Hell In Its Cruellest Form
This
article was the basis for the interview by Sue Fox for
the Sunday Times Magazine 'Best
of Times, Worst of Times' feature on David Gibbins, 4 December 2005. To
read that interview, click here.
In my novel Atlantis my protagonist, Jack
Howard, has a terrifying crisis of confidence deep in the ocean abyss. He
is about to make the greatest discovery of his life, yet he is suddenly
paralysed by fear. In his moment of agony he flashes back to a brush with
death in his past. He is an action hero with a flaw, a man who has been on
the brink once too often, whose outward confidence masks an inner struggle
against the crippling legacy of trauma.
Jack’s crisis closely parallels events in my own
life. When I was 17 I nearly died in a submerged mineshaft in Canada. Over
a quarter of a century later I can still remember it with utter clarity,
as if it were yesterday. My dive buddy Steve and I had just completed our
ninth open-water dive. We had trained together, and had already dived
under ice. We considered ourselves experienced. That summer afternoon we
planned to dive in a flooded quarry and explore an old mine-workings far
below, through a narrow vertical shaft just visible as a black hole in the
rock floor of the quarry.
We had none of the safety equipment which would be
mandatory today. We were unroped. We had only one torch, a specialised
diving light. We had no contents gauge on our air tanks, relying instead
on the ‘J valve’ to warn us when our air was low. The valve shut off
the air flow at 500 psi, so when our breathing began to tighten we would
open the valve by pulling down a rod on our tanks and know we had enough
air left to reach the surface.
At the bottom of the shaft it was freezing cold, and
the visibility was nil. We were more than twenty metres deep. We swam with
arms linked through a cavernous chamber, its supporting timbers lurched at
crazy angles all round us in the torchlight. I was exhilarated. It was
just as I had imagined the Mines of Moria in the Lord of the Rings, only
underwater. When I switched off the torch at the end of the gallery all we
could see was a hazy smudge of green where the base of the shaft lay far
behind us.
Things started to go wrong as soon as we turned back.
My breathing tightened, and I reached back to open my J valve. I signaled
to Steve that my air was low. We swam back quickly through the chamber,
bumping past rusted machinery and stirring up a maelstrom of silt. Just as
I eased myself into the shaft my air cut off abruptly. There was nothing,
not even a lungful. I realised that I must have jammed the J-valve against
the timbers that lined the shaft. I reached back and tried to push the
valve up, but to no avail. At that moment I dropped the torch and we were
entombed in darkness.
For reasons I still do not understand we had decided
to ascend face to face. It was this that saved my life. The moment I
dropped the torch Steve knew what had happened and we began
buddy-breathing, one arm around the other’s neck as we passed his
regulator back and forth, all by feel. Had we not trained together and
responded instinctively I would not have survived. There was no panic. We
even had the presence of mind to exhale continuously as we ascended, thus
avoiding the embolism that would have happened had we surfaced too
quickly.
I was badly shaken, but determined to recover the torch. To my stupefaction now, we returned the next weekend, this time with a safety rope, carrying out dive after dive until we found it buried deep in ooze in the well of the shaft.
I never dwelt on this incident. Diving was my
absolute passion, and my confidence was unassailable. Over the following
years I had my fair share of brushes with death. Once on a shipwreck I had
a faulty valve and ran out of air at fifty metres, and faced an emergency
ascent, almost certainly fatal from that depth, or the decision to swim
for a safety tank twenty metres away on the seabed. I made it to the tank
just as I was beginning to black out. Another time a fellow-diver was
paralysed by nitrogen narcosis and I brought her to the surface, clamped
face-to-face just as I had been with Steve, only this time I was the
saviour. Like the mineshaft, none of these later experiences threw me.
