Watsonworks

2012-02-15T01:09:00.006-08:00

WATSONWORKS
Blog 29
February 2012

James Watson
A Writer’s Notebook

Contents
*Literary encounters (9) Meeting with a foot-mine
*Notes in Passing: ‘What a terrible way of earning a living’. Don McCullin at the Imperial War Museum
*Poems of Place (6) French Lines
*Correspondence: Dear Signore Giorgione

ENCOUNTERS (9) Meeting with a foot-mine

In No Surrender, set during the Angolan civil war, Malenga is a volunteer at a medical centre in the bush; and she has also begun to teach in the local school. She is surrounded by dangers, but the worst lie under foot.

Tomas possesses all the skills – trapping, dribbling, passing; and he can shoot with either foot. That is why Malenga has two extra players on her side. She calls, ‘Pass it, Salu!’ Her six-year old centre-back attempts to speed the ball on its way by using both feet at once. Ball and player crash into the sand at the half-way line – between a string of washing, sun-scrubbed and dazzling, and the New Medical Centre.

‘Okay, mine!’ The ball is with Malenga. She takes to the wing, overkicking a forward pass that threatens to run into the bush. The shadows are emerald dark here, and the sand green with oncoming dusk.
Tomas hurls out of his goal towards her. He collides with her outstretched palm. ‘Foul – free kick.’
‘For me, you mean?’
‘No, you fouled me, Sis.’
‘Tell that to the referee.’
‘We don’t have a referee.’

‘Well then…’ They stand six paces apart, she tall, wide-shouldered, long-armed, in jeans cut to knee length, wearing a loose shirt of scarlet; he in khaki trousers too big for him, taken from a dead bandit by the river: Tomas of the Nine Lives.
Tomas has no time for rules. ‘Okay, Sis – you try penalty.’ He takes up a crouching position between goalposts that also don’t conform to the rules – one is his backpack (which contains everything he owns), the other is his hunting rifle.
As Malenga wonders whether to slice her shot with the outstep or curl it across goal with her instep, she is suddenly called for. From the fields beyond the village edge – an explosion. The ground quivers. One blast, everybody running.
‘Bandits!’
Malenga runs, then halts, uncertain. ‘Doctor Garcia – we must fetch him.’ Brain and feet equally slow. Stupid. It’s shock. Tomas has retrieved his gun and back-pack. He comes towards Malenga Nakale, trainee medic and schoolmarm. In English now, ‘We not dilly dally, Sis’.

In the fields the women have been working the last hour of daylight. Now they converge upon a screaming. Until now there’s been singing, and the women’s voices have been answered by the tune of the cicadas and answered again deep in the bush by the frog battalions along the river banks.
‘Ma-lenga! Ma-lenga!’ The crowd of women opens for her. Tomas checks her progress for an instant. His face is screwed up, one hand half-covering his eyes.
‘It’s Dédo!’
Stood on a mine.
Salu’s sister; bright star of Malenga’s class.
Beside a cluster of cedars, in their lengthening shadow, Déodora had been hoeing rich, red earth. Everyone knows – mines are to be expected: the last of the war.
‘Tomas – go get the Doctor. Salu – black bag, please, from the Centre – hurry!’ Malenga kneels in hot soil; red soil soaked with red. ‘Don’t let her look! Hold her head, and her hands. Good. Soothe her. Cool her.’ The women obey, all eyes on Dédo’s face, averted from her terrible injury.
The girl’s left foot is a bloody pulp. ‘You stop bleeding, Sis,’ instructs Tomas.
‘I thought I told you…’
I fetch Garcia. Fast.’ She wishes she could do the racing away, the plunging into the bush. She looks down at the leg, writhing.
The foot’s severed. Stop the bleeding.

Malenga pictures Tomas go, sprinting down the slope from the village, down the burning yellow track which leads to the river, where Doctor Leon Garcia has gone – today of all days – to treat a sick worker on the bridge project.
She’s tugged off her shirt: red to red; places it over the leg, the stump. ‘Stretcher – we must get her to the centre. Dédo, listen. I’m doing what I can. You’ll be fine.’
Salu brings the medical case Garcia has been putting together for Malenga, of worn black leather, wide-based with a tough steel clasp.
Under the leg, fragments of mine. She scrapes them away. Treat for shock. In the past few weeks she’s watched over Garcia’s shoulder. ‘Your turn will come, Malenga.’
‘I’m not ready.’
‘You’ve the gift.’
But do I have the nerve? Dédo fights to sit up. Her face is stretched, swollen. Her scream is aimed at Malenga’s heart. ‘Keep her flat.’ From the medical case she takes a roll of cloth, stronger than a bandage. Old Maria has hobbled up from the village. The very breath of her is a comfort. ‘See, Maria’s arrived. That’s good news.’

As she has been taught to do by Dr. Garcia, Malenga applies a tourniquet.

Water has been brought. It is offered to Dédo, calm now, fading. ‘No drink. Doctor’s orders.’ Malenga works at the exploded leg, at the arteries. No to drink, no to antiseptic too. Not in a deep wound.
…The tourniquet will have to be removed shortly. She is tying off. The stretcher has arrived. In the corner of her eye, a metallic glint. Salu is holding the leftovers of the mine.
Malenga is up, stiff, swaying, steadied by Old Maria. For a moment in the turn of the light, the rectangle of steel held by Salu resembles one of those old catechisms hand-stitched and placed above the bed. Salu traces the lettering with his fingers. He has just begun to read.
His catechism for the day shines clear and bronze in the falling sun. In English, it says – FRONT TOWARD THE ENEMY.

In the story that follows, Malenga is taken captive by a squad of South African militia assisting Unita the rebel army of Angola. She meets Hamish, another captive, a young South African national serviceman, a deserter. Theirs becomes a journey of survival, friendship and love.

*

NOTES IN PASSING
‘What a terrible way of earning a living’

Shaped By War: Don McCullin at the Imperial War Museum

Of all the top photographers of war and conflict, Don McCullin has a singular distinction: he was officially barred from covering the Falklands War of 1982; the reason, he’d have sent home images that would have done something similar to what the media did for Vietnam – turned the American public against the war.

The evidence is to be found multifold in the major show of his work down the decades (50s, 60s, 70s and 80s in particular) Shaped By War, running at the IWM till 15 April.

Forgotten wars
In the film that accompanies the exhibition, McCullin says that he doesn’t believe his photographs of war, of atrocities, starvation, horrific suffering in over a dozen countries, from Biafra to Northern Ireland, from Berlin to Beirut, from El Salvador to Bangladesh, changed anything; further, he admits that ‘I don’t particularly believe I can trust humanity’.

Perhaps he is right, but this much has to be said, his images provide an electrifying record of events that have all too swiftly passed out of public consciousness. After all, who but those involved directly remembers the suffering and carnage of Biafra, the horrors of dispossession that occurred as Turk fought Greek in Cyprus; indeed what does the Vietnam war mean to a new generation?

Yet here in amazing detail, these events are documented. We are borne every which way on a tide of disaster and anguish, prodded into either remembering or having to admit, ‘I didn’t know that…didn’t realise that’.

Courage and dedication
All this is salutary in the context of current public outrage at some media practices and the subsequent low esteem in which journalism is held. Here, though, is a different story: here are photo-brilliance, personal courage and dedication that amaze and inspire; timely reminders that we owe a debt of gratitude to a profession which at its best serves the public right to be informed.

It is also a reminder of how that profession has been sacrificed on the altar of profitability; how hard-gained news, serious comment, in-depth enquiry have been in retreat in face of contemporary media obsessions with celebrity. The work McCullin became famous for, which he risked limb and life for, has been eroded and seriously displaced, and with it a cosmopolite vision of the world.

McCullin highlights the dilemmas affecting him as a person. Of the humanitarian crisis in Biafra in 1969, McCullin told Life magazine, ‘I was devastated by the sight of 900 children living in one camp in utter squalor at the point of death. I lost all interest in photographing soldiers in action’.

Ambivalence
Of his time in Northern Ireland (1970-71), he acknowledged the uneasiness of his own position as an agent of record. In his book Unreasonable Behaviour (1990), he wrote, ‘For a journalist, one of the prevailing emotions in Ulster was feeling like a Judas to both sides’. He confesses, ‘What a terrible way of earning a living’, while at the same knowing this was what he was good at, the best, and that what he was doing served human awareness.

Don McCullin on assigment was deported from Uganda, strip-searched by Israeli officials during the Yom Kippur Arab Israeli War and badly injured in El Salvador. On display in the IWM exhibition is Don’s Nikon camera that had been struck by a bullet from an AK47 in Cambodia. It still works, ‘Or thereabouts’.

Beyond madness…
Eventually, Britain’s best war photographer, confessing to being ‘beyond madness’, turned away from earning his bread on the war fronts of the world. Visitors leave the show in a more tranquil mood having seen McCullin’s latterday landscape photography. Here is peace at last, though one cannot help sensing the brooding darkness that lies beneath. Even so, McCullin believes that the landscapes have ‘actually healed a lot of my pain’.

*
POEMS OF PLACE (6)

FRENCH LINES

At Gisors red lake
Coot duck among weeds
Wind in corn; at Auvers
Cemetery shadows
Poppies remembering
Vincent’s blood; towards
Talcy deep green speed of Loire
Sunflower clouds
Float on golden river
Of the wheat god.

At Blois brick patterns
Make music, Chambord reciprocates
With towers and prickly tunes
While Giverny, all style and medallions,
Flags us on to water-wed Chenonceaux
Where queens once counted
Monarchs in and out.

All quiet on the plane of Beauce:
Crimson twilight spilling
Over silent patter of cobbles
Towards black barn mouth
Where in wooden majesty
Sits cobwebbed winepress;
Not forgetting sky-perched
Côte of doves, once a city
Of birdly babel, century silent.

Squirrel horde,
For winter comes.

*

Correspondence
Popular demand from our readers has encouraged the editorial team to continue with Ed Baslow’s Letters to Celebrities in which he asks them some very searching questions. He informs us that to date Harold Goodwinson has not so far responded to Ed’s advice about not rushing in to things at the Battle of Hastings.

He has mailed a duplicate letter to Homer with regard to the poet’s lack of a Christian name, and praise for his Hanging Gardens in pre-invasion Babylon has so far not brought a reply from Lord Nebuchadnezar, though artist Billy Blake has, we are informed, agreed to the British Museum altering the title of his masterpiece from ‘Nebuchadnezar Grovelling on His Knees in Shame’ to ‘Nabonidas doing likewise’.

Ned tells us that for his last birthday he received from his wife Betty (who is studying hard for an Open University degree) Art Fund membership, since when he has been visiting museums and galleries at greatly reduced prices. His recent attendance at an art lecture prompted the following letter to one of Venice’s top-rated Renaissance artists.

Dear Signore Giorgione
I seem to be getting into the habit of writing to people of note, even of fame, who do not seem to have Christian names – at least in the reference books I’ve been sifting through.

Lately I’ve received, at the second time of prompting, a caustic missive from the Greek poet and raconteur, Homer; who is of the opinion that a man (presumably) of his historical stature has no need of first names.

However, his most stinging comment relates to the query I raised as to his existence other than as a legendary figure emerging out of the mists of antiquity etc. etc. I hasten to assure you, Signore, that there is nothing in what I am about say that casts the slightest doubt on your own existence between circa 1476 and 1510.

It is well known that you were a prodigious talent, working in Venice and very probably a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, expert in madonnas and blue skies. According to my Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists you were the first exponent in Venice of the small oil painting for private collectors; which, if I might be allowed to say, comes as a relief from the endless parade of holy altarpieces, gloomy crucifixions and Last Suppers that bung up so many Italian cathedrals, churches, chapels, cloisters and depressing refectories (the Dominicans’ are the worst).

The fact is, a Giorgione on your wall, and you’ve got all you need for a sense of alluring mystery – the magic of landscapes slipping in and out of light and shade; sir, a veritable feast of the senses; and an inspiration, of course, for the mighty Titian, expert in undressed women and overflowing cups of plenty, who some experts say learnt everything from your good self.

Wonderful – and congratulations. But to my purpose, Signore, in penning this letter to you. Such has been my admiration for your (admittedly few) surviving masterpieces that lately I attended a lecture on The Enigma of Giorgione.

The lecturer (whose name escapes me) explained that what was enigmatic about you was what he referred to as Attribution, meaning – Did you actually do it? As the lecture proceeded, I became aware of a slow chill passing through the packed audience, made up chiefly of over 70 year olds most of whom, like me, had Giorgione among their top-ten favourites.

Alas our professor, who seemed to know what he was talking about, cast doubt one by one upon the authenticity of your masterpieces. It seems that the stripling Titian had begun to muscle in on your brooding landscapes, your style – the chi-as-ros-curo, as I think the professor described it – along with a troop of imitators recruited from the less prestigious night schools in downtown Venice.

By the end of the lecture a terrible silence reigned. A chasm of bottomless doubt had opened at our feet. The professor had whittled down your Complete Works first from twenty-five paintings, then to fifteen, then a creditworthy dozen, then six and counting.

Suddenly we were faced with a last, fleeting but penetrating gaze that almost literally turned us all to stone. By the time our distinguished professor had stepped off his dais and disappeared without a backward glance, the sum total of your ’ouevre’ as he referred to it, had been reduced to zero. At least three members of the audience took ill, one fainted, and the rest of us exited with a pallor that haunts me still.

Such has been my uneasiness at the prof’s failure to authenticate a single one of your masterpieces, I feel I might be forgiven for harbouring the dreaded thought that you never actually existed, or that you were an invention by a very clever bunch of dealers convinced that what makes a hot property is a touch of ‘was he, or wasn’t he?’

If you are reading this – my fourth letter of enquiry in as many months – you will appreciate the importance to your reputation of at least a one-line reply. For me, it really is a personal matter: your famous masterpiece, The Tempest, has hung over the damp patch in our parlour ever since we moved in to the house. Time and time again my wife Betty (who is more in to literature than art), has been on at me to replace the work with her Uncle Ivor’s Christmas gift, a gilt-framed rendition of The Stampede of African Elephants.

This would not only cover up the damp patch, but also my son Benjie’s infantile scribbles in the style of Picasso (who, by the way, has a Christian name and, unlike yourself, Signore, signed his work with such a clear and memorable hand that they named a car after him).

Rest assured, Sir, that I have your best interests at heart in this matter, but as a believer in a thing being exactly what it’s claimed to be (in common parlance, what it says on the tin), I would appreciate some indication that you aren’t and have never been, as our learned professor implied, a figment of the imagination.

Yours confidentially,
Ned Baslow, Art Fund Membership (300197)
‘Yer Tis’, Old Roman Road,
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven.

*Subject to legal advice, we will be publishing next month Ned’s somewhat controversial letter to John Milton, in part questioning his literary style as well as his ethics.

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
Website: www.Watsonworks.co.uk
* Read them on Kindle: Talking in Whispers (£2.01), The Freedom Tree (£1.03) and Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa (£5.15).

***

ENCOUNTER WITH GHOSTS

2012-01-18T02:26:00.000-08:00

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.co
January 2012

Blog 28
James Watson: A Writer’s Notebook

CONTENTS
*Literary Encounters (8): GIRL MEETS GHOSTS
*Notes in Passing: No Great Novels, Just Great Passages
*Poems of Place (7) Lakeland: the Children’s Part
* Correspondence

GIRL MEETS GHOSTS
Bored with her French village holiday, Elsa fails to befriend a young local boy. Curiously, he seems to know her and her attempt to start up a conversation makes him nervous. Wondering why he seems so scared, so desperate to get away, she wanders alone into the church.

She is at a loss, rather more upset than she really ought to be. Also, despite the heat of this April morning, she is shivering.This whole place gives me the creeps. In to the church. It is cool, and, as shafts of sunlight penetrate the gloom, mysterious. Churches can also be creepy, so full of dark shadows. The slightest sound is amplified, rises to the vaulted roof and seems to return as a reproach.

She sits down. There is a potent odour of incense mixed with damp. This holiday is becoming a disaster. Dad’s on edge, Carol’s on edge and so am I. Three’s a crowd: I’m beginning to understand what that means. I’m the odd one out. I resent Carol and I can’t disguise it; and I’m mad at Dad. He thinks everything can be normal. She’s not my mum and never will be. I told him in Carol’s hearing. She probably won’t ever forgive me…

As for the boy out there, that I don’t understand; why his startled look, especially as he seemed to recognise me; and what or who was he staring at over my shoulder? He’s a loner, that’s my guess; stuck all day on a farm out there, herding cattle, picking grapes or whatever; probably with only rabbits and crows to talk to. I liked his eyes and his dark hair, though…

Elise wanders towards the east end of the church, and the high altar. Sunbeams project the colours of the stained glass window, blue and red across the tiles of the choir and the altar steps. She closes her eyes, inhales the scent of spring flowers, though, look as she might, she cannot see any.
The cool has become cold. That’s it, then: five minutes and I’ve run out of the tourist attractions of Izieu. Elise quickens her pace towards a door on the north side of the church. She pauses beside a tray of unlit votive candles. She picks up a box of matches. This’ll be for my Gran. The matches are too damp to light.
Sorry, Gran. I’ll bring Dad’s lighter next time.

Beside the north door is an oak table. There is a large leather-bound Visitors’ Book and beside it the stub of a pencil. I suppose people pinch the biros. Elise opens the book. Its yellowed pages give off a pungent, musty smell: wet tobacco and rotting cabbage. What shall I write? ‘Had the most exciting holiday of my life. Back again next year!’ Better not or Dad might take me at my word and rent the cottage for every year till I’m an old maid.

That’s strange, I could have sworn…Must be the poor light in here. She looks closer at the pages of the Visitors’ Book. Odd – very: could be some joker. She runs her finger down the list of names. Astonishment makes her voice ring through the church: ‘It can’t be! The last date is 1943!’ Not a very good joke. She turns back the pages: 1942, 1941, 1940. Could be that the priest’s put out an old visitors’ book by mistake. This is ridiculous. All at once, the silence of the church provokes her. She pronounces the word out loud:‘Ridiculous!’

1943: that’s the war – Dad’s war. She addresses her words to the back of the church: ‘Hitler, Nazis, Goebbels, the concentration camps – Auschwitz, the gas chambers…Huh!’
Not funny. Elise has been studying both world wars in History. She turns, as if imagining the church full of parishioners. ‘The war’s over, folks!’

Suddenly, from the West door, a voice: ‘Eloise! You must come now.’ The woman wears a shawl around her shoulders and a patterned scarf around her head. In the poor light she looks ancient but she is coming towards Elise with the speed of someone strong and determined.
She says in a loud, harsh voice, ‘So Stefan didn’t manage to persuade you.’
‘I’m sorry, I…’
Stefan? Warn me?’
‘You will bring disaster on us all with your wilfulness.’
‘Disaster?’ She called me Eloise.

Stay calm, stay polite. In this gloom she’s mistaken me for somebody else. Elise tries a smile, yet steps briskly towards the North door: your turn, she tells herself, to leg it.
The woman advances on her, clasps her arm. ‘Why do you do these things – and risk everything?’
This is weird. ‘Risk everything? Every what?’ Elise is pulled towards the North door. ‘You’re hurting me. Please let go my arm.’
‘You will remember the rules, Eloise, whatever your natural desires. And you will obey them, like everyone else has to do.’

Elise guesses it’s to do with talking out loud in church. Sure, for most of us, the war’s long over, but for some it’s never over; and that means they take offence easily if you don’t show proper respect. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I was alone. The words just slipped out.’ She is wondering, will a Hail Mary or two get me off the hook and away from this crazy lady?

‘You will not be slipping out in future, I can assure you of that.’ The woman thrusts Elise out of the church door, then prods her in the back when she hesitates, dazzled by the sun in her eyes.
They have emerged on to a side street, unfamiliar to Elise, running at an angle from the village square. Everything looks different from here. Elise can’t make out the war memorial, but her concern is for the hand that bites into her forearm.

‘Please, I’m not…’ In broad daylight surely the woman will recognise her mistake. She’ll apologise. Elise can think of nothing to say but, ‘I think I’ll be all right now. Sorry about that.’
But the misunderstanding is not to be resolved. ‘You wish to be independent, my child, yet –’
‘Yes I do.’ All at once Elise is keen to assert that independence. This is not a joke; indeed it’s scary. She had been shivering in the church and now she is trembling in the morning heat. ‘I’m not a child, and if you don’t mind…Madame.’
‘I do mind. Don’t you understand? – your actions put us all of us in peril. All of us!’
‘My actions? I was just…’
She is not to be heeded. ‘Come now! This is your last chance.’ When Elise tries to reply, the woman clamps her hand across her mouth. ‘Move – and not a single word!’

From The Ghosts of Izieu (Penguin Readers).

Previous encounters:
Boy Meets Girl (Besieged! The Coils of the Viper; Blog 21, 17 March 2011). Girl Meets Girl (Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa; Blog 22, 14 April). Dissident Girl Meets Dissident Poet (Ticket to Prague; Blog 23, 11 May). Enemies Meet Face to Face (The Freedom Tree; Blog 24, 6 September). Encounter with Bombs (The Freedom Tree; Blog 25, 13 October). Athlete Meets Bull (The Bull Leapers; Blog 26, 19 November). Mother Forest Meets Brother Business (Justice of the Dagger; Blog 27, 15 December).

NOTES IN PASSING: No great novels, just great passages
Re-reading classic novels imported for next-to-nothing on Kindle, I’ve reached the hesitant conclusion that ‘masterpieces’ scale the heights but also include some very low-level passages. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina possess a kernel of passages which reach the heavens of literary achievement; yet they are complemented by acres of text working at a lower, more pedestrian or even irrelevant level that prompts the reader to question the literary judgment of the writers as storytellers.

The centrepiece of Crime & Punishment is the existential life of Raskolnikov, the penniless student who murders the wickedly mean moneylender and the subtle reeling in and entrapment of the ‘hero’ by the investigator, Ily Petrovych. In good Russian tradition we are treated to an almost uncountable host of characters and situations, many directly relevant to the emerging story, but also many existing in a parallel universe, a galaxy of red herrings.

Distracting incursions
One becomes bogged down in freshly imported lives that distract from rather than adding to the unity of the novel. They slow its pace, disperse its tension: in short, keep running away with the story. It’s as if Dostoevsky were being paid lineage and was thus reluctant to impoverish himself by judicious editing.

In Anna Karenina Tolstoy creates one of the greatest love-stories in literature. His portrayal of the passionate, tragedy-marked Anna and her well-matched hero, Prince Vronsky, is stunning, the depth and turbulence of their relationship magnificently examined.

In parallel, and connected throughout, we encounter the life of Levin, his love for Kitty, his marriage, his fatherhood: in fascinating contrast, the honest, deep-feeling ‘good’ person intriguingly documented, his feelings sensitively recorded and divined with great perception.

Doldrums
However, Levin has another side, reflecting the interests of the author himself, and it is one that borders on the mundane, is treated at such length and becomes tedious – Levin’s obsessive interest in Russian estates, agriculture, the character and attitude of the stuck-in-their-ways peasantry. Much text is also given over to hunting, for partridge, ducks and snipe, leaving the story in a sort of instruction-manual doldrums. At other times, the novel risks becoming a dry social tract.

Acknowledgment has to be made that at the time of writing these interests might well have been seen by contemporary readers as important uses of the novel, addressing issues of the time. Even so, the chapters on this issue are endless, as are those detailing the minutae of provincial elections. Only when Anna reappears does the novel spring back to life; then for a few chapters she has to step entirely aside for a narrative that seems to occupy the more mundane side of Tolstoy as writer, sinking into social discourse.

Life goes n, but should the story?
Both novels bore as much as they inspire, leaving one to wonder whether, at the time of writing, the authors reflected on the erratic levels of their achievement (or just carried on with their 2000 word a day regardless). Even when Anna Karenina reaches its grand finale with the suicide of Anna, suggesting that nothing could reach beyond this devastating event, Tolsoy ploughs on for several chapters with the doggedness of life itself which rarely judges a decent climax.

In contrast, very little of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights deserves to be left on the cutting-room floor. It is dramatically tighter than the Dostoevsky or the Tolstoy, but it takes a greater narrative risk with ensuing hazards.

The Russians are god the creator. We get inside the thoughts of characters through the direct agency of the author. In Brontë’s case we have two narrators, Mr. Lockwood and housekeeper Nelly Dean. Nelly in particular is a great raconteur; she is author Emily in scarcely concealed disguise. We gain from the narrative emerging directly from events though at the same time the device prevents us from knowing the thoughts of the hero/villain of the story, Heathcliff.

...but who speaks for Heathcliff?
We are given much on his behavour, his wild love for Catherine, his depthless bitterness, the way he destroys two families and makes the lives of so many he has power over miserable; but what is lacking is the author’s own explanation and analysis until, towards the end of the story Heathcliff opens his thoughts to Nelly.

There’s reason to commend this, for it leaves the characters subject to fate. It also allows the author to hold back from giving explanations, especially with regard to Heathcliff’s life between leaving Wuthering Heights and returning to it a rich man. We are permitted no revelation of his inner self or made aware of any transition to self-knowledge. As far as the old servant Joseph is concerned Heathcliff lies in death as damned as he lived: ‘Th’divil’s harried off his soul…and he may hev’ his carcass into t’bargin, for ought I care! Ech! What a wicked ‘un he looks, girning at death!’

Shades of epiphany
And yet ‘poor Hareton, the most wronged’ by Heathcliff sees something beyond common judgment: he ‘kissed the sarcastic, savage face that everyone else shrank from contemplating’. By this time of course the young Catherine has employed the magic of reading and affectionate compassion to bring Hareton Earnshaw into the radiant glow of love, the kind that might have rescued Heathcliff from himself had circumstances been different.

By limiting herself to narrators within the text Brontë resists the controlling power of the author-as-god. But the story is more concentrated and more consistently intense as a result, leaving readers to make their own judgments about Heathcliff. After all, towards the end, he concedes defeat. Referring to Catherine and Hareton, he says to Nelly, ‘I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing’; and there are shades of hope, for he acknowledges ‘there is a strange change approaching’, an epiphany in which love does not defeat death but comes to terms with it.

We are offered confirmation of this when Mr. Lockwood recounts meeting a little boy on the moor, ‘crying terribly’. The lad ‘blubbered “There’s Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t’nab…un’I darnut pass ‘em.’ With such an ending, one is left thinking that the ultimate dream is possible, love overcoming death.

*
Final paragraph, Wuthering Heights, Mr. Lockwood speaking: ‘I lingered round them [the headstones], under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heather and the harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’

A quote from Anna Karenina: ‘And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his, and still less from her own heart.’

***

POEMS OF PLACE (6)

LAKELAND: THE CHILDREN’S PART

Coniston: the lakewaves glitter, glad
To host kids’ feet slow-stepping
Over pebbles and the risk of glass;
Around their heads a haunting
Of flies like shrunken bats – a coven
Of night witches envious of childhearts
And of mornings crystal bright.

Later Tarn Hows’ fernclad slopes
Were their splashing picnic ground;
Farmsteads sprinkling white
Up Langdale’s blue-green crags
Made a backcloth worthy of Claude Lorraine
Only to be quite ignored.

We alone, disengaged from their games,
Drew together the cobweb strands of vision –
The light, the landscape, the figures,
The streamsong of their voices; hoarding
Them as solace for a winter’s day.

CORRESPONDENCE

Dear Editor,
As Director of Homer Studies at the Institute of Greek Literature, I wish to query the assertion of your correspondent Ned Baslow that our nation’s greatest poet was probably a member of a scriptwriting team called Anon, and whose reluctance to put pen to paper can be explained by his suffering from dyslexia. The suggestion is preposterous. Further, we object to the doubts he casts on the intelligence of the Trojans in welcoming the Greek gift of the famous Wooden Horse and not suspecting that it was packed to the tail with warriors.

After all, weren’t the Germans successfully deceived by the escape pit dug beneath the wooden horse and out of the prison camp in the popular movie The Wooden Horse starring Leo Genn and Ian Dalrymple? If the Germans of all people could be taken in by such a ruse it’s obvious that a people shell-shocked after ten years of war might as easily be deceived.

Should Mr. Baslow care to visit the Institute, or provide us with a stamped addressed envelope, we will be happy to supply him with ample data that proves beyond doubt that Homer was neither dislexic nor a figure of the Greek imagination: after all, if he were, how would the Institute justify its own existence?
Yours etc.
Prof. Milos Kanzankstasis
Institute of Greek Literature,
1, Mount Parnassus Drive,
Athens.

We are happy to publish letters on all matters included in or referred to in Watsonworks Blogs. As promised in Blog 27, we reproduce here another letter from Ned Baslow in his Celebrity Letters series. This month Ned turns his attention to a historical misunderstanding involving Nebuchadnezzar and the famous London artist, poet and visionary, Mr.William Blake.

Dear King Nebuchadnezzar,
I am writing to you to convey rather delayed apologies on behalf of the well-known London artist, Mr. William (Billy) Blake. You may or may not be aware that one of Mr. Blake’s finest works of art concerns your good self; alas, I doubt whether you would consider it the sort of portrait you could display in front of your children or your subjects.

It is no portrait in the flattering style of Raphael or Van Dyck, dignified, in elegant profile and adorned with suitably magnificent garments, lace cuffs and jewellery up to the elbows. Rather, Mr. Blake portrays you on your knees and in hairy nakedness, best described as grovelling. The theme of his painting is, my wife Betty informs me (she is studying for her Open University degree and knows about such things) is one of Shame and Mortification, but, and this is the reason for my writing to you – it’s based on a simple misunderstanding.

The Him in the painting is not You, meaning that generation after generation of gallery-goers, including vulnerable school parties, have mistakenly been turning up their noses at you and making inappropriate comments.

Some, of course, would say you deserve it considering what you did to Jerusalem or the citizens of Tyre, but what is essential in an honest world is to get the facts right once and for all. Instead of thinking good thoughts about your Hanging Gardens in downtown Babylon (don’t ask me what’s happened to Babylon since your day!) visitors to galleries and especially those queuing for entry into the British Museum (and paying good money for the privilege) have been confronted by your ‘portrait’ when in truth the squalid creature before them was one of your lesser successors, one Nabonidas.

In Mr. Blake’s days there was no Google to summon up in order to get one’s facts straight. The painter was either drunk, quarrelling with his printers or in a haze of dreams and fantasies trying to summon up positive things to say about the British nation, when he happened upon your utterly worthless successor, painted his masterpiece (Betty admits it is of high quality) in the hope that sensation would score over truth (it usually does, but that’s another matter).
From what my Betty tells me, this Nabonidos got into hot water for trying to mess about with the state religion (like the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten who incurred similar bother). Nab switched his support from the Moon God, your own particularly favourite according Betty, to Marduk who by all accounts was a thoroughly bad influence.

I’ve long held it to be true that tampering with people’s gods is one of the quickest ways for a ruler to end up on his knees in a sea of shards, or as we would term it these days, shrapnel. Art that misrepresents the past plays some nasty tricks with people’s attitudes as I pointed out in my letter to the Director of the British Museum demanding that your denomination (ie name) be immediately replaced in all future posters, captions, indexes, postcards; in short, Nab for Neb. I have the Director’s email assurance that Mr. Blake is equally willing to make amends so long as nobody attempts to render Nab upstanding as grovelling has been one of Mr. Blake’s chief selling-points over the years.

With every best wish for an eventually successful makeover of your public and historical image, I am, My Lord King, Yours Truly (incidentally a great admirer of hanging baskets),

Ned Baslow,
‘Yer Tis’
Old Roman Road
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven

Readers may be interested in learning what Ned Baslow had to say in previous Blogs: to King Harold (Blog 26) and Homer the Greek (Blog 27). The editorial team wishes it to be known that they do not necessarily share Ned’s opinion of the god Marduk.

*
·Kindle reading
Now available on Kindle:
Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa (£.5.95 inc. VAT)
Talking in Whispers (£2.24 inc. VAT)
The Freedom Tree (99p + VAT)

Thanks for reading this. And a Happy New Year!

MOTHER FOREST MEETS BROTHER BUSINESS

2011-12-15T00:53:00.000-08:00

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.com
December 2011

Blog 27
James Watson: A Writer’s Notebook

Ned Baslow’s Letter to Harold Godwinson has caused a stir in the office at Watsonworks as readers will find in our CORRESPONDENCE section. His comparing the Normans to the Tories has not gone down well at the Conservative Party HQ in Tunbridge Wells. We expect a similar flurry of protest, at least among the Greeks, following Ned’s Letter to Homer which is included here uncensored.

Also in this December 2011 edition, the Literary Encounters series, which has varyingly touched down in Medieval Florence, contemporary Kyiv, post-Soviet Prague, the trenches of the Spanish Civil War, the streets of Guernica bombed by German Heinkels and the bull ring of ancient Crete, visits the whispering forests of East Timor.

Contents:
* Encounters 7: Mother Forest meets Brother Business
*Notes in Passing: Invasion of the Nordics
*Poems of Place: Jarrow Visited
*Correspondence

Mother Forest meets Brother Business

From Justice of the Dagger (Collins Cascades) in which the forest people of East Timor are presented with a business proposition.

At the village of Muyu Father a man called Marquez, escorted by two soldiers, came from the timber company. He held up sheets of paper to Muyu Father. ‘It is all agreed with your people. This is a signed document.’
Muyu Father took the paper, held it at arm’s length as if it were a poisonous insect. Marquez turned it round. ‘You’ve got it upside down, stupid.’ He knew a little of the language of the forest people. ‘It is an Order in Council. It requires you to vacate your village.’
‘Vacate?’
‘Move. Remove yourselves. Within seven days – you understand?’
‘How is this? Our people have lived here since Great Island rose from the sea.’
‘Not any longer,’ snapped. Marquez. ‘In any case, your people have no claim to the land. And it is not true you have occupied this village for a long time.
‘In fact you people are wanderers, you build a village and then when it gets stiff with shit, you move on, leaving a mass of litter in the forest.’
Muyu Father retorted, ‘All the forest is the Mother’s gift to us, so long as we cherish it. We move our villages to let the leaves grow once more. Mother Forest gathers back what belongs to it. Always.’
Marquez was not happy to be dealing with a tribesman who was also a philosopher. ‘The forest belongs to the government, Chief, and the government decides what to do with the forest.’
Lyana heard these words in torment. Hers was not the right to speak, but nothing could suppress her thoughts: it is you who have no rights. This island is not yours. You stole it from us, with your guns and your aeroplanes. It will never be yours even though you fill the valleys and the mountains with your battalions, even though you kill every one of us as you killed by family and all my clan.

Muyu Father rarely showed anger. Sometimes by his calmness he made Lyana angry. ‘And the forest, what has the forest decided?’
Marquez paused. ‘You talk as if the forest had a mind of its own.’
‘It has a mind. It has a soul. If you listen, you hear the heartbeat of the forest.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, friend, this forest is a goddam nuisance. It’s full of flies and lizards and snakes – and people like you who get in the way of progress.

