The disaster in Lebanon triggered something in my memory, the way these tragedies sometimes do, and the undisciplined memories run away on a wild tangent…
It is October 1974. I am working at the University of Exeter when I receive an invitation from a Professor Reggie Smith at the University of Ulster to speak at a conference he is running on Australian literature. Northern Ireland is in tumult: Belfast is racked by bombings, street battles and burnings when I land at Aldergrove Airport. It is, I am assured, ‘the worst night in the worst week’ since ‘the troubles’ had resumed in 1968. But that’s another story.
Professor Reggie Smith picks me up the next day as arranged and we set off for the conference in Derry through bleak mists and intermittent whipping rain. He is an interesting bloke, Reggie. Tall, balding down to grey, fluttering wisps, running to fat round a capacious waist, he seems on first acquaintance bumbling and hail-fellow-well met, vaguely aristocratic in that stuttering, hesitant upper class way under cover of which the Poms used to condescend to culturally deprived colonials.
But Reggie has more to him than that. A brilliant cricketer in his day, he had played in Australia and was in the NSW Sheffield Shield squad. He played county cricket in England with distinction, and also first class Rugby Union. Marrying on the eve of World War II, he took his new wife to his new job in Bucharest. When, in October 1940, Ion Antonescu invited German troops to enter Romania and Bucharest was occupied, Reggie and his wife managed to leave the city minutes ahead of the occupiers. They escaped to Athens, then precariously to Egypt and finally to Jerusalem from where they returned to London in 1946 and renounced at last their nomadic and dangerous existence.
This story emerges as we drive through sunshine and shadow, mist and rain, on our way to Derry. The more Reggie fills in the details – he is a loquacious, digressive, often distracted anecdotalist, so the narrative inches out slowly and takes its shape reluctantly – the more I have the eerie feeling I’ve heard something like it before. I search my memory for whatever cues I can find to explain this sense of familiarity and suddenly it’s obvious.
‘You know,’ I say to him, risking a somewhat personal observation, ‘your story is amazing. It sounds like