A Writer’s Notebook
No. 42, September 2013
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Friends and contributorsCONTENTS
Notes in passing
Laura Solomon, extract from ‘Imitation of Life’
Poems of place (19)
Quote of the Month
The Ned Baslow Letters
Kindle editions 1
Editorial
It’s
been a summer break worth taking. Out came the electric fan, dusted down after
years of inactivity in the loft; and there was scarcely a day when the
temperature dropped below 70 degrees. In this Kentish neck of the woods a few
prayers went up for rain, in part for the gardens, but also for a few minutes respite
from the noise of kids on holiday: can’t help mentioning it!
In
this issue the team is delighted to print the first of extracts from Laura
Solomon’s 2009 novel, published by Solidus, An
Imitation of Life, with a very singular theme. Many thanks, Laura.
These
blogs have welcomed contributions from other writers – novel extracts, short
stories, poems and reviews; plus correspondence. We look forward to more,
including those pieces tucked away in a drawer in face of the usual publishers’
mantra, ‘We don’t think there’s a market for this kind of work’.
E-books
have opened up ‘this kind of work’ and the internet has facilitated as never
before individual author enterprise in terms of that ‘market’.
The rest of Blog 42 speaks for
itself.
Notes in passing
No Pasarán, No
Surrender, No what?
What
do these expressions refer to and do their meanings change according to who is
using them? It’s confusing and sometimes disturbing to see how such exclamations
are appropriated. So, No Pasarán –
good, inviting us to unite with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War,
and to remember La Pasionara, Dolores Ibárruri, to such inspiring effect.
In a spirit of approval, I entitled a novel
set in the Angolan civil war No Surrender,
little realising at the time that such a call to arms, or more literally
defence against a usually mightier force, was a watchword familiar in the
history of Northern Ireland.
Derry/Londonderry
But
which party in the sectarian divide does the expression belong to, the
Catholics or the Protestants, or has it been used in turn according to changing
circumstances? The phrase might well have originated in Derry (the Catholic
name for it) or Londonderry (the Protestant tag). The apprentice boys of
Londonderry shut the city gates in face of the Catholic troops of King James
11, this prior to a long and devastating siege (April-July 1689): No Surrender.
Circumstances change. William of
Orange brought victory to the Protestant cause and the dominance of
Protestantism led to exploitation and inequality. The Catholics of Derry
launched fight-back: No Surrender! They had already been winning the
demographic stakes. All at once some Protestants felt surrounded: No Surrender;
while in the Bogside the Catholics erected a wall declaring YOU ARE ENTERING
FREE DERRY. No Surrender?
In the recent riots over marches,
re-directed marches or banned marches in Belfast, the summons to unity appeared
on the placards of Protestant protesters.
Is it about freedom, territory or
creed? The worry is that one of these days I’ll be holding a banner or a
placard declaring No Surrender and find myself in a protest I have no wish to
subscribe to. The danger for the open-minded concerning the realms of liberty
is to end up backing the wrong side, often without realising it.
Taking the rubber to
history
For
the moment No Surrender belongs to the protestors in Egypt in face of military
action; but the same placard might appropriately serve those defending a
secular democracy against an Islamic takeover.
Of course there’s appropriation and
erasure. An example of erasure (or attempted erasure) from Nottingham catches
the eye. When the Conservatives won the county elections in 2009, an
information board commemorating the local volunteers who fought and died in
Spain with the International Brigade was removed. In a sense, the Right were
reasserting their version of ‘the right’ reading of history while marginalising
alternative interpretations.
In Madrid, meanwhile, erasure is
threatened. The Complutense University has been instructed by the Madrid high
court to remove a memorial to the International Brigade on the ground that it
was erected without planning permission. The university authorities claim they
twice applied for permission but the council, dominated by the Right wing
Popular Party, never replied: old story, old tactics.
What is being erased, of course, is
not so much the memorial as the memory: history never stops being re-written.
At the time of writing, petitions and protests were under way to preserve the
memorial where it belongs.
The better news is that the Tories’
attempt to displace the memory of the sacrifices of the Nottingham brigaders
was reversed when Labour regained control of the council in May 2013: No
Pasarán!
Laura Solomon: An
Imitation of Life (Solidus, 2009)
Extract 1 of her
novel, published by kind permission of the author.
I was
the black cloud that had entered their formerly sunny sky, the guest who casts
a dark spell upon the wedding party, the evil fairy who arrives, uninvited, to
the christening. I was the devil's walking parody on all two footed things.
I
was born too soon. Mine was not an easy birth. Nature failed to take its
course. From my mother's womb I was untimely ripped, torn out of the darkness
and thrust into the light. I was six weeks premature but I had no need for an
incubator. I was gigantic, clocking in at a heaving twenty-one pounds six
ounces. I was triple the size of your average bubba, a great flubbering lump of
an infant, who lay screeching upon her mother's stomach, fists slamming down
into her flesh, tiny nails clawing across her skin.
