Equal Tempers

It was in London, as seventeen and a half million of us locked eyes at the two tired warriors, heads bowed, exhausted under the unbroken rays of sunlight, that I felt a sharp stab of anger.
Both men are desperate for the same prize, for the glory, desperate to unearth the last physical and mental reserves available to them.

The Championships, Wimbledon.

These are the best two tennis players on Earth, in the greatest tennis tournament on Earth and, as a tennis player and lifelong fan of tennis, I’m honoured to be present watching this match of matches in this, the home of tennis.

I doesn’t matter, I'm reminded of something that has been on my mind, the kind of thing that you try to forget about, try to bury in the recesses of your mind, but it’s the sort of thing that taps at your skull, every minute, every second it’s there.
The match ends in spectacular style, the eventual victor playing a cross court forehand that leaves his opponent standing stock still having been wrong footed and outplayed; he takes the applause with his arms raised in celebration; the screams and cries of adulation, of incredulity, of a sea of sycophants.

It wasn’t this atmosphere that I troubled me however, it wasn’t even the champion now beaming with his arms raised to the heavens; it was the loser I looked at, the man with pain written across his features, with energy sapped from his limbs, with tears streaming from his downcast eyes.

~

A month later I was in Budapest, more specifically the Keleti Railway Station.

To put this into context: I was in Budapest on holiday, enjoying it immensely so far having just walked along the banks of the Danube where, completely coincidentally, there was a biplane aerial stunt competition in progress. The weather was continental, by which I mean it was hot, very hot and we were doing what most sensible tourists do in a new city, wandering around aimlessly.

It was during this rudderless expedition into uncharted Budapest that I stumbled out of a winding side street into a wide, sun-soaked square. This square wasn't empty though, as you'd expect at the height of the sun's arid reach. No, instead the square was a prismatic fusion of tents, tents everywhere, taking up literally the entirety of the square. Was this some kind of protest? What were these people doing? I could see hundreds of people; everywhere there were backpacks and possessions strewn across the ground, the people all looked exhausted, lifeless figures with hunched shoulders. Despite the body language, there was a palpable sense of hope; you could tell by the occasional smile, the occasional group singing or maybe it was just their presence in this heat in the first place, they were all here for a purpose, this was a stepping stone to some greater goal.

Across the square from me loomed the Keleti Railway Station, a strange building to behold owing to its eclectic architecture. Rather than taking a direct route through the tent city I decided to skirt around the edge of the square to avoid being swept up into this kaleidoscopic frenzy of canvases.

Coming to Hungary I had known that the language was unique, it was unlike any other language in Europe, however, I had already heard Hungarians on this holiday and these shouts and fleeting conversations I heard as I walked were not in that language.

~

I approached the grand, ornate entrance to the train station where there were policemen leaning against the walls to either side, they were loosely clutching rifles but most looked relaxed in spite of the noise and activity around them. Above the entrance were two signs, the first chiselled into the stone "Budapest Keleti pályaudvar." The other a very new sign hurriedly made with words scrawled in paint, "Menekültek: Nincs több vonat!" Although this sign was likely to explain this whole situation I couldn't read a word of Hungarian...

As I stood at the entrance a shrill whistle sounded, it pierced the humid air around me, startling me out of fixed gaze at the sign. The apparent exhaustion of the people disappeared with the coming and going of the whistle and I turned round to see hundreds frantically grabbing their bags and folding up their tents, children were lifted up by their parents; one by one the canvases fell to the ground. The policemen near me sprang into action, scrambling into the train station and hastily closing the entrance gate with a resounding clang behind them. I quickly got out of the way of the gate as a wave of the crowd crashed into the metal, their fists rattling on the surface and shouts erupting from among the mass.

This outburst was, however, drowned out by a low rumble from inside the station; I recognised it as the sound of a train entering the station.

No, it wasn't a protest; they were trying to get on the train.

They were trying to find a new home.

They were refugees, one and all. The human outcome when a civil war thousands of miles away consumes a country to the extent that its own citizens flee for their lives. When political ambition and greed blinds those trusted with the power and the fighting gradually, almost imperceptibly escalates until one day the newspaper arrives at the door on a morning much like any other: ‘War!’ It declares it brazenly, and from a word printed on paper it transforms further; first as an annoyance and a distraction and then building slowly, soldiers recruited, far-off sounds of planes, it is now a day-to-day fact but life goes on. Then coming back from work one day you are stopped by a road block a few miles from your town: ‘What the hell is this, I need to get home!’

