February 2009

Ian McKewan’s Atonement powerfully draws the reader into the world of the Tallis family, particularly Briony and Cecilia Tallis, and Robbie Turner, in England in the 1930s. The peaceful opening of the novel belies the approaching build up of sexual tension and the dreadful misunderstanding that changes the lives of the protagonists in ways they could never have envisaged. They are as unaware of the entanglement they move towards as they are of the approach of World War II. Both will profoundly affect them.
  The middle section of the book finds Robbie Turner as a soldier in the British Expeditionary Force, making his way with two comrades on their arduous journey through the countryside of France
as they join the evacuation on the beaches at Dunkirk. As I read this, I reflected on how faithfully McKewan had recreated what I had come across about this operation, when I had occasion to view these events by seeing a primary source.
  An adult student called Elise mentioned that at her office, her boss’ father, Manfred Baldwin, had shown her dairies he had kept at the Dunkirk evacuation and then at the Battle of El Alemein, and at other places during his years of service during World War II. Elise noted my interest in this period of history, and was happy to talk about her meeting Mr. Baldwin.
  Then she inexplicably offered to type up these diaries for him. I don’t know why she did this. It might have been lack of the indisputable wisdom of not offering to help when you don’t know what you are getting yourself into. Or, Elise’s instinctive generosity overrode her common sense for what after all she considered merely a small act of kindness costing little time or effort.
  It did not occur to her to question the peculiarity that even after all those years, Mr. Baldwin had not done this himself. A number of reasons may disincline someone from polishing and rewriting their memoirs, the simplest of which is plain modesty. Accounts proliferate of people who have done courageous deeds in wartime and other exceptional circumstances, and yet discreetly conceal their narratives, with the firm conviction that their gentle recollections do not deserve the distinction of wider circulation. Conceivably, our recorded and archived history represents merely the tip of the iceberg, with the majority of human experience only held in personal memories.
  Yet here was someone toting their notebooks around and proffering them to complete strangers in the office. Evidently, their owner afforded them some importance.
  Members of his family would be in the best position to help him make the journals presentable. These people knew him well, had a native grasp of the language in addition to a firm background of a period that was part of the national memory. Alternatively, this might have been precisely the reason why Mr. Baldwin didn’t want to enlist their help. The procedure of editing and collaboration would entail scrutiny, analysis and questioning. Clarification would have meant the unasked for reliving of events and times best left alone for people wishing to leave memories undisturbed. Reluctance to do this may have been a desire to preserve a real or imagined reputation from an undertaking that might remove the mystique of jottings taken in the field, showing ventures up as being less admirable than the writer would have people imagine.
  Mr. Baldwin evidently didn’t want the journals typed up, yet he was indifferent about whether Elise did it. Their lack of two-way communication further diminished once Elise was busy at the job. Even if Mr. Baldwin had been willing to discuss them, which he wasn’t, Elise was keen to avoid any questioning or clarification. That would be admitting that she was not up to the task, and therefore earning great loss of face. Hong Kong’s education system and the local culture associates great pride with language acquisition, along with ample negativity and competitiveness. With a period of history that was a closed book to her, she wouldn’t know where to begin asking, and if she did there was the very high risk that she would not understand what the diarist would reply anyway.
  After having assumed it would have been a few hours’ work, about as demanding as typing up a few company letters, Elise found herself in an awful quagmire. She couldn’t really make out the man’s almost copperplate handwriting, the normal product of grammar schools of the time. Then there was contemporary military and everyday slang along with place, celebrities’ and notable people’s names. Her lack of familiarity with this era further ensured that she only understood a fraction of the diaries.
  She typed what she thought the sentences meant. She then attempted to repair some of the mess by feeding it through a spelling and grammar checker. This administered only the kind of profound mangling you could achieve from use of a device that freely changed things like ‘Betty Grable’ into ‘belly garble’ and ‘Bren gun’ into ‘bran gun,’ and ‘BEF’ into ‘beef;’ and a grammar checker that was notorious for barely being of marginal use to fluent writers, and even more dubious with indiscriminate use of the ‘auto-correct’ button.
  Therefore, Elise turned to me for help. I didn’t have the luxury of refusal for such requests. In any case, none of them was normally nothing more demanding than dispensing some first aid to a memo, letter, essay or report. She handed me some sheets. A few of the sentences made sense. The intelligibility of the others ranged from the enigma of Times crossword clues to utter gobbledygook. I had no choice but to ask for the photocopies of the notebooks themselves, telling Elise that I merely wanted to clarify a point or two.

  Then I began writing up the whole thing from scratch. I eased aggravation at sorting out clutter that was only destined to be shoved into a drawer or tossed into the rubbish anyway, by recognising that I was ensuring that at least Elise would not be handing the man his World War II experiences reduced to stream of consciousness-like, disordered mess of surrealism.
  I did the drudge of confirming place names in my Times Atlas of places the young gunner visited, and double-checked events of World War II. Most of the time the common soldiery were quite in the dark as to what was going on, and lived an existence of almost unbearable boredom. Nevertheless, I considered what a splendid piece of work Mr. Baldwin potentially had if he were to redraft these accounts with historical hindsight and reflection. That amendment would have to include the removal of several months’ superfluous entries after the German surrender in 1945, in which a disconsolate Mr. Baldwin wrote nothing in a camp except intermittent grumbles about boredom.
  The writing gave me the exhilaration of having acquaintance with great events. The part that stood out in all the text was the account of Mr. Baldwin moving with a few comrades towards the beaches of Dunkirk. Everything around them seemed to be very close to chaos. Even though the narrative had no literary pretensions, it provided a striking image of a retreating army barely keeping a semblance of order in a landscape littered with the detritus of a withdrawal carried out with the intent of leaving as little as possible of use to the Germans. Artillery guns with burst barrels stood in fields. Burning piles of munitions sent smoke curling up to the sky. The sounds of explosions came from incoming fire and the destroying of the BEF’s ammunition. One of Mr. Baldwin’s comrades was leading a sheep, which the man insisted they would butcher and eat at the first chance they had. Even though the others doubted they would get an opportunity, they let him drag the animal along. The sheep got its reprieve when the men came across an abandoned NAAFI truck full of Mars bars, which the men plundered.
  Mr. Baldwin wrote of the Luftwaffe strafing military personnel and civilians alike, and French refugees attacking and killing downed German pilots. Mr. Baldwin wrote blissful lines about the feeling of arriving back at Dover to a heavenly silence after the hell of the beaches.
  The time at which I tidied up these memoirs it was people had come to widely feel that World War Two had little relevance. It would take a profound upheaval to shake people out of this complacency, and this came upon the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. This refuted the delusion that one’s way of life was inviolate and that upheavals of the past could be forgotten. A healthy resurgence of respect for and interested in the great upheaval of World War II ensued. As Nietzsche said ‘A poet could say that God has placed forgetfulness as a doorkeeper on the threshold of the temple of human dignity.’