ANOTHER VOICE

Anguish which cannot usefully be shared

AUBERON WAUGH

ast time I retreated to Champneys Health Farm, in the agreeable Hertford- shire countryside, it was to study a curious pamphlet written by Margaret Drabble in which she argued the case for paying everyone — the heart surgeon and the 'ancillary' floor cleaner, the captain of the ocean liner and the cabin boy — exactly the same wage. This time, I retreat with the maledictions of her sister, A. S. Byatt, ringing in my ears, for having argued — an argument familiar enough to Spectator readers — that a reduction of 100 deaths in the figure for road accidents is insufficient justification for a reign of police terror and an end to virtually all social life in the English countryside.

Writing with the moral impregnability of one who has suffered an appalling tragedy in the family, Byatt argues that it would be justified to impose random testing on everyone if just one life could be saved. 'How can the discomfort of those who are tested be set against the pain of the 100 killed, or of those who pick up the tele- phone or open the door to shock and grief and the lasting destruction of their lives as they knew them?'

To all of which the conventional answer would be a respectful silence, thereby emphasising the tendency, of which Byatt complains, to treat the grief-stricken as pariahs. Perhaps her question was not expecting an answer and many will judge me foolish to try and answer it.

An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high, But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a mother's eye!

But I feel it deserves to be answered and should be answered, if only because it contains a rhetorical device which, used with increasing frequency in the day-to-day running of our affairs, threatens almost every aspect of life's enjoyment and should therefore be resisted. The inconvenience of the one party must indeed be set against the pain of the other, and in order to do so, both must be quantified. Otherwise, if public policy were determined by the intensity of an individual grief, we would have to ban not only all alcohol but also all driving and most forms of movement. Even that, of course, would not restore the dead to life. As Ludovic Kennedy exclaims in the course of describing his campaign to save Derek Bentley from the hangman: 'God knows one's heart bleeds for the widow of PC Miles, but killing Bentley could not restore him to her.'

First, let us measure the degree of inconvenience caused. It simply is not true, as Byatt asserts, that moderate drinkers and 'observably competent drivers' are in no danger from random breath tests. That is one basis of the objection to the random element (the other is the enormous in- crease in police powers to harass and intimidate private citizens). Random tests mean that no one who has gone out to lunch or dinner or drinks with a friend and has drunk as little as two glasses of wine is safe — even if he is sober as a judge and driving faultlessly. All this may be as nothing to the intensity of the grief of a bereaved mother, but in fact it means that an enormous number of people will have to change their entire way of life, and change it dramatically for the worse. Why not, at that point, ban all alcohol, all driving, all movement?

Now, let us measure the amount of pain. Whatever premium one places upon the agonies of bereavement, the fact remains that some 670,000 people die in Britain every year. Nearly all are mourned by someone, most by more than one person. Many of these deaths at the time may seem to herald the lasting destruction of all happiness for those who survive. Nearly all are misfortunes. Of that number, perhaps 300 are the innocent victims of drunken drivers. They are the merest drop in the pool of human anguish. However strong the feelings of the bereaved may be, and however strong our sympathy for them, it is a matter of common sense that they cannot expect to dictate road traffic policy as a result of their misfortune.

Perhaps there is some comfort to be derived from joining a discussion group or one of the various pressure groups on offer, agitating invariably for heavier penalties, stricter controls. But like the Hang Myra Hyndley Committee of Sal- ford, these groups must be seen as ther- 'We've been remaindered by Dillons.' apeutic in function, rather than as neces- sarily having anything useful to contribute to debate on public policy.

Yet they are paid enormous respect.

Politicians, no less than journalists, are terrified of them. Their pain carries all before it, until it is scarcely recognisable as pain for all the power systems constructed around it, the moral blackmail, the self- pity, even the mercenary self-seeking.

Perhaps it is the endless search for sensationalism which has destroyed all sense of proportion on the subject of death, just as it is the collapse of belief in an after-life which explains the appalling sentimentality which attends any discus- sion of it. A hundred years ago, mothers expected to lose at least two children in infancy, usually from avoidable causes.

Now, when a baby dies of a new disease called listeria, the whole country has to renounce chickens. A few months ago, when the idiotic Mrs Currie announced that eggs, if eaten raw, would communicate a mild form of food-poisoning, involving an attack of diarrhoea such as many people suffer perhaps once a week, the egg industry was ruined.

The same disproportion can be seen in over-reacting to Lockerbie. Of course flying involves a little risk. It is absurd to suppose that terrorists can be prevented from blowing up planes, if that is what they want to do, just as it is absurd to suppose that some planes will not blow up of their own accord. While the risk remains tiny, we will have to live with it. When it gets larger, we can choose whether to fly or not. No amount of extra precautions will do anything to reduce the anguish of those already bereaved, nor of those about to be bereaved in the next disaster. Three-hour security checks achieve nothing but an intolerable nuisance. It is a question, once again, of setting the nuisance against the risk.

It could be that newspapers and televi- sion are to blame, once again, for this lack of a sense of proportion which threatens to destroy many of the pleasures of 213th- century life. The attraction of air disasters may be explained by their rarity — when corpses and bits of aeroplane are falling out of the sky on a daily basis, perhaps they will be relegated to local rather than national news. But I doubt it. A hysterical terror of death leaves no time for the enjoyment of life.