‘When I look at this forest, Chief, I see timber. I see sawmills. And I see things being made for the good of humanity. Timber for homes, timber for furniture, timber for building boats.’
‘Oh yes,’ Muyu Father replied. ‘Some trees must fall. Some must be used, yes. We agree –’
‘Listen, I don’t want to be preached to on conservation by natives. This forest has fifty years of timbering in front of it. Anyway, the government has issued licences. And those licences mean one thing to your people – move on!’

All the villagers heard these words. As one voice, they asked, ‘Where do we move?’
‘Further into the forest. There are thousands of kilometres of it not yet turned to timber.’
Marquez hated the forest and thus he did not begin to understand it. Muyu Father said, ‘Sir, the forest is not like a long road. Everywhere is its centre, like the circles of the moon.’
Marquez was hot. The sweat made his feet squelch in his boots. His shirt was dripping into his trousers and his trousers stuck to his legs as if his body fluids had turned to glue. ‘The government knows what is best for you and your people, my friend.’

‘How can it know, when it is so distant, and when it does not listen?’
‘It’s you who should be doing the listening, Chief. Then you’ll see sense. You’ll go to the special villages built for you; send your children to school to be educated. To be frank, you people need civilizing. This is the twenty-first century –’
‘And your people, sir,’ interrupted Muyu Father, ‘’you talk with guns. Yours is the justice of the dagger. You have brought massacre. Our people lie dead in the forest –’
‘Because your people rose up against the government,’ stormed back Marquez. ‘Attacked the camps of the soldiers. And because you listened to the Resistance who would stir you up in hatred against the government.’
‘We do not listen to the Resistance,’ returned Muyu Father.
‘That is what you say. Soldiers who stray in the bush, they die. Not because of the snakes, but because your people obey the rebels, do their dirty work while they vanish in the forest to start new troubles elsewhere.’

‘We do not listen to the Resistance,’ repeated Muyu Father, glancing at his son. Muyu nodded, though reluctantly; and his gaze met Lyana’s: her elder brother had joined the resistance movement. The soldiers of the government caught him. Tortured him. Gave him a ride in a helicopter; and over the sea, invited him to ‘take a walk’; as the soldiers put it, mundi laut – gone for a swim.

Marquez knew he was wasting his time and his breath. ‘No more arguments, Chief, the earth movers, the Yellow Giants as you people call them, come in seven days time, one hour after dawn. Take all your property with you.’
‘Property?’ The word has no parallels in any of the many tongues of the forest people.
‘Belongings – your pigs, man, and your bows and arrows, though if I had my way I’d have them confiscated.’

There was a waiting as the two men glared at each other. And the forest whispered in a new wind from the south.
‘Come on,’ said Marquez as Muyu Father stood still as a hunter aiming at his prey. ‘Give me your word. I don’t want any trouble…What I want, Chief, is empty huts. You will not yet have made the acquaintance of Captain Selim, but I imagine his reputation will have already reached you. Do not cross him. Obey him to the letter – quit this place without fuss – and you will survive.
‘Seven days, Chief. Very generous in the circumstances. Then we shall be coming in for a dawn start.’ Marquez fixed his gaze upon Muyu, sensing the youth’s hidden rage. ‘And with machine-guns ready for any hot-heads who protest.’

For a second the eyes of Lyana held Marquez’s stare. She is a beauty, he thought, but that look alone could cut a man’s throat. He was tempted to warn Muyu Father – keep the girl out of sight of Selim. Instead, he wagged his finger and repeated, ‘Empty huts, Chief!’

* Justice of the Dagger was a Waterstone’s Book of the Month.

Previous encounters:
Boy Meets Girl (Besieged! The Coils of the Viper; Blog 21, 17 March 2011). Girl Meets Girl (Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa; Blog 22, 14 April). Dissident Girl Meets Dissident Poet (Ticket to Prague; Blog 23, 11 May). Enemies Meet Face to Face (The Freedom Tree; Blog 24, 6 September). Encounter with Bombs (The Freedom Tree; Blog 25, 13 October). Athlete Meets Bull (The Bull Leapers; Blog 26, 19 November).

NOTES IN PASSING: Invasion of the Nordics
If a stroll through any Waterstone’s is anything to go by, the world of crime thrillers is under Nordic occupation. There is no avoiding the sons and daughters of Larsson, even though several of them were making a name for themselves long before the phenomenon of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In fact Larsson was a relative newcomer, better known as a journalist, in this country a regular contributor to Searchlight magazine.

In fact, Larsson’s Millenium trilogy almost never got off the ground. An interview on radio with the publisher of the English edition of the first volume revealed an almost barren take-up. His response was to do something the rest of us writers ought to consider: he took to the highways and byways (mainly tubes and trains) and gave the books away to anyone willing to take them.

Helping hands
It wasn’t critics, massive advertising, celebrity recommendations or high-profile marketing that scored for Stieg Larsson but reader recommendations. It helped, of course, that the Larsson trilogy (part 2, The Girl Who Played With Fire, part 3, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest) proved compelling narratives, expertly orchestrated, and introducing a more than feisty heroine, Lisbeth Salander, in a story dealing with issues both specific to Sweden and of relevance and interest to contemporary readership everywhere.

It didn’t take long for publishers and bookshops to guide other Nordic writers, some already best sellers, into the wake of Larsson. For instance, the Vintage Books cover of Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman, gives prominence to a quote from the Independent – ‘The Next Stieg Larsson’ though it might be equally correct to refer to Larsson as the next Jo Nesbo.

The difference, in my view, is that Larsson is better: he writes more fluently, is less narrowly obsessed with manic serial murder of young women scenario, not to mention Larsson’s superiority in terms of narrative pace. Nesbo crawls along. When the reader’s attention is engaged, as in The Snowman, that’s fine and welcome, but when the distant past burgeons in on the story, weighing it with coil upon coil of detail and complication, as in his earlier book, The Redbreast, this reader had to ask, ‘Do I really care what happened next?’

The weight of stereotype
This does not occur with Larsson, even though the reader has to hold on to continuities over three volumes and well over a thousand pages. Another difference is in the chief male protagonists. Mikael Blomkvist, the campaigning journalist in the Larsson trilogy, escapes the stereotype that often prevails when the ‘hero’ of a crime thriller is the detective.
Harry Hole in The Snowman has at least moved on in terms of interest from the (honestly) boring Harry featured in The Redbreast. He is as dull as the weather; indeed one feels that the wet and the cold (characteristics of Nordic fiction as a whole) have cooled him off as a person, often rendering him inert.
This problem with the detective protagonist recurs in other Nordic tales. In Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back we encounter Inspector Sejer. He is sharp, persistent, patient; but he is a plodder. He and his young assistant, Skarre, have a relationship distantly similar to that of Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis.

Curiously the Morse novels also reflect some of the dry and dour atmosphere of the Nordics; it’s only when TV carries the viewer into the glories of Oxford and enriches characterisation with non-verbal communication and fresh new dialogue (by writers such as Alan Paton) that the stories take on colour and humour.

Gloves and mufflers
It could be, of course, that the ice and snow, the shivering winds which are so characteristic of stories written by the Nordics are inescapable and a necessary component. After all, the Wallander TV series (the two Swedish versions plus the British) are, not to put a too fine a point on it, no advertisement for holidaying in Sweden any more than the Danish The Killing series persuade us to rush to book a flight to Copenhagan. The opening line of Henning Mantell’s novel The Dogs of Riga neatly summarises the entire genre of Nordic crime fiction: ‘It started snowing shortly after 10am.’

What constitutes the ‘right pace’ in a story is a matter of reader judgment. Fossum’s Don’t Look Back works on a narrower, quieter terrain than do her male rivals. The body count in 400 pages is modest, but there is more scrutiny: the crime here allows the author to dissect a tiny Norwegian community with scalpel sharpness.

Talking of scalpels, a common factor of Nordic crime novels (and TV series) is the brutality of the killings. The horrors described in the Millennium trilogy were given dramatic emphasis in the films that followed. In Hakan Nesser’s Borkmann’s Point our murderer specialises in beheadings. Nesser is also characteristic in the way he spins things out, taking 321 pages to reveal what the reader has guessed since page 200; only the crime-busters themselves don’t get it.

The author almost confesses as much when he puts the following words into the mouth of the now-revealed axe-man: ‘I thought it took you a bit long, even so…’

In a similar way to Harry Hole’s entanglement with a distant past in The Redbreast, Inspector Erlander in Reykjavik author Arnaldur Indridason’s Hypothermia neglects the crime he is supposed to be solving for one that obsesses him from the past.

This reader spent most of the time wishing he’d just get on with the crime he was being paid to solve; either that or make the crime-past as interesting to the reader as Erlander seems to find it. The book drifts along, indulging in loads of aimless dialogue. It has none of the menace of Nesbo or the dynamic incident of Larsson. The problem seems to be to find original character traits in stock police stereotypes.

What the books do have is loads of atmosphere; it’s cold, it’s bleak, the territory is under constant snow or icy hail; the chilling factor of the murders is already anticipated, underscored and sharpened by the weather. One is left hankering for a little glow of Oxford in the night.

POEMS OF PLACE 5: Jarrow Visited

Below the grey gleam of the Slake,
Tide-abandoned, rustles the polluted Don –
Oily and sluggish, tin-canned,
Rubber-tyred and rusty-prammed
Beneath the ancient black stones
Of Bede’s golden kingdom.

Curlews share the rainy wind with ragged gulls
And one rapt pilgrim by the shore.
His eyes have scanned, fingers touched,
Mind encompassed everything in books –
Till now, when his senses faithfully portray
The real Jarrow, its illuminations shed:
This lunar fortress of Esso towers
And Shell Petroleum, of sad vessels
At lonely wharves turned to rusted stone;
Of gibbets in Slake mud where Vikings once
Broke open the dawn with blood and fire.

Then why the resonances, loud as a peal of bells
For this intruder on his cheap day-return;
Beyond the sight, what perception?
Hear the boots on cobbled streets –
Jarrow’s crusaders are on the march, banners high
While sounding brass bears them south
To gentler climes yet bastions deaf to reason.

Here, times without number, the battle for sensibility,
For civilisation, has been fought over but never won,
Between song of pen and whistle of sword,
Between the promised land and King Brass
Leaving loosestrife and charlock sole victors.

Only the dream remains, its vision blunted
On the cold sea wind: and this dreamer –
Straining in solitary vigil, to capture
The timeless canticles of Bede’s flock,
The furnace heat of Red Ellen’s oratory.

Nature eternal has the last word:
Once upon a time humans passed this way.

Correspondence
Our postbag has approached ‘Dear Father Christmas…’ proportions as a result of Ned Baslow’s first Letter to Celebrities. Clearly Ned is fast on the way to becoming a celebrity himself. See below for his latest contribution; but first, three items from the postbag.

Dear Blogmaster
It has clearly escaped your redacting eye that Ned Baslow, though neither an ox nor a moron is not above putting the two together as in ‘King Harold (nèe Godwinson)’. While acutely aware of the gravity of the statement, I am astonished that it has been left to Ned Baslow to reveal after all these years that Harold was born a woman. But in that case should it not be Godwinflaed?

If he had written ‘Harold née Godwinflaed or Godwinfleda’ then this would have been an indication that the Anglo Saxons had mastered gender realignment surgery some time before 1066. An opportunity lost to point out that yet again the Saxons led the werold.
Yours
TW, South Ealing.

Dear Editor
Mr. Ned Baslow is perfectly free to hand out advice to Harold Godwinson but comparing the Normans to present-day Tories is to do neither of them an ounce of credit. First, where would we be without the Normans? And don’t say ‘under the Tories’. They’ve given us castles and cathedrals that make Britain one of the chief tourist attractions of the world.

You only need to watch films about Saxons, with their unkempt beards and their late-night booze-ups to realise what the country would have turned out like if Harold had taken Mr. Baslow’s advice and considered his predicament rather than pitching in his boneheaded housecarls without a decent breakfast.

True, under the Tories very few of us have access any more to a decent breakfast, but in my book Harold Wilson was as much to blame as Billy Norman, not to mention Jack Straw, who at least answers your letters (which Harold Wilson never did).
MC, Rishton-Under-Lyme.

Dear Ed.,
Looks to me like King Harold never got Ned Baslow’s warning letter. The rest, as they say, has been history.
DAC, St. Leonard’s-on-Sea.

We have also had a number of emails, mainly from teenage readers, who want to know how you become a Housecarl. We have passed on their enquiries to Google Search.

See below for Ned’s 2nd letter to celebrities.

Ned Baslow: Letters to Celebrities 2
The editorial team has exercised its right to abridge Mr. Baslow’s contribution.

Dear Mr. Homer,
It is a lucky coincidence that the manager of our local post office is Greek, a Mr. Papandreou, though we call him Mr. P or Phil the Greek (not to be confused with Prince Philip, our Prince Consort). My wife Betty gets in to lots of conversations with Mr. P, especially since she joined an Open University course which seems to be really worked up about Greek civilisation.
Betty’s brain is now buzzing with questions about your good self, your authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey; and I have to admit I’ve taken a peek at your stories, my particular favourite being the one about the goddess who turned blokes into wild animals; oh, and the one about the Cyclops with one eye: a real no-brain.

Betty says all that is symbolic, but to be honest with you, she’s not altogether convinced you could have got away with stories that size and never thought to write them down. In short, what’s the secret? I mean, those books took our Betty three months to read, and she confesses she skipped a chunk here and there, particularly the battle scenes which, to be honest, Mr. H, get rather repetitive, that is until you get to the Wooden Horse.

I guess you’ll be pretty pleased, by the way, at the number of films and TV series that old horse has inspired. It takes a bit of believing, though – I mean, you wheel this flipping great nag through the city gates, the Trojans doing the pulling and pushing, and yet not one of them asks, ‘Is it hollow?’ Even my Benjie spotted that one, and he’s only nine.

Betty’s theory is that the Trojans were caught napping, literally, found the Greeks plundering them and their wives, so they cooked up the horse-story in order to illustrate, and give proof to, the old saying, ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’.

Which brings me to my query on Betty’s behalf: what real store can we put on your having anything whatever to do with these (in my humble view, overlong) masterpieces? Further, if the ancient Egyptians had been writing their hieroglyphics for thousands of years, how come you seem to have been unfamiliar with pen or paper, or should I say quill and parchment?

Now I can hear you saying, what about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? They weren’t around to check their facts about J.C., and yet by and large they get the same events more or less in the same order; but that is my point. Plainly M,M,L and J got together. It’s obvious – a case of what Betty’s tutor refers to as ‘collusion’ or (the Lord spare us) a ‘coalition’.

So I am putting it you, Mr. H, on behalf of Mrs. B, that The Iliad and The Odyssey were created by a team of scriptwriters who scrabbled around for a pseudonym to protect themselves against the wrath of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon and the like, in exactly the same way that scores if not hundreds of poets have adopted the name Anon to cover both their tracts and their tracks.

A single iota of proof of your authenticity would be welcome. For example, how is it that you had no Christian name; that there are no blue plaques put up by the Greeks in their towns and cities to celebrate the so-described greatest poet of the ancient world; why no statues, or a tomb full of your bits and pieces, your memoirs on tape?

Please regard this letter as a genuine academic enquiry. But more, there could be something in it for you of a positive – nay, profitable – nature. The Illy and the Oddy have sold a fair number of copies down the centuries. I reckon we’re talking millions. Betty says they’ve even been translated into Kazakstani and Sherpa.

So the royalties, in addition to film rights, might by this time equal the gross national product of a fair size country, and would certainly have a steadying effect on the economy of your alleged homeland, which has had more downs than ups in its history since your day.

I look forward with excited anticipation to receiving some clarification from you; or as my Betty has charmingly put it, ‘Mr. H – show me the evidence!’ If writing is a problem (some theorists, Betty says, believe dyslexia was your handicap), we would be happy to receive a phone-call, preferably between six pm and eight – but do please check whether Greece has finally decided whether it will be an hour ahead or an hour behind Greenwich Mean Time.

With many thanks for your patience in reading this letter (or having it translated) and in the hope that we can settle the question of your existence swiftly and to the satisfaction of all.

Sincerely and Confidentially,

Ned Baslow (for Mrs. B.Baslow)
‘Yer Tis’
Old Roman Road
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven

In Blog 28 Ned offers a few words of apology, on behalf of William Blake and the British Museum, to King Nebuchadnezzar.

Happy Christmas!

LITERARY ENCOUNTERS: Athlete Meets Bull

2011-11-18T01:23:00.000-08:00

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.com
November 2011
Blog 26

James Watson: A Writer’s Notebook

Contents

*LITERARY ENCOUNTERS 6: Athlete Meets Bull
* NOTES IN PASSING: Capa challenged
*Poems of Place…3: Dolbadarn Tower
*Correspondence: The Celebrity Letters of Ned Baslow 1

Athlete Meets Bull

An edited extract from The Bull Leapers, set in Crete
at a time somewhere between legend and history. In
the kingdom of Minos slave athletes were brought, under
duress, from other parts of the Greek world to take part in,
and often to die in, the favourite sport of the Cretans – bull leaping.

Piros knelt at the altar built into the limestone wall of the arena. His companions, young men and women wearing loin-kilts of stiff brown cloth and light boots laced past the calves, bowed low around him, invoking the protection of the Goddess. The silence of the crowd gave way to excited conversation. The women’s dresses shone in the morning sun like the tail of a giant peacock, proudly unfurled. Its shimmering motion was matched by the women nodding or bending their heads, for their frizzed black hair was garlanded with strings of pearl and gold chains studded with jewels.

Brilliant blues and reds contrasted with the glaring arena sand. White walls stood in vivid outline against the misty green slopes of Mount Jukta – cleft, it was said, by the gigantic club of an angry god.

In this flourish of colour, Piros himself appeared no less distinctive. He was as black as the court ladies were sallow. His limbs were trim and muscular. His lips and nostrils were thicker than those of any other person there, and he had no need of court hairdressers to make his hair curl close to his skull.

Although he was only seventeen he had long been the favourite athlete of the crowd. He was called ‘The Egyptian’ because he had been a slave in the kingdom of the Nile. His mastery of the bulls had won him admiration throughout Crete. He was agile, cool-headed, wise in the ways of these creatures made mad by darkness and blinding light, and starved to make their tempers sharp.

The mark of Piros’ fame hung around his throat, a chain of gold supporting a disc engraved with the head of a bull. It had been awarded him, at the request of nobles and court ladies, by the man he now approached.

Nickname ‘The Bull’ for his powerful and frightening appearance, Prince Tauros looked older than his twenty-one years. He sat with his mother, the Queen, and his two sisters. Queen Pasiphae was a disdainful woman with arched brows, thin features and shrewdly intelligent eyes. Princess Ariadne, a girl of sixteen, also had a nickname, but one given her in admiration. She was called ‘Princess Fairlocks’. It was claimed that the Earth Goddess, as a birthday gift, had once brushed her hair with enchanted silver. Ariadne’s younger sister was Princess Phaedra, dark and solemn…

At the rasping summons of a conch horn, the painted gates opened. The bull stood motionless in a cloud of dust and sand, dazzled by the light. Its head swayed heavily, tail flicked. Its hooves stamped impatiently on the hot ground. A roar from the crowd broke over the bull’s head, confusing it, filling it with panic. It tried to halt the noise by wheeling round and snorting, only to discover that the sounds had swelled in volume. They had become united and were advancing to torment the bull with invisible thrusts.

Across a golden distance immediately ahead, a figure moved forward. All the noise and light seemed to concentrate in it. The figure danced, arms waving, and the voices seemed to burst from it, growing louder as it approached. Head down, blood pounding behind its eyes, the bull began to trot. It fixed the position of the black shape. Sand rose. The light was blocked by a swift shadow. There was a sudden pressure around the horns, a weight on the head that forced it downwards. Then a soft touch on the hind quarters, and beyond the settling dust there was nothing, only a yellow mist and specks of light.

The shadows came fast now, one after another. The bull tossed its angry horns and struck nothing but air. It felt the weight again and again, the strange final touch on the hind quarters, followed each time by the triumphant shouts and the sounds of hands beating together.

Despite its rage, the bull recorded the habits of its attackers. It knew their direction; that a shadow left the ground and a moment later there was the weight on its lowered horns. With every sortie the bull proved a more formidable adversary. It learned to raise its head as the shadow left the ground. Then there was a more rewarding encounter, with the impact of flesh and a cry different from the others. The light touch of hands on the hind quarters did not come.

Above its own stormy breath, the bull sensed a change in the noise. It was less certain, less triumphant. The creature spun around. Instinct was beginning to dispel its earlier desperation. The taunting had gone wrong. Something white and low moved close by, not dancing now, not waving, its head bowed.
The bull stood with sweat steaming on its shoulders and back, no longer terrified but filled with eagerness for the attack. The voice, a few strides away, was human, and in the whiteness there were eyes. Out of line of the bull’s vision, it sensed a flickering of shadows, but it had seen enough of its target to make no mistake. The weight on its horns was immense, uneven, then fell away, leaving spurts of hot liquid that coursed into eyes and nostrils.

The bull knew victory. Spattered with the blood of the young leaper, it now came straight for Piros. The Egyptian danced right up to the moment the horns were an arm’s length away. Then he was in the air, searching confidently past the blooded points to clasp the horns from each side. The bull’s head jerked upwards violently but Piros was already plunging forward, body straightened to the horizontal, legs beginning to bend at the knees.

He touched down on the slippery hide, rose again slightly, then brought head and knees tightly to his body. He sprang and landed on the balls of his feet. Momentum carried him a yard farther where he was checked by his team mate, Chronakis.

Yet the bull had measured another pattern. Instead of continuing its run as it had before, it halted and turned about. Shadows scattered. A white low form raised itself feebly. Horns were lowered to kill when all at once a weight came, not from the front, not in the form of a shadow. It was on the bull’s back. There was pressure about its throat as though ropes were being tightened.

Its eyes wrenched from the target and held square into the sunlight, the bull stumbled and tripped across the white shadow. ‘Quickly!’ yelled Piros. ‘Get him away.’

Theseus, the Athenian, enters the tale and adventures race through labyrinths of intrigue.

***

NOTES IN PASSING: Capa challenged
So Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier, the photograph that has come to encapsulate the poignancy and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), is once again being charged as a fake: evidence in a recent issue of the Independent (‘Shot down – Capa’s classic image of war’, Elizabeth Nash) suggests a set-up arranged far from the scene of any real battle, in the Espejo region. A second picture taken at the same time shows several militia men in a scattered line, firing against a landscape that certainly resembles that in The Falling Soldier.

Of course authenticity matters: the moment of death-by-bullet is real and symbolic; the simulated reality is symbolism of another sort. Capa’s picture portrays a bare hillside and a featureless sky; a republican soldier is hurled back by the force of the bullet that kills him.

His right arm is flung outwards, his rifle slipping from his grasp. Legs buckle, neck jerks partially sideways: for him, the last moment of life, but for the photographer, a supreme moment of truth.
The problem seems to arise from differences over location – Espejo or Cerro Muriano, though it has to be said that the landscape of both is not dissimilar. Could the painstaking research of amateur sleuth Mario Brotons (not mentioned in the Independent article) help resolve this decades-long controversy?

Painstaking research
At the age of 14, Mario Brotons had fought in the Civil War. He was present at the same time as Capa in the Cerro Muriano front near Cordoba in September 1936. Later in life, Brotons became haunted by Capa’s picture. He felt sure he recognised the picture’s terrain and the dress (not uniform) of the dying soldier – open-necked shirt and light-coloured trousers.

Brotons was convinced that this soldier was a miner from Linares in Andalucia, in particular one of the 300 militiamen of the Alcoy contingent, recognisable from the cartridge belts and harnesses they wore, hand-made by local leather craftsmen to the garrison commander’s special design.

Brotons actually went as far as identifying the soldier, naming him as Federico Borrell Garcia, a 24-year-old millworker from the town of Alcoy (Brotons’ home town), recorded dead on 5 September 1936. Though archives in Madrid and Salamanca state that many militiamen had been wounded on the Cerro Muriano front that day, each registered only one dead – that of Federico Borrell (maternal surname, Garcia).

‘I knew him well.’
Questioned about the soldier in Capa’s photograph, 78-year-old Maria, widow of Everisto, Federico’s younger brother, confirmed that the man in Capa’s picture was her dead brother-in-law: ‘I knew him well.’

Sadly, Mario Brotons died in 1996 before he could publicise his discovery or defend his conviction about the authenticity of the photograph. Nevertheless, he left behind copious documentation that was given headline treatment in the Observer and duly honoured in the Imperial War Museum’s Spanish Civil War exhibition, Dreams and Nightmares (2001-2).

Capa was killed in 1958 photographing the Vietnam War. I reckon I’ll opt for that cartridge belt and harness as likely authenticators until evidence stronger than a black-and white background shifts my faith in this amazing picture.

***

Poems of Place 4

DOLBADARN TOWER

When stone upon stone
This tower was built
By hands untutored
In the language of art;
On this eminence: the hill peak
With Lamberis lake beyond,
And further still the mountains,
The talk would never
In a thousand years
Have dwelt on myth or mystery,
The quaint or the magical; and yet
The Tower of Dolbadarn
Placed by rude hands in raw clime
Inspired constructions in oil-paint,
Fabrications in delicate washes
By masters such as Claude Lorrain
And in consequence the mighty Turner
As well as lesser daubers
In search of style.

Moses Griffiths painted here;
William Jennings and Henry Gastoneau.
Here sketched entranced Thomas Tutor,
William Buttle and John Josiah Dodd.
Here on damp grass under lowering skies
Georges Salter, Campion and Barrett
Defined the picturesque,
And after brief dreams made way
For Sandby, Paul and Thomas Smith Café.

On a special Sunday in Lent
The humble masons left their shivering tombs
For a private view –
Sponsored by the Arts Council of Wales –
Of tower and landscape framed,
Of mists enticed, sun-streams captured,
Of light romanced, of meaning
Delineated in golden
(But also learned) hues.

‘How’s it strike you, Dai?’
Enquiries the Curator with sherry poised,
Of the master mason, disengaging him
From his moss-covered huddle.
‘Such artefacts,’ Dai pronounces
(The room’s electric
For art and life are truly met),
‘Such artefacts show bravura,
Indubitably sweet sensitivity,
Unarguable skills, if not genius –
‘But’ – and here the room grows cold
As the myriad ghosts of artists past
Rise up with dank breath
And palettes colourless –
‘But I fear the secret message
Of Dolbadarn eludes one and all.’

Aghast, the master daubers shiver.
Their bones rattle like wild Welsh gales.
‘Pray how, Dai,’ ashen tinctured
Quakes the Curator, much deflated,
‘Do you deny the vision
Of sublimity, reject the judgment
Of scholarly voices
To arrive at such a conclusion?’

Dai’s words are winter leaves
Crackling through frosted churchyards:
‘The secret all probed for
Lies not in the tower but in the stone,
Not in the tree but the bark,
Not in the leaf but the vein,
Not in the lake, but the waterdrop
For my parched throat; not
In the sky but the air
I can no longer breath.’

Though fading fast, Dai mutters on,
Dolbadarn shimmering, Llanberis aglow
In his outstretched palms:
‘Put them together, good Sirs,
And what have you got?’

From their own cold beds
In windswept heather and thyme,
The geniuses of the sable
Cock fleshless ears and await
The master mason’s divination.

Alas dear readers, at this moment
Another master – the caretaker-in-chief –
Slams open the museum doors, and calls,
‘Everybody out, smelly corpses first!’
For none high or low dare say him Nay.

And that is the reason the Tower of Dolbadarn
Retains its secret to this very day.

***

CORRESPONDENCE
Readers may recall correspondence the Blog has received from Ned Baslow of Derbyshire. In response to a NOTES IN PASSING feature on the ancient sites of Derbyshire, such as Arbor Low and The Bull Ring (Blog 15, 15 September 2010) Ned wrote to point out that he and his wife Betty did their courting on the hallowed site of the Bull Ring.

He later informed us of the super arts festival he was helping to arrange in his home village of Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven, though this has had to be postponed as a result of Councillor Stokoe, star of the musical dramatisation of The Adventures of Don Quixote, having suffered a fall resulting in the need for a hip operation.

Councillor Stokoe very kindly wrote to Editorial recommending Ned’s Letters to Celebrities and we have permission to reproduce the councillor’s comments here:

COUNCILLOR GILBERT STOKOE MBE recommends…
It gives me great pleasure to comment on what has become known as The Baslow Letters or Letters to Celebrities, written by my friend Mr. Ned Baslow whose entrepreneurial energy as honorary Press Officer of the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Drama and Light Opera Society and the district’s Annual Summer Arts Festival has become a byword and an exemplar in the town and beyond.

What comes out of the letters is Mr. Baslow’s humanitarian concern, his willingness to speak his mind, his dedication to the arts and his occasional erudition which caused surprise in some quarters, until it was discovered that his good wife Betty is well in to her Open University degree.

Above all, the reader will be struck by Ned Baslow’s patriotic sentiments mixed with a healthy scepticism concerning the occasional pretentiousness to be found in the world of arts, and more generally in people who have experienced rather too much higher education.

Councillor Gilbert Stokoe MBE.

The editorial team were somewhat taken aback at Ned’s choice of correspondent, expecting missives addressed exclusively to those at least with a toehold in the land of the living. However, reading the first of Ned’s letters we acknowledge that, dutifully taken, the advice he gives could well have made a difference to a great deal that has happened in this country since, well, since 1066 and all that.

Dear King Harold (nèe Godwinson),

I am writing this in haste hoping to reach you (despite the recent bout of postal disputes brought on by new mechanisation) before you march south. But first I’d like to congratulate you on your fine victory at Stamford Bridge (the northerly outpost that is, not the home of Chelsea Football Club). It is truly amazing to learn of the speed at which your prodigious Housecarls marched to battle and, scarcely with half a day’s ration in their bellies, put the enemy to route.

However, my purpose in writing to you is to urge a degree of caution. Your decision to hasten south, at the double – that is, bearing in mind the fatigue of battle experienced by your stout-hearted Saxons, could be judged rash if not precipitous. Bravery is one thing, my lord, but recklessness might well get you and yours into hot water. True, William of Normandy is by all accounts encamped on English shores, exercising his men and his steeds at Pevensey and carousing in hostelries from Lewis to Bexhill.

True he has a certain legal justification for what I know all of Saxon England considers a gross trespass, but believe me, Sire, once the lawyers get their teeth into something, peace of mind flies right out of the window. The story going round is that you signed a document acknowledging Billy Norman as your sovereign overlord, though you may have a case for defaulting on that signature as you had put pen to paper under duress.

The nation appreciates that Billy, having you captive by the short and curlies following your rescue from the prospect of a watery death, was taking advantage of his hospitality; but to expect a kingdom as payment for bed and breakfast and possibly an evening meal with a free glass of wine – well, sucks to that!

Now these Normans are a mercenary bunch, a band of spoilers – I mean, look what they got up to in Sicily. There’s not a democrat among them. What they see, they take and what they can’t take they sell off on the black market.

In summary, my lord Harold, they are not to be underestimated or casually classified as snail-eating softies. Billy Norman means business, and make no mistake, he is a cunning varlet and has already made it clear on a number of occasions that he considers you a Thick Brit, stronger in the arm than in the head.

The future of our nation, Sire, depends on you and your counsellors, your housecarls, your archers and halberdiers (if you have any in your ranks) playing it cool, opting for the tactics of stealth as opposed to full-frontal attack.

It’s been mentioned that you are particularly anxious about your properties in Wessex and it is understandable that this bit of England scores slightly higher on your personal popularity meter than lesser places like Essex, Cornwall and all those parts to west and north covered in snow for half the year. My advice, in this matter, in fact my strong recommendation, is that you look to the bigger picture.

As for your immediate strategy, forgive me for urging you not to head hell for leather for Billy’s camp. Doing that would be like putting your entire savings on Shrewsbury Town beating Manchester United in the Cup Final. Your lads will arrive tired, hungry and bleary-eyed, with not a pint of ale or a roast boar in sight.

They’ll be needing a change of shirt and god knows how long it’ll have been since they had clean underwear. Boots? What boots after all that marching?

To be frank with you, I have had this premonition that you might let heroics rule over common sense. Clearly you will be impatient to deliver one in the eye to your enemy, but he is no slouch. Being a Norman (we call them Tories these days) he’s certain to resort to dastardly tricks, especially if he considers you might have the advantage, say, of the high ground.
Watch him! That is my counsel; and if he tries on one of those canny feigned retreats…well, of course, you know all about that sort of thing; but if you’re dog tired there’s always the danger of forgetting the ABCs of combat. And you can be sure that Billy will have treated himself and his cohorts to a decent night’s sleep and a fried breakfast.

Attack? – No. Your best advice is to play for time. Relax, the whole country’s behind you. Let old Billy fret. Let him worry about when his next meal is coming from; and as his line of advance begins to look like a line of retreat, when his cavalry’s eating grass and wondering where all the signposts to London have disappeared to, then you strike. This time it will be you who have him by the short and curlies.

I am of the opinion, Sire, that it would be stark, staring lunacy not to opt for defence by stealth on this occasion. Ignore the temptation to play two up front, leaving your centre backs open to counterattack. Those housecarls of yours are renowned for having more muscle than grey-matter, so keeping them on a tight leash should be a priority.

Despite the doubts that have driven me to pen this message, I feel confident that even if my letter does not reach you before your departure, its recommendations will already have been anticipated and heeded.

Sire, I can see 1066 being another triumphant year for Britons everywhere, and yet another affirmation of the English (I mean Saxon) way of life.

Yours confidentially,
Ned Baslow
‘Yer Tis’,
Old Roman Road
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven..

Editor's postscript:

Thanks, Ned. There’s nothing lost by trying, though we fear your advice might not reach Harold in time. Meanwhile, we are considering your next in the series as we're confident our readers will be as interested in hearing what Mr. Homer has to say for himself as you are.

NEXT MONTH:
Bleakland Scenarios
Notes on Nordic crime thrillers.

* Now available on Kindle:

Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa Women's soccer in Ukraine: read it

before it happens in 2012.

Talking in Whispers Chile, life under the Generals.

ENCOUNTER WITH GUERNICA

2011-10-13T00:54:00.000-07:00

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.com
October 2011
Blog 25

James Watson: A Writer’s Notebook

Contents:

*Number 5 in a series on ENCOUNTERS
*Notes in Passing: Temenos on Teesside
*Poems of Place…2 Windchimes on West Hill
*Correspondence

LITERARY ENCOUNTERS 5

Guernica, market day, 26 April 1937

The dramatic finale of The Freedom Tree, set during the Spanish Civil War, sees Will, a British Battalion volunteer and Molly, a nursing assistant, accompanied by their Spanish friend José, arrive at the Basque market town of Guernica. In Peg, a commandeered van, they have made a lucky escape into seemingly peaceful territory. General Franco’s fascist army is aided and abetted by German aircraft. Mola, commander of Franco’s northern battalions, has issued a proclamation demanding that ‘if submission is not immediate I will raze all Vizcaya to the ground, beginning with the industries of war’. The proclamation concluded: ‘I have the means…’

The tide of war seemed to be behind them. Ahead were signs of a people still at peace – farmcarts pulled by oxen and piled high with produce for market. The Basque peasants walked backwards in front of their oxen, gently urging them on with the occasional tap of a stick on the horns. They talked to the oxen and the oxen seemed to take in every word…

The Oak of Guernica seemed to beckon Will and Molly to its quiet solitude. It was, thought Will, like walking out of the bustle of his home town, Jarrow, to the holy silence of Bede’s Well; a similar pilgrimage. They stood before an oak tree like other oaks, not bigger, not grander; yet a special oak.

