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  Liddell became the camp’s conscience without ever being pious, sanctimonious or judgemental. He forced his religion on no one. He didn’t expect others to share his beliefs, let alone live up to them. In his church sermons, and also during weekly scripture classes, Liddell didn’t preach grandiloquently. He did so conversationally, as if chatting over a picket fence, and those who heard him thought this gave his messages a solemn power that the louder, look-at-me sermonizers could never achieve. ‘You came away from his meetings as if you’d been given a dose of goodness,’ said one member of the camp congregation.12 ‘Everyone regarded him as a friend,’ said another, giving voice to that unanimous verdict.13 Someone else saw an enigmatic side to him amid all this subjugation of the self.14 Aware of how ably he disguised his own feelings, she thought him ‘elusive’. She pondered what Liddell was really ‘thinking about when he wasn’t speaking’, which implies how much anguish he bottled up and hid away to serve everyone else’s needs.

  One internee spoke about Liddell as though Chaucer’s selfless and chivalrous ‘verray parfit gentil knight’ had been made flesh. ‘You knew you were in the presence of someone so thoroughly pure,’ he explained.15 A second put it better, saying simply, as if Liddell were only a step or two from beatification: ‘It is rare indeed when a person has the good fortune to meet a saint.16 He came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.’

  In his own way, Liddell proved that heroism in war exists beyond churned-up battlefields. His heroism was to be utterly forgiving in the most unforgiving of circumstances.

  Of course, most of the world sees a different Eric Liddell. It frames him running across a screen, the composer Vangelis’s synthesized soundtrack accompanying every stride. The images, the music, the man and what he achieved in the Olympics in 1924 are familiar to us because cinema made them so.

  We know that Liddell, then a twenty-two-year-old Edinburgh University student and already one of the fastest sprinters in the world, believed so strongly in the sanctity of the Sabbath that he sacrificed his chance to win the 100 metres. We know the early heats of that event were staged on a Sunday. We know that Liddell refused to run in them, leaving a gap that his British contemporary Harold Abrahams exploited. We know that Liddell resisted intense pressure – from the public, from his fellow Olympians and from the British Olympic Association – to betray his conscience and change his mind about Sunday competition. We know that he entered the 400 metres, a distance he’d competed in only ten times before. And we know that, against formidable odds and despite the predictions of gloomy naysayers, he won it with glorious ease.

  We know all this because the film Chariots of Fire told us so and took four Oscars as a consequence in 1982, including Best Picture.

  In it, Liddell claims gold in super-slow-motion; he’s then chaired off in front of a raucous crowd. The story has its perfect full stop – tidy and neat and also clinching evidence that cinema does what it must to fulfil its principal purpose, which is to entertain. To achieve it, the first casualty is always historical fact. Fictional contrivances shape anew what actually happened to create a compelling drama. Most of us are smart enough to realize that film-makers who pick history as their subject tinker with the veracity of it. But our perception of an event or of a person still becomes inextricably bound to the image presented to us. So it is with Chariots of Fire. So it is with Liddell. We’ve ceased to see him. We see instead the actor Ian Charleson, who played him so compassionately.

  I regard myself as possessing dual nationality. My birthplace was England, not far from where Hadrian built his wall. My other country is Scotland. My father was born there in a village only 2 miles from the site where Robert the Bruce won the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. The significance of that date constituted my first history lesson.

  In contests between Scotland and England our household always wore tartan. I was brought up on seminal Scots. From architects such as Mackintosh to poets such as Burns and also the writers Scott and Stevenson. From Smith the economist to Hume the philosopher. From the inventors Baird and Bell to the philanthropist Carnegie and the multi-faceted Dr Livingstone.

  And then came Liddell too.

  I saw Chariots of Fire twice in the week of its release from the cheap seats of the local cinema, where the curling blue-veins of others’ cigarette smoke and showers of casually flicked ash blurred my view of the film-makers’ recreation of 1920s Paris. After Oscar success initiated periodic re-releases, I watched it a third and then a fourth time, never caring then or now about the intentional inaccuracies. On each occasion the price of the ticket reaffirmed one piece of knowledge: the best portrayals of sport are never about the sport itself, but rather the human condition in pursuit of its glories, which is why you can excuse Chariots of Fire its intentional inaccuracies. It captures the inherent decency of Liddell. He is much more fascinating and likeable than the relentlessly driven Abrahams, presented as his implacably bitter rival to ratchet up the drama.

