“Granddad, granddad! Book, book!”

Nothing matches a baby’s smile. Watch it slowly spread, then burst into a gurgling laugh! That laugh! It’s an infectious laugh that reaches deep into your soul and rips your heart open. Nothing in life prepares you for it.

This last Christmas our family shared a house near Worcester, England, where our three grandchildren – five months, nine months, and a year and half – delighted and transported me to heaven. Their innocence, their awakening to the world, their softness, their warmth – especially their helplessness, their cries of hunger, uncertainty, fear – utterly overwhelmed me. My grown children warned me. But I underestimated the power of these little ones. Grandparents are indeed lucky. What a gift it is to have children – let alone to see their children!

We had rented a house near Malvern, under its famous hills. Nearby, C.S. Lewis had gone to school, had seen the iconic gaslights loom out of the fog and mist, whispering ““Narnia” and beckoning. We drank at the Unicorn, where J.R.R. Tolkien and he discussed Other Worlds and talking trees. Sadly, all things ‘ebb and flow’, and the pub itself seems to have wandered “down market”. Alas, as Heraclitus says, all is flux; nothing is permanent.

We walked past the house where Theodore Roosevelt convalesced as a child in 1869, where, it is said, he dreamed of becoming President. As I looked up at his window, which looks up to the Malvern Beacon, I thought of that St. Valentine’s Day 15 years later, in 1884, when both his wife and his mother died unexpectedly on the same day, writing in his diary, “The light has gone out of my life.” But, just as he survived his serious asthma attacks, he took this loss in stride, taking only a couple of years off to ranch in North Dakota’s Badlands before returning to politics.

I walked up to the British Camp, the last stand of Ancient British Chieftain Caractacus against the invading Romans, immortalized by another child of Worcester, Elgar, in his Opus 35 of the same name. Introspective, an outsider to the Establishment, being both poor and a Roman Catholic, Elgar instinctively distrusted the fickleness of his listeners. As an interesting aside, Caractacus fought the Romans for ten years, and, once defeated, captured, and brought to Rome for Emperor Claudius’ triumph, gave a speech that not only brought his release from sentence of death, but his freedom and pardon as well. Tacitus describes his speech, where he famously asked of Rome “Why do you still covet our poor huts?” Caractacus himself has become a hero in his own right, appearing in many recent books such as serious ones by Robert Graves (Claudius the God), and nonsense songs such Rolf Harris’ Court of King Caractacus:

* * *

I don’t know how they do it. Food bought in regular supermarkets in the UK is fresher there than here in Canada. It was a pleasure to cook there; the ingredients were inexpensive and there seemed a better taste in the vegetables and fruit. One afternoon after a fine lunch (with a nice Nemean, Peloponnesian wine), I climbed the tallest hill, the Beacon. I passed stunning beech, chestnut, large-leafed lime trees, and aged oaks, until I left the trees behind (Malvern means ‘bare hill’ in Welsh). Climbing further, I could see seven counties, Wales, the Forest of Dean, the Black Mountains, and countless villages…

The well-worn path petered out to slippery grass and treacherous mud-cum-puddles and troughs. The wind, while not strong, reminded you of its presence. Clouds, rank upon rank, marched above. It was bracing, but neither cold nor unpleasant.

The climb made me think of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and vainly how I wish I could write such a masterpiece. It is a bildungsroman, a epic that combines the education of an individual, his passage to adulthood, while at the same encapsulating themes of pre- and post-WWI German society, concepts of humanism, radicalism, the Western Tradition, time and philosophy…it covers all life. It is a metaphorical journey up a mountain, to a sanatorium, swept with snowstorms and allegories! The mountain, the destination, is itself in a separate world, enriched with echoes from Wagner and Goethe.

Melancholic, I arrived at the top, just as a cloud completely descended and reduced visibility to under 50 feet. Suddenly, my world seemed to shrink from a grand vista to the fog and the nearby triangulation cairn. In my solitude I felt like the author of Piers Plowman, the hero of the mediaeval poem who falls asleep upon the top of the Malvern Hills one May morning and has a series of dream visions. The poem is humorous yet seriously satirical. The author searches for the elusive farmhand, Piers the Plowman. In his dreams he finds no one except the gluttonous rich, the slothful, the incompetent – all deeply flawed ordinary people like you and me. The simple ploughman, of course, is the only incorruptible one. He is the only one who knows right from wrong, who is not swayed by temptation, by lies, or greed, or by fears and doubts. He follows no passing fad or fashion. He is the archetype we all wish we were.

I descended the Beacon, thinking how easily we put our faith in politicians and their ideas, which we invariably find false, and how easily we are misled. It is almost as though we want to believe the fabrications and distortion told us. We want it easy and simple. We don’t want to work hard and think for ourselves. Thus, it is easy for us to fall victim to half-truths and deception. Well educated Germany fell for the nonsense promoted in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It is easy to forget – or overlook – the horrors of our age. Wars surround us. Suffering is everywhere. Perhaps we are removed from much of it – yet we know it is there. We close our eyes and ears.

As a child, I remember asking my father whether the pilot of the Focke Wulf 190 he shot down in 1942 – one of the first ones shot down by a Typhoon – bailed out or not. He looked straight at me, and his eyes still widened and as he seemed to make excuses, “He tried to outrun me – he dived to the deck, thinking I was in a Spitfire, which is slower than a 190, but I was in a Typhoon, and it is faster at sea level. A short burst of my cannon, and it was over, there was nothing, nothing in the water. I flew over the water – there was nothing, nothing.” He walked away. He was still clearly affected – a victim himself – all those years later.

Let’s now think of the Luftwaffe pilot’s widow, holding the now fatherless baby, looking toward the setting sun over the English Channel, vainly waiting for his return. The pilot was 22, older than my dad, newly married, with a baby, Lt. Hermann Kennewig of 8/JG2, flying aircraft WNr 2150 out of Flugplatz Brest Nord, (Brest-Guipavas).

War is futile. Life is holy. The baby’s laughs provide us with hope and dreams. We must not venerate the ideas of the Warmongers.

We should sacrifice our own greed, ambition and wealth to minimize wars and suffering. I close with Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, a poet killed seven days to the hour before the end of World War One:

…you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Contributed by Nigel Scotchmer