WATSONWORKS Blog 13

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).


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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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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!