Barefoot Soldier

Barefoot Soldier by Johnson Beharry VC

Johnson Beharry was born in Grenada in 1979, the third in a family of seven.  He wasn’t scholarly, preferring to build things or play with cars, and attended school at the insistence of his great uncle Hamilton, who he lived with from the age of 9.  He spent his summers working in a family car yard belonging to another aunt and uncle, dreaming of becoming a mechanic and a driver.  When some local boys started causing trouble for him because they felt he should be sharing his wages with them, he decided to visit Hamilton’s son and wife in the UK for a month or so.  The month extended into a couple of years and, finding himself caught up with a bad crown, Beharry decided to join the army on the spur of the moment.  He trained and worked hard to get himself physically fit before being sent to a boot camp, two weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Once qualified, he was sent to Iraq as a driver of a Warrior Tracked Armoured Vehicle, where he earned the Victoria Cross by repeatedly putting his life in danger to rescue his comrades.

The full citation of Beharry’s VC can be found here, if you want to know the nitty gritty of what he did before reading the book.  Beharry’s own version of events goes into more detail but also somehow manages to soften the impact of his actions, he does that soldier thing of “any one of us would have done the same thing”.  I’m sure it’s true and his humble reaction to being awarded the highest possible award for bravery simply impresses me more.  In summary, he was given the award for two acts in particular – the first, he had been hit in the helmet by an enemy bullet that stopped just short of entering his skull.  Having lost contact with the men in his Warrior, he went in through a hatch that was exposed to enemy fire to rescue his commanding officer and then went back to get the rest of the men and to drive the Warrior to a place where it couldn’t be used by insurgents.  On a second occasion, the open driving hatch at the front of the Warrior was hit by an RPG which exploded around 6 inches from Beharry’s head.  Despite sustaining serious brain injuries (a surgeon described his skull as “what happens to an eggshell when you hit it hard with a spoon”), he managed to reverse the vehicle away from the immediate battleground so that his injured colleagues could be rescued more safely.  It was at this point that the severity of his wounds became apparent and he fell into a coma that lasted 2 weeks.

Beharry is the first person to have been awarded the Victoria Cross since 1982 and the first living recipient in 40 years.

Impressive bravery aside, the book is actually a very good read.  Beharry wrote it with Nick Cook, a journalist specialising in aviation, so it’s fluid and varied in its sentence structure which always makes for a better book.  But Beharry has had an interesting life and the lead up to his joining the army takes up the whole first half, whilst his Grenadian accent and speech patterns shine throughout.  This is another book that I read from The Guardian’s best unread books of the decade list, Mark Lucas says about it:

Barefoot Soldier by Johnson Beharry VC, published in 2006. It was a Sunday Times bestseller, but should have gone on to take the world by storm. And never did, quite. Johnson was the first living recipient of the Victoria Cross for nearly 40 years. He saved the lives of at least 30 of his fellow soldiers during two separate ambushes within weeks of each other in Iraq in 2004. Little, Brown published it in 2006 with considerable passion, a major marketing campaign, and utter devotion to this most charming and courageous of young men. He’s an example to us all. So why isn’t Barefoot Soldier up there with Bravo Two Zero? Part of the problem, I fear, is that a huge number of people under the age of 40 have no idea what the Victoria Cross stands for. Perhaps the public got confused, and saw him as more victim than hero. Perhaps their antipathy to the conflict itself coloured their response to his experience. Perhaps there wasn’t enough gunfire. And maybe the BNP played a part … I don’t begrudge Jordan her megasales. But I’d prefer to live in a world where Johnson Beharry VC’s astonishing, selfless bravery is more vigorously cherished.

This is a book that describes conflict at the ground level without a sense of judging, that gives a view of Grenadian life and depicts acts of outstanding courage with humour and humility.  It is interesting if you, like my boyfriend, are fascinated by war and it also has a lot to offer if you, like me, will read anything if it sits still long enough.

Journal

Journal by Hélène Berr

NB. You’re lucky to get any review at all for this, I spent most of an hour working on it and then [expletive deleted] WordPress deleted the whole thing.

