tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1530228291433234632024-03-14T06:18:10.631+00:00A Writer's LifeThe Disconnected Ramblings of an Itinerant AuthorKathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.comBlogger1040125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-54436307639726547022023-09-28T17:34:00.002+01:002023-09-28T17:36:01.835+01:00Windswept by Anne Worsley: Review<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghtIEpMwjV_jgvXob34ZfPlGACM0IO_DZkv9EBLgqvPNkVTrBLHNjjqThyphenhyphenlqP-8nLgS8S0AAYFLsm5tD0q7ygzpNK9LjUw5EqIeB7SSYEmNR5JsI-qIJE3vfjyhabUDyjEDIIx9Bbn9XOjEIxrIpCyDrCHwEK2rakeGYBmWKv0IRwc8-fKDYUsYBFMjgA/s500/WindsweptCover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="311" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghtIEpMwjV_jgvXob34ZfPlGACM0IO_DZkv9EBLgqvPNkVTrBLHNjjqThyphenhyphenlqP-8nLgS8S0AAYFLsm5tD0q7ygzpNK9LjUw5EqIeB7SSYEmNR5JsI-qIJE3vfjyhabUDyjEDIIx9Bbn9XOjEIxrIpCyDrCHwEK2rakeGYBmWKv0IRwc8-fKDYUsYBFMjgA/s320/WindsweptCover.jpg" width="199" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>When I started out as a writer I was told by a very experienced editor, ‘keep description to a minimum, keep the action moving or you’ll bore your reader’. For me, <i>Windswept</i> just has too much description - poetic, painterly though it is, the need to be original is sometimes strained too far.</p><p> Description is wonderful in itself, but not for 300 pages. I wanted a personal narrative to tie together the accounts of sunrises, sunsets, storms, seascapes and mountain views. I wanted more probing into the deep ecology of the landscape, the need to change how we live in it for the future. There is very little about the author’s personal journey and her struggle with crofting. Was there any? </p><p>The Highland Clearances are skimmed over. And at the end of the book there’s no real conclusion – a good book, particularly in ecoliterature, should change your outlook just a little, offer hope or stir you into action. My favourite piece was the return of the corncrakes. On the whole I enjoyed the book, though I felt that an editor with a red pen and a firm hand would have improved it considerably. </p><p>Don’t let that put you off! Immerse yourself in ‘Life, Nature and Deep Time in the Scottish Highlands’. It is, after all, endorsed by Robert Macfarlane! </p><div><br /></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-91845969441392707932023-08-30T14:14:00.000+01:002023-08-30T14:14:47.373+01:00What Happened to Sally?<p> I first met the woman I'll call Sally when I was twenty, newly out of England, my first time on a plane. I was sitting in the lounge at Beirut airport, waiting out a twelve-hour transit, and I had a baby on my lap. Beirut airport was a confusing experience. I was fascinated by crowds of men talking staccato Arabic, some of the men wearing a European waistcoat over their long white robes, with a red Fez on their heads. There were women in black veils, the occasional Europeans - confident women in designer dresses with furs carried casually over their arms; the men in three-piece suits, followed by Arab boys with trolleys of luggage. </p><p>I became aware of a very tall woman with long blonde hair in a man's dishdashieh, a wide gold collar around her neck. She was striding up and down the rows of seats brandishing what looked like a very expensive camera taking photographs of the crowds. Sometimes she crouched down to get a better shot. She stopped in front of me and asked if she could photograph my small son, who was just beginning to toddle. Her accent was American - the full-on southern drawl, and her manner was bold almost to the point of rudeness. Feeling lost and vulnerable in a foreign country, I envied her assurance. </p><p>'What are you doing here?' she asked. I explained that I was flying out to the Gulf States to join a husband I hadn't seen for six months and had a long stopover. 'Then I must show you Beirut,' she said, impulsively. 'If you've never been here before you must see the most amazing city in the world.' I was commandeered, all protests silenced, and taken out of the airport, plane ticket and passport waved through by an airport official who seemed quite familiar with this force of nature who told me her name was Sally.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyXn76TFu1AmcMriELXF6rxPMfIau5-ZL1R96bS0KSq_PSlaE3GilRL-6mirfiekbVxBU_0qAMzxlMDQngHgVFsTvIqAgMyc0xrk1aS4GqvlrlUu1lkdIbQmqv35g2hkblWZl5dUSUUChyrs81gvJojXNhLmz3_0hNwt2w77vrosiGaPsBbG5OBpY4gH0/s435/Beirutc1970.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="305" data-original-width="435" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyXn76TFu1AmcMriELXF6rxPMfIau5-ZL1R96bS0KSq_PSlaE3GilRL-6mirfiekbVxBU_0qAMzxlMDQngHgVFsTvIqAgMyc0xrk1aS4GqvlrlUu1lkdIbQmqv35g2hkblWZl5dUSUUChyrs81gvJojXNhLmz3_0hNwt2w77vrosiGaPsBbG5OBpY4gH0/s320/Beirutc1970.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beirut in the 1970s before the war</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhynD328ZBH2TLGlcqLxGV7ROkyyNQ0wU3_CQes5K7DVTcKYSfr402nnkXVCO5lTbGLKKasVtjQt4fd1pgR1rmelw_AJ2xknPZTBb5xZHTG1U2St_Vs7_CsVskRtWQJmp3uF7CN-d0i5lQughpM3ZskyiC1GE-v6Xo2yJUxaJoKWkO-wS8aG4LqSzSAbIQ/s450/AftertheWar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="290" data-original-width="450" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhynD328ZBH2TLGlcqLxGV7ROkyyNQ0wU3_CQes5K7DVTcKYSfr402nnkXVCO5lTbGLKKasVtjQt4fd1pgR1rmelw_AJ2xknPZTBb5xZHTG1U2St_Vs7_CsVskRtWQJmp3uF7CN-d0i5lQughpM3ZskyiC1GE-v6Xo2yJUxaJoKWkO-wS8aG4LqSzSAbIQ/s320/AftertheWar.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beirut - after the war</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>She was in Beirut to take a series of photos for the <i>National Geographic</i>, she explained as she hailed an elderly Toyota taxi driven by an equally elderly man whose head was swathed in white, smoking a long cigarette out of the window. It was dark, but the city was ablaze with lights. She kept giving the driver instructions in a mixture of French and Arabic. At the Phoenicia Hotel he was ordered to wait while we went into the bar, where she bought me a glass of bourbon and exchanged banter with the barman who gave my son some sweets. Sally began to tell me details about her life. She'd been living in Venice, in a ground-floor apartment paid for by her Italian lover. But she'd had to leave after an exceptionally high Aqua Alta. She was a professional photographer and journalist - <i>Vogue, Time Magazine, Geographic</i> - and was now writing her first novel. She was a writer - everything I was trying to be. Sally seemed fascinated by my son, now asleep in my arms, and told me that she had a nine-year-old daughter who lived with her grandmother in Milwaukee.</p><p>Then it was back to the taxi and around the city, the corniche, where the bay stretched out into the Mediterranean, illuminated by the moon. We drove along the boulevards with their nightclubs and elegant Napoleonic facades, paused to look at the main square with its fountains and palm trees. Beirut, before it was shelled into rubble was one of the most beautiful cities. the meeting place, Sally told me, of European and Middle Eastern culture. 'But you just have to see the Roman temples at Baalbek by moonlight,' Sally said, made more enthusiastic by the bourbons she'd downed at the Phoenicia. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6NkhTcIopNn3ydooOZwbWWUp9Tq__4PRt1ZzIg6jixCDXQFjYgdDce3oi_IMxpybmi4xtqmfk3dqHBVKyIXDYux9A0wbvTtStEEEd1nwzeWVbFtRMMshex0Wwik1P0EuQOlVLCZwWwqzAIPWw6fUleOGHhhG2-7OAIgHDqJTaamHTHMGby1Q9FyXn3iU/s950/BaalbekSm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="950" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6NkhTcIopNn3ydooOZwbWWUp9Tq__4PRt1ZzIg6jixCDXQFjYgdDce3oi_IMxpybmi4xtqmfk3dqHBVKyIXDYux9A0wbvTtStEEEd1nwzeWVbFtRMMshex0Wwik1P0EuQOlVLCZwWwqzAIPWw6fUleOGHhhG2-7OAIgHDqJTaamHTHMGby1Q9FyXn3iU/s320/BaalbekSm.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Roman Temples at Baalbek</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>She gave instructions to the taxi driver who stopped suddenly in the middle of the street and demanded American dollars in advance for such a trip. Sally didn't have any and she seemed surprised to find that I didn't have any, not so much as a dinar of foreign currency on me, since I hadn't been expecting to need any. So we didn't go. But Sally pointed out to me the ring of mountains that edged the horizon, the moon just catching odd patches of white snow on their peaks.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH1p9trvgBjap6f3L7VVBi23nqfKHqhSEXCk77ENAVUPhzfLZ9kAyzwmj-zjwJTQlslF8tf4nNQuYesMv-a4kh5p93jc_gE_e7o3SwJcLdVciyToW9Tkw0-jcPJPJiwyNbvkCQZzd7YNI7Seoa9L-qpErRrVclC_WiyyXITv2SAfCWVG8ji3UJj5kV8Qs/s800/PhoeniciaHotal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="800" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH1p9trvgBjap6f3L7VVBi23nqfKHqhSEXCk77ENAVUPhzfLZ9kAyzwmj-zjwJTQlslF8tf4nNQuYesMv-a4kh5p93jc_gE_e7o3SwJcLdVciyToW9Tkw0-jcPJPJiwyNbvkCQZzd7YNI7Seoa9L-qpErRrVclC_WiyyXITv2SAfCWVG8ji3UJj5kV8Qs/s320/PhoeniciaHotal.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Phoenicia Hotel</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>'You must come back and see it all!' she said. The sky was lightening in the east when she dropped me back at the airport. I put two pound notes I found in my pocket into the driver's hand as we went back inside and hoped it would be enough of a contribution. </p><p>I thought I would never see the woman who had erupted into my life like a volcano, again. I flew to Dubai on the morning flight and then took a DC3 to Abu Dhabi where the plane landed on the beach. A man was waiting for me, a stranger I didn't recognise, bearded, tanned to a shade of mahogany. Our son shrank from his father and wouldn't go near him for days. We were staying in a small room in a half-built hotel near the seafront. There was only space to walk round the bed we had to share with our son. Electricity depended on an old generator; there was no air conditioning and water only for an hour or so twice a day, or when the tanker arrived from the Buraimi oasis. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCVPtYENhN13WIYlhESeHa-Cfw0Jqo9QF6QQC6aOC1JA8Skv_fO-wPVKi5ujB7-js1ul0XVrVUusFVud77uy2j6z7WaPDywyPyWWPRuV1a1VLXrFMOFsYm8MEY2LHImqpr3237yGLvmj1jqN1UqeD6tfq4o6DRlSqUJlCncxz13vZigymGdyeeLcsUXYE/s1920/CamelinDesert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1279" data-original-width="1920" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCVPtYENhN13WIYlhESeHa-Cfw0Jqo9QF6QQC6aOC1JA8Skv_fO-wPVKi5ujB7-js1ul0XVrVUusFVud77uy2j6z7WaPDywyPyWWPRuV1a1VLXrFMOFsYm8MEY2LHImqpr3237yGLvmj1jqN1UqeD6tfq4o6DRlSqUJlCncxz13vZigymGdyeeLcsUXYE/s320/CamelinDesert.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Camels in the Desert</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>We were invited to a small reception at the Embassy. I was one of only six European women in the Sheikhdom so most of the guests were men, very smart in their white tropical evening jackets. But there, half a head taller than anyone in the room, was Sally, glass in hand, this time wearing a very short blue silk shift she told everyone was Christian Dior and had been a gift from a lover in Paris. She pounced on me, found out where I was staying and became a frequent visitor. Sally said she was still working for the Geographic, living in a room behind the Suekh for the 'genuine experience'.</p><p>When we moved out of the hotel into a prefabricated house shipped from Denmark, complete with contents, she became an even more frequent visitor. My house had air conditioning, so where better to sit out the afternoon heat than my sitting room. She would stay for hours, talking mainly about herself and the novel she was writing. Her agent in the US was very excited by the idea, she said. It was going to be about this young woman who finds herself adrift in the Arab world. I began to wonder if I was being used for copy. </p><p>By now I was pregnant again and finding the climate exhausting. I longed to spend the afternoon siesta in my air-conditioned bedroom. I began to avoid Sally. I locked my front door and went to bed, pretending not to hear the car, the knocking on the fly screen. 'Why are you hiding from me?' she asked one day when we met in the Suekh. I lied and said I wasn't, but she knew.</p><p>One day, when my son was at nursery, full of remorse, I drove into the group of houses behind the Suekh to try to find out where she was staying. I asked a small boy, in my rapidly improving Arabic, where the American woman lived. He pointed to a small white building and made a rude gesture. A big Cadillac was parked outside with the gold, crossed swords of the royal family on the number plate. I went away and came back a few days later. </p><p>She asked me in, grudgingly, making apologies for her way of living. 'It's all very simple,' she said, waving her arm round the single, white-washed room. 'There's no distractions.' She offered me lukewarm Coca-Cola and sat down on a rug on the floor, gesturing me to sit down opposite her. Her typewriter sat on a tin trunk that seemed to be the only piece of furniture she had. The floor was loose sand, a camping stove stood in a corner, pots and pans and carrier bags of food were hung on hooks on the walls - to keep them away from the rats, she said in a jokey way. 'And the cockroaches.' </p><p>'What do you do for the bathroom?' I asked. She showed me a corner of the yard outside, which had a bamboo screen around it. Inside, a hole in the ground buzzed with flies. There was a barrel of water and a plastic scoop that served as a shower. I was shocked. I was also worried about her. Sometimes when I saw her she was drowsy and spaced out, and I had begun to suspect that she was taking drugs. Hashish was everywhere in the Suekh, and so was opium. I wondered if this was one of the reasons that we never met Sally at parties anymore - the European community had closed ranks against her. She was unpredictable, charming when she was in the mood but riotous when she'd had a few drinks and liable to cause scenes. My husband wanted me to cut the connection. 'Everyone else has,' he said. 'She's bad news.' But I couldn't. I was beginning to write my own novel, and she was a character in it.</p><p>When my daughter was born in the local hospital, Sally gave me a framed photograph and signed it 'To a fellow traveller and a faithful friend.'</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSt_YuBRkT5h8u7Der4eKs3FDYChQ3dBfw6AwL_iE3MXPe1DZ8igu7B4ZOI0t9rcxFPRQDFXeMNnTV-q7mlnZj7yfnfT5okauH_zYjXsKfDMXsestvtgrLC_tZCiTg1uvBmbp9IAaReDLDpsl2f03XhZdwIfWEtcaiqYAZrF5lg4CSjUDGpx1ZTDiSklA/s1379/Save0034a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1379" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSt_YuBRkT5h8u7Der4eKs3FDYChQ3dBfw6AwL_iE3MXPe1DZ8igu7B4ZOI0t9rcxFPRQDFXeMNnTV-q7mlnZj7yfnfT5okauH_zYjXsKfDMXsestvtgrLC_tZCiTg1uvBmbp9IAaReDLDpsl2f03XhZdwIfWEtcaiqYAZrF5lg4CSjUDGpx1ZTDiSklA/s320/Save0034a.jpg" width="232" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Then one day she came round to the house very agitated. The Sheikh had refused to sponsor her for another residence visa. She had to leave the country in two days' time. Would I keep her belongings for her until she had somewhere to stay and could send for them? Of course, I said. The next day she brought the tin trunk which contained, I was told, the Dior dress, the typewriter and the draft of her novel. 'I've sent the original to my agent,' she said. She had sold the gold necklace to pay for a flight to India.</p><p>I never saw her again. When we left Abu Dhabi I gave her trunk to the American Consul to keep for her. Later, back in England, a letter arrived, forwarded from Abu Dhabi by my husband's firm. It was already three weeks old. Would I wire her some money? Sally wrote. Urgently? She was destitute. Her cameras had been stolen and she was begging outside the airport in Delhi. Her mother had cut her off. I was her last hope. 'I need food,' she wrote, 'and a plane ticket out of here.'</p><p>I had no money of my own. I showed the letter to my husband, who refused to send her anything. 'The US Embassy will help her,' he said. 'It's her own fault she's in such a state.'</p><p>And that was the last contact I had with Sally - though I always hoped to find some trace of her in magazines, publishing news, the <i>Geographic</i>; but she had vanished. I'm still haunted by her. </p>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-17677033063476928302022-05-07T00:11:00.000+01:002022-05-07T00:11:07.334+01:00Wild Places: Kathleen Mansfield and Flowers<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi_nhssiE-Kh4Oyauu-oArUeWfHo84ngiElyA4iM57RbT4lyH-SPVtlb7bctrVIF05ZIGAEsbqyzcsHmRHsPb815xiF6-BavZ81f7rs1yoB1P_0L9_mBVjeFtM1ilD3uJ3HTHkC1mkdUNT4Zm42r85wbxncNtQ8QOMZY3osBLS4ueN-PeB1FJlvGg-/s480/18-kathman-1911%20(Small).JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="338" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhi_nhssiE-Kh4Oyauu-oArUeWfHo84ngiElyA4iM57RbT4lyH-SPVtlb7bctrVIF05ZIGAEsbqyzcsHmRHsPb815xiF6-BavZ81f7rs1yoB1P_0L9_mBVjeFtM1ilD3uJ3HTHkC1mkdUNT4Zm42r85wbxncNtQ8QOMZY3osBLS4ueN-PeB1FJlvGg-/s320/18-kathman-1911%20(Small).JPG" width="225" /></a></div><br />When I open my eyes Mansfield is sitting on the end of my bed looking at me in that dark, accusing way she has. Everyone has their own haunting, and she is mine. Tonight, I’m sleeping in a budget hotel in Wellington listening to a category two cyclone throwing an ocean’s worth of rain at the window like gravel. I should be working on a new story, but I haven’t written anything worth keeping for weeks. Mansfield disapproves of my inertia.<p></p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>‘Shouldn’t you be doing something?’ she says. ‘Don’t you think this is a complete waste of your life?’</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>She’s holding out a bunch of primroses arranged in a blue bowl. A still life; <i>une nature morte</i>. They smell of the forest, damp moss, undergrowth – The Wild. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>‘You know they’ll die, of course,’ she says, arching one perfect eyebrow. ‘They always do.’ And then she vanishes in a waft of yellow broom and white manuka.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sometimes she brings chrysanthemum blooms floating in a black Japanese dish. Yellow chrysanthemums remind her of sunflowers, a painting by Van Gogh, a new way of writing. On another occasion she brought me purple lilac in a green jug. Lilacs are for grief, she told me, their scent a memory keeper from the time she travelled on a train across Germany, pregnant with the baby that didn’t live. Lilacs are for abandonment. Lilacs are Garnett Trowell.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Once she appeared in a navy blue suit, very elegant, with an ivory marguerite brooch on the lapel, flaunting a daisy ring she said had been given to her by a new lover. I didn’t know whether to believe her, since Middleton Murry never seemed the kind of man to buy jewellery, or to be fond of daisies.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>‘The mind I love must have wild places,’ she told me extravagantly, when I asked about the lovers who had, one by one, proved unsatisfactory. There had to be ‘little flowers planted by the wind’, and ‘dark damsons’ bruising themselves in the tangled grass. A cultivated garden was death to creativity, she insisted, impossible to order perfect paragraphs from something already pruned naked. </p><p><br /></p><p>I’m imagining the motel room on Tinakori Road. I can’t go back there, any more than she could. A global pandemic, not TB this time, keeps me here. ‘You should be writing,’ she says again. But I can’t write, can’t breathe. Pure panic. Mansfield knows all about that.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I let her tell me about Karori, about the wild garden around the house, and the pear trees in the orchard. She talks about the aloe, that flowered only once every ten years. ‘The very essence of truth’. All that fertility, a bud pushing up inside the skull, finding its way out of darkness, shaking the flower free. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The motel is quite close to the Botanical Gardens, now manicured, well managed, but, in Mansfield’s time the gardens were close to the bush, where darker, more disturbing forms waited in the margins of her imagination. They lurked inside her body too, throwing an ink bottle, a book, switching identities from Maori to Pakeha and back. ‘You are a little savage from New Zealand,’ someone told her, and she was pleased. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Neurologists say that the sense which stimulates memory the most is that of scent. A whiff of fragrance can take us straight back to a particular place or time. Mansfield is fond of an expensive perfume called Genet de Fleurie. It takes her back to Thorndon, and the hills where broom and gorse bushes grew like flocks of golden sheep, where she loved to run wild when she was a girl. She has never been so free since. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p>It’s spring in Europe, and the wild jonquils are seeding themselves among the rocks in the alpine meadows, and swaying in yellow clouds further down in fields grown for perfume. Mansfield is in southern France, mourning the death of her brother. She is alone, once more abandoned, drawing the scent of jonquils into her rotting lungs. By now, a quarter of the population of Europe has died from what her lover refers to as the ‘romantic disease’. In the past it has claimed the Brontë sisters, Keats, and one of Mansfield’s favourite Russian writers, Chekhov, but Mansfield is determined to survive. The elusive Middleton Murry is persuaded to return and, in the market, she buys six bunches of violets to welcome her reluctant lover, ‘in a state of lively, terrified joy’. She rents a house with an almond tree in the garden, economises on food, lives on omelettes and oranges, and is often hungry. Then comes the agony of another parting. Another disappointment. The sound of the gate closing behind her. <i>Pas de nougat pour le Noel</i>. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But now she is experimenting with the word ‘husband’. And she is pale, fragile as the violets she takes from the collar of her coat and crushes in quick, nervous movements. Is he faithful? ‘There are letters,’ she says. They lie on the hall table like fatal white petals.</p><p><br /></p><p>The scent that takes me home is the astringent smell of sphagnum moss and pine bark, the sweetness of moorland gorse, with bitter undertones of peat. The fox-coloured hills I grew up on were rich with these odours. I wrote my first poem under a larch tree, breathing them in. This was the primal imprint, like Thorndon, or Karori. You can find echoes of it in other places, but never so strong, with so much life in the breath of it. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Mansfield is critical of my poetry and reminds me sternly to remember to be accurate – the exact word – nothing else will do. The ‘detail of detail - the life of life’. She herself is forensic.</p><p><span> <span> </span></span>‘Colour. Pink. 5 petalled flower with seed purse darker colour, thick reddish stem, small leaf like a bramble leaf. The seed purse is highly glazed, it is – in 3, one long wing & 2 little ones. Attached to it is the 5 petalled flower. It always falls in delicate clusters.’</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p>She frowns at my cheap hotel room. Her life has been a procession of rooms like this, she says; worn carpets, faded roses on the wallpaper, swelling and reddening in the middle of a feverish night. ‘I know I shall die in one,’ she tells me. ‘I shall stand in front of a crochet dressing-table cover, pick up a long invisible hairpin left by the last “lady” and die with disgust’. In a more comfortable hotel in Cornwall, her friend Anne Rice brings a bunch of flesh-and-blood red roses. They bloom in Katherine’s cheeks, on her tongue, and on the white lawn squares she tucks up her sleeves. She tells me about her ideal house, the Heron, which must have a magnolia in the garden, wisteria on the wall, and a medlar tree. And there must certainly be bees.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>‘Why flowers?’ I ask her. ‘Why?’ She shows me a moonlit pear tree at the bottom of the garden. It is perfect, but the blossom is already falling, rotting down into the grass, leaving just the promise of fruit.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p>From a chalet in the alps, drifted under snow, Mansfield erects a marquee in a garden in Wellington, orders lilies and roses, trails her fingers through the lavender that grows beside the path. At the bay she runs to the sea, through blue grass and toi-toi, sea pinks and dew-pearled nasturtiums, swims out into the cold, blue waters towards the snow-tipped mountains of the South Island. Mansfield’s husband talks of nettles and danger, quoting Shakespeare. But it’s January and she has already escaped him. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>‘What was it like?’ I ask her. ‘Really?’ </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>She shrugs her shoulders, her face a mask. She’s holding out a notebook that opens to reveal pressed flowers between the pages; petals that still seem to move and breathe in the draught from the cyclone-battered window. She raises another, enigmatic eyebrow. ‘You can still find me here, can’t you?’</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And there is Kezia, admiring the moon-white cosmias grown from a 3d packet of seed, now as tall as herself, but ‘frail as butterflies’, their petals fluttering ‘like wings in the gently breathing air’. </p><p><br /></p><p>© Kathleen Jones 2021</p><div><br /></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-32456162935192566122021-03-12T14:04:00.001+00:002021-03-12T14:05:37.226+00:00Racism, Misogyny, and a Cobra in the Bath<p> </p>After we left the Middle East, scouting round for something else to do, my husband met a man who owned a small civil engineering consultancy in West Africa, nominally fronted by a Ghanaian with political connections. Chris was offered a job in charge of their office in Accra, with oversight of contracts in Nigeria as well. If he was successful, he would be offered a partnership. He relished the opportunity to work for himself and Africa sounded very attractive. But the position was conditional on his wife’s social suitability, as the job would entail a lot of entertaining. I had to be vetted.<div><br /></div><div> I left the children with a baby-sitter and went to London for this ordeal by misogyny. We were taken out to a high-end restaurant for a meal. I wore a yellow silk shift dress I’d made myself – very simple but displaying an intricate gold collar necklace that had come from the jewellery suekh in Dubai, courtesy of one of the Sheikhs.
