I remember one long year in particular: a year which for me is now redolent with all the sights and smells of youth and innocence and discovery and love. It was the year I grew up; the year in which I began to comprehend what it must mean to be an adult, to accept responsibility.

 

I was seventeen going on eighteen and we were in Rome. For reasons which I won’t bore you with my parents led a peripatetic life. We had a home in England, a good solid, large house and home lost in the somnolent depths of one of the mostly rural Home shires of England, but my parents were still, in 1967, engaged in that great post-war task – the rebuilding of our world after the Second World War. I grant you, the task was mostly completed by then and, really, they, and others, were just tidying up a few, but important, loose ends and setting our world on course for what has turned out to be an unprecedented increase in human wealth, creativity, invention and discovery.

 

Need I remind you all that the great reconstruction of the post-war period would have been impossible without the help of the United States of America. The financial aid was colossal and the practical help provided by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of young Americans made possible this modern and wonderful Europe in which I now live. It wasn’t just in Europe that the power house of the American economy, and the willingness for hard work of those young and happy Americans, effected the rebuilding of our shattered world. Scarcely a country on Earth was untouched by that unstinting selflessness, and by those bright-eyed, level headed and happy American youngsters. I came to know some of them in my wonderful year in Rome. I still know many of them today and I still think that they were, and are, great and selfless people.

 

However, the great contribution of the USA to our world throughout those years is not the purpose of this piece, so let me move on. I am in Rome with my parents and siblings in 1967. My parents had rented a two-floored flat – a duplex I think you Americans would call it – in the centro historico, just off the Corso – from a slightly impoverished aristocratic friend. From the roof terrace one could see across most of the old city and that view was punctuated by some great landmarks. The dome of St. Peters stood out with, in the evenings, the red, flashing lights of the, then, triple masts of the Vatican Radio Station peeping up behind it. If I turned almost right round I could see the top of the dome of the Pantheon and just a little further round and I could see the roofs of the Palazzo del Quirinale almost atop the hill. Most of Rome lay at my feet and it was a dizzying prospect for a youngster brought up on the classics and well educated about the rinascemento (why do we say ‘renaissance’ when, really, it all began in Italy?).

 

I shared my life in Rome in that year with my best friend. His name was James MacFarlane Stevenson. He ran tame in our home because my mother had a certain sympathy for him. He was an orphan, you see, and a year older than I. His parents had been killed in a quite dreadful accident when he was fourteen. They had left him well off, but, because of the war, with no close family. We had been at school together and we had many, many shared interests. He died some few years ago now of that wasting disease which we now call AIDS and which way back then nobody could identify. No, he wasn’t gay; he probably contracted it in one of his numerous liaisons with a lady of negotiable virtue in some sleazy African port city. Such satisfactions were his one weakness. He never talked about sex, but I honestly think that he couldn’t help himself – he was looking for something which I don’t think he ever found. Not love, precisely, but some close contact which always eluded him. Something, perhaps, about being orphaned precisely in his life when he was had somehow unsettled some part of his make-up and rendered him witless about his maleness. Who knows? That’s just me looking back over the years and trying to make sense of things which, perhaps, have never had any sense to them anyway.

 

All that was, back then, in the future. We had our wonderful year – our gap year, perhaps – and enjoyed it thoroughly, as I remember. Jamie had bought an Hispano-Suiza H6C – the same one which I now own (he left it to me) - and we had restored it together. In that great car we explored our world. We criss-crossed that ancient city seeking out the silly and the commonplace, the great and the stunning. We spent so many Saturday evenings on the Capitoline in the Museums – they’re free on Saturday evenings – that the guards and the Curators knew us by name. ‘The Dying Gaul’ was a familiar friend and the coloured marble heads of forgotten imperial Romans entranced us. Back then, Marcus Aurelius was still a horseback on the plinth in the piazza between the museums.

 

I still remember our quite audible gasps, the first Saturday e’en that we went there, as we came upon that wonderful Caravaggio St. John the Baptist, and the quiet smile on the face of the gallery attendant as he registered our awe. He allowed us to reach out and touch the frame just a scant foot or so in front of us, but not the canvas, no, never that precious canvas – and quite right, to. I treasure that memory. For the privilege we tried to tip him but he laughed at we two youngsters and waved us on our way saying, in heavily American accented English, that he never took tips from those who knew what they were looking at. I felt, I’m sure we both felt then, that I was, we were, a man, men, of the world – cognoscienti and recognised as such. What a wise man that gallery attendant, whose name and face I can scarcely remember, must have been. A father, I have no doubt, and a clever one at that!

