Robin Baird-Smith
Robin Baird-Smith is a writer and distinguished publisher who has held senior posts at HarperCollins, Constable and Duckworth. He is currently publishing director at Continuum. His son, Archie, was killed in a car crash in 1994 at the age of 14.
‘Je n`enseigne point. Je raconte’, Michel de Montaigne
The facts are simply told. What happened, happened in a split second.
On 8 January 1994, my wife and I and our middle child, Archie, were driving back from Dorset. We had been thinking of buying a small cottage and had joined the A303 road just north of Shaftesbury. It was late afternoon and very dark.
At 4.50pm, a young man in a white Volvo car drove into us at 70 miles an hour. I can remember the impact clearly. By an error of judgement, imagining it to be a dual carriageway, he was driving up the wrong side of the road. I was unconscious for 50 minutes. How I survived I do not know.
When I came round, I felt very cold but I did manage to reel off a whole lot of telephone numbers so my relatives could be informed. My wife, Sarah, was sitting beside me, secured by her safety belt. She looked beautiful, radiant. I did not know she was dead. My son, Archie, about whom I most want to write in these pages, was fatally injured on the back seat and unconscious.
He lived for 2 days. He was taken to Southampton Hospital Neurological Unit but his case was hopeless. I never saw him again.
I was taken by ambulance to Salisbury General Hospital. Just as I was wheeled into the operating theatre for orthopaedic surgery, the surgeon told me that my wife was dead. I thanked him for being so professional and for telling me immediately.
The novelist William Trevor once wrote: ‘I know that losing a child is different from losing a wife. You have lost your wife and your past. With the death of the young it is the future.’
Ultimately, the death of Archie has been the greater pain, the greater sadness for me. He was 14. But nature has its way of helping us to cope with such sadness. It is called shock. If one realized fully at the time how terrible such losses are, one might not survive them. So for shock, one must be profoundly grateful. It is a kind of numbing of the senses.
In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis describes the sensation as a feeling of being mildly drunk, concussed. There is a kind of invisible blanket between oneself and the world. Because of the shock, I was unnaturally cheerful in those early days. People who came to visit me in hospital, expecting to find me in a heap, were amazed to find me making jokes. This was not courage. It was not optimism. It was shock.
Above all I seemed to be completely devoid of anger. Early on, I became very resentful and irritable on the subject of religion. A nurse in the hospital, no doubt with the best intentions, told me to ‘turn my mind to the Man Upstairs’. This enraged me.
I also became deeply anti-clerical. I am a Roman Catholic, but the presence of priests became quite irksome to me. I realized later that this was a kind of sublimated anger against God. The only priest who did not irk me was a young Dominican who visited me in hospital and simply said, ‘I don’t know what to say’. That made two of us.
But let me go back. In a strange way, I think the soul, the psyche, has a sense in advance of big events in people’s lives. Certainly of death. When I was 18, my mother gave me a book for a present by Laurence Whistler called The Initials in the Heart. Laurence was the brother of the celebrated artist Rex Whistler. He was himself a considerable poet and a glass engraver of genius. He had married a beautiful actress called Jill Furze who had died 4 years later of cancer. The book is his poetic account of their life together. It is entirely unsentimental. I was struck by something he wrote and copied it down in my notebook. ‘The more one suffers, the more one’s capacity for gaiety increases’. I shall come back to this, and to Whistler, later on.
When Sarah and I became engaged in 1975, we went to the opera together to see Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at Covent Garden. As the orchestra played the celebrated ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’, she tapped me on the arm and said to me: ‘That is the music I want at my funeral’. And so it was to be.
In September, before the car accident, we all went to the Crimea for a family holiday. I took with me to read the collection of short stories by Chekhov called Lady with Lapdog. In this collection there is a story simply called ‘Grief’. In it a farmer drives his wife to hospital in a carriage because she is critically ill. After a while, he can hear her body, her bones, thudding against the side of the carriage behind him. He knows she is dead. This story gripped me. I could feel that thudding resonating and reverberating in my own bones. I still re-read the story from time to time.