Beneath the spread of its branches there were wooden seats carved with the arms of Vizcaya – a tree and lurking wolves. ‘Smell the sea, Molly? It can’t be faraway.’

‘I’ll remember this for ever.’ The early evening sunlight tilted red through the dark branches as José described how, when the rights of Vizcaya were declared, trumpets were blown and bonfires lit on hilltops all over the province. The hum of the market did not drown the soft rustle of the leaves. A breeze carried rose petals along the ground.

‘Peace!’
Then from across the town came the sound of a church bell. It struck single chimes, and the look of contentment on José’s face vanished. ‘San Juan!’

‘What’s he saying, Molly?’ José was dragging them away. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Air raid!’
General Mola was keeping his word.
The three of them ran. And then they stopped running, for where was there to run? They stood still. They waited. The bell of San Juan struck again and again and again, stirring apprehension into fear…

Above the squall of voices close by, the shouts, the clatter of panicky feet, there came a faint drumming roar. Will and Molly knew that sound well enough. ‘It could be they’ll pass over – on their way to the factories in Bilbao.’ They took comfort from this possibility. After all, what strategic significance had this sleepy market town?

A single plane, blunt-nosed, with the outline of a killer whale, skimmed the town. ‘Heinkel!’ The bombs were clearly visible. They glided through the rays of evening sunlight. One…two…three…four, and the ground shook, the air flashed. A blistering wind swept the rose petals over the dusty earth.

Five…six, followed by the crack of grenades. Will gripped José’s arm. Were there any anti-aircraft guns in Guernica? The young Basque replied that there were no guns and no troops either; scarcely a rifle to aim at the sky. Having delivered its load, the German Heinkel 111 banked towards the west. José beat his fist against stone. He had heard the rumours, he said, of other bombings, at Durango, Elgueta, at Ochandiana and Elorrio.

Perhaps this was just a warning. Perhaps a single pilot had a few bombs to drop to fulfil his quota. Perhaps the Heinkel was the first and last…An aching pause. Optimism rising, then fading as a second Heinkel traced the path of the first, its target the town centre. It completed an unchallenged tour of destruction with a burst of machine-gun fire.

José advised that if a full air-raid came, they must look for the sign REFUGIO where they would find shelter behind sandbags. Thirteen minutes. Fourteen. On the fifteenth, silence died. The thunder of man rolled across the western horizon.

‘Tranvias! Tranvias!’ The call spread down the street. ‘Tranvias!’ José explains: ‘’Trams. That’s what the people call the Junkers…Junker fifty-twos.’ The temporary peace was shattered by the clanking roar of huge, ugly, clumsy monsters that hardly seemed able to hold their position in the air.

‘Too late for a refuge. Quick, against the wall!’ Will’s hand searched for Molly’s. They watched the bombs fall in a single, streaming cascade. They saw whole streets shudder with the impact of high explosive. Houses split in two, lifted from their foundations. Great walls keeled over into the streets. Solid brick and stone disintegrated. Plumes of black smoke shot upwards through the jagged ruins…

This was a new kind of war, no longer soldiers against soldiers, but the deliberate extermination of civilians. Will watched the bombs falling, tilting in line, sometimes spinning. He saw them plunge to the very heart of the houses. Roofs collapsed into upper storeys, upper storeys on to the floors below, ground floors into basements.

He was sick with fear. He could hardly breathe. He felt Molly trembling. Equally shaken, José prowled. He refused to stand with his back to the wall. He advanced into the road. He snarled abuse at the sky…The streets were deserted no longer. For the people, their refuges threatened to become stone coffins. They fled from battered and unmolested homes alike. They would take their chance in the open. The town was doomed. They must escape from it.

José had stepped in among the crowds. He tried to rally them, turn them back as though a barricade or ranks of determined people would frighten the German aircraft away. ‘Gara Euzhadi Eskatuta! Gara Euzhadi Eskatuta!’

‘What’s he shouting, Molly?’
‘It’s the Basque freedom cry…Long live free Euzhadi.’
The Heinkels, with their characteristic split wheels, were flying so low that Will could see the faces of the pilots. The aircraft swooped over the streets. José declined to take shelter in a doorway. He was in the middle of the road, screaming at the Heinkels. Their target was not wood and stone and glass, but running flesh. They dived. They machine-gunned.

‘José, come back!’
The young goatherd was advancing in the direction of a lone Heinkel coming in from the east, diving low, furrowing the stone ground with machine-gun fire. He was a sleepwalker. He had stepped out of his living skull. Rage was his only instinct. He paused. He looked over this shoulder at Molly and Will. He raised his fist in salute as if to say thanks, as if to say – goodbye.
‘José!’
He held his empty wine bottle as a club. He cursed the Fascists. He cursed Franco. He walked almost into the shadow of the Heinkel. ‘Gara Euzhadi Eskatuta!’ He cast his bottle, spinning, flashing, at the plane’s propeller…

Previous encounters:
Boy meets girl, from Besieged: The Coils of the Viper (Blog 21, 17 March 2011).
Girl meets girl, from Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa (Blog 22, 14 April 2011).
Dissident girl meets dissident poet, from Ticket to Prague (Blog 23, 11 May, 2011).

Talking in Whispers the novel that followed The Freedom Tree is now available on Kindle, priced £2.34 (including VAT).

NOTES IN PASSING
Temenos on Teesside
The Temenos site is pure surrealism. The word temenos means ‘land assigned to holy ground’, a sanctuary; and the massive sky-perched construction by Anish Kapoor bestrides the old Teesport and a desert of waste ground like an aircraft uncertain of a safe landing.
Years ago, this vast, flat area beside the Tees was a dense landscape of working class housing, pubs by the dozen and ripe (as the 1960s developers saw) for clearing. Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium came first, towering above a desolation of flattened streets, though the bulldozers stayed their tracks, for whatever reasons, at abandoned brickshells, scarcely-surviving factory sites and the Victorian clock tower which still stands in sad isolation between the Kapoor and the dazzlingly bad chunk of the Middlesbrough College.

Future forlorn
What struck this visitor (once an inhabitant of these parts) was the lack of people. The area remains a bombsite, forlorn, full of promises about the future posted on endless hoardings of a new Middlesbrough. Yet everything peeling, fading.
One approach road from the town’s railway station represents everything: the road has been paved in multi-colours, yet the buildings to the side are either abandoned or are simply boarded up, with the Lord Byron pub the neglected prologue to hoardings concealing acres of waste land. They’ve put up new lighting pylons which have either begun to tilt, out of depression and neglect or because the designers considered tilt a design accessory.

The flash of aluminium
For no obvious reason coloured boxes have been placed along the patterned road that leads to the rear of the college when you would expect it to be the other way round. At the front, it is all flashing aluminium dwarfing what few windows have been included. The façade opens on to more waste land before the visitor comes to the old dock; an acre of dark water with not a sign of any ‘use’; no boats here, no marina, no fishermen, just a dank stretch of lonely water. Above it, the Kapoor hovers magnificently, but in its own loneliness a sad spectacle.

One looks beyond the brick walls, the outline of abandoned buildings, the huge steel hoist, itself a kind of afterthought, probably too costly to dismantle, to the iconic Transporter Bridge brightly painted in blue. This superb emblem of a once-dominant steel town seems to stand as a timely caution to those setting out to match reality with aspiration. Time and progress caught up with the Transporter; time and circumstance seems already to have caught up with the Temenos site.

Photoscape
The most fascinating aspect of Temenos is not what the planners intended
but, with its variegated shapes and patterns, the juxtaposition of new an old. It is a landscape to excite artist and photographer. It teems with surreal compositions combined with an assortment of messages about past and present to delight sociologists and semiologists alike.

One day perhaps development will catch up with the Kapoor, do it proud rather than reduce it to a folly. In the meantime, photographers and artists are recommended to hasten to Temenos; and decide for themselves whether it suggests a metaphor for the Britain of then and now.

Poems of Place…2

WINDCHIMES ON WEST HILL

A night wind and at the sound of the chime
The walls around me begin to melt.
The theme of sea and fish, of shells,
Of boats hauled up on white shore of bath
Shakes, shimmers as this high house
Responds to the Last Post: spectres rise –
Listen! For the wind is whispering sea shanties,
Highland laments and moody blues.

From behind the sea-curtain homesick pilgrims
Mingle voices with the soft moan of war wounded,
With the nervous hum of evacuees driven
By necessity towards unwanted shores.
From farther off the chimes evoke the clink of iron
As gates close on the pallid faces
Of those whose requiem will be the hiss of gas.

Yet here on West Hill, the chimes speak softly
To sleeping children, of nursery rhymes and Postman Pat,
Or white peacocks and a lonesome donkey,
Or scented gardens and a pirate ship of flowers.
Here the great water tower stands sentinel,
Proud in neglect; its Renaissance balcony
The high-sky choirstall of migrant doves.

Washed and shaved, the poet descends
From his water tower of dreams, declares:
‘Those chimes – what magic!’
‘No chimes!’ is the laughing reply,
‘It’s only the plumbing, wind in the bathroom pipes.
Did you recognise the Last Post?’

With delight undiminished
He offers up a prayer to old houses
Where ghosts take up happy residence,
Turning copper u-bends into cathedrals;
And for a breeze of a price
Add to the bonus of hot and cold running water
A reverie of chimes for those on West Hill
Who choose to linger over time’s ablutions.

An Autumn Haiku

Orange leaves seem to
Be the wrong colour to show
People in bright scarves.

Lee Bishop

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter from America
From Ken Melling

For most of the spring and summer we get visits from black bears. They are searching for food and are attracted by bird feeders, compost piles, or anything else that appears to them to be a food source. Certainly for the last few months we have had a visit almost every day. We have three ‘visitors’, two bears are young, probably two years old. On their hind legs they are over six feet tall and weight around 250/300 lbs. Both are males. The third is also a male, but a fully grown adult weighing in at 350/400 lbs. and taller on his hind legs (over seven feet). We believe that the drought (causing a lack of food) is the reason for the regular visits. We are high up, very few houses and spaced out, in a forest landscape with steep slopes.

Only a mother black bear with young is likely to be aggressive toward humans. The three we have are not aggressive and do not make any attempt to attack us or our dogs. They just run off and try somewhere else. If shouting and banging is not enough (very often they just ignore you and go on eating bird seed) I use a "BB gun" (to you an airgun) on a low setting and shoot at the body. This does not penetrate the skin but rather stings a bit and after a couple of shots they run off. Of course one or other is back sometime during the next day, sometimes one after the other. And it's always the same three bears but not the Goldilocks type.

Best regards from wild America!
Ken

Ken does not write from a cabin in the Yukon but from North Carolina.

Dear Ned Baslow
This is just to apologise for not using your first Letter to a Celebrity which you kindly mailed to Watsonworks in good time for publication. Initially the editorial team were slightly taken aback by your choice of correspondent, though on mature consideration we thought – why not if the advice you offer is sound? The question is, will it be heeded in time? We’ll run your letter in Blog 26 and hope for the best.

Contributions to Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk welcome!

***

Autumn reading at Watsonworks

2011-09-05T22:54:00.000-07:00

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.com
Returning from a summer break, September 2011
Blog 24

Contents:

*Number 4 in a series on ENCOUNTERS
*Notes in Passing: A Book from the Shadows
*Poems of Place…1. Heptenstall for Sylvia Plath
*Correspondence

Enemies Meet Face-to-Face
in the trenches of Catalonia

An edited extract from the Spanish Civil War novel
The Freedom Tree (Puffin, Collins etc.).

In the footsteps of his dead father, Will has joined British volunteers
to fight alongside the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and
against the forces of General Franco. He finds himself, with his
companion Griff, in the bitterly cold trenches of Catalonia, northern
Spain. He has been sent out by the group leader, Candy Sam, to
gather brushwood. In the pitch darkness, Griff and Will lose their way.

In the dark, north, south, east and west wore the same featureless mask. The stars were over- clouded, and anyway neither Will nor Griff could read the stars. They left the limestone parapet of the home trench and dropped in to no-man’s land. ‘When you hear a shot,’ Candy Sam had instructed, ‘drop flat on your faces. It’s a thousand to one against being hit.’

Every footstep, for Will, was agony because he could hear his steel-shod boots designed to make the biggest possible noise over crackly limestone. And if he could hear them, so could the watchful enemy. He might as well have had bells tied to his feet.

Boulders were the chief hazard and Will duly tripped over one. He fell among firewood. ‘Roots!’
‘Drag them up, then.’
He was grateful to halt his progress towards the enemy lines. He hacked at the rough limb of stunted oak. ‘This’ll never burn in a month of Sundays.’ The tree took five minutes’ sawing. It quivered and fought for its survival until Will began to feel sorry for it. Yet he moved on, dragging his prickly victim with him.

The thought of crawling into a trench and finding not their comrades but a scowling enemy, made Will stop. ‘We need to take our bearings.’ Instinctively, they crouched down and at the very same moment the hill halfway up the sky burst into flames. An explosion raised the lid of darkness, and small explosions burst on the heels of the first.

There was one second of silence before the entire battlefront unleashed its armoury. Somehow the blackness made things worse. Distances closed in. Between a machine-gun barrel and the victim was sightlessness – no matter that in daylight you couldn’t see the bullets either.

Head down, smelling the bitter winter earth, hands clamped over ears. A bullet smashed stone close by. Another ricocheted off rocks to left or right. Will raised his eyes as the intensity of the gunfire – and got the very worst shock of his life. His gazes fell on another face.

The enemy soldier lay belly down, pointing in the direction of his own trenches as Will and Griff were pointing at theirs. He was as terrified as Will – and as young: wan faced, pop-eyed, immovable as though his limbs had been driven into the ground with wooden stakes.

If he was armed, there was no sign of it. At the sight of two of the enemy, he rolled sideways like a rabbit springing from the hand about to descend upon its neck. Will said, ‘Please!’ It was all he could think of: please – don’t do anything, don’t shoot, don’t run. But Griff cut words. This was the closest bang, the closest bullet and it drowned Will’s anguished ‘No, Griff!’

Too late. The bullet was straight. The enemy turned half in a circle. His hand was raised as if to some invisible support, some arm held out to him in the last flash of his living mind. His pop-eyed face fell before the rest of him.

‘There was no need!’
‘Him or us.’
‘He’d no gun.’
‘Beggar that!’
Will was across the body. ‘If he’s only wounded –’
‘Forget ‘im, he’s dead.’
The young Spaniard lay as only the dead lie. Yet Will would not let him go. Feebly, he bent over him, willing breath back into him. ‘Sorry. Sorry…’ He no longer heard the flying bullets. He did not care whether they struck him. The pop eyes were in his head. He could see nothing but them.

One life. Sixteen years of caring and loving and feeding, of laughing and crying and running and talking – turned, in a single moment to cold flesh. Will cocked his head. He lifted himself. Great waves of nausea drove upwards through him. He was sick in his throat, sick down his nostrils.

When the nausea departed it was replaced by anger and disgust. His mind had never prepared itself for this. It had imagined other, nobler pictures – all shattered. In these seconds, Will’s hatred was not for the Fascists but for Griff. The look in his companion’s eyes – which again and again reverted to the dead Spaniard – was of pride. He was glad of what he had done.

Will gathered up the firewood they had collected. He felt no fear, for he felt nothing. He was changed. Something – perhaps everything – of his past self lay with the young Spaniard. Back in the home trench with the others, he took out his pistol. He handed it to Candy Sam. ‘Give it somebody else, please. I want none of it.’

Will’s war moves to the Battle of Jarama, where he meets Molly, a medical orderly, and is then followed by a desperate journey north, to the Basque town of Guernica. Encounter 5 in Blog 25 will describe the blitzkrieg of the town on market day by German bombers.

***

Notes in Passing
A Book from the shadows: ordinary people in extraordinary times

To have lived through the 2nd World War and to have actually lived through the war years in Berlin, the epicentre of Nazi tyranny and eventual defeat, was a truly unchallengeable qualification for an author to pen an authentic fictional account of the ‘thousand year Reich’. Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, first published in 1945 and now in a fresh English translation by Michael Hoffman, is a remarkable achievement, historical and literary.

Alone focuses on ordinary people living in day-to-day terror of the Gestapo and the SS; people who were never asked to approve of, or support, National Socialism, who had too much to contend with in their own lives to feel any degree of patriotism, who delivered up their sons to the war effort because they had no choice.

Berlin, for working-class people, was a tyranny of surveillance, ruled by fear – of crossing those in authority, of being reported by neighbours, friends or even family to a hierarchy of monsters in uniform, themselves in terror of those above them.

Otto Quangel and his wife Anna have lost their son in the war. Their bitter response to what they both see as a pointless and tragic conflict is to fight back. They do this by writing postcards condemning the Nazi regime and leaving these in public places; their hope that from acorns oaks of resistance might grow.

It is, from the start, a hopeless aspiration, yet it is one requiring a stubborn courage. In a free society such protestations would be seen as trivial, as amusingly absurd. In the totalitarian state of Hitler’s Germany, where nothing is disproportionate, such protests prompt a remorseless manhunt, equally absurd: there will be arrest, there will be interrogation and torture; and anyone with any connections with the ‘traitors’ will be caught in the trap.

Though the Quangels become an increasingly isolated, withdrawn couple the ripples of their activity sweep wide and darkly. Merely to have known or met them draws the innocent in to the abyss.

The novel teems with characters that could have been drawn from The Beggar’s Opera – petty thieves, bullies, drunks, rarely honourable never heroic; while those in authority, police, Gestapo, judges are straight out of George Grosz (see his ink and water colour on paper, Interrogation recently acquired by the London Jewish Museum of Art, supported by the Art Collection Fund).

Alone in Berlin is a brilliant and gripping narrative, terrifying in places but also verging on the comical as the villains of the piece live a ‘truth’ shot through with insanity and brutality, at once unbelievable and actual. A dull couple in any other circumstances, themselves to a degree unhinged by their hopeless campaign of protest, the Quangels find themselves capable of strategies of resistance far more successful than their postcards; or if not resistance, survival in face of the most horrific treatment.

The reader is offered a glimpse of hope at a personal level, but no assurance about the potential of people-power. Of the many postcards they leave in public places in the belief that they will be taken away, read, noted and perhaps acted upon, the majority are handed in to the authorities immediately on discovery.

Hans Fallada’s novel is loosely based on real characters who campaigned very much as the Quangels do in Alone in Berlin and whose fate paralleled that of Fallada’s characters. He took a mere 24 days to write 586 very readable pages; alas he did not live to see the publication of his book.

Geoff Wilkes in the Afterword to the novel writes that whereas Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) dissects and analyses ‘the banality of evil’, Fallada’s book ‘comprehends and honours the banality of good’.

A five-star read.

***

Poems of Place….1

HEPSTONSTALL:
FOR SYLVIA PLATH

They do not bury those
Dead by their own hand
Outside cemetery walls these days.
So I searched for you among those
Who bore their agonies
More stoically than the poet often does.

For what, I wondered, should I look –
What stone, what shape, what last words
Suitable for one whose brief lines
No overdose could kill?

Not, surely – Much Remembered.
Not – Dearly Beloved.
Not floral with white lilies
Or soothing angels
Eyes fixed on confident eternity.

I guess by now there will be a sign
Saying ‘Sylvia Plath lies this way’
(in Aldeburgh Ben and Pete and Imogen
All lie together in grey-marble convenience
Close enough to play nocturnes and trios
Under the baton of the sea wind).

I am glad I walked in vain
The parade of marble, glad I failed,
Despite a skylark’s company
And rooks reciting their own laments
In the deep thunder of the sycamore,
To find you written up
As ordinary mortals are.

For in truth my search
Was your epitaph
And a little of my own.

***

Correspondence

"I just finished reading your book Ticket to Prague for the third time, and I wanted to tell you how much I love it. You described Prague in such vivid language, I want to get my own ticket to Prague!! I won Ticket to Prague in a book quiz at my local library last year and like I mentioned before, have read it several times. I'm a young writer myself, and books like Ticket to Prague give me something to aspire to. I'm waiting for school to start again, so I can hunt down some of your books in my school library, and I can’t wait!! I suppose you might get this a lot but you are a brilliant writer Mr. Watson and I love your work. ST."

Thanks, ST. It’s always a relief for a writer to learn that somebody has dipped in to his or her work (and kept going to the end!). Blog 23 featured an extract from Ticket to Prague under the Encounters series – DISSIDENT GIRL MEETS DISSIDENT POET.

Dear Jim,
It’s me, Ned Baslow again, just to thank you for agreeing to find space for one (or more) of my Letters to Celebrities. As I’ve explained, I think important people could often do with some feet-on-the ground guidance from the likes of us ordinary folk. It’s been my recent experience that a word of advice from the rank-and-phial is often appreciated by those dazzled by their own greatness or with their heads in the cloud as a result of hangers-on flattering them to the nines.

Anyway, you’ll get my first missile, sorry, missive, in good time for your next Blog (which my Betty says is improving). However, neither of us can make head nor tale of Miro who you seem to admire. For us, a good plain landscape with a cottage, some Derbyshire sheep among the Derbyshire Peaks is more to our liking, though if it’s squiggles you want Benjie, our nine year old, could knock out those till the cows come home. Takes all sorts!
Yours,
Ned.

I look forward to your contribution, Ned. As for Miro, I read in a magazine lately that Miro actually visited Belper on the A6 with the intention of drawing the East Mill that overlooks the Derwent, but gave up on account of the rain and, as he termed it, ‘problems with perspective’.

How sad that letter writing has been on the decline:
why not join Ned in a campaign to cultivate the fast-disappearing art of correspondence?
PS: You don’t have to be from Derbyshire.

Contact: Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

http://www.watsonworks.co.uk/

***

FICTIONAL ENCOUNTERS: Dissident Girl meets Dissident Poet

2011-05-11T01:07:00.000-07:00

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.com
Blog 23

Contents:
· Dissident Girl Meets Dissident Poet
· Notes in Passing: Miro, another perspective
· Five Haikus for Istanbul
· Correspondence: a regretful cancellation

DISSIDENT GIRL

MEETS DISSIDENT POET

The Power of a Good Book
Number 3 in a series on ENCOUNTERS

An edited selection from
TICKET TO PRAGUE
(Gollancz, Penguin, Collins)

Since her parents were killed in a motorway car crash Amy Douglas has been at war with the world. She has been expelled from school, she has been involved in a violent streetfight which has led to her boyfriend being put behind bars while she has been issued with a controlling order. She has ended up as a part-time carer in a home for men who have either rejected society or been rejected by it.

Josef is a Czech poet. Almost a generation ago he had been permitted to join a group of poets and other writers on a cultural visit to Britain. He absconded, but the decision was so traumatic that the poet, along with all the evidence of who Josef actually was, vanished into silence. All he does, from week to week, month to month, year to year, is stare at an empty television screen.

Neither Amy nor Josef realise on their first meeting that their period of isolation, their seemingly pointless and directionless lives, are about to change. The key that unlocks the door to silence is a shared love – of literature, the enriching power of reading.

***
From a distance, High Lawns does a passable imitation of a stately home. It stands on a pleasant incline among acres of meadow and woodland, all encompassed by high stone walls. Ancient beech trees escort the main drive which stretches through rough pasture to a sunken wall.

Beyond this are lovingly tended gardens, smooth-cropped lawns, a tennis court and an open-air pool…
…
'Whatever you do,' senior nurse Sylvia Benson, had advised Amy, 'never call the place a loony bin. Never use such words as "lunatic", "mad", "round the bend" or "round the twist". These unfortunates are our family. Now they're your family.'
…
'And this gentleman, said Mrs. Benson on Amy’s first morning on duty, ‘is Josef, spelt with an "f", one of our longest-serving customers.'
'Customers?'
'Oh yes, that is what we have to call them these days. It sounds more business-like. Josef is foreign. He smokes too much and hates taking exercise. A lazy old scruff, really – aren't you, Josef?’
Still in pyjamas and slippers though it is past eleven, Josef makes no response to Mrs. Benson. He is around sixty, Amy guesses. He is short, scrawny but still with a generous head of grey hair.
He spares one glance at the tall, handsome girl with blonde hair. There is the dart of a smile from watchful green eyes that seem to say, 'I know secrets but I'm not telling'.
'Josef won't give you any bother, Amy. There is little point, by the way, in trying to engage him in conversation. He's foreign and doesn't seem to have bothered to learn our language beyond "I want", "No" and "Football!" He is what Dr. Parrish calls homo mollusca, someone trapped for ever in a shell of almost absolute silence.'
Amy is wondering, should Mrs. Benson be saying all this in front of Josef?
'Don't worry, he never listens to what anybody says. We call him Sir Stubborn.'
Amy takes to Josef instantly: Sir Stubborn, meet Lady Stubborn.
'Shall I turn the telly on for him?'
'No, he prefers it off.'
'He looks as though he is watching it.'
'Oh yes. If he's watching it, or looks as though he's watching it, and it's off, don't wheel it away or he'll become quite agitated.'
'And if I turn the telly on?'
'He'll walk away.'
Amy grins. 'That means he's got good taste. I'm not struck on telly myself.'
Mrs. Benson isn't used to considering the opinions of young people sent up on Community Service or from the Youth Training, but Amy seems different; brighter, more full of herself. 'You've got a point. All that violence and suffering before your very eyes, well it's enough to make you feel suicidal...'
'Like you want asylum?'
'Yes, I guess that's what we are at High Lawns, a refuge from all the horror and carnage.' Ms. Benson explains that Josef, as a special privilege, is allowed to stay up to watch the late-night football. 'Otherwise he retreats into his shell completely.'
Amy contemplates Josef. 'He looks so intelligent.'
Mrs. Benson drops her voice. 'There's absolutely nothing wrong with Sir Stubborn that a good kick up the backside wouldn't cure. Private opinion, mind.'

After settling a nocturnal fracas between two ‘customers’, Josef and a Mr. Dodds over a packet of fags, Amy is curious to draw Josef out of his shell.

There is this terrible silence. Amy recognises it because somewhere in the building, far off, somebody is crying – a child, a grown-up, it is difficult to say. And the crying goes on and on and it makes the silence in this room and the silence outside so clear; like a frost…
…'You've got a real reputation, Josef. Your friend Mr. Dodds says you killed your kids. I don't believe that... though you were pretty violent just now. He says that's why you never tell anybody about yourself. Because of your guilt.
'I don't believe that either...Do you know what I think? You're afraid. If you just stick with Please and Thank You, nobody will report you: am I right?'
Why did I say that? Guesswork. But it's pressed something in his head. Josef's gaze for a second shifts from the empty TV screen. 'Still, don't think you're the only one. Everybody's afraid – I mean everybody who's ever lost anyone. Or lost themselves, you know what I mean?'
Another flicker of the eye; a recognition. 'Yes, I think you do. I hope you don't mind me talking to you like this. I lost my parents, you know. They were passengers in this car going along the M25. Heard of that? It's the most dangerous stretch of road since the First World War. Then I went to live with my Auntie, who's not actually my real auntie at all. She was kind – so long as I didn't bring home any “darkies”.'
The mournful weeping from a distant ward has continued, and until it slips into silence, Amy keeps on talking.... 'I quite like it here, actually. It's a sanctuary. I think you like it too, Josef. It's a horrible world out there, do you agree?
'I get my meals, same as you. And Mrs. Benson thinks they might take me on, as a temp. Pay me, even...Mind you, I've only got GCSEs. Though I can swim. I used to race. And when I did, when I competed and left others ten metres behind, I was somebody. When I didn't, I was nobody.
'You're very trim, Josef. I bet you did sport when you were a boy. Football? They're very keen on it in Czechoslovakia, am I right? Course, personally I'm more into books these days.’
She dangles a juicy literary worm. 'Now Czechoslovakia – that's where Franz Kafka lived.' A pause; a flicker of recognition, no, more than that. 'A bit morbid, though – that story about a man turning into a beetle. Poor Gregor Samsa!'
Something is happening. Josef's face seems suddenly to melt in the glare from the strip light above; melt, go out of shape, and then re-form, almost into a new face.
'One of your favourites, is he, Josef – Franz Kafka? We could sort of read him together. The Castle, what about that? No? Okay, The Trial then. My English teacher Mrs. Ambler was very keen on him.'
Josef suddenly emits one word. Amy does not recognise it, fears it might be a curse. 'What was that, Josef?'
'Sveyk!'
'Sveyk? Right.' A long pause. Baffled. Sveyk – doesn't sound like a swearword. Josef is reaching out his hand.
'Come. Please!'
Three words! This must have exhausted Josef's usual tally for the year.
'Okay.'
Upstairs, to his room, head nodding now, vigorously. Josef switches on the light, goes to a set of drawers, opens the top one.
Amy waits by the door. 'Sveyk.' She practices it aloud. Does it mean 'bedroom' or 'drawer' or perhaps even a 'secret case' that Mr. Dodds accused him of hiding away?
Josef produces a fat paperback with a flash of yellow on the cover. He holds it up. 'Sveyk.'
At last.
'He's the author?' She receives the book. She reads out the title. 'The Good Soldier Sveyk by Jaroslav Hasek.'
'Hashek!' replies Josef, correcting Amy's pronunciation.
Eyes meeting, eyes aglow now.
On the cover, an officer in a blue uniform is sitting down and smoking a fag. Coming through the door, saluting, is a plump soldier with a stubble beard and a big grin.
'Sveyk?'
Amy points, Josef nods. She turns to the back cover and reads: The Good Soldier Sveyk and His Fortunes in the World War...it says here that it's the "classic novel of the 'little man' fighting officialdom and bureaucracy with the only weapons available to him – passive resistance, subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence".'
Dumb insolence, eh? Amy gazes across at her new friend. All she says is, 'Sveyk!'
Josef nods again, and now he smiles. 'Sveyk!'
'And you want me to read this to you?' She examines the volume which has suddenly brought her close to this old man full of dumb insolence. '752 pages, Josef, that'll take us a lifetime!'
Another nod. No sweat. She flicks through the pages, pauses at Chapter 4: Sveyk Thrown out of the Lunatic Asylum. She looks up but does not speak, then turns to the opening page.
She reads out the first few lines:

'And so they've killed Grand Duke Ferdinand,' said
the charwoman to Mr. Sveyk, who had left military
service years before, after being finally certified
by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now
lived by selling dogs – ugly, mongrel monstrosities,
whose pedegrees he forged. Apart from this occupation he
suffered from rheumatism and was at this very moment

rubbing his knees with Elliman's embrocation...

Amy's turn to nod. 'It looks as though it might give us a laugh or two.'
Josef is beaming. All at once Amy begins to feel good. She closes the book.
'Sveyk!' says the old man.
'Sveyk!' repeats Amy Douglas, little realising how this one word will change her life.

Amy and Josef become friends and she discovers that far from being the murdererof his kids, Josef is a poet of distinction, almost but not quite forgotten in his own country. Her aim becomes to reconnect him with his past and bring him fully and creatively into the present. In doing so, she comes to terms with her own past and present.

CONTINUES…
********************************

Notes in passing…
MIRO, ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

Unless you’re an expert it’s so easy to get art wrong, specifically to have an idea about an artist which prevails in the absence of certain significant information. When this becomes known a sort of revelation takes place. You look at the same painting but with new eyes.
This happened to me at Tate Modern’s current Miro exhibition, Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape. My previous experience of the artist’s work was always when it was hung alongside the paintings of others, and my impression was of verbal wit, fun in a world of surrealist elements; a sort of play theory on canvas.

Pain in Spain
Reading of Miro’s Spanish upbringing and background, of the historical contexts in which his art was created forced an engagement, a link between painting and history which drew me away from former impressions. This history included Miguel Primo Rivera’s military coup in 1923, the suppression of the Catalan language and customs, not long to be followed by Franco’s overthrow of the short-lived republic.

Such events impacted powerfully on Miro, eventually driving him and his family out of his homeland, to settle in Paris where he was soon to witness the Nazi occupation of France. The paintings as seen, not in the memory but on the walls of Tate Modern, studied in the light of history, demand a re-view and reconsideration.

Encoding the serious
Miro does not translate his reaction to repression by becoming a realist, rather he turns reality into a powerful iconography in which the abstract or semi-abstract images are dramatically encoded. What I’d previous read as visual jesting now revealed themselves as charged with a deep seriousness. The passion lies, as it were, beneath the paint’s surface, controlled by Miro’s fidelity to the act of painting itself. Yet even here there is a paradox: what we see on the canvas is exact and painstaking. Its strives after, and achieves, considerable aesthetic satisfaction; but one gets the impression that it was in the act of painting that Miro’s passionate response to events going on around him, is to be found.

Deceived by titles
Perhaps in the first place my take on Miro was over-influenced by his idiosyncratic titling – Dog Barking at the Moon (1926) or Woman With Blonde Armpits Combing Her Hair By the Light of the Stars (1940). Such titles actually belie the paintings’ content and the act of creation, as does the sheer mastery of colour and design. Inside these formalities is an astonishing degree of savagery.

In referring to one of Miro’s series, the Tate Modern guide, written by Marko David and Matthew Gale, refers to ‘heavy encrustation of paint often laden with sand, accompanied by hacking, stretching and nailing – urgent, frustrated action’. No joker here!

Conflagrating
Influenced by the American Abstract Expressionists, Miro stepped out of his precise iconography to produce large canvases some of which he set alight, leaving the viewer to scan both burnt painting and exposed canvas, communicating anger, even outrage, perhaps prompted by events beyond the act of painting or just as likely recording the inevitable pain and frustration when vision rides ahead of application. Burning canvases but still exhibiting them is an apt comment on the creative process.

Miro’s better known (less inflammatory) works may serve as symbolic concealments of his reaction to the world, but they are never wholly hidden. At the same time, as we enjoy Miro as painter, we acknowledge his own pleasure in the creative process; something that took him away from the horror of contemporary events. The title of the exhibition and of a 1940 painting, The Escape Ladder seems to speak for Miro’s art generally.

American dreamer?
Art is escape, the making of marks, the application of colour, but it is the process, not the subject-matter which constitutes the escape. Yet the one does not necessarily work without the other. In paintings done towards the end of his life, content seems to have taken something of a back-seat, somehow losing substance (in the triptychs The Hope of a Condemned Man and the paint-splattered Fireworks) simultaneously with the loss of the iconography that had stood the artist in good stead from his student days.

They are brave canvases, but seem to indicate that Miro, in those final days of success, riches and celebrity, might have been looking over the wrong shoulder. It’s a moot point whether the American art that so impressed him hasn’t something to answer for.