I never knew I was on a knife-edge until an incident
twenty years on. I was excavating a classical shipwreck in the Aegean. It
was a fabulous site, one of the best I had ever seen. That morning I was
in the deepest part of the site, using an airlift to reveal exquisite
pottery cups of the 5th century BC, all intact. It was one of
the high points of my archaeological career. As my time ran out I
reluctantly left the excavation and swam back to reposition the anchoring
weights of the airlift, ready for the next divers. To my consternation
they had dropped into a fissure a few metres deeper than the ledge. What
should have been a single heave turned into series of hops and jumps as I
walked the weights up the slope. I finished just as the bell rang on the
surface signalling time to
swim up the shotline to the decompression stop far above.
I began to hyperventilate, badly. I gripped the rocky
seabed until my fingers bled, trying to control it. My rational mind told
me this was perfectly normal, that at forty-five metres any extra effort
would accelerate my breathing. But something else told me the
unimaginable, that I was panicking. I looked up and saw the other divers
from my shift heading up the shotline. My air began to tighten. In the
exertion, probably fogged by nitrogen narcosis, I had failed to check my
pressure gauge. This time there was no J-valve. I knew I had to get to the
regulators dangling from the decompression stop or die.
It was this realisation that somehow propelled me
upwards. With the decrease in pressure I had more air, and breathing
became easier. But it was not over yet. I desperately wanted to reach the
surface, yet had to spend twenty minutes at the stop expelling excess
nitrogen. I was terrified that I was going to lose it and swim flailing
upwards, almost certainly getting the bends.
When I reached the stop I transferred to the new
regulator, gripped the line and shut my eyes. Immediately I was back in
the mineshaft. It was extraordinary, a photographic recall. I can shut my
eyes now and see what I saw then. I was face to face with Steve, his eyes
just visible as they looked into mine. It was the point half-way up the
shaft when I knew we were safe. An event I had not thought about for
years, suppressed by youthful euphoria, had been lurking just below the
surface.
That was several years ago now. Like my hero Jack I
overcame my trauma, and dived again. A few cracks remained. For months
afterwards I had to steel myself before every dive, something
inconceivable before. I harboured a fugitive fear that I would panic in
moments of stress, that I would become claustrophobic. Looking back on it,
I realise that my state of mind that summer had left me vulnerable. My
father had died, suddenly and devastatingly, only a few months before. My
professional and emotional life was in turmoil. Enough chinks had been
knocked in my armour to leave me exposed in a way I never had been before.
All of the controls, all of the parameters, would have to be painstakingly
rebuilt from scratch.
As a climber too I had read much of the current wave
of mountaineering literature, books like Joe Simpson’s Touching the
Void, about youthful brushes with death which can lead years later to
harrowing self-doubt. Until it happens to you these accounts can seem
melodramatic, glorified, just one of the ingredients of high adventure. I
began to reflect on those whose trauma is not self-inflicted but is forced
on them, on young men who have endured the horrors of war and have to find
a way of containing it for the rest of their lives. I realised that
something in my maternal grandfather Tom Verrinder’s First World War
experience was beginning to strike a new chord for me.
Tom and his brother Edgar volunteered in 1915 and enlisted as regular soldiers in the British Army in January, 1916. Their father had been in the 7th Dragoon Guards in Egypt and India in the 1880s, and Tom and his brother were also cavalrymen, serving with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers for two and a half years on the Western Front. As cavalrymen they were poised between the medieval and the modern worlds, training for months in the New Forest in England to use a sword and a lance from horseback, and then going straight into the trenches as riflemen on arrival at the front. The photograph shows my grandfather, aged 19 – the same age as me in the picture above it – shortly before joining a dismounted party for the Somme offensive on the first of July 1916. A year later he was again dismounted in the Third Battle of Ypres, near Passchendaele, four months of action which he described in his autobiography as ‘the most vile that one could possibly experience – it was definitely my worst experience throughout the war, and none of us expected to survive. We all experienced Hell in its cruellest form.’