My apparent metamorphosis from gawky girl to young executive wife was almost complete, at least on the outside. When I left home at sixteen I had never eaten in a restaurant, but now, thanks to all those Embassy dinners in the Middle East, I knew the intricacies of cutlery and crystal and the basic etiquette of a formal social occasion. I spoke only when spoken to, watched my vowels, and only picked up a fork once my host’s wife had done so. I feigned an interest in the different models of Rolls Royce being discussed and made polite noises at the high Tory views expressed by Mr B-H, my husband’s future employer. If everyone worked hard enough, apparently, no one need be poor. It was all about ‘graft’. Chris told them I was a farmer’s daughter from the Lake District; I was suitably vague about my background. At the end of the evening I felt like a complete fraud. </div><div><br /></div><div> I must have passed the test because Chris was offered the job the following day and we celebrated. I would have gone almost anywhere to have a permanent home again. ‘I do hope you’re going to be safe,’ my mother said over the phone. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I told her, ‘You’re such a worrier!’ It was all going to be fine. Ghana was a stable country, which had until recently been ruled, after independence from Britain, by Kwame Nkrumah. Everything I read led me to believe that it was civilised. There was a photograph of a colonial style villa with a mango tree in the garden. It would be another adventure. For my mother it was another bitter separation, but she never questioned it because she believed that it was a woman’s duty to go with her husband. Before I left, she gave me her war-time engagement ring, which she could no longer wear on her arthritic fingers. I didn’t see her again for nearly three years. </div><div><br /></div><div> We flew to Accra on a Ghana Airways flight that was different to any other I’d been on. The plane was battered and shabby, the organisation of the boarding procedure chaotic. Passengers were fighting over seat allocations and luggage space. One of them had a parrot in a cage. The plane took off from Heathrow five hours late and it was pitch dark when we landed. From the window of the plane I could see the lights on the apron – each beam a whirling column of insects. When the cabin doors were opened the humidity and the smell poured in. It was primitive, raw and so thick I could taste the stench of rotting vegetation, refuse, sewage and hot, wet earth. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1NM_gUdsAqqPKs4xWs_ygwMqlTzD8IRJT3A6pSQ-0A6cNZntfBa9EPUsCIouwZoP3VJK1BK07BeXoA50BpQ8CnDZVt9UxNVzvopQVV8HKVky-uXGwUBzHj7QJntPsATMNy9_xq1aLd1Y/s1024/AccraGhana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="498" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1NM_gUdsAqqPKs4xWs_ygwMqlTzD8IRJT3A6pSQ-0A6cNZntfBa9EPUsCIouwZoP3VJK1BK07BeXoA50BpQ8CnDZVt9UxNVzvopQVV8HKVky-uXGwUBzHj7QJntPsATMNy9_xq1aLd1Y/s320/AccraGhana.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div> On the evening of our first day, we were taken to the British Club and formally enrolled. There was a swimming pool, tennis and squash courts and a small theatre. Broad verandas were laid out with steamer chairs and bamboo tables in the shade of mature palm trees. Black waiters in white uniforms walked around with cocktails on trays. It was like a movie set. The faces of the guests were, without exception, white. ‘Are there any Ghanaian members?’ I asked. ‘Oh goodness, no!’ was the answer. ‘This isn’t their sort of thing at all. It’s not that we exclude them, of course, they just don’t want to join.’ It was a conversation that revealed a racism so deeply entrenched in the system it could easily be ignored. </div><div><br /></div><div> I quickly fell out of love with Africa. It had great beauty, but also a frenetic, almost obscene fertility. The floors of the house had to be mopped with paraffin every week to prevent termites from eating the wood. The legs of the bed sat in little jars of paraffin to prevent the ants from devouring us. A preying mantis, a foot long, sat behind the toilet door ambushing mosquitoes. The rows of beans I planted in the garden were eaten by pests before they had a chance to grow. One morning there was a baby cobra curled up in the bath, having crawled up the drain. After the first coup there was chaos and violence everywhere I looked. It was not unusual to drive into town and pass a dead body lying by the side of the road, sometimes for days. One of our neighbours was stabbed to death when they disturbed thieves in the house during the night.</div><div> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpCJQ4yNXHQoesa51oJcdF1lzT_Qiaxpil8DuzqAh71yK9YoNYY7rmwBvaTXLwUgzjXj-FbZlysGeW02Pqija1yAAI1VK7tVuQTMRd6u1fHcuFqYcDEVkRYWTTDOf1t7mfv85rpSHwNok/s550/cobra-in-the-bath.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpCJQ4yNXHQoesa51oJcdF1lzT_Qiaxpil8DuzqAh71yK9YoNYY7rmwBvaTXLwUgzjXj-FbZlysGeW02Pqija1yAAI1VK7tVuQTMRd6u1fHcuFqYcDEVkRYWTTDOf1t7mfv85rpSHwNok/s320/cobra-in-the-bath.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div> Six months into our contract, I was arrested by a policeman at gunpoint as I drove the children to school one morning. He held up his hand and stepped out into the road at a traffic crossing in the centre of town. When I stopped, he climbed into the front seat of the car and ordered me to drive to the police station. I had been observed driving dangerously, he said. But half a mile up the road he began to tell me that he was only a poor man and I was a rich European woman and he didn’t really want to arrest me at all. If I was generous to him, he would let me go. I had the children’s school fees in my bag. With shaking hands I took the roll of money out and gave it to him. He got out of the car, put his gun in its holster, and walked away. I was never sure that he was a real policeman; there were a number of cases of fake policemen committing crimes. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyJBFH2G7uT2_Zz2AN5dqqZVLdDeclmmPQ0vP2qOuCqrY05bJQyJE3VVE0H6MgiKGQsXfz3529rrMSQK3qkipOLO1R5sKRkbNdPpFISRM1oF1giuoJ-gPbp38C5s579WMinka2UsARNdo/s1024/ABuriBotGarden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyJBFH2G7uT2_Zz2AN5dqqZVLdDeclmmPQ0vP2qOuCqrY05bJQyJE3VVE0H6MgiKGQsXfz3529rrMSQK3qkipOLO1R5sKRkbNdPpFISRM1oF1giuoJ-gPbp38C5s579WMinka2UsARNdo/s320/ABuriBotGarden.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div> In colonial society racism and misogyny go together. I experienced both from the clients Chris was expected to entertain. We took one of them, an Africaan engineer from South Africa, out to a nightclub called La Rene, where he leered at the hostesses, called them ‘Mammies’ and the waiters ‘Kaffir’. He had a hard, young face with little mean eyes. He claimed, within earshot of the staff, that black people were animals – even the dogs could smell them in the bush. I had to swallow my outrage and smile politely, for the sake of Chris’s business, when I really wanted to kick his teeth in. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw3H2vAGtqoOT16cYbdL6SnyqIQqIpKHwtbxTcgVS35AmAhVA-6LrTPik8nMKDezGvsYw1ri0heHCv_JsfI6VdkzDSZMUgr1wPFuDTzPyxhYKlWPTI1CTYWPSDrRFpKGOhMDDtb3aj3c8/s736/Colonial+villa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="490" data-original-width="736" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw3H2vAGtqoOT16cYbdL6SnyqIQqIpKHwtbxTcgVS35AmAhVA-6LrTPik8nMKDezGvsYw1ri0heHCv_JsfI6VdkzDSZMUgr1wPFuDTzPyxhYKlWPTI1CTYWPSDrRFpKGOhMDDtb3aj3c8/s320/Colonial+villa.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div> Another man, head of a big corporation, who had been in Africa for more than thirty years, invited us to dinner in his palatial colonial-era residence. We drove up a long, curving driveway between immaculate lawns, with fragrant hedges of Oleander and Hibiscus. The mansion was old style, a heritage building of polished floors, carved screens and antique furniture. The dinner was formal. Every chair had a servant behind it in a white suit and turban, with a tea cloth over their arms, standing to attention like a military platoon. I was struggling with mosquitoes on a particularly sticky night. My host noticed and signalled to the man behind my chair. ‘Boy! Fetch the <i>Off</i>’. </div><div> The man returned with a canister of insecticide on a silver drinks’ tray. As I reached up for it, my host commanded, ‘Boy! Spray madam’s legs.’ </div><div> I felt utterly humiliated by the sight of this elderly, dignified man, kneeling on the floor to spray me with mosquito repellant.</div><div> ‘You have to treat them with authority,’ my host announced to the dinner table, presumably for my benefit. ‘I treat mine like children. I take care of them, but every now and then they must be chastised.’</div><div> His idea of punishment was to slap their outstretched hands. It was an extension of the colonial model. Ghana, like many other former colonies, was regarded as a ‘young’ country, not grown-up enough to be able to look after its own affairs without the oversight of its colonial betters. Political and economic chaos was regarded as a kind of juvenile delinquency. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoxJkJSALQF5Bj9AYWcJCXzV4TNBHiz8bfMKh1QYs8sIFTGMEBP-ImQ4VTzxfR8NnBhwfSOvVay0hfAgFzmTy-6jd5gDRESSs15Ex42Gf2hZAq21Ui94_VFEs_W2uggdoM01sM_Op5C6g/s551/ColonelAcheampong.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="551" data-original-width="444" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoxJkJSALQF5Bj9AYWcJCXzV4TNBHiz8bfMKh1QYs8sIFTGMEBP-ImQ4VTzxfR8NnBhwfSOvVay0hfAgFzmTy-6jd5gDRESSs15Ex42Gf2hZAq21Ui94_VFEs_W2uggdoM01sM_Op5C6g/s320/ColonelAcheampong.png" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Colonel Acheampong announcing his takeover on the radio</div><div><br /></div><div> After the second attempted coup, as the country tumbled into bankruptcy, the English owner of the company came out on a visit to assess the situation. Chris told me that I had to be on my best behaviour to impress. He was still on probation, hoping to become a full partner. I was expected to entertain Mr B-H at our house, alongside a few other selected guests. Finding ingredients suitable for a dinner party was a challenge without foreign currency. After a visit to the market I planned to have baked fish with creamed yam, a kind of dumpling called fufu with spicy palm oil stew, plantain crisps, a salad of tomatoes and onions, and coconut pudding. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWt2HrhmAL5JfFK31h34Ikjsj0D4H3ItUA5vTAPbqsKGbtPQLLGwU9ECMlcqIpjhEHyfEaok3E-H7gfHCqLThX3jwnVB10648S6TkRDaqzb8rel4Uk14b8kPjtdkgskAx6CG5wOoFQmgc/s1024/marketwomen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWt2HrhmAL5JfFK31h34Ikjsj0D4H3ItUA5vTAPbqsKGbtPQLLGwU9ECMlcqIpjhEHyfEaok3E-H7gfHCqLThX3jwnVB10648S6TkRDaqzb8rel4Uk14b8kPjtdkgskAx6CG5wOoFQmgc/s320/marketwomen.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div> That morning, my Head Boy scalded his arm in the kitchen and was taken to hospital. Desperate for help with a menu that was beyond my skill level, a friend leant me her cook and her ‘small boy’ as a waiter. As this was a dinner jacket affair I got out the big silver platters and asked the cook to make sure they were clean before using them for food. Then I went to get dressed. It was a hot night and I chose to wear a dress with a long skirt, split to thigh level, very flattering and cool.
Everything appeared to go quite well. I hadn’t been able to find any wine, so I had made a rum and fruit punch – the only way to make the local spirit drinkable. The guests were quite merry. The cook and the small boy managed the silver service really well, balancing the salvers on their palms high above their shoulders and using two spoons to scoop the food onto the plate. I noticed, as they served the creamed yam that each scoop was green underneath and realised, with a sinking heart, that the cooks had cleaned the silver with polish and neglected to wash the dishes before putting the food on them. What was I supposed to do? It was the main part of the meal and had taken all day to prepare. I decided that I simply wasn’t going to notice and if any of the guests did, they could simply leave the food on the side of the plate. Drowned in the bright crimson palm oil sauce it was possible to miss it. But worse was to come. </div><div><br /></div><div> Halfway through the main course I felt a hand on my left knee. As I was sitting at right angles to Mr B-H, who was at the head of the table, it could only be him. I froze. The hand began to work its way up my bare thigh, to the edge of my pants. I looked indignantly at my husband’s boss but he wasn’t looking at me. He was talking to the man on the opposite side of the table while he tried to wriggle his fingers underneath the elastic. He had a satisfied smile on his face as he talked, and I knew that he was enjoying my discomfiture, knowing that I would never dare to make a fuss in front of clients; knowing that I would never jeopardise my husband’s job. Feeling sick, I excused myself, got up and went to the bathroom. </div><div><br /></div><div> I felt angry for days afterwards and could hardly bring myself to be polite for the remaining time of his stay. On his final night he told Chris he would like to go to the nightclub ‘for a little fun’ and I claimed a headache and let them go alone. Being sexually assaulted by the boss seemed to be just one of the things an executive wife was expected to handle as part of the job description.</div><div><br /></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-64904691697465753272021-03-08T12:54:00.009+00:002021-03-08T13:16:24.026+00:00The 'Trailing' Wife: International Women's Day<p>By the time my third child was born at the age of 28, I'd moved 29 times, visited 18 countries and lived in 4 of them. The logistics of packing and moving, and establishing a functional family life wherever we were, was always left to me. It was what women did. During ten years of marriage I'd lived in hotels, B&Bs, with relatives, in rat-infested flats, cockroach-ridden Arabian villas, African bungalows, and an assortment of rented, furnished accommodation. I was what was known as a 'trailing' wife. I followed my husband wherever he went, dragging the children with me. They lived it too and there were some very happy times. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaZJ7kOhtR9pFbfwHbT858N0Q-l2ncvmyUcenK5zxF0wDzXvaGVcAM47ibhJVW2bpp_xZYiSm8pa5_jqEQGtmqhXv0BRrZDW-qscBjDTMD_PQqsNE6oOqy4qReEAnlkWi3X6bRb9l5VOQ/s950/DPMsmall.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="636" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaZJ7kOhtR9pFbfwHbT858N0Q-l2ncvmyUcenK5zxF0wDzXvaGVcAM47ibhJVW2bpp_xZYiSm8pa5_jqEQGtmqhXv0BRrZDW-qscBjDTMD_PQqsNE6oOqy4qReEAnlkWi3X6bRb9l5VOQ/s320/DPMsmall.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;">A beach in the United Arab Emirates</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>But there were other times too. By the time the older children were 10 they had been to 7 different schools. We lived out of suitcases and steamer trunks. we coped with military coups, power cuts in 48 degrees of heat, economic collapse, and accident and illness in third world countries without proper medical facilities. It left its mark on all of us, physically and mentally. But it made us resilient. When I was growing up on a remote hill farm in the Lake District, I never saw myself bribing my way onto an aeroplane during a coup in an African state dissolving into chaos. This is an extract from a memoir:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHhk_cqgyNBU3Ur0hEs-SyJk7r2aQ7YmIqHnh2xHY-LCOKhCoLvubipLL-qxHTMKHQRWR4POnZ464dsZWTbUvv_HSw2WdjLzCRmy29S1yJz2bqnTAoYWnp_7pvbTZwJ-Nvs1VnXIRU6ig/s1000/NurseryGhana.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="614" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHhk_cqgyNBU3Ur0hEs-SyJk7r2aQ7YmIqHnh2xHY-LCOKhCoLvubipLL-qxHTMKHQRWR4POnZ464dsZWTbUvv_HSw2WdjLzCRmy29S1yJz2bqnTAoYWnp_7pvbTZwJ-Nvs1VnXIRU6ig/s320/NurseryGhana.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Mrs Boshung's Nursery School, Ghana before the coup</div><p>The peaceful situation after the first military coup didn’t last. Within months there was a counter-coup, a rebellion by rival military officers, and this time not so benign. My husband, Chris, was in Nigeria, negotiating another contract and unable to return when the country’s borders were abruptly closed. I realised something had happened when my steward, Richard, didn’t come to work, so I turned on the radio to hear the familiar martial music. The telephone network was down, so I walked down to a neighbour’s house to be told that soldiers were looting the town and I should go home and lock myself in. At lunchtime Paul, the garden boy, arrived and hammered on the sliding door. I let him in. He looked pale and was carrying two machetes. He gave one to me. ‘The soldiers are coming,’ he said, ‘you must make everything safe.’ We made sure every window was closed, the curtains drawn, every door locked and furniture moved against them. Paul sat inside the kitchen door, machete in hand, and I got the children into their bedroom, barricaded the door and crouched on the floor, with the other machete, knowing that I might have to use it. Then the soldiers came, running round the house, banging on the walls, running their rifle butts over the bars, firing the guns into the air, shouting ‘Yi! Yi! Yi!’. I pushed the children under the bed and shielded them with my body. And then the soldiers were gone, but we could hear the gunfire out in the cantonments. Some of the empty houses were ransacked. </p><p><br /></p><p>The coup failed, but it was two days before Chris could get back from Lagos. The schools and shops were closed for a week. Even though things began to go back to normal our lives changed very quickly. There were military roadblocks on every road, the banks didn’t always have money when you went in to withdraw cash. The airports were crowded with foreign nationals returning home. It was announced that, because of the corruption of the previous government, the country was bankrupt. The cedi ceased to be traded on the international money exchanges. The IMF proposed stringent terms for a loan, which the military council refused. Imported goods no longer arrived. Medicines, including anti-malarial drugs, were unobtainable and, overnight, essential food vanished from the supermarket shelves. Local fruit and vegetables were still on sale in the market, though prices doubled, but all the imported meat, cheese and other staple foods, cereal, dairy products, sugar, flour, rice, coffee and tea, as well as washing and hygiene products became a memory. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj04BGwKD-5MVQkH_skOcuOjzNsMks6vINOEt0NcmmDQWHMPf9kScJXSBau5vMDRU6WbaaelGNCeCTEkZPQ-vPAsI1RVR96oe-RCUFESzvoQHsoW3O6Jpf3yNeP2jfKAjUvJgaeRRv1wEI/s740/RiotsinGhana.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="740" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj04BGwKD-5MVQkH_skOcuOjzNsMks6vINOEt0NcmmDQWHMPf9kScJXSBau5vMDRU6WbaaelGNCeCTEkZPQ-vPAsI1RVR96oe-RCUFESzvoQHsoW3O6Jpf3yNeP2jfKAjUvJgaeRRv1wEI/s320/RiotsinGhana.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;">Riots in Ghana</p><p>Hotels and restaurants closed. Only the restaurant belonging to the Minister of the Interior, who had a Swiss wife, remained open for anyone who could afford the prices. My diary records being taken out to dinner by a client and stealing the sugar lumps out of the bowl on the table. On April 4th the car broke down, and a month later I wrote, ‘Still no car for lack of spare parts. . . we are without indefinitely’. But the flame trees were vibrant with red plumes and the orchid tree was a mass of creamy bloom. Long-tailed Whyddah birds performed cheerful acrobatics on the telephone wires every morning.