The night before our accident, Sarah and I went to see a performance of An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley. On stage was a huge iron edifice, a structure which is a house. At a certain point, with a terrible crash, the edifice collapses with so many hopes and illusions with it.
* * *
First, let me tell you a bit about Archie. He was, as I have said, 14 at the time of his death. He had been at St Paul’s School in Barnes, London, for only one term. Archie was an essential bridge between his elder brother, Max, and his younger sister, Leonora. With Max he shared a passion for sport – cricket and football. Sarah had erected nets in our back garden. They used to play many evenings in the summer.
Recently, I found one of Archie’s school exercise books. It contained a short essay called ‘My Hobbies’. In it he wrote: ‘My most joyful hobby is playing football with my brother – except we usually end up fighting’.
With Leonora he shared pranks and jokes. They were always, as I remember, laughing, singing songs, giggling.
Sam was Archie’s best friend. They were brought together by a desire to be extremely naughty. I keep in touch with Sam. This is important to me. He is now married and enjoying early success as a television director and writer. Sam wrote recently: ‘I cannot think of Archie as a child, but as someone older than me. It’s probably because all my friends and I always looked up to him so. He was always the cleverest, the best sportsman and the one with the wittiest insults!’
Archie was a natural linguist and showed early signs of being a fine musician. We did not need to nag him to practise the violin. He just did it of his own volition. In just one term at his new school, he had made significant progress in learning Italian and had played second violin in a stirring end of term performance of Walton’s ‘Crown Imperial March’.
He showed an early interest in the opposite sex. He could be extremely charming.
Archie was very fast on his feet. Any of my attempts to wallop him were fruitless, as he moved so much faster than me.
* * *
As soon as I returned to London and got back into a routine – bringing up my two remaining children, slowly getting back to work – I was advised to embark on a compensation claim. Not that it would bring Sarah and Archie back to us, but it would be a concrete way in which we could express our anger at what had happened to us.
The claim would not be against the driver, but against his insurance company. Compensation claims are now a huge industry. If you go into a supermarket and a tin of baked beans falls off the top shelf and hits you, you sue the supermarket. Lawyers get rich on the process, and there is much lucrative work for their henchmen – psychiatrists, loss assessors. The purpose is to establish a financial scale to ‘quantify’ your injury or loss.
In spite of the confusion of my feelings at the time, I decided we would embark on a claim. It was something specific to do and should result in a sizeable award, or so I was advised.
Immediately I realized the dangers. I would no doubt have to go over and over the details of my accident. This might involve my two remaining children, and cause them emotional distress. They had quite enough to cope with anyway. Would this not be an intolerable burden for them?
And what about the money? In the strict sense I did not need the money urgently (I had a job and was able to pay my bills). My wife had wisely insured her life for just such an eventuality. Money is a symbol of exchange. Was it not just cheap to take money for what I had been forced to give up? Or was it in some sense the public acknowledgement of our loss?
On a practical level, what would I do with the money once I had received it? Give it to charity? Blow it as some kind of gesture of defiance? Buy a Lamborghini?
The compensation claim I embarked on lasted 5 years and I had at the outset no idea what it would involve. I consulted my brother-in-law, a senior partner in the law firm Farrer and Co. in London. He said his firm would be happy to act for me, but I decided that I must remain as detached as possible from this legal process and to involve any member of my family would be a mistake. I found out that the firm of Russell, Jones and Walker was expert in claims of this kind and one of its partners was put in charge of my case.
The purpose of a claim of this kind, as I have said, is to quantify loss. There are absurd aspects to this, as I shall describe. How can one quantify emotional distress? Material loss is a different matter. One of the most bizarre aspects of this was the cooperation between the legal and medical professions. Feelings of grief and bereavement are extremely complicated and as mysterious as the human personality itself. But in order to quantify the emotional distress all three of us had suffered, I had to be examined and in some cases re-examined by psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, neurologists and neuro-psychologists – a whole battery of professionals. This is not to mention two visits to orthopaedic surgeons to examine my bones, and three visits from a personal loss assessor.
