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and pioneering insights
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Book extracts
from Gothic Image

At the Eleventh Hour

Elizabeth Beech

When I look back on family celebrations in the aftermath of the Second World War I remember the excitement of the ceremonial opening of the large parcel sent by my mother's brother from Australia. It always contained souvenirs, from the small sheep farming town in New South Wales to which my uncle had emigrated long before I was born.

My father was of the opinion that everyone was somehow involved in producing these tasteless items, inscribed with the name of this obscure town in the middle of nowhere, since everyone in the town was an immigrant who wanted to send gifts home which announced that the spot on the planet that they had chosen to settle was worthy of the same note as Blackpool or the Tower of London, as indeed, to us, they were. These presents were treasured, despite their incongruity amongst the Rockingham china and Stuart crystal in our family home.

My picture of the other side of the world was profoundly influenced by all this. I had an image of a town, just like those in Wild West films, with one main street, surrounded by a featureless plain, inhabited by sheep, and men on horses, and a large wooden building in which people worked at producing these mugs, and tea towels, and key rings.

Almost forty years later, my brother went to New South Wales to work, and our family celebrations were excited by a phone call from him. We always remarked on how clear the line was, "You could be down the road!"  and how odd it was to imagine him the other side of the world, eating Christmas lunch yesterday, or is it tomorrow?

"Is it Boxing Day over there?"

on the beach in hot summer sun, and, whatever he said, I found it impossible to change my fixed idea, formed in my childhood, of what that region of Australia was like. My imagination, fuelled by scraps of information, was a more potent force than mere facts, however proven.

So I think the boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred and, as a consequence, honest remembering has almost nothing to do with the truth, as in "I swear by Almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".

This creates a paradox
what I say is true
and yet
"You can't most always generally tell"
as my Gran so often said.

Kitty Barter, who lived in our house in a room which smelt of lavender water and Devon violets, and whose walls were covered with pictures of cottages with roses round the door, and crinoline ladies, and sayings.
"If you see the funny side
you'll walk along the sunny side
while other folk are walking in the rain"

"Telling the truth makes you safe"
said Sister Louis Gabriel, who wore shoes with heels, and spat as she spoke in her thick accent, terrifying us with her passion and conviction. Sister Louis Gab, who later metamorphosed into Charlotte Klein, German, Jewish Catholic nun, in a bright red dress, smoking cigarettes and alarming and charming my children as she had alarmed and charmed me all those years before.

Women as different as two people can be.
Apparently,
at opposite ends of the spectrum;
dark and light
sunshine and rain
the rainbow
the covenant.
the promise,
and the promise is 'good', or 'happy ever after', although I don't quite know what the promise is.

When I walked through the gates at Birkenau I had no idea what I would discover
Or any thought of what I was looking for.

It was partly a pilgrimage for these two women, or a thanksgiving for their lives, and also a journey to lay my past to rest.
I found a place which described the human condition.
Gaudy hot house flowers, lovingly presented by other pilgrims, vied, uneasily, with the grasses and trees which have pushed through the stern concrete.
Little plastic 'Star of David' flags flapped hopefully against the rusty wire.
Children invented games to play on the wooden sleepers of the notorious railway line which runs relentlessly through the centre of the site.
The World Monument was an edifice which looked destined to last for at least another millennium, while the red brick gateway, through which a million victims passed, seemed ready to crumble to dust.

I sat under some birch trees and weaved a dream of planting there the most beautiful garden on earth.
Eden.

Our promise. The promised land.
The covenant we make,
"Never again will I curse the ground because of man, however evil his inclinations may be from his youth upwards. I will never again kill every living creature as I have just done.

While the earth lasts
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat
summer and winter, day and night,
shall never cease."
(Genesis 8. 21.22.)

you say to me
but
it's all the same it's all the same
the felling of trees
destroys us as surely as bombs

and I say
quite so
in my head I agree
but I tell you my friend
as well
that a tree is
a fire
a table
a raft
and you can't most always generally tell
but
a man or
a woman or
child
hacked down
that's hell.

The people of Eastern Europe know I have the privilege of a lifetime of comfort to enable my arrogant disdain of tawdry toys, cheap wares, junk food. I had a childhood and an adolescence and can afford to grow up and notice what's what.

My teenage son is into raves and the right to party. I danced the night away to the rhythms of jazz. I smoked dope, and of course inhaled. I was careless and irresponsible. I didn't sweep the streets or badger tourists to part with their money. I didn't have to prostitute myself in national costume, or have my bottom pinched by rich Germans over sixty years of age.

I hitched around the continent of Western Europe escaping from the dreary bomb-cratered land of rationing and my parents inevitable need for certainty, and security, after the brutal interruption of their young lives which was World War Two.

The people of Eastern Europe are only now facing their former enemies, as coach loads of German tourists re-invade their land, as truck loads of Russians display their spoils in the markets of their former colonies.

The mother of Nick Ingrams went for the American dream.
The land of instant gratification
Of the hand gun, the shot gun. The land of the Wizard of Oz and Reservoir Dogs.
McCarthy and Macdonalds.
Marilyn Monroe and O.J. Simpson.

In Eastern Europe no-one wants a past.
In modern America emotional accounts of the past fill the daytime tv screens.
At the World Monument at Birkenau people stand in inscrutable silence.
There are no words.

Original research, ideas
and pioneering insights
from authors
at the cutting edge

Book extracts
from Gothic Image