Some Thoughts on Decca Aitkenhead's extraordinary memoir 'All at Sea'

Following my Howard Marks experience, I���d like to explain why I also rather like someone else who, in theory, I ought to loathe, the 'Guardian' writer Decca Aitkenhead.  Let it be a lesson to me. I think it���s the honesty, mainly, but also a certain largeness of mind on her part ( I can���t vouch for myself). This made it possible for us to speak to each other across the chasm of disagreement, and find that we were both grown-up enough to realise that common humanity and the ability to see good in those who do not share our opinions, our faith or our desires, are precious possessions. I���ve said before and will now say again that one of the greatest discoveries of my life was the realisation that one could disagree with - and yet not hate - one���s opponent.

Why does this matter so much? I think it���s because it embodies a great hope that I think many of us have, that all will in fact be well, and all manner of things will be well, that our measures of goodness are too feeble and limited to describe the judgements that will eventually be made in eternity, and our quarrels here are less important than the Charity described by St Paul, in the 13th chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians,  which remains one of the highest evocations of goodness in the English language. Because flat, stale, airless modern translations have driven the original from the schools and the churches, and because I don���t think one should ever miss an opportunity to give it an airing,  I���ll reproduce the whole thing here in the unimprovable grandeur of the Authorised Version:

���Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

���Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

���For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.���

And so, as we stumble on through our unsatisfactory, embarrassing and accident-prone lives, it proves. The greatest of these is charity, and all our greatest failures are failures of charity. Our morals are there principally to allow us to judge and correct ourselves. The lives of others are a mystery to us, and we should concentrate mainly on making sure that we do not make them worse, by anything we do or say.

Decca Aitkenhead is pretty much the opposite of everything I like, believe in and hope for, in both her life and opinions.  The first time I met her, at a conference organised by an odd outfit then called ���LM��� (which was short for ���Living Marxism���), she made a speech extolling the benefits of abortion on demand, which I regard as an abomination. Then she interviewed me for ���The Guardian��� about my book on drugs, which takes the opposite view to hers.

This resulted in the following article:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/21/peter-hitchens-addiction-drugs-war

I describe the experience here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/10/how-to-get-psychoanalysed-for-nothing-the-joy-of-interviews.html

So you can well imagine that we haven���t since spent any time in each other���s company.  I don���t think my pleasures are hers. The idea of her haunting a cathedral on a late winter afternoon, examining stained glass, misericords and inscriptions or staring upwards into the darkening vaults, as the choir practises the psalms for evensong,  is close to hilarious, though not as funny as the idea of me pursuing the sort of pleasures I rather expect she enjoys.

Then, a little while back, a series of dreadful events overtook Decca. You may have read of the death of Tony, her children���s father at the time. It made it into several newspapers partly because Tony died bravely while saving one of his sons from drowning. Decca also played a courageous part in this rescue. But himself he could not save, and nor could anyone else. He was pulled from the  treacherous waters of a Jamaican beach by friends, but did not survive.

I read of it at the time and felt that powerless sympathy which one feels at such times. Now Decca has written a book ���All at Sea���, which describes with unsparing honesty the terrible event, what went before it and what came afterwards. It is a concise masterpiece of autobiography, especially fascinating for me because it is the account of a life I could never have imagined living, would not have wanted to live, still do not want to live, among people I would never have known, and would have greatly disapproved of if I had known them, and also of heart-shrivelling disasters we all fear and all hope to avoid. The fact that it is a  despatch from a land I have never been to and am never likely to visit, makes it all the more telling.

The difference between my life and hers oddly emphasises our common humanity. Who would have thought I could find myself reading, with sympathy, some laughter,  and fascinated engagement, an account of a fierce love affair between a left-wing metropolitan woman and a (presumably very) violent professional drug dealer? Well, there it is. I did, not because I wanted to, but because it is just so, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the human heart.    

That drug dealer (sort of) reformed, under the influence of Decca Aitkenhead and the children she bore him - though he appears to have diverged into the booming business of cannabis farming shortly before his sudden death. Nothing in Decca���s description of him will ever make me like him, except his final act of courage and his obvious success as his small sons��� father (a tribute, it seems to me, to the example of his unknown adoptive parents whose heroic and open-minded embrace of a dreadfully troubled child is one of the most moving parts of the book).

Don���t misunderstand me here. If anything, I dislike Decca���s opinions and milieu even more now than I did before I read the book. It���s not my opinions I���m talking about here, but myself. The book is full of truth, about grief, about consoling grief, about the special grief of bereaved children, about the relentless, repetitive way in which loss invades the life of the bereaved. There are descriptions of dreams, in which the dead man returns, which will make you gasp. It passes the old test, that you���ll be a better person after reading it than you were before, but not in any way you could possibly have expected.