Don gained inspiration from a black-and-white snapshot
of Finnish troops fighting in the Winter War and thus
was borne the article below, first published
in the British periodical, History Today (April 2000).

 

ALMOST ALL of my novels deal with people caught up in the great, and mostly horrifying, historical events of our century. In my first novel, The Flute Player, a woman reminiscent of such great Russians as Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam becomes the life-nourisher while, all around her, dark events unfold. The White Hotel shows how the terrible hallucinations of one of Freud's patients become the 'real' hallucinations of the holocaust. Ararat explores the chaotic lives of Soviet poets against a background of an earlier genocide, that of the Armenians. This novel was followed, much to my surprise, by four others taking further the themes of the Cold War and tangled love, making a Russian Nights Quintet. Flying into Love moves across the globe to the America of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Pictures at an Exhibition looks back at the Nazi genocide taking place in the Balkans, and the West in the grip of a milder form of fascism called Political Correctness. Eating Pavlova looks into the mind of Freud as he lies dying in Londong in September 1939.

I have never been interested in the small-scale - the Jane Austen or Barbara Pym kind of fiction. I'm not proud of that; it bores me, and I can't do it.

I can trace the historical preoccupation back to important moments in my early childhood. I lived in a pleasant working-class home, with my parents and much older sister, in pleasant, peaceful Cornwall. But outside of this idyll - though of course no home is an idyll - there were darkening clouds, for I was born in 1935.

It must have been the summer of 1939 when I had an experience, or experiences, which created my first complex memory. I was sitting on a pouffe in our living room, near the figure of a Negro servant holding an ashtray. My father was engaged in sombre conversation with some friends who had dropped in. I saw a huge black spider running across the room, unseen by the adults; quietly I rose, walked to intercept it and placed my sandal on it firmly. I peeled it calmly from my sole. (How odd that a spider resembles a Swastika.) Later I stand in the porch outside, holding my Daddy's hand as he waves goodbye to our visitors. I can see a clear starry sky overhead, and the great curve of the Milky Way. I say to my father, 'Daddy, is it peace or war?' And he replies, 'Peace.' The word, and the clasp of his hand, are reassuring, though not completely.

These are my first memories of spiders (starting a lifelong arachnophobia), of my father's voice, of his handclasp, of stars. Even of ambivalence - the uncertain tone in his voice as he said Peace. A sense of history must begin with the first consciousness of life beyond one's small family world, of events outside one's parents' control; and for me that happened in July or August 1939.

I have only a faint, doubtful memory of listening to Mr Chamberlain's voice as he announced we were at war. But I remember being excited and moved when, that winter, I looked at Picture Post and saw white-hooded soldiers on skis, crossing a snowy forested landscape; and read words describing the heroism of the Finns as they defended their homeland against the savage hordes of the Red Army. When I have listened as an adult to Sibelius, who became one of my favourite composers, I have always seen in my imagination that vague image from the winter of 1939-40. What is still more mysterious is that Russia became a central feature of my writing - as symbol as well as reality - and it came into my sheltered Cornish life as early as five years old. Snow and conflict and heroism.

Memories of the first dire years of Britain's war are more lucid yet less poetically intense than that single image of the war in which the Soviet Union gained Karelia but lost innumerable men and prestige. My parents' dread of invasion; of his being called up (luckily, just too young for the First World War, he was just too old for the Second); the air raid sirens that drove us to crouch under the cellar-stairs; even a stray bomb, from a raid on Falmouth Docks, which threw us on to our hands and knees - these seem far behind-the-lines of my psyche.

The ancient Greeks were wise when they made Aries, god of war, the lover of Aphrodite. As the fear of invasion passed and - with American and Russia alongside us - it became clear we would win, a more immediate fear and tension crackled like electricity in our home. Cornwall was awash with handsome, brave, reckless young men from the US and the Commonwealth, and my vivacious, red-haired sister, turning seventeen, could take her pick at the Drill Hall dances. Would she keep her virginity, or get herself pregnant? Even at seven, I could feel the almost hysterical anxiety. Perhaps my writerly taste for seeing great conflicts as background and metaphor for private, erotic conflicts had its commencement then.

My memory hooks onto one potent image. Night after blacked-out night I would look up and see searchlights weaving in crisscross patterns as they sought to fasten onto their prey. It was, in its way, beautiful, a predatory beauty. Mum and Dad were less worried now about German bombers than about Lois dawdling in lanes, on her way home from a dance with some RAAF navigator or Texan major. Ultimately those were the two who, without ever meeting or perhaps even knowing of the other's existence, fought over her future. The Australian ultimately won, and my sister's heart was lost. But those searchlights... This was Love and War, for me. The image has something of the silently-running spider in it, but also of my sister's suspenders (nylons garnished from the Yank) as they seemed to crisscross on her thighs as she rushed around our house half-dressed before a date.

I followed avidly, in the News Chronicle, the pioneering advance of the allies from the West, the wonderful Red Army from the East. My father was a fan of both America and Russia: the first because he had spent ten glorious years in California in the Twenties, the second because he was a Socialist. So, taking my cue from him, I thrilled more to the advance of Patton and Zhukov than of Monty.

The final point of departure, as the war neared its end: the images of Belsen, seen in the News Chronicle and the Pathé news. This was absolute evil, and has always haunted me. There was another absolute evil in the homeland of our ally Russia, responsible for ten times as many deaths, lasting ten times as many years; but we didn't have the pictures and so, even after Solzhenitsyn, Stalinism still doesn't have the same impact.

In my childhood, of course, I didn't think those cataclysmic events were history. History by definition happens in the past, to dead people. I think it's only late in life that we begin to experience the reality of history. I've been discovering it in my fifties and early sixties. I had tears of joy in my eyes when the Berlin Wall came down. Revolutions, I had believed, were only in history books - but then all the Communist regimes, which had seemed eternal, collapsed so quickly. It was a wonderful, bloodless revolution.

Then, the re-unification of Germany, and the Maastricht Treaty; and I though, my God, Hitler has won after all! For hadn't his vision been that of a united Europe with Germany at its centre? He'd got rid of the poor, long-bearded Eastern Jews; his spectre could live with the rich ones, so long as they mostly weren't in Germany. (They could even be thankful to him, for giving them Israel.) Wasn't he the brutal police chief, who so terrifies the people he beats up and tortures that they willingly cave in to his gentler partner, offering cigarettes and sympathy? Time itself, I reflected, would have softened fascism into a gentler orthodoxy, not so very different from politically correct Social Democracy. Yes, he'd won - so what were all those sacrifices for?

As recently as last spring, I watched in disbelief as the Luftwaffe went on the attack against the Serbs, who had fought bravely on our side in the war and whom the fascists had 'cleansed' with utmost brutality. Whatever crimes the Serbian special forces were committing - and most the crimes occurred under the cover of our bombardment - I couldn't stomach hearing a German general talking on television about the NATO actions; being my spokesman, as it were. Above all, I couldn't stomach the fact that everyone else in the West (except Alan Clark) didn't seem to see any outrageous irony in this.

And the brave independent Finns were in the EU and were mobile phone fanatics... At this point I realised that my views and my emotions were simply history.