AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human

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Blood and Water

My formula for greatness in a human being is ‘amor fati’: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

At the brow of a hill in Norwood, south London, stands an imposing red-brick building. It is called The British Home and Hospital for Incurables. The word ‘incurable’ sounds strikingly Victorian, and indeed it was during Victoria’s reign, in 1894, that the building was officially opened. Just as striking is the word’s directness. Incurable. The people who come here aren’t going to get better, it says. We might mock the Victorians for their stiff upper lips and prudery, but in their choice of this word, they showed a frankness that we would balk at today.

Among the seventy-odd residents of this Victorian terminus is my father, Colin Rowland Smith. His particular incurability is multiple sclerosis. It is his story that will provide the framework for this first chapter.

The reasons for choosing my father are threefold. First, he represents the origin, along with my mother, of my own life. He is therefore the starting point of my story, which unfolds in the chapters ahead.

The second reason is that, by bringing a real person into the picture, we can gain some initial purchase on what a human being might actually be. For a human being is always a particular human being, not some vague notion of a human being. I often think of an article by the British novelist Zadie Smith, reflecting on the process of writing. She talks about how you always start out with the ambition of penning the perfect book. From the moment you write the first word, however, it becomes this book and no other.

Behind the idea lies, I suppose, a simple logic. That first word limits the range of options for the second word, the second for the third, and so on, until you have a paragraph which determines the next paragraph which determines the next, until you have a chapter. Then each chapter conditions the chapter after it, until the whole thing is done. A book has to follow an internal sequence to reveal its own identity. By definition, this identity will differ from the identity of other books, and so become unique.

As the book, so the human being. None of us has an ideal, perfect or general self. We have the self that we have, with its irreducible specificity, its one-of-a-kind combination of history, biology and character. What’s more, our choices narrow as we grow older, making us even less likely to deviate from who we are. The golden thread that leads from the beginning to the end of our lives only becomes finer along the way. So that is why in this chapter I’m looking at a human being in all his book-like individuality.

The third and most important reason for choosing my father is that his story gives us a first answer to the question that will serve as a prompt to all the chapters ahead. The question is: ‘What does it mean to be a human being?’ Each chapter will offer a different response. In the case of my father, that response goes something like this: ‘Being human means dealing with our fate.’

My father’s fate was a heavy one. It wasn’t just the MS with which he had to contend. Yet how he contended is what matters. It matters for us all. Whether our fate is lucky or unlucky, we are dealt a hand. We might be born into poverty or affluence, good or bad health, peace or war – but the playing of that hand is up to us. And so it is that tension between being determined by our circumstances and determining ourselves which is an essential part of being human.

Mutiny in the body

The ‘sclerosis’ in multiple sclerosis or MS refers to lesions resulting from damage done to the sheaths encasing the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. This damage affects physical coordination, speech, ability to concentrate, memory and more. Maybe all diseases are strange, travelling as covertly as spies and silently infiltrating our systems. What makes MS especially mysterious is that it seems to result from a mutiny in the autoimmune system. Rather than do its job of protecting the body, the autoimmune system revolts and attacks. But not only that:

 women get it more than men;

 you’re more susceptible to it the further your origins lie from the Equator;

 there is no available cure; and

 its causes are unknown.

Unknown but not unguessed at. The medical literature points to both genetic and environmental factors, though the evidence for either remains inconclusive. It is not a lifestyle disease. Nor is it considered heritable, even though there’s some debate about your increased likelihood of getting it if you’re related to a sufferer. As Colin’s son, I am acutely aware of this possibility, though I’ve never shown any symptoms and have reached an age at which they’re less likely to appear. That does, however, raise the question of just how closely related he and I are.

Institutionalised

Colin’s parents, Rowland and Beatrice, divorced early in his life. At the tender age of eight, Colin, an only child, was packed off to an English boarding school in leafy Sussex, called Hurstpierpoint College. This was in 1945, just as the war was ending. I picture the school as a rural haven from the disarray in cities to the north. It was set, as if to a metronome, to the consoling tempo of public-school life – cricket matches, prayers, tea, weekly baths. But rationing was still in force, those baths were cold, and the school will have had its share of bullies. Female presence was limited, and academic study came a long way ahead of emotional development.

Beatrice, his mother, went to live a hundred and fifty miles away in Birmingham. Rowland took a new wife and had four more children. To begin with, they set up in Hove, adjoining Brighton, and a mere ten miles from Hurstpierpoint. Later, they moved to handsome surroundings in Bungay, Suffolk, which was scarcely any nearer than Birmingham, and required of my grandfather a lengthy commute into Liverpool Street station.

