25th March 2013
I first met Geoffrey Carnall, who was to be my supervisor for the four years of study for my PhD, in his small office at Edinburgh University in 1980.
I was an energetic Marxist-feminist student, a former journalist, with cropped hair in staunchly corduroy dungarees, and he was a quiet thoughtful man with studious horn rimmed glasses and an endearing habit of saying ‘aha’ in reply to most comments, which as I learned gave him time to pause for thought.
Of all the things I learned from him, that pausing for thought was perhaps the most valuable. Not that I have ever achieved it in my own life! I am by temperament impulsive; but his passions: for scholarship, for peace, for social justice, run deep and slow. The ‘aha’ was more than the acknowledgement of someone truly listening: it was also chance to think about the reply.
He taught me so many other things too. A rigorous and fierce regard for the detail of writing history: from punctuation (this is the man who taught me the use of the semi-colon which has enriched my writing and clarified my thinking) to the correct form of a footnote. My first version of my painfully wrought thesis was rewritten word for word after his insistence on accuracy in the text. For a mild mannered man committed to peace he has a fierce adherence to precise thinking and precise expression. How I wish that had satisfied him! When I arrived with much heart-ache at the penultimate draft, he commanded a total retype of everything: for there were too many typing errors. He was a hard task master, and he taught me a standard of work which sits before me always, even now, nearly thirty years on.
His demands were high but his teaching was gentle. Silent students were encouraged to sit and think; if they could not scrape up one word to say. I grew accustomed to his quiet and formal tutorials. For the first two years he called me Miss Gregory and I knowing he was a committed Quaker and would not welcome any honorific title – merely called him, inelegantly: You. As the years went on any my studies continued we developed an understanding. With his wife Elisabeth, he attended my wedding, and they were among the first visitors when I had my baby, Geoffrey merely observing that the arrival of Victoria might delay the current chapter of the thesis. Years later, when Victoria was grown and attended Edinburgh University herself, she stayed with them for her first term.
I could not have written my first historical novel without reading the eighteenth century novels that I undertook under his supervision. But equally, I could not bear to start my first fictional biography, based on a real person, without writing to him to demand that he lift the embargo he had unwittingly placed on my imagination.
It was a casual aside in a seminar on John Stuart Mill (which owing to the vagaries of my old typewriter I always wrote as John Stuart Nill, which Geoffrey delightedly took as a coded revelation of my true opinion of the philosopher). Geoffrey remarked that he could not tolerate novels that deployed real historical characters, his imaginary instance was: What do you think of giving the suffrage to women and would you pass the marmalade Mr Mill?‚ With my new proposed novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, shaping itself in my mind, very much based on a real character: Mary Boleyn I had to write to Geoffrey and ask him if it was all right‚ to go ahead.¬† Of course, he had no recollection, either of that seminar, or of the aside, but he took a mischievous delight that his casual remark was haunting me. He gave me exorcism from the remark and read my subsequent books with, I think, some pleasure.
Early on in our relationship I discovered his wry and self-deprecating humour, his love of word-play, his intense sense of the ridiculous, and his joy at the smaller follies of the world. But some follies he could not condone. I was amazed to learn that he had been arrested for demonstrating against the glamourising of war at the world-famous Edinburgh Military Tattoo. His defence was based on Aristophanes' ‘The Peace’, which he delivered to the court in the style of Aristophanes, to the bemused entertainment of the jury. He was triumphantly acquitted, the court accepting that it was perfectly proper to make such a protest. I learned from this incident of the grit that exists, beneath his quietly spoken pacifism.
The subject of Horace Alexander is thus particularly appropriate for such an author and this biography has been a labour of love for ten years, and is Geoffrey’s tribute to his mentor, with whom he travelled in India in 1949-50. Geoffrey refused to serve in arms in the second world war and registered as a conscientious objector. The tribunal allowed him to work in India and Pakistan with the Friends Service Unit from early October 1948 until late July 1950.
Horace Alexander was the senior Friend in the subcontinent, based in Delhi, and was very much part of efforts made to prevent the outbreak of war in February 1950, when there was a massive exodus of Hindus from East Bengal and Muslims from West Bengal. Geoffrey himself took part in fact-finding missions crucial to reducing the tension created by inflammatory rumours.
As a young man, Geoffrey observed Alexander's quiet detachment as he worked as a mediator and fact-finder at a time of great political tension, with India and Pakistan on the brink of war. He learned that Alexander had been one of the few people trusted by the independence movement in India, and played a significant role in the peaceful transfer of power from a suspicious imperial power to an even more suspicious emerging independent state.
That Geoffrey has dedicated so many years to this biography, which he described cheerfully to me as a work about a relatively unknown pacifist by a relatively unknown academic, alerted me that this book was a story of genuine significance, telling the story of an ordinary man who, inspired by the great idea of peace, was able to play an extraordinary part in one of the major events of the twentieth century. In a private email to me, in his most engaging and idiosyncratic style Geoffrey wrote:
I have lately been intrigued by the thought that my first book, ‘Robert Southey and his Age: the Development of a Conservative Mind’, narrates the sad story of someone who went Wrong – while my last book narrates the inspiring story of someone who went Right. Who says that age makes one melancholy! (Robert Burton, actually, but the question is rhetorical.)
I am left only to hope that Burton is wrong and that age never makes Geoffrey melancholy, and also that this is not his last book.