The purpose of much of the medical and psychological examination was to ‘label’ me. Was I now a clinical depressive? Was I so grief-stricken that I might go mad? Could I be shoved into a category which might persuade a judge to award me more money? There seemed to be some kind of scale of awards. If I had gone into the psychiatrist’s clinic doing a John Cleese walk and giving the appearance of lunacy, I might get a lot more money.
All this seemed to me to be somewhat absurd. The grief and pain at our loss was something we wanted to come to terms with very privately. I did not want to be peered at and examined by a string of people who were filling in reports and passing judgement on the state of my body and my psyche. And I most certainly did not want my children to be exposed to all this either.
The person who delved into my psyche in the most irritating fashion was the neuropsychologist. His brief was to see what effect the accident had had on my own mental processes. I was submitted to more than an hour of intelligence tests (all too reminiscent of IQ tests at school, at which I was a complete disaster). At the end he drew himself up and passed judgement of my thinking processes, my power of memory and my ability to express myself in writing and in speech.
This made me furious (a fury I contained). How dare this man pass judgement on me having only met me for an hour? I stormed down Wimpole Street in a rage.
I then had a lengthy visit from the representative of an organization specializing in personal injury assessment. The purpose of this was to ‘quantify’ the loss of my wife in the context of our domestic and family life. I had to provide a list of every domestic activity my wife undertook.
Sarah was an extremely practical person. If there was a domestic task to be achieved or a problem to be solved, she would never call in outside help unless she had failed to solve it first herself. Her activities ranged from making curtains, plumbing repairs and gardening, to driving the children to school and organizing holidays. It also involved unblocking the loo and laying concrete slabs in the garden. In every sense, she was a strong woman.
Against every one of these activities was put a sum of money. I found this at once rather comic but also slightly insulting. But it was part of the process I had embarked on, and I had to go through with it. Certificates had to be obtained from specialists to demonstrate what outsiders would have charged for doing the jobs that my wife undertook so willingly.
Another important issue came to the fore at this stage. Four years before she died, my wife had given up a successful career as a publisher to write a novel. The book was completed days before she died and it was published posthumously under the title Hanging On. I now needed to demonstrate that by her death a brilliant writing career had been cut short, and we were to be deprived of much income.
The novel was published to much critical acclaim and was as commercially successful as a novel could possibly be without an author to promote it. It was pointed out to me that the nearer I could get to proving that Sarah would be the new Jackie Collins, the more money I would extract from the insurers.
The reviews were plentiful and favourable. Rabbi Lionel Blue selected it as his book of the year in the Evening Standard describing it as ‘Dostoevsky with a Harrods heroine’. Sarah he described as a ‘spiritual Jilly Cooper’. Nicola Beauman in her review wrote: ‘the novel is marvellously entertaining. The tragedy is that the author will never have the chance to go from strength to strength – as I am sure she would have done’.
* * *
By the time all this work had been done, it was the beginning of 1997. My children also had to visit the lawyers to try and quantify their loss.
It was time to visit the barrister to assess progress. I was summoned to his chambers. He was a man of courtesy and tact. During the meeting I received a devastating and quite unexpected blow. The barrister let slip that my son Archie had regained consciousness after the accident. I felt pole axed.
In coming to terms with my loss, I had been reassured by the certainty that Archie had died without suffering any pain. Now I learned after 3 years that this was not the case. My lawyer, perfectly reasonably, told me that she had not mentioned this to me in order to save me distress. This new knowledge released in me a severe depression from which it took me some weeks to recover. The truth was that the shock of the accident was beginning to wear off and I felt worse than I had ever felt since the accident itself.