  Liddell was never fixated on anyone else’s form the way Abrahams became fixated about his. Losing in Paris would have mortified Abrahams, probably destructively, because he believed his status was dependent on his running. Liddell was no less competitive. But he saw Abrahams as an adversary rather than as the enemy; and he considered athletics as an addendum to his life rather than his sole reason for living it.

  Indeed, there are countless anecdotes of his sportsmanship towards fellow competitors that sound a bit like the brightest boy in class allowing everyone else to copy his homework.17 In competition he’d lend his trowel, used to dig starting holes, to other runners who lacked one. He once offered to give up the precious inside lane on the track, swapping it with the runner drawn unfavourably on the outside. On a horribly cold afternoon he donated his royal blue university blazer to a rival, freezing in only a singlet and shorts – even though it meant shivering himself. On another occasion he noticed the growing discomfort of an Indian student, utterly ignored before an event. He interrupted his own preparations to seek him out; their conversation went on until the starter called them both to the line. This was typical of Liddell. He’d engage anyone he thought was nervous or uncertain, and listen whenever the inexperienced sought advice on a technical aspect of sprinting. He’d share what he knew before the bang of the pistol pitted them against each other. In the dash to the tape, however, Liddell suspended friendship. He was fearsomely focused, the empathy he instinctively felt for others never slackening his desire to beat them.

  Harold Abrahams, whom the French newspapers called the ‘Cambridge Cannonball’.

  He toiled to become the fastest, testing himself in all sorts of ways. Through hilly Edinburgh he’d audaciously race against corporation buses to spice up his training, challenging the driver from the pavement. If a bus beat him to a traffic light, Liddell would reproach himself for coming second.

  Obscure one moment and a feared title contender the next, he lit up athletics like a flash of sheet-lightning, and did it despite the fact that he was so stylistically unconventional as to be a freak.

  We prefer our sporting heroes to possess aesthetic as well as athletic prowess. We want to see poetry and hear the song of the body in their movements, the impeccable coordination of mind and eye and limb that enables the fan in the stand to make this specific claim: that watching sport is akin to watching one of the fine arts. The obvious allusion is to dance, usually ballet. That comparison has been made so often, consequently becoming a cliché. But it never invalidates the legitimacy of the argument – even if those unappreciative of sport struggle to understand the idea. The best dancers are performing athletes and vice versa. And what always stirs us, viscerally, is the beauty that exists within them. Think of Roger Federer whipping a crosscourt backhand past a bewildered opponent. Think of George Best on one of those slalom runs from halfway line to penalty box, the defenders sometimes beaten twice. Think of Viv Richards holding his pose, eyes following the arc and drop of the ball after another six has cracked off
his bat. Think of Muhammad Ali doing his shuffle.

  Sometimes, though, the ugly duckling wins.

  Liddell didn’t look like a sprinter before a race started. He was only 5 feet 9 inches, which was considered slightly too short for the distances he ran. In an 11-stone frame, his bull-chest was heavy and his legs were short and thin.

  He looked even less like a sprinter when a race got underway.

  There was an ungainly frenzy about him. Liddell swayed, rocking like an overloaded express train, and he threw his head well back, as if studying the sky rather than the track. In Scottish colloquialism, this ‘heid back’ approach became his signature flourish. His arms pumped away furiously and his knee-lift was extravagantly high, like a pantomime horse. The New York Times thought Liddell ‘seemed to do everything wrong’.18 In one cartoon the Daily Mail’s celebrated caricaturist Tom Webster sketched Liddell as if he were a rubber contortionist.19 His body is shaped into a capital S, his head tilted so far backwards that it is almost touching his waist and he can see only where he’s been and not where he’s going. The caption reads: ‘Mr Liddell wins his race by several yards. He could never win by a head because he holds it back too far.’ In another cartoon Webster nonetheless highlighted that means, however peculiar, could always be justified by a triumphant end. Liddell, he said, ran a furlong at Stamford Bridge in what seemed to be ‘three or four seconds’ and ‘created a draught that was felt at Wimbledon’. That draught would have swept all the way through the decade and into another Olympics – if he had decided to carry on running.