 

We drove out of town fairly often, too. In June, on the night of the full moon, we took a pique-nique and drove up to Tivoli. We broke into the grounds of the Villa d’Este , that great seicento villa in the hills, and laid out our feast on the flat topped, low wall in front of Le Cento Fontane. Hardly any waters ran, but that didn’t matter, for the fountains were turned off at night to conserve the precious fluid. It was being there that mattered to us, being part of our world, part of our history, part of something we two youngsters couldn’t yet identify, but something we felt, viscerally, was important to us. I have no doubt but that we fancied ourselves to be erudite and learned men sampling the best that our world had to offer – such poses were what we adopted, that which we used to justify our rather, in hindsight, gauche stupidities. (Gosh, how embarrassed I am to recall our callow behaviour – our youthful certainties.) Naturally, and as you would expect, we were caught – not a consideration at the planning stage, as I recall – by five burly security men.

 

As they approached us, fully recognisable under that warm, pale gold, full moon, I distinctly recall Jamie, with great presence of mind, offering them a glass of the wine which we had brought with us. A tall, slim man in the uniform of a Lazio Carabinieri (La Benemerita) officer stepped forward and picked up one of our bottles. He shone his torch on it and laughed. There followed a quick exchange in the local dialect – far too quick and thick for either of us to follow – and much laughter from the security detail. In short order we, and our pique-nique, were gathered up and bundled down through the moonlit gardens to the security post. Just as we expected to be arrested and charged, all our food was laid out on the big table in the office under the glare of a single overhead bulb and much more food seemed to appear out of nowhere – in some strange way it was like the parable of the loaves and fishes – and suddenly we were invited to sit and feast with our captors. There was, however, one important difference from our pique-nique – the wine served was Frascati: the golden white and the much, much rarer, delicately scented, rose pink.

 

That’s why the Officer had laughed at us – our wine was the rubbish which young men bought. That night, that warm, scented, civilised night amongst real men in a guard post in Tivoli, Jamie and I learnt several important lessons: good wine and good food should not be taken lightly; good wine, and the good men who make it with pride, often go together; it takes a Carabinieri officer and five good Frascati men to run start a damp Hispano-Suiza in an early Roman dawn; decent English boys take their telling off in good heart and know that the Officer is right and that they are in the wrong, despite the twinkle in his eye; decent English boys, like us, also know what that Officer, and the guards, showed them that dawn – that there is something just a little magical in those gardens as the Aniene stream and the Rivellese spring, chuckling as they go, refill the cisterns for yet another day of giochi d’acqua  – a rare and privileged view of the inner workings of a great monument. May God bless those tolerant adult men who did nothing worse than laugh at two, romantically inclined, young English idiots!

 

Much later that same day, back in our apartment, I came across my mother in floods of tears. Clutched in her hand was a piece of telegraph paper. As I started forward to console her, with no idea as to why she was crying, my father overtook me and sat down beside her. Through her tears she saw him and offered the telegram to him. He scanned it quickly, looked at her, threw his arms around her and howled and cried with her. I didn’t know what to do. My parents, the centres of my world, were deeply, obviously very deeply, distressed right in front of me, and I didn’t know why and didn’t know what to do. Instinct took over and I went to them, the most important people in my juvenile world, and I put my arms around them. I think that I was trying desperately to make them stop crying – to stop that awful sound, to blot out, if I could, the signs of weakness which I couldn’t cope with. I was completely unprepared for their reactions. They hugged me so tightly that I could hardly breathe; they almost smothered me with their kisses. Crying, almost keening in grief, they kept on repeating, time after time, ‘never again, never again’.

 

It took an hour or so for them to calm down, to release me from their fervent embraces, and to explain why they were so upset. One of ours, one whom they had hoped against hope might just still be alive somewhere, had, after twenty-five years of searching, just been confirmed amongst the dead at Flossenburg concentration camp. Surviving eye-witnesses had finally confirmed her death for the recorders of such things in Vienna and in Israel. It was a bitter blow for both of them. Then I wept – not just for my parents and their pain, but for the person, the people, whom I would never know – that part of me, my family – which had been extinguished utterly by those mad, bad men.

 

So, as we face another war in Europe, as we line up so, so bravely against the might of Russia and consider its might to be of little worth, as we decide, stupidly, that Georgia is worth dying for, let me ask you this – do you honestly think that I and mine can go through that again? Let me honestly answer you – we cannot! It’s not worth it for the simple foolish pride which is all that seems to be on offer here.

 

No, no my friends. Georgia is a lost cause as is your much vaunted missile shield. Just remember this, if you exchange weapons fire with the enemy today you won’t just be fighting a war in Europe – the war will be global, for Russia, today, is playing to win. There won’t be fresh-faced, bright-eyed volunteers to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again for they’ll all be dead, or dying, in America. Europe will be a blasted nuclear wasteland incapable of recovery.

 

Tell me, is Georgia worth that? Is that what my parents wanted you to come to? I think not. Back down now! This time, I sense, MAD ain’t going to work! MAD only works if people believe it’s the worst outcome. Moscow no longer does. Don’t kid yourselves. It’s over. They will fire, first, if necessary. Don’t push them to it -------please, not over Georgia and Poland. It’s not worth it!

 

This is the wrong fight at the wrong time against the wrong people. Stop now!

 

You’re not doing this for people, you’re doing this for a stupid sense of pride. Stand off and stand down. For God’s sake, stop this madness!