The Norm Chronicles (11 page)

But sometimes the reports are real. There was a classic example in 1976, when a new strain of swine flu was identified in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Fearful of a repeat of the 1918 flu epidemic that killed millions around the world, the authorities ordered mass vaccination, and 45 million people were immunised.

Within a year the programme was abandoned, for two reasons. First,
around 50 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome – a gradual paralysis that is now thought to have been Franklin D. Roosevelt’s condition
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– were reported, and 500 were eventually identified among those vaccinated. This suggested that among every million who had the vaccination, 10 more people than usual would get Guillain-Barré.
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In all, 25 died.

The second reason the programme was stopped was that the epidemic never got out of Fort Dix: nobody else had the flu, and there seemed no benefit to balance the possible harm. The Director of the CDC was later sacked but still believes the vaccination programme was right.
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Not all flu vaccines have the same risks. Following the UK swine flu outbreak in 2009, 9 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome were diagnosed within six weeks of vaccination, but it was concluded this would be expected by chance alone.
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But Finland and Sweden have reported increased rates of narcolepsy – sudden paralysis and sleepiness – in children after the swine flu vaccination, and this is still being investigated.

As the MMR saga showed, it’s hard to disprove an association. Thimerosal is a preservative used in some vaccines and contains mercury. It has long been accused of harming children. The CDC say there is ‘no convincing evidence of harm’, but it was agreed in 1999 that it should be ‘reduced or eliminated in vaccines as a precautionary measure’.
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The official line that the overall benefits of vaccination outweigh any risks ignores the way in which imposed and highly visible harms, however rare, are seen very differently from potential benefits some time in the future, which can never be confirmed and seem ‘virtual’ in societies where the risks of infectious diseases are so low.

It is a different matter in less-developed societies: the WHO report that there are still 140,000 deaths from measles each year, one every four minutes.
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And, as we have seen in England, these are preventable. Vaccination has already made huge inroads: there used to be 2,600,000 deaths a year. The eradication of measles is thought to be feasible, just like smallpox, especially now the vaccine is stored in the fridge, not in a small boy.

7
COINCIDENCE

F
OG EVERYWHERE
. Fog lying in city streets like sleeping vipers. Fog, ghostly and concealing. The fog of novels, thick, bleak and secretive. The fog of spies, mysteries and thieves.

Norm, 18 years old, walking. Hesitant in the gloom. Lost in thought of his father, who set sail two years ago to the day in his adored sloop
Bill
, for a sally off the coast from Lymington to Cowes – as was often his habit – and in the most perfect of English zephyrs disappeared, boat and all, never to be seen again. How Norm yearned to hear once more the old man’s rambling seafarer yarns. Even the fog seemed to whisper memories of the sea.

As he stole through the damp, grey air, Norm’s left foot chanced to strike upon something soft. He was of a mind to walk on but fancied he heard a moan, and the humour came upon him to investigate, whereupon he discerned through the fog a human form, face down on a park bench, legs sprawled across the path. He knelt and examined what turned out to be an elderly man. To Norm’s astonishment, it was the silent but unmistakable and thankfully still breathing figure … of his very own father.

Over a restorative cup of hot chocolate at a nearby Costa, while outside the fog still crept, the bearded man’s remarkable story unfolded, of sudden loss of memory, of drifting vacantly to what he later discovered was France, where he woke in only a pair of shorts and sandals, without
identity; of months wandering, picking up casual work as he could, avoiding the authorities for fear that he carried with him some dark secret about poisoned fish, of how he fell in with a gang of pickpockets who roamed Paris and only yesterday had come to try their criminal luck, as luck would have it, in Basingstoke, and how, as hazy recollections began to return to him in this his home town, betrayal and lies saw him abandoned late in the evening, asleep on a park bench.

‘I think,’ he said on the slow bus home, trying to understand his sudden state of bewilderment those two years ago, ‘it was the shock of our lottery win – £100,000 it was – and then my silly superstition about banks such that I chose to bring it home in cash in a Tesco carrier bag, then left it all on the number 63.

‘After so many years struggling to raise money for my old orphanage in Clacton, threatened by that developer, the loss was too much to bear. Out at sea, my poor, tortured soul and wounded mind simply chose to forget … everything.’

‘You never know, father,’ said Norm, ‘it might turn up. Who knows, it could be lying undiscovered under this very seat,’ he laughed.

And Norm playfully reached down. There was indeed an abandoned plastic Tesco carrier bag wedged in the frame under the seat. Did they not clean buses nowadays? He pulled it out and peered inside at the usual lumpy detritus people were in the shameful habit of casting hither and thither, only to discover, amazed, great piles of tightly bundled £50 banknotes.

‘My God,’ said Norm’s father, ‘that’s it! I’d recognise the money anywhere.’

‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ said an elderly female voice behind them. They turned to see a small, frail woman in a black shawl, peering strangely at Norm’s father.

‘I couldn’t help noticing the unusual birthmark on your right ear. And then when you mentioned the orphanage at Clacton, a shiver ran through me. Forgive an old lady, but I’ve been searching for so long, you see, and I fear my mind plays tricks upon me. But I believe … no, one more question before I can be certain: did you ever wear a silver chain bearing the small figure of a cat?’

‘Ah’ said Norm’s father, ‘I’m afraid I did not. I perceive your hopes, but I am not the son you seek.’

The old lady sank visibly. Another hopeful trail, perhaps the most hopeful of all, had led nowhere.

‘But I know who is …’

She looked up. She smiled, hesitantly, a hopeful light restored to her eyes. She could scarcely contain the beating of her frail old heart. Could it be true?