Hurstpierpoint College

So, from the age of eight to eighteen, the Neo-Gothic flint castle of Hurstpierpoint College would have been my father’s entire world, a colony unto itself. Apart from school holidays, that is. These he spent with his mother in Birmingham. There, as a fifteen-year-old, Colin met his wife-to-be, Patricia. A year younger than Colin, Patricia had already left school, and was doing a clerical job in the Midland Bank not far from the Bull Ring. As a girl in the 1940s and 50s, her education wasn’t deemed important, though that didn’t suppress her aspirations to improve her working-class lot. She dreamed about one day having a son and sending him to Dulwich College, the famous public school of which she had once heard as in a legend. With his Queen’s English, shiny bicycle and public-school credentials of his own, Colin appeared in Patricia’s life like the key to a door. For his part, he found a first meaningful female connection. The relationship flourished.

Trouble in paradise

Thanks to the class divide, however, neither family approved. By the time the couple reached their late teens, and Colin too had left school, Rowland, his father, was ready to take action.fn1 With a view to splitting them up, he packed Colin off again, only this time much farther afield. Colin was dispatched to an outpost of the family food business in Canada.

The plan backfired. From his exile Colin wrote to Patricia, imploring her to join him. He enclosed a ticket for the Atlantic sea crossing. The letter landed on the doormat of a terraced house in Bell Hill, Northfield, one of Birmingham’s less well-to-do districts. Patricia opened it, made up her mind and set sail. Some months later, at a United Reformed church in Hamilton, Ontario, in a ceremony attended by no more than a handful of well-wishers, they married.

Colin and Patricia might have settled in Canada for life, but a combination of factors drew them back to England. Here my mother was grudgingly accepted and subsequently patronised by her in-laws. The newlyweds set up home in south Croydon, then a still desirable suburb of London. Colin began commuting to the family business’ head office on Tooley Street, opposite London Bridge station. Patricia gave birth to three children, two girls and one boy. She sent me to Dulwich College.

My two sisters were privately educated also. The combined fees can’t have been cheap, but the business was doing well and paying Colin a tidy salary. In 1970 the family moved to a much-extended house with a large garden on a private road further into the suburbs. I had a pine tree outside my bedroom window. Colin bought himself Jaguars, Daimler Double Sixes and BMW 7 Series. For Patricia there was a gold Ford Escort, then a cherry red Opel Manta. The pinnacle was a white two-seater Triumph Spitfire with detachable roof. I would beg her to collect me from school in it. My parents shopped for clothes on Bond Street. One year we went on holiday to Chewton Glen in the New Forest, then the UK’s fanciest hotel.

Yet by the end of that decade a serpent had slithered in. The economy was tanking. The family business was running out of the steam that had powered it since its heyday in the late 1960s. A major factor had been the death of ‘Uncle Bob’. He had been the company’s driving force. Robert Rowland Smith – after whom I was named – was my grandfather Rowland’s brother, and my father’s uncle. Tall, talented and magnetic, Uncle Bob was a legend. With no children of his own, he invested his energies not only in the firm but also in his extended family. So whilst he was happy to splurge on himself – a mansion in St John’s Wood, a Rolls Royce – it was he who had bought Colin and Patricia that first house in south Croydon. What with his passing and the weather in the market turning squally, the business began to founder.

From Colin’s perspective, the squeeze on company revenues wasn’t the only challenge. Without Uncle Bob’s mediating influence, Colin found himself working directly to a father whose modus operandi with his son was criticism. ‘Useless’ was his put-down of choice. Colin was conscious that his father had gone on to have a second family. The youngest of four among that second batch of children was another son, also named Rowland. This new Rowland was about fifteen years my father’s junior and an incipient rival. My father was jealous not just in the way that any brother might be jealous of a half-brother, but also because Rowland – known as Rowley – was taking his own first steps in the family business.

The axe falls

There was a third man for Colin to worry about. This was David Cooke. As is obvious from his surname, Mr Cooke wasn’t part of the family. He was an outsider. Like the owners of many family businesses, I suppose, the proprietors of Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. were aware that family ties could be a liability as well as an asset. They saw the value in an external perspective. Besides, David Cooke came with a reputation as a marketing genius. Before long, Colin perceived his father to be favouring the interloper over him, just as he had suspected his father of transferring his favour to young Rowley. Colin might have been made a director of the company, but psychologically he found himself twice displaced.

Meanwhile, in his thirties, Colin had been diagnosed with MS. He would complain of pins and needles, and of a recurrent ache down the left side of his body, starting in his shoulder. He acquired a slight limp. Mercifully, the disease stabilised at a low level, barely impinging on his capacity to function. Until, that is, the storm clouds that had been gathering over the business finally broke. The money began running out and desperate measures had to be taken. As the big boss, my grandfather decided on cuts. Having tallied up the golden salaries paid to the directors, particularly to my father and David Cooke, he chose to delete one. He sacked his son.

That was in 1979, when Colin was forty-three. He made some half-hearted efforts to set up a marketing enterprise. But, having been given a house and a job and a salary just by virtue of belonging to the Rowland Smith clan, he couldn’t muster the initiative to make anything happen. Perhaps he had also internalised his father’s verdict on his uselessness. He never properly worked again. He sold the big house and gave himself up to his disease.

