Joe Bennett: the misfortunes of others

Iwas having a shower and trying to recall a quotation. I knew the quotation was in there somewhere. I could almost taste it. The problem was digging it out.

My mind is like a lumber room, crammed with quotations that I’ve thought might come in useful one day. When first installed they stand to attention, eager for the call to action. But when the call doesn’t come, they sag a little, and then other prettier quotations arrive and stand in front of them and there seems no point in competing so they give up and withdraw to the dusty back of the mind and slump. They never completely disappear but they become hard to dredge up. Which is where the shower came in. I find a shower sometimes lubricates the memory.

The quotation I sought addressed the inner bastard, the core of human cruelty. I knew that someone somewhen had crystallised the inner bastard in words both neat and true and I wanted to resurrect those words. But they defied resurrection. I soaped myself, and sang a song or two and even gave the hair I haven’t got its annual shampoo but the quotation refused to surface.

I gave up only when my fingertips had become crinkled like the leaves on a primrose. And then of course, when I was towelling my flesh and thinking of dinner, the quotation came. It came to me whole and I said it out loud to the bathroom mirror. ‘‘We are all strong enough,’’ I said, ‘‘to bear the misfortunes of others.’’

Two minutes with the Dictionary of Quotations and I had traced it back to Francois, the sixth duc de la Rochefoucauld, and a book of maxims published in 1678.

Quite how it found its way to my mental attic, I don’t know. I have not read the book in question. But I must have come across this line somewhere and thought it worth committing to memory. What I like is its ironic cynicism. When he writes of strength, la Rochefoucauld doesn’t mean strength. He means the inner bastard, the pleasure we take in the misery of others. And to illustrate why I had this in mind, I need to introduce you to tuff.

Tuff is a rock formed of compressed volcanic ash. It’s the signature rock of Lyttelton. The land is steep here, so the early settlers had to build retaining walls and they built them of tuff. It was locally abundant and easy to quarry, so this was understandable. It was also unfortunate. For no rock was ever less aptly named than tuff. The stuff is feeble. It’s porous. Water gets into it. It rots like wood. It becomes as friable as bacon. It crumbles like crumble. And when an earthquake happens it all falls down.

Which is why contractors have been reinstating Lyttelton’s retaining walls for the last five years. And a wonderful job they’ve done.

They started with the big ones, stripping off the rotten tuff, scraping back to real rock, and then drilling into that rock to fix fixings. They put in drainage. They anchored concrete panels into place. And then, in a touch you had to admire, they brought the tuff back in, all trimmed and cleaned and lovely, and they applied it as a veneer. So Lyttelton still looks like Lyttelton. One has to be grateful.

And now they’ve turned to the smaller walls, like the one at the bottom of my road. Because they had to annex half the road they’ve installed traffic lights, so I have spent whole minutes watching the men work in their dazzling high visibility gear. First they stripped the wall back, then they sprayed it with concrete. It looked like a cake with grey icing.

One day last week the horizontal driller arrived, a deafening brute of a beast. Marked on the concrete icing were targets for the drill. They were moving the thing into place as I drove out to take the dog to the beach. When I came back an hour later, the drill had fallen silent.

The men were standing in a group and staring at the wall. I followed their gaze. Where the drill had gone in, the concrete had split, shattered and all fallen away. It looked very expensive. And it could hardly have been more public. You just had to feel for the guys.

And my instinctive first reaction was to snort with laughter. It just looked so funny.

I know, I know, and of course I’m not proud of it. But I’d be lying if I denied it. 339 years may have passed since La Rochefoucauld went to the nub of things, but we are all still strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.