***************************

FIVE HAIKUS FOR ISTANBUL
February 2011, when it never stopped raining

1. B(L)O(W)SPHORUS HAIKU

Fingers frozen, brolly soaked
Finding it hard
To warm to Istanbul.

2. A TIFFIN HAIKU

Muezzin for breakfast
Muezzin for lunch; grant us
A peal of bells for tea.

3. SAYS IT ALL HAIKU

No sink plugs our guide
Points out is down to the Turks’
Fear of still water.

4. A NEITHER NOR HAIKU

No sun in Istanbul
Nor promise of it
In Constantinople.

5. FAMOUS ARAB ARCHITECT HAIKU

Sinan: four hundred and more
Buildings later; what was
His name again?

Correspondence
An urgent notification from Ned Baslow, secretary of the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Grand Summer Festival Committee.

Dear Jim
I’m desperate to get this letter to you prior to the publication of your Blog No.23 on account of the fact that we have had to postpone our summer festival till the autumn or beyond. Following my letter to you last month, introducing such items as the Tableau of Womanly Beauty and the Battle of the Titans, I’ve received several inquiries for tickets from your readers.

Very regrettably Gilbert Stokoe (‘Lord Gilbert’) is booked for a hip operation and a carthage operation during what were to be rehearsals for his starring role as Don Quixote in The Spectacles of the Man from La Salamanca. Bearing in mind that he was also lead singer in our Tribute to Wolfy (vocals from the light operas of Mozart) we have decided to cancel rather than let the festivities go off at half-cock.

This has been a disappointment for the scores of actors and musicians who have been rehearsing round the clock for a range of festival events, but also for the local athletic and body-builders clubs. They volunteered their services as Ancient Greeks and Robin Hood’s Merry Men only for us to cancel the Battle of the Titans as a result of the local recreation ground being bought up by a national supermarket (whose name I can’t mention at the moment pending a legal enquiry).

As my wife Betty said – she is studying hard for an Open University degree –
finding time to catch up her on studies is poor compensation for losing out on her chance to play opposite Don Quixote as the Fair Dulcy-Naya, a part she has really got her teeth in to.

We are not disheartened. I know the whole district of Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven is resolute in its determination to put our show back on the road once Lord Gilbert can turn his limp in to a leap following surgery (this of course being dependent on whether recent government cuts won’t extend his waiting time till the next millennium!).

Please reassure any of your readers who feel let down as a result of our festival postponement: their application for tickets will be kept on record; indeed for those who contacted me so promptly, via your good offices, there will be a number of complimentary tickets available for performances by the Under-Sevens Choir and the Garland of Poetry Evening performed by members of the Fernhaven Women’s Insitute, always memorable occasions.

Councillor Stokoe asked me to mention that while for the moment his mobility is restricted, he remains in excellent voice, promising a special solo-event singing a medley of areas from The Magic Flute and Cosy Fran Tootie. He will be accompanied on the piano by his good wife Beryl, though her own health has not been of the best lately.
Kindest regards,

Ned.

A real pity, Ned, but knowing the people of Derbyshire we at
Watsonworks feel confident that the festival will be back on course soon.
We had applied for tickets for the ELVIS RESURRECTED gig
under canvas and were on the waiting list. Keep in touch.

***********************************************************

PREVIOUS Blog topics:

Politics and Fiction (Blog 17)
Fiction and History (Blog 16)
Aspects of Storytelling
Triggers (7)
Props propel (8)
Frames, Codes & Character (9)
Fiction & News (10)
Tale Power (11)

Thanks for reading Blog 23. Watsonworksblog
will be taking a summer break. Back in the Autumn
with more in the ENCOUNTERS series.
JIM.

**************

GIRL MEETS GIRL in a world of snow...

2011-04-14T02:14:00.000-07:00

Watsonworksblog

No. 22

Contents:
Girl Meets Girl

Edited extract from FAIR GAME

· Notes in Passing: A Class Act
· Letter from Ned Baslow: on a festival never to forget

Girl Meets Girl

Second in a series on ENCOUNTERS. This edited extract is taken from the opening chapters of FAIR GAME: THE STEPS OF ODESSA (Spire Publishing).

Introduction
Kyiv, capital of the Ukraine; a bleak winter’s night. Natasha, a talented soccer player, ambitious to play for her country, broods on the dangers to herself and her brother Lonya resulting from investigations into government corruption by their father, campaigning journalist Victor Kaltsov. When the SBU, Ukraine’s secret service, call at Victor’s flat, they find Natasha alone and take her hostage, driving her through heavy snow to a ‘safe’ house in the city outskirts.

…There’s a window open and Natasha can smell countryside – a wind that has travelled for hundreds of kilometres across the flatlands, upwards from the infinite Steppe, an ocean of grass crossed by countless rivers…

Snow is coming in through the car window. She feels its coldness on the sweat of the hood. Out there, what? – gentle forests, avenues of linden stretching through a thousand years of history, all of it, the glories and the tragedies, culminating in this: a hostage, hooded, a pistol in her ribs, innocent as snow, but then, in this world – Dad’s words – ‘It’s the innocent who suffer most’.

…Myk has turned off the road. The snow is so thick in the headlights that the Shogun slows to walking pace, then stops. ‘Okay, Comrade, bring her out.’

Sergei’s pistol is still jammed against her side. She’s grateful for the coat they let her have. The ouse seems a long way from where the Shogun has been parked. The wind hums through the trees on bohth sides of her. She guesses it’s a dasha, like Dad once rented, in the good old days when he wasn’t on the bad side of people.

‘Steps,’ warns Myk. Two wooden stairs lead on to a verandah already heaped up along its length with freezing snow. The dacha has no electricity. Myk lights two paraffin lamps. In the first of two rooms, there is a table, bunk beds against the side wall and a wood-burning stove in the corner. Natasha is marched by Sergei into the second room, empty except for a single bed. A small window is shuttered.

Natasha’s captors open the vodka. Myk falls asleep on his arms, but Sergei has other plans, and they involve the fair prisoner.

In the darkness she reaches for the bed. The thin mattress is covered only by a single blanket, and both are soaked with damp. Her legs are shaking. She sits, then lies on her side, her knees pulled up to her chin. Her teeth are chattering with the cold. She stands, moves to the door, listens.

Sergei is in two minds: take the oil lamp or leave it. He picks it up and the room sways with shadows, dizzy as his head. He decides against the lamp, replaces it on the table, fiddles for his torch, can’t find it, but does locate his flick-knife.

In search of a weapon to defend herself, Natasha has darted back to the bed. She stoops, then kneels, feeling the metal legs in the hope that one might be loose enough to remove.
Hopeless: she’d need a wrench to shift the nuts and bolts.

…It’s going to happen. If the idea is in his head, vodka in his stomach, then he’s not going to turn up this juicy chance. Me. Juicy – who’d ever have thought that? She is shaking, like before a big match, or just before taking a penalty. Jock, our lovely coach, calls me Cool Head. I’m not cool now; only maybe I’ve got to be…

Sergei hears nothing above his own nasal rasp. Natasha hears him swallow; and she also hears herself say, almost aloud, I’m no defender. Miss-time my tackles. Gave away a penalty last week. Jock said, ‘Forget it – attack, that’s what you’re born to do.’

Attack. Huh!

A key is thrust into the door, turned soundlessly. Sergei guesses she is asleep. She steps away from the door. Okay, Cool Head – prove it. Jock’s back: rehearse; think ahead what you’re going to do. The door is opening. It brings with it the faintest image of the snowstorm and the outline of Myk asleep and snoring.

Sergei pauses. He should have brought the lamp. He enters Natasha’s room, closes out what light there is as he eases the door to. He almost shuts it, but not quite. He steps forward, his boot scraping on the earth floor. He stops, breathless, sightless.

Natasha is an arm’s length away, to his right, her pulses drumming. She smells the vodka. She could trip him. She could kick him. She could even trample on his head. But there’ll be noise, so she hovers: that’s how the best goals are scored, by slipping silently, swiftly, unseen and unexpected through the defences.

Sergei passes her. He whispers ahead of his conquest. ‘Shush, kid, not a word, this is just between you and me.’

Now!

The door proves no friend. It betrays her with a loud squeak. But the vodka proves her ally: it catches in Sergei’s throat and he coughs, knows nothing of her departure. Natasha is through the door – speed she never needs to rehearse – and across the room.

For a moment her intention is to wake Myk, thinks the better of it, heads for the door of the dacha. Miracle! Neither of the guards thought to lock it.
In the same instant, Sergei discovers his juicy opportunity has taken flight. He yells out in frustration and fury – ‘Myk!’

Natasha is away into the storm, its own fury matching Sergei’s. The snow swirls and blinds. Her trainers sink in it past the ankles – moving ankles, striding ankles, ankles suddenly stuck in a drift, extricated, commanded to move – move! – to put distance between the dacha and the runaway…It’s cold, God it’s cold. The wind’s straight from Russia. It turns crystals into bullets. Need shelter, something till morning, till light.

Natasha struggles on through the snow till she reaches the outbuildings of a farm or large dacha. She has banged her knee in the dark, but the light from a distant window beckons her on.

Well, what are you waiting for? There’s the door – knock. Suddenly a dog barks. A man’s voice orders its silence, but the dog senses a stranger, becomes more excited.
Knock!
The door is so solid Natasha’s fist makes no impact and no sound. Yet inside they know someone is there. The voices are hushed. Natasha knocks harder. The door opens. Her first reaction is to note – they’ve got electricity, wonderful! An elderly man, shorter than she is, holds out in front of him a long-barrelled shotgun.

‘There’s only me. I was out running. Got stuck, and lost.’

The man lowers his weapon. He is joined at the door by a woman of his own age, and a third person, much younger, who does their talking for them.

‘Let her in, Uncle, and close the door, or we’ll freeze to death.’

The elderly man hesitates, suspicious, then nods her forward into blissful warmth. He steps back for his wife who exclaims, ‘Grief, the child’s covered in icicles. Put more logs on the fire, Vanya. Monika, help me brush her down. Hot water, that’s what she needs. Come, child, sit here.’

Normally Natasha would resent being called a child; but not at this moment. If a child gets spoilt like this, they can call her what they like. She grins at Monika as she brings a change of clothes from another room, then hands her a large towel.

Without waiting to be asked, she helps Natasha off with her shirt; offers dry jeans for soaked jeans and then busies herself towelling Natasha’s hair. ‘I’m Monika. This is my Aunt Sophia, and you were nearly shot by my Uncle Vanya.’
‘Uncle Vanya – like in Chekhov. My favourite. Other than Pushkin.’ It’s by way of introduction. ‘And my name is Natasha.’

Monika is fair, taller, a little older than Natasha; blue-eyed. She keeps towelling while Sophia has brought a dish of hot water. ‘Now warm those toes, my child.’
‘Some run,’ Monika observes. ‘This is the wilderness, you must have been training for a marathon.’ There is no suspicion in her voice, only good cheer, as though Natasha’s arrival has broken the monotony of a life in the outback. ‘You’ve hurt yourself.’

Monika has noticed Natasha’s cut knee and the bruise already swelling and turning blue. She dampens a cloth in tepid water, ties it gently round the knee. ‘Keep it on just for a bit.’
Natasha confesses, ‘This is too good to be true. I mean, your kindness.’

…She is invited to the scrubbed table, served hot broth – potatoes, beetroot, leak, flavoured with chervil, and home-made bread. The food warms her throat, her chest, and as she eats, they stare, too polite to ask questions, so she asks her own: ‘Do the trains go straight into town?’
‘Don’t say you jogged all the way from Kyiv?’ smiles Monika. ‘It’s twelve kilometres at least.’
‘Sport’s my thing. I play soccer. Jock, our trainer, says we should do thirty kilometres a week. At least.’
‘You look done in, Child,’ says Sophia. ‘A night’s rest is what you need.’
‘You’ll have my bed,’ says Monika, ‘I’ll sleep in here.’
Natasha is too exhausted to argue. She stands, tries her knee. It’s not so bad.
Monika takes her arm. ‘Lean on me.’

The bedroom is also a workshop, and Natasha gasps as Monika switches on the light. ‘Oh, amazing – pysankys!’ The broad table in the centre of the room is strewn with wooden eggs – pysankys – in various stages of completion, the finished ones painted with images of Christ, the Madonna, angels and saints, glowing with fresh colour.

There are carvings too, brightly painted, while on drying racks against two of the walls are jewel-bright icons. ‘You make these, Monika?’
‘Uncle and me. I’m sort of his apprentice. We make them in the winter, sell them in spring.’
Natasha examines two of the famous holy eggs of Ukraine, one of St Cyril with a golden halo, the other of a long-haired warrior carrying a broadsword.
‘I recognise St. Cyril, but who is this?’
‘Ryurik the Viking, the founder of Kyiv.’
‘He’s wonderful.’
‘He’s yours – if you want him.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Something to remember us by. Your good luck talisman.’
‘Well, I could do with a change of fortune.’
‘I promise: Ryurik will look after you.’

Natasha is usually slow to take to people, but in Monika’s case it’s friendship, swift and warm and if her expression is anything to go by, reciprocated. She feels suddenly awkward and asks, awkwardly: ‘You make a living out of these, Monika?’

Monika nods. Her nervous smile seems to suggest she is also surprised at her feelings. ‘Well, almost a living. Business has picked up as more and more tourists arrive in the country, especially the Americans. They prefer the icons, though Vanya’s statues of St. George are a nice little earner too.’
‘And when you’re not making pysankys?’
‘I’m a tour guide. Foreign visitors, mainly. Americans in particular.’
‘So you know English?’
‘Enough to explain to our visitors which are the Men’s loos and which are the Women’s.’
‘I’m learning it too – from my trainer. He’s from Scotland. I play for the Kyiv Falcons, the cinderellas of women’s football, though all that’s going change at the international tournament in Zhytomyr’.
Natasha gazes down at her troubled knee, then grins, raises Ryurik into the light. ‘He’s already working his magic – the pain’s easing already!’
‘Tomorrow at first light we’ll ski to the station.’
‘You’ll have to keep picking me up.’
‘What are friends for?’
Friends, yes; it happens that way. How strange, thinks Natasha that in this moment of her fraught life she feels so happy.

CONTINUES…

Next in this series on ENCOUNTERS, ‘Dissident Girl Meets Dissident Poet’, selected from Ticket to Prague (Puffin).

*****************************

NOTES IN PASSING: A Class act
It’s curious how films set among the upper classes seem to have happy closure: they rarely relate to us now. They allow us, if that’s what we’re looking for, escape to a kind of neverland unaffected by the present; a social milieu almost entirety excluding the ‘lower classes’ apart from the servants. Yet with films set among the working class, like Brassed Off (directed and written by Mark Herman) and Made in Dagenham (directed by Nigel Cole, screenplay by Bill Ivory), though they deal with events that happened years ago, have a dramatically ongoing relevance.

Brassed Off, set in 1992, provides us with a moving and amusing story of the Thatcher years when the pits were shut and whole communities forced onto the dole. Made in Dagenham is set in 1968. The machinists at Ford’s Dagenham plant go on strike for equal pay with men. As with Brassed Off we learn about the lives of workers experiencing discrimination and exploitation. In Made in Dagenham the women machinists take strike action and in doing so challenge both the industrial and political establishment, eventually achieving legislation that benefited themselves and future generations.

Apart from a number of insignificant anachronisms (the Triumph Toledo was not introduced at Dagenham till two years after the women’s strike), Made in Dagenham says as much about contemporary British society – its prevailing inequalities – as it does about the events of 1968. We have an Equal Pay Act, but many women still suffer from pay differentials and an array of factors that impede progress towards equality and level playing fields not dissimilar to those experienced by Rita O’Grady, the leader of the Dagenham rebellion (superbly played by Sally Hawkins).

What gives these films both authenticity and relevance is that they are part of a historical continuity reaching back through the centuries – the eternal struggle by ordinary people against those in power and protecting their privileges. At Peterloo the working people poured on to the streets of Manchester in support of a principle; they were shot at and struck with sabres in order that the privileges of the hierarchical few might be preserved.

And so struggles continued, achieving a little and always at snails’ pace, through the struggle against Taxes On Knowledge, Chartism, the Suffragette movement, the General Strike of 1926 up to the London protests of only a few weeks ago. Both films articulate fundamentals of British, Us-and-Them society. Looked at from the present they remind us that progress towards equality in a fair and compassionate society is as likely to suffer retreat as advance and that some set-backs might be permanent.

The characters in Brassed Off or Made in Dagenham would readily recognise the social injustices, the outrageous inequalities of wealth and opportunity that prevail in 2011. They would identify with no great difficulty the ‘usual suspects’ defending and furthering their own interests while at the same time manning the discourses of justification and persuasion.

It is to be wondered whether we today have the courage, resolve and belief in collective action that so characterised the machinists of Dagenham, the Suffragettes, the Chartists, the radical press of the 19th century and innumerable left-of-centre pressure groups down the ages. Digital activism may be offering a spark of hope, though the Net will not further the cause of equality if it falls into corporate hands in ways similar to what happened to the mass media.

Whatever the arguments, if you have not yet seen Made in Dagenham or indeed Brassed Off, please sample them and be inspired.

**************************************

Correspondence
A letter from Ned Baslow

Dear Jim at Watsonworks
Me and my wife Betty were delighted that you printed my letter in your Blog about the sacred site at Dove Holes where we did much of our not-very-sacred courting in and around the Bull Ring.

I’m prompted to write again in my capacity as secretary of the local Panto and Light Opera Society to inform your many readers of the first international summer festival we’ve ever held in Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven. It’s going to be a real humdinger of an affair, I can assure you.
In particular I’d like to draw your readers’ attention to three events which will be a sell-out long before August when it’s all going to be happening.

First, there’s our musical spectacular on the Adventures of Donal Quixote, sponsored by Spexsavers and starring our local big-whig Mr. Gilbert Stokoe MBE whom we affectionately refer to as Lord Gilbert on account of his many financial as well as cultural interests in the region. I personally will be playing the role of Sancho Panzer.

Additionally, we shall be drawing the crowds with an Epic Battle of the Greats, setting the Ancient Greeks against our very own Robin of Sherwood and His Merry Men (all of whom in actual fact originated either from Yorkshire or Derbyshire – Robin Hood, that is, not the Ancient Greeks).

On a more leisurely and fashionable note we are presenting a Tableau of Womanly Beauty that will feature some of history’s most memorable lovelies, from Helen of Troy to Tarzan’s Jane, Ladies Macbeth (whose good looks have been underestimated) and Godiva, Audrey Helpburn, Marilyn Monroe, the late Elizabeth Taylor (played by Lord Gilbert’s daughter Melissa) and Miss Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven 2011 in her own right. The beauties will be accoutred by some of the finest designs by BTEC students at the local further education college and the Wickerstaff Ladies Sewing Circle.

Other highlights will be the Ballet of the Nymphs presented by the Bernadette Stokoe School of Dancing, a concert by the Julian Stokoe Jazz Quintet (made up entirely of the Stokoe family, by the way), a Sing-along-with Elvis (by a very talented look-alike artists from West Hartlepool) and a Grand Knees Up on the final Saturday night to the music of the Belper and Heige Brass Ensemble.

I’m confident this programme will whet the appetite of your readers and it is very kind of you to agree to take the names of those who wish to purchase tickets in advance. Equally my wife Betty, who is in charge of ticketing (despite having her work cut out doing her Open University degree), is delighted you are willing to carry further news of our grand summer enterprise. In short, my message to everyone is – watch this space!

Confidentially yours,
Ned Baslow.

Thanks, Ned. Always glad to give backing to worthy causes.

Contributions please to:Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com

BOY MEETS GIRL...in Medieval Florence

2011-03-17T01:43:00.000-07:00

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
No. 21

Boy meets Girl
An extract from a new story

Besieged: The Coils of The Viper

Introduction

The mercenary armies of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, called The Viper, have brought terror to Italy. Cities such as Siena, Perugia and Bologna, have either been overcome in battle or been terrified into submission.

Florence alone stands out against him. In the burning hot summer of 1402, the Viper has laid siege to the city, his intention to starve the citizens until they are too weak to resist.

In the refectory of the priory of the Dominican brothers, the Master, one of Florence’s most distinguished artists, and Luca, his teenage apprentice, see no choice but to continue with the great fresco that the Master has been commissioned to paint. They know that once Visconti’s savage mercenaries breach the city walls few citizens will survive the brutality that has become the Viper’s trademark.

While escaping the heat of the August sun and sketching the masterpieces of Giotto in the gaunt but magnificent Santa Croce basilica, Luca has become aware of the girl in a brown robe, hovering in shadow as if compelled to look over his shoulder at what his skilful hand commits to the page. Will one of them pluck up the courage to speak?

The Girl in the Brown Robe
Selected from Chapter 3 and edited

…I’ve been sketching the figure of St. John the Evangelist and the petitioners kneeling around him. Usually, after I’ve been here in Santa Croce for a while, I’m recognised by one of the lay brothers. He pinched my cheek once, and I only smiled and shook my head. Since then he seems to haunt the chapel, and when he sees me he brings out a stool for me to sit on.
He pats my shoulder and leaves me to my sketching.

It looks as though the girl isn’t going to turn up. She’s become almost as regular a visitor as I am; about my age, curiously dressed – a brown woollen robe, complete with hood but cut short at the calf. I guess she bought or stole it from a mendicant friar, took if off his corpse or traded it for services rendered.

It’s that kind of world; everything is possible, and blame is as stupid as it can be unjust.
She usually wears rope sandals but at other times she appears out of the shadows barefoot. That’s how I think of her – a mystery; a sort of spirit. I never see her arrive, never see her depart. Yet I’ve decided her eyes are too bright for them to belong to a ghost. Her skin, though fresh, has the hue of dark leather; and there is the hint of a limp, making her rock slightly from side to side as she walks.

Hers is as beautiful a face as I’m likely to see in these blighted days, for the respectable daughters of Florence are kept indoors, unless they’re in service to the rich and need to chance the city streets to fetch and carry, or if their business is in the tanneries or the woolsheds along the Arno…

Today I promised myself I’d speak to her at last. All it needs is a word, a question, a smile. It’d be worth it merely to have her smile back, for so far she’s been as solemn as one of the angels my Master complains about in Santa Maria Maggiore; ‘joyless,’ he calls them.

I shouldn’t feel so disappointed that she’s not turned up. Only a fool gets his hopes up in these horrible times. My hand seems to lose its motivation to draw, and I realise the only reason I keep coming, poring over the Evangelist’s resurrection of Drusiana, over his Ascension or the Death of St. Francis, is to see her.

I realise I’m talking to myself and this is at the same moment that I sense her presence. She is close enough to see the page of my open sketchbook. I’ve been scribbling devils. She glances up at the fresco where there are no devils, and the drumming of my heart tells me she is about to break our silence.

Pointing up to Maestro Giotto’s fresco, she says, ‘Scusami, excuse me, but is that what you see?’

I amaze myself with my nerve: ‘I was thinking you wouldn’t come.’

The comment startles both of us. We evade each other’s embarrassment by staring up at the flowing robes of Giotto’s figures.

She seems to be pleased at my frankness. ‘You noticed?...I’m surprised, for you seem to concentrate so hard.’ I’m struggling to keep up with her, say the right words that won’t put her off; but she doesn’t need any help. ‘May I look?’

She almost brushes my shoulder as I turn the pages of my sketchbook. I say, ‘All very quick…Just, sort of, ideas on paper.’
‘Why do you like Giotto so much – because you sketch only his figures, don’t you?’
‘Because…well, they have volume, roundness. They’re solid – real.’
‘As if they’re about to step from the painting – alive?’
‘Yes, that’s it, exactly.’
I am pleased. Her interest is welcome, her perceptiveness obvious. ‘You see, so many paintings are just like the old mosaics – everything flat.’ I hear myself going on a bit, but I can’t rein in my enthusiasm. ‘They’ve no space, no perspective. They shut you out instead of drawing you in.’
‘Is that the secret – perspective?’
‘My friend Filippo swears it is. Perspective, he says, is the key to great art. Without it, we are left with pure decoration.’
‘Does it mean the same as having a perspective on life?’
I decide she’s half-teasing me, but I’m grateful for that half-smile and look forward to receiving a whole one. ‘That’s a bit more complicated,’ I manage to say. I return to my latest sketch.
‘That devil could be Gian Galeazzo the Viper, could it not?’
I nod. My pencil shifts to a space on the page and I begin to draw a coiled serpent – Gian Galeazzo’s emblem. There are seven coils narrowing to a pointed tail. Trapped in the final coil is a tiny human figure, struggling in terror. ‘That could be the people of Florence,’ I say, ‘in a few days’ time.’
‘You are very talented.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I suppose everyone tells you that.’
‘They did, once. But there’re no “everyones” any more.’
‘Are you an apprentice?’
‘For my sins.’
She blesses me with a full smile. ‘You look too innocent to be a sinner.’

They are clearing the church, locking up. The great works of Maestro Giotto have faded into shadow. I stand. She is tall, my height if not a shade taller. She is thinner than I remember her; yet close up, her face is truly beautiful, full of character (as the Maestro often describes his madonnas and his saints – ‘depth of character, that’s what counts, in art as in life’).
‘My guess,’ I say, determined to hold on to her company for as long as possible, ‘is you’re not from these parts, neither Florentine nor Tuscan.’
‘You can tell by my accent?’
We are outside in the piazza. Normally it would be crowded, but we are almost alone. The heat is as intense as it’s been since early morning, but now the atmosphere is clammy. ‘You’re from the north, I think.’
‘From Lombardy. Remember the Bianchi? I was one of them. When we marched here, Florence gave us the kind of welcome that made us want to stay.’
I laugh, remembering something the Master had said: ‘My Master approved of the Bianchi, and the city loved them, he says, because they paid their bills!’
‘True, but our cause – universal peace, that was what Florence welcomed.’
‘Peace, my Master says, is good for trade, and trade is Florence’s first religion.’
She takes the comment in good part. ‘Be a cynic, if you wish. But it was much more than that. There was a yearning among the people, for an end to wars and bloodshed. We felt it then and still do.’
…
We’ve strolled down to the river. There’s scarcely a dribble of water. A pale golden light still lingers on the façade of San Miniato high above us. The avenues of pine and cypress are deepening from green to black tinged with the last flashes of crimson along the horizon…
. ‘My name’s Luca, by the way.’
‘Caterina – come sta, how are you?’
‘Sto bene, grazie, I’m fine, thank you!’
We talk about Florence. ‘You are very proud of the city, aren’t you, Luca?’
‘And sometimes I’m ashamed of it. At its best, I love it. It was once beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful city on earth.’
‘Are you forgetting Venice?’
‘Never been, but the Master jokes about his visit there – “Too much water!” he said.’
Her face lights up every time she smiles. ‘Especially if you’re not looking where you’re going. I went there once. It does pong a bit. But as for Florence, it’s what the city stands for, isn’t it, which makes you Florentines proud?’…

Caterina puts her hand on my arm, shakes it gently with what I can only guess is affection. ‘I see Florence being truly great once more.’
I cannot believe it, but we are holding hands. ‘You seem very confident in the future,’ I say. ‘What are you – a fortune teller?’
She stares down at the riverbed where a child in rags is trying to scoop up water in a brass pot. ‘Perhaps I am…something like that. Or just an optimist.’ She glances again at the river. ‘The Arno looks as if it is dying, doesn’t it? But come the spring, everything will be different. The seasons bring hope.’..
I’m not so easily shifted from my dark mood. ‘Yes, and sometimes the floods wash away bridges. Nobody’s safe.’
For a moment we both sense that the floodtide is in ourselves, one of sadness and bereavement. Our fingers slip reluctantly apart. Defeat is in my voice: ‘It’s so difficult to hold on to hope when everything seems stacked against us.’
I guess that she is as loath to depart as I am. Her gaze meets mine, lingers… and I sense that if I had put my arms around her and hugged her she would match the strength of my feelings.
She is now holding out her hand towards me, formally, almost stiffly. ‘Till next time, perhaps.’ We shake hands. It is almost comical when really I would like to hold her and kiss her.
Her smile closes this, the happiest hour of my life. ‘Things to do.’ She turns, strides away, limping a little from the hip.
I call after her. ‘I would like to sketch you.’
She stops, faces me. The last light of the evening adds a splash of scarlet to her face and hair. ‘One sitting will cost you ten soldi.’
‘Can I pay you when I’m famous?’
‘A gold florin if I have to wait that long!’
I call after her one last time. ‘You didn’t say where you live.’
This time she does not look back. ‘No I didn’t.’ She heads towards the Ponte Vecchio leaving me suddenly empty, struck by melancholy as if I’d lost something precious that I might never recover.

NEXT: Girl Meets Girl
From Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa.

****

A good read...

Anna Perera’s first novel took us into the horrific heart of Guantanamo. The detail was so well-worked, so convincing that it was difficult for the reader to believe that the author had not somehow undergone the experience of incarceration and torture herself.

In Anna’s new novel, The Glass Collector (Penguin), we get the same sense of sometimes overwhelming authenticity as in Guantanamo Boy. In both cases we are introduced to a scarcely imaginable world. Teenager Aaron, his family, his friends, his neighbours are Zabaleen Christians scratching out a desperate living in one of the poorest quarters of Cairo.

We gag at the stink. Nothing, anywhere, could be worse, more hazardous; yet Anna’s characters shine out of the ordure of rubbish collection just as do the fragments of glass, the coloured bottles which Aaron gathers and sometimes cherishes.

The Glass Collector punches hard and relentlessly. It deals with the isolation of a neglected community which nevertheless holds together and has a vital function in the greater order of Cairo life. At the same time, it is brave. What is striking among the young people Anna describes, and whose lives she portrays compassionately but with steely objectivity, is their lack of aspiration, the unwillingness to seriously contemplate escape.

True, an artist working on the local church gives Aaron a leg up when things are really down for the young thief, but once things are on an even keel, once his love for Rachel is reciprocated he does not aspire to be an artist, perceive that as a way out of his predicament; rather he returns happily it would seem, to the harsh but strangely rewarding reality of collecting a city’s discarded glass.

We can read here a lesson in belonging, that to be part of a community for all its often traumatising customs and pressures, is sometimes more powerful than western-style individualism and personal ambition. What we have here in Anna Perera’s excellent novel is an antidote to the prevalent values of our times. The life world she creates is impossible actually to desire, but somehow impossible not to admire.

***

As ever, contributions and correspondence are welcome, at http://Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

WATSONWORKS Blog 20

2011-02-15T01:18:00.000-08:00

The Bull Ring, Derbyshire See Correspondence

Watsonworks Blog 20

Every story is a journey,

every journey an exploration

Stories operate across time and distance; they are exterior and interior explorations. As readers, we take a journey in the hope of resolution, and on the way it’s possible that things happen to us. In the best stories we enter in to the action through our own imagination and the alchemy of the writer. We seek escape, change, pastures new; and often having relished these pastures we return for more.

For the author the terrain that has been covered and re-covered by other writers resembles Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. On the face of it exhaustively worked, minutely excavated, the treasures seemingly dug up and carried away leaving bare patches of earth, there is the risk of accepting that the only new story is Journey’s End.

Bearings
Inspired by the likes of archeologist Howard Carter who persisted in his searches in the Valley of the Kings against learned advice, and came upon Tutankhamen, the dedicated writer spades away until some talisman, however small, however insignificant turns up.

The search itself is a journey and this is aided by tools of the trade – curiosity, alert interest and attention, observations noted and stored, connecting up elements which may have strewn the creative path, unused, scarcely noticed, for years.

So part of the choice of journey has something to do with the market, but chiefly it is about the journeys an author would like to make or has already made, in fact or imagination. It goes back to childhood: what at that time were the journeys at first read out by parents, teachers, uncles and aunts doing the babysitting.

Competition for attention
It depends, of course, on the availability of stories, those books with such magical illustrations that the images haunt the memory for a lifetime; if, that is, the opportunity is there, and the motivation to read and look.

For every writer-in-the-making reading comes first, then comes emulation or even straight copying. In my case I was soon jungle-bound inspired by Ryder Haggard or manning the battlements of Malta in face of the invading Turkoman to a point when reading and writing were almost the same activity.

History as well as myth and legend was stirring the creative genes, and the more this took me away from home base (and British winters) the better. The pen became my Cook’s tour, carrying me on an adventurous journey from London to Renaissance Florence (in Sign of the Swallow), landing me on Crete, isle of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur (The Bull Leapers) or guiding me along the amazing Silk Road to China (Legion of the White Tiger); in fact, anywhere but chez nous.

Not safe for tourists
But there’s more to travel than tourism. The story is where the action is. Tourists may be suddenly caught in dramatic events not of their own making, but they’ve not come on holiday to suffer bricks and bullets. The writer of stories – of adventures – does. Drama and conflict attract the storyteller. It could readily be said that this is pure escapism in that writers in their studies may create chaos and mayhem but at the end of the afternoon there’s still tea and a quiet kip in the sun.

That does not make the process risk free. If, in the action there are messages; if these messages illustrate values, then for writers in a dozen or a hundred countries there are those dedicated to curtailing freedom of expression. Along the route of the journey values lie like stepping stones, sometimes (and often preferably) hidden.

Even if their existence is denied by the author, they continue to configure who the writer is and what he or she ultimately stands for. The clues may be miniscule and fragmentary, but they are still present and in a constant state of activation.

A world evoked
Each sortie into a journey reaches for an authenticity beyond plain fact. At a basic level the process is one of description, what the terrain looks like, feels like, but it soon becomes one of evocation. The sketch has filled in the outlines. Imagination takes up the baton and slowly the evoked world is transformed into a new reality where fact merges into legend; a world possessing its own dynamic.

Journeys take us into the unknown but once there they can become more real to us than our everyday experience. They are dramatically heightened, often scarily so, drawing us in, enfolding us in visions and emotions that frighten us but embolden us to progress, to traverse the minefield of coming events.

No better example of journeying from the real to a fantasy of overwhelming power is Philip Pullman’s masterly His Dark Materials trilogy, not only creating a world beyond the real, but two worlds living side by side. Lyra’s journey to the Arctic is both real and a dream, terrifying yet shot through with examples of memorable humanity, even if far from all the characters are human.

Pullman captures the essence of travel as revelation and discovery in the final words of Northern Lights, the first book of the trilogy: ‘So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky’.

Being there
Years ago I was interviewed on radio about Talking in Whispers set in Chile during the tyranny of the generals. When I said I had not actually been to the country, the interviewer couldn’t keep out of her voice a sense of disapproval. A little while later, an exile from Chile said after reading the book that it was an accurate portrayal and that she could hardly believe that I had not actually walked the avenues of Santiago.

My response was that imagining things and places is what authorship is all about: you try, you try harder until you hope you get it right. In my BBC interview perhaps I ought to have pointed out that I had not fought in the Spanish Civil War (The Freedom Tree) or been ambushed in the jungles of West Africa (No Surrender).

Also, I doubt whether Philip Pullman has spent much time at the North Pole; nor, I guess, did Michael Morpurgo personally experience the horrors of the 1st World War trenches. He researched and acknowledged the help of Piet Chielens of the In Flanders Museum in Ypres. The proof of the pudding is in the reading.