The government brought in rationing for essentials and a flourishing black market sprang up for goods smuggled in from neighbouring Togo and Sierre Leone. </p><p><br /></p><p>Anyone paid in hard currency could drive over the border, fill up their car boot at Carrrefour and drive back, bribing the border guards with cigarettes and whisky. Because we were paid in local currency we didn’t have that option, and inflation meant that Chris’s salary halved in value overnight. He employed a boy at the office whose job it was to scour the town for food. The Foreign Office advised all those who could to leave. Chris still had six months to run on his contract, which we were expected to fulfill, before the firm would pay for a flight back to the UK. I could have left with the children, but there was no home to go to and no money to pay for us to live anywhere but Ghana. I realised that I was totally dependent on my husband. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx3aGRBF3PvRdwSxw0Sj7Pwd1zxghbqwAsV26uixpdZlpGXVTHBGeFZLsZL1YpmZGNnscKLTu4IWGVb_k1N0VLU1hTEqS2nkxUBcnDUs2OTtyxcHIJtVIzrAYioOX2EUw3jg91lYhpD70/s1000/jones+family-072.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx3aGRBF3PvRdwSxw0Sj7Pwd1zxghbqwAsV26uixpdZlpGXVTHBGeFZLsZL1YpmZGNnscKLTu4IWGVb_k1N0VLU1hTEqS2nkxUBcnDUs2OTtyxcHIJtVIzrAYioOX2EUw3jg91lYhpD70/s320/jones+family-072.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;">Travelling children: a railway station somewhere in China</p><p>Pets were being abandoned by fleeing Europeans. I went with a friend to rescue two cats from a neighbour’s house, and we acquired a guard dog from another. He was a strange mixture of bush dog and long-haired English Sheepdog. The children loved him but, we discovered too late, that he’d been trained to be very aggressive with people whose skin was not white. As we had many Ghanaian friends, this was embarrassing. It was also difficult for the staff. I had to lock Watson on the veranda before my steward, Richard, would clean the house. But there was no doubt that I felt safer. No policeman was going to hi-jack my car with Watson on the back seat; and any thief was going to think twice about breaking into the house with him there. At the British club, the pool began to turn an unhealthy shade of green as chlorine supplies failed to arrive. The steamer chairs were empty and, when you ordered a drink at the bar, you first had to ask what they had behind the counter. Very few Europeans were left. We huddled together like survivors of a shipwreck. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiQFUQm7_vdY6bH58P8C6FlATGC1wgGcu__4uCxxHX1ZRSDqIGJ0mgIB08W8VxIoFb9JN3uvhPnsujicICO9o07g7RetG1klgpqHdkLIjye81ogqmjKgQGblZwzG1z223YSWv3prDT4xA/s1024/AccraGhana.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="498" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiQFUQm7_vdY6bH58P8C6FlATGC1wgGcu__4uCxxHX1ZRSDqIGJ0mgIB08W8VxIoFb9JN3uvhPnsujicICO9o07g7RetG1klgpqHdkLIjye81ogqmjKgQGblZwzG1z223YSWv3prDT4xA/s320/AccraGhana.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;">The Centre of Accra</p><p>The next attempted coup happened a few months later as the military officers argued amongst themselves. One of the Colonels wanted to set up an interim civilian administration pending democratic elections. By coincidence, Chris was again absent. An Italian friend, Piero, had planned a trip up-country to check on his timber suppliers and had offered to take Chris, and my son David, with him. They intended to go to the far north, on the border with Burkina Faso, where the land turned into savannah and there was a lot of wildlife, giraffes, elephants and leopards. This was a Boys’ Own adventure. Piero argued that his car wasn’t big enough to take me and two-year-old Peta as well. Chris thought she wasn’t old enough for such a rough expedition anyway. </p><p><br /></p><p> Two days after they left I woke up and found that none of the staff had come to work. I gave Peta her breakfast, listening to the martial music on the radio, and recognised the familiar sound of gunfire in the distance. Surrounded now by empty houses, remembering the last time, I felt very afraid. I made up my mind to leave if I could. There had been roadblocks on the main roads since the previous coup, so driving out wasn’t an option, even if I’d had enough fuel and a reliable car. The telephone line was still connected, so I rang the airport and was told it was open for internal flights, though the borders had been closed. I grabbed a suitcase, threw some clothes into it, ransacked the house for whatever money I could find, let the dog out into the garden, put my daughter into the car and drove to the airport using only the back streets. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_Fd9tiPGbRsqhBkpuNZ0-9r0W3DwkJ_JqVct7qm1Q1ggn6V09lj3URYAxfPkHHx_lEK3An1a4h9Kjic3Y62MKU8PHr4Xg6YCF8hgQnd3-vvx9rItknViYAn9i8XhOkj1KncLaSyI0rTE/s1600/GhanaMap.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1327" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_Fd9tiPGbRsqhBkpuNZ0-9r0W3DwkJ_JqVct7qm1Q1ggn6V09lj3URYAxfPkHHx_lEK3An1a4h9Kjic3Y62MKU8PHr4Xg6YCF8hgQnd3-vvx9rItknViYAn9i8XhOkj1KncLaSyI0rTE/s320/GhanaMap.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>At the airport, the departure lounge was rammed with people. I asked the ticket clerk what planes were leaving and was told there was only one flight for Kumasi in the north, already boarding. </p><p>‘I would like a ticket please,’ I said. </p><p> ‘But it is full madam,’ he replied. </p><p> I put some money on the desk. ‘I have to be on that flight,’ I said. ‘Please?’ Peta had begun to cry and I picked her up. I put some more money on the desk and then some more, feeling suddenly quite desperate. Eventually he took the cash and reluctantly issued me with a ticket. </p><p><br /></p><p>The plane was a WWII Douglas DC 3. There were holes in the fuselage. The pilot, a veteran Australian with blood-shot eyes, was going through the cabin, redistributing the passengers to balance the weight. He kept counting and re-counting them. I kept very quiet, sitting on one of the crew seats at the back with Peta on my lap. He asked two African women for their tickets, which were in order, but didn’t check mine. Still puzzled, he closed the doors and soon we were taxiing out to the runway. I felt nauseous with relief. As we skimmed the rain forest, I could see the tops of the kapok trees through the floor, but we skidded safely down the runway in Kumasi. </p><p><br /></p><p> I had no plan beyond getting out of Accra and knew no one in the north. After we landed, I shared a cigarette and a can of warm Fanta with the pilot on the grass beside the runway. He was curious to know what I was doing there and, when I told him the story, he suggested I go into town and enquire about the government guest house. I remembered that there was a branch of the firm’s bank, Standard and Chartered, in Kumasi, so I took a taxi there. The manager, a smiling man called Joe, came to the reception desk and said, ‘I’ve just seen your husband!’ Chris, David and Piero, were staying at the guest house on the edge of town. </p><p><br /></p><p>We spent the night in the guest house, discussing what we were going to do. Peta and I could have stayed there for a few more days before returning to Accra, but the situation was so unstable, we couldn’t be sure that Kumasi wouldn’t be affected. I was also reluctant to go back on my own. In the end it was decided that I should go with them. After some juggling of luggage, fuel cans and an improvised roof rack, we all crammed into Piero’s old Peugeot and headed north for Bolgatanga and Burkina Faso.</p>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-7727285119472879982021-02-02T23:53:00.002+00:002021-02-02T23:54:43.679+00:00Jessie Kesson: The White Bird Passes <p> </p>I was recently introduced to the work of Scottish author Jessie Kesson. She was a novelist, poet and playwright who did a lot of work for the BBC, but also a nature writer and friend of Nan Shepherd. Jessie was the illegitimate child of a woman who lived in the tenements of Glasgow and, through poverty, drifted into casual prostitution. Jessie was taken into care and brought up in orphanages while her mother died slowly and painfully of syphilis.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEJk5pA4gndXhwZk1FC12LGmnSc6eEhULz1v7A_Wa_TuSSjluMx0xboRhl_5GiLpdUO-RVhAOq20vPPIdBx_WPF9ZhT4AeVUG_HEnU5YGatAS1QyJoFoFaybG8ZxOC-lfItBxlmNIu658/s750/JessieKesson.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="671" data-original-width="750" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEJk5pA4gndXhwZk1FC12LGmnSc6eEhULz1v7A_Wa_TuSSjluMx0xboRhl_5GiLpdUO-RVhAOq20vPPIdBx_WPF9ZhT4AeVUG_HEnU5YGatAS1QyJoFoFaybG8ZxOC-lfItBxlmNIu658/s320/JessieKesson.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Although intellectually brilliant, the ‘training schools’ of Scotland only equipped girls for a life in service. Instead of going to university, as she wished, Jessie worked as a servant until she met her husband, an agricultural worker. For the first decade of her married life, Jessie was a ‘cottar wife’ – working on the farms alongside her husband, living in ‘tied’ houses, with no security and very little money.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgeRYrtINOxEUK3DFm0OV5FOJvcs9uywvNqcvVbvmfTg6OwluKAoUktEt9Q86rzOv6bwHltYcD2Mk2vstyiaZ8Wei1lzr6hyL8TK74c-Ln000FOti9lBESFdOxxY8dhr030S639B6lObI/s480/EardleyTenements.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="397" data-original-width="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgeRYrtINOxEUK3DFm0OV5FOJvcs9uywvNqcvVbvmfTg6OwluKAoUktEt9Q86rzOv6bwHltYcD2Mk2vstyiaZ8Wei1lzr6hyL8TK74c-Ln000FOti9lBESFdOxxY8dhr030S639B6lObI/s320/EardleyTenements.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">The Glasgow Tenements painted by Joan Eardley </div><div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Jessie became a published writer, encouraged by Nan Shepherd, a stranger she met on a train. Critics talked about ‘Kesson’s consummate ability to catch the moment passing; that transitional, trembling point of awareness of life as painful yet delightful, dangerous yet desired . . . As always in Kesson, there is that sense of a pool of light beyond which the darkness lowers’. (Books in Scotland) Her account of life in the tenements reminds me very much of the paintings of Joan Eardley.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWkMiV7KwNvr8M7lKhYFaxmu47CNgPHdPmjrMI0G-a2rMljKmie98wVykDdFXzPoAbSGUpNxAaoV0Lu2rgc0RqcRFl3hq3NPKGdzLWPBPAmG4_7IlG81HxMRIc9Xz4S26lrXaAdx-mfaU/s278/WhiteBirdKesson.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: left;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="181" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWkMiV7KwNvr8M7lKhYFaxmu47CNgPHdPmjrMI0G-a2rMljKmie98wVykDdFXzPoAbSGUpNxAaoV0Lu2rgc0RqcRFl3hq3NPKGdzLWPBPAmG4_7IlG81HxMRIc9Xz4S26lrXaAdx-mfaU/s200/WhiteBirdKesson.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">Jessie was a protégé of Carmen Callil, published by Virago. But it was as a broadcaster that she was best known. I’ve just discovered her novel, <i>The White Bird Passes</i>, a fictional account of growing up in the tenements and being taken into care. It’s a novel written by a poet and playwright. The descriptions of place are stunning, the characters leap off the page and the dialogue is so brilliant you can close your eyes and hear them talking to you. No wonder that it was turned into a film.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0312020/" target="_blank">The White Bird Passes - Film</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Towards the end of the book, the young girl, told that she must leave the shelter of the orphanage, stands on the edge of the wild land, listening to the wind. She’s full of passion and wild emotions she doesn’t know how to handle.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> ‘. . . the aloneness of the night was beyond the bearing of the land itself. It caught you, the land did, if you walked it at night. Held you hostage. Clamped and small within its own immensity, and cast all the burden ot its own aloneness upon you. The wind had begun to threaten the air. Passionately she had longed for the wind to come. To blow herself and the landscape sky high into movement and coherence again. Almost she had been aware of the wind’s near fierceness. Ready to plunge the furious hillside burns down into Cladda river. To hurl the straws over all the dykes. To toss the chaff into the eyes of protesting people, bending before it, flapping in their clothes like scarecrows. To sting the trees in Carron wood into hissing rebellion.’ </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> How sad that such a fantastic novel has almost vanished from view. I’m grateful that it has been re-issued, and I’ve now found others, which are on my TBR list.</div></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-63752039038391105962020-12-24T12:22:00.000+00:002020-12-24T12:23:37.530+00:00The Meeting place of Four Kings in 926<div class="separator"><div class="separator" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> </div></div>
Cumbria is littered with the evidence of our ancient past. Today I went to Mayburgh Henge, close to where I live, part of a three henge complex at least 5000 years old. It used to have four standing stones, but only one remains.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9H1ejW8EZTUipCF3OGrA0Njo6MYkbQKZ-Y7TnqHJuyTjtqsJuNbCYJl8LdgnouNRQ7fO4pH45Y1efg7A58DdYkVs3A630sjm58S2Z4sGXBkdSSKmJpB9TqkcCd_3tyOULolrdCHuxhtA/s950/MayburghStStone.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="950" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9H1ejW8EZTUipCF3OGrA0Njo6MYkbQKZ-Y7TnqHJuyTjtqsJuNbCYJl8LdgnouNRQ7fO4pH45Y1efg7A58DdYkVs3A630sjm58S2Z4sGXBkdSSKmJpB9TqkcCd_3tyOULolrdCHuxhtA/s320/MayburghStStone.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>A few hundred yards away is what is locally known as Arthur’s Round Table, which is also circular, with a raised central stage, like an ampitheatre. <div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXDmQZ9UIUeL0ytdvE-Rn3K_qUlcGtt62c7r2QYFxJoT3vgmDK1Xk4f9lIjMHUasGdv0UVC9QPmXhSpplDofEFuAdcIAkze7Esq3dI80MoY-Vwlmr8GzUHqB1neOO_MbdPolIQ9wFzLNk/s950/ArthursRoundTable.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="950" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXDmQZ9UIUeL0ytdvE-Rn3K_qUlcGtt62c7r2QYFxJoT3vgmDK1Xk4f9lIjMHUasGdv0UVC9QPmXhSpplDofEFuAdcIAkze7Esq3dI80MoY-Vwlmr8GzUHqB1neOO_MbdPolIQ9wFzLNk/s320/ArthursRoundTable.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>A third henge was destroyed a hundred years ago by road building. Mayburgh is gigantic – surrounded by a circular boundary of stones, four metres high, now covered over with grass and oak trees. <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiycwICNG9ztbF0L_bPrcW5GFGMpA6EHVo9y6zRWc7Ksx3_nrHb1APAo01LyyMDC-VFrJfLRVD3NQOAoh-LsRcOTpVWrITUjFbaqYDRVWBZ847HIJuYHEF9kKvwHKPEkMfNCTQQsyNVAGE/s950/MayburghFullSize.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="950" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiycwICNG9ztbF0L_bPrcW5GFGMpA6EHVo9y6zRWc7Ksx3_nrHb1APAo01LyyMDC-VFrJfLRVD3NQOAoh-LsRcOTpVWrITUjFbaqYDRVWBZ847HIJuYHEF9kKvwHKPEkMfNCTQQsyNVAGE/s320/MayburghFullSize.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Mayburgh is where, in 926, King Athelstan (grandson of King Alfred of the burnt cakes) met with King Owain of Strathclyde and Cumbria, Constantine, King of the Scots, King Hywel Dda of Wales and Earl Ealdred of Northumberland. Each of the kings would have had a considerable retinue, but Mayburgh is big enough to accommodate over a thousand people.
Here the Kings agreed the Treaty of Eamont Bridge, which effectively made Athelstan King of all England. The kings then rode to Dacre, where there was a monastery, established in 713 (later demolished by the Vikings). There’s a moated Norman castle now at Dacre, and a church where the monastery was. But in the ancient, overgrown churchyard four strange, carved figures, pre-Saxon, believed to be pagan. <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI8ZNjVlwc27pkslS1SJE_3Z66nSZTuyHbwG7AALW7F7b0IpwhNMDAXRuDu6Sdejn1p-AYNBluaH63HZAtgZ1QvjoGJo2vGJhl28aIU6lTwdA38pLFdOyt4iu-HgkZYaG8ud9xGlAGsTw/s950/DacreFigure1.jpg" style="clear: left; display: block; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="428" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI8ZNjVlwc27pkslS1SJE_3Z66nSZTuyHbwG7AALW7F7b0IpwhNMDAXRuDu6Sdejn1p-AYNBluaH63HZAtgZ1QvjoGJo2vGJhl28aIU6lTwdA38pLFdOyt4iu-HgkZYaG8ud9xGlAGsTw/s200/DacreFigure1.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHihK1oUAYWXlTrxOjocQ7jzUEpA-81a-o7jr0mVeDP85xj_Etkln0PCXGuoHx2Norq6KEg2fLcDjEnrlQ25FjXU19SGqlZQv30a8hxzFui-Ly8JWBFnOj5AtZxmYDojmSu5_m2vhCqlU/s950/DacreFigure2.jpg" style="display: block; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="428" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHihK1oUAYWXlTrxOjocQ7jzUEpA-81a-o7jr0mVeDP85xj_Etkln0PCXGuoHx2Norq6KEg2fLcDjEnrlQ25FjXU19SGqlZQv30a8hxzFui-Ly8JWBFnOj5AtZxmYDojmSu5_m2vhCqlU/s200/DacreFigure2.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJb11EP8pUTEslxUOqrDmuVZyhiIFL3z2bO_IqFhAFWpv07CGca03TMfaz_JkOExHWlp3sP6fSTLh9wm5Cl-xPGhtIVnsL0uaIPtQOjSP8xmBOM1M-k-qICUr_RILmMx4OOlINbqPf9bA/s950/DacreFigure3.jpg" style="clear: right; display: block; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="428" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJb11EP8pUTEslxUOqrDmuVZyhiIFL3z2bO_IqFhAFWpv07CGca03TMfaz_JkOExHWlp3sP6fSTLh9wm5Cl-xPGhtIVnsL0uaIPtQOjSP8xmBOM1M-k-qICUr_RILmMx4OOlINbqPf9bA/s200/DacreFigure3.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div>
It’s a fascinating place, thick with yew trees, and one of the old graves, twined with ivy, and with its own sundial, looks like Aslan’s Table or something else out of mythology. Made me realise that in 5000 years time none of this Boris/Trump/Covid stuff will really matter.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMTJYFPPj8sqNKNV-klNQ7QoO-7J45OsQ6USg6ShyphenhyphenBF6OZBM9U_7Cjob0ITVY3p33rEgoZbwg_wvLlg4908zZuJXh4SiGzVxsPFxHWCegjBv5Psjo8DD1aliRGUgacPv4yKmXRLhg5HSA/s950/AslansTable.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="950" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMTJYFPPj8sqNKNV-klNQ7QoO-7J45OsQ6USg6ShyphenhyphenBF6OZBM9U_7Cjob0ITVY3p33rEgoZbwg_wvLlg4908zZuJXh4SiGzVxsPFxHWCegjBv5Psjo8DD1aliRGUgacPv4yKmXRLhg5HSA/s320/AslansTable.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></div></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-44013036401805608782020-11-25T17:26:00.000+00:002020-11-25T23:05:57.263+00:00Sojourner Truth: One of our forgotten 'Mothers'.<p> </p>Today is the anniversary of the death of the woman we know as Sojourner Truth. She was born as Isabelle ‘Belle’ Baumfree in New York State. Her parents were slaves and her first language was Dutch. She was sold at the age of nine with a flock of sheep to another owner who ill-treated her. She was sold again, at least twice, finally to an owner who raped her, as was common practice at the time. As a result she gave birth to two children – a boy who died in childhood and a girl called Diana. The man she loved, also a slave, was savagely beaten by his owner when they were discovered together and he died shortly afterwards. Marriage to another slave produced three children, before ‘Belle’ ‘walked away’ in her words, with her youngest child, and was taken in by an abolitionist family in New York, the Van Wagenens, who kept her until the Emancipation Act became law and she could be officially freed. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGu53IA8VgqokfTYgfKsIktaQjlClSxJpQV6Poxag9loOUoMo1-8Q3L6-t82jsFYRn0mV4VRHTy4eV0ee_WfcVBMTlesZzf-66kXx49I0lnRLx5CS6oZmLbtKLdRRieeqa5ZhLMGHxmKY/s425/SojournerTruthcolour.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGu53IA8VgqokfTYgfKsIktaQjlClSxJpQV6Poxag9loOUoMo1-8Q3L6-t82jsFYRn0mV4VRHTy4eV0ee_WfcVBMTlesZzf-66kXx49I0lnRLx5CS6oZmLbtKLdRRieeqa5ZhLMGHxmKY/s320/SojournerTruthcolour.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><div> Meanwhile her previous owner had sold her son Peter at the age of five to a family in Alabama. Belle sued to get him back, in 1828, with the help of her protectors, and was the first woman of colour to win a case against a white man. Peter had been badly abused by his owners. In 1842 he sailed in a whaler from Nantucket. Belle received two letters from him, but when the ship returned to port, Peter had disappeared. The loss of her second son affected her deeply. </div><div> Belle had become an evangelical Christian while living with the Van Wagenens and in 1843 became a Methodist, claiming that God had instructed her to go out into the countryside to preach the truth and campaign against slavery. She changed her name to Sojourner Truth. At almost six feet tall, she was an imposing figure with an air of calm and strength that impressed everyone she met. Her preaching and singing attracted large crowds wherever she went. In 1850 she dictated a memoir to friends, and it was published as <i>The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9LzRwj5wtkImoGgwPxLE73iKlnQJLAWxyTBL30W9Pouzhqzh9Q937BhsD7fy-wlMvcKOrZPhWt35vOAmVMd7S-Ey-_gHoyArMfdjpqIr8r3OsGfMXNPzr22AnR1aJk_snX50FCK3NIVU/s950/SJBook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="950" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9LzRwj5wtkImoGgwPxLE73iKlnQJLAWxyTBL30W9Pouzhqzh9Q937BhsD7fy-wlMvcKOrZPhWt35vOAmVMd7S-Ey-_gHoyArMfdjpqIr8r3OsGfMXNPzr22AnR1aJk_snX50FCK3NIVU/s320/SJBook.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div> In 1851 she attended the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, giving the speech we now know as ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ In it she argued passionately for rights for all women regardless of colour. Unable to read or write, Truth spoke extempore, and various versions of her speech were published afterwards, some of them in a southern dialect quite alien to Truth, who was a New Yorker and spoke English with a Dutch accent. Slavery was often seen as a southern issue. She was also credited with thirteen children in some versions, rather than the five she herself claimed. But, whatever the details, the content of the speech electrified all who heard it and was an inspiration for second wave feminists and anti-apartheid activists in the 20th century.</div><div><br /></div><div> “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?” </div><div><br /></div><div>If you’d like to know more about her original speech click here: <a href="https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/ " target="_blank">https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/ </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHPQsPXmvg1LmIO1ahHqQUaxPwMzrcYPtNdBXplVeAIJJ_eBpTGmDg-MmiHvd47uV4tpmAlv_VYW0ShGisOlF_X605P_cxBWapuKMinjjTlWsPb3-pFriRRHgwMMMtXrjPMc9ZZdHs77E/s950/SJandLincoln.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="950" data-original-width="653" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHPQsPXmvg1LmIO1ahHqQUaxPwMzrcYPtNdBXplVeAIJJ_eBpTGmDg-MmiHvd47uV4tpmAlv_VYW0ShGisOlF_X605P_cxBWapuKMinjjTlWsPb3-pFriRRHgwMMMtXrjPMc9ZZdHs77E/s320/SJandLincoln.jpg" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div> Her activism brought her into contact with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln. She is reported to have ridden the streetcars in Washington to protest at their segregation, making a precedent for 20th century Rosa Parks.