Hélène Berr was twenty-one when she started her journal on 7th April 1942.  Although Paris had been occupied by the Germans for two years by this point, her entries mainly concern visits with friends or to her family’s country house in Aubergenville, the literature she has been reading lately, her violin practices, or her beau Gérard who was fighting with the Free French.  Gradually, the degradations put into place by laws passed by the Vichy regime begin to impinge on her life – the wearing of a yellow star, the curfews in place for Jews – and become all the more real when her father is arrested for wearing his star “incorrectly” and sent to the Drancy internment camp.  Hélène began working for General Organisation of Israelites in France (the UGIF) to help those detained and, later, to hide Jewish children and prevent them from being deported.  Nonetheless, her journal focuses on her whirlwind social life and increasing sense of separation from Gérard rather than the realities of the situation for Jews across Europe or her fears for her father.  After a gap of around ten months in her diary, Hélène’s understanding of her perilous position as a Jew in Paris is much clearer – she has witnessed the deportation of friends and colleagues, she has seen countless children arrive at the orphanage at Neuilly whose parents have been taken by Germans, often despite severe illness or being in an advanced stage of pregnancy.  She hears stories about beatings and other atrocities committed by the Germans.  She and her parents began sleeping at other people’s houses to avoid deportation, but on March 8th 1944, the Berrs were arrested and interred at Drancy.  Hélène was later shipped to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where she was beaten to death whilst sick with typhus, five days before the camp was liberated by the British army.  She was twenty-four.

This was another book I saw on The Guardian’s Best Unread Books of the Decade list (and the last one I’ll review for a good while, probably – I’ve not reserved any more at the library) and this is what they had to say about it:

Journal by Hélène Berr, published in 2008, deserves to be read and studied in every school in the civilised world, read and reread for what it tells of the circumstances of the arrest of a young and brilliant Jewish girl in Paris and her eventual murder in Bergen-Belsen, days before that camp was liberated. The story of how the text of her journal came to light so many years later is remarkable enough. The journal, which is a love story too and an account of inescapable horror, is beautiful and beautifully translated by David Bellos, whose Afterword entitled France and the Jews is also essential reading.

Whilst the second half of the Journal does more directly record the inescapable horror and the first part might technically be termed a love story, it doesn’t save it all from being pretty boring and a struggle to get through.  Jean Morawiecki makes an early appearance, while she’s trying to decide on her feelings for Gérard, and the entries that concern him tend towards the “when I saw him, it was as though the sun shined” variety, but there is still little detail regarding how she feels about the people she’s writing about.  She frequently expresses annoyance at a postcard she has received without mentioning content or who it is from.  Mostly, the six months account for Hélène’s whirlwind social life and she expresses a mild bewilderment at being singled out for a religion that she doesn’t feel epitomises who she is as a human being.  There are a lot of people and places named that meant nothing to me, with practically no commentary from the translator/editor to explain anything.  If you don’t know that UGIF stands for Union générale des israélites de France, or General Organisation of Israelites in France, it isn’t made clear when you meet that organisation in the text.  Nor is it made explicit that it was an organisation with close ties to the Nazis and viewed with much suspicion by the Jews in France for that reason, although Hélène’s purpose in working there was more closely tied to her desire to save the lives of Jewish children who could potentially be rounded up by the Germans.

The second half of the journal, the six months leading up to her arrest, is vastly more interesting – in part because there are fewer people mentioned by name and so it’s easier to follow the events described.  Potentially, it was also more interesting because I discovered the index of people, places and acronyms at the back of the book and so could work out who everyone was or where the buildings were that she kept writing about.  The indices are something that could have been mentioned in the introduction, frankly.

Of the few first hand depictions of the second world war that I’ve read, this doesn’t stand out as being anything special.  I much preferred Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man/The Truce, although I acknowledge that he benefited from both hindsight and the ability to edit his manuscript.  Whilst it piques my interest to read about the slow changes in society that were made that resulted in someone like Hélène – a graduate of the Sorbonne, a talented musician, gregarious and charming (or so the introduction tells me) – being shunted to the edges of society and marked as a monster by a yellow star, this could have been improved by an ongoing commentary for an English speaking audience to understand the context a little better.

