Ian on Sunday

Let me give my memories of one weekend at Cambridge University when I met two of the most remarkable men of the age, one after another.

There have been a handful of men who have made a deep and unforgettable impression on me: my father, first and always; Jock Campbell, Chairman of Bookers in the 1950s and 60s; Martin Carter, whose poetry time as it passes burnishes to a yet brighter gleam.

There are some people who are so much part of the world you know and feel secure in that when they die, meaning that they depart forever and will never again be part of that dependable world which you have known for so long, you feel a special loss that goes deep and you experience a sense of almost desperate longing that the death you have heard of will prove not to have happened and that the person will in fact be back in his place after all and that normality has returned.

When some years ago Colin Campbell, an old Etonian and quintessentially English, died at his home in Blackhorse Lane, South Mimms, in Hertfordshire at the age of 86 his death went almost completely unnoticed in Guyana.

It happens. It is life. Great contributions are made. Years go by and they are forgotten and those who made them are forgotten too.

In one conversation with Godfrey, amidst the multitude of evocations that continually cascaded out of his extraordinary memory, he told me about bird-whistling competitions and donkey-cart racing in Guyana long ago and described to me the hundred and one manifestations of that condition of bewitched infatuation in a man or a woman called typee.

Sheik Sadeek died at the end of January 1986 in the U.S.A.

Let me write now as the spirit moves me, and as memories crowd the mind, about a good man through and through, and a citizen of incomparable quality.

Reading prevents your life ever narrowing down to the humdrum, the routine or the boring.

In my last column I remembered my old friend H.L. `Bertie’ Taitt, one of a group of us who regularly met for rum, curry lunch and unending talk more than 60 years ago.

Every moment in our lives is embedded in the extraordinary architecture of our minds.

Cheerful, bespectacled with thin gold rims, chubby-fat, cherubic Arthur Goodland, kindness in the very soul of him, lover of beauty in nature, art and woman-kind – one would not automatically at all see in him the extremely well-trained chemical engineer and hard-driving top executive in a highly successful company and industry. 

I interrupt my series on Extraordinary People to reflect on the concept of excellence which is involved, one way or another, with any life which is exceptional or exemplary.

There was a time when I tried not to know Mahadai Das.

Sparks from the central fire – I was lucky to be near enough to feel the blaze these men ignited in the world.

For a short while one summer day out of nowhere in my life she flashed like a comet across my sky.

Such men as these walk onto a field of play, or enter a room, and their life-force brings everyone to silence and attention – these were two men who in their very different ways set my mind alight.

Rex Nettleford I found people liked to recall the royalty of his name and nature but thought that King was too high and mighty so they named him a prince of men and that somehow seemed right.

Hardly a month or even a week went by in my working life without one or the other or both of these men appearing in the world’s headlines.

Two of my Uncles were extraordinary men. Here are a few sparks from the fire of their lives.