Truth lived in Battle Creek, Michigan with her daughter Elizabeth until her death in 1883, campaigning for social justice until the end. Her funeral attracted almost a thousand mourners. She was the first black woman to have her bust placed in the US Capitol building, Washington, in 2009. Another statue appears in Central Park NY. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPEKxWxhWr2YA-1JUaqGc6L58x96JrfKJbrF_c2RotyT7Adgv10xTpeWJoeF1ZKfG5NpDqiqhhEu8sIZwfVS_8F0kFjZC1EGdx55Nbiy4eMh_utAWLr_cOQI4GoCGu9htzs3p3PYW6d-w/s500/SJMemorial.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="332" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPEKxWxhWr2YA-1JUaqGc6L58x96JrfKJbrF_c2RotyT7Adgv10xTpeWJoeF1ZKfG5NpDqiqhhEu8sIZwfVS_8F0kFjZC1EGdx55Nbiy4eMh_utAWLr_cOQI4GoCGu9htzs3p3PYW6d-w/s320/SJMemorial.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>If you would like to know more, there’s a very comprehensive account of her life and achievements on Wikipedia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_Truth">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_Truth</a></div></div><br />Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-45576500405465312952020-11-06T11:47:00.001+00:002020-11-06T11:48:38.299+00:00Photoshopping the Dead<p> Since I began writing a memoir about my mother, I’ve spent a lot of time going through old family photographs and letters. Some of the material I’ve found is unfamiliar. Over the years, since I left home, albums and letters have come down to my mother from grandparents and other relatives. Among these I came across the strange photograph of a girl who I presumed was one of my great aunts. My grandmother was originally one of five daughters, but three of her sisters died of tuberculosis between the ages of twelve and twenty.</p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They were a working-class family, living in a two-up-two-down terraced house in Denton Holme, Carlisle, in the shadow of Dixon’s Mill, where their father worked as a pattern maker. I knew very little about the girls who died – my Carlisle grandmother didn’t talk much about intimate things. One of them, my father understood, had lived to become a welder during WW1 and I found a photograph of her dressed for war work in a kind of mob cap and all in one ‘boiler’ suit. Another, with pretty curly hair, appears in a group photo with her two surviving sisters, aged about sixteen. This is Aunt Etty in her boiler suit.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2wmD5URCN8wSSLA37YLObKHVIrGUm6Sm78rPR7q3JfrPPJBpYlx_Roas4Q0kV0nWrlvtI0Q_UytPPqgLW4QJwD-euiXTxfYsocTMcv7sBqEdKH6FsaWjdiPi5ZCTkIDamc6c0ygwgYh0/s749/GtAuntEtty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="749" data-original-width="472" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2wmD5URCN8wSSLA37YLObKHVIrGUm6Sm78rPR7q3JfrPPJBpYlx_Roas4Q0kV0nWrlvtI0Q_UytPPqgLW4QJwD-euiXTxfYsocTMcv7sBqEdKH6FsaWjdiPi5ZCTkIDamc6c0ygwgYh0/w202-h320/GtAuntEtty.jpg" title="Aunt Etty in her boiler suit" width="202" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The photograph that caught my attention was of a schoolgirl, about eleven or twelve, standing in an awkward pose, leaning against a plant stand draped with trailing greenery. Something about the way she was standing wasn’t quite right – the way the dress hung on her, one arm stiffly by her side with the hand at a strange angle. It was only then that I realised what I was looking at. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc8lxst02BpzTFgzVTGdWYFLgBXSNxGavQiGM1FVUByVQwgSoybqphD7BPRaraffvDtgcShJG0zAK916Ak9POMTfYyx_5HKTrK4osO-ziouJABsGFp0Oba1VbUe8sgDEQdvTAriycmkXQ/s553/DeceasedGtAunt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="553" data-original-width="381" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc8lxst02BpzTFgzVTGdWYFLgBXSNxGavQiGM1FVUByVQwgSoybqphD7BPRaraffvDtgcShJG0zAK916Ak9POMTfYyx_5HKTrK4osO-ziouJABsGFp0Oba1VbUe8sgDEQdvTAriycmkXQ/s320/DeceasedGtAunt.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Victorians were very keen on post-mortem photography. It seems ghoulish to us now, but many lower-middle or working-class families couldn’t afford to have photographs taken. So, when a beloved member of the family died suddenly, a photograph would be taken as a memento mori. The first one I ever saw, was in the Katherine Mansfield archives in New Zealand. Katherine’s baby sister, Gwen, died of cholera at a few months old and there’s a poignant photograph of their grandmother sitting in the nursery in front of the doll’s house, holding the dead baby who is immaculately laid out in what looks like a christening dress. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBT75qLpUkpU1eYdOhG1X8DbTkbkysOxKFo6RcHPsZkBV1G7sA7uaGkv5DLg5lz7tw3ev3OnDUMY5GXaaNOeR9kJPP7ta8UfdRN66vrIv9GTe1Kdj6H8tABiJg70KIYFGpVgvMGdQ7DN8/s270/GrannyDyer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBT75qLpUkpU1eYdOhG1X8DbTkbkysOxKFo6RcHPsZkBV1G7sA7uaGkv5DLg5lz7tw3ev3OnDUMY5GXaaNOeR9kJPP7ta8UfdRN66vrIv9GTe1Kdj6H8tABiJg70KIYFGpVgvMGdQ7DN8/s0/GrannyDyer.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Then I went to a reading by a poet called Jennifer Copley, who had written a series of poems using these post mortem images as a starting point. I was surprised (though I shouldn’t have been) to find that there was a huge archive on the web for this genre. Jennifer explained the process in detail, and it was one of the most interesting poetry readings I’ve ever been to, and also one of the saddest.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgQ93V6Tbgqy4MolTiimrcDuKrHmguu8P1ShyphenhyphenXhtXMlExjjQMqUeE7gGdir7XztBRvn6GV85u4i8zlT0oxDva6Nq8UnLg41t5RLjNJJU_W1F8CF57l9hIyf4jEDciDVGBKMMUiF05J6wc/s200/sisterscover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgQ93V6Tbgqy4MolTiimrcDuKrHmguu8P1ShyphenhyphenXhtXMlExjjQMqUeE7gGdir7XztBRvn6GV85u4i8zlT0oxDva6Nq8UnLg41t5RLjNJJU_W1F8CF57l9hIyf4jEDciDVGBKMMUiF05J6wc/s0/sisterscover.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Victorians had lots of clever technology to enable them to take life-like photographs – not just of the loved one lying sleeping, like Katherine Mansfield’s baby sister, but of them standing up in a natural pose as if they were still living. Iron braces were used to support the body, before it was dressed and arranged, often using pieces of furniture as props to enhance the effect. After the photograph was taken, the face would be expertly touched up and the eyes painted to give the impression of life. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc7nRNEzQJRjQIba_Dr9juVpOPh-AX77EwGY7vVX81dn4V99nltfuRm60TYEJRpn_S8YYuutCZM0-S1WYdIsloCCtlf2ZY9_3vRxRqxb7VcFU-RqXE5QUr27SvLpMDemjN1aQyDwDBwQo/s361/PMphotoBrace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="361" data-original-width="240" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc7nRNEzQJRjQIba_Dr9juVpOPh-AX77EwGY7vVX81dn4V99nltfuRm60TYEJRpn_S8YYuutCZM0-S1WYdIsloCCtlf2ZY9_3vRxRqxb7VcFU-RqXE5QUr27SvLpMDemjN1aQyDwDBwQo/s320/PMphotoBrace.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It may seem strange to us now, but earlier generations were less squeamish about death than we are. And we still take photographs of stillborn babies in their mother’s arms to give comfort to bereaved families. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>You never know what is in your family album until you look. I just wish there was someone still alive to tell me the stories behind the faces. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-71084302309350288642020-10-19T23:09:00.009+01:002020-10-19T23:14:47.235+01:00Airmail: Writing Letters in a Time of Pandemic<p> It was while I was still in a state of admiration and envy at the re-election of Jacinda Ardern as New Zealand’s amazing premier, that I opened my current bedtime book and read ‘We are coming, I am sure of it, to either the end of the <i>letting men be in charge of the world</i> period of history, or the end of the human race’. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkRs8g4SUix-Z7169ZHDioNe2ZMUuvMBaeCyDhKps1dKsJJpitIKbKaXwtqI-2ndorhN7HcJRTdnzjyow-o3mtQOrTZ7hrMvXH7L7G_EDCnhTiVKhoVdiSUS3Y1DEuTjS761siQCtxYQM/s275/AirMail.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkRs8g4SUix-Z7169ZHDioNe2ZMUuvMBaeCyDhKps1dKsJJpitIKbKaXwtqI-2ndorhN7HcJRTdnzjyow-o3mtQOrTZ7hrMvXH7L7G_EDCnhTiVKhoVdiSUS3Y1DEuTjS761siQCtxYQM/s0/AirMail.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This observation is in a letter written by an author I love – Pam Houston to her friend, American author Amy Irvine. The two women live in Colorado, one each side of the mountain range. This is red MAGA country, ‘where mud and mountains and bringing home meat for the freezer’ is paramount, but both women are Democrats. They have chosen to set up home in the wilderness and try to live as eco-friendly an existence as they can. Until the arrival of the Covid Pandemic, their challenges had been mostly how to keep their horses, sheep and cattle from being eaten by bears or incinerated in wild fires. Both are outspoken feminists with histories of abuse and complicated relationships. Anyone who has read Pam Houston’s wonderful short stories, <i>Cowboys are my Weakness</i>, will understand what I mean. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They were already struggling under the man they describe as the ‘Monster in Chief’, when Covid arrived. Living in a Republican heartland has not been easy and has suddenly become more difficult:</p><p><i> ‘agreeing to disagree isn’t going to cut it anymore as I watch this administration attack and destroy every single thing that brings me joy: air and water, trees and animals, every slice of wildness we have left, but also the arts, education, diversity itself.’ </i></p><p> After the arrival of the virus confined them to their individual territories (Amy has a vulnerable daughter) someone suggested that they write letters to each other, recording their lives in lockdown. Both women were struggling to write in isolation. ‘I tried most of the afternoon to work on an essay and got mostly nowhere, but in correspondence the words come more easily.’ What has emerged is a sad, beautiful, funny, revelatory record of what it’s like to live in Trump’s America, in the age of Covid – ‘How we were, together apart’. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8V9tUI9Cl6GJf0-WdtF-BNMP9DoGSWXccKN7-UtuqHyvw_cWJerPDqv3QnX_pzoV8zMvVgdLZ0fh64xfudmyaAoKrSnx55UmxRNRdxU63IoGsUzvV-fDniOA9KuA8i4jR7FzsSRwk80Q/s600/PamHouston.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8V9tUI9Cl6GJf0-WdtF-BNMP9DoGSWXccKN7-UtuqHyvw_cWJerPDqv3QnX_pzoV8zMvVgdLZ0fh64xfudmyaAoKrSnx55UmxRNRdxU63IoGsUzvV-fDniOA9KuA8i4jR7FzsSRwk80Q/w200-h200/PamHouston.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pam Houston and her partner on her Colorado ranch<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Pam reflects that she would rather die being hugged by a Black Bear than a MAGA hatted Republican without a mask. The future is uncertain. The Pandemic is a hiatus, an ‘in between’, a pause, a place ‘between the world as it was and the world as whatever it will be after’. To Amy the pandemic feels inevitable ‘the natural expression of greed and corruption gone completely unrestrained.’ She also sees both the response to Covid and the climate catastrophe as an extension of toxic masculinity.</p><p> <i>‘It’s never been so clear to me, this umbilicus between misogyny and the devastation of the natural world. . . As a woman who likes men a great deal . . . it’s hard to admit that such hatred exists’. </i></p><p> The book asks the question ‘what sort of stories do we tell now’? It challenges what it calls ‘the whitewashing [rightly named] of history’, that is buried so deep within the language we use to tell those stories it could render us dumb trying to eradicate it. Pam asserts her faith in ‘the concrete nouns of the world’, and believes that ‘we can build the world we want to live in, and we must, because time is short and inaction is death. Fighting for the Earth and each other will be the only way to feel how alive we still are.’ It’s an interesting choice of verb. In the state of Colorado gun checks have gone from averaging fifty in the system at any one time, to thirteen thousand. </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This is an amazing book that kept me involved and also had me pencilling notes and underlining sentences on almost every page. The fact that I've scribbled all over it is a sign that this is a must-read!</p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Air-Mail-Letters-Politics-Pandemics/dp/1948814382/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=airmail+pam+houston+and+amy+irvine&qid=1603144512&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Airmail</a></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Air-Mail-Letters-Politics-Pandemics/dp/1948814382/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=airmail+pam+houston+and+amy+irvine&qid=1603144512&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Pam Houston and Amy Irvine,</a></p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Air-Mail-Letters-Politics-Pandemics/dp/1948814382/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=airmail+pam+houston+and+amy+irvine&qid=1603144512&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Torrey House Press, October 2020</a></p><p><br /></p><div><br /></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-49964549574738297942020-09-22T00:30:00.005+01:002020-09-22T11:06:58.512+01:00Tuesday Poem: Debasish Lahiri, An Unsent Letter, (for Paul Celan)<p> </p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPJKbXzaq7xugxbA7py4IoauWQkDrLSCxA0e5XmNgWhU9_R64IOQEELayYS2rXSAp5Y6E0qRLqJPLTGqzQZnkOvIJydhfvuvA_Ld2tkUri8tYb8I3ACgEdWKo8B1BJ5hftyQs_FFnNIhQ/s290/PoppiesBlack.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="290" data-original-width="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPJKbXzaq7xugxbA7py4IoauWQkDrLSCxA0e5XmNgWhU9_R64IOQEELayYS2rXSAp5Y6E0qRLqJPLTGqzQZnkOvIJydhfvuvA_Ld2tkUri8tYb8I3ACgEdWKo8B1BJ5hftyQs_FFnNIhQ/s0/PoppiesBlack.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> The introduction to Debasish Lahiri’s collection has been written by Mansfield scholar, editor and TLS critic Gerri Kimber, who describes it as ‘a confident, animated collection of poems . . . deeply rooted in Western classical mythology, whilst at the same time reflecting his Indian roots’. <p></p><p> This is a very unusual combination, but if we are surprised by it, then that reflects attitudes we need to examine. As Debasish says, in his interview below: “In a world that is seemingly cosmopolitan writers should have the freedom to write about any subject or idea under the sun and not be limited by the colour of their skin or the stamp on their passport. A writer from India need not only write about things Indian.” Instead of advancing towards multi-culturalism we seem to be stepping backwards at the moment, reinforcing cultural and national boundaries.</p><p>
Debasish speaks five languages and his poems have also been translated into French. The influence of France is very prominent in the collection, which contains poems dedicated to Paul Celan, and others inspired by Cezanne, Monet and Van Gogh. One of Gerri’s favourite poems is also one of mine. It’s called ‘Colours by Rain’ and describes a journey that Debasish made to Van Gogh country at Auver-sur-Oise.</p><div>On a morning,</div><div>
Like today,</div><div>
When the sky brooding on itself</div><div>
Had forgotten its own colours,</div><div>
Moved by a painter’s question,</div><div>
A man had found them:</div><div>
Colours, </div><div>
Huddled into a navel of quiet,</div><div>
All the colours that had escaped</div><div>
The sky’s palette. </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRpF2HHawTLTxAayhdO84_49pbXeTkersBa_932bqJcc7tKgWvg67cJFyA27P9zfDceLO6c8BQk924wyn8iOcdMxtWeQ7E4Zt0D5EA_bg3HeOUkPhg08rD_53vFyaEQ7Mosmqf3FGhxjU/s200/Debasish.jpg" style="clear: right; display: inline; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="150" data-original-width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRpF2HHawTLTxAayhdO84_49pbXeTkersBa_932bqJcc7tKgWvg67cJFyA27P9zfDceLO6c8BQk924wyn8iOcdMxtWeQ7E4Zt0D5EA_bg3HeOUkPhg08rD_53vFyaEQ7Mosmqf3FGhxjU/s0/Debasish.jpg" /></a> <br /> I didn’t always find this poetry easy. I’m not a fan of capitalisation at the beginning of the line and the detailed references to classical mythology stretched my own understanding of the Greek myths to the limit and had me reaching for the Dictionary of Mythology. I sometimes found the mix of Indian and Western mythologies confusing. But there is some fine poetry, as in ‘a blind blacksmith/Forges stars on this page/That I cannot see.’ And ‘Look at what blood does to us./ In giving us life/ It kills us by saying/ That time is soon gone.’ In another poem, I’m taken straight to the Bazaars of Hyderabad and one of those spine-tingling moments I recognise from my own time in the east:</div><div><br /></div><div>
Suddenly a muezzin calls to prayer</div><div>
The very air of the place.</div><div>
A cannonade of startled pigeons</div><div>
Bursts through the thin indifference</div><div>
I had carried into the square.<p> Debasish lectures in English at Lalbaba College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta, and received the Naji Naaman merit literary prize in 2019. Poppies in the Post has also been reviewed in <a href=" https://bit.ly/2FWodWN" target="_blank">Academia magazine. </a></p><div>
An Unsent Letter </div><div><i>(For Paul Celan</i>) </div><div><br /></div><div>To reply,</div><div>Verb;</div><div>To write,</div><div>Verb:</div><div>Actions that perform </div><div>The true rites </div><div>Of my passage</div><div>Through this Paris of secrets well-lost;</div><div>The pain of disclosures</div><div>Surmounted by an idle rain</div><div>Like a café offering its summer munificence.</div><div><br /></div><div>Why should I write beautiful lines in this city?</div><div>Will the chestnut bloom twice if I do?</div><div>Autumn always calls once</div><div>And Provencal bees do not storm summer</div><div>On Rue de Luxembourg.</div><div>This is another hum,</div><div>And traffic loiters in awe of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Death-beetle summer,</div><div>Summon your autumn Elysium.</div><div><br /></div><div>To write,</div><div>Verb,</div><div>To scratch the itch of tears,</div><div>Now dry,</div><div>To remember,</div><div>Verbs too.</div><div>Shall I send poppies in the post?<p>(Paris, 2017)</p><p>I asked Debasish 10 questions about his work, which he was kind enough to answer. </p><p><b>1. Tell me a little about yourself - where were you born and brought up?</b></p><p> I was born and brought up in the suburbs of Kolkata, a city with a distinct colonial identity and a pronounced Anglophilia. From kindergarten onwards I was admitted to the Don Bosco school, an institution run by a Catholic order called Society of Saint Francis de Sales or the Salesians. Being there for twelve years has been a vital shaping influence in my life. </p><p><b>2. How did you start writing?</b></p><p> My first, albeit slightly confused, steps in writing were taken in school when I was in the seventh standard. Heavily influenced by the poets prescribed in the syllabus I got it into my head that all writing had to be chiselled out on paper in the shape of a structured poem. I started this somewhat bizarre experiment with my student essays much to the mystification and often ire of my teachers. I think it was bizarre for them, not for me, because I quite enjoyed it. </p><p> Any way, transgressions like this piled up and I was brought to, what seemed at the time to be a trial, before our rector Fr. Patrick Sheehy. Grades had been suffering and everyone was rather concerned. To my great surprise, and also relief, Fr. Sheehy did not chide me. The benign Irish rector who never raised his voice above a soft whisper was grandfatherly. He weaned me away from my experiments but only by offering me another avenue: to write as I pleased and to bring it to him for his scrutiny. Besides he opened the doors to his personal library every weekday for my use. That's where I discovered the poets.</p><p><b>3. What brought you to poetry?</b></p><p> It took me till my eleventh standard in school to realise that what I was writing was mostly poetry, mostly bad poetry. I say bad because that was a long apprenticeship in words, in structure, in the sound of, in the fall of the notes of poetry; an apprenticeship that was clumsy and imitative at the best of times. It was perhaps around that time that I also realised that mere structure on a page was not something that was tantamount to poetry: there was the voice and the content, the idea or an insight that was necessary for a scribble to become poetry. Frankly, most of what I was writing by the time I finished school and went to college was, looking back, in speech rhythm, a half-dramatic, half-confessional set of monologues. Poetry was for me a way of living and engaging with the society, with the world around me, without really doing so. I was, and still am, very much an introvert by nature.</p><p><b>4. How many languages do you speak?</b></p><p> I can speak in English, in Hindi and Urdu, and Bengali of course, it being my mother-tongue. My French is very halting, sadly.</p><p><b>5. How difficult is it to write in another language?</b></p><p> In fact, it was quite easy to write in English for me, almost inevitable. Let me explain. I have already said that Kolkata - Calcutta - as it was spelt earlier, had an ingrained Anglophone culture thanks to its establishment and provenance by British colonial fiat. In my own house English was a language I had heard spoken from my earliest childhood. My father was very comfortable in the language and I grew up happily bilingual. In school English was accentuated. So when it came to choosing a language in terms of writing, English was a natural choice. And never did I feel afterwards that I had abandoned Bengali in favour of English: there was no guilt.</p><p><b>6. Which authors do you like reading? Have you a favourite book?</b></p><p> Amongst the poets I like reading are Homer, Virgil, Cavalcanti, Shakespeare, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Keki Daruwalla and Arun Kolatkar. Among prose writers Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Dickens, Maugham, Joyce, and Rushdie. My favourite books would be Sterne's Tristam Shandy, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Larkin's High Windows and Kolatkar's Jejuri.</p><p><b>7. Who are your biggest influences? </b></p><p> In life my biggest influences have been my parents, and next to them Fr. Sheehy, and my English teachers in school Mr. Diaz and Mr. Allaphad. </p><p> In my poetry Keats, Eliot and Larkin have been strongest as influences. Later the Russian poets, Akhmatova, Pasternak and Mandelstam along with Neruda have been shaping and inspiring presence. Further, I cannot but acknowledge the role played by Keki Daruwalla as a mentor and inspiration in my early years as a poet.</p><p><b>8. You draw from a number of mythologies; what fascinates you about our cultural contexts and the mythical landscapes we inhabit? </b></p><p> I have always held that mythologies are merely powerful imaginative projections of situations we encounter in daily life. I read mythology as archetypes of the everyday that we can invoke, access and enter into organically a myriad number of times without affecting its original freshness and appeal. That is why I use myths, western and oriental in my poetry, not as stilts, but as natural outcrops of language, situation and emotion. A rose that bloomed in an Athenian garden in the 5th century is the same rose that bloomed in the garden of a Mughal Emperor in the 16th century and is the same rose that blooms in my neighbour's garden nigh. It is the same rose, but it is also different. I use myth, like the rather bruised-by-overuse metaphor of the rose, that I have outlined. </p><p> The nature myths and the myths of resilient figures in western mythology attracts me particularly as I feel one aspect of the appreciation of beauty is the strength and patience to endure. The one prized moment of rapture in the presence of the beautiful is presaged by privation, suffering and long silence.</p><p><b>9. Is there anything else you want to say?</b></p><p> No tall claims, or oracular statements. Just this: In a world that is seemingly cosmopolitan writers should have the freedom to write about any subject or idea under the sun and not be limited by the colour of their skin or the stamp on their passport. A writer from India need not only write about things Indian. He/She could as well choose to write about Roman Britain, or Italy during the Great War or anything else for that matter as long as a sense of authenticity and regard for cultural specificity colours every act of imagination. - It is often the case that publishers also discriminate between writers of different countries writing in English. If I try a British publisher with a manuscript of poetry in English without an obvious British connection, I will be asked to try an Indian publisher. Whereas an Indian publisher can and often do tell me to find European avenues because my poetry is too western. My poems are strewn with references to both oriental and occidental mythologies and realities, where then do I pitch my poems? - Just the travails of writing in a world that swears by cosmopolitanism.</p><p><b>10. What are you working on at the moment? </b></p><p> Here's the catch. I've finished putting together a short collection of poems on the lives of common-folk in Roman Britain. A British Publisher will be bringing it out in 2021.</p><p> Additionally, I've just finished writing forty poems on Miniature Paintings from India, from the 11th to the 17th centuries which I hope will form a collection in the near future.</p><p> Thank you so much for asking me these questions and allowing me to open up on some aspects of my writing.</p><p><i>Poppies in the Post </i>by Debasish Lahiri</p><p>Authors Press, Delhi, 2020</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p></div></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-57104259266936501602020-09-11T00:30:00.039+01:002020-09-11T11:30:48.842+01:00Reading My Mother: 50 elderly sheep and a lame horse<p> Eventually my parents begged and borrowed from every relative they could, took out an agricultural mortgage and bought a small, marginal, fell farm at the back of Skiddaw in the Uldale fells. It had been empty for almost ten years and could only be reached across a ford and almost a mile of rough track.</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgisCibwJb8mY2nsWWfLjvGdysm1Q5_q75O7gfh4FkuEZzu-7QGH0Ey3T6XtOD2EDXBCw3tu66b5PwfAQf8vzIplP94BLQDvEr5Ixh8t_ZvGyo9IcX3D_IMdMKCjBSauNOfZf5KaYJ9QQU/s1152/RoughClose2020.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgisCibwJb8mY2nsWWfLjvGdysm1Q5_q75O7gfh4FkuEZzu-7QGH0Ey3T6XtOD2EDXBCw3tu66b5PwfAQf8vzIplP94BLQDvEr5Ixh8t_ZvGyo9IcX3D_IMdMKCjBSauNOfZf5KaYJ9QQU/s320/RoughClose2020.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Rough Close as it is now</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i><span style="text-align: left;">It’s impossible to over-estimate the importance of Rough Close in all our lives. It meant everything to us. For the first time we had somewhere to belong. This land was ours; we owned it. For my brother and I, it became a place of magical enchantment; for my mother it was the ‘dear perpetual place’ where she could make long-term plans; it was my father’s life-long dream – a farm of his own, with no one to tell him what to do. He was thirty-two, my mother four years older. </span></p><p> We arrived on a cloudy northern day in two cattle wagons that lumbered and lurched their way over the ford and up the rough track. Our possessions were in one, the animals in another. The front door was open and a fire had been lit in the grate of the black range. A woman in an overall was on her knees scrubbing the stone flags. She got to her feet shyly and introduced herself as Nellie, one of our new neighbours. A kettle was hanging from the hook over the fire and soon we all had mugs of hot tea. She had brought an apple cake to eat and as soon as we were finished she melted away before my mother had time to thank her properly. It was our first experience of the kindness of the northern fells. In a couple of hours the furniture was all in the right rooms, if not in the right places and the beds had been screwed together so that we could sleep in them as night fell.