husband George, in 2001, who died at the age of 58 from lung cancer. Also, she spoke of the night an intruder broke into their home and attacked her, and George, with a knife. You think you are a man, or woman, of peace, like John, and then all of a sudden you are under attack, and in the blink of an eye you need to forget all that and resort to violence in order to defend yourself, and those you love.
This dilemma is encountered at a personal level, but also nationally, and globally. What do you do if your neighbour attacks you? Turn the other cheek? But if you do, you will be exterminated. Our Lord knew this perfectly well. When his disciples said they would follow him to the ends of the earth, he shook his head and said, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. Or words to that effect.
Michael Caine, now 90, has made a film, with Glenda Jackson in her last role before her death, about a veteran who breaks out of his care home in England in order to return to the beaches of Normandy for the 70th anniversary of D-Day. The Great Escaper. When the title caught my eye I first thought it might be a film about Roger Bushell, because I have a book of that same title, by Simon Pearson (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013) all about Bushell, “Big X” of Stalag Luft III. Incidentally, I see that David McCallum, “Dispersal” in The Great Escape, also of Ilya Kuryakin fame, has died aged 90. He was the son of David McCallum, the leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in its heyday under Sir Thomas Beecham. They provided the soundtrack, along with Yehudi Menuhin, for a film about Paganini, The Magic Bow. Menuhin screen tested for the starring role (at least they wouldn’t have had to dub Paganini’s violin playing) and there is a rather ridiculous photograph of Menuhin dressed for the part in his autobiography Unfinished Journey. He didn’t get the part, which went to Stewart Granger. Granger had to learn at least to look like a fiddle player, and McCallum Sr. was his tutor in this regard. Now McCallum played a Stradivarius, and it is a measure of his magnanimity that he handed the instrument over to Granger during rehearsals with the LPO. So Granger dreamed up a gag. He surreptitiously substituted a cheap fiddle for the Strad and, during rehearsal, apparently frustrated at his own incompetence, he had a fit of temper and proceeded to smash the fiddle to pieces. McCallum went as white as a sheet. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a practical joker.
(This reminds me of another story about an actor trying to look as if he could play a musical instrument. James Stewart played the part of the band leader Glenn Miller, who played the trombone. You can watch the late Michael Parkinson’s interview with Stewart, in which the actor recounts the anecdote, in his laconic style, about a trombone teacher brimming with enthusiasm at the prospect of teaching him the trombone, and then proceeding to have a nervous breakdown. It’s hilarious.)
But I digress. Somebody on the film set of The Great Escaper took a look at the endless memorials to the war dead in Normandy, and remarked that it was such a waste. But no, said Michael Caine. Not a waste. Hitler had to be stopped. So we return to the dilemma, what do you do if your neighbour attacks you?
I see that the Doomsday Clock, specifically with respect to a nuclear holocaust, has been moved forward to ninety seconds to midnight. Ironically, it might have been Herr Hitler himself who dreamed up the Doomsday Clock. Alistair Cooke of Letter from America fame once heard Hitler speak at a rally in a German village during the 1930s. For some unaccountable reason, Hitler had a nurse in attendance. Perhaps he felt members of his audience might succumb to emotion. If so, he was probably right. He kept saying, “Fünf Minuten vor Mitternacht!”
Anyway I caught up with the latest Doomsday time-check in an extended article in the Sunday Telegraph (I only take it to attempt the fiendish crossword Enigmatic Variations), Inside the world’s new nuclear weapons arms race, by Lewis Page. Page is rather dismissive of the latest time check, and indeed employs an argument ad hominem. The board of 18 members which sets the clock is not made up of atomic scientists, but political scientists, a lawyer, US Democrats and so on; no Republicans.
The numbers are interesting. 9 countries possess nuclear weapons, the global nuclear stockpile is 12,000 weapons, 90% of them belonging to the USA and Russia. China has 400, the UK has 120, 40 of them “actively deployed”. The weapons are becoming increasingly sophisticated, especially in terms of their ability to approach a target undetected, and with extraordinary rapidity. Lewis Page seems to be quite sanguine about all this. Apparently we will need nuclear weapons to destroy encroaching asteroids.
I read all this with a gathering sense of dismay, especially as I am currently reading Mike Rossiter’s The Spy who Changed the World (Headline, 2014), all about the scientist Klaus Fuchs who worked on the UK’s nuclear project Tube Alloys, then on the Manhattan Project in the US, and subsequently on the UK’s development of its own bomb, all the while spying for the Soviet Union. I’ve reached 1949, and I have a sense he is about to be nobbled. I find him rather a sympathetic character, rather like Mark Rylance’s character Rudolf Abel in the film Bridge of Spies, whom I recall Tom Hanks’s character James B. Donovan also rather took to. I’m still not clear on what Fuchs’ motivation was, other than that it must have been born of his early life in Germany, and the realisation that, as Michael Caine said, Hitler had to be stopped. Which brings us back to Olivia Harrison’s dilemma. What are you to do when you come under violent attack?
I’m afraid I don’t share Lewis Page’s apparent complacency. And I don’t think our current crop of political masters spends too much time thinking about global issues. As James Donovan might say, they don’t seem worried – to which Rudolf Abel might reply, would it help? They are too busy trying to win the next general election. I’m getting an attack of the vapours. I need to be attended by the Führer’s Krankenschwester, with a dose of smelling salts.
jamescalumcampbell 