His eyes were one of the first things to go. He developed a squint and had to wear an eye patch. He had trouble forming sentences. One day he lost control of the accelerator pedal on the Citroën to which he had downgraded. He rammed the vehicle in front, causing a minor accident. With great reluctance, he agreed not to drive again. The limp that had been with him since his thirties became unignorable. The staircase at home had become an abyss into which he risked tumbling from the top. Before long, the walking stick was traded for a wheelchair. Colin would trundle this contraption around the downstairs of the gingerbread cottage he now lived in with Patricia, smashing against the door jambs until they were splintery and raw. By the late 1990s he would fall down regularly getting in and out of it, and my small-framed mother was losing the strength to haul him up again. It was then that she approached the British Home and Hospital for Incurables.

Man’s character is his fate

Colin’s story shows just how singular was his fate. In its details it belongs to nobody else. That is what makes him different – different even from me, his son. The truth is that, having witnessed the onset of his MS, which terrifies me, I’m glad of it. For all the compassion I feel towards him, that his fate differs from mine is something for which I can only be thankful.

Maybe it would be nobler if I felt the urge to take on his disease in order to spare him. That would be a grand filial sacrifice. It is what sacrifice is, at heart – the loving instinct to take over somebody else’s fate, to bear their cross. But that is a fantasy, and in any case doing so is impossible. We can never really stand in for anybody else. Even in the extreme case of offering up our own life to save another’s, it is still our own death that we will die, not theirs. We can’t actually spare them, we can merely buy them some time. What’s more, sacrifice seems to flow more appropriately in the other direction. If anything, parents sacrifice themselves for their children, not the other way round, at least in the West. They cede to the flow of time, giving priority to newer life over older. Incurable is incurable, as the Victorians said.

Wrapped up inside fate is another element that makes family members other to us. It was identified by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In a precious fragment of text from the ancient world, Heraclitus is quoted as saying that ‘man’s character is his fate’. Who we are, as much as the action of any external influence, determines what will happen to us. To change our fate, therefore, requires changing who we are. But changing who we are is never easy. The drive to carry on being ourselves counts among the most powerful forces in the universe, rivalling gravity. After all, our character is what stops us from becoming other people. As if it were a repelling magnet, our character keeps others at arm’s length, insisting on its own space.

I saw first hand just how much my father’s character shaped his fate. Despite his education, his money, his family, and his luck in being given both a job and a house, he experienced life as a series of calamities. The slightest thing would vex him. If the traffic was bad, if he couldn’t open a jar, if a utility bill arrived in the post, if the sink got blocked, if the lawnmower ran out of petrol, if the television picture went fuzzy – in all cases, an almost existential despair would wash over him. It was as if every red light on the road was a monstrous unfairness trained deliberately on him. In little things he saw large tragedies. Fate had seen that Colin’s character was tragic, and decided to follow suit.

What overwhelmed him, I believe, was the sense of confronting his own resourcelessness. It wasn’t just that he had been given a lot, but that both boarding school and the family business were institutions that ran life for him. True, he had shown initiative in bringing Patricia to Canada. But she was expected to be a stereotypical 1950s wife, managing his domestic infrastructure. In other words, he’d had precious few opportunities to develop agency of his own. So whenever something less than advantageous occurred, he looked into his cupboard of personal supplies for dealing with it, and saw that it was empty.

In such tiny moments, Colin exhibited a brief but bottomless despair. He would let out what the English Gothic writer Thomas de Quincey called a ‘suspiria de profundis’, a sigh from the depths. I remember this sigh filling the house like the exhalation of a wounded animal. So when something truly terrible finally did happen – his own father ousting him from what was purportedly a family business – one can only imagine the hollowness into which he stared. If it was hard enough for Colin to roll with the mishaps of everyday existence, how frightening it would have been to behold this once-in-a-lifetime tsunami.

In the jargon, Colin lacked the necessary ‘coping mechanisms’. The want of resilience that he had shown in allowing minor inconveniences to flummox him became, when he was fired, his condition of being. Cruelly, it also provided the ideal environment for the MS to thrust upwards from beneath the ground, where it was only half buried, into the light. For whatever else multiple sclerosis might be, it is a disease that deprives its victims of the ability to cope. To someone whose coping mechanisms are already feeble, an incurable disease such as MS, mixed with unemployment, produces a fatal concoction. Paralysis was the result.

Other people might have responded differently. Stories abound of those who conquer or at least subdue their MS through a combination of attitude, diet and exercise. But my father responded in the way that only he could. He met the emptiness that faced him with an emptiness of his own. That was his character, and it became his fate.

Our parents are foreigners in time

Both character and fate set Colin apart. They even set him apart from me, his biological offspring. The straight genetic pipe from him to me contained leaks, so not everything got transmitted. Besides, there was another pipe coming in from the maternal side, although with leaks of its own, to be sure. It is by these twin leaky conduits that we’re connected to our biological inheritance.