like cabbage, but you don’t cook it.’‘Lettuce?’‘No, not lettuce . . . it’s got a hard skin like a crocodile . . .’ ‘Cucumber?’ ‘Yes, that’s it, cucumber, I cut it up, you know, and sprinkle a bit of pepper and salt on it . . .’
I reminded him that he had an appointment to see Dr Simmonds tomorrow, and his tone immediately became melancholy. ‘I think he wants to get me into hospital for an operation,’ he said. ‘No he doesn’t, Dad,’ I said. ‘It’s just for a check-up.’ ‘What’s he going to do, then?’ ‘He’ll probably take a blood sample -’ ‘That’s a needle, innit? I hate needles’ ‘- and a urine sample.’ ‘Oh, well, no problem there, I produce one of them every five minutes.’ I thought it was a good sign that he could still crack a joke.
I phoned Anne. She is OK, apart from backache. I told her I was going to Poland, but would be back in plenty of time for the arrival of the baby. ‘Were you thinking of giving a hand with the birth, then, Dad?’ she joked. ‘No, I’ll leave that to Jim,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to be around.’ She was supportive about my trip. ‘It’ll do you good to have a change. I feel you’ve been getting into a bit of a rut lately.’ ‘It’s called rut-irement,’ I said. She groaned. ‘You always loved making terrible puns, didn’t you? And you encouraged us to do the same when we were kids - I remember it used to drive Mum mad.’ ‘It was an educational device,’ I said, ‘to give you a feeling for language.’ ‘Well now you could get a retirement job making up jokes to go in Christmas crackers.’ ‘Thank God we’ve seen the back of all that for another year,’ I said. Fred and I spent this afternoon taking down the Christmas decorations, putting them back in their cardboard boxes for storage in the attic, carrying the moulting Christmas tree through the French windows into the back garden and hoovering up the needles in the drawing room.
I phoned Richard, and got through to him for once, instead of just his answerphone. I told him about the trip to Poland. ‘I expect you’ve been there,’ I said. ‘Yes, I went to a conference at Cracow a few years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s very beautiful - it was hardly damaged at all in the Second World War - just about the only city in Poland that wasn’t. Wonderful churches of every period - Romanesque, Gothic, baroque - it’s an architectural anthology.’ Richard is a cultured scientist, and knows much more about architecture than I do. ‘And of course Auschwitz is quite near,’ he added.
‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Yes. You should go.’
‘Well, I don’t know if I shall have time . . .’ I said.
‘You shouldn’t miss it,’ he said. ‘Everyone should go if they get the chance.’
I told him about Dad, and said that if he happened to be in London with some time to spare it would be nice if he called at Lime Avenue, especially when I would be away. He said, without great enthusiasm, that he would try. ‘Be sure to phone him first,’ I said, ‘or he might not recognise you. He might not even open the door.’
I wish Richard hadn’t told me about Auschwitz. It has cast a kind of cloud over the prospect of my trip. I’ve read about it, of course. I know about the glass cases full of shoes and hair, the gas chambers and the ovens . . . but I’m not sure I want to see them. There’s something wrong, it seems to me, about making the site of such appalling atrocities into a museum, a tourist attraction. I’ve read enough about the Holocaust - Primo Levi’s books, other memoirs, histories of the Third Reich - to convince me that the systematic cold-blooded murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis was a deed of unprecedented evil. I don’t know what visiting a kind of heritage site, with turnstiles and guides and coach parties, which I presume Auschwitz is like today, could usefully add. But perhaps I’m being lazy and cowardly.There was an implication that it is a kind of duty, a moral obligation, in Richard’s ‘should’: ‘You should go . . . Everyone should go, if they get the chance.’This is almost certainly the last opportunity I shall have in my life, so I