Miraculously both he and his brother did survive,
physically unscathed, and lived long and fulfilling lives. As an air raid
warden in the Second World War Tom was by all accounts a pillar of calm,
unfazed as he and his young family survived their house being bombed and
single-handedly putting out incendiaries in the street. In the years that
followed, my mother hardly ever heard him talk of the Great War, but it
was always an undercurrent. By the time I had grown up the barriers which
had prevented him from speaking openly to his children had fallen away. He
talked to me endlessly about it, reams of fascinating, often mundane
detail punctuated by flashbacks to squalor and terror.
He had the common contradictions of veterans who had
seen sustained action. Like many who had served in Regular Army units, he
was fiercely proud of his regiment and loyal to his officers. He loathed
warmongering and jingoism and never wore his medals or went on parades. He
cried often and easily, in joy and in sorrow. I can still see him aged
ninety, sitting in his chair pulled up to the television where he loved
watching sport, weeping quietly through the Armistice Day service. He was
commemorated in church with a Union Jack draped over his coffin, an old
soldier at the end.
There was one searing experience that resurfaced to
haunt his final years. It took place on 21 November 1917, the
second day of the Battle of Cambrai. That morning the 9th Lancers had helped to capture Cantaing, a village behind the Hindenberg
Line some five kilometres south-west of Cambrai. Tom had been detailed to
act as galloper for the colonel commanding the 2nd Cavalry
Brigade Field Ambulance Unit, and went with them as they established an
Advanced Dressing Station. The site they chose was a house with a
courtyard and cellars on the edge of the village, only a few hundred
metres from the inferno of battle. The house proved fatally exposed, and
in the early evening a German aircraft dropped a bomb which scored a
bullseye, killing everyone in the courtyard except my grandfather – the
chaplain, the colonel, the wounded, most of the medical staff and four
horses tethered to an ambulance.
Early the next morning, with an officer who had
survived in the cellar, ‘we few left dug one large grave, near at hand,
buried all the dead, irrespective of rank, conducted a suitable service,
and retired from the area.’ The dead and the grave were soon forgotten,
among the 44,000 British casualties of the battle. But for Tom the horror
endured: the colonel had only been a few metres away and the explosion has
blown his brains all over my grandfather’s uniform, which he was unable
to change as the battle raged on for days and the village was retaken by
the Germans.
The quote above comes from a letter he wrote to the
Royal Army Medical Corps Historical Museum in 1985 – when he was 88
years old, almost 70 years after the event. He was still trying to find
out more, to rationalise the unspeakable. His war experience came to
obsess him as an old man. He rarely described his months on the Somme and
at Passchendaele, as if they had been blotted out, but the carnage at the
dressing station came up over and over again, in vivid and appalling
detail. I believe that single event came to crystallize for him both the
horror of those years and his inexplicable survival, that by focusing his
entire experience on this incident he was able to control his response to
the war for most of his life. When I saw the flag on his coffin I could
only think of that single shocking memory he was never able to erase.
I would never dare to suggest that my experiences are
comparable, yet there is a common psychology. My grandfather often said
that the reason he survived unimpaired was his youth, and the men he
pitied were the older soldiers, in their 30s and 40s. Insouciant youth
kept me from dwelling on my own early brush with death. The reawakening of
my trauma years later was triggered by another jarring event while diving,
my grandfather’s by the fragility of old age. Every life-threatening
experience has its own enormity, it seems, and we trivialise them at our
peril.
Copyright © 2006 D J
L Gibbins
Illustrations:
David Gibbins emerging from a night dive off Sicily in 1982.
Tom Verrinder with
his troop of the 9th Lancers in 1916.
Tom Verrinder shortly before joining a dismounted party for the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. He wears the insignia of the Empress of India’s Own 21st Lancers, with whom he trained at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain before joining the 9th Queen’s Own Lancers in France. Both regiments carried sword and lance while mounted throughout the First World War. Photographs copyright © 2006 Ann Verrinder Gibbins and David Verrinder.