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-RXh2iakqtWgzGDVd9_s7KBtvwB74PSaKL-g-0pmvuMLNBrujib3CfUOgFLz-IJDskjlKmp4EkS21KP2ONz5zIlD03kyxXWUInKOtSOL5AVrG0TqMybd01nPmolPH0XdrojhenJiPG5Y/s1225/Skidda+and+Overwater2020.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-RXh2iakqtWgzGDVd9_s7KBtvwB74PSaKL-g-0pmvuMLNBrujib3CfUOgFLz-IJDskjlKmp4EkS21KP2ONz5zIlD03kyxXWUInKOtSOL5AVrG0TqMybd01nPmolPH0XdrojhenJiPG5Y/s320/Skidda+and+Overwater2020.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><i>Skiddaw (England's 3rd highest mountain) and Overwater, our nearest lake.</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: left; white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;"> While my mother unpacked sheets and towels and wrestled pillows into their cases, my father was out in the barns and byres settling the small stock he had brought with him from Low Ling; Prince the horse, Jennifer and her flock of daughters and grand-daughters, two cows with their calves and Flo the collie. It was a small beginning. Dad intended to use the money they had saved to buy more sheep and cattle at auction in the weeks that followed.</span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5gSre-AFKRckFtg4JNfk1joAsBAqyS7Qb0t9Upl3LY4rnnvpXWsZ7bxJ91QHyfJP4vb3TsxnYZgIqLyHTyixZyL5XQk8xE-sYLPwiwvdsffQhMlcxiCiJECaMUmQ1eFJsgFFCQxGRLq4/s1308/slight+family-015.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1308" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5gSre-AFKRckFtg4JNfk1joAsBAqyS7Qb0t9Upl3LY4rnnvpXWsZ7bxJ91QHyfJP4vb3TsxnYZgIqLyHTyixZyL5XQk8xE-sYLPwiwvdsffQhMlcxiCiJECaMUmQ1eFJsgFFCQxGRLq4/s320/slight+family-015.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>One of the shires between the shafts with Jean and Dad</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: left;"> Dad took me to auction with him and I listened to the incomprehensible patter of the auctioneers, which he seemed to understand, above the noise of anxious cattle, sheep calling lost lambs and men shouting to be heard over the din. On that first day, Dad bought fifty ‘cast’ ewes. These were sheep that had had several lambs and were now past their best. They were usually sold for pet food, but Dad knew the farmer who had kept these particular ewes. He looked at their teeth and their feet and reckoned that they were likely to have another two or three lambs apiece and their offspring would give him the flock he needed at a fraction of the price. Even after he’d paid the obligatory ‘luck money’ to the vendor, he thought they were a bargain. Other farmers thought he was mad.</span></p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> In the pens at the back of the mart were the horses. Although some milkmen, breweries and delivery firms still used horses, most businesses were modernising. Milk carts were going electric, the railways had converted to three-wheeled Scammell flatbeds. Petrol driven lorries were taking over everywhere. Farming had also mechanised during the war and tractors were now doing the hard work that horses had done before. My father had never learned to drive. He was happier with four legs than four wheels. Horses, he said, were kinder to the land than tractors, they were also environmentally friendly, and had the great advantage of being able to reproduce themselves. It broke his heart to see so many healthy animals being sold either for export to the continent for meat, or going to the pet food factory. He was committed to cultivating the farm with horses. Over that first year, the stack yard at Rough Close gradually began to fill up with museum pieces of horse-drawn machinery. At farm sales no one wanted them any more, except my father. Everything went for a song, including the harness. Cleaning it was one of my jobs and I loved sitting in the quiet stable, breathing in the smell of horse mingled with harness oil.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN4m_WjaqVFC1lU4rfSv5ZBkxzklTO3NvGDgVzP53vy_EJwTOjxklyfzLqqMj_ehrtE8EIvisoKAeCFKiry5WJptwgvYPI1glKK_vL066Ze4z3RNzr5nlWRTRBHxQ2fTNdwNxZ8910Zs4/s640/Copy+%25282%2529+of+haroldPloughing+copy+%2528Small%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="463" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN4m_WjaqVFC1lU4rfSv5ZBkxzklTO3NvGDgVzP53vy_EJwTOjxklyfzLqqMj_ehrtE8EIvisoKAeCFKiry5WJptwgvYPI1glKK_vL066Ze4z3RNzr5nlWRTRBHxQ2fTNdwNxZ8910Zs4/s320/Copy+%25282%2529+of+haroldPloughing+copy+%2528Small%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Dad ploughing with Prince and Peter</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: left;"> Prince was our only shire horse, a favourite that had been with my father since he had worked as a hired lad on the farm at Raughton Head. He’d taken Prince with him to Coldslopes and then to Low Ling. Man and horse were so close Dad said that Prince could read his thoughts. The horse was so tame he would try to come into the house if the front door was left open. Once he had to be backed the whole of the length of the passageway, after he tried to follow my father into the kitchen. Now Dad had his eye out for another horse. Plowing needed a team and there were fifty acres of neglected land at Rough Close that needed to be turned over. Peter was the first of the shires to be rescued from the slaughter house – a young horse in a very neglected state. He limped because the horn of his hooves had overgrown his shoes, one of which was missing, and his coat was rough and full of snags. Properly groomed and shod, my father decided that he would make a good team with Prince. So, we came home in the cattle wagon with fifty elderly sheep and a lame horse. </span></p><div><br /></div><p> </p>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-27960485162588448032020-09-08T00:30:00.001+01:002020-09-08T00:30:03.709+01:00Tuesday Poem: And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur, Bob Beagrie<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2rMTnp9hP3E9IbJtXCSQQ_Yx1vKFov-R_YBIkBheGvQXTuXIwvkDNBD-YKYhvV0ZVvhc8S6L1FqvM-9nU2EwNxD13e9Hhaxu0qJB79aMYC0r7oL4fXEMCiT3x3NKMgmTFU9zcr-EuNko/s279/MinotaurBob.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2rMTnp9hP3E9IbJtXCSQQ_Yx1vKFov-R_YBIkBheGvQXTuXIwvkDNBD-YKYhvV0ZVvhc8S6L1FqvM-9nU2EwNxD13e9Hhaxu0qJB79aMYC0r7oL4fXEMCiT3x3NKMgmTFU9zcr-EuNko/s0/MinotaurBob.jpg" /></a></div><br />English poetry is blessed with fantastic poets whose work never makes the headlines. Bob Beagrie is one of them. His work has been translated into ten languages, yet his name is still less well known in the UK than it should be. I met Bob when I was the RLF Fellow at Teesside University, where he teaches creative writing. The breadth and depth of his work amazed me. His poetry is rooted in the oral, performable traditions of poetry and is often accompanied by music. <i>Leasungspell</i> (Smokestack 2016) is set in 7th century Northumbria and plays with Old English languages and dialect. It is 'the small tale of a nobody wandering alone through the Dark Ages', written along the faultlines where the new religion and the old magic collided, shattering linguistics and mythologies. <p></p><p>His work is often political. <i>Civil Insolencies</i> (Smokestack 2019), whose publication coincided with the Brexit debate, has its roots in the literature of the Levellers and the Royalists at the time of the English Civil War in the 17th century. It tells the story of the Battle of Guisborough, which becomes a micro-canvas where the social inequalities and injustices that drove the Civil War are played out. The parallels with twenty-first century Britain are clear.</p><p>His latest work <i>And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur,</i> is a sonnet sequence which is much more personal, referencing the painting by surrealist Leonora Carrington.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIUvt1rQam5rdKplfNAIiJK8ppAS-vcz9sZCbqa2J02jVoAPIcIj81EydXfV25jzYLCS20zcnRuVlsGUaVb5Gd7pTiJcozgtfgD6FHMtsgdAjyRIAc9y5CLtYedy7tlzgrmNB2WqJpXpA/s258/daughterMinotaurLC.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="195" data-original-width="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIUvt1rQam5rdKplfNAIiJK8ppAS-vcz9sZCbqa2J02jVoAPIcIj81EydXfV25jzYLCS20zcnRuVlsGUaVb5Gd7pTiJcozgtfgD6FHMtsgdAjyRIAc9y5CLtYedy7tlzgrmNB2WqJpXpA/s0/daughterMinotaurLC.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p>The sequence was written after Bob's far-too-young wife suffered a brain hemorrhage, which could have killed her, the poems are moving and compelling, from the initial dash to collect her from a railway station, to the final post-hospital reunion in the hotel where they had their honeymoon. First, he has to navigate the labyrinths of city road networks, low on fuel and his phone out of charge.</p>'It's about an hour's drive to York.<br />I know the route of the tarmac maze<br />by heart, each intersection, slip road, <br />roundabout, wind and fork, clocked as I pass<br />in the early dark. . .'<p></p><p> Bob's wife has collapsed at a railway station and he brings her home where it becomes clear that she is seriously ill. She collapses again and Bob rings 999 and finds himself caught in a dark underground world of fear and grief that seems to have no way out. </p><p>The arched ceiling is adrift with grazing clouds
<br />supported by rows of Corinthian columns,<br />it's surprisingly warm in the bowels of the earth. <br />The tunnels around us squeeze all sound<br />to a nugget of hard jet. I hold her hand<br />as we scramble over rubble, bones, leave<br />footprints in dust. I think the sea is above us.<br />I think I can hear its pulse - the ever-grind-<br />and-scrape of itself on its bed, restless, insatiable,<br />nibbling on the roots of lost cities, foregone<br />civilisations, there are marks on the walls<br />of these chambers: glyphs, pictograms, graffiti -<br /><i>Please don't leave me here please don't leave</i><br /><i>me please don't leave please don't please . . .</i><br /></p><p>At the hospital, in a surreal landscape neither of them recognise, they come face to face with the female doctor, who they recognise as the Daughter of the Minotaur. She diagnoses a bleed on the brain. "Is she dying?" I enquire in silence./ "Can you name one person who isn't?" A surgeon, in the person of Theseus, expertly slays the monster lurking in the labyrinths of his wife's brain, while the poet paces rooms 'mapping their meridians,/ hang my breath on the mast like an ensign . . . the sun drowning in the insatiable sea,' and finally goes home, 'repeating the question I cannot be sure of;/ "Did I glance back as I left the labyrinth?" Finally his wife escapes, assisted by the Minotaur's daughter. She is in recovery, 'headaches, brain fatigue, but she/ is walking now, remembering . . .' </p>'Tomorrow we plan to drive down to the beach<br />beyond the field of bullocks with sad coal eyes,<br />climb over the dunes to spend some time with<br />the shifting permanence of sand, sea, wind.'<p></p><p></p><div>In the sonnets, Bob explores some of the images in Leonora Carrington's mysterious painting, which has the quality of a dream, without meaning, but with intense resonance. We feel it in our blood, but it escapes the grasp of our minds. In painting, like poetry, you sometimes depict things you don't know you know. The images of the labyrinth and the Minotaur are deeply embedded in our cultural psyche - metaphors for the monsters that lurk in our subconscious minds. Sometimes we can't even admit to ourselves what it is that we are afraid of. Rebecca Solnit writes in <i>The Faraway Nearby</i>: ‘Elaborate are . . . the labyrinths in which we hide the minotaurs who have our faces’. Our greatest fear is of not being able to escape, of losing the magic thread that will show us the way out. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur</i> is a beautiful sequence of poems, a pamphlet with a gloriously surreal cover by poet and artist Jane Burn. It's published by the Black Light Engine Room Press, and costs £6.00 including postage. You can message the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/theblacklightengineroompress/" target="_blank">Black Light Engine Driver here to get a copy. </a></div><div><br /></div><div>Bob has also published <i>Remnants</i>, a collaboration with Jane Burn (Knives, Forks & Spoons Press, 2019), which plays with language, myth and magic. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicjmFKqcEvS2nOlaK2qhUiiE1A4EqsFBezcuQPt_Wmdj_2_VO6gXqOhctWjxkumPvY2w05BSYxr7kgA6N8EovuDDEo8ROse-r9RKddwxGQLGBWHyXT8GAcHeEIWk6jnjaqu6nKg1E7csI/s241/remnants.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="241" data-original-width="209" height="123" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicjmFKqcEvS2nOlaK2qhUiiE1A4EqsFBezcuQPt_Wmdj_2_VO6gXqOhctWjxkumPvY2w05BSYxr7kgA6N8EovuDDEo8ROse-r9RKddwxGQLGBWHyXT8GAcHeEIWk6jnjaqu6nKg1E7csI/w107-h123/remnants.jpg" width="107" /></a></div><br /><div>He has also collaborated with northeastern poet Andy Willoughby on a number of projects including <i>Sampo; Heading Further North</i>, a journey in poetry and music shaped by the Scandanavian Kalevala and the rhythms of shamanic music. Both Bob and Andy have been involved in an exchange project with poets in Finland and this has been a big influence. </div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-54874845770251846622020-09-01T00:30:00.001+01:002020-09-01T00:30:04.320+01:00Meet the Author: Meg Pokrass and Angela Readman talk Flash<p> </p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://megpokrass.com/" target="_blank">Meg Pokrass</a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijwE3y6rzOaqVCZ2YalpHh2Hfx4H722HpiT1mkM3AOVngAZDjnw62LaaTVe4n72V7JvnO7yp9jbLwZ_7oQUMB68ws9bNRAn35Ps-I4XaBWQ5oA0wUvGVwyNWu5925V-U_KERPo20b-qb0/s225/MegPokrass.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijwE3y6rzOaqVCZ2YalpHh2Hfx4H722HpiT1mkM3AOVngAZDjnw62LaaTVe4n72V7JvnO7yp9jbLwZ_7oQUMB68ws9bNRAn35Ps-I4XaBWQ5oA0wUvGVwyNWu5925V-U_KERPo20b-qb0/w144-h144/MegPokrass.jpg" width="144" /></a></div><br /><p>and <a href="https://www.andotherstories.org/authors/angela-readman/" target="_blank">Angela Readman</a></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Wm-n8XYCi1mPWY6EfVJ20kL_twN0j1VXDrDiuvhp78A2P-5bOqOGkGq1JBwUMYtyp_98gvZrzkZXHiQoDU12C0tcaUUk1yHQiCfTrreDYQKD0rEmaYPD52rXgap_feAJ-2qdnbeeEGA/s337/angela+readman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="337" data-original-width="285" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Wm-n8XYCi1mPWY6EfVJ20kL_twN0j1VXDrDiuvhp78A2P-5bOqOGkGq1JBwUMYtyp_98gvZrzkZXHiQoDU12C0tcaUUk1yHQiCfTrreDYQKD0rEmaYPD52rXgap_feAJ-2qdnbeeEGA/w146-h173/angela+readman.jpg" width="146" /></a></div><br /><p>are two of the most original and interesting exponents of Flash Fiction writing today. They have won more awards than I've got space to list, including the Costa Award for short fiction (Angela) and San Francisco's Blue Light Book Award (Meg). Angela's books include, <i>Don't Try This At Home</i>, short fiction, a poetry collection called <i>The Book of Tides</i> and a novel, <i>Something Like Breathing</i>. Meg has nine collections of short fiction, including <i>Alligators at Night, My Very End of the Universe, Bird Envy </i>and <i>Damn Sure Right</i>. They are the featured authors, with US poet Jeff Alessandrelli, in a new publication, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Triple-No-12-Meg-Pokrass/dp/1735113182" target="_blank">Triple 12, available here.</a></p><div><div><i>This is a socially-distanced interview with Meg and Angela, who both live in the north of England. </i></div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSyRzAyTy0GeYaOz7cO2uWHswytkxQcmEoNuwKkKXz0BWzKPj3ipC-bFwW8tBg70_QkrMHjSWfAusN-G-9JtqM-o1h_7jaBojMA-zRJGC-R52fRM39wd55Pfr45gWpv0JN7AbbrQG8DGs/s499/Triple12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="314" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSyRzAyTy0GeYaOz7cO2uWHswytkxQcmEoNuwKkKXz0BWzKPj3ipC-bFwW8tBg70_QkrMHjSWfAusN-G-9JtqM-o1h_7jaBojMA-zRJGC-R52fRM39wd55Pfr45gWpv0JN7AbbrQG8DGs/w161-h255/Triple12.jpg" width="161" /></a></div><div><b>1. First of all, can you tell us a bit about yourselves? Where do you live? Where did you grow up? How did you begin writing?</b> </div><p> Angela: I'm a short story writer and poet who lives in Northumberland. I used to live in Newcastle, so it's all a bit different to growing up in a city. I was drawn to writing because I was so anxious growing up I think. I spent a lot of time alone and found myself looking out the window wondering. I guess that's what writing is for me, another window to look through, a view I didn't know was there. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: I grew up in Southern California and spent most of my adult life in San Francisco. I moved to the U.K. 4 years ago to live with my partner. He was living in London when we got together, but he wanted to retire in the north country, so now we live in a small market town in Northumberland. It has been a bit of a change from San Francisco! As a kid I studied acting, and acted in plays all through my teens and early 20s, at which time I began writing poetry and was lucky to work with the wonderful Molly Peacock in NYC. I started writing flash fiction 12 years ago by taking out the line breaks in my poem and writing in what I thought of as 'connective tissue’.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>2. Is there a definition of Flash Fiction that means something to you? </b></p><p> Angela: This quote by Blaise Pascal from Flash Fiction International resonates with me: '<i>The letter I have written today is longer than usual because I lacked the time to make it shorter</i>'. That really covers it, it's a careful application of words. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: Flash fiction is the art of miniature: of telling a brief story in such a way that it casts a bigger, longer-standing narrative shadow. </span></p><p> </p><p><b>3. I was amazed to find that the origins of the short, short story went back into pre-history, because it seems so modern. Apparently, it's particularly common in Spanish and Arabic literature. Have either of you been influenced by writers from the past, rather than contemporary authors? </b></p><p> Angela: The writer who influenced me most is probably Richard Brautigan. I didn't find him until I started writing flash. I've read a lot since, but he's still my favourite. He can make me ache and laugh at the same time, that's incredible. I often feel that way about Meg's work, that the whole of life is there, with all its strange turns. It's funny, yet deeply human. I respond to that, it's an honour to be in a book with her. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: Admittedly, I haven't studied much very early short-form writing. I love the work of Kawabata Yasunari who wrote Palm of the Hand stories in the mid-1900s. I've been influenced by Ernest Hemingway who wrote short fiction using the art of omission, some of his short stories are flash. Hemingway was the king of white space, and of making very brief pieces feel enormous with his brilliant use of omission. I love Richard Brautigan. <i>Revenge of The Lawn</i> is my favourite collections in the world. I was very much influenced by Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis, Jayne Anne Phillips. </span></p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">I want to say that having a collection with Angela Readman is a huge honour. When I came across Readman's flash fiction about four years ago, I devoured it whenever I could find it. I'm a huge fan of Angela's writing. Her whimsical, quirky, beautiful stories, poetry, and her exquisite novel, <i>Something Like Breathing</i>. </span></p><p> </p><p><b>4. Do either of you write the very short forms eg Twitterature?</b> </p><p>Angela: I admire people who do. The shorter forms take longer than people to write than people imagine. I tend to go a bit longer than a tweet, my favourite short I wrote is 75 words: </p><p><i>I once saw a woman on TV who couldn't bear to be touched. It wasn't clear why. She built a chair designed to embrace her, strapped herself into pillows and leather every day after work. I think some of it involved a carjack, anyway there was pressure. I'm not sure how the show ended, I missed it, but I think of it sometimes in bed. That tender machine. I don't tell you. You'd think it meant something. </i>(Tender Machine- Paragraph Planet) </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: I've written one book of extremely short prose poems, many of them were influenced by the word count on Pinterest. I would post the little pieces on Pinterest with strange vintage photos, that's pretty much how the book came about. This book won the Blue Light Book Award in 2016, it's called "Cellulose Pajamas" (Blue Light Press, 2016). </span></p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Here is an example of one of these fragments:</span></p><p><i><span style="color: #45818e;">When the cars did start to move, he began to remember again how beautiful living near the ocean was. He remembered that he had finally grown a beard and people said it looked good on him. He remembered also that he could make a health-freak parfait for the woman with the nose cancer and that she liked it, even though it was full of flaxseed oil. All of the good things in the world, when the cars moved. The sun crept back into his face.</span></i></p><p><br /></p><p><b>5. How does it differ from Prose Poetry? Some of your stories are really poetic in the way the language works, and the third person in Triple is a poet. </b></p><p>Angela: There's a fine line between prose poetry and flash, flash snips boundaries. Both are condensed into a sort of heightened state. Whenever I try to define the difference, say if I said flash needs to tell a story, and involve character and place, I'll read a flash that throws it out the water. I've read flash I felt were poems and seen poems some consider flash. It may be down to the reader and context. With many of Raymond Carver's poems, if I'd seen them in a different context, I'd have thought they were flash. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: This is a subject which folks are interested in these days. I believe that for the most part, flash fiction tends to be more character-driven, and prose poetry more language-driven. And this is a simplification. There are no hard-and-fast rules about what designates one from the other and I honestly feel that it is sometimes what a writer or publisher decides to label it. For example, I believe that if the prose poet Russell Edson were publishing his pieces today we'd be calling his work flash fiction. </span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>6. I know both of you write poetry, what signals to you that this material is going to be a Poem or Flash? </b></p><p>Angela: Usually the first line, the voice of a character tells me it's a story. Occasionally, I won't know until I write. I had a flash out at <i>Ilanot Review</i> last year, 'Anyone Could Have a Godzilla', that started as a poem. Only one image remained, looking at the flash no one would guess it had anything to do with poetry but without the poem I'd never have written the story. It's as if the poem was a looking glass. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: I never know until a piece is done. I often shift from story to poem back to story! I'm a crazy reviser, experimental revision is what I love doing the most. I never have preconceived ideas. I come back to my work a month later and feel like I have some perspective on what it is.</span></p><p> </p><p><b>7. What excites you about Flash as a form? How did you start writing it? </b></p><p>Angela: I started writing flash the same year as the first National Flash Fiction Day. I was fed up and wanted to try something fun. It worked as a tonic that made me excited about writing again. It felt like the difference between reading literature you think you are supposed to read and tearing through a graphic novel to reach an ending that makes you fist pump. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: Twelve years ago I became fascinated with writers of the short form, such as Amy Hempel, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Lydia Davis. The magic of their tiny pieces! I didn't think I could do it. I became obsessed with trying my hand at flash, wrote my first collection, <i>Damn Sure Right</i> (Press 53, 2011) in under a year by giving myself 5- 10 random words that I'd have to incorporate into a story every day. I'd grab those words from anywhere: newspaper, magazines, shopping lists. I also turned some of my poems into stories. I'd say it was the second time in my adult life that I knew I could be very good at something I loved doing. It was so exciting to me.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>8. What are the problems of structuring a narrative arc in something so short? </b></p><p> Angela: When I've judged competitions, a problem I've come across is a sense that nothing hangs in the balance. Nothing has changed, or too much changes so fast it doesn't convince us. There's a juggling act between concrete detail that makes us feel we are there, and not so much detail we're in a longer story. Getting that right can be tricky. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: I don't consciously think about structure when writing a story. Narrative arc in flash and micro is often so quiet it's hard to pinpoint, and yet it must be there in some fashion. There is often, with successful flashes, a sly, eccentric narrative arc. Since the essence of flash is experimentalism, reinventing the form every time one writes it is part of the charm! As with traditional short stories, something often shifts in the way a character sees something in their world, but overall the idea of narrative arc and story structure is best when it comes about intuitively.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>9. Most of your pieces have a narrative - but I've read some Flash that has the feel of a vignette. Do you think it's important to have that narrative feel, or is it okay to just capture a 'moment in time'? </b></p><p>Angela: Flash is so versatile. It can span years, or just 60 seconds. What you do with that minute makes the difference. Something simple like, say, a woman making toast, may feel like a beautiful painting in a vignette. We'd see the kitchen, crumbs, sunlight bouncing off chrome, we are there. There may be no sense of why the woman is here or life beyond breakfast, which is fine. A flash, using the same subject, would be different. The woman may still be making toast, but there'd be a sense of danger. Someone's in another room, it's the last piece of toast she'll ever make, the toaster is demonic- whatever. The urgency creates a story that carries us beyond. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: Anything is okay! Flash is more active and tends to hook the reader hard. Vignette writing is gentler, more passive. Like a still life painting. The novels "Mr. Bridge" and "Mrs Bridge" by Evan Connell are great examples of what can be done with vignette chapters. It's as if the reader is peaking in the window of the Bridge's house, looking at accumulated, intimate moments. The layered effect of these snapshot portraits leaves us with a feeling that we have known these people intimately. </span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>10. How much do you leave to the reader's imagination? </b></p><p>Angela: Probably more than I should sometimes. One thing someone pointed out is a lot of my characters don't have names. I hadn't even thought about that! They are right though. In my flash Girly, we find out a lot about this girl, what she wears, when her birthday is, what the kid who sits next to her doodles on his notebook, but she never says her name. I like to think that's OK, we still feel we know her, the reader can christen her. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: This is a great question. Some stories benefit from detailed information juxtaposed against the intentional omission. In this way a writer might show what a character is thinking about vs. what they are avoiding thinking about. What is said and what isn't will tell us so much about a character's emotional life. </span></p><p><b>11. You both have some really succinct and witty last lines. How important are endings? </b></p><p>Angela: The last line can make the difference between a good flash and an astounding flash. Equally, it can kill a decent flash and spoil the whole thing. There can a temptation to fade out like the end of a record, or just stop dead leaving the reader flicking the page looking for the end. I like last lines that stick, last lines like a flavour that sticks in your mouth after you've finished the sweets. Meg's endings are fantastic for that. There's a story in the <i>Ravena</i> book that ends, '<i>The thing about otters is they're hungry animals. I thought, aw hell, here it comes.</i>' Yum. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: Endings are one of the most important parts, I'm afraid. Endings are so very hard to conquer! Can take me months of thinking, rewriting, experimenting… to get an ending right. </span></p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">There is a story in Triple #12 by Angela Readman that ends:</span></p><p><i><span style="color: #45818e;">“My mother's crazy”, Amy said, pretending a bull got loose outside Esso's. Not in a way that left bruises, just in a way that involved falling in love every few months.</span></i></p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">The way she leaves us with this wild, bullish feeling of undefinable love. Magic. </span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>12. Some of the stories are quite surreal. They seem to exist in another dimension. Are either of you attracted by surrealism/magic realism? I'm thinking particularly of Angela's 'The Night Life of Wives', and Meg's 'The Sting'. </b></p><p>Angela: I love surrealist art, like Dorothea Tanning, Leonara Carrington, poetry like Pascale Petit, or stories by Murakami. I'm attracted to work that captures a feeling we may have difficulty giving a name. It's the only way to get to a truth sometimes. 'The Night Life of Wives' is like that, it's a product of years of insomnia, living with a guy who always sleeps like a baby. The story makes night a whole other world, which is how it feels. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: I love Angela Readman's surreal flash, she does gently surreal better than anyone I've read. Funny you mention my story 'The Sting'. The Sting is loosely based on a real experience! So, I guess that tells me something. Real is often quite surreal, once investigated emotionally…</span></p><p><span style="color: #45818e;"> I love surrealist art and film. I'm thinking of Yellow Submarine. Beatles music. The Beatles teach us how to write, how to let go and dream. In terms of magical realism, I'm crazy about the short stories of Aimee Bender. </span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>13. Who are your favourite flash fiction authors? Mine include - Amanya Maloba, Grace Paley, David Gaffney, Lydia Davis. </b> </p><p>Angela: Richard Brautigan, Etgar Keret, Lydia Davis, Meg Pokrass, Kathy Fish, Ken Elkes, Tania Hershman, Sandra Cisneros and Jayne Anne Phillips. They all blow me away, but honestly there are far too many to name! </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Brautigan, Jayne Anne Phillips, Angela Readman, Frankie McMillan, Kathryn Kulpa, Aimee Parkison, but there are so many more.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>14. Who would you recommend if you wanted to get people started - apart from yourselves!!! </b></p><p>Angela: Starting out, it's inspiring to find something you relate to and everyone's different, so I'd go with an anthology. It helps to read widely. I'd recommend <i>Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions</i>, the <i>Norton Flash Fiction</i> books, <i>Smokelong Quarterly</i>, <i>New Flash Fiction Review</i>, the<i> Bath </i>flash anthologies, it's all good. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: I'd sample flash writers by reading highly regarded anthologies such as <i>The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction</i> (disclosure, I'm series co-editor) <i>New Micro</i> (WW Norton & Co., 2018) and <i>Flash Fiction International</i> (W. W. Norton & Co, 2015). <i>Wigleaf</i> magazine is wonderful and they have a prestigious Top 50 List every year. And I love Electric Lit's <i>The Commuter</i>, which publishes flash. </span></p><p><br /></p><p><b>15. What question would you like me to have asked?</b> </p><p>Angela: I've been reading Meg Pokrass lately, with our chapbooks being in the same book. In lockdown, I've also been curating celebrity dinner party lists to stave off the boredom, as well as thinking more seriously about being a writer, how to keep going, what it means to be in the arts. I've missed artists’ dates, doing something for a few hours a week to look after our inner artist. I think of mine as a sad child who needs little rewards & encouragement sometimes. So, I guess a question I'd love would have been: Where would you take Meg Pokrass on an artist date? I'd make a flask of tea and take her to the zoo to see the spoilt racoons, Suki and Bert. </p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Meg: What becomes more and more clear to me is that I must keep at it, keep it personal, writing it and publishing it, simply because it is what I love. I wouldn't feel like me if we weren't writing it. I believe that writing flash fiction (writing anything you love!) is a sustaining way to live one's life in this difficult time and increasingly fragile world. </span></p><p><span style="color: #45818e;">Admiring the work of a writer as brilliant, kind and special as Angela Readman, and then sharing such a project with her, has been one of the most meaningful experiences I've had thus far. </span></p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>A big 'thank you' to both writers for their frank and fascinating answers!</i></b></p><p> <i>Triple #12</i> also contains poetry by US poet Jeff Alessandrelli. It's a good introduction to the work of all three authors. </p><p>You can get Triple #12 from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Triple-No-12-Meg-Pokrass/dp/1735113182" target="_blank">Amazon.com on this link</a>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhus8KsVXqfSjEq_Qyzm_DQnsjmmBl7W6j5b43Cgg7I42O7imfEbygXP075wNGicBPGdPkxtLbPSWNL4A_yQ0uz5ANltSWRZ1nc3qr-nfvOfMe9GN-i_tn-W-iRmDl9WU8JO1TWinF3Wdg/s499/Triple12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhus8KsVXqfSjEq_Qyzm_DQnsjmmBl7W6j5b43Cgg7I42O7imfEbygXP075wNGicBPGdPkxtLbPSWNL4A_yQ0uz5ANltSWRZ1nc3qr-nfvOfMe9GN-i_tn-W-iRmDl9WU8JO1TWinF3Wdg/s0/Triple12.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-86094585431156772732020-08-25T15:38:00.000+01:002020-08-25T15:41:15.439+01:00Tuesday Poem: Anna Akhmatova - Requiem<p style="text-align: left;"> It's #WomenInTranslation month and I've been re-reading the poetry of Anna Akhmatova - one of the greatest voices of poetry under totalitarianism that has ever lived. Under Stalin, her husband had been killed, her lover and her son imprisoned. Her poem <i>Requiem</i> is a record of living under terror, boldly naming the head of the KGB. If it had fallen into the wrong hands, it would have meant that she also would have lost her life. She didn't write it down, but committed it to memory. Then, to prevent the record being lost, she asked her friends to memorise it too. You can read more about <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180515-requiem-how-a-poem-resisted-stalin" target="_blank">the poem's journey here</a>. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuRW40oDrvMLRdKa6jo5YFda_XjrsTTMwoRp43IWUWShps76ovtdZVAmcU2-tB1qXHw2_6ffhLaoaci8bdxTLLTu11rYBnMSJh72WWxoMhTkeK05zZ95BHZ1NWWic1yc2AHkgxAU2MZf4/s244/Akhmatova.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="244" data-original-width="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuRW40oDrvMLRdKa6jo5YFda_XjrsTTMwoRp43IWUWShps76ovtdZVAmcU2-tB1qXHw2_6ffhLaoaci8bdxTLLTu11rYBnMSJh72WWxoMhTkeK05zZ95BHZ1NWWic1yc2AHkgxAU2MZf4/s0/Akhmatova.jpg" /></a></div><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">This is at the beginning of <i>Requiem</i>, describing a moment while she is standing outside the prison in Leningrad waiting to see her son.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">INSTEAD OF A PREFACE</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">(everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">something like a smile slid across what had previously</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">been just a face.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]</span></div></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;">Akhmatova was married twice - both times to Russian poets - but neither marriage lasted very long. Her first husband was executed for anti-bolshevik sentiments. Akhmatova was very beautiful and had many affairs, most notably with Modigliani who almost lost his sanity over her, and with Boris Pasternok and Alexander Blok. She finally settled down with art critic Nikolay Punin, who was also imprisoned by Stalin. Her son by her first husband was only released from prison in 1943 to serve in the Russian army, but re-arrested in 1949 and ordered to serve another 10 years hard labour. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGXA-Br3b5j3fjFlhnYmGQRVhJr644myckvs4-T4KaIzk-2fUIpGLjSH5vt956GxzCQ5IQu7erN1OEzxqSu8i6vcZ-LY9xRoxMLZ6r53-ZJ7pVncNfw4WnFG3YEnhCzbWVF2d0o4jnHug/s245/AkhModigliani.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="245" data-original-width="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGXA-Br3b5j3fjFlhnYmGQRVhJr644myckvs4-T4KaIzk-2fUIpGLjSH5vt956GxzCQ5IQu7erN1OEzxqSu8i6vcZ-LY9xRoxMLZ6r53-ZJ7pVncNfw4WnFG3YEnhCzbWVF2d0o4jnHug/s0/AkhModigliani.jpg" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><i> Akhmatova by Modigliani</i></p><p style="text-align: left;">Akhmatova set out to record the suffering of the Russian people with the same passion as her earlier poetry recorded her personal emotions. She was banned from the Union of Writers for her opposition to Stalin, which meant that she was denied publication. Her most important poems would not be published until after her death. After a lifetime of trauma Akhmatova was nominated for the Nobel Prize and, in 1965, allowed to travel to Europe again. She died in 1966.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">Why is This Age Worse?</span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">Why is this age worse than earlier ages?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">In a stupor of grief and dread</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">have we not fingered the foulest wounds</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">and left them unhealed by our hands?</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">In the west the falling light still glows,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">Translated by Stanley Kunitz (with Max Hayward)</span></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-72860675107115019222020-07-20T15:15:00.000+01:002020-07-20T15:17:07.817+01:00Reading My Mother: Tom's Garden<div> Rosley was the most normal part of my childhood. We lived in a house like other people’s, and had electricity and running water. There were abundant Christmas and birthday presents because my parents were now in a position to be able to afford things. Dad, as a farm manager, was paid a very good wage. There were new clothes in the wardrobe, a modern three piece suite in the drawing room and a carpet. They were buying Mozart’s <i>Eine Kleine Nachtmusik </i>in instalments, one 78 record at a time, at the end of every month. But most of the money was put into a savings account towards the deposit on a farm of their own. My father was a man in a hurry and he had no intention of spending his life working for someone else. He didn’t have the temperament for it. There was constant friction. My mother would sigh and say, ‘He won’t let anyone be the boss of him’, and it was true.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0363tArOq6BLq8_yWOVi7nZOosVuZsEDr_izOUg8TdrnW9lB4M67WDSOhpA_29Hq2vuEh4QwR5wsQ29cfLGPj2fwMv2zRlWK74p4cKt5z40UOteWnp3Rk4oCNESx3auc8Xtq-SO3pbRI/s640/Copy+of+lowlinghorse+copy+%2528Small%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="640" height="126" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0363tArOq6BLq8_yWOVi7nZOosVuZsEDr_izOUg8TdrnW9lB4M67WDSOhpA_29Hq2vuEh4QwR5wsQ29cfLGPj2fwMv2zRlWK74p4cKt5z40UOteWnp3Rk4oCNESx3auc8Xtq-SO3pbRI/w200-h126/Copy+of+lowlinghorse+copy+%2528Small%2529.jpg" title="The family with shire horse outside Low Ling" width="200" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div> The family with Shire horse, at Low Ling</div><div> </div><div> It was through the chapel that we met the Routledges, four elderly brothers and a sister who lived on a neighbouring farm, never to be seen except on Sundays. Neighbours said that they were very reclusive and if you met them they rarely spoke to you. I was fascinated by their farmhouse, which was a sturdy, black and white, traditional Lake District house set in a beautiful cottage garden. Tom was one of the younger brothers, a lean, craggy man with a face creased and brown from the weather. When he smiled, which was often, you could see that he had a mouthful of rotten teeth. To sweeten his breath he sucked extra strong mints, and kept several packets in his coat pocket which were liberally offered to everyone he met. He came to the local chapel and became my father’s groupie, cycling to wherever he was preaching. </div><div> Soon he was cycling down to Low Ling in the evenings for a ‘bit of crack’, bringing a bunch of flowers from the garden for my mother. It became obvious that he had, what my parents called, ‘taken a shine’ to her. No one mentioned the word love. I remember those evenings, sitting by the fire, in awkward silence once the initial pleasantries had been exhausted. Tom was no conversationalist. Every now and then the stillness would be punctuated by an indrawn breath and an ‘Aye’, that could have meant anything. My parents dreaded the visits, because they couldn’t read books or listen to the radio while he was there, and attempts at talking were strained. Eventually, after a couple of hours and the consumption of tea and cake, Tom would get up and say ‘Better be off’, put on his overcoat – a brown dog-tooth wool affair that he wore winter and summer – slip on his bicycle clips and step out into the night.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjApCBR_7zCn7lswUIykSm9rO7ta7LHX1YrdY6kJTqCsdu_-g4O2yAsQlV6TRcmN0kGZYTIg7AU3OYdgLKlOqCHsh0t8kioABIxqYQg9vszJa5e1abIQq7K_9HcV96Qq6wT6tOG-3fRri0/s640/LowLingFarm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjApCBR_7zCn7lswUIykSm9rO7ta7LHX1YrdY6kJTqCsdu_-g4O2yAsQlV6TRcmN0kGZYTIg7AU3OYdgLKlOqCHsh0t8kioABIxqYQg9vszJa5e1abIQq7K_9HcV96Qq6wT6tOG-3fRri0/s320/LowLingFarm.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"> <font size="2">The long driveway to Low Ling farm</font></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div> We were honoured to be invited to the house for tea. It was a journey into a previous century – nothing had changed since the Routledge parents had furnished it when they married decades earlier. There were flagged floors with rag rugs and a gigantic grandfather clock in the hallway. The interior was dark because there was no electricity and there were candle sconces on all the walls. The rooms were papered in old fashioned floral prints in greens and reds, darkened by decades of paraffin fumes and candle smoke. There were heavy velvet curtains in medieval red, and the furniture was Victorian mahogany the colour and sheen of chestnuts. It had the kind of patina that only generations of polish can produce. There were table covers of chenille, and glass lamps in blues and greens with painted glass shades. Above the fireplace a text embroidered in cross stitch announced: ‘Christ is the Head of this House, the Unseen Guest at Every Meal’. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW7RT8jX4hX9wFhOF6OwpKv3c-xsBWZUJ2qsishZz81h6l-52_OsFraxo82IqjKUtIvSER9mj-P2NsApe-TCUeG3hzD8n-_ZA1QuUG5tDhhbClIDO-vrJ_mZiIICM4ah89lESmmHierys/s500/Christ+is+the+head.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW7RT8jX4hX9wFhOF6OwpKv3c-xsBWZUJ2qsishZz81h6l-52_OsFraxo82IqjKUtIvSER9mj-P2NsApe-TCUeG3hzD8n-_ZA1QuUG5tDhhbClIDO-vrJ_mZiIICM4ah89lESmmHierys/s320/Christ+is+the+head.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> We were introduced by Tom to his sister, Ginny, a thin, stooped woman in an overall, with grey wispy hair drawn back into a bun. She avoided our eyes, whispered hello in a voice that could barely be heard and beckoned my mother and I towards the sitting room door. Inside, the curtains were drawn and it was as dark as a cave, lit only by a fire in the grate, although it was August. Beside the fire in an upholstered, spindle-back rocking chair, was a woman so ancient I wondered if she was real. Mrs Routledge was dressed as I’d seen pictures of old Queen Victoria, in a full-length black dress trimmed with buttons and frills and a black satin cap on her head. The room was full of the scent of decay, as she held out a shaking hand to greet us. We were given tea round the kitchen table with the brothers. It was a silent affair, apart from my parents’ attempts at conversation. Ginny didn’t sit down with us, but ran round slicing home-made bread, putting out home-cured ham with beetroot jelly, scones and cakes, making tea in an antique silver service. She looked at me nervously as she put down a slice of apple cake and smiled a quick shy smile that seemed almost to escape from her mouth against her will. </div><div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Gradually, as Tom gained confidence in us, their story began to emerge. Their parents had been extreme non-conformists in some small sect. Methodism was deemed to be too liberal. The only book they had been allowed to read was the bible. Once, when Ginny won <i>Alice in Wonderland</i> as a prize at school her father put it on the fire as the work of the devil. The only time they were allowed to go anywhere was to religious worship. In her thirties, Ginny had once had a boyfriend she’d met when she went to the market to buy groceries, and she used to sneak out of the house to meet him on the main road, where they walked up and down for half an hour before she ran back home. When her father found out what was happening it was stopped. It broke her heart, Tom said. </div><div> Only their eldest brother had escaped. He had thumbed a lift on a wagon and gone south. He’d sent a letter to say he was in Oxfordshire, working on a farm and wouldn’t be coming back. Although their father had been dead ten years, nothing had changed. They still had no electricity or telephone, or any other modern conveniences. His stern influence was as thick as woodsmoke within those four walls and their mother, slowly fading in the sitting room, still feared and respected, like a spider at the centre of a web.</div><div> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCZipApc6UwhGAex3aDGqG6U1NzXKwYEENdi-Z8l_g4Xf0BqDUnHWdvKnnFdvE2LkZrf0JYXs1CLWBAwVo-HLSwv6Cbvv_oZHlJKQesmZ2vFfvoPHAMAaHwlGldyLt_cA4TN3SA52A_Vw/s950/CottageGarden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="950" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCZipApc6UwhGAex3aDGqG6U1NzXKwYEENdi-Z8l_g4Xf0BqDUnHWdvKnnFdvE2LkZrf0JYXs1CLWBAwVo-HLSwv6Cbvv_oZHlJKQesmZ2vFfvoPHAMAaHwlGldyLt_cA4TN3SA52A_Vw/s320/CottageGarden.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> I often wandered up to the farm on fine days and Ginny would pat my head and give me tea and cake and let me chatter. Tom would take me out into the garden, which I quickly realised was his special place. He grew sweet peas, lupins, sweet william and enormous dahlias. It was a traditional cottage garden with white lilac and purple lilac by the gate, peonies and alchemilla on either side of the path and, against the wall, roses as big as mop heads, buzzing with bees. He would go into the greenhouse and give me strawberries, or raspberries – whatever was in season – to take home to my mother. </div><div> My Aunt Nancy had just given me <i>The Secret Garden</i> to read, and Tom’s garden was everything I’d imagined a garden should be. Neither of my parents were gardeners; they had neither the time nor the energy. The garden at Low Ling was waist high with unmown grass. The conservatory remained empty, the gardening equivalent of Miss Haversham’s sitting room with stacks of cracked pots, a few weeds struggling up through the staging, rusting tools, and shawls of cobweb everywhere. It smelt rank, the scent of a rogue shrub that had shouldered its way between the wall and the frame.</div><div><br /></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-79624969674515885622020-06-30T23:53:00.003+01:002020-07-01T09:56:26.262+01:00Tuesday Poem: Tomas Transtromer, Silence<div><font size="5">Silence</font></div><div><br /></div><div>Walk on by, they are buried . . .</div><div>A cloud shifts across the sun.</div><div><br /></div><div>Starvation looms over us, a tall edifice</div><div>shifting in the night</div><div><br /></div><div>in the bedroom, a dark pit opens -</div><div>that elevator drop in the stomach.</div><div><br /></div><div>Flowers in the ditch, celebration and silence.</div><div>Walk on by, they are buried . . .</div><div><br /></div><div>Silver cutlery swarms in shoals</div><div>where the Atlantic is deep and black.</div><div><br /></div><div>Translation © Kathleen Jones</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjngP8fMAeI-21ci-h1J8iwjwNXNmZjzNpk81wWQbhmXTgs_6RLzRDd6Zj54F_J7cUIZ1iBbmLLwx_ccVd9Lf7WNbp9zRs8ZnmmxAuZ9ZksR_MdcBuBdgasu3RbYV-xbH4Rw2ISnnpMPdA/s275/cloudoversun.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="183" data-original-width="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjngP8fMAeI-21ci-h1J8iwjwNXNmZjzNpk81wWQbhmXTgs_6RLzRDd6Zj54F_J7cUIZ1iBbmLLwx_ccVd9Lf7WNbp9zRs8ZnmmxAuZ9ZksR_MdcBuBdgasu3RbYV-xbH4Rw2ISnnpMPdA/" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><font size="5">Tystnad</font></div><div><br /></div><div>Gå förbi, de är begravda . . .</div><div>Ett moln glider över solskivan.</div><div><br /></div><div>Svälten är en hög byggnad</div><div>som flyttar sig om natten </div><div><br /></div><div>i sovrummet öppnar sig en hisstrummas</div><div>mörka stav mot innandömena.</div><div><br /></div><div>Blommor i diket. Fanfar och tystnad.</div><div>Gå förbi, de är begravda . . .</div><div><br /></div><div>Bordssilvret överlever i stora stim</div><div>på stort djup där Atlanten är svart. </div><div><br /></div><div>© Tomas Transtromer </div><div>Sorgegondolen</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I love Transtromer's poetry, it's so stark and deceptively simple. In theory it should be easy to translate, but, word for word, the result often feels crude and facile. All kinds of questions present themselves - What is this poem really about? Hunger? Grief? What is that terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach? And what is the significance of the cutlery - literally the 'table silver' - swimming in the depths of the Atlantic? And then there's the word 'svart' - a lovely, harsh word with a long vowel to stretch the mouth. It has much deeper, more sinister undertones than the simple 'dark', coming into English as 'swarthy'. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxI1P9ef6OdFM2x5AYz8lqRMQB5br4AfCt2h9CerhrMwSnyNWWAjt7K6EPmwbPHBboaety6amcIQE3ML8KRyrajP9ENN9uiNoTkJ0SvjBNQpnDpoW7YpKvugUotTE_MW8_0GY6mukrEQ/s180/tuesdaypoem.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="161" data-original-width="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVxI1P9ef6OdFM2x5AYz8lqRMQB5br4AfCt2h9CerhrMwSnyNWWAjt7K6EPmwbPHBboaety6amcIQE3ML8KRyrajP9ENN9uiNoTkJ0SvjBNQpnDpoW7YpKvugUotTE_MW8_0GY6mukrEQ/" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-42292190074464512192020-06-20T11:04:00.000+01:002020-06-20T11:21:22.809+01:00Beyond the Wall<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Another extract from 'Reading My Mother'.<br />
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Beyond the Wall</h3>
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One of my mother’s favourite poems was W.B. Yeats’ Prayer for my Daughter. She was particularly fond of the line where he wished her to be ‘rooted in one dear, perpetual place’ – something my mother always longed for. But she had married a man who was restless and determined, perhaps something he’d inherited in his itinerant Irish genes. Ella was destined to become a nomad.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Just before my third birthday my father took a position as an assistant shepherd and we moved to a remote location on the Cheviot hills, in what were known as the ‘Debatable Lands’ beyond the Roman Wall. It was a kind of no-man’s land between England and Scotland fought over for centuries by Romans and Vikings and then generations of feuding Border Reivers. The shepherd’s croft, long ago swallowed by the Kershope Forest, was called Coldslopes and it was aptly named. It was a traditional Scottish longhouse, perched on the moors below Christenberry Crags. At one end there was a byre, with a hayloft above, and a door into a narrow kitchen, more like a passageway. This opened into a tiny living room going through into one bedroom that again led into another. There was an earth closet at the back. In those days there were no trees to break the strength of the wind off the Solway Firth; it was totally exposed. There was no road to it, only a rough track across the fell - not that it mattered as we didn't have a car. The croft was isolated and there were only two farms within walking distance: the Crew, whose lights could just be seen further up the fell, and, across the beck and down through the woods, the Flatt Lodge where the gamekeeper and his wife lived.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The nearest village, several miles away, was Bewcastle, with a shop and a small school attached to the church. It had once been an outlier of Saxon and then Viking civilisation, and the churchyard contained the Bewcastle Cross, carved with celtic knots and fantastical beasts, dedicated to Alcfrith, son of a seventh century king of Northumberland. My parents both loved history and they passed it on to me in the form of stories and images that fired a child’s imagination. Bewcastle was where I first learned the fascination of living in a layered landscape, the concept of ‘deep place’, a location marked by thousands of years of habitation.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Just before we left Raughton Head, My father bought a small Ayrshire cow, called Betty, and eight Sussex hens and arranged to have them delivered. His employers generously gave him a young border collie pup called Flo. On moving day a local cattle wagon came to take the furniture, while my parents were driven up by a friend who had a car. It wasn’t possible to take the lorry to the house, so the furniture was off-loaded at the roadside and taken across the moor by horse and cart. It was a bumpy journey and my mother watched, anguished, as her precious post-war austerity furniture bounced around on the cart, and the wardrobe fell off into the heather. But everything was eventually in place, a picnic supper eaten, the cow tied up in the byre, paraffin lamps lit and a small daughter put to bed in a strange room.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My father later wrote that: ‘Coldslopes became for Kathleen "Green Gables" and "The Little House on the Prairie" both rolled into one’. The kitchen door opened onto the moor and I roamed free among rushes as tall as I was, curlew’s nests, and mattresses of sphagnum moss. The sky seemed to go on forever. I played in the hayloft, searched the rush beds for hens’ eggs, and regularly fell into the small beck that ran just below the croft. My mother couldn’t keep me in and eventually gave up trying. After all, what could happen to me in such a remote environment? The family called me ‘Little Miss Independence’. I came in for tea filthy, wind-blown, tired and brown as a nut.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Mum was not so happy. She missed the sea, she missed the lakes and the mountains. An entry in her first reading diary records ‘March, spring, homesickness’. It was an intensely lonely existence for someone who had been brought up in a city and loved companionship. Even when she did go to community events she found that she had nothing in common with her neighbours. Most of the local farmers’ wives had had little education and most had never been more than thirty miles away from their homes in their entire lives. The radio became her lifeline during the day. In the afternoons we both listened to ‘Listen with Mother’. But her biggest treat was the three weekly visit from the mobile library.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Cumbria has a long history of mobile libraries. Back in 1857 a man called John Sanderson became the first person to provide a ‘Perambulating Library’ service. He walked pushing a box of books on wheels around isolated Lake District villages every six weeks, rain or shine. He was once reported to have walked a hundred and fifty miles in two days. Subscribers paid a penny a month to use the service.<br />
