Images of Beckett - Index of

again joined a local Resistance group. He returned
to Paris through a war-ravaged France. All of these
events shook him profoundly.
In another decisive experience, the months
after the war that he spent working with the Irish
Red Cross hospital in Saint-Lô in 1945 meant that
he saw real suffering at first-hand. It was there that
he witnessed devastation, destruction and misery:
buildings, each of them someone’s home, reduced
to rubble by the bombing and the shelling;
personal possessions blown to smithereens; a
hospital, created out of nothing on fields that
were a sea of mud; a ward full of patients ill with
tuberculosis; people in urgent need of food and
clothing, yet clinging desperately to life. One of
Beckett’s medical colleagues in the hospital,
Dr Jim Gaffney, in letters home to his sister,
spoke significantly not about Beckett’s quiet,
introspective manner, his sullenness or his moods
of despair, but of his positive helpfulness, general
kindness and thoughtfulness towards others. 39
Working as an interpreter as well as the storekeeper
of the hospital, Beckett was forced to step outside
himself to help those who were self-evidently
much less fortunate than he. If he did not
communicate with people, nothing got done.
His war experiences and the earlier lessons
of psychotherapy seem, then, to have combined
to distance him from the arrogant, self-obsessed
young man he had been in the early 1930s. Even in
the immediate post-war years, when they had little
Ben Kingsley and Alan Howard in Waiting for Godot, 1997
A PORTRAIT OF BECKETT 27