It also could have been improved by not having been used as a fly catcher by the previous lendee, finding little bug corpses as I turned the pages was more than a bit gross…

Stalin’s Children

Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews

In 1937, Boris Bibikov said goodbye to his wife and two daughters for the last time, although none of them had realised that their family would be torn apart in the proceeding days and months.  Boris thought he was being rewarded for loyal service to the Communist party with a relaxing trip to the seaside, but instead was arrested and executed.  His family were disbanded across the country for “re-education” and disrupted further by the advancing front of the second world war.  Surviving starvation, illness and war, Boris’ younger daughter Lyudmila managed to find her family, get a good education and attend university in Moscow.  This is where she met and fell in love with a young foreign student, despite being separated for most of their courtship by the fall of the Iron Curtain, communicating through passionate love letters for the next six years.  Their eventual union produced Owen, who explores their family history and the influence of the Soviet state on the four generations of his family, from his grandfather Boris to his son Nikita.

Matthews clearly had his imagination captured by stories from his mother’s childhood and her optimism in spite of the numerous traumatic events she endured: being separated from her mother before her 4th birthday whilst suffering from measles; soon after catching tuberculosis of the bones, which meant one leg ended up 16cm shorter than the other and requiring a number of operations on her hip.  His father, on the other hand, seemed to be someone that his son never really saw eye to eye with, his history isn’t imagined as vividly and the town of his youth, Swansea, is described as “always suffused with a dirty yellow light, somehow poisoned and gravity laden.”  The book really comes alive when it starts its Abelard and Heloise-esque* recounting of the letters exchanged between the lovers.

The cover of the book boasts positive reviews from just about every reviewer you can think of, with endorsements such as “an extraordinary story” and “A Russian Wild Swans“.  Now, I’ve read Wild Swans and, good though this is, Wild Swans it ain’t.  Jung Chang infuses her narrative with empathy and beauty, each generation of her family is given its own voice and she endeavors to look through the eyes of her mother and grandmother to write each of their histories sympathetically.  Whilst her grandmother might be a staid traditionalist who drives her progeny mad, the section of the book devoted to her isn’t critical or judgemental.  Matthews makes no such effort and the views of his antecedents are coloured by his personal thoughts and the culture of his upbringing.  His dislike for his father and maternal grandmother are evident throughout, although he makes an effort to understand why they are the way they are and does develop a kind of grudging respect for his father’s efforts to help Mila escape Soviet Russia.

The section of the book devoted to Matthews’ mother, Mila, is fairly straightforward, whilst that of his father, Mervyn, is interspersed with his own experiences as a journalist working in Moscow after the fall of the Iron Curtain.  I mention this because the switching narrative is extraordinarily well written (take note, Danny Scheinmann) and emphasises the divergent-yet-reflective experiences had by father and son.  On the whole, I found it to be a great starting point for learning more about Soviet history.  I picked up a copy of The Gulag Archipelago about a year ago (when Solzhenitsyn’s profile was raised through his death and the bookshops were cashing in with Russian literature window displays) but couldn’t get into it because I know so little about that part of history, I had no reference point to use as a guide.  Matthews’ makes reference to Solzhenitsyn’s (that’s a hard name to type) seminal work on several occasions and I intend to pick it up sometime soon.  Possible in the Christmas break, if I get through the humungous pile of library books next to my bed!

On the whole, it really is beautifully written – the description of Mervyn managing to smuggle himself into a Soviet country on a day trip and the few hours he and Mila managed to spend together before saying goodbye made me well up, remembering how hard it was to say goodbye at the airport to my Irish boyfriend – and the only bad thing I can say about it is that it could have tried to be a bit more sympathetic to its main characters.

(but it’s a high 4!)

*I should note here that Heloise is one of my all-time heroines, she’d be at my perfect dinner table along with Stephen Fry and Oscar Wilde.  If you’re interested in their story, I cannot recommend Heloise and Abelard by James Burge highly enough, although you will need to pick up The Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Betty Radice as well to read the full text of their letters.  Read the latter first.  I’ll lend them to you if 1) I know you and 2) you swear to give them back.  Or ask Santa to bring them for Christmas, you’ve got a week to get your letter into him!

