DIARY STAN GEBLER DAVIES
Radical surgery can have a deleterious effect on personality. I mean that the consequence of having chunks of one's body sliced up or hacked out is liable to be a foul temper. Nice old ladies who have heart bypass operations can be trans- formed overnight into raging maniacs who toss flowerpots at their children and cannot be pacified even with crates of gin. Loving- kindness flies out of the window, shattering it in the process. I was not warned about this before I was operated on for lung cancer last month. Suddenly I find myself snarling at newspaper editors and other kindly persons who enquire after my health or wellbeing. It is not simply the pain or Inconvenience, though both are pretty foul. No, it goes beyond that. The body, and with it the nervous system, has suf- fered a severe trauma, the consequence of which is a mental disorder, expressed in the form of a mild psychosis, which fortu- nately is transient in nature. Or some such claptrap. What I really mean is that I am fed up with being sick and I will bite the head off the next fool who asks me how I am.
My mother has taken to ringing me up, at vast expense, from Canada, anxious to keep up with my progress, or lack of it. 'I prayed to your God,' she tells me. 'I hope you have thanked Him for your recovery.' I suppose this is characteristic of mothers, who never stop trying to teach us manners. My mother does not believe in God, having lost her faith at the age of 14, or so she tells me, when the Immaculate Conception was first fully explained to her. To her mother I owe my membership of the Catholic church. I was born in 1943. My father was Jewish. My grandmother thought it likely the Germans would mur- der me on that account, should they happen to win the war, and so, with the aid of an aunt, she smuggled me from the nursing home where I had been born, and had me baptised. By the time the first SS regiment stepped ashore at Dun Laoghaire, my birthplace, I would have been spirited away into the countryside and disguised as Echt Irish by cousins. The Germans, thanks be to Christ, did not win the war, so I was spared being murdered or brought up by cousins. I was desultorily educated in Christianity by the Church of Ireland until about the age of 12, and thereafter not at all. The faith came of its own accord, as it does when it is wanted, taking the form at first of a fierce Protest- antism, moulded by the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible and the music of J. S. Bach. It was a long time before I understood the true Catholicism of all three, and by then I had had more than enough of the Anglican Communion. We are in Holy Week and must be charit- able, but I shall admit I was sent at last on the splendid path to Rome when sermon- ised by the Bishop of Kensington (?) in St Paul's Cathedral about seven years ago upon the sanctity of the Women of Greenham Common. Holy Church posses- ses also its own idiots, but at least it is based upon a rock which is not flimsy. I would have thrown my stool at the bishop, but I was reminded that that is contrary to the civil law.
When at last I came to Rome, I discovered I had been there since I was born. Kindly friends announced their in- tention of throwing a party to celebrate my reception into the church, and only then did I dredge up from memory some recol- lection of having been told by my grand- mother, just before I got on the emigrant boat, of my baptism. It meant, thanks be to God, I need not, indeed could not, be baptised again. So I am not a convert. To become a convert is to tread a stony path. Even Quakers loath converts. The Con- servative Party is rough on them. Ortho- dox Jews will not tolerate them at all, except upon the most stringent examina- tion. I have been at home since I was born. The ancestral chant rings a bell. Thanks be to Jehovah. I am upon the baptised register in Dun Laoghaire.
The worst distemper visited upon a sick man is constipation. It is the same thing, precisely, as Protestantism. I suppose that is why the Lord God Almighty visits it upon me. It is productive of the most evil temper. I suffer from it now. It is the most irritable and least supportable pain. I pray to the Lord to lift it.
It is as well my tolerance was strained already. The doorbell rings and it is Fur- phy. Furphy is the world's best fisherman, and lives the next bay over from me, at Courtmacsherry in County Cork. He is a Geordie who wound up in Ireland after he calculated that an ancestor of his must have been a dyslexic Murphy. I suppose there were some other reasons also. Furphy takes me out fishing from time to time. We go hunting the seabed off the Old Head of Kinsale, where the wreck of the Lusitania lies. It is a rich ground. Certain fishes are dangerous. On board his boat Furphy carries a baseball bat, for it is as well to beat to death specimens of ling, monkfish or full-grown cod before attempting to take the hooks from their mouths. The ling's nervous system is centred upon its anal aperture, and that is where you must hit it with the bat. There is no point hitting it upon the head, where the fearsome teeth are, and the brain is, because it can still bite after suffering huge brain damage. There may be some lesson to be learned about Ireland in the nervous system of the ling, but I doubt it. As soon as I am fully recovered, I shall go out fishing with Furphy again. We can usually find a bunch of Dutchmen to pay the bill. Furphy will be in Courtmacsherry by Whitsuntide and so will I. I would like to beat the brains out of a shark. Furphy can get me one.
In retrospect, what mostly I regret about having had cancer is the ten weeks I spent, in agony, abstaining from kindly alcohol, after being told by a certain surgeon at the Charing Cross Hospital that drink was all that was wrong with me. That misdiagnosis so very nearly cost me my life that I am also bereft of Christian charity when I think of the gentleman who made it. I cannot pray for him but I shall certainly pray for his patients.
If Jesse Jackson fails to be elected to office in the United States this year it will not be because he is a black man but because he is a socialist. Americans, very sensibly, do not like socialists at all, but they are very fond of blacks. The conven- tional wisdom is otherwise, but I should think the Revd Mr Jackson is getting lots of white votes precisely because he is a negro. There is no other reason why anybody should vote for him. His politics are transparently nonsense, but he is black. Americans would love to have a president who looks like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte. They would even settle for Eddie Murphy, so long as he wasn't a socialist. Blacks are far and away the least unpopular ethnic minority in the United States but my guess is that the Republican party will cotton on to this electoral fact before the Democrats do.
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