No place like…
Of course literary travel does not require leaving home shores. What’s home-located gives the opportunity to journey into one’s own life and experience, not the least into one’s own language. The landscape in which stories are set is either entirely personal or more personal. The past may be ‘another country’ but it is one that influences and abuts the living present.

The hills of Lancashire, the Victoria Tower on the highest point above my home town, have featured in a number of my novels and plays; but the literary landscape is a fusion of future areas of habitation, Teesside and the North York moors, and the Derbyshire dales and peaks.

Where Nobody Sees is an amalgam of these but the story is an invention and the characters constructed out of fragments of friendship, acquaintance or simply observation and overhearing. Two young people happen upon the illegal dumping of nuclear waste. They are shaped out of the writing process, growing out of the necessities of narrative but then, hopefully, existing in their own right.

Path hazardous in places
Today perhaps more than ever before authors have to accept the fact that the competition for their wares is immense, that the outlets for their books are narrowing, that the small, attentive publishers of the past, who took the time to nurture talent, have been swallowed up by conglomerates with eyes fixed on what will sell, and sell quickly; all this in a context of cutbacks across the board in education, library closures and bookshops struggling to survive in the network society.

Good book, won’t sell is a familiar mantra. It’s a choice: tailor your work for the market (and possibly become rich) or follow your instinct. In my case, if I’d chosen the former path I’d never have set stories in Chile, East Timor (Justice of the Dagger) or Ukraine (Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa), and I’d certainly not have spent a year developing a tale set in medieval Florence, riddled by the plague and with the armies of Gian Galeazzo Visconti at the gate (Besieged: The Coils of the Viper).

Why such apparently unpromising (and practically unsaleable) choices? Well, as they say, it seemed a good idea at the time. I’m happy: I travelled, explored, discovered and the words on the page, I like to think, spoke the best of myself.

Further reading on Aspects of Writing:

Triggers & Props [Blog 7, 7 January 2010]
Props propel [Blog 8, 15 February]
Frames, codes & character [Blog 9, 15 March]
Fiction and news [Blog 10, 14 April]
Tale Power [Blog 11, 14 October]
Fiction & history [Blog 16, 14 October]
Politics in teen fiction [Blog 17, 17 November]
Storytelling: the pleasures of research [Blog 19, 12 January 2011]

An edited composite of these is planned for posting on Scribd.com
open book site.

Correspondence…
* Jacqueline Christodoulou writes with reference to Blog 19’s piece on Storytelling: the pleasures of research…
"Very interesting blog post. There is a growing interest in visualisation being as good as 'being there' - or is it just filling in schema and, if so, would this be termed as fantasy writing as opposed to fiction writing re the scope of imagination involved? Hmm... On with the research."

* email from a friend: As I'm writing this, news has just come in of Mubarak's resignation. I stopped to take a look at TV showing the crowds in Liberation Square and I must confess that tears came to my eyes. A drop of hope in a seemingly brain-dead world.

* Mr. Ned Baslow writes to Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com about The Bull Ring, Derbyshire.

Dear Jim (may I?)
My wife Betty and I were very pleased to happen on your article about the megalithic sites of the Bull Ring and Arbor Low (in your Blog 15), and you’re absolutely right about the Bull Ring still being the centre of local activities. Betty and me did some of our courting there and any night after dusk you can expect to find the whole site, as it were, under occupation.

The tree in the centre of the site was actually planted from a cutting by my Grandad Barney. It was his intention to propose to my Gran under its leafy shade, only she missed the bus from Macclesfield. However, they made up for the disappointment with a fish and chip supper at Abbot’s Friary in Ambergate.

What’s very true in your comments is the feeling one gets of past generations still haunting the site, though my Benjie (fourteen next month) says his teacher told him there was a lot of human sacrifice going on, especially at Arbor Low – which explains the stones that lie all over the place just waiting for bodies to be laid out on them. ‘People were tied down and cut up,’ says Benjie.

Of course, as my Betty says – she is at present doing an Open University degree and thus knows about these things – this is nonsense, for the stones quite plainly were once upstanding and used as landmarks for weary travellers.

Benjie’s teacher is from Yorkshire, which explains things. Us Derbyshire folk know our history. Incidentally, my cousin Colin was in charge of Bonfire Night fireworks at The Bull Ring for many years – best night of the year he used to say. There was a bit of an accident last year when one of those super rockets, called Jupiters, I think, set fire to the local cricket pavilion, though nothing was damaged except some musty pads, stumping gloves and back copies of Wisden from 1958.

Betty and me enjoyed reading your poem 'Continuities' about these wonderful old sites, though Betty considered it on the long side, believing that anything longer than a sonnet makes her yawn. She quotes her OU tutor who believes there’s nothing in this world that can’t be expressed in a haiku.

Anyway, thanks again for reminding us of our courting days up at Dove Holes. It’s amazing to think just how many hundreds of generations snatched a bit of intimacy on those hallowed slopes.

With greetings from Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven (which also has a small megalithic site called Witches Rendezvous).

Yours etc.
Ned R.Baslow & family

Ed: Thanks, Ned, keep up the correspondence. Apparently those copies of Wisden would fetch a fortune these days.

RECENT BLOGS…
Blog 18
14 December 2010
HISTORY’S BACK IN TOWN!
Takes up the theme discussed by historians such as Simon Shama on the vital importance to community understanding and identity of the study of history, and poses the question – which key events in history should young people know about?
PLUS reviews of two novels by Barbara Kingsolver by Tony Willams.

Blog 17
17 November 2010
POLITICS IN TEEN FICTION
Part 2 of the adapted article from The Best of Books for Keeps. Under Correspondence, an email letter from Anna Perera and a photo of a model made in a school to celebrate her Scottish literary prize.

*****************************************
THANKS FOR READING THIS!
JIM.

STORYTELLING: THE PLEASURES OF RESEARCH

2011-01-12T01:36:00.000-08:00

Watsonworksblog 19

In this issue:
* RESEARCHING STORIES: THE PLEASURES OF FINDING OUT

* A LETTER FROM AMERICA

****

Years ago during a school visit I was asked, Can you write about what you’ve not experienced? The question had been asked to another writer who had given a talk the previous week. She had replied firmly, No, you can only truly write about what you are and what has happened to you. Theoretically this would mean that after exhausting biography writers would be advised to take up some other occupation; that, or (good advice, of course) get out there in the world and experience some more.

My own response was in part coloured by the fact that I was also a teacher and an academic; in both instances treasuring the value of other people’s experiences, knowledge and wisdom. Further, as an academic working in the field of cultural and media study, and as a former journalist, I belong to the ‘constructivist school’, meaning that all stories, all texts, are constructs – made-up things based upon the accumulation of events, experience and perceptions, shaped by particular purposes.

News stories are constructs (if not fabrications) in which information is gathered and shaped according to specific expectations. A key process is selection, as relevant for the novelist as for the journalist or the academic writer; and the guiding principle is the same or similar: what you don’t know, you find out.

Something to work on
What the writer needs above all is imagination; but imagination needs kick-starting in order to function. It needs something to work on. Of course if what you are writing about is what you have personally experienced imagination will still want to be on the field of play rather than waiting on the bench. For those preparing to let loose imagination on material which is not drawn from actual personal experience, then the essential helper (in the author narrative) is research.

Just as the reader samples many books for diverse experience so writers scavenge the world of their own and others’ experience; indeed emulating the jackdaw attracted to what glitters and hoarding what it gathers. Writers await the moment when such jewels of experience become, to use a horrid word, ‘marketable’.

Surveillance and substance
The writer, like the artist, watches the world, listens to its big speeches or its trivial chatter; and records. That is the instinctive and unpredictable part of the process, but so far insufficient in itself to drive things on. A vague idea floats about somewhere in the half-conscious. If one is alert, on the look-out, it will connect with other floaters. A story, too early even to be repeated to another mortal soul, begins to tug at the mind, cause a tremor in the fingers.

Time to go out and gather substance. Writer becomes reader with increasingly specific objectives. Yet life-out-of-books is only a start. To cut to the quick, what is both invaluable and often exciting is seeking out and talking to people who have ‘been there’, done it, seen it, felt it, survived it.

The lives of others
The writer borrows real-life evidence from others. In preparing my Spanish Civil War novel The Freedom Tree I put an ad in a national newspaper inviting former veterans of the war to get in touch if they had a mind to talk about their experiences.

The result was research which carried me beyond what books, however comprehensive, could provide. What I learnt in a number of interviews with old British Brigaders was unique to their experience and their vision of that experience.

A simple anecdote, an observation, a way of describing something, became a gem to weave into the author-invented fabric, lending it a sense of authenticity. The patent, as it were, belonged to the speakers recalling (with quite amazing vividness) what had happened to them so long ago; the literary result rested with the skill of the author: a fitting partnership.

Sometimes peripheral, sometimes central
Occasionally a source offers more than vital though peripheral detail. An article in Index on Censorship magazine led me to visit Frances Meacham, a retired nurse in Clacton-on-Sea. She had a wonderful true story of how she had rescued a Czech poet from oblivion.

Ivan Blatny had escaped the wilderness of Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia only to plunge into a wilderness of his own during a rarely-permitted cultural visit to Britain. He chose asylum, was vilified in his own country and ended up a patient in a mental hospital.

The poet became a mute, most of his waking life staring at a blank TV screen – until, that is, Frances heard about his plight and began to visit him.

Slowly she built up trust with Blatny. He began to communicate again, to write again. My novel Ticket to Prague is about Ivan, and it retells Frances Meacham’s resurrection of the poet, only with one major difference: in the book Frances is replaced by Amy Douglas, a teenager almost isolated and troubled in her own life as Blatny, renamed Josef.

It is a story about how friendship between young and old can be mutually beneficial and enriching. A courtcase against her results in Amy being sentenced to a period of social service. She encounters Josef, gaze fixed on his lifeless TV screen.

First base
Like Frances Meacham, Amy turns to books as the medicine for recovery. She reads to Josef and life and meaning return. My correspondence with Frances, and my visit to her in Clacton, enjoying lunch as well as her memories of Ivan, proved precious hours. Of course, that was only the beginning. What I had to do next was take Josef and Amy back to Prague which, at the time of writing, was itself returning to independent life as the Velvet Revolution got under way.

The long trail of research began once more on Charles Bridge crossing the Vltava. There was the smell of roasting chestnuts, the music of strolling players and somewhere at the back of the mind the memory of a simple commemorative plaque on the wall of a small family hotel in Clacton, this recording: IVAN BLATNY FAMOUS CZECHOSLOVAKIAN POET.

Sadly Ivan never got to return home to the plaudits of his liberated people; but Josef did!

Research made Ticket to Prague possible, but I think that what drove the story in to existence was that corny old phenomenon, empathy, the feeling of growing and deepening sympathy and one-ness with the characters and their situation; to the point where the writer is actually living the lives he or she is creating, day by day, month by month.

Synergy
In this sense, the question asked in school – Can you write about things that have not happened to you? may be more Yes n’ No than one or the other. Unless you can live the life of your characters things can go wrong; but there’s no doubt that the required empathy can always do with an ample helping of research. The one seeks out and directs the other, which in turn provides material for shaping, structuring, livening. In short, research serves to prompt and sharpen mind and imagination.

The only danger is that it could prove a comfort zone where the gathering impedes the creating. What is more likely is that impatience to get writing kicks in before research is complete. It happens with me; a fact I celebrate, because I know from experience that once the story is out of the trap, everything else follows in its wake. Where it doesn’t, there’s time to catch up in the second, third or umpteenth draft.

*************

Related blogs:
Teen Readers: Politics and fiction (Blog 17, Nov. 2010); Fiction and History (Blog 16, Oct 2010); Tale Power (Blog 11, May 2010); Fiction and News (Blog 10, April 2010); Frames, Codes and Character (Blog 9, March 2010); Props in Storytelling (Blog 8, Feb. 2010); Triggers in Storytelling (Blog 7, Jan.2010). An edited version of these under the provisional title Aspects of Storytelling will be posted on Scribd.com in the spring (2011).

LETTER FROM AMERICA

K.G. Melling is an Englishman living in the States whose working life was largely spent in Europe. Below, he offers a view of his adopted country, prompted by the notion expressed on both sides of the Atlantic, that ‘we are all in it together’.

Your comment in Blog 17, "Con-Dems Cuts Coalition would have us believe we’re all in it together" got my attention. It's the same in the US. This is what our politicians want us to believe, when in fact we are not. From my perspective, it's a question of the haves and have nots. The UK and the US are in deep debt and we have just experienced the worst economic crisis in decades. In a nutshell, this was caused by greed and lack of financial market regulation.

Seriously in debt
The US is probably the most capitalistic country on the planet and has serious fiscal problems, not least of which is an enormous deficit. This is a problem in the UK and other countries in Europe and elsewhere. A couple of examples of national debt expressed as a percentage of GDP: UK 10.5%, US 9.5%, France 7.5%, Germany 7.5% on the one hand and Switzerland +2% (no debt!) on the other. Note: the US has a population 5 times greater than the UK with a GDP 7 times greater.

There are many reasons for the above situation in the US, including overspending (governmental and private), lopsided trade agreements, wars, no insight to dubious financial dealings, a decline by design of the middle class over the last 10 years, party politics, and self-serving senators and congressmen.

Middling fortunes
Already during the last decade the middle class, the backbone of the nation, has been decimated. The decline continues. This is the section of the population that is/was mostly in manufacturing industries, significantly contributing to national economic strength and growth. It is this largest sector of the population that suffers most, loses the most and will pay the most when austerity measures bite.

During the last decade, the US has lost 10 million manufacturing jobs and middle class family income has been reduced by 5%. Today, 27% of families are classed as poor (gross income below $22,000). In North Carolina (my own state of some 6 million people) two major industries, textiles and furniture manufacturing, have been devastated. Since 2006, when housing prices were at a peak, average value (based on 72 million homes) has dropped dramatically –a shattering blow to homeowners' equity.

We have 15 million unemployed (official figure 9.8%) and this jumps to 25 million when we add those who have temporarily ceased to look for work. Untold millions are either on short time, or have taken low paying jobs. Forecasts for 2011 suggest 8 to 9% unemployment.

Party bickering
This great country is in decline with little hope of an early recovery. The political scene is a disaster with little expectation of a change for the better. For years our political representatives fight and bicker across the aisle, vote party lines and pass little legislation. A Supreme Court ruling earlier this year allows companies and interest groups to make anonymous and unlimited political contributions to whom they please. Obviously these contributions are used to influence the electorate. The recent mid-term election saw some $3 billion spent by political action groups and others to influence the election outcome.

Targeting the floating voters
There is a large section of the electorate designated as independents. They are not members of either party. This group can be considered as a swing vote and the target for these activities. So-called lobbyists "lobby" congressional members on behalf of companies, associations, large interest groups and others to gain support for their clients. At least to a European, all this doesn't feel right. Is this really government by the people for the people in the sense the phrase was coined so many years ago?

Democrats currently have a majority in the House of Representatives, but not the absolute majority in the Senate (100 members). The house votes on a straight majority. In the Senate there is a procedure requiring a majority of 60 votes in order to pass legislation.

Compromise
As a result of the mid-term election in November 2010, the Republicans will have gained a sound majority in the House and in the Senate the Democrats will have 5 fewer seats (53); no absolute majority.

This is the situation as Congress reconvenes in 2011. The United States of America was created as a result of compromise between the representatives of the 13 original colonies, when they wrote the constitution. We surely need that spirit now.

Not much if any of the above helps the poor and middle class. But there is a glimmer of hope. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives could not produce acceptable legislation to extend the so-called "Bush tax cuts". These were substantial cuts in income tax across the board, valid until end 2010. The estate tax had also been suspended, and this was also up to the end 2010. There was utter deadlock between the two parties, resulting in a compromise: in exchange for Republican concessions President agreed to a two-year extension – still including the rich with an income in excess of $250,000 p.a.(against his party's line and his own conviction).

The inheritance tax will be reintroduced in 2011 at 35% above $5 million, replacing the original inheritance tax of 55% above $1 million. The 6.2% Social Security tax (paid by employees) will be reduced to 4.2% for 2011, $1000 p.a. for an average family. Federal unemployment benefits will be extended by 13 months (a further 2 million unemployed were to lose their benefits).

Modest presidential achievement
Also included are a maintaining of the dependent allowance of $1000 p.a. and tax breaks for parents with children studying at university. Also extended are refunds to householders for installing energy efficient appliances and other related items. Grants to companies involved in renewable energy research and development will receive financial assistance.

In all, the bill signed by the President, will cost $858 billion, none of which is financially secured (adding to the deficit). The US approach is to get the economy growing strongly prior to introducing austerity measures aimed at reducing the deficit, and there is political consensus for this policy. A bipartisan 18 member "Deficit Committee", appointed by the President, recently made its recommendations known. This report, with sweeping spending cuts, will most likely be one of the guidelines for future debate.

All in all President Obama got approaching 90% of what he wanted and the Republicans got what they wanted. However, some members on both sides of the Senate and House voted against the bill for various reasons. Voting in the Senate was 81 for and 19 against, and in the House 234 for and 188 against, a vote to be regarded as one for the country and the people, especially the middle class and the poor.

Hope for 2011
Compromise at last. But will it last? In 1994 President Bill Clinton was in exactly in the same situation regarding the composition of Congress. It turned out to be a successful tenure, with legislation being enacted on the basis of compromise between the President and the Republicans. And at the end of his term as President, he left a balanced budget in place. There is a chance for President Obama and thus the entire country, but don't hold your breath.

Thanks, Ken!

Correspondence…

Hello Jim,
I don't usually respond to your blog, but I agree on the importance of history, and am a Barbara Kingsolver enthusiast [See Tony Williams' review in Blog 18]. The Poisonwood Bible is superb and a 'must read'. I have not read the second book as it has not yet appeared in the charity shops! However her other, maybe slighter, books are all worth reading, and she enlightens one about the life and feelings of native Americans and other rural folk in the USA who do not have the lavish lifestyle we see on the TV etc. Chris Wigzell.

On the themes of research or ‘we’re all in it together’ – comments long or short would be welcome. Blog 20 will be in preparation early February.

THANKS FOR READING THIS.
JIM.

HISTORY'S BACK IN TOWN!

2010-12-14T01:15:00.000-08:00

* Watsonworks 18

December 2010

Comments on Simon Sharma’s claim that
history teaches us who we are

*Digging among the skeletons
Tony Williams reviews the incendiary work of
Barbara Kingsover

Shama says history is good for us
Writing in the Guardian, TV culture and history pundit Simon Shama makes a powerful case for the study of history in schools, and links this to the current situation Britain finds itself in. History, Shama argues, teaches us about who we are; it reminds us, in case we have forgotten, what our identity was and remains, while offering a framework in which young people can find relevance for themselves and the national community to which they belong.

Says Shama in ‘Kids need to know they belong’ 9 November 2010, ‘even during the toughest trials it’s our history that binds us together as a distinctive community in an otherwise generically globalised culture’. The ‘understanding of the identity of us’ is ‘not the uncritical genealogy of the Wonderfulness of Us’; quite the contrary, history is about inquiry which resists and probes ‘national self-congratulation’.

Children, argues Shama, need history the most: ‘Unless they can be won to history, their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of eternal Now: the flickering instant that’s gone as soon as it arrives’.

Fact and fiction
Would a historian such as Shama approve of fiction as history (or history as fiction!): yes; but he backs the case which brought novelists to history in the first place: it is teeming with wonderful stories. Shama confirms that history is ‘so often more astounding than fiction – just as gripping’; and his recommendation is for the reinvention of ‘the art and science of storytelling in the classroom and you will hook your students just as tightly’ as fiction does.

History, whether it is conveyed through fact, analysis, research, seeking and finding, reconstructing, discussion or whether it is presented in fictional form has suffered loss of academic status where it has not disappeared from timetables altogether. The residue of Henry Ford’s alleged comment that ‘History is bunk’ is still with us as is George Santana’s pithy warning that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.

Joining the debate
Shama’s Guardian article won plenty of support in the paper’s letters column. Head of history at Royal Holloway Sarah Ansari writes that history ‘faces the challenge of justifying its “usefulness”’ and thus the seemingly inescapable definition among some parties that education is entirely instrumental, all about jobs.

Professor Colin Jones, president of the Royal Historical Society, warns of ‘an Anglocentric vision that offers a one-eyed view of the past’. He believes that ‘schoolchildren need to know about the world in which they live and not just the country they inhabit’. He goes on, ‘they need to understand history isn’t only about “who we are” but also very much about who others are (and were) and how we differ from each other’.

In my own fiction I’ve attempted to carry readers out of ‘the country they inhabit’, away from what Colin Jones refers to as ‘the Hitlerlisation and Tudorisation of A-level teaching’ and in to journeys of exploration, including self-exploration, beyond our shores.

The young characters in Sign of the Swallow, my first story, cross Europe to Italy, meet the young Leonardo. Those in The Bull Leapers find themselves in Minoan Crete, prisoners forced to entertain the crowds in the sport of leaping the bulls.

In Legion of the White Tiger (see illustration), the reader joins an expedition from the middle east to the Great Walls of China, while in The Freedom Tree young British volunteers experience the viciousness of civil war in Spain and witness the horrific (and immensely symbolic) bombing of Guernica (the famous tree of freedom, by the way, survived and survives).

‘Surprisingly absent’
Shama selects a few particular events which he believes young people should be aware of and study. In some ways it is an odd choice. There is no mention of Tom Paine and the 19th century struggle to establish a free press, free speech and democracy in Britain; and this, surely, should be preceded by a focus on the rise of the printed word and its impact on Britain and the world.

In another Guardian letter Michael Leigh offers topics ‘surprisingly absent’ from Shama’s list – the Industrial Revolution, the Enclosure Acts ‘and the formation of the working class’, a ‘story that is being repeated today in the developing world, from South America to China and India, and it has never been more important that it is told’.

Five days later, again in the Guardian, James Vernon, professor of history at Berkeley, California, pitches in his dollar’s worth. First, his concern: ‘History, it appears, is not just in retreat in our schools, it is fast becoming a privilege of the privileged’. Blame may be laid at the structures out of which history teaching emerges or, connectedly, the ways in which it is taught, but Vernon reminds us ‘that the way history is taught in schools is itself a product of history’. He states that every generation ‘shapes the teaching of history around its own preoccupations and sense of itself, but these are always changing’.

Powers of analysis
Shama’s list is only a ‘for instance’ but along with others Vernon believes there are ‘conspicious absences of some of the central staging posts of modern European history – the Renaissance, the Reformation and the global missions of European religions’.

On the value of history teaching Vernon is in agreement with Shama, believing in ‘its capacity to reanimate our civil society and produce an engaged and capable citizenry’, but he disagrees with the assertion ‘that good story-telling will get you there’, asserting the importance of indispensable analytical skills, ‘for citizens who want to understand our present conditions’.

There should be no conflict of interest here between study and story; rather the two should be complementary and mutually supportive. Vernon fears history being turned into pure entertainment.

Yet fiction rarely plays history for laughs, and serious stories are more likely to prompt, rather than deflect, or get in the way of, the worthy aim of encouraging young people to ‘think critically and effectively about the world they live in’.

To think critically
Vernon concludes with the warning that history is not for ‘turning schoolchildren into Britons but by enabling them to analyse the present and to think critically when we hear ministers and advisers offering populist solutions to more complex structural problems’.

It follows that keeping history and history teaching out of the hands of politicians is of paramount importance. When ministers talk of ‘our great and glorious past’, they are not necessarily talking about my history or our history but theirs; one is mindful of Dr. Johnson’s comment about patriots and scoundrels and such attitudes as My Country, Right or Wrong. They are for the most part talking propaganda stirred with heaped spoonfuls of the wishful; and propagandists, as Jan Vladislav has said, ‘rely on people having short memories’, risking ‘new generations having no historical memory at all’.

DEAR READER, WHAT DO YOU THINK SHOULD BE THE STAGING POSTS OF HISTORY? Take 5!

***

Digging among the skeletons
Tony Williams reviews incendiary work by
Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver takes older readers back to times, places and monstrosities they either passed over or might prefer to forget. She is not afraid to dig among the skeletons, mainly left by the US past and its government’s misdeeds at home and abroad.

We might dimly remember the Congo of the 1960s, Katanga, the brutal murder of the socialist prime minister Lumumba and other atrocities, all for the sake of mineral exploitation and in no small measure orchestrated by the CIA. If it is hazy to us, Barbara Kingsolver brings it all back in The Poisonwood Bible, a fictionalised story of a Southern Baptist missionary family transplanted to carry the word of a protestant Christian faith to a previously happily catholicised jungle folk.

Cultural trespass
The author gives a tragically hilarious account of the total incapacity of the preacher and his family to grasp what they had landed themselves into. This is encapsulated in the title, the misplaced effort of the preacher to say “Christ is Risen” in the local Kisanji language which is the same expression for the poisonous root that spreads everywhere. One of the teenaged daughters is totally at a loss, being suddenly wrenched from her school Prom and dumped in a world without her accustomed Piggly Wigglies stores. It all ends in horror and disaster for the preacher, his children and the people of the Congo.

Trotsky laughs!
Try googling Bonus Army + Tiananmen Square and you will get 5000 hits at last try. Then try Bonus Army Eisenhower Patten MacArthur. Better yet read Barbara Kingsolver’s Lacuna where all will be made clear. This is another of her semi-fictionalised historical accounts, this time set in the Mexico and United States of the 1930s and 1940s. The young Mexican-US hero finds himself in the household of Mexican socialist artist Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, at the time when they take in the Soviet revolutionary Leo Trotsky, fleeing Stalin’s NKVD assassins. A heavy time and a terrible topic, which does not prevent Kingsolver bringing all these personages to life with great wit and light ascerbity.

Broken promises
One episode takes the hero to Washington D.C. in 1932 where the Bonus Army of US World War I veterans is encamped in a long and peaceful protest to demand the wartime service bonuses they had been promised but never paid. The disciplined protesters with their wives and children are finally dispersed by the army led by General MacArthur, organised by genial Major Eisenhower and slashed by the unsheathed sabres of the cavalry spurred on by the eager Major Patten.

When the protesters reassembled, MacArthur ordered in the tanks to roll over the Bonus Army tents. The media duly reported two or three deaths, but if you read Kingsolver you will decide which version you believe. Socialist literature has never forgotten the Bonus Army massacre, but it seems that everyone else has and I am in debt to the author for Lacuna for shocking me out of forgetfulness. This an unputdownable well-crafted novel, with not a few laugh-out-loud moments. I had never imagined that I would chuckle at wry utterances of Leo Trotsky.

Thanks, Tony. I hope to receive more contributions from you and indeed from any reader signing in to this blog.

***********************************************************
TextDisc Watsonworks:
A lifetime’s fascination with the early Renaissance artist PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA
has prompted me to write, over the past few years, a full study of his work – Genius in Context: Piero della Francesca, A Journey Through His Art, complete with illustrations of the majority of Piero’s paintings. These, on screen, have all the clarity and colour that anything but professional printing lacks.

In addition I have focused on one of Piero’s most famous masterpieces. The Flagellation, and compiled an analysis of the various explanations of what still remains a riddle. Masterpiece and Mystery: The Flagellation by Piero della Francesca is a 16-page study, on disc, of a painting that measures a modest 58 x 81centimetres, housed in the Ducal Palace in Urbino. Copies of this are available free to readers (or as an Attachment); orders please through Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk. The papers are also mentioned on the Facebook page of the PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA SOCIETY (UK).

FEEDBACK WELCOME. Next blog, mid-January 2011.

Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

TEEN READERS: POLITICS IN FICTION

2010-11-17T01:26:00.000-08:00

Watsonworks Blog 17

JAMES WATSON

November 2010

NO HISTORY WITHOUT POLITICS

Part 2 of a piece based on an article published in The Best of Books for Keeps (Bodley Head, ed. Chris Powling) on writing fiction for Young Adults. Blog 16 focused on why a sense of history is well worth encouraging in young readers; but understanding only comes when it is linked with politics.

Whoever believes that that history does not repeat itself is absolutely right if he or she sticks to the pedantry of detail. Hitler was unique; Franco was unique; the bombing of Guernica was unique, and President Pinochet of Chile was unique.

Tyranny, however, is not unique; nor are poverty, racism, sexism or exploitation. That much we can learn from history, though the root causes of such phenomena are admittedly less the task of the novelist to explain than that of philosophers, historians, sociologists and political scientists.

In tandem
If history is to be effectively learnt and taught it needs to be examined within political frameworks, very specifically the exercise of power. My own take on this, bearing in mind that stories only kick in when disequilibrium occurs (something dramatic happens), is to focus on the abuse of power.

The Freedom Tree follows certain events during the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the action, which climaxes during the bombing by German war planes of the Basque market town of Guernica in 1936, the young actors both struggle to survive and search for answers to the questions how and why horrors such as these come about.

The reader sees history through the subjective experience of the characters and along with them shares that experience and, hopefully, asks the same questions why. In Talking in Whispers a story following the seizure of power by the generals in Chile, the event that sets the hares running for Andres is when his father, a nationally popular folk singer, is arrested and imprisoned, along with thousands of others, in the Santiago football stadium.

Response to crisis
Our interest is in how Andres and his new friends, the twins, Isa and Beto, react to the predicament they finds himself in; and here we are addressing wider questions – what can be done in the teeth of oppression, especially what can be done by young people caught in the eye of the storm?

I’m intrigued by the staying power that I believe young people are capable of in crisis, a staying power driven by certain fundamental values; in short a commitment to justice, what is fair, what is a human right. In Whispers 16-year old Andres falls into the hands of torturers. Partly through his courage, party through fortuitous circumstance, the torturers fail to extract the information they require from him about his father and his father’s friends. Most importantly, they fail to destroy his spirit.

One of the interrogators, the Hog, flings off all control:

He seized Andres. He roared not as the hog, not as the hyena but as the bull. He seized Andres as if suddenly he were all prisoners, as if he represented every wrong answer, every defiant spirit, every act of simple courage, every refusal to betray a loved one, every resistance to tyranny. He beat him. He dragged him. And yet it was his own cries which were loudest, his own wailing: his boundless despair.

That is arguably the testament of humanity’s faith in the triumph of good over evil. Yet it might be asked – for the young reader? If it were a universally observed right that children were protected from the realities of the adult world, privileged to escape the hardships suffered by their parents, then caution about putting too much ‘realism’ into stories for the young might be justifiable.

Sympathetic sharing
Children, though, are and always have been among history’s victims. Those of El Salvador, Eritrea, Brazil, Indonesia, Haiti or the Congo know that well enough. Our own children have generally been more fortunate: all the more reason for them, I believe, to at least know the plight of their peers; to sympathise, to empathise, eventually to understand the connection between the happiness of some and the misery of others; to feel a sense of solidarity – if that is not too emotively political a term – with others.

It is that which makes The Freedom Tree, Talking in Whispers, No Surrender, Ticket to Prague, Justice of the Dagger and Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa political. They are about uniqueness but they are concerned with universals: of justice and commonality. There is the danger of young people being swamped by the seemingly universal obsession with celebrity while education has constantly been at risk of being defined as job preparation, an instrumental activity, a galaxy of mission objectives, targets and league tables, bounded by the ever-presence of financial justification and regulation: does it pay; is it value for money?

No hiding place
The context in which we live, write and read is dominated by paradoxes – we are a rich nation, but ‘we’ are prepared to throw people out of work, deny young people the promise of a free education; and every day we hear how ‘our boys’, as the Sun has always likes to describe British armed forces, are doing such a noble job in Afghanistan, while simultaneously we are hearing (thanks to Wikileaks) about coalition troops handing over suspects to the notorious Iraqi Wolf Brigade.

Read further and we encounter official and British military instructions on approaches to interrogation which, with no exercise of imagination, amount to guidelines for torture. As for Britain’s part in Rendition, the full facts will come out sooner or later.

What are young people to make of all this? Surely not to write politically at such times is, on the part of the storyteller, something of a dereliction of duty? I think it is more important now than even in the past, because we have experienced a generation of near silence on the part of young people, crippled as they are by obsessions with measurement, diminishing work prospects and future landscapes overshadowed by debt.

‘Liberal’ claptrap?
In a companion piece to my article in The Best of Books for Keeps, Jan Needle takes the view that too many English novels for young readers are political; this I take it to mean in the sense that they reflect socio-cultural situations which are the product of centuries of political ‘management’ (or class cultivation). True, and he is also right in suggesting that ‘liberals’ are preaching to would-be liberals in secure ‘liberal’ contexts. That’s cosy, not convincingly real and scarcely to be commended.

I would guess, however, that Jan would not baulk at stories exploring the nature of justice, not only in our own, but other societies and also in other times. This I confess, though I hope it will not be held against me: my heroes and heroines (sorry for the stereotypical language, but would ‘protagonists’ be any better?) are generally articulate, thoughtful, serious and curious about where they find themselves in the world.

Words, dammit
That, I hope, does not make the stories unduly earnest, preachy or didactic, but it does acknowledge and affirm the critical role of language, its power of words to clarify, mystify, inspire, deceive, mislead, prompt hope and aspiration, nurture prejudice, hatred and bigotry; words that constitute the channel through which meaning is explored.

Much of the language of narrative finds expression in action, events, dramatic situations, conflicts, decision-making, but all the while it is what we say and how we say it, and what we don’t say, which does the defining. Too often, if not always, those who wield power in society are also the key operators of language, defining situation and meaning, selecting and deselecting according to vested interest.

Thus in George Orwell’s 1984, the meaning of ‘freedom’ is narrowed down to denote being free of fleas. That’s politics. In the stories I’ve been talking about, the purpose has in part been to recognise how the defining power of language is a terrain of constant conflict; and this reflects my own lifetime’s interest in the baleful tyranny of censorship in all its manifestations.

‘Other’ is ‘Us’
These days there is no such place as ‘elsewhere’, no such persons as ‘other’ (though many would persuade us that there are). We may, as the Con-Dem Cuts Coalition would have us believe, all in it together – but only in theory: in practice we have a hare and tortoise situation, and only in fairy stories does the tortoise reach the winning tape first.

Writers are in no position to redress the balance but they have the possibility of articulating in narrative values that address such problems as systemic inequality, the nurture of prejudice, the arguments that ‘There Is No Alternative’.

In Talking in Whispers Andres witnesses the burning of his father’s and his own books. The flames lick indiscriminately at philosophical tomes and children’s books alike. Today’s writer is faced with the challenge of producing stories riveting enough to hold attention in face of mass media competition and the allure of Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and the kind of role-modelling exemplified by TV programmes such as The Apprentice.

Among the difficulties facing writers today is not the risk of having their books condemned and burnt, for that would be an acknowledgment of their purpose and value; rather, in the maelstrom of current message systems, all competing for attention, the writer’s voice risks being ignored, if it is heard at all.

HAVE YOUR SAY…
Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

Correspondence…
From Anna Perera
First many thanks for sending the blog. Yours are so refreshing to read. I admire the way you’re able to pinpoint and classify my own hazy, unregulated thoughts on fiction and history for Young Adults and can’t help remembering my own experience of school where I longed for unabridged versions and a variety of texts, as well as stories that brought the past to life as a result of writers like you. It was far back but the novelist Anya Seton taught me more about John of Gaunt than Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was, ever did.

