The Evaporation of Exteriors

by Theodore Dalrymple (November 2017)

A Battery Shelled, Wyndam Lewis, 1919

 

 

In those days, we still used pounds, shilling and pence. There were twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. There were therefore two hundred and forty pence to the pound. There were also guineas (though no coins or banknotes thus denominated) which were twenty-one shillings, and were used mainly for the sale of superior goods such as Vermeers and Rembrandts. We had sixpences and threepenny bits, forty and eighty respectively to the pound, and florins (two shillings) and half crowns (two shillings and sixpence), ten and eight respectively to the pound. There were halfpennies and even farthings (a quarter of a penny), of which there were four hundred and eighty and nine hundred and sixty respectively to the pound. As a system, it was not very convenient and it drove foreigners mad, but we who grew up with it found it perfectly easy and natural, and its other advantage—other than driving foreigners mad—was that it gave us an agility in mental arithmetic which in my case has lasted to this day.

 

 

 

Mr B had been at the Battle of El Alamein where one of his duties, being good at figures, had been to count the bodies on the battlefield afterwards. He had also shot a German soldier dead as he emerged from his foxhole. He was not sure whether he should have done so, because it was possible than the German soldier was surrendering to him. Of course, one does not in the heat of battle have the time or the inclination to indulge in an interior Socratic dialogue about the moral propriety of one’s actions.

 

One would never have guessed from his exterior—Mr B kept his umbrella more neatly-furled than Mr Chamberlain’s—that he had ever had such dramatic experiences. Nor, as far as I could tell, had he been traumatised by them, in the sense that they affected his day-to-day existence ever afterwards. Indeed, I suspect that it was a matter of pride with him that they should not, and that this very pride prevented them from doing so. This, of course, was completely against what was soon to become the zeitgeist: such stiff-upper-lippery would soon become the object of derision, if not of outright hatred. Among other things, it offered no job opportunities for a regiment of carers.

 

My father, I think, despised Mr B, mainly because he was his employer, and therefore he was ex officio contemptible. In a way, this was a kind of self-contempt: for how could anyone be so lacking in character as to consent to be employed by me? But I did not despise Mr B. On the contrary, I admired him and wished I could be like him when I grew up (which I already knew that I could not).  

 

Mr B must have been in his mid-forties when I knew him— immensely old to me then, but more than twenty years younger than I am now. Actuarially-speaking, he must long have been dead, though there is the very faintest of possibilities that he still lives. But in my mind, he is forever at the age at which I knew him—a fly in temporal amber, a victim (if that is not overdramatising) of memorial egotism.

 

He was an important figure for me because he taught me a lesson, or rather, planted a seed in my mind that has become ever more important to me as I grow older: namely that exteriors do not, or at any rate ought not, capture the essence of a man and that an ordinary, conventional appearance may, and perhaps often does, conceal a wealth of experience and even heroism. For to have gone through much and yet to continue without any demonstrative conduct that inconveniences others or puts them off their ease is, in my view, a high kind of heroism. This, of course, is a very old-fashioned view. Today, self-disclosure, as publicly as possible, is what we admire and call brave. It is known in prolefeed journals and internet sites as opening up.

 

Nowadays, I constantly wonder what the lives of the people are or have been. For example, in the small town in which I live when I am in England there are some Indian restaurants. I recognise their waiters and sometimes I see them on the bus. This gives me something of a shock, for it reminds me that they are not waiters twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year, but have lives other than serving me with a smile. They come mainly from India and Bangladesh and must have an interesting story to tell, and probably a deeply moving one, if I had but the time or temerity to elicit it. I never will do, of course, and neither will anyone else, so their stories will never be told, at least not outside their family circle. This is a shame, not because I want to promote their self-dramatisation or encourage them to think of themselves as victims, but to promote our imaginative appreciation of the lives of others.

 

I could imagine what it was like to be a waiter, but I could not imagine what it was like to be one of the fat, shaven-headed, tattooed monsters who behaved towards them in so vile a fashion. Many such were my patients, but I could never enter imaginatively into their lives, though they were my countrymen far more than were the waiters. Did I really want to do so? I confess that I did not.

 

What had made them what they were, other than of course their decision to be what they were? Their lives, it seemed to me, perhaps wrongly, were circumscribed by beer (too much of it), football, television and pop music, to the enjoyment of all of which work was a regrettable interruption. Sex for them would have been an itch that had to be scratched, but not otherwise associated with any form of affection, other possibility than the exclusive possession of someone as a means of bolstering their egos. Of all the forms of common existence which I have encountered in the world, this was easily the ugliest, the most charmless, the only one without any redeeming feature whatsoever. I exclude North Korea from my strictures, of course: but North Korea is not another country, it is another universe.

 

 

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