PETER GODWIN Exit Wounds. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Peter Godwin’s memoir charts a life of exile, ranging from the horror of civil war to family eccentricity and life in London and New York. 

Exit Wounds is a curious title for a memoir, especially when Godwin, early in the book, tells of an illustrated lecture on wounds given by a combat surgeon, Major Jolly, to a group of war-bound BBC correspondents on a ‘hostile environment’ refresher course. Two slides present the results of a bullet shot into the abdomen:

The entry wound was small and pursed. It looked survivable.

But the entry wound isn’t usually your problem, explained Jolly. Once the bullet hits you it starts tumbling … He clicked the remote to the next slide, a rear view of the same man. The bullet had punched a huge hole out of his back.

It’s the exit wound that’ll get you, Jolly said. It’s the exit wound that kills you.

Godwin’s own exit wounds, it seems, have been many and varied but not lethal. His first was the traumatic separation from his family and the freedom of his Rhodesian childhood when, at the age of six, he was sent to a strictly regulated boarding school. He was desperately unhappy, but his visiting parents, to his shock, refused to take him home. Then, ‘a deeper wound’, when his elder sister, Jain, was killed in a Rhodesian army ambush.

The horrors he sees and experiences as an 18-year-old draftee in the Rhodesian army during the civil war that followed the Unilateral Declaration of Independence ‘sucked the youth clear out’ of him. And his later forced exile from the country leaves him contemplating whether voyaging ‘far from home, the places and people that once nourished you’ induces ‘a kind of spiritual scurvy’, so that ‘old scars open and you begin to bleed’. Then, his wounds are suddenly and unexpectedly opened by the breakup of his marriage (‘partners of 25 years’), and the disintegration of the family as his boys grow up and leave home.

Godwin, however, is too good a storyteller for this underlying trauma to become depressing reading, and Exit Wounds, as he tells us in the Preface, ‘is not a conventional memoir’. Instead he has tried to ‘track the way memory works’: so it is subjective, random, inexact – ‘rather like viewing life through a fairground mirror’. And, especially when he writes of his elderly mother, Helen Godwin, it is very funny.

Helen is a doctor. For many years, she had been Chief Medical Officer in Rhodesia, but in the early chapters of the book she has taken to her bed, ‘as if prematurely lying-in-state’, in the London home of Godwin’s younger sister, Georgina. Her voice, too, has suddenly changed, and she has begun to speak in a ‘frightfully mannered, haute Edwardian fashion’, such that he and his sister nickname her the ‘Empress Dowager’, or ‘Her Grace’.

At ninety, my mother measures her longevity against two pacers. Her Majesty the Queen, who is eight months her junior, and whom she considers as a colleague – they both served in the WRENS (the Women’s Royal Naval Service) during the Second World War. And her nemesis, Robert Mugabe, who misruled Zimbabwe for the last thirty years my mother lived there. He is one year her senior, and she is determined to outlive him.

Watching TV coverage of Mugabe, Her Grace spots his swollen ankles and ‘diagnoses right-side heart failure. Doctors never retire.’

‘Mugabe’s losing it,’ she says cheerfully. ‘Have you noticed how his kaftans have pictures of his own face all over them? … I think he wears pictures of himself to remind him who he is. He’s getting dementia, I tell you.’

Godwin comes back frequently to his interactions with his mother. She maintains her powers of critical observation and her sharp wits, but she has shed her social filter and blurts out ‘whatever happens to move through her mind’, oblivious to any embarrassment or offence it may cause. On one occasion, as Godwin sits at her bedside, she examines his profile and wonders aloud how he would describe his forehead:

My brow is rather prominent, a dashboard abutting a windscreen, so, in jest, I reply, ‘Neanderthal?’

Yes,’ she promptly agrees. ‘That’s the word I was looking for.’

At other times, he recalls episodes from his childhood; events and people from his war-service; his time in the 1980s ‘based in South Africa reporting on the last years of Apartheid’; his years living in England; scraps of the research he is doing on a biography of Emin Pasha; random bits of history, literature and other knowledge; and his life in America with his wife and sons. The book flows smoothly between past and present, always with Godwin’s easy way of capturing the moment and bringing it to life for his reader. His ‘fairground mirror’ approach, too, offers many unexpected scattered reflections.

Describing his first, temporary, sojourn in New York, where he lived in an apartment building overlooking the river, he notes that ‘the Hudson was once so toxic that brigs sailed up it to burn the barnacles off their hulls’. Then he remembers his encounter with a group of people blocking the riverside path where he was walking his dog. He asks a man what is going on.

