My Year Off (8 page)

I was more than interested. I was in love; indeed, we both were. When I try to recall that time now, after the dramas of my year off, what sticks in my mind is the moment when Sarah said that, no, she was not free for dinner on Sunday night, but that she probably could manage Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday … or Friday.

The next few weeks flashed by. London. New York. London again. And then I was preparing to go away once more. Here my old nomadic life was in conflict with my new relationship, though it seemed that I’d met someone who was almost equally peripatetic. Indeed, it was not until I found myself
in extremis
that I discovered the extraordinary reserves of courage and resilience in Sarah’s nature.

Although I was excited about the possibilities that Sarah seemed to offer, I was committed to a potentiall dangerous journalistic trip to the Far East, to East Timor. My friend the photographer Julio Etchart and I had already made plans. The rainy season was approaching. We could not delay a moment longer. Early in December 1993, we took off for the sad city of Dili.

Flying via Bali, we arrived in East Timor shortly before Christmas. All my thoughts were with Sarah, who hadn’t wanted me to go, but I was exhilarated to be on the road again. No question that this was the fabled East Indies. Blink, and you could almost mistake the palm trees and corrugated roofing for the Caribbean. Almost,
but not quite. As we passed through Customs I was conscious, among the taxi drivers pushing for work, of searching eyes - uniformed officials and soldiers with guns.

We rode into the capital in a beaten-up blue taxi with door handles made of coathanger-wire and a garish photograph of Pope John Paul II on the dashboard. It was very hot, the streets were almost deserted, and beyond the broken promenade, small boys dived and splashed in the bitter sea. A hog rootled among the mangroves on the shore. Further on, there was a piazza, a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and on the corner a street vendor was selling noodles in the shade of a mahogany tree.

When we arrived at our hotel, we were aware that many people hanging about the dark lobby were noting our arrival with interest. My visa said I was a tourist, but a one-legged Australian swinging on crutches like Long John Silver, swigging from a can of local beer, asked if we were selling guns. After dark, troops in crash helmets rode shotgun in open trucks. Within hours, I was conscious only of the oppression and the fear.
Timor conturbat me
 … What I’d been told was true: East Timor was an occupied territory, a police state, an infernal paradise, one of the saddest places in the world. Some time during my first twenty-four hours here that famous line from
Doctor Faustus
popped into my head: ‘Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.’

Such are the paradoxes of global communication that it was not difficult to find a telephone from which to call through to Sarah in New York on the far side of the world, and thus we spoke, night after night, while the police spies hung around the gloomy, air-conditioned hotel lobby, watching my every move but unable, I
judged, to understand what I was saying. In answer to her questions, I explained to Sarah that there was, along the mean, dusty streets of Dili, a kind of desolate normality to everyday existence. ‘It’s so
boring
here,’ whispered one of the hotel maids. Outside, especially to the south and east, there was the conflict between the army and the guerrillas, a story that had gone comparatively unreported. I persuaded Julio that it was time for us to take the bus into the interior.

Eventually, we reached our destination, a Roman Catholic mission on the edge of a forest. Father Fernando De Souza, the local priest, was forty years old. His mission and its church were at once a school, a surgery, a place of recreation, a refuge, a social centre and a source of inspiration. Beyond the walls of the mission there were spies, policemen, informers - the Indonesian army of occupation. Inside, there was teaching, prayer and song - at almost every hour of the day there seemed to be groups of nuns and schoolchildren rehearsing anthems and Christmas carols. (I thought of Sarah in the frosty air of New York at Christmas, and felt terribly far from home.) Father De Souza said he would arrange for us to make contact with ‘the armed struggle’. He said it might take some time. So we settled down to wait. I passed the time with a copy of
The Woman in White.
The day slowly faded. The hours ticked by. Night fell. We sat on the verandah of the mission, waiting. I remember looking up at the stars of the southern hemisphere wheeling overhead and wishing that I had more such times in my life for reflection. When such a moment came, with a vengeance, eighteen months later, alone in the National Hospital, I remembered Father De Souza’s mission and found myself weeping inconsolably.

After waiting for hours in the tropical darkness, I finally met a guerrilla I’ll call Joaquim Guterres, who described the activities of the freedom-fighters. Some time after midnight he handed over messages for fellow resistance workers who had somehow managed to flee abroad, and then he disappeared silently into the dark.

Next day, we bade farewell to Father De Souza and took the bus back to Dili. We were tailed and spied on to the last. At Dili airport, officers of military intelligence were on hand to arrest and then interrogate us with futile, and quite alarming, belligerence, but for some reason that still baffles me, neither my notes nor Julio’s film were confiscated. Within hours, we were back in a world that remains largely indifferent to the terrible plight of East Timor. I filed my copy, and took the first plane to New York. It was nearly Christmas time and the city seemed more than usually magical. It was then one evening, over dinner, that Sarah and I began to speak - in a hypothetical way, I insisted, and with the immature person’s fear of commitment - about getting married. Looking back, I suppose I was vaguely conscious of being no longer a very young man, and of knowing that Sarah was the person with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life, in the state of matrimony - a state any amount as risky as Indonesia.

After East Timor I needed no encouragement to devote my time to her. Her conversation was always so delightfully whimsical, variously flippant, ironical and charming. Our first year, from Christmas 1993 to Christmas 1994, was much about looking forward to the time we’d spend together. We made a point of visiting each other, either in London or New York, at least once a month, and the year flashed by in a whirl of bargain-basement transatlantic flights. Less than twelve months
after we’d first met we were engaged to be married and the date for the wedding set: 13 May 1995. I was, in the words of romantic fiction, ‘the happiest man alive’.

