A lament to deeds softly whispered

May 12 2003

Today's language is fraught with puffery; modesty has become redundant, writes Adam Nicholson.

The obituaries page is a daily reproach. The people whose lives you flit through for a few minutes every morning have done something. They have lived, perhaps only for a few significant moments, in a way that stands outside the norm.

An obituary won't be written about you if all you think about each day is what to give the neighbours for supper or what colour to paint the spare room. And what are you doing? Leafing through a newspaper, wondering how you might delay even further the moment when you, too, might get up out of your chair.

There was one notice earlier this year that struck a particular chord. Pip Gardner, in late February. He was 88 and had spent a large part of his life as managing director and then (until two years ago) chairman of the family firm of heating and ventilation engineers, J.Gardner & Co, in south London. At one point, he sold off the air-conditioning arm, but continued to manage the property side of the business.

He was active in support of the Brunswick Boys' Club in Fulham, for which he had originally raised the money, and which he persuaded the Duke of Edinburgh to open in 1949.

He "was a private man", the obituarist wrote, "of genuine modesty, who never sought the limelight".");document.write("

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No, you might have thought, there is no reason why this Mr Normal - dogged certainly, working until he was 86, but steady, even circumscribed - should ever consider the limelight his natural or even deserved environment.

But it was, because Gardner was, in fact, Captain Pip Gardner, who twice during World War II in North Africa, where he was in the Royal Tank Regiment, performed acts of heart-stopping courage - once at the Halfaya Pass and once at Tobruk, both with the intention of saving wounded British officers - for which he was awarded the highest accolades for bravery, the Victoria Cross and the Military Cross.

After the incident in Tobruk, for which he won the VC, Gardner wrote to his father from hospital: "Don't get alarmed and think I am badly wounded. Just a few odd bits and pieces in my leg, neck and arm, nothing serious."

Of course, he didn't mention, as the citation for the VC described it, how "with complete disregard for his own safety, despite his wounds and in the face of intense fire at close range", he had saved "the life of his fellow officer in circumstances fraught with great difficulty and danger".

Even that language is minimalised, suppressed far below what any of us would now use. What would a modern description of "fraught with great difficulty and danger" sound like? Full of words that tried to mimic in their violence and extremity the conditions they hoped to describe.

We have lost, or are at least in the process of losing, the habit of understatement as a means of conveying the nearly indescribable. When I was a boy in the 1960s, I remember being taught the virtues of litotes - how effective it was to say that Paul was "a citizen of no mean city" - and we absorbed the lesson.

We used to say that a cover drive "wasn't bad", when we meant that Barclay would obviously be playing for Sussex in a couple of seasons. Or that he was a "pretty good" batsman. Now everyone would say he was "brilliant" or "totally f------ amazing".

Of course, Gardner's life was governed by the dignity of understatement, by the outstandingly heroic being described as the perfectly acceptable, if at times slightly tricky. His life did not display or advertise the extraordinary virtues and qualities he clearly had.

The man, who twice in the desert war had done things that no human being could be expected to do, slid back after his investiture by the King in 1945 to an existence of overwhelming normality, with his wife, Rene, and their one son, and the business and the boys' club in Fulham.

A chasm as wide as the Atlantic opens between Pip Gardner's world and the one I have always inhabited.

I have lived my life in a pocket of safety, guaranteed first by people such as Gardner, then by the American nuclear umbrella and now, perhaps, by my son's generation of professional soldiers. It has been five decades of thinking where to go on holiday and what car to buy, what book to write, what film to see.

It has been, in other words, a period in which any kind of courage has not been required and in which, as a result, understatement and modesty have become redundant.

Our belts are loose in a way they haven't been since ... when? Regency England? The Restoration?

Our fears have been the very opposite of Gardner's: that life is not dangerous enough; that it bores; that it's stale; that it lacks "dynamism". And so the language we use about it has been enlarged and inflated into a fat balloon of overstatement, of pumping up an existence we are terrified might be inert or dead.

Will that change now? If, as the Americans and Tony Blair think, our comfortable lives have begun to face a prolonged and continuous threat, will we now turn a corner back towards a world that, in its rigours, Gardner might have recognised as his own?

Few of us think so, but it is difficult to see where else this might go. Forget, for a moment, the war in Iraq. The deep change in public attitude will come with the next September 11. Like the second atomic bomb on Japan, it is the hook after the jab that tells you they are serious.