I feel a cold anger at the stupidity of this war
Last Sunday evening, weary from digging, I staggered in to wash and eat, and then, cup of tea in hand, slumped down in my kitchen chair by the Rayburn to listen to the radio. The clocks had gone forward and it was just after nine.
I enjoy digging. Since early childhood I have been fascinated by trenches, tunnels, gutters, dams and watercourses. My place on a Derbyshire hillside is a dream for anyone so inclined. Named 'The Spout' after the constant spring that supplies the water, the property is crisscrossed by underground streams. Wherever I dig. I seem to come upon another old land drain, and, just at present, new springs keep appearing in unexpected places. Whether this has been caused by the wet winter or (as is rumoured around here) by the collapse far below the ground of a sough draining an old lead mine on the other side of the hill, the result is that to prevent my land becoming a marsh has recently required a minor feat of civil engineering. At local builders' merchants I have become a familiar sight, with my latest order for perforated land drains, limestone chippings and new pickaxe handles. I awake of a morning, see the sun streaming through the window, and my heart lifts as I remember the new trench I plan to dig today and the flag irises I shall plant. I have always been like that.
But this Sunday there was something added. In the face of the uncertainties of life, David Hume thought one had best play billiards. Voltaire suggested we should cultivate our garden. I am with Voltaire. Every news bulletin was shouting at me about war. Bombs, I knew, were raining down on Baghdad. One military correspondent had sent a tape-recording of people screaming in terror. Politicians kept getting up on their hind legs and ranting about liberation (They bark of freedom,/Oh I hate the sound.' wrote John Clare) and the more I heard it the more my hands itched for my new trenching spade and the handles of my wheelbarrow. Affairs of state are my profession but not my life, and I rarely lose sleep about politics, but this month and with this war a cold anger at the stupidity of it all, the awful miscalculations being made and the damage being done, and feelings of useless despair of a quite personal sort. keep returning to trouble me, intruding into everything. I have even thought of joining a protest march — and I detest public demonstrations.
I had opposed the war on principle, not thinking that the invasion itself would prove very difficult. I had supposed that Tony Blair and George W. Bush had at least got their military calculations right. Now I found myself flying at my excavations with a kind of fury, trying to blot out the thoughts and images of war. Dislodging a boulder that blocked my planned channel, I had caught myself shoving and swearing at it as if it were some Pentagon spokesman who had offended me.
And now, after a day of such furious exertions, and feeling at last more mellow, I was sipping my tea. The radio was tuned to BBC Radio Two and I started to listen.
It was Alan Keith's programme. But Alan Keith is dead! He died earlier this month — I had heard as much a few days before. Odd, I thought, and somehow creepy. His weekly selection of light classical favourites has been popular first for the music, but the old man's inimitable manner — the slow drawl, his antique accent, and a stately courtesy which seemed to come from another age — has been an important part of the programme's attraction, too. I'm a great fan, and selected Alan Keith as part of my BBC Pick of the Week late last year. To hear this very personalised programme broadcast now, when the person was no longer with us, seemed a dubious editorial judgment. No doubt he had prerecorded a show or two without knowing he was soon to die. I thought, but should they have been broadcast?
Soon, though. the music overtook me. The late Mr Keith had introduced a movement from Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto, played slowly with sadness and poise. And now he was not here to listen. Perhaps I was wrong: perhaps he did have some intimation, when recording the programme, that it would be broadcast in a world of which he was no longer part. Tears pricked my eyes.
His next selection was, as he reminded us, one of the most famous tenor arias of all time — `Che gelida manina', from La boheme — and it was sung by Pavarotti. Introducing it, Alan Keith seemed to be labouring somewhat to draw breath. I switched out the kitchen light, to listen in darkness.
After the intermezzo from Johann Strauss's 1001 Nights, Keith began a substantial introduction to his next choice. In the dark, in the presence of the voice of an old man who was broadcasting as live but was dead, the same chilling thought struck me as had occurred when I was alone on a small offshore island near Desolation Island, overnighting in a tiny cabin three years ago. That place was 2,000 miles from any continent except Antarctica. Our base, several days' walk away, used to transmit 'canned' music programmes, looped and continuous, all day and night, seven days a week. We had no broadcaster and no studio; just the technical equipment, which ran automatically. Listening, with a gale howling outside, I reflected that if everyone at the base had been blown away — indeed, if the rest of the world had been blown away — and if, despite the apparent company of my radio, I had been alone in the universe, then music which came by no living agency would have made me feel more lonely, not less.
After an excerpt from Brahms's Requiem, Alan Keith played -My Tears Shall Flow' from Handel's Rinaldo. It was, he said, taken from the 84th Psalm, 'How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place'. And soon the programme was over. Bidding us goodbye, Alan Keith said his programme had been broadcast for 44 years. Now I'm 94, I have decided the time has come to say farewell — for the last time.'
He will have recorded that before the war with Iraq began. And so, for the last time, he signed off: 'This is Alan Keith, saying a very good night to you all.' He cannot have known into how troubled a night his words would be broadcast: from another time. Now, his really was another voice.
Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.
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