Hurricane Mitch devastates Honduras and Nicaragua - 13 November 1998

A couple of nights ago, just before turning out the light, I came on a passage in my favourite diarist that hits off the frustration that's come over many of us in looking at and thinking about a catastrophe, they say the worst that has ever befallen this hemisphere, that has overwhelmed everything else in the news.

Well here is the entry from the late James Agate's diary for 29 May 1935. His paper had asked him to write about a murder case then being tried at the Old Bailey. A squalid case, but one which had a poignancy that stirred the country. The facts were simple and not disputed. A woman in her late 30s, married to an architect, 30 years older, had hired a young, 18-year-old chauffeur and become his mistress. One night the boy hit the husband over the head with a mallet and killed him. Both of them took the blame.

The diarist noted that one or two unforgettable bits of evidence relieved the sordidness of the whole thing. The mistress, trying desperately to bring her husband round, accidentally trod on his false teeth and tried to stuff them back in his mouth, so he could speak to her and when the prosecutor asked her what her first thought had been when the young lover had got into bed and said what he'd done, she replied, "My first thought was to protect him". The 18-year-old was condemned to death, the woman was acquitted. Five days later, she went down to the river, stabbed herself and was drowned.

Now while this was going on, there'd been an appalling earthquake in India with 50,000 dead and when the news of it came in, the day of the sentencing, Agate noted that he could not get out of his mind the woman treading on the false teeth and her saying "My first thought was to protect him". And then comes the note. "What a rum thing is the mind. This trial has moved me immensely, while the dreadful affair at Quetta makes no impression. The thousands who perished in that earthquake might be flies. I see no remedy for this, since one can't order one's feelings and to pretend something different is merely hypocrisy."

So, you may ask me now, what was the most startling news from America in the past week and at once comes to mind the image of the Speaker of the House, outside his home in Georgia announcing something that has never been done before. Not only did he resign from the Speakership, but retired from the Congressional seat to which he'd just been elected in a landslide for the tenth time.

And yet, every evening since then, there has been a never-ending procession of dreadful pictures of outrageous violations of nature. Crumbling mountainsides, sliding horizons of mud, burying villages and villagers. 20,000 drowned or suffocated. This was the mischief done by the hurricane Mitch on Honduras and Nicaragua which together are just about the size or area of New Zealand, but four times as densely populated, nine millions in all. Three millions, one human in three, are now homeless.

This catastrophe was not only unimagined, it was only hinted at while it was happening. Only now are the television networks apologising for the fact that when it started to happen, three weeks ago, it led the news for only, I think, one night. When hurricane Mitch was boiling up, the last of the season, way down there, we saw pictures of the fuzzy doughnut every evening, as we always do, so long as there's a chance that it'll threaten the United States, which is natural enough. But the chief reason we paid only 30 seconds' attention every day at the time was because we had our own trumpeting headlines.

Glenn was going up, or seen working up there, in space. Then the election was coming up and then it came and brought its own thunderbolt of a surprise and we've always been on the alert for air strikes against Saddam Hussein. It's since then, only in the past week, that we've had extended coverage of the huge devastation. Ex-presidents Carter and Bush have been down there and Mr Bush, a Navy flying veteran of the Second World War, who saw his fill of devastation in the Pacific islands, said he had never in nightmares dreamed of anything like Honduras, its forests thrashed to tinder and in the boggy valleys, the crops, bananas, coffee, corn, beans, practically non-existent.

The lean economy of Honduras has been set back, they say, 50 years. The United States government has put up some 80 million dollars, Spain, gallantly thinking of its colonials, 100 million, but President Clinton has said it's not nearly enough. Of course Congress doesn't exist until the new one meets in January but there's already talk of a massive American effort, something like the Marshall Plan in scope, to rescue and reassemble the bare bones of life and livelihood in Nicaragua and Honduras.

So while we tried to brush aside the unforgettable image of Speaker Gingrich standing in front of his house in Georgia, for once we can have feelings about a remote disaster, because of television this time. And I believe, I hope, we can do something. The United States Navy is keeping up a Berlin Airlift routine, round the clock, of food and medicines. There is no prospect of starvation and disease, they were already there, and as usual the United States, known down there in normal times as the big bully of the North, is the first to organise medical teams and rescue workers and this time, at the urging of a psychiatrists' foundation, teams of emotional counsellors.

Last Wednesday night, in that same bed book, I came on a simple, solemn entry, written two months after the start of the Second World War, Saturday 11 November 1939. "Today, throughout the country, all the trains and in the towns and cities, all the buses, stopped at eleven o'clock and people stood in the streets." By now, in this country, 11 November is the symbolic day that commemorates the dead of all the wars the United States has fought and was long ago re-named Veterans' Day and last Wednesday, while the president was laying a wreath in Arlington National Cemetery, the French government acted on a generous and imaginative idea that I don't think any other embassy, in Washington certainly, has ever thought of.

They searched around, through musty records, by now probably available in sharp print by that ever inquisitive little mouse, and traced down to various regions of the United States several score very old men, some in their 100s, the last surviving American warriors who'd taken part in some engagement that, in the words of a citation, contributed to the salvation and the honour of France. Twenty-eight of them were brought to Washington, most bent into wheelchairs, a couple on foot, to receive France's highest honour, the Legion of Honour.

Talking of remembered small things in the midst of enormous events, I've never failed to recall the first 11 November, 80 years ago last Wednesday, and two images of a small boy, a week away from ten years of age, walking along the promenade at Blackpool on a mild, watery, sunny day, pretending rather to march, while holding on to my mother with one hand and carrying a large white scroll with the other. Two days before the end came, the newspapers had printed the armistice terms and I'd copied them out in careful script on large sheets of what we called then cartridge paper, which I then pasted together, rolled into a scroll and then circled with a red and blue ribbon and I marched off on our little walk, representing I suppose, an Allied plenipotentiary. At that early age, you see, there was in your reporter already a visible slice of ham.

The second picture, at the end of the walk, finds the boy looking into the window of what we then called a confectioner's. For many months, for more than a year certainly, there'd been nothing but dark or black bread. Throughout the spring and summer of 1918, the German submarine blockade was so successful that, we learned later, the island was down to a two-week supply of basic foods. That morning, in the middle of an empty shop window, was a cake stand, a cut-glass cake stand, and perched in the middle of it was a small bun. It was draped, or encircled, with snow. Not snow, but a layer of some magical substance I'd never seen before. It was icing. It may explain the special lift I get, to this day, whenever, at Christmas, I see the countryside of Vermont blanketed with snow and better, indoors, my daughter's cakes with that magical topping.

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