I used to save up books to read on my red-eye trips from New York to London. One of these, devoured in a single flight, was Sherwin Nuland’s compulsive bestseller
How We Die.
I returned to it when I began to write this book, and found the following passage marked in the margin: ‘In previous centuries, men believed in the concept of
ars moriendi
, the art of dying.’

On All Saints Day, 1 November 1994, Sarah came to live in London. I decided that this was a momentous transition for me and I decided to attempt a diary (soon discarded, however). My first entry ran: ‘Our first day together passed like a dream. S. slept all day, and five enormous suitcase now fill the downstairs living room. This, apparently, is just the hors d’oeuvre to the main course. Watching Channel Four News, we discussed the difference between “yob” and “hooligan”.’ Sarah now says that I had also to explain to her the meaning of ‘toff’.

We were married outside Philadelphia on a glorious day in spring. In my speech I said that, like the defeated British troops at Yorktown, I’d had my world turned upside-down by an American. I’d certainly never expected to return to Pennsylvania in such idyllic circumstances. Sarah was, I said, ‘my American Revolution, my Declaration of Independence, my first and only Amendment, my Supreme Court and my Boston Tea Party’, deeply felt sentiments that were greeted with drunken whoops of joyous acclaim by family and friends. Our honeymoon was spent in Morocco. When we came back to London, Sarah found an assignment waiting for her from
Vanity Fair.
Would she go to San Francisco to
interview the novelist Amy Tan? So at lunchtime on Saturday 22 July I took her to Heathrow for the flight. As I accelerated the car away from the unloading bay, I remember watching her diminutive figure on the kerb in the rearview mirror …

One morning at the National Hospital the bedside phone rang at nine thirty. ‘The Holloway Police here. We have to identify a dead body. Where is Queen Square?’ Me: ‘I’m not dead; I’m just a patient.’ Cop: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but we have orders to identify this body and I was given this extension. Where’s Queen Square?’ Me: ‘I’m not a corpse, thank you very much. Don’t you have a map?’ Cop: ‘I was hoping for a bit of co-operation and politeness.’ Me (suddenly furious): ‘The kind of politeness, I suppose, for which the Metropolitan Police are renowned.’ I slammed the phone down.

Sometimes I wondered when I was going to open the newspaper and read my own obituary. I discovered that, in the outside world, my stroke had caused something of a stir among the small world of media-dwellers, writers, journalists and editors, who had lived as I once had. It was as though the Grim Reaper had coughed, or tapped us all on the shoulder. The chairman of Faber & Faber,
Matthew Evans, joked that he was becoming so fed up with answering questions about my state of health that he wanted to sport a lapel button: ‘Robert McCrum is dead.’

So the year faded and summer turned to autumn, while I eagerly monitored the tiny external changes that constitute convalescence after a stroke. At first, my left leg had been totally paralysed and wholly unresponsive to the commands of movement. Miraculously, it seemed, within a few days, I was beginning to be able to move it, very slightly, as it lay at rest on the mattress. The left side of my face, which had seemed so numb and lifeless, was beginning to recover sensation, and my speech was slowly becoming more intelligible.

My confidence, however, remained shot to pieces, and I had the greatest difficulty in finding any motivation to participate in the physical therapy offered by the National Hospital’s rehab experts. I would be wheeled through the hospital’s labyrinthine corridors to the gym, and would lie on the chilly plastic exercise bench, barely able to move, and longing to be left alone to sleep. At this stage, the exercises were absolutely basic, essentially an attempt to remind my brain that I still had a left leg (and arm) by simple attempts to get me to move the affected limbs and to try to stand upright, a seemingly impossible feat at that time. Sarah had to battle hard to get me to respond and used to refer, ironically, to what she called ‘tough love’. I had no inkling what kind of inner battle she herself was going through at this time.

I believe that at this time Sarah’s biggest struggle was with my obstinacy; and one of the battlegrounds between us was speech therapy. I found it humiliating to have to accept that, though my thought processes seemed unimpaired, my utterances needed help from a speech therapist. The failure of articulation seemed such a fundamental failure, and one that went to the core of my self-esteem. My therapist, Dr Renata Whurr, a mildmannered, friendly woman and an acknowledged expert in her field, gave me a set of exercises, which I loathed. (‘Press lips together, then release: three times. Push lips forwards, then release: three times. Stretch lips sideways, then release: three times. Repeat
Ban - Bee - Boo
: three times. Repeat
Dan - dee - doo.
’ Etc., etc.
ad nauseam.
) I had always spoken quickly; now it seemed that even the words I was uttering had become scrambled, although in fact, compared to many stroke-sufferers, I was
extremely fortunate and never experienced the confusion of, for example, saying ‘elephant’ for ‘pillow’ or ‘banana’ for ‘knife’, or ‘Pass the dinosaur’ for ‘Pass the milk, please.’ Many people lose language altogether - aphasia: in the worst cases, left-side stroke-victims will have to relearn what words mean, and how to use them. (One woman I spoke to during convalescence, Annie Bristowe, a vigorous forty-two-year-old, discovered after her stroke that her accent, which had been ‘somewhere between Cheltenham and Chelsea’, had become perfectly Scottish, ‘like Janet out of
Dr Finlay’s Casebook
’.) Another famous case is the stroke suffered by the playwright, and author of
A Man For All Seasons
, Robert Bolt. Like me, Bolt was treated at the National Hospital but, as his secretary puts it, ‘It was very difficult to understand exactly what he was thinking because his speech was so impaired. He was tailoring his thoughts to what he thought he could say, so what came out was very simple. He found “yes” difficult, so he’d say “of course” which has overtones to it. You had to keep thinking, he doesn’t really mean that. He kept saying to a doctor that he had to tell Phil Hurricane something. No one knew who Phil Hurricane was.’ It turned out that ‘Phil Hurricane’ was Bolt’s secretary, Gill Harrison.