Arrival

This is part of the first draft of my first section, written last week.

As usual, the Ryan Air plane is packed; as usual, the cabin crew are hunted. Check the overhead lockers. Are seats in the upright position? Please fasten your safety-belt, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to switch off your phone now. Then there’s the safety floor-show with the comic Spanish pronunciation: “Hinavent esudden drop hinapressure, hohegeen emask hover ehead anda breth normálly”. After that there are in-flight menus to distribute, then the magazines to hand out, the blocky trolleys with refreshments and “freshly made” sandwiches to trundle up and down the aisle: Excuse me, sir, keep your arms in please. Then it’s: Duty-free, madam? Lottery tickets? Win a car? Collect in the magazines, the menus, the litter. And: Cabin crew, stand-by for landing.

Across the aisle and a row of seats in front of me there's a teenage girl with a big notebook open on her lap, sketching – for a moment I think she’s drawing the cabin crew, but then I realise she’s just doodling. A bald man with a long face, a pipe and a tie; a fat man with a bucktooth grin, wearing baggy trousers and standing in a city of oblong blocks. Further along there are families with children, remarkably un-fractious, elderly couples, young men with clipped hair and sporty t-shirts, middle-aged women in summer dresses, a couple of teenage Goths, all dark eyes and leather coats. (In the cabin it's air-conditioned, but how do they manage out of doors in the heat we've been having?) And then there are the punks, savagely pierced. The one I've been watching has a cockscomb of hair braided with some synthetic blue material which glitters. Through his nose he has a thick horseshoe-shaped bar, each end of which is decorated with a small steel ball. From the corner of my eye it looks like two massive blobs of snot hanging beneath each nostril. I suppose that’s the idea.

As we descend from the sunlit heights through the white, then ever greyer cloud cover to Gothenburg City Airport, the captain says something about the weather on the ground: it’s “not very nice”. He sounds English. Landing, the rain streams across the windows. And now the pace picks up again. Please keep your seatbelts secured till the captain turns off the fasten seatbelts sign, but once it’s off get up and get out, Out, OUT! The aisle is suddenly full, and between the rows of seats, the twisted bodies of passengers who didn’t manage to reach the aisle in time, press their heads against the underside of the overhead luggage compartments and their knees against the backs of the seat in front of them. Unwilling to sit again having dragged themselves up, but unable to stand straight. A few of the more experienced travellers, and those in window seats, sit smugly watching the chaos and discomfort of the rest.

And, freeze! We all hold our positions until the doors can be opened. Once that happens the pressure begins to let up, but finally at the door, with a plunge down the open stairs and across the tarmac to the little terminal building ahead, I realise the airport is the epicentre of a downpour of tropical proportions, the heavy rain, driven by wind, is not falling so much as flying horizontally straight into my face. But the rain and the wind are warm, and the rush to the terminal is stimulating after the flight. Someone shouts “Welcome to Gothenburg!” Kids of all ages are running around, chattering in English and Swedish, jumping in puddles, trying to catch rain in their mouths. There’s a good-natured atmosphere among the adults – even the Goths and the punks look quite cheerful. Only the elderly couples don’t seem to be enjoying themselves.

In the serpentine queue to the immigration, spirits are good, though they become muted somewhat in the long, crowded, hot wait to reclaim baggage. Some children begin to whine and cry, though one little girl in her mother’s arms leans backwards to look at me upside-down and reaches to touch my beard, till her mum pulls her hand away.

It takes about an hour and half to fly from Stansted to Gothenburg nowadays. Getting to Sweden was never so easy. Even the ferry, which runs from Newcastle by way of Kristiansand and takes 23 hours, is fast. In 1653 it took Bulstrode Whitelocke ten days of hard sailing through November storms.

Whitelocke was on his reluctant way as ambassador from Oliver Cromwell’s England to the court of Queen Christina. He was reluctant for several reasons. The prospect of representing a government of regicides at the court of a powerful and highly regarded monarch was not a job to be relished, however much the two countries were on the same side of the religious fence in the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism. The job had been practically forced on him by Cromwell himself, with veiled threats to Whitelocke’s family and fortune if he refused. Not that his fortune was going to be left intact by his acceptance of the job. It was the custom of the time for an ambassador to pay his own way, claiming back what he could from the authorities after the event. Whitelocke was financing the embassy from his own pocket – the clothes he and his hundred-strong entourage would wear, the gifts he would present, the horses and carriages he would use in Sweden, the provisions for the voyage and the ships he needed to carry everything. The state’s generosity extended only to a flagship and a naval escort.

The most serious reason for Whitelocke’s reluctance, though, was the prospect of losing his life at sea, or, worse, surviving his voyage and mission but returning to find his wife had died while he was away. While he could take his two eldest sons with him, he had to leave the rest of his family of ten behind. His wife, Mary, who was heavily pregnant, was distraught.
“My dearest love,” he records her saying. “I would fain speak to you, but tears will not suffer me; let them speak for me and you, you ought not to leave me: for if I cannot, yet – how – because – then – if you will – how can your heart but be melted towards me and these poor children?”
“Consider what is best for us all, and let not passions have too much power over us,” says Whitelocke. “God knows I leave thee with as sad a heart as ever husband parted with from a most loving wife.”
“Oh then why will you go?” She cries. “Let me conjure you by all my tears, by all loves … by marriage promises and affections, not to leave me, especially at this time when the pangs of travail are coming upon me. Alas! What is it I require but a little time and strength, to enable me to bear you company, and in danger to take part with you?”
Whitelocke answers: “I am neither in a capacity to stay nor you to go: you know the necessity on me: I must go and go presently. … [On the sea] I confess my life is in danger; if I now do not go, my life, it may be, is in more danger [in England]. Those who have engaged me will not be baffled by me: they have the power; let us have the prudence and temper to submit to that which we cannot well avoid … God is all-sufficient: I doubt not but that he will preserve me in my journey and bring me back again in safety to a joyful and comfortable meeting with thee and all my children.”
“The Lord … grant us this mercy,” Mary replies, but cannot stop herself from adding that: “it must be more than ordinary mercy if we ever see the faces of each other again.”

It is not quite the sort of leave-taking you expect to overhear at Stansted.