As for the snippet of Besieged: The Coils of the Viper, it’s brilliant and I’m intrigued to read more. I can see why you advised me to give away a few morsels of the next book, though which ones is something I’ll have to think about. I agree writers should help each other…It’s the least we can do in this increasingly tough market.

Anna is the author Guantanamo Boy (Puffin), which was winner of the Erskine Stewart’s Melville Book Award (2010) and shortlisted for the Costa Children’s Award and the Lancashire Children’s Book of the Year Award. Her next novel for Young Adults is due out in the New Year.

THANKS FOR READING THIS.

BACK IN DECEMBER with details of new DISC-TEXTS from Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk available free.

JIM

WRITING FOR YOUNG ADULT READERS

2010-10-14T00:52:00.000-07:00

Fiction & History

On writing for Young Adults…

• New history novel: introduction and sample
• Notes in Passing: Robin Hood

Watsonworks Blog 16

A sense of history
An extract from an article published in
The Best of Books for Keeps (Bodley Head),
edited by Chris Powling.

For me, writing is an interaction between the author and readers, a sharing of things held close to heart and mind. To begin with, I wrote stories that would be sufficiently exciting to stir in the young reader something of my own fascination for history.

I set quick-moving adventures in vivid historical settings such as the Florence of Leonardo in Sign of the Swallow, or among the Minoan splendours of Knossos in The Bull Leapers. The aim was to thrill and at the same time sow a seed-trail in the reader’s imagination, ready to germinate when he or she looked into the past with a more searching eye.

Trenches of Aragon
That old triple alliance of objectives – to entertain, to inform and (possibly) to educate – forms a reasonable basis for communication over distance and between strangers. For the novel, however, it leaves out the crucial role of being there; of being it. In my Spanish Civil War story, The Freedom Tree, the central characters, Will and Griff, find themselves in the cold, rat-infested trenches of the Aragon front, caught in a blazing cross-fire.

Suddenly, in the pitch darkness, they are eyeball to eyeball with a youth of their own age from the enemy side, as terrified as they are. What happens next, and how it affects the two friends, their relationship, their attitudes to the conflict and to death is unique to them and, I hope, to the reader.

For a split second, if the illusion has been well-enough staged, the reader is the experience: the mediation of the author, words and paper are forgotten in the same way that, with a film, the reality of celluloid, screen and light gives place to a reality of direct identification.

Mutual discovering
If that amounts to authorial power, then the irony is that the author rarely, if ever, knows what response there has been to that power. Yet the writer is not only talking to, sharing with the reader, but is undergoing his or her own route to discovery. To be interested in history is but a small step to the altogether more dynamic condition of recognising –and perhaps developing – a sense of history. Without this, it is difficult, in my view, to make sense of the present.

Nothing unique?
Whoever believes that history does not repeat itself is absolutely right if he or she sticks to the pedantry of detail. Hitler was unique; Franco was unique; the bombing of Guernica was unique, and President Pinochet of Chile was unique.

Tyranny, however, is not unique; nor are poverty, racism, sexism or exploitation of the weak by the powerful. That much we can learn from history, though the root causes of such phenomena are admittedly less the task of the novelist to explain than that of philosophers, historians, sociologists and political scientists.

Part 2, on the ‘necessity of politics’ will appear in Blog 17, due mid-November 2010.

On the stocks, historywise…
Just completed, a story set in medieval Florence at a desperate time in the city’s history. Here is an Introduction, followed by the opening pages of Besieged! The Coils of the Viper.

Introduction

The mercenary armies of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, have brought terror to Italy. Cities such as Siena, Perugia and Bologna, have either been overcome in battle or been terrified into submission.

Florence alone stands out against him. It is the burning hot summer of 1402. For 14 months Florence has been cut off by a blockade mounted by the Viper, his intention to starve the citizens until they are too weak to resist. The River Arno has been reduced to a polluted trickle. Water supplies have dried up; plague stalks the streets. Visconti’s final order to attack the city is expected hourly. If Florence falls to him, all of Italy will become subject to his tyranny.

What was once the richest and most cultured city in Europe has been reduced by hunger, thirst and disease. A centre of banking, crossroads of trade, it has been cut off from all contacts with the outside world. Its streets are deserted except for rats scavenging on the corpses of those struck down by the Black Death or those who, in stepping out into the night streets in a desperate hunt for food, have been robbed and murdered by roaming gangs.

In the refectory of the priory of the Dominican brothers, the Master, one of Florence’s most distinguished artists, and Luca, his apprentice, see no choice but to continue with the great fresco that the Master has been commissioned to paint. They know that once Visconti’s mercenaries breach the city walls few citizens will survive the brutality that has become the Viper’s trademark.

Yet artist and apprentice continue to mix their plaster and their colours and prick out the lines of what might one day be one of Florence’s proudest masterpieces. There is still time, it would seem, for love. While escaping the heat of the August sun and sketching the masterpieces of Giotti in the gaunt but magnificent Santa Croce basilica, Luca becomes aware of the girl in a brown robe, hovering in shadow as if compelled to look over his shoulder at what his skilful hand commits to the page.

Will one of them pluck up the courage to speak?

1. Master and Apprentice

Resting his brush for a moment and talking up his spirits, the Master says, ‘A monster he may be, but I have it on good report that the Viper has a soft spot for the arts’. The Master is stooped, well into his fifties, a little unsteady on his feet, but bright eyed; with the paintbrush in his hand, bursting with ideas and energy.

He adds a touch of azure to the Madonna’s gown. ‘On a good day, when my Lord of Milan has fattened his belly on venison, suckling pig and sated himself on our Tuscan wines, he might spare a drop of mercy for us poor artists. After all, who will record his glories for posterity if our talents are extinguished?’

In reply, Luca grunts, ‘Doesn’t that make us slaves, Maestro?’

‘True, at the very best, we are mere servants at the tables of the rich.’ The heat of the afternoon is speeding up the drying of the fresco. ‘More lime, Luca, I think, before the light fades.’
The Master’s apprentice works swiftly, adding water to the lime mortar, mixing it into a thick paste. There is anger in his movements. ‘And the people, Maestro, will the Duke’s mercenaries spare them once they are through the city gates?’

Luca has just turned eighteen. These days he lives in a fury mixed with a sense of helplessness. His dark hair tumbles as far as his bony shoulders and his deep brown eyes appear to blink back emotions that threaten the steady eye and hand he needs in his work.
‘Luca, calm yourself. We don’t want two of us with hands shaking so badly we can’t draw a steady line. How often do I have to remind you? While we work, we dismiss our worries, put awkward and depressing questions behind us.’
‘I do my best, Maestro, to cool my blood. But it boils at the thought of how we have been brought low; and at how you are suffering for lack of a decent meal in so many weeks.’
‘We’ll not get fat on self-pity, Luca.’

The vast end wall of the priory refectory is closed off by wooden scaffolding, but light from the high windows floods across the half finished fresco of the Madonna and Saints in Majesty. The prior and the frati – brothers – of the Dominican order had, with this commission, planned to outshine all rivals in the city, and at least to match the masterpieces in the mighty churches of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella.

Alas they are no longer present to witness the evolution of the Master’s work. At the news of the advance south of Visconti, Lord of Milan, with a vast and seemingly invincible army, of his rout of the Bolognese at Caselechio and the city’s surrender, of the terror that spread faster than the Black Death as his mercenaries plundered every town and village they passed through, the Dominican brothers quietly and under the shelter of darkness, made their escape, taking refuge in a sister abbey in the Casentino.

At first, the Master had been outraged at the departure of the frati. ‘Huh, Dominicans – the Hounds of Heaven, yet what do they do? At the first whiff of danger, with not so much as a blessing for those left behind, they high-tail it into the hills. Yellow-livered desertion, I called it. And do you know what the Prior’s answer was, Luca, when I made my objections?’

Luca has heard the tale often enough. He waits patiently to hear it again. ‘Says he, with a perfectly straight face, “We are not escaping Gian Galeazzo, Maestro, we are simply avoiding the stifling heat and intolerable dust”.
Oh dear, mia colpa! – my mistake. The Lord forgive me for misjudging their motives. Heat and dust – of course!
‘The scales of doubt fell from my eyes when the good Prior explained how the cooler air of the Casentino is more amenable to the contemplation of sin and sacrifice than the stifling odours of the city.

‘When I happened to mention the little matter of ten thousand cut-throats advancing like locusts from Bologna, the Prior assured me the frati would pray morning, noon and night that Florence be spared.
‘I felt so overwhelmed with gratitude, I nearly throttled him with his chain of office. Huh! Pious hypocrites. Give me a Franciscan every time!’ Still, the Master has had to admit, ‘They left us with provisions, though the wine they spared us is worse than dishwater.’
Luca corrects his master’s tenses: ‘Was worse than dishwater, Maestro. Our provisions ran out days ago.’
The Master sighs. ‘I am unhappy, Luca, that you have had to become a scavenger.’
‘Scavenge or starve, Maestro. There is no choice.’

Continues…

Notes in passing…
US Award
Glad to report that Michael Scammell’s biography of Arthur Koestler, featured in Blog 12 (Lest We Forget: The Power of Biography,16 June 2010) has been awarded the 2010 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

A better than expected Robin
Ridley Scott’s take on Robin Hood was damned with faint praise by the critics. The feeling seems to have been that our national hero should have been played by an English actor. Yet both Russell Crowe (Robin) and Cate Blanchett are Australians – and where did Australians come from in the first place?

It was an honest telling. For the first time in a Robin Hood movie the ‘saintly’ Lion Heart comes out of the tale badly; and deservedly. As a squady in Richard’s retreat from the crusade, Robin earns himself a spell in the stocks for saying the unsayable, recalling King Richard’s order for the slaughter of several thousand civilian Muslim men, women and children following the siege of Acre; Robin even mentions the Hill of Ayyadieh, where it all happened on 20 August 1191.

What’s particularly interesting about Scott’s choice of narrative is that Robin is no outlaw; indeed his life as an outlaw only begins as the film story ends. We encounter a differently calibrated King John in this version: a scheming, untrustworthy knave, indubitably, but when the French invade he leads his troops valiantly; Robin and he are almost comrades.

Given the power and confidence of victory, John then renegades on his promise to guarantee the liberties of the people, thus turning Robin Hood from national hero to outlaw. One wonders, is this ‘prequal’ hinting at a sequel, or is it a neat piece of historical reconstruction?

Either way, with convincing portrayals by Crowe and Blanchett, and a memorable vignette by Max von Sydow (the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), the film works, with some splendid set-pieces and top-quality photography.

Recommendations

The Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern is deservedly drawing in the crowds. It's thematically rather than chronologically presented so you can start at the end or the middle of the displays without losing the thread. You may be advised to do this considering the queues that have formed by 11.00 in the morning. Take care to step over the school kids busy committing Gauguin to paper.

THANKS FOR READING THIS.
Jim.

GLASTONBURY 2500 BC?

2010-09-15T01:06:00.000-07:00

James Watson

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com

Blog 15
The Bull Ring
Three Thousand Years When Nothing Much
Happened: a Derbyshire reverie

Takes some finding: not a lot of people stop in Dove Holes; and unless you’ve read the guidebook you could be forgiven for walking past it without noticing. The locals do. Asked a Mum hastening home with her child from playschool: ‘Ancient site? Ooh, don’t know about that. But there’s this field where they do the fireworks.’

At least 2800 years old and it’s still scarcely on the map: an earthwork, bereft of fallen megaliths; a grassy entrance between modestly-raised grass furrows, a grassy exit. And yet a scene to wonder at.

They have it all at the more famous Arbor Low, and many more visitors, dropping a pound in a box before passing through a farmyard and to a site both ancient and famous; yet somehow a location steeped in loneliness.

One comes away with the wrong impression, for both Arbor Low and The Bull Ring were meeting places, and probably for hundreds of people, decade after decade, century after century.

Where did it all go?
Today, we have no time. Today, when people meet, they’re as likely to say, ‘Doesn’t time fly?’ as commune about the weather. Time – where did it go? What’s left of time is a chorus of ‘If onlys’. But not for the ancients assembling at the henge sites (there are scores of them in Derbyshire alone).

We know practically nothing about these sites, who actually used them, what they used them for, whether they were for worship or mainly communal gatherings, ancient equivalents of Appleby or Glastonbury. Was there music; were there games, buying and selling, parleys with sun, moon and stars?

Yet while the Bull Ring offers us less than Arbor Low in terms of furniture, its location gives us more clues. Its circular mound, with evidence of an outer rim, is more spacious than Arbor Low. The solitary tree in its centre has no ancient lineage; what counts, though, is what surrounds the Ring – a living community, and thereby ancient and modern connect.

The circular mound, with evidence of an outer rim, is still distinctive, though the mounds would have been higher and the ditches deeper. What the site was like has to be left to the imagination, for since it was abandoned there have been enclosures, the creation of a cemetery and the layout of football pitches.

Unlike Arbor Low, the Bull Ring remains a centre of community activity complete with a primary school and a children’s playground. And it’s to this Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age location that folks from miles around gather to watch the fireworks – the stars and planets and rockets bursting into the sky, sharing pleasure, experiencing a sense of awe.

I was reminded of the travellers congregating at Appleby, and the crowds gathering at Glastonbury, coming together for ritual, for social pleasure. In contrast Arbor Low is isolated, with a farm close by, but otherwise a lonely and abandoned outpost; disconnected yet no doubt once drawing thousands for purposes similar to these at the Bull Ring over hundreds of years.

Quietness that deceives
The modern visitor relishes the silence, the abandonedness, the contrast with the bustle of life in towns and cities, yet there is something of anachronism about the preference. As Mark Edmonds and Tim Seaborne say in Prehistory in the Peak (UK: Tempus, 2001), ‘far from being places of “quiet solitude” that we now seek to conserve, Arbor Low and the Bull Ring were sometimes alive with people’.

The authors write of a 'confusion of camps and animals in the environs; people moving in and out of clearings and approaching along different paths. The mess of building gangs or companies gathered around fires; cooking, eating, talking. And then, when the time was right, an order amongst the multitude; people taking their places to participate or to watch proceedings in the henge itself. A broad social geography mapped to a tight scale'.

What the authors refer to as ‘the shock of the multitude’ is compounded by the difficulty we have in imagining how these henges were built. The ditches would have been deeper and steeper, the banks possibly three metres above the ground surface – altogether more formidable, suggesting purposes beyond that of assembly. The mounds would serve as a ‘steep and dramatic barrier that fostered a sense of containment’, hinting at exclusion as well as inclusion: ‘Children would not have rolled down the slopes as they do today.'

Questions concerning leadership, control, social hierarchy, privilege and authority will go on being debated, especially whether these were memorials to heroes, gods or spirits. Edmonds and Seaborne are wary of such conjectures, for ‘to see henges only as monuments to leaders misses the broader and more varied purposes they served in bringing dispersed communities together’.

Multiple purposes
Nevertheless, whatever the many functions of henges there is high probability that they had something to do with the dead, with the ancestors of the tribe; and that the purpose of large gatherings was reunion, of communion with the spirits of the dead – not unlike the way the Chinese picnic beside the graves of the deceased.

According to the authors of Prehistory in the Peak the ceremonies that might have taken place at the henges ‘tied the flux of the present to tradition, and tradition in turn to the timeless'; all this set against ‘a backdrop of communal events’ suggesting that ‘participation in rituals renewed ties between people’ while at the same time, perhaps, honouring ‘the standing of particular individuals’.

All-flux
It is this sense of framing and contrast, of the constant changes of the present day with a ritualised, and thus treasured, past that probably fascinates us most as we explore the sites of antiquity. We have minimal or modest fact to rely on, consequently we are left space not only to imagine who these ancestors were and what they did here, but to empathise with them; wondering, perhaps, what lessons the present might learn from the past.

My visit to The Bull ring inspired the following:

CONTINUITIES

Appleby is where the travellers meet
As compulsively as migrant birds
Flock to foreign shores, driven
By the seasons, and past habits;
To the rational mind beyond all reason.

The scholars surmise such gatherings
Were witnessed across millennia.
At Arbor Low, its concentric rings home
To standing stones anchored in earth
Signalling a long journey’s end,
The prize of community awaited,
The blessing of renewal, the promise
Of encounters old and new.

The bleakness here waylays witness,
Misleads with its sparse emptiness,
Its tune of silence imposed by mystery.
For this site probably teemed with assembly,
With music and gossip, tall tales and laughter,
A place neither still nor calm nor even holy;
But a goose fair, pop festival, highland fling,
An assertion and confirmation of origin,
Breed, race, tribe, restoring patterns of us and we,
Refurbishing the spirit of belonging.

While Arbor Low speaks poetry but no people
The Bull Ring a day’s hike to the north, nestles
Within the limestone village of Dove Holes;
Again the circles, the grassy banks, the sense
Of waiting; yet here continuity stands out
As prominently as the megaliths of Arbor Low –
The playtime voices from the school yard; kids
On the merry-go-round, the climbing frame,
The Saturday cajolings from the soccer pitch.

Here fondly and without ritual, ancient and modern
Are accommodated to the point where
The walker and her dog shows hesitant recognition
Of the earthworks under her feet, no notion
Of the tread of others down the centuries, where or why
They came, but at least with this knowledge
That on days of celebration, there are fireworks here;
The crowds are something to see, gasping in delight,
In childlike awe at fire, cascade and fountain
Exploding in the dark memory of the sky.

As we pause at such meeting places, we sense
The flicker of recognition, and possibly of regret
That what must have been a constant gradually
Or swiftly, we do not know, ended, to be replaced
By other cultures; by hierarchies favouring
Property over access, the power of privilege
To bar passage to what once was communal ground.

We see the face of the past in many disguises,
Often little realising that as we enact the present
We re-enact the past; walk the same ancestral paths,
Resist in our unique ways those driven appetites
For change, improvement, betterment, profit,
That the ancestors of those who became masters
Nurture for their own interests and comfort:
History is re-defined, curtailed as heritage.
If we step off the roped path we are guilty of trespass.

Our possibilities now are largely substitutes:
We join the crowd, do Glastonbury, stop to snap
A bikers’ reunion; more quietly strive
To piece together the mysteries of hallowed sites,
And sometimes imitate the rituals we guess
Celebrated sojourn and solstice, solemnly
Noting that here the dead, enticed with gifts,
Asserted their right of presence and inclusion.

As with the Chinese gathering each decade on Tap Mun
For the Festival of Peace, combining thanks and praise
To Tin Hau, goddess of the sea, with family picnics
Beside the graves of their dear departed, honouring
The space of those who failed to make the journey,
Introducing them to those arriving, those to come.

Whether at Arbor or the Bull Ring, Gibs Hill,
Hay Top, Withery Low or Gardom’s Edge
The visitor can expect a moment of reverence
But also of regret, as though discovering
A sudden loss; a feeling of having missed
An appointment with someone precious;
The same, perhaps, experienced aeons ago
By those gladly closing in on their destination
Only to count and mourn the missing faces.

NOTES IN PASSING
From the Writer’s Notebooks
March 2009

Picasso: Challenging the Past was, on its first day out at the National Gallery, packed. I wonder how many felt numerous questions arise about a genius of prodigious energy spending so much time mining the past, for I wasn’t convinced ‘challenging’ was the right term.

Much of the work is, or borders upon, caricature. The pleasure of recognition is obvious and one is intrigued at what Picasso actually does with masters of the past; and the range, from Ingres back to Velasquez. He matches Ingres for sheer painterly bravura; but Velasquez remains so infinitely superior.

The homage is there and welcome, but why did he do it? The exhibition organisers seem reluctant to go beyond their own awe and admiration. My own favourite was not really reworking the past: it was him, Picasso, his Cubist portrait of a woman. Yes, the derivation is rightly claimed to be Cezanne, perhaps the first ‘cubist’. But this did not represent a play on Cezanne, rather a development from him. Here Picasso builds on the art of the past rather than exploits it (however pleasurably).

Just another Nabonidas
So many of these big and expensive exhibitions, like Babylon at the British Museum which I toured today, would be so much better if they were simply in book form. The items on display are small; often hieroglyphics on stone letter scrolls; and the print instructions gather so many people round them that one’s tempted to skip… At least it was interesting to learn that with his tormented Nebuchadnezzar Billy Blake got it wrong.

Nebs it would seem never went down on his knees with torment and madness. It was a later Babylonian monarch, Nabonidas, who, like King Tut, attempted meddlesome changes to religion; in his case switching allegiance from Marduk to the Moon God, and paying a price of condemnation and dismissal.

Apologies it would seem are due to Nebuchadnezzar. What, however, was especially memorable was the epilogue to the exhibition – photos of post 2003 invasion Babylon, the site occupied by a Yankee military camp: you destroy a country, it follows that you trample on its history.

To be fair, Saddam had already re-cast himself as the hero of Babylon and built his own palace in the grounds of the ancient city. Just another Nabonidas.

Moral: beware of tampering with the gods; or the Yanks.

For King and Country
Just a reminder of something I heard on radio: how the US, UK and France excluded black soldiers from the Liberation of Paris parade in 1944; at the same time as some British general issued instructions that black GIs should not be invited to people’s homes.

The general wrote in a memo that while there was a minority of normally educated negroes, the majority of them were simple and unsophisticated. I suppose the same sentiments would equally have applied to the Tommies, the British working class, reflecting an attitude that had come down the class divide for centuries. 6 April 2009.

Thanks for reading this!

Why not write something for inclusion in the Watsonworksblog? Currently it is issued monthly around the 10th of the month.

NOT JUST A BUNCH OF CHOCOLATEERS...

2010-08-12T03:55:00.000-07:00

James Watson
Watsonworks
Blog 14

*What’s it about the Belgians?
* Hardy & Chekhov: happy endings?
* Lest We Forget… Gaza, the pusillanimous West
* ‘Snaps’ & ‘Tom Thumbs’

What's it about the Belgians?
No one seems to have much of a good word for the Belgians so I’m glad to report on a book that does them proud. The Twentieth Train, by German journalist Marion Schreiber, is an account of the Nazi occupation of Belgium and the persecution of the Jews; the key focus being the determination of the SS etc. to get the Jews on to trains heading for Auschwitz.

The 20th train was the one – the only one – in which escape took place, resulting from the hi-jack action by three Belgian friends armed only with pairs of pliars, a hurricane lamp covered in red paper and one pistol between them. The train was halted, a skirmish followed and 225 prisoners managed to escape.
The book matches any thriller, the events being described in the kind of detail which allows the reader to dramatically and movingly realise the wider picture.

In fact, the book devotes only a chapter or so to the ambush of the train – successful for many on board, disaster for others, including the leader of the tiny guerrilla band. The rest of the book focuses on the build-up to the attack, taking in the many connected people among the Jewish and non-Jewish community.

Protecting the hunted
What is so much to the credit of both Jews and non-Jews in Belgium is the respect that was shared, the very real (and dangerous) protection the non-Jewish extended to the Jews under the manic eyes of the Nazis. Families were hidden. Children separated from arrested parents were ‘adopted’. Time and time again Belgians risked their lives to protect the hunted.

Of course there were SS stooges who, to curry favour with the Germans, wormed their way into the confidence of Jews and then betrayed them; men such as the elegant and charming Pierre Romanovitch, the self-styled ‘Russian count’.

The leader of the ambush of the 20th Train, Doctor Youra Livichitz, having survived that fateful night of 19th April 1943, having so successfully kept the enterprise secret, relaxed his guard. Putting his trust in the apparently honest Romanovitch, he let slip the names of those needing help; and for that misjudgement paid the ultimate price. He was arrested, tortured and shot – as his brother, and fellow conspirator, had been.

It is a traumatic as well as a moving and inspiring story. Those that escaped were but a tiny fraction of those who completed their journey to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. But Schreiber’s excellent and important record of events pays due regard to the courage and resolution of ordinary Belgians during these horrific times; something folks should remember when a nation is classified as little more than a bunch of chocolateers.

Notes in passing…1
From the Writer’s Notebooks

Hardy, Chekhov & happy endings
Even in his short stories, Thomas Hardy sets Destiny against happy endings. While Chekhov’s Lady with the Little Dog does not exactly end happily, it does not end sadly; indeed though the affair between Gurov and Anna will continue to be troubled, because it has to be kept secret, it suggests there will be no end; that true love will overcome circumstances.

The same would probably happen in Hardy’s stories, but there is always the invisible hand of fate unwilling to permit happiness or true deserts.
Chekhov focuses on the human predicament of fate, nevertheless, in that both lovers are married to people they do might have been the opportunity to commit to love without concealment.

Love as identified in the Chekhov story is difficult to define, to pin down, and the characteristics which induce love in the first place are unclear. What is it about Gurov that makes Anna love him? He is twice her age, greying. In turn we learn very little about what he sees in her except her beauty, for her sense of guilt at the affair, of being a sinner, is not a feature that draws him closer; on the contrary.

So we are left with a mystery, though it might be asked whether the need for secrecy, the risks that are being taken, the on-the-edge nature of the affair is the spice which, for both of them, gives the relationship its frisson.

Notes in passing…2
From the Writer’s Notebooks

4th Jan. 2009: Another year, another protest
Having practically choked Gaza to death, Israel has now been bombing it for days. Last night they invaded. Meanwhile between London’s Embankment and Trafalgar Square thousands of us protested, in bright sunshine surrounded by an ocean of banners.

It may do us good, the marchers; make us feel that we are achieving something, but as with the million-strong march against the invasion of Iraq, we were powerless, probably even pathetic.

The war went on because those in power willed it, were in collusion. As always the odd man out was Joe Public. Of course the New Labour government’s response has been pusillanimous – oh, the grave concern of it, the wringing of hands; but as for doing something about the situation, nothing.

Politicians keep using the word ‘disproportionate’. When a rocket from Hamas takes one life in Tel Aviv and Israeli bombs kill a whole mosque full of worshippers, that is disproportionate.

What does that bloody-well mean? Not fair; not just; not playing the game? And yet, under media interrogation the foreign secretary, Mr. Arsole Miliband, refuses actually to speak a word. Oh yes, it has been collectively expressed at the United Nations – but for a minister of the Crown to say it out loud, no.
Of the many placards the one that took my eye said:

GUERNICA
WARSAW
GAZA
ISRAEL STOP BEHAVING
LIKE NAZIS

‘Snaps’ & ‘Tom Thumbs’
Visitors to the excellent blog of Sarah Salway (Sarah Salway’s Writing Journal) will have become familiar with her short stories of 50 words, the triggers for these being odd or intriguing snapshots. I’ve been doing something similar only (so far) without the snaps and with a more indulgent word-count of 100, or fewer. These tiny tales I’ve called Tom Thumbs. Who knows, Snaps and Tom Thumbs might catch on – an annual festival, maybe…

To round off this blog, here’s one that abides by Sarah’s rule of 50 words:

Two’s a crowd
The world’s greatest faced each other across the Signoria. ‘After you, Maestro,’ said Michelangelo.
‘No, after you,’ replied Leonardo.
You’ll need longer,’ argued Michelangelo.
Leonardo: ‘I’ll wait till you have a decent wash.’
Without adding a brushstroke they went their separate ways. A lesser painter, one Vasari, spared Florence’s blushes.

Thanks for reading this. As ever, feedback welcome.
JIM.

WATSONWORKS Blog 13

2010-07-14T02:05:00.000-07:00

A BLOG ON

BLOGGING
Point and Purposes

The Internet made the blog possible, but it did not invent it.
Once upon a time when printing and publishing were cheap writers could express themselves in many different forms. As well as the long stuff, they produced essays, papers, edited newspapers and magazines.

Jill Walker Rettberg in her recent book, Blogging (1) claims that the French novelist Alexandre Dumas was the first blogger: ‘he was truly into the new technology of the modern press, introduced in France in the 1830s. Dumas’ first newspaper was written solely by himself, and was called Le Mois, with a tagline that sounds so bloggish it must be in use by some blogger, somewhere: jour par jour, heure par heure (‘day by day, hour by hour’)’.

Dodging the crush
Contemporary writers have, until the last decade, depended in one way or another on the mass media to open doors to their publications, short or long. Such has been the competition for access that inevitably queues form as fortunes rise and fall and as new kids come rolling or skateboarding on to the block.

Agents have queues at their door; publishers have slush-piles of unread scripts. The BBC Scriptwriters grant a ten minute window for every submitted script; what doesn’t impress in that time goes back into the stamped-addressed envelope.

Fees apart, fat or thin, that scenario prevails in the markets for mass media and mass consumption. The Internet, however, has opened other doors. Would-be writers, or established ones, are no longer limited, as broadcasters have been, to ‘wavelength rationing’. They don’t have to line up for judgment, largely by people they’ve never met and are unlikely ever to meet as big publishing companies swallow up smaller, more intimate and often more supportive ones.

Today, one has an idea for a story, a play, an article, an essay, a poem, even a haiku, and one can post it for the world to read, free of intermediaries. The writer is liberated from gatekeeping.

True, though there are ways of checking the numbers out there who key in to the uploaded texts, the writer can rarely be sure that the readers have sustained their interest, read a sentence, a paragraph or the whole piece. That, of course, is also true of texts in print: who’s reading your book, in what way, and to what (if any) effect?

What blogging on the Internet does allow, makes easy and indeed purposeful, is feedback. Uploaded texts can prompt discourse between author and reader which one-way print media or traditional radio or TV broadcasting rarely can.

Quality control?
Resistance to the notion and practice of blogging is an offshoot of a long tradition concerned with standards. Unless you’ve gone through the mill, how dare you seek to bypass those who police quality? The trouble with standards and quality is that they fluctuate and often defy accurate or even fair definition.

Culture is as much about restricting entry as nurturing it; like so much education, it serves to favour the few over the many. It views talent as essentially a restricted commodity, both highly selective and exclusive.

There are good reasons for careful scrutiny of, for instance, citizen journalism; after all, journalism is a respected trade, requiring many skills and ideally preparatory training and experience. Yet few bloggers aspire to be ‘professional’ in the traditional sense of journalism, and very few, if any, have ambition to replace those trained, practised and professionally committed to journalism.

Uneasiness about citizens ‘intruding’ on the patch of media professionals centres less on standards than on economics. As in most other businesses, employers are constantly on the lookout for cost cutting in a labour-centred industry – why pay a professional photographer, for example, if amateurs are happy to get their snaps in the paper for little or nothing?

Yet it is not bloggers who are shutting down papers but competition in and between traditional media industries. A solid case can be made for saying that Internet communication has benefited mass media. A scan of the press indicates an already well established synergy between traditional media and blogging. Newspapers dedicate columns and sometimes whole pages to the comments of bloggers on particular topics in the news. They do it for liveliness, originality and brevity.

A vital role
Further, it is important to recognise and celebrate examples of the way bloggers contribute to our knowledge of what is going on in the world. Reports by Salam Pax from Baghdad during the war in Iraq were individual in transmission and content, but of global interest – because they were issuing from the epicentre of events.

Salam Pax was in no position to report – as professional journalists would be expected to do – ‘objectively’, but the personal in this case was what was so valuable and unique.

Such citizen postings will increase as online readership searches for information, news and views which escape the mediation characteristic of traditional media ownership and control.

While expecting objectivity from blogs is to mistake their nature, other principles that apply to serious mass media reporting should be equally honoured and observed. Bloggers often function as anonymously as Salam Pax, for similar or different reasons, but there are quicksands ahead for those who set out to deceive their audience.

Principles of performance
Sooner or later scams get found out and the backlash can be devastating. Narratives that purport to be real such as the video blog Lonelygirl15 which turned out to be a fiction, scripted and acted out by professionals, invite rejection, censure and disillusionment.

The freedom to be anybody on the Internet inevitably blurs the
line between truth and fiction and between what’s real and what is simulation or simply PR. Trevor Cook in ‘Can Blogging Unspin PR?’ published in Uses of Blogs (2) believes that bloggers, professionals or otherwise, need to maintain trust by affirming ‘fairness, balance, accuracy and integrity’.

Thus if you’re earning a few pounds, dollars or euros from product sponsors, then you must come clean about that sponsorship. Even on the Internet there is no such thing as a free lunch. For most of us, though, blogging is free because we are not reliant on income to finance our messaging.

A ‘common possession’; but for how long?
What bloggers are reliant on is a free field of delivery and access. There have long been fears that cyberspace will prove to be less of an open prairie than it used to be.

Currently, what the late Roger Silverstone in Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (3) refers to as the ‘otherwise invisible and unheard’ and the blog as ‘a phenomenon to contest the already weakening stranglehold of the national press and broadcasting systems’ remains ‘a platform for public participation’.

Silverstone sees this alternative to mass communication as ‘a common possession’. He envisions a mediapolis characterised by justice and what he refers to as ‘hospitality’ – openness, the acceptance and welcoming of Other, equality of exchange; but he also states his uneasiness about a situation that is ‘constantly at risk both of its own self-violation (paedophile and terrorist networks) and its enclosure (by transnational corporations and political controls)’.

What has scared Netizens in recent years is the threat to network neutrality. In a Washingtonpost.com article (4), media analysts Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney wrote that network neutrality ‘means simply that all Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet’s wires cannot discriminate’.

Pressure to legislate for precedence
Lessig and McChesney’s article is entitled ‘No Tolls on the Internet’. They write that network owners ‘could slow down or even block the websites and services of their competitors…Without net neutrality, the Internet would start to look like cable TV. A handful of massive companies would control access and distribution of content, deciding what you get to see and how much it cost’.

The authors refer to the ‘smell of windfall profits in the air in Washington’ as the phone companies ‘are pulling out all the stops to legislate themselves monopoly power’.

Blog battlers
Alerted to this corporate threat to their futures, bloggers by the thousand, aided by over 700 Internet groups, successfully pressurised the American Senate Commerce Committee into approving the AT & T merger with BellSouth in June 2006 on condition that network neutrality was preserved.

The New York Times commended this ‘limited but important victory for net neutrality’ but added that ‘it should not be necessary to negotiate separate deals like this one’. Net neutrality remains, but so do the ambitions of the corporate sector. As the New York Times asserted, ‘On the information superhighway, net neutrality should be a basic rule of the road’.

Loose wheels on the big-buck tumbrils
Corporate Man has never been hesitant to follow the rule If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them. How many global Internet sites are not in the hands of the big spenders? MySpace passed into the ownership of Rupert Murdoch in 2005 for an estimated £200m.

In the following October Google snapped up YouTube; while Facebook, with its millions of ‘friends’, has been described by journalist Tom Hodgkinson as an ‘extension of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive information-gathering tool’ and which is commoditising human relationships; success, it would seem, guaranteed (5).

Yet a prevailing feature of the Internet is uncertainty. What goes up usually comes down, and often with a sudden bump; even the media masters get their fingers burnt. Hundreds of jobs have been lost at MySpace. In June 2010 AOL sold Bebo for a sum dramatically less than it paid for it.

David Teather writing on social networking (6) talks of ‘soured investments’: ‘Ever developing applications and a lack of customer loyalty mean social networking can become huge, almost overnight, and crash just as quickly’.