Getting friendly

Friends Like These by Danny Wallace

Danny is about to turn 30.  He has just moved to a slightly nicer area of London, bought display cushions, hired a builder, started eating olives and is about to turn 30.  He’s about to become a grown-up and it’s terrifying.  So when he finds an old address book he hits upon a great idea – find the people that used to be his bestest best friends in the world and see how they’re coping with it.  The people he knew when he was 12, the ones he played conkers with or who also worshipped Michael Jackson, learning all the words to all the songs.  The people he swore would be friends forever and who seem to have fallen by the wayside as he got older.  And in finding the friends, Danny might just find out something about himself.  Or maybe just an awful lot about owning a Toby Carvery.

My first experience of Danny Wallace was Are You Dave Gorman 10 years ago and I’ve half-heartedly noticed his career since then – the happy cult with an ethos of being nice to people on Fridays, all lovely and nice; the multiple appearances on Richard & Judy or other daytime TV magazine shows; that kind of thing.  I just didn’t take to him in quite the same way I did Dave, I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s because his beard was less interesting.  More likely his brand of humour didn’t tickle me as much.  This book was well written, slightly self-effacing, some nice gentle banter and clever word play, but that’s about it for me.  I don’t think I can go further than “nice”.  To be honest, Danny Wallace’s early-life crisis doesn’t seem like great material for a book, for all that the man can write.  And employing a man who owns his very own stepladder is lovely for him but not necessarily something I need to be reminded of 6 or 7 times over the course of the story…

Being a work depicting real people, there is the necessary disclaimer at the beginning about how “names and events have been changed to protect people, the order of things has been messed around with to better facilitate the storytelling and nothing you read is necessarily true.”  (NB. not a direct quote).  Which kinda made me wonder – why not write an entirely fictionalised account of the experience, rather than something semi-fictional that reads like a story anyway?  I feel like he has milked his life of most of the “real” events by now, creating pretend crises (my flatmate wants to meet people!  I started a cult!  I’ve seceded from the UK and run my own country!  I’m getting a little bit older and own cushions!) to write about.  Just make the crises up completely and start writing proper novels already.

Danny writes in a very welcoming, warm, friendly way.  It’s easy to like him and the people he describes, you could do a lot worse than to read his biography-in-installments books.  But I’m after something either with a bit more edge or a little less self-indulgence.  A bit like Dave Gorman’s reaction to turning 30 – to grow a beard, get a book deal and accidentally go on a Googlewhack Adventure.  (get the DVD, as I’ve said before there are moments in it that have to been seen to be understood!)

I’m not

Are You Dave Gorman? by Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace

One night, after a plentiful quantity of tequila has been consumed, Dave Gorman bets his flatmate Danny Wallace that he can find “loads” of people with the same name as him.  The next day, sobering up on a train to East Fife to meet the manager of the football club, Danny begins to have doubts about the mission.  Dave, meanwhile, is as excited as a child about to meet Santa for the first time, and insists that they see the bet through to meeting “loads” of Dave Gormans.  Danny, showing some prescience at how this adventure would turn out, limits the number to 54 – one for every card in the deck, including the jokers.  The bet kickstarts a quest that takes them all over the world, to New York, Israel, France (only to discover that the France DG is in London) and – much to the chagrin of Danny’s girlfriend, Hanne – Venice.  Will Dave succeed in finding his Gormen before the quest utterly destroys Danny’s relationship or Dave’s bank balance?

I remember watching the TV series of this while I was doing my A-levels.  In fact, I distinctly remember being annoyed that I would miss the final installment because I was at the pub, then discovering they had it on a TV with the volume turned all the way down and trying to lipread after drinking a few Peche Bleu too many (I can’t find a recipe online, but it definitely had blue curaçao in).  Still, I had no idea until I read the book whether Dave managed to find his Gormen, or if he kept his miles-per-Dave-Gorman within the acceptable range.  There were charts and everything.  I think managers everywhere should study Are You Dave Gorman? as an exercise in making PowerPoint presentations interesting.  (the link is to the next TV show Dave made, about following his horoscope exactly for 40 days.  There’s surprisingly little from Are You… on YouTube.)

