Silence

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Written September 2020

‘So what are you going to write about this week?’ Wendy asked me. ‘Not sure,’ was my answer. ‘How about something on silence?’ was her suggestion. ‘Maybe she knows I’m not often given to saying much, especially when I’m tired,’ was my thought, ‘So perhaps I do have something to say about this.’ So here goes.
 
It starts with a memory from primary school. I’d been talking when I’d been told to be quiet. We were made to sit quietly, an index finger held upright over my lips. I felt a little like one of the three monkeys, who hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. It was probably just for a minute or two but a bit over the top, as I think of it now. I was learning lessons of obedience the hard way - in silence.
 
But something much more dramatic and far-reaching was the day my father, just in his early forties, had a right-sided stroke. With it came aphasia. He could say nothing for weeks on end. We were allowed to go and say goodnight to him, but got nothing back by return. He was off work for many months. We struggled as a family, but friends supported us with deliveries made anonymously onto the verandah. It was anything from a cauliflower, freshly picked from their own garden, to a leg of lamb bought as an extra to their own at the butcher. Our mother worried whether she’d be able to afford the fee for Dr Solomon, the GP who’d attended him regularly until arrangements could be made for dad to get regular anticoagulant injections from Dr Boekstein, the district surgeon. ‘The bill will come in due course,’ he told her. It came - for just one pound!
 
Thirty years or so later I’d been invited to speak to the Rotary Club of Signal Hill in Cape Town. I looked at the name-tag of the Rotarian seated opposite me at lunch - Boekstein. I decided I’d ask. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance have been the district surgeon in Grahamstown in the 50s, would you?’ It was him. I told him how much my dad, and my mum, had appreciated all he’d done. No silence from me that day! I was glad to be able to say thank you. He said very little in reply, rather like me when appreciative patients remind me of details I’ve long since forgotten.
 
But other moments linger in the memory. Here are a few. The silence of Maundy Thursday evening as we sat in the Chikankata garden under a pascal moon, reflecting in the spirit of gethsemane each Easter; the final note of a choral piece from the St Martin’s Singers disappearing into the rafters and the audience wonders whether to clap or sit in respectful silence; the hushed anticipation of a cricket oval watching the bowler on his run up before the burst of cheers as he gets a wicket; predawn silence as we wake early for another drive in search of wildlife in an African game park broken by the sound of the land rover starting up.
 
There have been times when I’ve deliberately sought out silence. ‘Ive got important decisions, so let’s go to St Julian’s,’ I’d say to margaret. Asked to lead the India Strategy Commission in 1988, I needed the silence of this Sussex Anglican retreat centre with its quiet library, silent meals and a quiet bench in the garden to assemble ideas and make a few preliminary plans. I may return there one day, to experience again The Sacredness of Silence. We would also attend the occasional evening of Silence in the City at Westminster Cathedral. If two minutes on Remembrance Sunday seems long, twenty minutes can feel like an eternity before the bell breaks the silence of meditation.

One of the postgraduate medical refresher courses I attended in the 80s was on the therapeutic value of spirituality. Relaxation and silence, I discovered with other medical colleagues, are some of the vital ingredients of well-being. John Oxenham expresses his need for it:
  The traffic of those ways dried up into the emptiness of the streets as we would walk during the recent lockdown. But even then we needed a quiet place. You have to find it. And when you do, it’s only the song of a bird that could disturb.
 
Margaret’s sister would sometimes joke about her being slow in speech development as a child, ‘But you’ve certainly made up for it since,’ she would say with a smile. Margaret would turn to me with: ‘Am I really that bad?’ We would laugh together, knowing that here the pot was calling the kettle black. But as Margaret’s final illness developed, communication was lost completely as she sank into increasing dementia. Clearly the speech centre of the cerebral cortex was irreparably damaged. We longed to hear something. Her silence was painful - at least it was to us. But it was also a reminder for us that communication is not essential to our humanity. We are still human, even when we’re silent.
 
The silence of my increasing years is different. Beethoven didn’t have anything like them. He relied on an ear trumpet. But I am extremely grateful for a pair of digital hearing aids. Of course I can switch them off if I’ve had enough. But as you can guess, I don’t.
 
September 2020