Born Running

I was born running – almost literally.
Nine months later, I was already able to walk.

I was born in late-November, a true Sagittarian, in the year of the tiger.

I was born probably under grey skies, in the middle of the 20th century.

I was born in the middle of a place that had, 10 autumns earlier, suffered the brunt of the Nazi bombing storm on my native city and country.

I was born 5 years after peace returned to Europe; so, in a place and a time that was, most surely unwittingly to my family or any of those around me, to prove in the years to come akin to winning a lottery jackpot.

I was born into a family deeply scarred by tragedy, more of which was also to attempt to assert its total dominance on us in such a short time ahead.

I failed to die as I was expected to when I was only 20 months old, unlike my preceding brother, who succumbed to meningitis in the war-year spring of 1943, only 14 days after the birth of my sister, so that I became widely known as the ‘Miracle Child’, who had clung to life in the immediate aftermath of an appalling kitchen accident, when a young intern doctor, late into the first night in hospital, replied to my father’s tortured plea to know what were my chances of survival, since having lost their first son, they would not be able to stand losing the second:
“Well, there isn’t very much of him, is there?”
He then asked my father as the two of them stood in the silence, looking down at my terribly scalded body, me face down and tied like a political prisoner in a police state by wrists and ankles to the 4 corners of my cot, as if it were a jail cell:
“Mr Scott, do you have faith?”

Poor, wretched, desperate Mr Scott answered “Somehow, still, I think so. Why?”
“Because I’m going to ask you to go home now and pray. Stewart is no longer in our hands, there is nothing more we can do to help him pull through, only monitor. He may survive, but it will not be because of any miracles that we have”.

And wretched, wracked Mr Scott did just as the young doctor bade him.

6 months later, I went home. A miracle? Here I still am. However, no journey is that simple.

There is a long road between that distant, unremembered “then” and today. It is all – in so many ways – explained by that flashing instant of “then”……….

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The deaf can hear
the trees singing among themselves;
The blind can see
into the souls of the flowers;
The dumb can speak
the purest poetry to the birds.

And what can we, perfect, do?

Hear unanswered pleas for help;
See blood flowing on streets of shame;
Speak obscenities.

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Les sourds savent entendre
se chanter les arbres;
Les aveugles savent voir
dans l’âme des fleurs;
Les muets savent parler
la poésie la plus pure aux oiseaux.

Et nous, parfaits, que savons-nous faire ?

Entendre les supplications ignorées au secours;
Voir s’écouler le sang dans les rues de honte;
Parler des obscénités.


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That child wrote this:


“I am living in the only place I belong…………In my head.
It is dark, cold, lonely, desolate.
The walls are too thick for anyone outside to hear me or see me.
They are not thick enough to keep out either the sounds and sights of a cruel and stupid world, or the knowledge of everything that I couldn’t find, do or be.
This is where I belong, alone in here with all my failures”.