Unless I am a part of everything, I am nothing.

One night I dreamed a dream

I was lying on a hammock

made out of branches

in a secret place

somewhere in Egypt.

Across the dark sky

flashed scenes from

Claudia Hampton's life.

An unconventional historian,

writer,

a war correspondent

during World War II

dying of cancer

in hospital bed

forced living inward

she moves randomly

across time and place.

When the last scene of her life

shot before my eyes,

I realised this novel is about the ways

in which lives are moulded

by personal memory

and collective past.

Her reflections leave traces

in the air,

long after,

she has died and there was nothing more

to write about...

As a child she always ached

to go higher,

faster,

further

just to find out

that she reached

again

the starting point.

Throughout the life

we move in circles

coming back,

when time comes,

to our beginnings.

She stood out,

with her height,

unruly long hair

and turbulence of mind.

She was 13

learning about Tudors at school

and discovered

that history

was not a matter

of received opinion:

' Henry VIII was not a good king,

Queen Elizabeth was great,

ruling firmly,

cutting off the head of Mary Queen of Scots.'

“Did the Catholics think she was right to cut off Mary's head?”

She asked her teacher who just advised her

to put down what is on the board.

“I will not,”

She answered,

ready for an argument,

my words against yours,

this evidence against that.

There is no such thing

as absolute truth.

She didn't pass her history exam,

and yet she gained more that she has lost.

Truth is tied to words,

the testimony of the page,

moments shower away,

the days of our lives vanish utterly,

fiction can seem more enduring than reality.

From that time on

she concentrated her historical eye

upon years,

places

and most of all

people's arguments,

the whole point of history.

People give power to words,

words give form to dreams,

dreams preserve us for eternity

and yet in life

as in history

the unexpected lies

waiting,

only with hindsight we are wise

and our choices are scrutinised.

She was 19 years old,

climbing a hillside

on the Orkney Island

from which you can look down on

to a neolithic chambered tomb,

there,

they discussed

with her brother,

the Third Reich and the incoming war.

'...from the wrath of the Northmen,

o Lord deliver us...'

a poor monk wrote

these words

sometimes in the 9^th century

just before

a chunk of Viking iron

had cut his throat.

She had a race

at Lindisfarne beach,

the place of Viking raids,

with her brother,

before they embarked

on their separate journeys

on the other sides of the world.

She arrived in Cairo,

smelling of the heat,

dung and dust

and kerosene.

The sun rising

from the desert

of the east

reflected on pyramids,

in their shadows,

passing khaki convoys

of 1942

the babbling streets

full of people,

carts and animals

surviving the war years.

“What is like out there?”

She asked one of the soldiers

passing by:

“...the war...being at the front line...”

He looks intently at her:

“It's so many different things,

boring, uncomfortable,

terrifying, exhilarating...”

“You are making history,”

she exclaimed proudly.

“History,” the soldier says.

“I used to be rather keen

on it,

right now,

I feel

rather differently.

Now it is brought

uncomfortably

home to me

that history is true

and that unfortunately

I am part of it.”

The next day the soldier died.

He was just 23.

The aftermath of the war,

disorder,

the struggle to set straight,

everything,

what went wrong,

the counting of living

and the dead.

The drift of the dispossessed

back to their homelands,

national boundaries

make no more sense,

the landscape

has an impersonality

and uniformity

of nowhere,

scuffed about by armies

over and over,

it is a wasteland,

full of survivors,

their faces

grey and scraggy

looking for answers,

that never came,

lost opportunity

of guilt

and blame,

once it is all written down,

we know

what really happened.

The snow, the twenty degrees

below zero of the winter 1941.

The furnace of Stalingrad,

the million dead in Leningrad,

The three million labour slaves...

the two million prisoners of war...

left to die

in the frozen landscape

anonymous grey face,

crouched over shot bodies.

It is in these words

that reality survives.

The twenty millions

misplaced

lost

never really found.

The skeletal buildings,

the bodies chewed by frost,

the screaming faces of wounded men,

this is the record,

this is what history

comes down to

in the end,

this is the language of war.