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It was all the idea of a northern philanthropist called George Moore, who was interested in promoting literacy and wanted books to be available in remote communities. By the end of WW2 the library had become motorised and resembled a removal van on the outside. Inside you had to climb up steep steps into a dark corridor lined on both sides with books. The librarian sat in a little cubicle behind the driver’s seat, ready to stamp your books in and out. My mother always borrowed her maximum allowance.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Cumbrian dialect is unique; a chaotic mix of Old Norse, Anglo Saxon and Celtic, which didn’t begin to modernise until medieval times when a few new expressions crept in, and even now it still has its own counting system. It was, and is, as Melvyn Bragg observed, better understood in Oslo than in London. My father spoke it at work, in the auction ring, or when mixing with fellow Cumbrians in the community; my mother never. The farms she’d worked on as a landgirl were in lowland areas where dialect wasn’t generally spoken. She was also regarded as rather posh because she'd had elocution lessons at school to iron out her Tyneside accent, and now spoke a clear middle English. I was expected to speak like that at home, but at school and in the playground I talked the same as the rest of the children. When someone came to the door and asked my mother, ‘Ist tha thrang?’ I knew that they were asking if she was busy, though she sometimes couldn’t make out what was being said. Speaking so properly, reading so prolifically, my mother had no chance of being accepted as ‘one of them’ by the local women. She was marked as an off-comer.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But to the small child we all seemed happy. During the day my mother did her domestic chores and read her books; my father worked among the sheep. If he was going up to the crags in search of strays he sometimes took me with him, perched on his shoulders when my legs needed a rest. There was a ruined house that had once been a way-station for whisky smugglers, and an old track he said had been a drovers’ route across the Scottish Border. He would stand, wistfully, looking at it and I wonder now whether he was thinking that perhaps his unknown Irish drover grandfather might have once walked this route. In the country beyond the wall, over the White Lyne river, nature still ran unchecked. He showed me adders and grass snakes, identified moss cheepers, curlews and lapwings. Once, he got me out of bed at dawn to climb up to the crags to see the wild goats. We hid behind rocks to watch them graze, slithering across the scree in search of better fodder. The old Billy was enormous, with huge horns that curved up and back as wide as the span of my arms. They had been here since the Romans introduced them, he told me, and had gone feral. (Later I learned that he was wrong – they are even older than that. The Cheviot goat dates back to the Neolithic period, introduced by early nomadic tribes moving north after the ice age.) As the sun rose higher, the mist began to rise from the ground and obscured our view. The goats vanished into the cloud and I’ve never seen them since.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A family picnic with my grandparents. You can just see the roof of the croft</td></tr>
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In the evenings, once I’d been put to bed, my parents read and listened to the radio. As there was only a thin, badly made wooden door between my bedroom and the living room, I listened to the radio too. They weren’t fans of the highbrow Third Progamme, preferring the diet of light classical music and factual information provided by the Light Programme, which had begun in 1945, and the Home Service – a fore-runner of Radio 4. Sunday lunch was always accompanied by the mellow voice of Cliff Michelmore and Two Way Family Favourites. Sometimes on Sundays in summer, we would put sandwiches in a basket and go up the fell for a picnic. My father turned his underpants back to front and went in the river to fish for minnows. Even my mother tucked up her dress and paddled in the freezing water.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My mother had more courage than any woman I’ve ever met. She had gone through the war fearing that at any moment her family might be bombed out of existence, lost her first husband, attempted a man’s share of manual farm work, and was now more lonely and isolated than she had ever been in her life. ‘You make your bed and you lie on it,’ she used to say to me. ‘I knew what life would be like with your father and I chose it.’ She swore that, given the chance, she would have made the same choice again. Later, much later, she changed her mind. She had been brought up, and every book she had read had conditioned her, to believe that a woman followed where a man led. Where it led was not always comfortable, particularly for children. I was not so compliant. I blamed her for years for some of the decisions that blighted our lives.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feeding the calves before bed</td></tr>
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The people who wrenched a living from the land around us, could trace their ancestry back into the murk of pre-history; they belonged to that land as we could not. Around Bewcastle people were known, not by their surnames. but by the names of their holdings. There was Bobby the Shop, who was the blacksmith at Shopford, Dick the Crew who farmed the holding above us with his brothers Watty, Johnny and Ted. Then there was Olive the Row who regularly invited my mother and I to tea. The tradition didn’t apply to offcomers like my parents, or to our social superiors. My father’s immediate boss was the land agent for the estate called the Captain, who lived, for some of the time, with his aristocratic wife and little daughter at the big farm house near the Flatt Lodge. The Captain was said to have had a ‘bad war’, and suffered from what we would now call PTSD. He could be very kind, but had a ferocious, unpredictable temper and sometimes disappeared from view for weeks on end.<br />
His wife was the same age as my mother, but class differences prevented them from ever becoming friends. I was sometimes invited to play with Lady Caroline, who was the same age as myself, but led a precious life, never allowed to go anywhere unless accompanied by a parent or nanny. I have photographs of us together – she has pretty curly hair, is dressed in children’s clothes from Harrods and tiny, buttoned, kid slippers, while I’m in a home made pinafore and hand-knitted jumper (probably with scabby knees!). She had a nursery playroom all to herself, and it was filled with toys, including a story-book rocking horse. I had so few toys I can’t even remember them, kept in a cardboard box in a corner of the living room. On library days, and occasionally if we needed to see the doctor, we would be given a lift to the village in the Captain’s vintage Rolls Royce. It was the first time I became aware of class difference and the sense of social hierarchy that ordered our rural community.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My mother’s social life had contracted to the narrow isolated community we found ourselves in. It never occurred to me, as a child that she had been lonely, but she was. I was out on the moors appearing only at mealtimes, my father was up on the fells shepherding sheep, leaving Mum at home alone with only the radio for company. The trite lines she copied into her commonplace book seem to indicate unhappiness, if not depression.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Somewhere the sun is shining,<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Somewhere the skies are blue<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Then what is the use of repining<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Because they shine not on you.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
Mum didn’t find housework in any way fulfilling. She hated domestic chores but, being by nature dutiful, she swept and scrubbed and dusted conscientiously. There were no labour-saving devices, and no electricity to make things easy. Carpets were beaten on the washing line, flagged floors scrubbed with carbolic soap on her hands and knees. She often took refuge in religion, trying hard to make the work a grace. She talked to me about Martha and Mary and how Jesus had excused Mary from domestic chores, justifying it to her sister Martha because she had chosen a more valuable route to salvation. I knew which woman my mother identified with. A poem Mum found in a woman’s magazine was quoted often. ‘Lord of All Pots and Pans and Things’.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates,<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Although I must have Martha’s hands, I have a Mary mind,<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And when I black the shoes Thy sandals Lord I find . . .<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Warm all the kitchen with Thy love and Light it with Thy peace<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Forgive me all my worrying and make my grumbling cease.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But there were some social occasions to dress up for. The village hall was the venue for any celebration of birth, marriage or death, as well as all the traditional feast days of the calendar, and the whole community came, whether invited or not. So long as you brought a ‘plate’ of something, you could come. And, once seated on the benches at the long trestle tables, across the plate cakes, victoria sponges, jellies and potted meats, people talked. Beyond the reach of electricity and far from any cinema or other forms of entertainment, everyone told stories, while others played folk tunes and jigs on the fiddle or the accordion. As children we were never excluded. Wherever the parents went, their children went, however late at night it was. I listened to George the Underwood, who had been born in 1858, talking vividly about the lime-burners on the moors, and the drovers who had brought the cattle down from Scotland. I also heard about someone nicknamed ‘Pipe Head’, a shepherd who lived even further out than we did, who was renowned for his appetite and not particular what he ate. His wife was once reported to have removed a dead rat from the butter churn before continuing to churn it.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibLPVs6q0XX5idUCaSEUMrcHbKZ7xdakuQ6kGYK8C6JKKgpCBiVg3G7OWUTKgqIOmBDg2gEpwBkqXLWF9mUPi_SWzvhDDc-Eib8eDvvre-w-fvGNPSeUmeJE6jTy8gKrFo1hV4EKiME1o/s1600/bewcastlecross.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibLPVs6q0XX5idUCaSEUMrcHbKZ7xdakuQ6kGYK8C6JKKgpCBiVg3G7OWUTKgqIOmBDg2gEpwBkqXLWF9mUPi_SWzvhDDc-Eib8eDvvre-w-fvGNPSeUmeJE6jTy8gKrFo1hV4EKiME1o/s320/bewcastlecross.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">the 8th century Bewcastle Cross</td></tr>
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I heard tales about the winter of ‘47. How Billy the Hope had spent three days floundering through the snow with a horse and sled to fetch supplies for his starving family. His story, as they told it, was a tale worthy of a Greek epic. I learned about travelling teachers and dancing masters who boarded at the farms for a few weeks and taught the neighbourhood children for pennies and their keep, though it must have been nearly a hundred years since these itinerants stopped coming. It was still an oral culture and things lived on in the minds of those who told the tales. First nation people have a saying that when an elder dies part of their own history dies too, because of the stories and memories that are lost. My grandparents had been born at the latter end of the nineteenth century, their parents in the 1850s, one or two of their grandparents predated Queen Victoria. That's a long memory line.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgTjhJppF3ihwp32X6T9UZV21BJyPPMcjW5uYxu12FdWogIjKREHQpVAGmlpTq9c-jWu_sOGd3g-nfSlA-Q2DnkRA9pMq4qAJIsMCqZTQwXdEqinwRjkWUv0bVAaUcTiRwtucI2jTjqok/s1600/slight+family-059.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1326" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgTjhJppF3ihwp32X6T9UZV21BJyPPMcjW5uYxu12FdWogIjKREHQpVAGmlpTq9c-jWu_sOGd3g-nfSlA-Q2DnkRA9pMq4qAJIsMCqZTQwXdEqinwRjkWUv0bVAaUcTiRwtucI2jTjqok/s320/slight+family-059.jpg" width="241" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My mother's mother is the little girl standing next to her father in row 2</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJneii4OEkp2zCwkbKDYCBKrYvibXz3G4riJNLpbdck_inuA_4tf_7-RiiMHGpogN6m0ZvjgyZXOlAAJxay9jpP57BVnALkY7NKnZbB2SzRUl2QO82gyw5uTMPnujxKUGkVt1mtuIUkHY/s1600/slight+family-007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1458" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJneii4OEkp2zCwkbKDYCBKrYvibXz3G4riJNLpbdck_inuA_4tf_7-RiiMHGpogN6m0ZvjgyZXOlAAJxay9jpP57BVnALkY7NKnZbB2SzRUl2QO82gyw5uTMPnujxKUGkVt1mtuIUkHY/s320/slight+family-007.jpg" width="219" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My father's Irish gt grandmother born in 1840.</td></tr>
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>At home, visits from grandparents, uncles and aunts, led to nights around the fireside talking. It was here that I learned my own family stories as I listened to my parents’ parents talking about ancestors who went across the sea on sailing ships to bring back cargos of bananas and marry exotic women, of others who drove herds of cattle from Ireland to London, how they despaired over errant children, disinherited their offspring and fought bitterly over religion. These were stories they had learned from their own grandparents. I was aware, even at five or six, that I was listening to an unbroken memory line going back two hundred years – stories passing like heirlooms from one generation to another. The tellers seemed to know exactly what my Irish great great grandmother Bridie had said to her daughter Frances Theresa when she came home with a baby she wasn’t supposed to have – fathered by a footman in the fine house at Warren Point where she was in service. The fancy rooms, the uniforms, the very porcelain crockery she washed in a lead-lined sink were all there in the story, leaping like a hologram in the firelight before my eyes. The account of my great great uncle Edward who had stood preaching the gospel of temperance outside his father’s pub on a Tyneside quay, was pure Catherine Cookson. It was hardly surprising that I grew up with a love of history, language and narrative that was somehow equated with the wild, untamed landscape beyond the kitchen door.<br />
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Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-30691009476220403292020-06-02T13:55:00.000+01:002020-06-02T13:55:51.436+01:00Reading My Mother during Lockdown<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The day before my mother died, she warned me that I would find my father’s love letters, and hers, in the old bureau in the sitting room.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>‘They’re not very exciting,’ she said, with a smile that seemed almost regretful, as she leaned back against the pillows of the bed she’d shared with my father. She was as thin as a bird and her skin was almost transparent. ‘We didn’t write about passion.’<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I suspected that, if the letters had contained anything very intimate, she might have already destroyed them. But perhaps I was doing her a disservice. I discovered, after she died, that I didn’t know my mother as well as I thought I did.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Later that evening, when she’d slipped into a morphine-induced sleep, from which, I’d been warned, she might never wake, I opened the bureau to look for the certificates and other documents I would shortly need. Overwhelmed by sadness, feeling guilty, a trespasser on a very private life, I opened the crocheted war-time clutch bag where she kept important things. It was a peculiar shade of khaki wool and it was hideous. I cringed to think that my mother might once have carried it, but wartime fashion wasn’t exactly about beauty or style. Inside the hand-sewn cotton lining, together with war-time ration books and identity cards, were about forty small Basildon Bond envelopes. I recognised my father’s looped scrawl and my mother’s neat copperplate, in faded blue ink, on fawn-coloured paper that might once have been cream or white. The ink had smudged in places. I didn’t open the letters; it would have seemed obscene to read such private communications with my mother sleeping in the next room.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>As I sorted through birth certificates and insurance policies, I realised that the bag also contained a collection of little notebooks – most no bigger than a small envelope. One or two were a horrible khaki colour like the clutch bag, with a government logo in the right-hand corner, a legacy of post war austerity. Others had pretty floral covers. Curious, but also half reluctant in case I’d stumbled on something not meant for my eyes, I opened one of them. A date was written at the top of the first page, January 1964, the year I left home for a more exciting life in London, the year my mother had what was then called a ‘nervous breakdown’. But it wasn’t a diary. Down the page, neatly divided under monthly headings was a series of book titles and their authors, each one given a star rating from one to five with the occasional comment from my mother. These were her reading diaries, and they ran from 1948 – two years after she married my father – to the present day; almost sixty years of reading history.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUy_HlVzLeLE6ygn6J3AJYtTYaFzKQ65PlV8608sIUNo3fe87mJVMVeHUTjgcw24wUosWMtf_T1-DKoajjuSER555n4EhRpO3BEmQt7aGt1q062-hbNjOKDWX20rIzijoDNvMZAzcJI7Y/s1600/Copy+%25282%2529+of+ella1945+copy+%2528Small%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="296" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUy_HlVzLeLE6ygn6J3AJYtTYaFzKQ65PlV8608sIUNo3fe87mJVMVeHUTjgcw24wUosWMtf_T1-DKoajjuSER555n4EhRpO3BEmQt7aGt1q062-hbNjOKDWX20rIzijoDNvMZAzcJI7Y/s320/Copy+%25282%2529+of+ella1945+copy+%2528Small%2529.jpg" width="197" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ella Sutherland in 1945</td></tr>
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I can’t remember my mother without a book in her hand. She read with her morning coffee and her afternoon tea. In the evenings in remote farmhouses beyond the reach of electricity she and my father sat in front of the fire and read by oil lamp or flickering candle light.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sometimes it was a guilty pleasure – busy farmer’s wives weren’t supposed to bury their heads in books when they could have been doing something useful. I remember her jumping up to hide her book under a cushion when a neighbour knocked on the door and the lunch dishes were still in the sink. She put her finger to her lips to warn me not to say anything. My mother’s cheeks were flushed with shame.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>As a small child, bedtime stories (and sometimes daytime stories) were a regular feature of my life. The works of Beatrix Potter were my favourites, but I loved poetry even when I didn’t understand what it meant. My mother could recite huge chunks of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and almost the whole of Omar Khayyam. Her rendering of Longfellow’s Hiawatha was often requested and the tragic saga of the Forsaken Merman always reduced me to tears as she reached the mournful conclusion: ‘Come away, children, come away’. The idea of a mother leaving her children was beyond my comprehension. Jabberwocky and the Walrus and the Carpenter were also in her repertoire. It didn’t matter how often I heard them, they gave pleasure – and still do, because I can hear my mother’s voice when I read the words. She had a way of reading poetry aloud that caught the imagination. When she recited Omar Khayyam –<br />
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‘They say the Lion and the Lizard keep<br />
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:<br />
And Bahram, that great Hunter – the Wild Ass<br />
Stamps o’er his Head and he lies fast asleep.’<br />
<br />
– the words took me straight to the Persian palaces of Persepolis and I became part of a fairy tale, watching the Sultan’s tower ‘noosed with light’ and the stars outside my bedroom window flung into ‘the bowl of night’.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I knew all about Persepolis. On my mother’s bookshelves, next to the poetry books and the medical encyclopedia, was a large, rather boring looking tome in a plain binding called The Wonders of the World. The photographs and drawings were in black and white, but the splendours of the world’s most famous antiquities were bright with colour in the mind of the small girl who turned the pages. It was too heavy for me to carry very far, so I read it on the floor.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Persepolis, the book told me, had once had gates of gold and ivory before it was sacked by Alexander the Great. I looked at it so often that its carved staircases and pillared porticos were as familiar to me as pictures of my local village. And when one day, only a decade and a half later, I walked through the ransacked palaces of Persepolis, a young mother with a small child in her arms, I thought of my own mother and the book that had instigated so many dreams of travel. The words in my head were the ones she used to recite; an enigma the child had not understood, but had loved the music of. Now, almost alone in the abandoned city, in the middle of the Iranian desert, the words made perfect sense.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia1Lp8l_fKoqxz9jCcEiQBu7CeHiSFj60DdJxJUn7i50c0r84J6SXSWpQv6JTavOYZsiK562zd-0vGp6xF_aUQtX9bSqA98ruyPVekbAQbXNDl1WFY25MAV1_7MtZNeGdXRebygETqOjA/s1600/bookworm+%2528Medium%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="429" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia1Lp8l_fKoqxz9jCcEiQBu7CeHiSFj60DdJxJUn7i50c0r84J6SXSWpQv6JTavOYZsiK562zd-0vGp6xF_aUQtX9bSqA98ruyPVekbAQbXNDl1WFY25MAV1_7MtZNeGdXRebygETqOjA/s320/bookworm+%2528Medium%2529.jpg" width="228" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The infant book-worm</td></tr>
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
‘One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,<br />
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste –<br />
The Stars are setting and the Caravan<br />
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing – Oh, make haste!’<br />
<br />
‘Books,’ Anthony Powell wrote, ‘have odd effects on different people’. And so, with the exception of Omar Khayam, there was a big difference between me and my mother. I didn’t get on terribly well with her when I was young. I was my father’s favourite, a tomboy, closer to him in temperament than to her. Her favourite was the brother who arrived about five years after I was born, a gentle, quiet baby who loved being cuddled and wasn’t always getting into mischief. ‘You were such a handful,’ she once told me, ‘I waited until you were at school before I had another.’<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Our tastes were fundamentally different. I despised the tacky sentiments of Patience Strong and the morally uplifting epigrams in the Friendship Books of Francis Gay. My mother was also very fond of a column called ‘the Man Who Sees’ in Woman’s Weekly. It was a series of thoughtful ruminations on various subjects while ‘the man’ went rambling around outdoors in a trilby hat with a pipe in his mouth. My mother loved his cosy philosophies and so, for a while, did I – there were truths there that I could relate to. ‘Go into the woods in company and you come back empty – go alone and you come back with more than you can hold’, meant something to a girl who roamed the wild countryside on her own. But, by the time I was thirteen or fourteen I’d outgrown it and was restless for something more questioning – things that went deeper and further into the wild hinterland of the mind. I gave my mother a hard time – once, in an argument, I called her gullible. I suspect that there were times when I made her cry after I had ridiculed some precious belief of hers.<br />
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<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>After she died, numb with the loss of someone whose value I still hadn’t fully appreciated, I took the things she’d left me back home and, for the first time, sat down to look at her reading diaries. The pages were covered with the titles of books I’d never read by authors I’d never heard of. Some of these unknown books had been given five stars and underlined. I realised how little I had known this woman who had given me my love of literature – perhaps even the compulsion to become a writer myself.<br />
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Copyright Kathleen Jones</div>
Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-29691202350757933082020-05-12T11:39:00.002+01:002020-05-16T00:12:48.382+01:00Tuesday Poem: The Seven Stations of Isolation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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First there was eating:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I ate as though the shops would still be open tomorrow<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and the day after.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I ate a whole tin of tuna in one go<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>poured Baileys in my coffee<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>opened the box of shortbread I’d been keeping<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>for an ‘occasion’<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and ate it all in 2 days.<br />