  Liddell broke away from athletics at the peak of his flight. Sportsmen who reach the summit of their sport usually try to cling on there until their fingernails bleed. Well in advance of the Olympics, Liddell had talked of his intention to abdicate gracefully because his real calling was elsewhere. For most of us that would be an easy vow to make before we became somebody – and an even easier one to break after the blandishments and the fancy trimmings of fame seduced us. Liddell never let it happen to him. He had promises to keep. That he kept them then and also subsequently is testament to exceptionally rare qualities in an exceptionally rare individual. Overnight, Liddell could have become one of the richest of ‘amateur’ sportsmen. But he wouldn’t accept offers to write newspaper columns or make public speeches for cash. He wouldn’t say yes to prestigious teaching sinecures, refusing the benefits of a smart address and a high salary. He wouldn’t endorse products. He wouldn’t be flattered into business or banking either. He made only trivial concessions to his celebrity. He allowed his portrait to be painted. He let a gardener name a gladiolus in his honour at the Royal Horticultural Show. In everything else Liddell followed his conscience, choosing to do what was right because to do anything else, he felt, would sully the gift God had given him to run fast.

  Chariots of Fire didn’t have the room to explain any of this. Nor could it expand on what came afterwards for him. So his final two decades were concertinaed into two sentences – white lettering on a black background. Reading it, rather than having it spoken to you, somehow makes the message more powerful still. It is as bleak as the inscription on a tombstone.

  ERIC LIDDELL, MISSIONARY, DIED IN OCCUPIED CHINA AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II. ALL OF SCOTLAND MOURNED.

  That such a gentle man died such an ungentle death here hardly seems possible. At least not today. Spring has dressed everything in blush pink and peach blossom, the flame-red of early hibiscus and also wisteria, which is a swell of livid lake-purple. Sprays of dense bloom waterfall from the branches of trees, run across gables and guttering, fences and trellising. Alive with greenery, lightly drowning the pale paths in leaf shadow, the bigger trees remind me that I am walking exactly where others, including Eric Liddell, walked decades before. With smaller trunks and spindlier branches, these trees bore mute witness to Weihsien’s woes.

  The Chinese, wanting no one to forget them, have created a museum. The exhibits, preserved in a sepulchral half-light, are mostly enlarged black and white photographs, watercolours and pencil drawings fastened behind glass. Liddell has a commemorative corner to himself. I see him winning a race shortly before the Olympics, his head back as always and his eyes half-closed. I see him on his wedding day, super-smart in morning coat and winged collar. I see the short wooden cross carved for his grave, obscured by overgrown foliage.

  The earth that held him during the war holds him still; though no one has known precisely where for more than half a century because the graveyard, located in the Japanese quarters, was cleared and then built over during the period when Shandong Province became more difficult to reach for the non-Chinese. No one can identify the date when his cross was removed and the clearance began either. So, instead of a grave, Liddell now has a monument – an enormous slab of rose granite shipped from the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides.

  Standing in front of that monument, I am aware of what no photograph of it can ever convey: its hulking size – 7 feet high and 2½ feet across; how age has weathered it; how the heat of the day warms the granite; how its edge, left deliberately rough and uneven, feels against my hand.

  One of my favourite stories about Liddell is also the first ever told about him.20 He was supposed to have been christened Henry Eric until a family friend stopped his father on the way to register the birth and asked what ‘the wee man’ was going to be called. The friend gently pointed out that the initials – H. E. L. – were scarcely appropriate for a missionary’s offspring, which is why his Christian names were reversed. This comes back to me as I stare at his name. The sun, at last burning a hole through the smog, appears with impeccable timing and makes the gold lettering glow.

  The accompanying inscriptions include the quotation from Isaiah, chapter 40, verse 31, that Chariots of Fire slipped into its script to cap a pivotal scene: ‘They shall run, and not be weary.’ A few, scant lines of biography cover the cardinal points of his forty-three years and thirty-seven days: his birth, his Olympic success, his death. The phrase ‘fraternal virtues’ acknowledges his missionary service.