Keep up the sharing
But to close on an up-note: enthusiastic student of, practitioner and advocate of blogging, Jill Walker Rettberg declares in Blogging, ‘People like participating in the media. We like contributing and sharing our ideas, and we’re unlikely to stop now that we have the technology to allow it’.

She goes on, ‘Participatory media which makes publishing available to everyone is like fire: once the cunning Prometheus had stolen the secret of fire from Zeus and given it to us mortals, there was no way for the gods to take it back’.

Rettburg receives ample support from Net guru Clay Shirky interviewed in the UK Guardian by Decca Aitkenhead (7). He argues that those who post – free of charge – their thoughts, views, knowledge, opinions on the Net do so because it satisfies ‘the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness’.

Compared to traditional media such as the press and TV, Shirky says the Internet ‘has removed the barrier to universal participation and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch’.

Islands of civil discourse
This is a hearteningly optimistic point of view, but would need to be considered alongside Decca Aitkenhead’s more sceptical position, ‘bewildered’ as she is ‘by the exhibitionism of online social networking’, its ‘juvenile vacuity’, ‘baffled by the amount of time devoted to posting photos of cats that look amusingly like Hitler’ and ‘a little bit dismayed by Facebook’s revelation of almost infinite narcissism’.

Shirky’s answer is that ‘even the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. And I’d still take the most inane collaborative website over someone watching yet another half hour of TV’. In other words, don’t blame the medium for the message!

Along with other commentators, Shirky recognises that while anonymity can make people ‘behave more meanly’, he remains confident that ‘we are slowly going to set up islands of civil discourse’. His message is, be yourself: ‘We need to set up the social norms which say in this space you need to use your real names, or some well-known handle’. He sees ‘the really big challenge’ is how to maximise the Net’s ‘civic value’.

NOTES
(1) Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging (Polity Press, 2010).
(2) Trevor Cook, ‘Can Blogging Unspin PR?’ in Uses of Blogs (Peter Long, 2006), edited by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs.
(3) Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (Polity Press, 2007).
(4) Lawrence Lessig and Robert W.McChesney, ‘No Tolls on the Internet’, Washingtonpost.com, 13 June 2006.
(5) Tom Hodgkinson, ‘With friends like these…’ Guardian (14 January, 2008).
(6) David Teather, ‘Social networking curse strikes again as Bebo is sold’, Guardian, 21 June 2010.
(7) G2 ‘If there’s a screen to worry about in your house, it’s not the one with the mouse attached’, Clay Shirky talks to Decca Aitkenhead, 5 July, 2010. See Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Allen Lane, 2010).

********************************

The author is currently working on the 8th edition of The Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies (with Anne Hill).

Thanks for reading this. Feedback welcome as usual.

JIM.

BRINGING WRITERS BACK FROM THE DEAD

2010-06-16T01:59:00.000-07:00

LEST WE FORGET:
The Power of Biography

James Watson
Watsonworks
Blog 12

Blog: A mode of Internet communication expressing the author’s interests, preoccupations, opinions and biography, to a known and sometimes unknown audience; with potential for interactivity.

Review……………………………………………

Michael Scammell, Koestler:The Indispensable Intellectual (Faber and Faber, 2010).

Prescient in almost all his judgments – on politics, history, literature and science – Arthur Koestler (1905-83) wrote in his diary ‘Every writer is forgotten after his death’. Plenty of people, even dedicated readers, might be forgiven for never having sampled Koestler’s vast and diverse output, and at best having the vaguest notion of who Koestler was or why he should be remembered.

Michael Scammell’s 689-page biography should restore Koestler to the pantheon of literary celebrity, not only because Koestler had much to say that still has relevance and interest but because of the amazing times he lived in. While reading about Koestler’s life one is reminded of the Chinese philosopher, faced with wars, famines and more wars, prayed that he might ‘live in uninteresting times’.

Running for his life
A Hungarian Jew, Koestler had scarcely emerged from his teens before he was in the thick of it. A bold and resourceful journalist he reported from the Spanish Civil War, was arrested by the Fascists, imprisoned and was a hair’s breadth from being executed.
Caught in Germany as Nazism ceased its pretentions to parliamentary rule, Koestler was once more on the run.

Desperate and remembering how in a film he had seen Jean Gabin escape a police hunt by joining the French Foreign Legion, Koestler, needing to disguise his Jewish origins, took the name of the Limoges police chief, Albert Dubert, and briefly became a Legionnaire. The rest of this tale can be followed in Chapter 16, Darkness Invisible.

The UK authorites, in particular M15, were slow in offering Koestler asylum. His record as a Communist activist (even though he had rejected Stalinism) led to his incarceration as a dangerous alien. It was probably only because of his well-placed friends – chiefly the literati – that he was not subjected to prolonged imprisonment during the 2nd World War. He escaped a life behind bars by signing up with the aliens’ Pioneer Corps (whose emblem was a crossed pick and shovel).

Koestler saw service in Ilfracombe and Cheltenham, largely digging tank trap holes before, in March 1942, being written off as ‘permanently unfit’ for service. Later in the war he worked as an air-raid warden and an ambulance driver.

Controversy: second nature
In his Prologue to Koestler, Michael Scammell writes that ‘Provocation and controversy were meat and drink to Koestler, elements of a tumultuous life in which he rarely experienced peace or quiet…Hungarian in his temper, German in his industry, Jewish in his intellectual ambition, he was never comfortable in his own skin’.

It was evident to those who knew him well that, despite his achievement and his fame, he suffered from self-doubt, ‘an undisguised vulnerability and painful honesty, a self-conscious shyness and morbid sensitivity’. This, ‘combined with his boyish exuberance and devil-may-care daring made him a magnet for innumerable women’.

Details of Koestler’s contribution to and involvement with historical events of the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s are for the reader to discover. However, what particularly warrants recognition is Koestler’s energetic campaigning as writer and activist against Capital Punishment in Britain.

Implacable opposition
During his imprisonment during the Spanish Civil War, 17 of his fellow prisoners in Seville jail had been shot to mark the anniversary of the proclamation of the Spanish Republic. Among them was 19-year Nicolas who Koestler had befriended during periods of exercise. He was later to dedicate Dialogue with Death to Nicolas.

It was from these experiences, writes Scammell, that Koestler’s ‘implacable opposition to capital punishment was born’ and led to the publication of his influential Reflections on Hanging. Koestler was also to demonstrate a lifelong sympathy for the imprisoned. He set up and financed annual awards for prisoners who demonstrated creativity in the arts – a scheme that continues to this day to reward endeavour in the visual arts and literature.

Animating the past
Koestler the man warrants the description ‘prodigious’ as indeed does the biography, Koestler. The product of ten years research and preparation it succeeds Scammell’s equally epical, Solzhenitsyn (1051 pages, Hutchinson, 1984). What we get in both cases is an immensely detailed historical tapestry. With the protagonist at its centre, the past is suddenly happening again, the reader being carried along as though actually involved in events.

A graduate in Russian from Nottingham University, translator of several books from Russian and Serbo-Croat, the founding editor of Index on Censorship magazine, now a professor at Columbia University, Michael Scammell conducted upward of two hundred interviews with Koestler’s friends, relatives and professional colleagues.

His Notes alone cover some 80-odd pages and he travelled in 14 countries in three continents in pursuit of one who had first sprung to fame after reporting on the first flight of the Graf Zeppelin from Berlin to the North Pole in 1931.

Dynamic but overstretched?
In one communicative form or another, Koestler, writes his biographer, ‘investigated a multitude of political movements, religions and scientific disciplines, from Zionism to Catholicism and even Buddhism, from anti-fascism to communism and anti-communism, from astronomy and evolution to neurobiology and parapsychology’.

Notoriously, and with little approval, Koestler allowed himself to be lured into the terrain of ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception), professing himself horrified at the prospect of coming out publicly in support of it, ‘fearing and relishing the risk, and feeling that having come so far, it would be cowardice not to follow his instincts’ (See Scammell’s Chapter forty-six, Chance Governs All).

The danger, as Scammell points out, has been an ‘inevitable unevenness’: Koestler could be accused of writing ‘too much in too many genres’ – novels, essays, biographies, scientific speculation.

Yet Koestler’s second novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, has never been out of print and though his other novels may ‘seem rather dated now’ – The Gladiators, Arrival and Departure, Thieves in the Night and The Age of Longing – ‘each has passages of imaginative power and intellectual brilliance’; while his science books such as The Sleepwalkers ‘brought both a storyteller’s eloquence and characteristic activism, for his urge is there, as in all his fiction and nonfiction, not just to describe the world, but also to change it’.

Ambiguities
Scammell deals frankly and fairly with Koestler’s reputation as a womaniser. In his many relationships with women Koestler was ‘an egotistical, mercurial, and unpredictable perfectionist…whose demands knew no bounds’. He was ‘too hard on his women (and on himself)’. While they were ‘far from infantile Cinderellas…it was true he had met many of them at vulnerable moments in their lives and had harassed them and bullied them all into submission’.

A ‘stream of righteous abuse of Koestler that continues to the present day’ concerns the confession in 1998 by Jill Craigie, wife of Michael Foot, to another Koestler biographer, David Cesarini, that she had been raped by Koestler.

Scammell is of the view that there ‘are many ambiguities surrounding Cesarini’s (and Craigie’s) account of the incident. First of all, Craigie waited so long (nearly fifty years) to make her accusation public when Koestler was no longer alive to defend himself or ‘give his own version of this meeting’.

Scammell cites Koestler’s diary for that day: ‘Jill Foot –Sunday pub crawl on Heath’, and states, ‘Given that Koestler was gloatingly totting up his conquests in his diary at that very time, it’s surprising that he made no mention of having had sex with Craigie, unless he was so drunk he completely forgot about it’.

Craigie joined Michael Foot and Koestler for lunch at the House of Commons a week later, ‘and some twenty years after that, in 1975, she and Foot were guests at Koestler’s seventieth birthday party’. For further comment, see Chapter Thirty-Six, The Phantom Chase.

Despite Koestler’s domineering conduct towards the women in his life, his second wife, Mamaine, found him, in her own words, ‘as angelic as ever’, while his third wife, Cynthia, obedient servant to Koestler’s every whim, knew no doubts about a life without him. He was 77 and in ailing health. Still only in her 50s, she shared his preparations for suicide and chose death rather than be without him.

More to come?
Closing this massive, complex and elegantly written biography, readers will be left with an appetite for more, in particular from Koestler’s actual texts. His publishers should persuade Michael Scammell to assemble a companion volume to Koestler, an anthology of those bits across the author’s oeuvre that possess ‘imaginative power and intellectual brilliance’.

In his Prologue to Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual, Scammell writes that he was ‘a romantic whose quixotic hopes that some variant of the utopian dream might lead to happiness on earth were constantly being shadowed and undercut by a pessimistic acknowledgment of the realities of human nature’.

His ‘quest for enlightenment was not some arid, abstract sort of research, but a deep instinctual urge, powered by personal unhappiness and psychological frustration, which started early in his life and continued to the very end of his days’. In this sense, Koestler was ‘emblematic of the twentieth century’s own flailings in the search for a workable form of utopia’.

Notable works by Koestler: Arrival and Departure, Darkness at Noon, Thieves in the Night, Scum of the Earth, Promise and Fulfilment, The Age of Longing, Reflections on Hanging, The Sleepwalkers, The Lotus and the Robot, The Act of Creation, The Ghost in the Machine, The Case of the Midwife Toad, The Roots of Coincidence, The Challenge of Chance, The Thirteenth Tribe, Janus, From Bricks to Babel (an anthology).

Further information can be found at the author’s website,
http://www.michaelscammell.com/; and feedback to Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com is of course welcome.

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BLOG LISTING

Blog 1
3 September 2009

Introduces FAIR GAME: THE STEPS OF ODESSA
(Spire Publishing, ISBN 1-897312-72-5), a human rights novel for Young Adults; a story about the struggles of Natasha, a talented young footballer in Ukraine. Her journalist father is on the run for revelations he has made about government corruption: the consequences for Natasha and her brother Lonya are not only career-threatening, but life-threatening.

To further complicate things, there is Natasha’s friendship with Monika who, on the face of it, is a tour guide, but what secret is she keeping about her and her family; and how has she come to be in possession of the Pushkin Ring that went missing from a Moscow Museum during the Russian Revolution?

The story heads for a dramatic climax on the Steps of Odessa made famous by the massacre scene in Sergei Eistenstein’s film masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin: could something similar happen on those steps that ‘seem to reach to the sky’?

Blog 2
15 September 2009
Introduces the BUXTEHUDER BULLE PRIZE awarded annually for Young Adult novels on human rights themes and judged by young German readers. The author’s Talking in Whispers was a winner and he was invited to Buxtehude near Hamburg to receive the prize.

I was so delighted by this old Hanseatic town with its canal (and its noisy ducks), that I wrote a children’s story, The Noisy Ducks of Buxtehude (later published in a dual-language version by Verlag an der Est, ISBN 3-926616-90-3). This blog gives an account of ‘a quacking tale’ translated into German by Heike Brandt and illustrated by Bjorn Holm.

Blog 3
29 September 2009
THE TROUBLE WITH MONUMENTS. In Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, there is Babi Yar, site of the barbarous executions perpetrated by the Nazis, and collaborators, during World War 2, a sacred site of immense symbolic importance. With the prospect of international football coming to Ukraine, there were those on the city council who wanted to build new hotels close to and overlooking the site. This blog protests about the proposal; which thankfully was rejected by the Kiev city council.
In contrast, in Senegal, one of the world’s poorest countries, a 49 metre bronze statue now dominates the capital, Dakar. It glorifies at prodigious expense the hubris of those in power, a £17m assertion of elitism over equality.

Blog 4
23 October 2009
HISTORY’S NEGLECTED WOMEN. In researching for a play on the struggles for press freedom and democracy in 19th century Britain (Out Damned Spot!) I came to realise what a vital part women played in those struggles, and how they seem to have been written out of the records.

They worked as hawkers of the radical press, printers and writers, and their sufferings were equal to men’s in the pursuit of those struggles – crippling fines, imprisonment and in a few cases deportation.
Eliza Sharples, second wife of the combative editor, Richard Carlile, became a star, addressing packed audiences in London’s Rotunda, while her husband languished in jail. Act 4 of Out Damned Spot! focuses on Eliza, and is titled The Lady of the Rotunda.

Blog 5
10 November 2009
IN PRAISE OF WOMEN’S SOCCER. Research is an author’s archaeology. In preparing Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa I was startled to discover that once upon a time in the UK women’s football was immensely popular; women’s matches drew huge crowds.

Yet on 5 December 1921 the Football Association banned women from playing on FA-affiliated pitches. This blog looks at how women’s soccer has fought to reaffirm itself in Britain, and how football has become one of the paramount sporting interests of women and girls.

Blog 6
15 December 2009
LAST FLIGHT OF THE HEYFORD K 6875. In July 1938 a six-crew RAF Heyford hit a violent rainstorm in the Derbyshire peak district. Before the days of radar navigation, the plane was off course and dipping towards Edale. The Heyford’s design was such that it blocked the pilot’s view immediately in front and below.

Another 30 metres or so, and the plane would have avoided Broadlee Bank. Instead, the plan struck ground, and the crew were consumed in a fireball.
Among the crew was my Uncle, Jim Barker. A version of this account, a tribute to the dead, was published in Derbyshire Life magazine.

Blog 7
7 January 2010
This was the first of five postings on ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING. Part 1, TRIGGERS AND PROPS, opens with a look at how stories get started, what triggers interest and motivation, and how such triggers carry the story forward, from a major national or world event (like the military overthrow of democracy in Chile, triggering Talking in Whispers) to a fleeting snatch of conversation (such as a reference to a misspelt tattoo triggering The Great Tattoo in Make Your Move, and Other Stories).

Supplementing the main course of Blog 7, in Notes in Passing, another World War 2 disaster is described; a disaster which result from an officer’s arrogance in the face of good advice.

A newly-arrived squad of Canadians encamped above Cuckmere Haven in Sussex. There was a wonderful view of the sea. A local man warned the officer that his men were encamped under the flight path of German planes.

His men were a sitting target. The officer knew better than to take advice from a civilian. As predicted, the Messerschmitts came. They could not believe their luck. It was too late for the Canadian officer to change his mind.

Blog 8
15 February 2010
ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING
Part 2: PROPS PROPEL
Following on from Blog 7, a look at the role played by props in narrative, from Cinderella’s glass slipper to the jewelled pendant worn by Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, from the Pushkin Ring that serves to animate a sub-plot in Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa to the Michael Jackson T-shirt that proves Eloise, in The Ghosts of Izieu, does not belong in 1942.

The author’s childhood hobby, hand puppets and string marionettes finds a literary outcome in Talking in Whispers in which the twins, Isa and Beto, use their puppet, General Zuchero, to protest at tyranny.

Notes in passing… Gives the thumbs down to Avatar.

Blog 9
15 March 2010
ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING
Part 3: Frames, Codes and Character.
A look at the structures of stories, how they fit in to forms or genres. The narrative forms of soaps and sitcoms are compared, the templates that govern them and how symbols illuminate and guide them.

The five narrative codes posed by French philosopher Roland Barthes, expounded in his book S/Z, are examined – the Action Code, for example, being traditionally associated with male characters, the Enigma code with women; codes, of course, inviting the writer to reverse or overturn them.
Also introduced is the categorisation of characters by the Russian Vladimir Propp in his study of folk tales.

Blog 10
14 March 2010
ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING
Part 4: Fiction and News
This posting explores the interlink between fiction and news, both of them narratives with common objectives though differing formats. What’s happening in the real world, in the news, has always influenced the content and approach of fiction.

Just as there is newsworthiness so there is fictionworthiness; and what is newsworthy triggers fictionworthiness. On the other hand, sometimes what happens in the news is so strange or exotic that in fiction it would be regarded as failing to suspend the reader’s disbelief.

Feedback…from novelist Anna Perera, author of Guantanamo Boy (Penguin).

Blog 11
15 May 2010
ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING
Part 5: Tale Power
Humans are essentially storytelling animals. We live stories, they are part of us, individually and collectively. This posting investigates the power that stories have to influence us – our attitudes, opinions, our outlooks, our values and sometimes our behaviour.

Though some downsize the power of stories, classifying them as little more than entertainment, a scrutiny of censorship, present and past, will at least indicate that those in authority, those in power, are fearful of stories ‘getting a hold’ on people, particularly if stories threaten to influence large numbers.

A simple 17-syllable haiku in Burma can get you a five year prison sentence, never mind the endless stories of the persecution of authors down the ages, from Sophocles to Solzhenitsyn.
The posting concludes with questions on how the Internet, in the Age of Twitter, is affecting, and will affect tale power.

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FURTHER INFORMATION:
http://www.watsonworks.co.uk/

CONTACT: Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

THE POWER OF STORIES

2010-05-14T23:41:00.000-07:00

Aspects of Storytelling
WATSONWORKS
blog 11 of author James Watson

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Previous sorties into storytelling –
BLOG 7 – Triggers
BLOG 8 - Props
BLOG 9 – Frames, Codes and Characters
BLOG 10 –Fiction and News

Part 5:

TALE POWER

Stories not only influence us, they are part of us. In his book Narratives in Popular Culture, Media and Everyday Life (Sage, 1997), Arthur Asa Berger says that we ‘spend our lives immersed in narratives. Every day, we swim in a sea of stories and tales that we hear or read or listen to…from our earliest days to our deaths’. We are truly Homo Narrens, the storytelling animal.

Of course, we can’t be exact and we certainly can’t predict what stories will influence, whom and to what degree. Very often we have to judge the potential power of stories – to influence or change attitudes, and sometimes to influence and change behaviour – by the reaction to stories; by the behaviour of those who would censor those stories.

When the Roman Catholic church introduced the Index Librorum Prohibitorum they were seriously worried about the power of books. Authoritarianism in all its forms
fears what books can do; in fact it very often shows more respect for the potency of reading than perhaps it warrants. Nobody ever suggested that, for example, the bar should be raised on Jane Austen’s work, unless it was those worried about people idling their time away with ‘a good read’.

On the other hand, Tom Paine would have been hanged, drawn and quartered by the British ruling establishment if they had been able to lay hands on him for his scurrilous condemnation of monarchs and self-serving governments in The Rights of Man and other works.

Fear of the collective
Attempts to curtail tale power have only marginally anything to do with what readers get up to in their own homes.

Rather it is about stories that bring people out of their homes to join the company of others with questions to ask, demands on their lips. What the censors fear most is people power. When those responsible for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in paperback landed in court the target was not the book but the kind of people who might read it and be influenced by it; that is, what Edmund Burke one termed the ‘swinish multitude’.

Today those who rule us are more polite about these things: we are customers, sometimes citizens and the Official Secrets Act keeps the only really dangerous ‘tale power’ under lock and key.

Slow seeds fermenting
For most of us, reading remains a personal experience. What impresses us, we share with friends and family. If we are teachers, we spread the world a little farther. We not only wish to communicate the specifics of a story or stories, but transmit our enthusiasm for reading itself.
Little by little, personal enthusiasms are shared, passed along, passed down.

At this level we are considering personal empowerment, but it would be risky to underestimate the transition of acorn to mighty oak. Indeed every collective begins with individuals, minorities; every ideology that at first struggles to surface is the work of individuals.

Without St. Paul, where would Christianity be? Without Karl Marx would the most populous nation on earth be a Communist regime?

Story-Myth-Power
There are tales which so powerfully take hold that we can no longer control them. What begins as a narrative slowly or even suddenly becomes promoted to the level of myth. This takes the form of explanation, then hardens into definition finally graduating into an incontrovertible truth: one word for this is religion.

Those who might challenge that truth – a new generation of writers, for example, may find they are regarded as enemies and punished for daring to call Truth Myth.

As races, as nations, people seem to have a profound need for collective reassurance which is what stories are good at providing. American professor Ernest Borman has referred to what he calls ‘rhetorical fantasies’ that ‘fulfil a group psychological or rhetorical need’.

In the Journal of Communication Autumn 1985, Borman writes that when members of the mass share a fantasy, ‘they jointly experience the same emotions, develop common heroes and villains, celebrate certain actions as laudable, and interpret some aspect of their common experience in the same way’.

Ground prepared
1930s Nazism in Germany was delivered through propaganda but it seems to have been sown on receptive ground. There came a time when principles of democracy, tolerance, fair-play and justice tippled over into their opposites. Arianism, notions of white dominance, became the key narratives of the time, with variations at work in Italy and Spain.

How do you undo a ‘true’ story that has gathered up the power of myth and become the only story in town; the only tale the powerful will tolerate? One might suggest that honest history will do it combined with fearless journalism; but how long will that take?

It was a puzzle to me on visiting post-Franco Spain how little there was in the public domain telling visitors, or indeed the Spanish people themselves, about the Civil War; how little that war was commemorated.

Tell me how it happened…
The true story was so horrific, reminiscence about it so sensitive, possibly hazardous, that it remained for more than a generation a secret, no part of public discourse.

Yes, there was Picasso’s Guernica, the most dramatic counter-narrative to Franco’s fascist tyranny, but it was not until a TV soap, Cuentame Como (Tell Me How It Happened), first broadcast to the Spanish people in 2000, that the story of the Civil War and its aftermath became a public property.

Writing in the UK Independent (9 August 2002), Elizabeth Nash viewed the soap opera as catching ‘the imagination of all generations of Spaniards: those who remember Franco relish the authenticity of every detail; youngsters who never knew him are fascinated by this window on their otherwise silent and invisible history’.

Similarly, in Uganda, a radio serial modelled on the BBC’s The Archers, Ngom Wa (Our Land), told the stories of the victims of the Civil War in that country – the massacres, the kidnappings, the rapes, the forced marriages; allowing communities to come to terms with the suffering of the Ugandan people at the hands of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army.

Prospects
It is crucial to ask whether tale power is gaining or losing in the Age of Tweet, where 140 words may be our lot in a speeded up world where that number of words might be sufficient for most purposes of communication.

Fears abound about the younger generation abandoning their reading for text-tale; and in the wider context of Internet postings and exchange there are legitimate anxieties about the risk to traditional storytelling professions, journalism in particular.

Watch this space
We are not, of course, talking here about the dislodging, or failure to survive, of media forms. We are deliberating on the power of the story. If, in the past, the story had power became it was communicated through limited channels, is there an argument for saying that the more diverse those channels, the more story-power might be diluted?

At the moment, it is impossible to say, but what can be affirmed is that people are slower to change than technology, and that they are more likely to adapt that technology to their requirements than become its slaves.

Blaming the means of communication rather than attitudes towards its use makes for easy excuses. We may mourn the apparently trivial driving the serious into the margins of cultural life, and rue the dominance of those Usual Suspects, Profit and Celebrity.

Yet it was ever thus as any swift glance at history indicates. The difference is the opportunity to communicate now available to hundreds if not thousands where in years past those presenting their literary wares to the public were numbered in hundreds.

Empowerment
Today as never before there are detours around traditional gatekeepers. Nothing stands in the way of writers posting their stories, poems, protests, arguments. Naturally the downside of such opportunity is that distribution may be confined to one’s granny or the cat. However, the potential is what counts and with a little bit of luck the writer can, in theory for most of us, but actually for others, turn a dozen followers into
a thousand or even a million: they are all out there.

Ultimately, storytellers both influence and shape the world. As Plato (c.428-347 BC) believed, those who tell stories also rule society. Today, narrative is two-way, multi-way, feedback instant. Just occasionally our stories tune in to grander narratives in which the power-elite discover that communicative dominance is no longer their private, uncontested territory.
It is a tantalising question: bearing in mind the exponential growth of the blogosphere, where cyberspace and ‘my space’ have become synonymous, could it be that citizen stories pose a potential threat to existing structures of order and control, the ultimate example of tale power?

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The Bull Leapers pictured at the beginning of this blog aimed to bring a myth down to a degree of historical earth without losing the magic of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Where would western history, culture and art be without the stories that have come down to us from Greece? The loss of the metaphors alone would have made our civilisation a a fairly barren peninsula had it not been swept by Homer's 'wine-dark sea'.

BLOG 12 will review the new biography by Michael Scammell – Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (Faber and Faber).

Thanks for reading this! As ever, feedback welcome.

THE ROLE OF PROPS IN STORYTELLING

2010-02-10T01:38:00.000-08:00

WATSONWORKSblog 8
TRIGGERS & PROPS
Their role in the making of stories

Part 2: Props propel
In theatrical terms a prop(erty) is usually an object with a practical purpose – a chair, a lamp, a tea-set. It need have no further purposes than its obvious function. On the other hand it may serve as a key player in the drama, its significance growing with the rapidity of events. In a detective drama, for example, props may be crucial evidence leading to the uncovering of the criminal and the resolution of the story.

In such circumstances props have symbolic value for one or more characters – like Cinderella’s glass slipper; or they suggest threat or danger, like the poisoned apple in Snow White.

Many stories take the form of quests – for the prop (treasure, the Holy Grail) which proves the source of striving, hardship, conflict. In the case of the Holy Grail as competed for in movies such as Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail what drives characters in its pursuit is more than a cup of gold, silver or clay; it is the prize of eternal life. The message is as clear as it is in the story of Icarus.

Vertigo: a single fateful decision
Those familiar with Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo will know that the whole plot rests on the axis of a single prop, a jewelled pendant which we see in the portrait of the mysterious Carlotta and which is worn by Madeleine (Kim Novak), the enticer of Scottie (James Stewart) and later in her true persona as Judy.
Her decision – Judy-playing-at-being-Madeleine – to wear the pendant on a date with Scottie, gives the game away, leading to the film’s denouement.
It is left to the audience to resolve in their own minds whether a woman of such remarkable adroitness would have committed this spectacular error, unless (probably Hitch’s intention and the most likely explanation) she was blinded by love.

The ‘McGuffin’
The term ‘mcGuffin’ was invented by Hitchcock. He defined it as that which the characters in a story are in pursuit of, but the audience/readership know – as far as the overall narrative is concerned – is merely a trigger for action; a device for playing the story along.

What matters is how we see the characters react to the mcGuffin and its pursuit and how they react to each other and the circumstances of the story. Nevertheless, without the mcGuffin one could argue there would be no story. If the characters in Waiting for Godot were not waiting and waiting for him, what opportunity would there be for the interaction that makes the play?

Rings and things
Writers are squirrels or jackdaws: they bury a nut for a winter’s day; they horde something that gleams in the hope that one day it will fit as significantly into a narrative as Carlotta’s pendant. In piecing together and constructing the story of my novel Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa, research brought me to a prop that was both real and illusory and which was to usefully to add intrigue and mystery to the sub-plot of the narrative.

This was the Pushkin Ring. It existed. It was bestowed on the poet by his lover, the wife of the governor of Odessa. Pushkin wore it for the rest of his life, until he was shot in a dual. The ring eventually came into the keeping of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. During the Revolution it disappeared and has not been seen since.

I asked myself, what if the Pushkin Ring had come into the possession of one of my characters, or the character’s family; and what might possession of this lost national heirloom impact on the drama of the story? In addition, what if this priceless token of Russian heritage has fallen into Ukrainian hands, in turn those of a family as rent by division as Russia and Ukraine?

Prop power
The danger in introducing props is their power to dominate. A precious ring is one thing; that it belonged to a great poet and dramatist is another, raising the decibel count to a higher level; perhaps threatening to subvert the main plot. Monika’s story in Fair Game could very easily have sprung to the fore as the fate of the Pushkin Ring was followed through. If that had happened the scrutiny of relationships would have shifted to her warring family and away from her (more meaningful) relationship with the story’s heroine, Natasha.

Props as evidence
Illustrated at the beginning of this blog is the cover of The Ghosts of Izieu, a Penguin Reader aimed at the Pre-intermediate level of readership. It had a good run, but now that it is out of print I’ve gone back to the original and completely re-written it, and expanded it.

Elise is holidaying in France with her father and his new wife. Again, real life is imported in to fiction, the story of Jewish children in hiding during the 2nd World War and threatened, if caught, with deportation. By dint of a number of circumstances Elise steps into the past, becomes one of the children in hiding.

She is not perceived as a visitor from the future, but definitely one of them. No one will believe her claims that she is ‘other’, that she is from another existence. In this case it is props alone that seem likely to rescue her: the trainers she is wearing, and, on her T-shirt, a picture of Michael Jackson (1958-2009).

Structuring around props
Often if not invariably a ‘trigger’ (See Blog 7) is incorporated into the action and becomes a prop-player in the narrative, sometimes peripherally, sometimes centrally. Sign of the Swallow, my first novel for teen readers, is about three silver medallions forming a set, each bearing the sign of the swallow and part of an inscription, the meaning of which can only be deciphered once the medallions are brought together.

Young Tom is involved in numerous adventures, in Bruges (where he meets William Caxton) and Florence (where he meets the young Leonardo da Vinci) before the mystery of the medallions is solved.

On the penultimate page of Sign of the Swallow, the question is asked, ‘And the medallions, around which so much evil had gathered, what of them?’ The reader must find out how they came to ‘lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean’.

Back on the shelf
Unlike the Pushkin Ring, the medallions were an invention. Sometimes, however, what might be considered props integral to a story might eventually be discarded. My second novel, The Bull Leapers, was set in Minoan Crete, among its leading characters, Theseus.
So what about the labyrinth, the minotaur and the ball of string? Excised every one!

My aim in The Bull Leapers was an attempt at a historical reconstruction, to tell a story of the possible, to bring the myth into a credible historical context. Thus the labyrinth is not the complexity of the palace of Knossos, but a dance, executed in a courtyard of labyrinthine design. The minotaur is two things – the real bulls in the stadium, and Tauros, the evil son of Queen Pasiphae.

True, Ariadne appears and she and Theseus fall in love – history is not about making things dry and dull; but escape from the labyrinth is surviving the sport of the bulls.

Personal properties
Props serve as adjuncts or accoutrements of character. In Where Nobody Sees the feisty character of Petra, member of a group of travelling players, has her character affirmed by the powerful motorcycle she inherited from her Dad, while Luke, the boy she meets, has the character accoutrement (among others, of course) of the Japanese garden he has created.

These props come as the choices of the characters. They can also spring surprises and, fulfilling dramatic requirements, challenges to character. Talking in Whispers is set in Chile at the time of the seizure of power by the military. Andres’ father, a famous folk singer, has been snatched by Security. At the Santiago Stadium where prisoners are being dumped by the hundred, Andres has a camera thrust in to his hands as an American press photographer is seized and dragged away.

The film in that camera is a prop critical to the direction of the story and the life of Andres. It pitches him into profound danger, but it also gives him a purpose at a moment in the story of despair and confusion.

Waiting in the wings
Props are harvested and put to use according to need. They crop up, they pop up, you dig them up. Sometimes
they have lain in personal earth for many a year. In Talking in Whispers, the most important prop I yanked out of my childhood. Hand and string puppets were my hobby; and for a while I was a one-lad touring puppet theatre.

In Whispers, the twins Isa and Beto are on the road with their puppet theatre. They rescue and befriend Andres. Their puppets become the means of protest and resistance to the Junta, and the ‘star’ of their show, General Zuchero, in every detail a facsimile of the
leader of the military government, General Zuckerman (naturally not to be mistaken for the real life friend of Maggy Thatcher, General Pinochet):

Proud as a peacock, the General strutted into the sunlight, medals gleaming, moustache fluffed and groomed, helmet polished and plumed. In his right hand Zuckero wielded a toy sabre with a flag of Chile attached to the point.

The crowd responded to the appearance of Zuchereo with gasps of delight, and with laughter when he raised a hand to salute and knocked off his helmet flowing with llama wool dyed purple.
‘Shame on you, General.’ Immediately Isa replaced the helmet with a military peaked cap which fell straight over Zuckero’s eyes.
‘Arrest that cap at once,’ screeched the General in a nerve-jangling voice, while Isa’s lips hardly moved a fraction. ‘Put it in irons. It is a traitor to the Republic.’

Not only do the puppets speak from the heart of Isa and her brother, they begin to give courage and hope to the crowd; to see the possibility of not talking in whispers.

Gearing up the imagination
Props largely start out as clues, half-baked items that require working at – dusting down, polishing, rejigging, adapting, connecting with other props; and the exercise is driven by imagination. Lots of writers will have found in managing workshops that a useful opener is to get fellow scribblers to make something of a random selection of props: given a banana, a compass, a caged canary and a bottle of ketchup, no two people would write the same story.

One could at least predict that all or most of the stories produced would confirm, at least in part, the theory that all the world’s tales, whatever their source, revolve around a limited number of narratives: the props might differ, but certain key features can be relied on to recur; something to look at in Blog 9.

NOTES IN PASSING: Avatar
About half-way through Avatar’s two hour and 40 minutes duration, a few questions formed in my head: first, ‘Is this a load of bollocks?’ Is it just well-made, horrendously expensive, overhyped 3-D tosh? Was Andrew Pulner in his Guardian review fair to talk of ‘vacuous ecco-waffle’ and could Andrew Brown in his blog be excused for calling the film ‘a shameful travesty’, describing the storyline as ‘just gruyere, made up of nothing but cheese and holes’?