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Secondly there was sloth:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a large mammal in pyjamas<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>that transferred itself slowly from bed to sofa<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>to the fridge and back, on a loop.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Its hair grew down into its eyes<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and its thoughts were like the fog<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>that blurs the horizon in the morning.<br />
<br />
This was followed by up-skilling:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>video conferencing, learning Japanese,<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>baking opera cakes and brioche,<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>making masks from T-shirts.<br />
<br />
I had not expected the dreams:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>as frantic as reality,<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>colossal, multi-coloured.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They burned through the brain<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>in the viral desert of the bed.<br />
<br />
Then there was temperature taking:<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and cough analysis<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and learning the 111 website by heart.<br />
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We were allowed walking and I walked with rage and grief<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>for the bodies in refrigerated trucks<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>for the medics without gowns or masks<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>for the ministers in their safe houses<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and I breathed all the oxygen I could from the spring air<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and I wept for those who had none.<br />
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Finally there was loneliness<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>the ache in the bone for the touch<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>of human skin<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>for a voice that is not your own.<br />
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© Kathleen Jones<br />
<br />
I'm 7 weeks into solitary confinement because of the dreaded Covid 19. Apart from a daily walk across to my allotment and Zoom meetings with my children, I have very little social contact. As a writer I'm used to my own company, so faring better than some. But I'm acutely aware of the implications for others - we're all living with anxiety levels off the planet, and some of us have lost family and friends. Many of us are also feeling outrage, at what we see as a disregard for the safety and well-being of others by our governments. It feels as though there is no certain future. We're all hoping we come through it and can be reunited with the people we love. </div>
Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-79131235709903889082020-04-08T00:11:00.000+01:002020-04-08T00:12:08.664+01:00Wordsworth's Birthday Postponed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Today, but for Corona Virus, we should have been celebrating the re-opening of the newly re-furbished Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage, as well as the National Trust’s Wordsworth House in Cockermouth. The latter was the Wordsworth family home and it was hosting an exhibition of William and Dorothy’s childhood, co-curated by Zoe Gibson, Helen Mort and myself. Neither event can go ahead until the end of the Covid 19 crisis. Lots of other lovely events had been planned with Cumbrian writers and poets taking part in the celebration.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1LXhxjOKbSZFgil5FOkW6GNkxhS1BFAwCkpbJStAHT9FGFnL7u_kNMchwUXP0WAAfP2uGrWosmvrSyzRhyRaJAZRzt0uo6Rwj8dAvTPHt0j4-dvLJsEVJiDafZ8xIaHN7cH-Z_TZ_VOg/s1600/wordsworth+house.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="238" data-original-width="400" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1LXhxjOKbSZFgil5FOkW6GNkxhS1BFAwCkpbJStAHT9FGFnL7u_kNMchwUXP0WAAfP2uGrWosmvrSyzRhyRaJAZRzt0uo6Rwj8dAvTPHt0j4-dvLJsEVJiDafZ8xIaHN7cH-Z_TZ_VOg/s320/wordsworth+house.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wordsworth House, Cockermouth.</td></tr>
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William Wordsworth was born on this day, 250 years ago, in the small Cumbrian town of Cockermouth at the junction of the rivers Derwent and Cocker. His father was agent to the notorious Earl of Lonsdale, the aptly-named ‘Bad’ Earl. William was the second child of the family. His sister Dorothy was born a year later, on Christmas Day, and they were christened together. They were the middle children, temperamentally close and William spent much of his early years playing with his sister rather than his older brother Richard. He and Dorothy spent a lot of time beside the river that ran behind the house, forming a unique bond that was to shape both their lives.<br />
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Their mother Ann died when Dorothy was only 6 and the family was split up; the boys to boarding school in Hawkshead and Dorothy to Halifax in Yorkshire where she was fostered by her mother’s cousin. She didn’t see her brothers again for nearly 10 years - seemingly forgotten by her father. It was a source of grief every Christmas when she celebrated her birthday and the family feast with those who, however well-loved, were strangers.<br />
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The death of their father five years later had an even more damaging effect on the siblings because it brought financial penury and the loss of the family home. Lord Lonsdale refused to pay what was owed to his agent and the house they had lived in was also in his gift. They became homeless orphans.<br />
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William took solace in the natural world around Hawkshead - childhood experience that produced some beautiful passages in The Prelude. Dorothy was removed from the excellent school she was attending and her fine mind had to manage as best it could in a local school for girls. What sustained both of them was literature – they had been brought up with books, particularly poetry.<br />
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But their fragmented childhoods left a legacy for both of them. Dorothy showed early signs of nervous anxiety in her letters to friends. Spending an evening in company made her ill and, though she loved dancing, public assemblies made her so agitated that she preferred to stay at home. But she was a brilliant letter writer and a keen critic of William’s early work. William was also what might be construed as ‘highly strung’. He suffered psychosomatic illnesses whenever he was stressed, and often when writing. There’s a lovely sentence in one of his wife Mary’s diaries, recording that “William is hurting himself with a sonnet”.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc3rLzLU-G1VZBZHJhzTVY70x1s5VdH4kijeHtqc8YGjqmpFnX4Yql2E0GeZ8l9aqqeVQSRC4R85Wx3ToqDmoUjdoTgzZ0NGam3tZaOuisGFcC_dwmQdKCAv6iNl1bD3_LqzHvTrfM1es/s1600/DoraDoveCottage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="175" data-original-width="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc3rLzLU-G1VZBZHJhzTVY70x1s5VdH4kijeHtqc8YGjqmpFnX4Yql2E0GeZ8l9aqqeVQSRC4R85Wx3ToqDmoUjdoTgzZ0NGam3tZaOuisGFcC_dwmQdKCAv6iNl1bD3_LqzHvTrfM1es/s1600/DoraDoveCottage.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dove Cottage in Grasmere, where they lived for a few years, drawn by William's daughter Dora.</td></tr>
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His personality was an enigma – outwardly he showed little emotion, appearing quite serious. But inwardly he was a passionate man both emotionally and physically. The young Wordsworth was interested in abstract ideas. He travelled widely on the continent while at university and later tried (with Dorothy) to learn German so that they could read the German poets and philosophers in their original language. William fathered a child while observing the French Revolution, but abandoned the child and her mother with apparently little regret. If it weighed on his conscience he concealed it well. The fact that he asked Dorothy to convey the news of his ‘aberration’ to his family suggests moral cowardice. Later in life he became more conservative.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dorothy's diary on the day of William's marriage - her great distress struck out. </td></tr>
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The great relationships of William's life were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dorothy. The first was a collaboration that led to the much-maligned Lyrical Ballads – a publication that changed English poetry forever. Dorothy became ‘the sister of my soul’ – life-long companion, critic, amanuensis, repository of experience, and keeper of the daily record of their lives that he often relied on for his poems. He even appropriated the poems she wrote, publishing them with his own, not always with enough accreditation. It was a complex relationship. William gave Dorothy the love and security of a family and a home; she gave him herself.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dorothy's Journals, an edited edition by William Knight. </td></tr>
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Dorothy was party, with Coleridge and Wordsworth, to all the discussions behind the compilation of Lyrical Ballads – not surprising that many of the poems in it reflected “death, endurance, separation and grief”. Although Lyrical Ballads contained poems by both Coleridge and Wordsworth, the all-important Preface was written in the first person, the viewpoint of Wordsworth himself. The poetry would not contain any ‘abstract ideas’, and would be written in the ‘language of men’, it would reject ‘mechanical devices of style’, and such ‘language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim to’. It would be the language of the common man, not the high-flown diction assumed to be ‘the common inheritance of Poets’. Dorothy, on the fringes of these discussions, a writer to her very bones, must have been acutely aware that she could only be an observer. ‘What is a Poet?’ her brother asks in the preface. ‘To whom does he address himself. . . He is a man speaking to men.’<br />
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Since Wordsworth, any woman writer growing up in the Lake District, as I did, has to cope with the gigantic shadow of Wordsworth as well as the misogyny that has saturated literature and literary criticism throughout the 250 years since his birth. At least we’ve managed to get rid of the word ‘poetess’!<br />
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<br />
If you’re interested in the private lives of the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey families, you might like to read <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Passionate-Sisterhood-Sisters-Wives-Daughters-ebook/dp/B0050DZ9QW/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=A+passionate+sisterhood+kathleen+jones&qid=1586300577&sr=8-1" target="_blank">A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets</a><br />
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published by Virago, reprinted by The Book Mill<br />
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Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-51957730625877030312020-01-22T10:49:00.001+00:002020-01-22T10:49:34.496+00:00An Old Man and a Young Girl<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It’s Davos 2020. A posh ski resort where the politicians and
CEOs show up and try to pretend they’re concerned about the planet. But the
carbon footprint they’ve made just getting there tells a different story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This year they’ve been given free snowshoes
in the hope that they’ll walk between the venues. Perhaps Trump will give it a
go?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all he’s just said that <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">“</span><i><span style="background: white; color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">I’m a big
believer in the environment. The environment to me is very important</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #121212; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">.” But he followed
it up with a disclaimer. Don’t pay any attention to the doom-and-gloom sayers,
he added. It’s all fake news. Apparently, everything is just fine.</span> </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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In spite of the hopeless task of
convincing neo-liberal capitalists they have to give it all up, some important
speeches are being made. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Already the
major figures in the climate change debate are making their voices heard –
particularly David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The moment of crisis has come</i>,” Attenborough said, unambiguously, a
few days ago. Thunberg reminded the politicians and bankers that they have
failed lamentably since the first climate change conference more than 30 years
ago. Since then, “<i><span style="color: #121212; mso-bidi-font-size: 13.5pt;">No
political ideology or economic structure has managed to tackle the climate and
environmental emergency and create a cohesive and sustainable world. Because
that world, in case you hadn’t noticed, is currently on fire.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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It takes an old man and a young girl to tell us the
unpalatable facts about the state of the world we live on. The former can tell
the truth because he no longer has anything to lose – his career is behind him,
his standing in environmental science is unassailable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second because she has all her life in
front of her and everything to lose by not speaking out. She is risking
everything for the future that older generations have compromised – perhaps
irrevocably. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The beautiful, natural world that existed when I was born no
longer exists. For me that is shocking, because I’m not that old. The
environment around the small farm I grew up on was teeming with wildlife – more
than 50% of which is now extinct or seriously endangered by human activity.
Moths, butterflies, bees, doves, sparrows, nightingales, corn-crakes, snow
hares, otters – I grew up taking their presence for granted. Further afield there
were wildernesses where you could wander and imagine that there was no other
human on the planet. Now even these are shrunk to a fraction of their size and
altered beyond recognition by human activity. This is not just me being nostalgic or a bit alarmist. In a new programme on the BBC Attenborough warns of <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">"</span><u1:p></u1:p><span style="background: white; color: #404040; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">irreversible damage to the natural world and the
collapse of our societies".</span></div>
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The satellites circling the globe tell us the truth. Forests
are vanishing at the rate of thousands of acres every day. Vanishing ice is
raising ocean levels across the planet, currently at increments of a couple of
centimetres, but the rate is increasing. In Louisiana land is being lost to the
sea at the rate of a football field every 45 minutes. In New Zealand a legal
case has just admitted that some Pacific islands will not exist in as little as
a decade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can’t turn on the TV
without a ‘natural’ disaster caused by fire, rain or wind – sometimes all
three. And each disaster comes at a humanitarian as well as an economic cost. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But we carry on our unsustainable lives as usual. Sadly, a
keep-cup and a reusable shopping bag won’t keep catastrophe at bay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have to look at a fundamental
restructuring of the way we live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a
matter of time – optimists say we have a decade, other scientists say a few
years – before we will be forced to abandon our wasteful, destructive
lifestyles and relive the privations of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a third world economic crisis, as governments
become less able to fund reconstruction or relocation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If we want to live like the inhabitants of Winter Fell in a
21<sup>st</sup> century version of Game of Thrones, we are heading in the right
direction.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The stark message that Davos should be addressing is that
most of the planet is on track to become an arid, storm-ravaged waste land. The
survivors will be fighting over whatever is left habitable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And how are we going to breathe an atmosphere
saturated by carbon dioxide, methane and the smoke of burning forests?<o:p></o:p></div>
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No one is coming to save us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We have to do it ourselves. And we can start by listening to the voices
crying truth in the wilderness of fake news – David Attenborough and Greta
Thunberg. We don’t all have to be activists, but we do have to take action and
make our governments aware that the natural world matters, because it’s the
only one we have. <o:p></o:p></div>
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#BrexitClimateEmergencyExtinctionCrisis</div>
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Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-63551212344011191752019-09-17T00:30:00.000+01:002019-09-17T00:30:03.489+01:00Tuesday Poem: Moya Cannon - Carrying the Songs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"Those in Power write the histories; those who Suffer write the songs"<br />
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Listen to Moya Cannon talking about the importance of song and reading her own poem.<br />
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<b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIGGDAQPHZ4" target="_blank">Carrying the Songs</a></b><br />
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<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CIGGDAQPHZ4" width="560"></iframe>
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My favourite poem of Moya's is 'Night' from her collection <i>The Parchment Boat,</i> which begins:<br />
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Coming back from Cloghane<br />
in the sudden frost<br />
of a November night,<br />
I was ambushed<br />
by the river of stars.<br />
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Disarmed by lit skies<br />
I had utterly fogotten<br />
this arc of darkness,<br />
this black night<br />
where frost-hammered stars<br />
were notes thrown from a chanter,<br />
crans of light.<br />
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You can read <b><a href="https://roisinkelly.com/2017/07/27/poem-of-the-day-night-by-moya-cannon/" target="_blank">the whole poem on this link: </a></b><br />
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Moya Cannon is one of Ireland's leading poets, with five published collections - most recently by Carcanet, and her work is a joy to read. </div>
Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-79396778903099633692019-08-28T16:59:00.000+01:002019-08-28T17:12:46.734+01:00"The times are running up like parchment on fire". 1642 or 2019?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In 1652 William Lilly wrote that the Westminster Parliament had become “odious unto all good men, the members whereof became insufferable in their pride, covetousness, self-ends, laziness, minding nothing but how to enrich themselves”. Not all MP s were corrupt - there was a kernel of “very able, judicious and worthy patriots who . . . by their silence, only served themselves; all was carried on by a rabble of dunces, who . . . voted what seemed best” to them at the time.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Lilly</td></tr>
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The 17th century chronicler, Bulstrode Whitelocke, recorder of events during the Commonwealth, wrote that Parliament was daily “breaking forth into new and violent parties and factions”, and making “too many delays of business and design to perpetuate themselves and to contrive the power in their own hands . . . nor can they be kept within the bounds of justice and law or reason” being answerable to no one but themselves.<br />
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Sound familiar? When I wrote the biography of the 17th century author<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Margaret-Cavendish-Duchess-Newcastle-Glorious-ebook/dp/B006ZDE7QO/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=margaret+cavendish+kathleen+jones&qid=1567007576&s=gateway&sr=8-1" target="_blank"> <b>Margaret Cavendish</b></a>, I was struck by similarities between that time and ours.<br />
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We seem to be going through a re-run of 17th century politics. Parliament was prorogued by King Charles I in 1629 and by 1642 there was increasing unrest. “The times,” wrote Gerard Winstanley, “are running up like parchment on fire”. That sounds familiar too. It didn't end well.<br />
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England was (and is now) dangerously divided and ordinary people felt that they had no representation. Governed by a stubborn, self-serving monarch, there was no choice for them but civil war. Thousands of people died in battle, were hanged, beheaded, defenestrated and driven into exile. Their lands, money and houses were seized. The poor found themselves even more impoverished. Cromwell, supposedly on the side of the people, won, but he didn’t do too well either, and he closed Parliament in 1653. An ironic note pinned to the door read “This House is to be Lett; now Unfurnished”.<br />
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Now, in 2019, we find ourselves, supposedly the Mother of All Parliaments, the ‘Oldest Democracy in the Western World’, exposed for what we are. We have a Prime Minister elected by 0.13% of the population, a hereditary monarch, no constitution*, a Parliament elected by a skewed system, rigged to favour one party over the others, a largely unelected upper house that can be rigged by a prime minister appointing his/her cronies into it to create a majority, and, like the 17th century population, we can do nothing about it except by direct action. It could be 1629.<br />
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We live in interesting times. When Margaret Cavendish wrote her book '<i>The Description of a New World called The Blazing World</i>', I don't think this is what she envisaged. The dangers ahead make me feel physically ill if I allow myself to think about them. Meanwhile, the world is burning and the sea is rising and the government is not even discussing it.<br />
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* You can’t call a collection of often conflicting statues (some of them dating back to Magna Carta), a few Parliamentary ‘conventions’, and host of ‘gentleman’s agreements’ (women didn’t get the vote until 1928) a constitution. There are no provisions for, or guidance on the situation we face today. </div>
Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153022829143323463.post-91349384841236085472019-08-27T00:30:00.000+01:002019-08-27T11:30:52.289+01:00Tuesday Poem: Blaga Dimitrova, 'Write each of your poems / as if it were your last.'<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>Ars Poetica</b><br />
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Write each of your poems<br />
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as if it were your last.<br />
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In this century, saturated with strontium,<br />
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charged with terrorism,<br />
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flying with supersonic speed,<br />
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death comes with terrifying suddenness.<br />
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Send each of your words<br />
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like a last letter before execution,<br />
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a call carved on a prison wall.<br />
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You have no right to lie,<br />
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no right to play pretty little games.<br />
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You simply won't have time<br />
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to correct your mistakes.<br />
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Write each of your poems,<br />
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tersely, mercilessly,<br />
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with blood – as if it were your last.<br />
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© Blaga Dimitrova (1922-2003)<br />
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We live in terrifying times; a burning, violent world led by self-serving billionaires who care little for the environment or for ordinary individuals. Political Activism often seems the only meaningful response we can make to the 'Game of Thrones' they play (with all its medieval butchery). As a poet and author I often wonder whether it's worth writing anything when the future is so uncertain and life so fragile. But then I read this poem and think, yes, it is! And there was never a more important time for writers and poets to make their voices heard - to obey the command: 'Send each of your words / like a last letter before execution'.<br />
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Dimitrova was a Bulgarian poet, but also Vice-President of Bulgaria from 1992-93. She was deeply political and even inspired a short story by John Updike, published in the <i>New Yorker,</i> called ‘<b><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1965/03/13/the-bulgarian-poetess" target="_blank">The Bulgarian Poetess’. </a></b><br />
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'Ars Poetica' appears <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scars-Blaga-Dimitrova/dp/1930214030" target="_blank">in <i>Scars,</i> selected </a>and translated from the Bulgarian by Ludmilla G. Popova-Wightman. Ivy Press. Translation copyright by Ludmilla G. Popova-Wightman.) Source <i>Washington Post. </i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scars-Blaga-Dimitrova/dp/1930214030" target="_blank">Available from Amazon.com </a></b><br />
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Kathleen Joneshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07645566938871914385noreply@blogger.com0