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Thursday 4 December 2008

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Pause for tort

Sir: Reading Sir David Tang’s diary last week, in which he recounts the story of me ‘Googling’ him on a train, made me reflect on how recollections of events can differ between honest witnesses. My own diary for that day read as follows: ‘Am sitting on the train trying to work when a businessman in a tweed jacket arrives with a substantial retinue. This man is clearly important. He sits opposite me and discusses the day’s pheasant shooting with his companions. It sounds extraordinarily productive (unless you are a pheasant). I gather that he has slept in Lord Lambton’s bed (minus Lord Lambton, it becomes clear). His plane has broken down. He lives in Hong Kong. Conversation subsides and his eye catches the law book on the table: Clerk & Lindsell on Torts. Suddenly animated, he leans over and asks me to remind him of the name of the case about the snail in the bottle of ginger beer. From Donoghue v. Stevenson the conversation leads on to his next stop: Blenheim Palace for dinner (where snails are only served with garlic, one assumes). Who is this man?? On his bag is a label in enormous capital letters: TANG. One of his companions calls him David. Google does the rest and he is gratifyingly startled when I quote his last Spectator diary to him. It must be fascinating to live like that. But at least one thing is certain — he will never write about me!’

Mark Simpson
London SW15

Terrorism in the raw

Sir: Since your correspondent R.L. O’Shaughnessy (Letters, 9 February) directly challenges me to say whether I have ‘ever experienced terrorism in the raw’, I hope you will grant me leave to answer.

As a schoolboy in south London during the second world war, I (along with some eight million other Londoners) experienced terrorism at its highest pitch, that of total war. I watched the vapour trails in the summer sky of 1940 as Fighter Command fought off the Luftwaffe’s attempt to win command of the air over Britain. With my neighbours and family I spent almost every night of the 1940-41 Blitz on London in a small air-raid shelter, listening to the drone of massed enemy bombers, the rolling thunder of anti-aircraft fire, and the whistle and crash of nearby bombs that rocked the house. Later, in 1944-45 (and again along with millions of other Londoners), I watched the V-1 flying-bombs riding in to that moment when the engine cut out and you wondered which way the bomb would glide before exploding. We were bombed out of our family home by a V-1 when three houses across the street were demolished by a direct hit. My future wife was in the Davis cinema in Croydon (the largest in Britain) when a German bomb came through the roof, but fortunately did not explode. Even so, several people sitting some rows in front of her were killed by falling debris.

And I remember that throughout all these bombardments, the railway stations and theatres stayed open, and the trains, buses and trams kept running.

As for terrorist violence in the narrow sense, I myself experienced it at first hand as a soldier in Palestine in 1946-47. I remember seeing in the Jerusalem morgue the corpses of British officers murdered in the bombing of the Officers’ Club by Jewish terrorists led by Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel, while the two British sergeants kidnapped by Begin & co, hanged in an orange grove, and their bodies booby-trapped, were colleagues from a neighbouring field-security section.

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