The war ended

and she reached maturity,

she survived,

busy with prosaic matters

of everyday,

preoccupied with personal gain,

seized by restlessness

and thirsty for fame,

her mind on anything

but destiny.

She wrote Mexico book

out of incredulity,

Hernando Cortez cannot be true.

How could anyone be so greedy,

fanatical and unimaginative

to lead a few hundred men

into alien continent

swarming with a race

devoted to the slaughter of foreigners,

and succeeded.

And when driven out,

set to and built thirteen vessels of war

and carry them across the mountains,

because the only way you can take

a city in the middle of a lake

is with superior shipping

and succeeded again.

Some people thought him the mirror of his time.

It was one of the most extraordinary

confrontations

of people and of cultures

there has ever been.

And also a dark hint of the world to come,

according to Claudia,

a polemical, opinionated, independent

Englishwoman of 1954.

Civilisation came to Mexico.

The victory is one mythology

over another.

The Aztecs, who sacrificed captives

by carving their living hearts

from their bodies,

were deeply shocked

by the Spanish custom

of burning transgressors at the stake.

Cruelty lies in the eye of the beholder...

That is what Claudia had learnt.

She gave long lectures about

'the conflict of evidence'.

Her 'Mexico book' told the tale.

In her dreams

lying

dying

in her hospital bed

the loss

of

civilisation

was heard

in her head.

Loss of an Indian language

of which we have no notion

against the chanting

of the Latin mass.

Loss of human lives

day after day after day...

Loss of the Emperor Charles V

in Madrid

who wants to control

the whole of the New World

not only part of it.

Howl of the mass of humanity

Spaniards and Indians

men, women, children

who died

unfortunate enough

to be around

at a climatic moment in history.

“ And what does

that moment in history

have to do with me?”

Claudia asked herself

and straight away replied:

“Like everything else,

it enlarges me,

it frees me from the prison

of my experience,

it also resonates within that experience.”

Him and her.

She lies looking at him.

“He is more inaccessible

than anyone in the world,”

she thinks:

“..more intensely known

and more inaccessible.”

He stands up and goes to the window.

It occurs to him

she is both

closer to and further from him

than anyone else,

he wishes it were otherwise.

He looks at her

for a moment

with the eyes of then,

she looks back.

Neither wishes to return there,

both celebrate,

in silence,

what will never be lost.

He died five years ago.

She is separated from him now.

No day passes she doesn't think of him,

but she does it

with detachment.

He is complete,

he has beginning and end.

The times in which they were together are complete.

She doesn't mourn him any the less,

but she had to move away,

there is no choice,

he was her sense of identity,

her mirror,

her critic,

judge and ally.

Without him she is diminished.

She has to go back

to her 'childhood history'

In the beginning there was herself

simply her and not her

the egotism of infancy

and when she became a child

she was the centre of all things

she looked at the world through herself

the world of others

observed but not apprehended

a landscape that existed only at her whim

when it ceased to interest her

it no longer existed

and eventually

she grew up

and saw herself

in the awful context of time and place:

everything and nothing.

She started to write 'history books'

that explain

why the war happened

how it evolved

and what its effect had been.

And yet

she forgot

about her soldier's experience-

raw and untreated

that didn't seem to contribute

to any of that.

Suddenly

she couldn't

analyse

dissect

draw conclusion

construct arguments

of it.

It is all clearer to her

than any chronicle of events

but

she can not make sense of it,

perhaps

because

there is none to be made.

She knows

the past is true

unless she is part of everything

she is nothing.

“I have grown old with the century,”

Claudia sighed,

“There is not much left of either of us.”

The century of war.

All history is the history of wars,

but this hundred years,

has excelled itself,

how many million shot, maimed, burned, gassed, starved, frozen, drowned...

She has been on the fringes of two

and shan't see the next,

hopefully,

neither of us do...

Beliefs are relative,

just as our connection with reality.

Tampering with the physical world

is what we do,

extremely well,

in the end,

perhaps,

we shall achieve it definitely.

Finish.

And history will indeed come to an end.