A definition of depression is ‘anger turned in on oneself’. As the depression lifted, I managed at last to feel real anger and came to realize that the compensation claim was serving a useful purpose therapeutically as an outlet for my anger. If it was a case of arguing about pounds, shillings and pence, so be it. I was going to go for every penny I could get. At this stage the insurance company made an offer for the loss of my son, Archie. This was £12,500. My barrister advised that we should accept, as the much bigger issue, financially speaking, was the loss of my wife. He may have been right, but this kind of logic was fairly unreal to me. It all pointed up the absurdity of awarding money for life.
I then went back for a second series of examinations by the medical professionals that I had seen first time round. I seemed to come out with fairly good marks. ‘Mr Baird-Smith is coping very well’. ‘Mr Baird-Smith has adjusted very well to his new life’. More judgements passed on me by outsiders who knew so little of what I and my children were really feeling. In order to cover up my distress and survive, I was determined to put on the appearance of being cheerful and optimistic, in part at least as a defence mechanism against what was really going on inside me.
By the end of 1998, a sum of money had been proposed by the insurers as a payment for the totality of my claim. After a certain amount of coming and going, my barrister advised that the proposed sum was fair and if we proceeded to trial it would be extremely expensive and we might come away with less.
A deal was agreed. I imagined that this would be the end and that I could now get on with my life. However, the lawyer told me that the settlement would have to be ratified by a judge in court, but this I gathered would be something of a formality.
I was summoned to the High Court in Holborn on a dull day in January 1999, almost exactly 5 years after the date of my accident. I had imagined that I would simply be ushered into a small room with two barristers for the formality of signing some papers. And that would be it.
We were kept waiting for an hour. The courts were running late. A previous case was running overtime – a woman was suing East Sussex Health Authority for irreparable damage done to her daughter during childbirth in an NHS hospital.
When I got to the court room, it was full of people. Worst of all, and contrary to all my expectations, there was a press box full of journalists.
Although the case had to all intents and purposes been settled in advance, the judge gave my barrister quite a hard time. As I sat at the back of the court, I listened to other people discussing my accident, talking about my wife and my son as if I was not there. Finally the judge got up, offered me his condolences on behalf of the court and said that he thought my children and I had survived the accident admirably. He then walked out.
The next day the Times carried an account of the case and announced to the world the sum of money I had been awarded (£145,000). My local paper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express carried a much longer half-page report, containing some inaccurate details.
And so the case was settled. Five years had come to a completion.
As I walked out of the High Court into Fleet Street, I felt quite alone. The encircling gloom was great. A link with the past was cut off. As the process had developed over the years, I had slowly learned to feel a bit of the anger within me, but I had some way to go.
* * *
The weeks following the end of the court case were dark weeks. Max had gone back to university. Leonora was in Australia for her gap year. But I am a good actor and nobody really noticed. I just became rather silent.
Out of the blue, a relative and good friend of mine, Margie, called and invited me to go to Mexico with her. I had never been to Central America before. I agreed. I could get away, have a change of air. As the departure day loomed, I thought of pulling out. I didn’t think I’d make it. I was not in good spirits. But I went.
The house we stayed in was at Tepozlan, on the road from Mexico City to Cuernavaca. The setting was extraordinary. The colours were vibrant, the surrounding mountains exceptionally beautiful.
One morning while I was there, an extraordinary thing happened. As I was sitting alone in the garden having breakfast, I felt my whole body shake. Every bone and every sinew seemed to vibrate. Behind it was a feeling of extraordinary anger. It lasted only two or three minutes. It was in no sense a spiritual experience. It was purely physical. When the shaking stopped, I felt better. A deep feeling of anger, of rage had been released. It was no longer repressed. I had no doubt that it was fundamentally an anger at the death and loss of Sarah and Archie. At last, after 5 years, it had surfaced.
But at whom was this anger directed? It had to have an object. I had feelings of guilt about the past but I was not angry with myself. How could I feel anger against the driver who had driven into me? I learned subsequently that his girlfriend who was in the passenger seat had suffered far worse and longer lasting orthopaedic injuries than me.