The Are You Dave Gorman? book is co-written by Dave and his then-flatmate Danny Wallace, who I had never ever heard of beforehand but who has gone on to form a cult (apparently the final straw in the relationship with Hanne, I think he forgot to ask her if she wanted to join too), to create his own country, to inspire a Jim Carrey-starring Hollywood blockbuster and to… erm… catch up with some old friends.  More on that last point in a later blog post.  In fact, Danny Wallace was recently described as a “master of stunt journalism” in a BBC News article about annualism – the practice of enduring something for a year or so, and then writing a book about it.  Dave’s career has followed a similar path, although slightly more personal in nature – he obeyed his horoscope, he tried to find 10 googlewhacks in a row and then he drove from the West Coast of the United States to the East Coast, without using any chain stores, motels or petrol stations.  But in the latter two, you can really see him suffer as he strives to reach his goals.  There’s a moment in his Googlewhack Adventure where I just want to give him a big hug – definitely one to hunt down on DVD because certain bits of it simply won’t have the same impact in print.

On the whole, it’s an adorable introduction to both Dave and Danny’s body of work.  I can happily read and reread this, giggling away to myself.

Suspicious minds

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or the Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale

One morning in 1860, the bed of four-year-old Saville Kent is found empty.  While his father rushes to alert the police, locals search the house and grounds of Road Hill House and find the child’s body stuffed down the hole of the outhouse with a slit throat.  The local police quickly point the finger of suspicion at the nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, but when a detective from the newly formed Scotland Yard’s detective division arrives, he sees guilt in another party.  And don’t worry, I won’t tell you if he’s wrong or right.  Or in fact, if anyone is ever found to be guilty.  (unless you want me to?)

In the tradition of In Cold Blood, this book attempts to breathe life into historical fact – the birth of the science of detection in general and the death of a child specifically.   It opens with the disappearance of Saville and the eventual discovery of his body, before moving back through time to describe the recruitment and successes of Detective Whicher in his career to date.  The narrative continues to oscillate between the close focus on Saville’s murder and the subsequent investigation and a wider look at how society reacted, in terms of “detective fever” and other notable-if-tangentially-related crimes.  Source material includes letters written by Charles Dickens, Kent family members and Detective Whicher, various newspaper reports – each with a different version of court events, depending on who they think was the guilty party – and chunks of texts from contemporary fiction.

In places, Summerscale seems determined to describe (in detail) the results of her impressively extensive research.  Whilst I can appreciate the effort she has gone to, and the quality of the information provided in the story is testament to that, at times it seems that she is listing facts because there was nowhere in the narrative for it to go.  There are some interesting little contemporary linguistic creations that she notes: footprints wasn’t set as the descriptive noun for some time, it was interchangeable with footmarks and foot-tracks; clue is derived from clew, meaning a ball of thread or yarn and the idea of it leading to a solution is from the Minotaur’s labyrinth.  It tells how the earliest detectives at Scotland Yard were trained in secret, because the public opinion was so vehemently against the invasion of privacy they represented.  All interesting to me but I think I was expecting the book to be a little more about solving murders and a little less a series of contemporary quotations, sometimes repeating and belabouring the point that another quote had already made.

A number of nineteenth-century novels are named throughout the book – Lady Audley’s Secret, Bleak House, The Moonstone, The Woman In White - all featuring detectives or motifs that the author seems convinced were inspired solely by the events at Road Hill House.  The female characters of Lady Audley’s Secret were apparently facets of the personality of Constance Kent; The Woman In White features women suffering from madness in the way that Samuel Saville Kent’s first wife Mary was alleged to have done; The Moonstone has a detective who had a logical mind and fanatically pursued the truth, the way Detective Whicher apparently did (although, surely that’s a general trait of detectives?).  That aside, the books that Summerscale mentions as being inspired by the facts of the Road Hill House case are very good examples of the genre and all well worth a read.  They are all probably better than this case, less interesting if you’re after proper historical fact, but still a lot more fun.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a good book: interesting, though-provoking and educational.  I felt slightly disappointed by it because it wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be (if I’m honest, I thought it was fiction until I got it home…) and I still prefer In Cold Blood‘s approach.  Initially I felt like giving it three stars but given a few days to consider the phenomenal amount of research that went into it and the very readable way it is presented, I had to bump it up to four.