‘It’s Tashlich,’ he explains, ‘the first day of the Jewish High Holidays. To atone, we write down our sins of the year on a piece of paper and then cast it into the flowing water, preferably with fish in it. Fish have no eyelids, you see, so their eyes never close; they see all things, just like our Creator’. …

I realize I haven’t been to Catholic confession in, what, more than a decade? ‘Phew, I may need more than one page,’ I say.

He laughs, tearing off a second one. ‘You don’t have to actually write your sins down,’ he says. ‘It’s symbolic.’

Some of Godwin’s happiest memories are of the times he has spent with his sons, Thomas and Hugo. Telling them the myth of Narcissus as a bedtime story, the boys want to know why Narcissus didn’t recognise his own voice when Echo repeated his words, or his own reflection in the pool.

‘It’s a myth, Tom,’ I said, frustrated. ‘It has gods and nymphs and stuff. It’s like a fairy tale or a fantasy movie.’

The boys are not convinced. Thomas thinks the story should have a moral, and Hugo, later, finds ‘an online listicle entitled “The 13 Biggest Assholes in Greek Mythology”. To his disappointment, Narcissus didn’t make the cut.’

Returning to London to visit his mother, who has been temporarily hospitalised, Godwin recounts the arrival of a priest at her bedside, which leads to a typically bizarre event. The priest gives Helen the wafer and wine of Holy Communion, then, to Godwin’s and his sister’s horror, proceeds to carry out the last rites.

Mum has recognised the Creed now and joins in with growing gusto. She has presided over many such deathbed rituals in her decades as a doctor, and now she is presiding over her own. Hers is soon the dominant voice, booming its Empress Dowager’s heppy vowels across the ward. …

The ward comes to a standstill as staff and patients alike pause to listen to her ex-straw-dinary voice.

The priest continues the ritual, finally marking Helen’s brow with holy oil.

‘Helen, be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit,’ he says.

‘Mmm, smells like Christmas,’ Her Grace says beaming.

And Helen, released from hospital, returns to her own bed and to what she calls, with precision, ‘latibulating’ (retreating from the world).

Beneath all this, however, is Godwin’s constant feeling of displacement, of not belonging, and his love for his lost, and radically changed, home country, Rhodesia. Maybe, he thinks, he is struck down by what Chaucer, in ‘The Parson’s Tale’, describes as ‘acedia’.

Acedia is sometimes called ‘departing monk syndrome’. When a monk left (not even the order, but just for another monastery, merely an inter-office transfer), the remaining monks would often plunge into a prolonged melancholy.

And yes, I know this analogy shouldn’t apply to me as it is I who left for other monasteries. So why do I miss my prior cloister so much?

‘In any case,’ he concludes, his ‘sickness’ is like ‘an emotional aquifer, it can spring to the surface at the slightest signal’.

Early in Exit Wounds, he writes, ‘We Godwins are paragons of stoicism. Pain is something we pretend happens to other people.’ But clearly he is still suffering from these old wounds, and the therapist he sees diagnoses PTSD due to childhood trauma; to ‘fighting in one war and reporting on many others’; and to the ‘moral injury’ of ‘bearing witness to, and failing to prevent, deeply transgressive behaviour’, such as that he has seen and experienced.

Helen’s death towards the end of the book is moving, Godwin is holding her hand, and she is articulate and unpredictable to the end:

‘I wish to pay you a compliment,’ she announces.

This is a highly usual occurrence.

‘I find that …’ She pauses, choosing her words carefully.

‘I find you don’t annoy me.’ She adds, ‘Most people do.’

At the end of the book, living alone in his New York apartment, Godwin sees ‘a chevron of geese, returning from their winter in Mexico’:

They are flying against the wind, honking to cheer each other on, honking to boost their morale.

They have almost reached their destination.

They are almost home.

Flying against the wind seems to be what Godwin has done for most of his life, but home, for him, is still Rhodesia, which is, as Jim Moore says in a poem he quotes, ‘a country that no longer exists’.

Peter Godwin Exit Wounds: A story of love, loss and occasional wars Canongate 2024 HB 288pp $39.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: apartheid, civil war, displacement, exile, family eccentricity, memoir, Peter | Godwin, Rhodesian army, Robert Mugabe, South Africa, war correspondents, Zimbabwe