Letter from my terrace in Palma 12 One Man in an Ambulance

One Man in an Ambulance 

If you have not read about Harris getting lost in the maze at Hampton Court, go and read it now.  And about George’s shirt in the River Thames. And about Harris, George and J trying to open a tin of pineapple without a tin opener. I have mentioned the book before in these letters but again I suggest you read it. Beg, buy, borrow or even download a copy of ‘Three Men in a Boat’.  It is a great tonic for this long, hot summer.

In 1889 three young men decided they needed a holiday on a boat on the River Thames.  They went from London upstream to Oxford and then downstream back to London again.  Well, almost back to London.  Why they never finished the journey is something else you can discover when you read it.

And the writer?  What happened to Jerome K. Jerome, the only writer, I think, with a palindromic surname? Ford Madox Ford almost qualifies, but not quite. His middle name should really be just an initial. Anyway, after such a carefree jaunt up the River Thames, what did Jerome do?

Life is never a carefree journey for long. In 1914 the First World War broke out.  Jerome wanted to do something. At 56 he was too old for the army so he volunteered as an ambulance driver at the front.

It must have been a terrible experience. His secretary said that when he returned, ‘He was not the same Jerome. He was strange.’ Yet in his autobiography, ‘My Life and Times’, published in 1926 just a year before he died, there is still something of the old Jerome.  There is still his enjoyment of the oddities of life. There is still some of the old spirit and humour. 

We like to file away our writers firmly in a pigeon hole. For us they are not human beings with complex lives.  Once they are safely dead and cannot surprise us with new work, we give them convenient labels which we can understand.  

So it is with Jerome K. Jerome.  Driving an ambulance at the front in the First World War is an uncomfortable truth for us. We push it to one side and try to forget it. What we want to hold on to is the carefree creator of the three men in their boat.

In the same way we want Kipling to be eternally in India writing the Mowgli stories. This is what we understand. In fact, he wrote the Jungle Books while living in Vermont, so Mowgli and Baloo were created in New England. We blot out Kipling’s years in the States or as the squire of Batemans, his house in the countryside of Sussex.

Some writers we delete altogether.  The fame of Sherlock Holmes deprives Conan Doyle of any sort of existence at all.

Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes when Holmes began to take over his life. Holmes fell with Moriarty into the Reichenbach Falls and that was supposed to be that. But the public demanded Holmes’s return, and so back he came giving Watson a tremendous shock.  ‘I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life.’

We, the demanding public, do not like our basic concepts to be shattered. We cannot accept anything which does not fit with our simple view of life. We like our world to make sense. We believe in our labels.

So, we must broaden our minds.  We must accept contradictions. We must tolerate inconsistencies. Let our favourite writers live full lives.  Above all, take out those labels that we keep for our own ease and tear them up. Life is never that simple.