‘Sir...you don't know?’

‘Know what?’

‘The insurgents...they swept through the town. They thought the government was hiding armour and weaponry among the buildings. They thought the people living there were all collaborators. It was a massacre.’

Looking up at the sky above the town and a great plume of the blackest smoke rises into the sky.
And then the war is not just a fact anymore, with just the clothes on your back and your old, rusty car you make for the coast. While the country around you, a place which you once knew and loved, a place where you grew up, a place tied to your heart, descends into chaos. The feeling catches on and people all round this carcass of a country now harbour it, a feeling of disillusionment, of alienation. There are better places than this, there are places where a man can walk freely, not forced to fight, to work, to endure the constant reminder of the burning buildings and cars and flags and corpses.

By boat, by train, by car, it doesn't matter how you get out, it doesn't matter that you're crushed into a compartment with fifty other people, even in these inhumane conditions there was laughter and there were jokes; people were playing cards, playing noughts and crosses and forgetting, for a while at least, why they were here in the first place. You hear of people swimming for safety, people so desperate to get away from the violence that they drive to the coast and swim for the next land they can see. They know that they can’t swim that far, they know they’ll likely die, but they do it.

~

Back in the stands of Centre Court in London and the ceremony has started. The famous old golden trophy is carried onto court and the champion's face fills with joy as he lifts it aloft. Thanking his sponsors, his coach and his family before posing for the cameras and finally sitting back down staring at his prize with gleeful eyes. He claps for his opponent of course, but doesn’t look up from the gold; he has to show some kind of respect after all, even if it is feigned.

His opponent, beaten and bruised both physically and mentally receives his runner’s-up silver plate and the check for his winnings. Returning to his seat utterly dejected I watch as his head drops and he starts to cry; the cameras show it up close, he can't believe he has wasted this chance to become Wimbledon champion. People around me are actually crying as they see it on the screen, people’s shoulders are shaking as they cry at the human drama that is laid bare for them on the court. His shoulders are shaking too, tears are forming in his eyes travelling down his cheeks and falling into his lap, finally landing on his check for £940,000.

In that torrid square in the centre of Budapest I look on as the train leaves the station, not a single refugee on it. Their once hopeful expressions melt into frustration, anguish and utter dejection with the passing of this opportunity. A man at the front of the gathering looks down at his two children and put each arm round one of them, I watch as he starts crying in front of them, then quickly turning his head away from them and rubbing his eyes with his hand to hide his pain.

The relativity of human emotion shocked me, not only because I found myself appalled at what I was seeing, but because I knew I was guilty of this offence. Should I fear upcoming exams? I do. Should I cry when I lose an important football match? I have. Should I feel exquisite anger when someone breaks our bond of trust? I know I have and I will.

Of course I have the right to be scared of such things, to cry at such things, to feel rage at such things. But why then, when I take a step back and think about it, do I feel that that right should be stripped from me? Because one man can feel the same pain from a broken T.V. as a broken family, does that make one wrong and the other right? That isn’t for me to decide. I can’t tell one to shut up, I can’t tell him he’s pathetic and shake him by the shoulders telling him to pull himself together.

What I can do, however, is learn from what I’ve experienced. I recognised the look upon the man’s face; I recognise the tears that are being shed, in both me and the defeated tennis player. I remind myself that however tough it gets for me, I should never lose perspective.
The trauma of the refugees facing deportation back to the hell whence they came, the trauma of the families of the dead as a result of the attacks in Paris and in Belgium, the trauma of witnesses to any of these events is more than a reason for others to help them, it is, in essence, an opportunity for them. Trauma is an opportunity for me, it can go one of many ways; I could end up with lifelong mental pain stabbing me at regularly recurring intervals, not learning from these experiences could leave me a weak-willed, shadow of a man.
No, I’ll learn. I’ll use it to strengthen my resolve, so that one day I could stand steadfast against the rushing tragedy that will inevitably befall me, so that I wouldn’t be taken by the tide of the death of my friends and family.
Trauma, of any kind, of any intensity, inspires heroism in a sense, and this is what I strive for, because heroism in life is to defy, to simply keep going.