I
was torn from the womb complete with fingernails, toenails, a healthy head of
hair and a good set of gnashers. My canine teeth were abnormally large and hung
down over my lower lip. My eyes were not blue like the eyes of other babies;
the left one was pitch black, as if it had been sliced from night itself and
the other was plain white, a burning sun. My hair was not red, nor black, nor
brown, but devoid of colour, as if being born had given me such a fright that
it had bleached each and every strand of pigment. I was the scariest baby this
world had ever seen. My mother took one look at me and decided that this first
hello would also be a last goodbye.
I
was the baby left abandoned in the basket. Unlike Moses, I had no river, nor
were there bull-rushes for me to nestle amongst. My mother did not bother to
remove me from my hospital blanket; she was too scared to unwrap me. She wanted
me out of her sight. I say basket; it was a box. Brown cardboard it was, with Barbados Bananas printed on the side in
yellow ink. Exotic. There was nothing else in there with me: no note, no
rattle, no dummy for me to suck. I had been left to my fate; a fate which would
prove to be both terrible and great. It was not my lot to be mediocre.
This
is the story of how I came to be, as it was told to me by Lettie, when she
wanted to remind me that I did not belong to her, when she wanted to disown me.
She would start with my humble beginnings and move on to the ruckus I had
managed to create in her household.
"Had
I not had such a good heart," she would say, "you really would have
been lost. Barry wanted nothing to do with you. If it hadn't been for me…"
My
arrival had turned Lettie's ordered life upside down. I had so terrified the
family cat that it fled into the night the minute it laid eyes on me and was
never seen again. The dog, Mutt, an enormous and savage Alsatian, made a run
for the far corner of his kennel, where he sat whimpering for the next seven
weeks, venturing out only twice a day for a brief scoff at the food bowl and a
quick slurp of water before dashing for cover again.
I
was a difficult feeder. There was no question of the breast, and I was too bad
for the bottle, chewing angrily through several rubber teats, and, in one
instance, gnawing away on the bottle itself, milk spilling everywhere, plastic
falling out of my mouth in gnarled fragments. Lettie soon resorted to a length
of rubber hose, one end of which she would hold in my mouth, while she poured
milk down the other. And I, I did not choke as a normal baby would, but took
down as much as I could and saved up this sustenance for later, timely,
regurgitation.
I
was not a sleeper. I howled all through the night – great, long, otherworldly
screeches which ricocheted around the house ensuring that neither parent was
granted a single wink of sleep. Everybody had always said that my adoptive
mother was a woman who had a good head on her shoulders, but even she was
driven out of her mind by this thing, this freak with a capital F. She had no
idea what to do with me. She was unravelling, at a loose end. Barry didn't want
to know. He was pretending that I was not there at all. I stretched the limit
of Lettie's endurance far beyond breaking point. She took seven long weeks of
me and then she shoved me away, out of sight from the world.
The
basement was her solution. To the old girl's credit, she did her best. It was
not a case of merely shoving me down there amongst the bricks and the
cockroaches; before she shut me away, she indulged in a wee spot of home
decorating. She painted the walls in bright primary colours; great splashes of
blue, yellow and red washing across the cellar in an attempt at cheeriness. She
hung mobiles from the ceiling and placed soft toys and cushions upon the floor.
There was a sheepskin rug and baby powder. There were two small windows and a
dusty sort of light. Please, don't think my adoptive mama cruel. She was at the
end of her tether, she felt that she had no alternative.
I
had no visitors to my basement home; the only soul I ever saw was Lettie, who
felt it her duty to continue to pay her twice daily visits. The same routine
every time; Lettie, appearing tentatively at the top of the stairs with a
torch, peering down into the dusky gloom in an attempt to discern my mood
before venturing into the cellar with her hose and her jar of warm milk. When she
thought I was calm enough, and providing that she was feeling game, she would
come down and feed me as quickly as possible before sprinting back up the
stairs and into the safety of the house.
She was especially terrified of my fangs,
those gigantic canine teeth, which had grown at an alarming rate and hung down
over the edge of my lower lip like the tusks of a walrus. She knew I could
bite; she had seen what I had done to those baby bottles and she did not care
to meet the same fate as that shredded plastic.
She never came near; she stood at a distance
and poked the feeding tube into my open gob and tipped sustenance into the
other end of the pipe. And Barry's words would drift down from above. What the hell are we gonna do with her?
About
the author
Laura published two novels in New Zealand in the mid-nineties. Following this, she lived in London for ten years, supporting herself by working as a P.A. and an IT consultant. During this time she completed a short story collection 'Alternative Medicine' and her novel An Imitation of Life. She returned to New Zealand in 2007 and completed a novel for Young Adults - Instant Messages. Her short story Sprout was short-listed for the Bridport prize in 2004 and another story The Most Ordinary Man in the World was short-listed for the same prize in 2005. Her poem Apocryphal was runner-up in the 2009 Edwin Morgan competition.