  ‘Fraternal virtues’ isn’t the half of it. Everything you need to know about the heart Liddell had – and what he did with it – is contained in one fact.

  Every morning in Weihsien, while the camp still slept, he lit a peanut oil lamp in the darkness and prayed for an hour. Every night, after studying the Bible, he prayed again. He did not discriminate. He prayed for everyone, even for his Japanese guards.

  How do you pay proper respect to a man as humane as that; a man, moreover, who strove every day for perfection in thought, as well as deed, and whose death engulfed those who knew him in a sadness almost too deep for words? I do the best I can. I place a cellophane-wrapped spray of flowers – gold tiger lilies, white carnations, orange gerbera – on the wide plinth of this grand tower of granite.

  When I turn towards the noise and colour of Guang-Wen Street again, I am convinced of one thing above all others. Whoever comes to this corner of China will always leave knowing the full measure of the man who is to be found here.

  The place where his faith never broke under the immense weight it bore.

  The place where his memory is imperishable.

  The place where, even on the edge of death, the champion ran his last race.

  Part One

  Faster

  CHAPTER ONE

  How to Become a Great Athlete

  THERE WAS AN impish look about him.1 He was slight and lightly built, barely 5 feet 4 inches tall. The flattish features of his face were disturbed only by the shallow rise of his cheekbones and an upturned chin, leaving a hard crease. His nose was a long blade. His mouth appeared to be nothing more than a slit. His eyes had bags beneath them. In profile he had a blankly stony look, like the countenance of an Easter Island carving.

  To strangers Tom McKerchar appeared sternly unapproachable, as if any enquiry might produce a grunt in reply. To those who knew him, however, McKerchar was the opposite – a pleasant and helpful gent who’d pass o
n his expertise to whoever asked for it politely.

  In early 1921 McKerchar was forty-four years old, the father of twelve children.2 He worked for a printing firm in Edinburgh, where the ink from the commercial presses stuck to the hand the way coal dust clung to the skin of every miner. He began there as a paper ruler and then became a lithographer.3 Away from the drudgery of clocking on and off, the mainstay of his life was sport. He advised the professional footballers of Heart of Midlothian – once multiple winners of the Scottish League Championship and Scottish FA Cup – and trained amateur athletes in Scotland, including those of the Edinburgh University Athletic Club. The students were expected to take physical excellence as seriously as book-knowledge. In 1887 the university’s elders placed the gilt figure of an athlete carrying the Torch of Learning on top of the dome that rose above its Old Quad – a reminder that improvement of the mind shouldn’t neglect improvement of the body too.

  McKerchar, though never an academic scholar, proved to be the perfect coach for the students. Like most of his working-class generation, raised during the final quarter of Queen Victoria’s reign, he’d said goodbye to school at thirteen to bolster the household budget: he’d delivered groceries for pennies.4 Midnight oil came later for him. From books, and also through empirical testing on the track, McKerchar studied the physiology and psychology of the games-player and the training necessary to make him better.5 When he began dedicating himself to it, the subject was seldom treated scientifically. To some sportsmen, climbing into an enamel bath swimming in blocks of ice provided the answer to every question about achieving and maintaining fitness and health. The freezing water was supposed to energize the heart and pump the circulation, harden the soles of the feet and tone the muscles. Advocates of this and nothing else were like those doctors from the Middle Ages who slavishly prescribed leeches for every ailment presented to them. Other Victorian and Edwardian theories for sharpening performance seem now like the ravings of cranks, quacks and charlatans. Some believed smoking cleared the lungs and improved breathing capacity. A couple of pints of beer were considered perfectly acceptable too; the bitter hops were reckoned to be strength-giving. Various potions and so-called pick-me-ups also swirled around the market. Among them were Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, which included morphine, a French tonic wine called Vin Mariani, which included cocaine, and Anti-Stiff, a kind of rub-on-all-over embrocation, which included petrolatum. McKerchar was nobody’s fool. He didn’t fall for these advertisements, never believing the wondrous promises made on the packets.