‘For there’s someone else we must both now find together, an old friend, Bill, my greatest friend, a friendship first fashioned in our days in the orphanage, joined as we were in an improbable bond by identical birthmarks on our right ears. He always wore a silver chain exactly as you describe. He suffered a terrible breakdown in mid-life at the memory of his abandonment in childhood and was confined thereafter to an institution. But alas, my own memory fails me now, and I cannot recall where. And yet for some reason I picture the sign of a ship in harbour.’

‘Like that one?’ said Norm, looking out of the bus window at the very moment when, by chance, the fog began to lift, and pointing across the road to a sign above the door of a house of tranquil and fetching beauty.

‘My God, that’s it!’ exclaimed Norm’s father, by remarkable coincidence for the second time that day.

A few moments later Norm and his father were witness to the most tearful but blissful of reunions. At the sight of both his mother and his old friend, Bill recovered his wits in an instant. Moreover, the old nurse who had tended him with such devotion beyond her retirement age on account of the striking resemblance of a birthmark on his right ear to that of the son she too had been forced by cruel luck to give up to an orphanage in Clacton, was, of course, the mother of Norm’s father, Norm’s grandmother, only that day reeling from the news that the orphanage was finally to close for want of a last £100,000 – and with it the last connection of many a mother to her long-lost child.

‘Perhaps, Granny,’ said Norm, ‘this will help.’ And he held forth the carrier bag.

‘You know,’ said Norm’s father, ‘it reminds me of the time I was
a-going around the Cape in the blackness of night in a force 9. The sea ’twas cruel, the ship’s very hull did answer the wind in pain …’

ONE DAY
, on a cycling holiday stop in the Pyrenees, Mick Preston set off to the post office with a postcard for his mate Alan. On the way, who should he meet coming up the street, but Alan, on holiday. So he handed him the postcard.
¹
As Mick said: a waste of a stamp.

What coincidence? Oh, that coincidence. Fancy meeting the very person, etc. Well, if you say so. But how much of a surprise is it? Call it spooky, weird, whatever, but is it really so improbable that this should happen to someone, somewhere, at least once, and since it happened to Mick, is it a surprise that he talks about it? Events bump into each other all the time; it is only when people notice that we use the subjective word ‘coincidence’.

In
The Art of Fiction
the author and critic David Lodge says: ‘Coincidence, which surprises us in real life with symmetries we don’t expect to find there, is all too obviously a structural device in fiction.’
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If true, that says something odd about us. Because this chapter is full of coincidences, and they are all real. If we don’t expect them in real life, well, we should. There are plenty about. Though maybe not quite so many per head as Norm experiences one foggy day in Basingstoke. So is one reason that we often find coincidence clunking in fiction – as David Lodge says – because we make too much of it in life? Is coincidence over-rated all round?

DS invited people to write to his website with their coincidence stories,
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a number of which follow. He received thousands, all in one way fabulously unlikely. But if fabulously unlikely things happen so often, can they be that unlikely?

The problem – though it’s also a huge evolutionary advantage – is that we are born seekers of cause and effect – as with the links between vaccinations and reactions – and we can’t help trying to work out why things happen. ‘Nothing happens without a reason’ is almost a description of how our basic cognitive kit functions. So if there is no particular reason, we’re easily foxed. To call coincidences random is almost two fingers to our normal sense of control and meaning.

But coincidences of the ‘fancy-meeting-you-here’ type are certain, if not for you then for someone, somewhere, and they needn’t mean anything. The opportunities are infinite, so why the fuss? There are enough of us with enough possible connections to make even the ingenious plot-driven inventions of Charles Dickens just about plausible. These coincidences are sometimes called artistic licence. Do they need any? Or do they just reflect the fact that when lots of things happen, as things do, some are bound to be strangely coincidental?

But let’s not strip all the romance from coincidences by making them trivial just yet. Mostly, so far, we have been dealing with the dark under-belly of risk – accident, death, disaster, gloom and doom – but coincidence can show the bright side of the play of chance in our lives. That’s why coincidence has an important place in a book about danger, as a version of danger’s opposite – the turn-up.

What is a coincidence? It’s been defined as a ‘surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection’.
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These concurrences may be two things that happen at exactly the same time: for example, a parent and child whose letters to each other cross in the post – after 37 years without contact.
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Almost everyone seems to have a story of meeting a familiar figure in some unexpected place, or discovering some unexpected extra connection, such as the engaged couple who found they had been born in the same bed.
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Objects feature too: such as buying a second-hand picture frame in Zurich, and finding in its lining a 30-year-old newspaper cutting containing your own photograph as a child,
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or being on holiday in Portugal and finding a coat-hanger that belonged to your brother 40 years previously.
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Why do these extraordinary events happen? Various strange forces have been invoked, such as Paul Kammerer’s principle of ‘seriality’: ‘The central idea is that, side by side with the causality of classic physics, there exists a second basic principle in the universe which tends towards unity; a force of attraction comparable to universal gravity’.
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Kammerer says seriality is a physical force, but he dismisses as superstition any supernatural ideas that could, for example, link dreams to future events. In contrast, the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung revelled in paranormal ideas such as telepathy,
collective unconscious and extra-sensory perception, and coined the term ‘synchronicity’ as a kind of mystical ‘a-causal connecting principle’ that explains not only physical coincidences but also premonitions.

Alas, more mundane explanations are possible.
¹⁰
First, some kind of hidden cause or common factor could be present – maybe you both heard that the Pyrenees was a nice holiday spot. Psychological studies have identified our unconscious capacity for heightened perception of recently heard words or phrases, so that we notice when something on our mind immediately comes up in a song on the radio. And of course, we only hear about the matches that occur, and not of all the people you have spoken to with whom you had nothing in common and indeed were pleased to escape. Few feel excited enough by not meeting a friend in the Pyrenees to tell anyone about their non-event.