The year I was born and the day I was born, at 08.00 hours on the 30th of June, the largest meteorite ever to strike the earth, indeed the greatest cosmic impact of at least the last 2,000 years, landed in Siberia. To quote Dr David Whitehouse, the BBC Online Science Editor:
The impact had a force of 20 million tonnes of TNT, equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. It is estimated that 60 million trees were felled over an area of 2,200 square kilometres …
… The first expedition to reach the site was led by Russian scientist L. A. Kullick in 1938. His team was amazed to find so much devastation but no obvious crater.
So began the mystery of Tunguska. What was the object that caused such destruction and why did it leave no crater?
When I read this piece to Gwen Hartfield, my housekeeper, she said: ‘It does bring you down to earth with a bump, doesn’t it?’
Naturally I disclaim all responsibility, and I have never been to the site. I rely on hearsay.
I rely on hearsay for everything that has happened in the world before I was born, and the world, as I know it, will end on the day I die. When I become part of ‘the dull, the indiscriminate dust’ there is nothing to prove to me that anything will still go on, any more than that anything existed before I opened my eyes and blinked up at my doting parents. Nothing can prove to me that the world and all it appears to contain has an objective reality. I know it has a subjective reality but no more. ‘There, sir, I refute it thus,’ Dr Johnson said, when in an argument with Boswell over Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the essential non-existence of matter, as he kicked vigorously at a stone. But what did Dr Johnson refute or disprove – if he ever lived, that is? Only that his foot felt the weight of the stone as it rolled away from him. I burn my finger and I feel the pain. I feel nothing of the horrible pains of a thousand martyrs who have been – it is said – burned at the stake for their beliefs, or disbeliefs. Even among my nearest and dearest there is no transference – can be no transference – of experience. One can feel empathy for someone suffering, but one cannot feel the suffering. We are all alone – desperately alone. What are we in this world? A conjunction of subjective impressions making up something that is accepted as reality?
I have long been convinced of the illusory nature of all human experience; but where does it lead me? – To Plato and his parable of the cave? Or is it just back to Cogito, ergo sum?
I have always been secretive about my age, therefore there have never been any great celebrations on my reaching any of the evermore-lonely eminences of life. Such secrecy, of course, runs totally counter to modern practice. Every newspaper demands it. ‘39-yearold, old Etonian, ex-Guardsman, former trombonist John Smith- Brown was yesterday charged with …’. Every official form, however trivial, has a space for ‘date of birth’. Any casual acquaintance will suddenly come out with ‘how old are you?’
Reticence over age is very much a family failing, and I can’t explain why. I remember when I was twenty being embarrassed that I was so old and preferring not to mention it. I never knew my mother’s age or my father’s age until just before they died.
But my aunt the violinist carried things a bit far. Taken with acute appendicitis at the age of seventy, she was asked how old she was by the doctor accompanying her in the ambulance to the hospital. ‘ Sixty,’ she replied, and ever afterwards her official age was economical of the truth by ten years. Since she had not contributed to a state pension and in those days it was not obligatory, the deception did not deprive her of a pension, for she would have received none anyway.
When she died, aged eighty-five, she left instructions that her age was not to be put on her coffin or on her tombstone.
For a person such as myself, who has achieved a certain notoriety, it is of course much more difficult to keep one’s privacy on this matter; but on the whole I have had a certain amount of fun in deceiving people. In Who’s Who I don’t give my birth date, and in four other similar publications around the world I have given different dates, all of them wrong. So what? Does it matter? Who profits but the idly curious?
In The Black Moon, when Aunt Agatha lies dying at the age of ninety-eight, her last conscious sensation is of her kitten’s fur as it rubs its head against her hand. I wonder what mine will be. I remember my first conscious sensation is of my grandfather jokingly putting his specs on my nose and my crying in indignation because the world I looked out on was all prisms. I can’t date that precisely but he died when I was two.
My uncle Jack, the one who died at eighty-four, was a newspaper editor who married a lady called Emily Towler. They had a son, who died, and then seven daughters, all good-looking and all of abounding health and vigour. They were called Emmie, Edna, Marjorie, Winifred, Kathleen, Millicent and Dorothea. Em, their mother, put on weight and then more weight and still more weight. She never went out, being embarrassed by her size, but was very extravagant, ordering things through the post, and constantly ran my uncle into debt. I remember going to see her once as a very small boy and being compelled, as it seemed to me, to crawl up a feather bed to kiss her. It must have been almost true, for when the family moved houses it was found she was too stout to get into a taxi, and she had to go in the furniture van.
Thus do music-hall jokes impinge on real life.