I mean, Brown is even disappointed at those aspects of the film which have won most accolades. He’s of the view that the 3-D effect is in some ways ‘even more two dimensional than normal films, since there is only one plane where anything is in focus’.

What interests me is why Pulner and Brown are in such a minority. True, most people who admire and are moved by Avatar are unlikely to join the growing legions of Avatards. Whatever the answer to my questions about bollocks and tosh, there has to be an explanation of the film’s amazing success.

For all Digital Domain’s technological virtuosity, the fact that some 60% of the movie is computer-generated, what is most striking is familiarity of content. In so many instances the film is a replay of what has gone before, on screen and in the real world, personal and public.

During the second half of Avatar I couldn’t get Peter Pan out of my head – all that fluff, all those flying lizards, but at the same time I was conscious of rather nastier experiences, in real life, the My Lai massacre of innocents in Vietnam, on screen, Apocalypse Now, Dances with Wolves; in literature, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, about the destruction by the white settlers of the Native Indian tribes.

I was even reminded, as the Na’vi warriors went for the gunships and the robot war machines with their bows and arrows, of the Polish cavalry charging the advancing German armoured divisions at the beginning of the 2nd World War.

Indeed, I couldn’t help thinking that director James Cameron might have found a copy of my teen novel, Justice of the Dagger, hanging on a string in the studio toilets: here, rain forest people are under attack from the Yellow Giants, the earthmovers sent in to harvest the timber and trash the tribes.

The familiarity aspect has also much to do with the personal. These Na’vi may be ten feet tall, blue-skinned with silver freckles, but they are humanoid in every way. They feel the same, sigh the same, kiss the same and they fight the same. In Andrew Pulner’s words, they have a similar weakness for ‘mystical rabbitings’.

Take your pick of all the resonances. There are so many, mingled and easily evoked and grasped, that no spectator, young or old, should feel excluded. The message, if it can be called that rather than a scribbling on a wall in single syllables, is of course salutary and in tune with environmental rectitude and the need for us to all hang together.

Maybe it shouldn’t ask any difficult questions (and Avatar certainly doesn’t), such as How would the Na’vi of Pandora survive the incursion of hard currency; at what point as barter became business, would the profit motive raise its ugly head; how would conflict be resolved, equality preserved?

Talking of equality, the film does not explain how this works in a society which has kings, princes and princesses as in every good fairy tale. When they are not flying their winged lizards, how are the Na’vi organising themselves on the ground?

The comparison with a rival sci-fi movie, also issued in 2009, is dramatic. The aliens in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (produced by Peter Jackson), are anything but amiable, and they are certainly not fancyable; in fact in close-up they make you want to run a mile. They suffer similar white-man treatment as in Avatar (the robots seem to have been constructed in the same workshop). One system of apartheid is laid uncomfortably on an older one. There is no epiphany, no easy resolution and no comforting closure.

Avatar offers, simplistically, all three. That may answer the question, Why so popular? And explain the movie’s Golden Globe awards and the reports that the Chinese have renamed a mountain in honour of what Tom Huddlestone in Time Out considers might signal a ‘new dawn of politically engaged sci-fi and horror’. So why do I keep thinking of Fairy Gossamer?

RECENT POSTINGS ON SCRIBd.com

Piero della Francesca: A Journey Through His Art. Article originally published in The Times expressing the pleasure at seeing the artist’s work in Tuscan and Umbrian contexts.
The Writing on the Wall. Short story set at the time of the Palestinian Intifada.
Last Flight of the Heyford K6875. Update of an article published in Derbyshire Life, describing the last moments of an RAF Heyford caught in a blinding storm in the Dark Peak, Derbyshire; among the crew, my Uncle Jim Barker, recently married. There is as yet no memorial to the many aircraftmen killed in the Peak District before, during and after the 2nd World War.
History’s Neglected Women. Among the 19th century radicals who fought for the liberty of the press were several women of outstanding ability and courage; among them, Eliza Sharples, nicknamed Isis and The Lady of the Rotunda.
In Praise of Women’s Soccer. It is a little-known fact that once women’s soccer was immensely popular, matches drawing big crowds – until, on 5 December 1921, the Football Association banned women from playing on FA-affiliated grounds. It took decades for women’s soccer to recover from this cataclysmic decision.
Representing Realities: An Overview of News Framing. The text of a lecture delivered at the University of Keio, Tokyo, and published in the Keio Communications Review (No.29, 2007); this posting dedicated to the author’s media studies students over the years.

My thanks for reading this; a punt if not a coracle, so the next river jaunt will be March. Barring an election, a writerly topic will be Codes of Narrative.
JIM

TRIGGERS IN STORY-TELLING

2010-01-10T02:02:00.000-08:00

WATSONWORKSblog
No. 7, January 2010

TRIGGERS & PROPS
Their role in the making of stories

Part 1: Triggers as galvanisers

Researching for stories tends, in my experience, to resemble beachcombing; or the curiosity of the jackdaw, targeting the thing that gleams, the item that comes as a surprise, the crumb of information you’d rarely find in history books.

A trigger does what it says on the label: it prompts an idea, a situation, an action or reaction. If a story has stalled, is suffering hesitation as to what is to happen next, a trigger can set it in motion again. This can be an object or an occurrence in the real world, or something somebody says.

When I was preparing a book of short stories, Make Your Move, and Other Stories, I was passing a classroom in the college where I taught and overheard a snatch of conversation: this was about how the speaker’s boyfriend had been for an expensive tattoo – and the tattooist had miss-spelt a significant word and was both furious and disheartened.

This triggered a story, The Great Tattoo, in which admission to the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels is conditional upon the emblazoning of HELL’S ANGELS FOR EVER across the applicant’s chest. With the brethren assembled, Big Steve proudly unveils his mastertext, wrought in ‘imperial purple inside regal red with royal gold edging’ and complete with ‘acanthus leaf trimmings’ and ‘a bayleaf cluster on the final R’.

The revelation that Oaky, ‘the artist of the needle’, has spelt it ANGLES instead of ANGELS causes mirth and ridicule, and plunges Big Steve into a pool of despond from which his level-headed girlfriend Louise must formulate a rescue.

In researching for my novel The Freedom Tree, set during the Spanish Civil War, I came across children’s drawings of the Fascist bombing of Madrid, these curiously in the keeping of a museum in Wales. Evidence of this kind has a galvanising effect, as did the shock of seeing the exhibits in the museum adjoining the Jewish Cemetery in Prague, and described in Ticket to Prague.

Here were drawings, paintings and hand-written and illustrated letters by children: ‘Nothing nightmarish about that, except that these are the last marks made on earth by Jewish children taken from the fortress of Terezin; before their journey to the railway station’, and the gas chambers.

You are stunned, silenced; and then you do what you have to do as a writer, come to terms with such things by writing about them. You note the details; you use them: ‘Ilona Weissova. Born 6th March 1932. Taken to the camps. Died 15th May 1944.’ You hope that some of your grief or concern or anger will rub off on the reader.

‘FRONT TOWARD THE ENEMY’
These words proved a haunting message for me as I researched and wrote No Surrender, which I later dramatised in four parts for BBC radio. This novel is set during civil war in Angola, West Africa (scene of the recent attack on the bus carrying the Togo soccer team). In my story, the rebel forces of Jonas Savimbi, supported at that time by certain western countries who should have known better, terrorised the country.

A photo I came across showed the above words engraved on a fragment of an exploded footmine, the type designed to disable rather than kill. Who was the enemy the inscription was referring to? – the farmer in his field; the child playing in an open space? Who ordered its manufacture, who made it, who sold it, and who buried it in field or furrow? The novel opens with a sudden scream from the bush: a mine has found another enemy:

Until now there’s been singing, and the women’s voices have been answered by the tune of the cicadas and answered again deep in the bush by the frog battalions along the river banks.
‘Ma-lenga! Ma-lenga!’ The crowd of women opens for her. Tomas checks her progress for an instant. His face is screwed up, one hand half-covering his eyes.
‘It’s Dedo!’
Stood on a mine.

Events, present or past, are the chief triggers to whole stories or parts of them. The military coup d’etat in Chile and the killing of Allende, the country’s elected president, triggered me into pouring much of the next two years of my life into writing Talking in Whispers.

The main event, the seizure of power by the Junta led by that friend of Margaret Thatcher, General Pinochet, was prologue to a welter of triggers as tyranny took over the country. Thousands were arrested, hundreds executed. The folk singer in the story of Whispers, Juan Larreta, is loosely modelled on the real-life Chilean entertainer, Victor Jara; and they meet a similar fate.

In my latest story, Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa, there are parallels between the real-life journalist, Georgi Gongadze, and the novel’s campaigning journalist Victor Kaltsov, father of the story's footballing heroine, Natasha; though here the stories diverge.

The fate of Gongadze – another journalist brutally murdered for attempting to publicise the truth about a corrupt government – caused in me a haunting that brought pen to paper. Thus, triggered into action, the writer becomes the inveterate, the obsessive beachcomber, digging out facts, using every means of exploration possible; sampling those facts, spreading them across a mental table in search of meaningful connections, forging them into a readable progression.

The above is a personal account: other authors are invited to check through their own galaxy of triggers, and maybe share these in a future Watsonworksblog. (email: Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk).

Next time, a visit to, and dusting down, of the Props Room, packed with odds and ends awaiting animation into a narrative: to be dramatised, symbolised, mystified.

Notes in passing…
The walk over Seaford Head to Cuckmere Haven was our all-time favourite. I like to think my wife Kitty is still by my side as I pause for breath, gaze back towards Newhaven, then turn as the Head flattens out and offers a first glimpse of the magnificent Seven Sisters to the east. It’s a walk now tinged with sadness, yet inspiring and invigorating.

I thought I knew every inch of it until, on a recent visit, I discovered that a bit of history had come back to life. In a meadow above the Cuckmere, and a hundred yards from the cottages picturesquely teetering on the edge of the cliff, I spotted a pyramid of flint. This was a newly-built memorial to an incident that happened, on the spot, during the 2nd World War.

The plaque on the memorial describes how a troop of Canadian soldiers, fresh from home, arrived and set up camp in the meadow. A local man, Leslie Edwards, walking his dog, watched the arrivals with consternation. This estuary, he knew, was a regular route of German fighter planes.

The Canadians, he feared, would be a sitting-target. Mr. Edwards sought out the officer in command, explained the risk to him and his men. His warning was ignored. Pursuing inland targets, Messerschmitts had a field day. Returning from their mission, they destroyed the Canadian camp. In the nearby cottage, the officer was killed as he shaved.

Such was the grief and compassion of Leslie Edwards that every Remembrance Day till his death in 2004, he laid a wreath of poppies on the spot. The memorial was built to commemorate a terrible and largely forgotten event of war; and to record a situation when an officer ignored the advice – of Corporal Leslie Edwards (1920-2004), either because he knew better or could not be bothered to shift camp on the advice of a corporal.

Talking of triggers, this story prompted me to scribble my own tribute:

A TRUTH TOO LATE

The meadow above Cuckmere
Behind the cottages standing tip-toe
Above the sea, is tranquil now.
Since I came last a pyramid of flint
Draws the visitor to a sad inscription.

The phoney war was over; Britain
Was occupied by friendly allies
Far from home, innocent as dew.

Walking the Head from Seaford,
A local man watched as the Canadians
Pitched their tents against a vista
To write home about – the winding estuary,
The Seven Sisters dipping chalk-white feet
Into shingle and shallow sea; aglow.

The walker paused, filled with concern,
Ventured to approach the busy officer
With this warning: ‘Sir, this site is dangerous,
Exposed.’ He pointed to the valley, ‘The enemy
Fly this way, there’s no defence,’
En route to Alfriston or lordly Charleston.
‘Your men will be sitting ducks!’

The officer had made secure his quarters,
Cottage residence, idyll over sky and sea,
Something of a treat for his men, conspicuous
In bell-tents on the sloping meadow, soothed
By the sigh of tide on pebble shore, unaware
Their destiny was target practice.

The Messerschmitts arrived out of the blue
Forging on to their destination; then recalled
No doubt with amazement and relish
The sleeping tents below; swiftly about-turned,
Headed back through their own slipstreams
And served the Canadians their last breakfast.

As for the officer who knew best
He was caught at his shaving mirror
And blown like his men into oblivion.

Nothing remained but the conscience
Of the local man, haunted by doubts –
Whether he had spoken strongly enough;
Should have taken the matter further and higher,
Had shrugged too soon, let other matters
Distract him from one more tale of war.

Though no one asked him, he did what he could
To assuage his regrets; each Remembrance Day
Brought poppies for the sons and brothers
Who came to war and never fired a shot;
Confirming in a bitter way that the prospect
Over Cuckmere Haven is a view to die for.

March 2009.

CIAO!
Jim.

LAST FLIGHT OF THE HEYFORD K6874

2009-12-12T01:12:00.000-08:00

PEAKLAND - NOT ALWAYS AN IDYLL...

SOMETIMES A TRAGEDY AWAITS...

Watsonworks Blog 6, December 2009

AUTHOR IN SEARCH OF A TRUE FAMILY STORY...

The most beautiful countryside often hides the darkest of secrets; and, having no memory of its own, is oblivious to them and utterly indifferent. Such were my thoughts on my visit to Edale in the heart of Derbyshire’s Peak District. Here, decades before, my Uncle, along with five other RAF crew members, met his death as their Handley Page Heyford K6875, an all-metal biplane- bomber, hit the hillside above the village.
My visit was an exploration – looking for the site of the crash; a homage to lives cut tragically short; and an attempt to restore a faded piece of my family’s history.

Newly-married
A picture of my uncle – Sergeant Jim Barker, aged 26, in his pilot’s uniform, sits on my bookshelf: a good-looking man with a bright career ahead of him; and next to it is a photo of his newly-married wife, Muriel. She was my aunt, my mother’s sister, and the effect on her of Jim’s death in a vicious summer storm amid the dark peaks was to be devastating. In her grief she lost the baby she was carrying.
Though she never re-married, she made a life for herself and was a precious friend to me till her death in 1997 – when at last I felt free to satisfy my curiosity about the exact spot where the Heyford met its end.
She had spoken little of Jim; and indeed most of what I learnt about the Edale crash was gleaned from a slim but invaluable volume Dark Peak Aircraft Wrecks 1 (UK: Wharncliffe Publishing, 1990; numerous editions) by Ron Collier and Roni Wilkinson.

On a bright, clear October day I descended into the valley from Rushup Edge, itself unnervingly steep. Edale is benign but running above it to the north is Broadlee Bank Tor; beyond that, Edale Moor at 1981 feet and looming menacingly beyond that, Kinder Scout, well over 2000 feet.
On the 22 July 1937 the Heyford, of 166 Squadron, was making a navigational night flight from Leconfield. It was piloted by Sergeant Newton W. Baker from Thetford in Norfolk. The co-pilot was Sergeant Charles Macmillan from London; the wireless operator was Aircraftman Harry Grey from Aberdare. Also on board were Aircraftmen Eric McDonald and Ernest Musker – both from Liverpool. – and my Uncle, James W. Barker of Horwich in Lancashire.

Doubtful design
The twin-engined Handley Page Heyford was a potential death-box. Collier and Wilkinson describe it as ‘ungainly’ and ‘ obsolete’. In December 1936 all but one of a flight of seven Heyfords in 102 Squadron, on a flight to Finningley from Northern Ireland, crossing the Pennines in bad weather, crashed or force-landed. Three crew members died.

Collier and Wilkinson write: ‘The biplane bomber’s unconventional fixing of the fuselage to the upper wing, leaving a gap between it and the lower wing, gave the Heyford an ungainly appearance. The resulting distance from the ground of the cockpit did little to aid the pilot’s view when landing’.

What was arguably worse was the fact that the Heyford had an open cockpit, so that in bad weather the pilot was as reliant on the navigational skills of the co-pilot as on his own capacity to see though mist and darkness. Here then was a tragedy in the making and it is amazing, in retrospect, that the RAF, having lost six out of seven Heyfords in December 1936, did not ground the rest.

Searching for the spot
At the Edale Visitor Centre I asked if there was any record of the crash on 22 July 1937. At least staff were aware of this crash and many others in the dark peaks. ‘I want to find the exact spot where the plane hit the hillside,’ I said. There was a shaking of heads; after all, nature takes all things to itself and the crash had occurred decades before. I was pointed in the direction of Broadlee Bank Tor; and warned, ‘It’s a steep climb’.

Too impatient to find a path that would take me to the crest of the Tor, I made a direct ascent, attempting to guess the flight path of the Heyford. In the Collier-Wilkinson book there are pictures of the site of the crash. A dry-stone wall had been destroyed; and beyond, in the photo, very faintly, was the outline of distant hills. These, I guessed, were situated to the west of Rushup Edge.

On the night of 22 July the charms of Edale were obscured by darkness and storm. The Heyford was some 13 miles off course, either flying along the valley from the direction of the Ladybower Reservoire or more likely passing close to the top of Mam Tor to the south; certainly dipping in to Edale and heading towards the village.

‘I looked out through the window and saw…’
Collier and Wilkinson quote a Mr. W. Dearnaly who lived near to the pub in Edale, the Old Nag’s Head. He was on his way to bed around 11pm when he heard the sound of an aero engine, low-flying: ‘It was so unusual that I looked through the window and saw a huge machine just skimming over the top of Rushup Edge, heading for Kinder Scout.’

These were the days before radar, and it can only be guessed whether the crew of the Heyford were aware, until the very last minute, that they were flying off course. According to Collier and Wilkinson, and to press reports after the accident, the crew were letting off flares; later, official reports asserted that this was not the case . Accident investigator Squadron Leader Hugh Wake found, ‘having interviewed the most reliable witnesses... the engines were running normally at the time of the accident’. The plane ‘did not circle round or fire any lights…’

Bearing in mind the difficulty the pilot had of gauging the ground, Sergeant Baker deserved high marks: with a little bit of luck, he might well have dragged the plane clear of the ridge which awaited him. My own ascent was more of a climb than a hike. The side of Broadlee Bank Tor is frighteningly steep and in places the slopes cave in as if there had once been excavations here. At the same time, it tempts with false summits. The Heyford was very probably only a matter of 50 feet from open sky. Alas, the Dark Peak was to show no mercy. One wing of the Heyford struck ground, precipitating the aircraft into the hillside.

Hands held up to their faces
Instantly the valley of Edale was lit by a fireball of such intensity there was no chance of the crew surviving. The bodies of the six airmen, disfigured beyond recognition, nevertheless retained the defensive shape of their last living moments: some of the crew were found to be crouched, with their hands held up to protect their faces.

I scoured the high ground attempting to guess the exact spot of the crash. At one of the ‘false crests’ I found a wall, demolished as much by wind and weather as by any possible collision with a crashing aircraft, but it did resemble the photograph in Dark Peak Aircraft Wrecks 1 in which Rushup Edge across the valley was framed by the rough curve of tumbled stone.

At that time in Edale there was a temporary camp for the unemployed. Edward Beeley, committee member of the Hyde League of Social Services, witnessing the crash and the flames that engulfed the Heyford, called for volunteers. Collier and Wilkinson quote him as saying, ‘Five men went with me and we took with us a stretcher and an ambulance box. We did not follow the ordinary path but made a beeline up the mountainside and it was hard going’.

It took them almost an hour before they reached the wreck, and they soon saw ‘that the occupants were past our aid’. What Edward Beeley and his team of would-be rescuers saw ‘was a terrible sight… and I hope I never see anything like it again’. Collier and Wilkinson write, ‘With the first light of dawn the appalling nature of the crash could be fully appreciated. The Heyford had struck the slope some 50 feet below the summit of the hill, ripping through the undergrowth, gouging a pit in the black earth, before smashing through a dry stone wall’.

In his book, Peakland Air Crashes: The North (UK: Landmark Publishing, 2006), Pat Cunningham describes the Heyford as capable of ‘a speedy 143 mph (124 knots)’. It had earned the nickname ‘Express’ and been ‘good value as a crew trainer’. It was ‘stable and pleasant to fly. But like all aircraft it needed airspace, and when this was denied it, the results could be catastrophic; as they were for the occupants of No 166 Squadron’s K6875 on 22 July 1937’.

Lucky for one
While all on board the Heyford died instantly, it could be said that there was one lucky survivor. He was Pilot Officer D.M. Strong. When K6875 had been allocated to 166 Squadron it was Officer Strong whose duty it was to fly it, and to keep an inventory of all equipment on the plane.
Collier and Wilkinson explain, ‘Although an officer, he [Strong] normally flew as second pilot to Sergeant Baker, however having crossed swords with the flight commander, he had been given other duties’.
His place on K6875 was taken by Sergeant McMillan. Pilot Officer Strong survived the war, becoming an air commodore: who knows what advancement the others may have won for themselves in the war ahead if the Heyford had managed, in the swirling storm, to skim instead of strike Broadlee Bank Tor.

‘…a slight error’.
After my Aunt’s death I found among her possessions a green canvas wallet in which she had preserved newspaper cuttings reporting the crash and letters of commiseration. In a letter to Muriel Barker dated 29th July 1937, Squadron-Leader Wake, the accident assessor, was at pains to correct what he seemed to see as press misreporting: ‘I blame no one for the accident which was due solely to the aircraft being slightly off its course and over high ground. Had it been on its course it would have been clear of the hills. This slight error could easily occur in conditions of low cloud, and, as we know well, happens frequently to all of us.’

Pat Cunningham explains how easy it was in those days for an aircraft to shift off course: ‘And if it is hard to credit that trained, or even trainee, aircrew could stray so far off track, it has to be remembered that they had few of the modern aids which now more nearly make air navigation a precise science…should an aircraft stray just one degree from its compass course, then having travelled sixty miles it will be a full mile from its planned track’.

Bureaucracy: a callous edge
Whether Squadron-Leader Wake’s assurances set my Aunt’s mind at rest must be left to conjecture; but other, more official letters from the RAF, necessary as I’m sure they were, must have been particularly distressing. One letter, dated 12 August 1937, dealt with such mundanity as ‘preferential charges’, that is ‘Mess bill, charges for lost RAF equipment etc.’.

I can only guess at my Aunt’s reaction to the sentence, ‘If you would let us have back your husband’s great-coat as soon as possible, these charges will be very small’. On 15 January 1938, a Mr. A.W. Donald, for the Director of Accounts, wrote: ‘514997. Sgt. Barker, J.W. (Deceased). Madam, I am directed to inform you that a sum of £26.17.9 is held by this Department in respect of the estate of your husband…I am, Madam, Your obedient Servant.’

Of more comfort to her was a letter of sympathy from the mayor of Beverley, C.H. Burden. ‘We remember,’ he wrote on the day after the Heyford crash, ‘that your late husband died on duty, and we are grateful to those who bravely face dangers to fit themselves for our defence’.

No commemoration
Many of us, in travelling through France or Belgium, have paused at the war cemeteries, so lovingly preserved over the years. Generations have been able to walk the ranks of white headstones, simply inscribed, and muse on the sacrifice of so many, so young; and upon the lives that they might have led.

Yet as I searched the high ground above Edale, cooled after my climb by the October wind whistling across the valley, finding nothing, I felt an acute sense of vicarious grief and loss – that nothing remained, not even a white headstone buried in the heather. I felt the victims of the K6875 crash deserved better; indeed deserved something to commemorate them. Could it be, though, that to pay material tribute would be to saddle the Dark Peak with a daunting reputation, of an aircraft graveyard, while at the same time casting a quizzical historical spotlight on the lesser glories of the RAF?

After all, within the area of a few short miles disaster stood in wait for the Swordfish P4223 at Heydon Head, January 1940 and four days before Christmas, the Hampden X 3154 at Chapel-en-le-Frith. 1941 proved a particularly bad year for Dark Peak crashes – in January the Blenheim Z 5746 at Ox Stones, in February the Wellington Z 8491 at White Edge Moor, in July at Crowden Tower – Edale once more – the Blenheim 1V Z5870, in August the Defiant N3378 at Bleaklow Stones and in December the Botha W5103 at Round Hill.

‘Is there anywhere in the High Peak,’ I asked at the Edale Visitor Centre, ‘where the deaths and injuries, and the colossal number of crashes that took place, are officially recorded? Is there a plaque to acknowledge the secrets hoarded in this lovely landscape?’ Apparently there is not; and in my view there should be; in addition, that is, to the books written by Ron Collier with Roni Wilkinson and Pat Cunningham which serve as impressive monuments to the dead as well as providing invaluable documentary evidence.

At the very least, one might expect a permanent tribute in good Derbyshire limestone registering all the aircraft that crashed on the Dark Peak and the names of those who died in the cause of King and Country.

Shared grief
What is beyond commemoration and strains even at the powers of record is the effect such tragically early deaths had on those left behind. My Aunt was far from alone in her grief. She had kept a very special letter, written only five days after the crash of the Heyford. This was from someone she did not know – a Mrs.Grace Ramsden of Huddersfield. Her daughter had been married only eleven weeks to Sergeant Pilot Wilkinson when he had met his death in an RAF plane crash in the Lake District.

In reaching out to comfort Jim Barker’s widow, Mrs. Ramsden perhaps said it all; for despite the loving comfort and support Dad and Mum could offer their grieving daughter, ‘only time and her own brave spirit can soften the blow’. A PS is added: ‘My daughter has been going to write to you, but didn’t know how she could comfort you, being so much in need of comfort herself’.

How such words resonate down the years, stirring thoughts of what might have been. Eventually on Broadlee Bank Tor I gave up my search. I sat on the broken wall that might or might not have been victim of the Heyford’s last moments so many decades ago. In the valley below a group of hikers was setting out on the Pennine Way. The Old Nag’s Head Inn, proud of its location in the ‘Switzerland of the Peak District’, promised another century of the finest ales; and the breeze up from Edale seemed to whisper ‘Who remembers? – not I!’

Postscript: the story continues
In 2002 Derbyshire Life magazine published a version of this article. Suddenly my search for the site of the crash of the Heyford was about to meet with success. Mr. Douglas Rowland of Chapel-en-le-Frith, having read my piece, wrote informing me that as a teenager, he, with his brothers, had visited the site of the crash the day after it had happened.

He had rescued from the wreckage the plane’s brass data plate, the Engine Particulars of the Rolls Royce Kestrel Series V1. It was in perfect condition, dutifully cared for over the years by Douglas, though the lower edge of the plate had been burnt into holes as a result of the intensity of the fire that destroyed the Heyford. Douglas kindly offered to take me to the site of the crash the next time I was in Derbyshire. On a bright June day the two of us set off from above the Information Centre in Edale to pay our respects.

Doug was turned 83 (and has now reached 90), and the route up to Broadlee Bank Tor was steep enough to tax a fit and energetic 20 year old, but with many stops for breath on the ascent, we reached the still-broken wall and the site where K6875 met its end.

‘Memories’
There was indeed a kind of memorial – a circle of roughly assembled stones, by unknown hands. There was a mesh of metal parts and lodged among these were two crucifixes, one white, with the word ‘Memories’ inscribed on it. As to what happened here, who was killed on that fateful stormy night, or who had left these sad traces of anguish and respect, there was no explanation.

It turned out that on my first visit to Broadlee Bank Tor I was only a couple of hundred yards away from the scene of the crash. Across from us, as Doug and I savoured the splendour of Edale, we could see Rushup Edge over which the Heyford probably flew, 13 miles off course, its crew either desperately attempting to establish the plane’s location or blissfully unaware of the fate that awaited them.

A coming home
After descending from Broadlee Bank, Douglas and I rested our weary feet in the Old Nag’s Head. We surmised on how many people’s lives had been altered for ever as a result of a ‘sight error’. On my return home to Kent I found a small parcel awaiting me, mailed from Chapel-en-le-Frith. Douglas had made me a gift of the precious data plate of the Heyford 6875.

Framed, it now hangs in pride of place, as polished as if it has only just been fitted – except for the evidence of the flames that demolished the plane and its crew. Beside it is the photograph of my Uncle Jim Barker, as real to me as though he had penned this narrative himself.

Recommended reading
Ron Collier followed up Dark Peak Aircraft Wrecks 1 with a supplementary volume, Wrecks 2. Pat Cunningham’s Peakland Air Crashes: the North is impressively comprehensive and includes a section on German aircraft crashes in the region, plus a couple of pages dedicated to answering the question, Do Ghostly Aviators Haunt Peakland’s Moors?, which he answers with deepest scepticism, rejecting ‘this lurid sentimentalism that conjures up spectral aviators’.

A retired aviator himself, Cunningham concludes by quoting Peter Jackson, 36-years a part-time Peakland ranger and for 27 years a mountain rescue team volunteer: ‘the Peakland moors encompass many a truly beautiful mystique; but not a single mystery.’ Walkers interested in visiting the scenes of Peakland crashes will find a trusty guide in John Merrill’s Dark Peak Aircraft Walks (Walk & Write Publications, 2002).

Jim's next blog, January: HAPPY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!

WATSONWORKSBLOG Number 5, 10 November 2009

2009-11-10T02:12:00.000-08:00

IN PRAISE OF WOMEN’S SOCCER
And some little-known facts

In researching for my novel Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa (Spire Publishing, ISBN 1-897312-72-5), linking the tribulations of women’s soccer with human rights abuses in Ukraine, I was startled to discover that once upon a time in Britain women’s soccer was all the rage and drew prodigious crowds. There were even professional women players.
At Goodison Park, Everton, in 1921, Dick Kerr’s Ladies FC attracted a crowd of over 50,000. On 5 December in the same year – cataclysm: the Football Association (all male, of course) suddenly put women’s soccer to sleep for a generation, banning women from playing on FA-affiliated grounds; their explanation, that ‘the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged’.

Doldrum decades
In a Guardian article, ‘When women ruled the pitch’ (10 September 2009), Anna Kessel writes, ‘It is hard not to suspect this was, at least in part, a defensive move made by male officials who felt threatened by the success of their female counterparts’.
She goes on, ‘And so the women’s game was allowed to wither on the vine, missing out on half a century of development while the men’s leagues established even stronger roots’.
Though the ban was suspended in 1971, women’s soccer has continued to be one of the cinderellas of British sport, inadequately funded, largely neglected by the media; yet guess what? Statistics indicate that football is the premier sporting interest of women and girls.
Take a closer look at the sporting scene and you discover that women’s soccer has not only advanced in public interest, the FA has worked to remedy its ban and its neglect. As Anna Kessel points out, if the FA ‘is culpable for invoking that highly damaging ban in 1921, it has, since assuming responsibility for the women’s game in 1993, made significant inroads and investment into promoting it’.

The extent of women’s soccer in the UK is startling. A survey conducted in 2008 identified 1600 women’s teams in England, while girls’ teams numbered 4,800, a doubling of the number in the previous year. The FA Women’s Club Directory cites over 30 prime status clubs, from Arsenal to the Bristol Academy, from the Lincoln Ladies to the Millwall Lionesses.
In addition there are more than 30 Centres of Excellence operating in the major cities but also in towns such as Milton Keynes and Northampton, and areas such as north Yorkshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Somerset.
Predictably America leads the way in women’s soccer, at least in terms of cash and enterprise. Cyberspace is abuzz with footballing websites such as Soccer America (w.soccerameerica.com), Women’s Soccer World (womensoccer.com) and in the UK, When Saturday Comes (wsc.co.uk).

Quality on the pitch
Anyone who watched England’s impressive performance in the Euro final against Germany in September would confirm that women’s soccer is ready to compete, for skill, tactics, speed and commitment at the highest level.
True, the German team beat England convincingly, but they are a squad – and have been for many years – that have proved pretty well invincible, characterised in their play by vision, pace and finishing power that matches anything to be seen in the men’s game. However, when it comes to remuneration, an England player earns in a year what an average male player in the football league earns in a week.
The England women’s team, under their manager Hope Powell, goes from strength to strength, but back in the sticks clubs face penury and in some cases – like Bristol City and Fulham Ladies – closure.

Gender fixation
The obstacles to the progress of women’s soccer are as much cultural as financial, each tending to undermine the other. By tradition, football has been regarded as a sport for men. Hockey and lacrosse are still the sports of choice for girls in secondary education.
The editor of a publishing firm I submitted Fair Game to was of the opinion that, surely, if the subject was football, the book should be aimed at boy readers; thus casting a woman footballer as the key protagonist of the story was simply to have mixed my genders if not my metaphors. This response to a work of fiction matched stereotypical thinking about women’s soccer in the real world.
In Fair Game Natasha’s aspirations to play soccer for her country are frustrated not by lack of ability or determination, but by factors beyond her control, and chiefly off the pitch.
Of course gender remains a crucial feature in the narrative but aligned with it is the sense that football mirrors and encompasses the struggles of life itself, the challenges, the disappointments, the joy, the let-downs, not to mention the bruises, the sprained ankles and the slagging off, in reality as much a part of the women’s game as of the men’s.

The price of free speech
The decision to set the novel in Ukraine was influenced by that country’s human rights record: it was ranked in 2004 by Reporters Without Borders as second only to Columbia as the most dangerous country for journalists, notorious for the beatings up in stairwells of editors, photographers and reporters; and the murder in 2000 of Georgi Gongadze, an online correspondent whose delving into state corruption was leading him to the heart of government.
Ukraine’s is an amazing history – occupied by foreign invaders over centuries, subject to Stalinist tyranny during the 1930s only to be savagely overrun by the Nazi war machine during the 2nd World War.
It is a country ‘of which we know little’ but it deserves better in its struggle to emerge from the shadow of Soviet rule and Iron Curtain mentality.

Search for identity
Among the key tasks of fiction writers is the shaping of the identities of their characters within the contexts that surround them. Those contexts too may be in search of identity. As a nation, Ukraine has been described as a ‘land without borders’, in the post-Soviet era, a country struggling to define itself.
Yet one of Ukraine’s most positive identifiers is its record as a footballing nation, typified by Shakhtar Donetsk or, most famously, Dynamo Kyiv. Here again, however, tragedy is likely to be the spectre in the wings. Dynamo’s website records a tournament which took place in the city during the German occupation.
Professional teams from Hungary and Germany were ferried in by the Nazis with a view to demonstrating that they were as superior with the football as with the gun. Probably believing that for once they were being granted an even playing field, Dynamo beat their German opposition.
They were not to be feted or forgiven: the winning side was arrested and duly despatched to a concentration camp where several were executed.
Of course in the 21st century Natasha and the Under 19s Ukraine women’s squad do not have to face that kind of horror; but the obstacles to achieving fair play as contrasted with the cynicism and malice of fair game, are real and formidable. They demand great resolution, courage and – yes, teamwork, to overcome them. Women footballers in Britain might well say Amen to that.

Recommended reading
Beheaded: The Killing of a Journalist by J.V. Koshiw (Artemia Press, 2003). The story of the life and death of Georgi Gongadze in 2000 and of the so-termed Melnychenko Tapes.
The Damned United by David Peace (Faber, 2006), featuring the stormy reign of Brian Clough during his 45 days as manager of Leeds United. A humdinger of a novel.