No, my anger was quite plainly directed at God. It had no other object.
I remembered that when I had read Richard Marius’s magnificent biography of Martin Luther, there was a passage where the author described Luther’s rage against his father. It was a rage so brilliantly described that I felt it in my guts. That was the nearest I had ever been before to a sensation in any way similar to what I had just experienced.
One of the things I have learned from my Jewish friends and from the Old Testament is that life is a running battle with God. We should complain. We should express our anger. ‘Why do the wicked prosper?’ shouts Job, shaking his fist at heaven.
I find no help in that strand of Christian thinking which says that suffering is good for the soul. I prefer Bob Dylan’s remark delivered with irony: ‘Pain sure does bring out the best in people, doesn’t it’. Or my tutor at Cambridge, Donald Mackinnon, who simply stated: ‘Pain never ennobled anyone’. They may not be right, but it is bracing to read.
The French have a phrase which sends a shiver down my spine. It is ‘la belle souffrance’. It was a phrase Marshall Petain used during the war when trying to persuade the French people to knuckle down under the Nazi occupation. Their temporary suffering would be for the greater glory of La Patrie – the French Fatherland. It was a form of emotional blackmail.
No, we should not take things lying down. ‘Gird up thy loins’, says God to Job. ‘Gird up thy loins like a man. For I will demand of thee. And answer thou me’. That last phrase has a special significance for me. God commands us to grow up and answer back. There is an answer within us, and He needs to know what it is.
This is what the Swiss Protestant theologian, Lytta Basset, has called Holy Anger, Holy Rage. It is an anger that we need to learn to work with. Anger that grows from pain obliterates pain, but anger against pain can be anger against the self and this is destructive.
This anger I felt was almost a kind of primal energy. I felt more myself, less intimidated, more what I wanted to be. And as to God, we must never sentimentalize Him or subjectivize Him.
And it was therapeutic. When Bruno Bettelheim was working with Holocaust survivors after the war he said simply: ‘My job is to help the patient feel anger’. That made sense to me.
I appreciated the remark of a rabbi friend of mine. When I asked him what he thought it would be like when we get to heaven, he just said: ‘God will have a lot to answer for’.
God purifies by rage.
From time to time since then, the feelings of anger have returned to me. When it returns, I feel it. I need to feel its surge and keep on feeling it.
This is a kind of anger which is positive and even creative. It can become a powerfully creative force. Maybe it is part of God’s creative activity within us.
The novelist Muriel Spark was sometimes moved to her greatest creativity by anger. When she learned that a former lover had sold her love letters at auction, she made him a central character in her novel A Far Cry from Kensington. In the novel she massacred him, tore him to shreds. It was one of her most successful works of fiction.
As the years advance (it is now 17 years since Sarah and Archie died) and as I have moved into a new life, with new relationships, new projects, feelings of gratitude grow in me which ultimately will be stronger than the feelings of anger. Not all anger is good. It can restrict and contract the soul, confine the heart.
The first line of the ‘Magnificat’ grows on me all the time. ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’. In response to God’s surprises, Mary’s heart expanded, expanded with gratitude.
I was married for 18 years. I was Archie’s father for 14 years. My children are both married. I have a grandson. Have I not much to be grateful for?
Let me end by turning again to Laurence Whistler. In that same book, The Initials in the Heart, he wrote this: ‘Stranger than all misery, with its harrowing sense of short measure, is the perception I always have – have now, as I had then – of an unexpected, measureless, laughably undeserved, good fortune’.
That’s it. That’s it exactly.
Books referred to in the text:
C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, Faber 1966.
Laurence Whistler, The Initials in the Heart, Rupert Hart Davis 1968.
Anton Chekhov, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories, Penguin 1969.
Sarah Baird-Smith, Hanging On, Cons1995 table 1995.
Richard Marius, Martin Luther, Harvard University Press 1999.
Lytta Basset, Holy Anger, Continuum 2008.
Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington, Cons1988 table 1988.