Laura published two novels in New Zealand in the mid-nineties. Following this, she lived in London for ten years, supporting herself by working as a P.A. and an IT consultant. During this time she completed a short story collection 'Alternative Medicine' and her novel An Imitation of Life. She returned to New Zealand in 2007 and completed a novel for Young Adults - Instant Messages. Her short story Sprout was short-listed for the Bridport prize in 2004 and another story The Most Ordinary Man in the World was short-listed for the same prize in 2005. Her poem Apocryphal was runner-up in the 2009 Edwin Morgan competition.
Poems
of place (19)
Deep
in the hunters’ wood
Dogs
yelp with hunger or loneliness.
I
scoop the pool with lordly net
Offering
salvation to beetles, cicadas
And
other lost souls who mistook
Their
reflections for mates or enemies.
The
motion of the net in water
Clearing
a passage for my own encounter
With
liquid sky, with Tuscan villa and hill,
With
olive orchards and vine, becomes ritual.
There’s
a raindrop of satisfaction beyond fun:
A
modest task, yet a mighty purpose.
As
for a buzzing prayer of thanks,
I’ll
settle for a little less attention
From
mosquitoes in the night.
Quote of the Month
In this terrifyingly
narcissistic vision of the world, Syria is not a war-torn nation, but simply a
stage for Western moralistic preening, and its people are not human beings with
political needs and desires, but merely props in a Western liberal pantomime
pitting goodies against baddies.
Brendan O’Neill, ‘Bombing Syria: war
as therapy’, Spiked! 5 September 2013.
The Ned Baslow Letters (Cont.)
We are delighted to be able to
continue publishing the letters of Ned Baslow as his campaign to put the
Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Arts Festival earmarked for the summer of 2014 on to
the international cultural map. So far he has pencilled in contributions from
William (‘Billy’ Blake), ‘Wolfy’ Amadeus Mozart and Mig Cervantes (original
author of the Festival’s musical treat, The Spectacles of Don Quixote).
Dear Vincent,
My
wife Betty has informed me that you sign your paintings with your first name –
Vincent – which I think is very friendly, so I am taking the opportunity to
address you in the same manner. The reason for my writing to you is twofold,
first to express my amazement at a fact which Ernie Shaw, vice-captain of our
pub quiz team, insists is true – that in your entire career you only sold one
painting even though your brother was a Paris art dealer.
Ernie puts
this down to the ignorance of the French nation. My Betty who is studying for
an Open University degree says the neglect of your talents has been a disgrace,
and considers it’s high time your career as an artist was given a boost.
To this end
we agreed a proposal that an exhibition of your paintings and drawings be
mounted in the ante-room, kitchen and upper stairs of the village hall during
our Grand Festival of the Arts, slated for July 2014.
The
committee is prepared to contribute to the cost of carriage and insurance of
your pictures (up to the amount of £25), in addition to supplying you and your
brother Theo’s family with half-price tickets for The Spectacles of Don Quixote and His Faithful Servant, Sancho
Panzer (played by myself, Panzer that is, not Quixote who will be rendered by Councillor Stokoe MBE – Lord Gilbert to
his friends – who takes all the star parts in Wickerstaff productions). I’m
afraid we can’t offer you any work on the scenery as we are expecting Willie
(Bill to his friends) Blake, a London illustrator of note, to get back to us
very shortly.
Do please
let us know, preferably by email, if you would be happy to consider our
proposal. I have been asked to remind you, however, that no weapons – razors or
pistols – will be permitted anywhere near the hall and adjoining fields, though
you might be interested to learn that there is a stretch of ground running down
to the river called Crows Meadow.
The local
landowner, Lord Gilbert as mentioned above, says that it would be acceptable
for you to set up your easel at any spot, so long as you avoid painting the
public stile which he is petitioning to have removed. He would be more than
pleased if, nevertheless, you included in any landscape his new barn, shippen
and other outbuildings which straddle what was once a right of way.
Rest
assured, Vincent, that you are far from forgotten. My boy Benjie was asked at
school who was his favourite painter and he answered, without any hesitation –
Vincent; at which his teaching assistant, fresh out of college and still wet
behind the ears, replied, ‘Oh no, Benjie, there isn’t an artist called
Vincent!’
In
conclusion, I must add that I thought Kirk Douglas was terrific as you in Lust
for Life which I do recommend to you in case you haven’t seen it. As for
Anthony Quinn, who I’ve always thought a bit of a ham, he was very suited to
the part of Gauguin, though if either was to get an Oscar for their
performance, or even an Emmy, it should have gone to Kirk.
Yours etc.
Ned Baslow.
The
Editor comments: Ned received a
swift reply to his letter addressed to the great Vincent, from a Dr. Gachet,
saying that the artist was at present indisposed but was highly flattered by
the offer of an exhibition in the Wickerstaff-cum-Fairhaven village hall, and
would be in touch again when he had settled similar one-man shows in the
Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Modern, London, the National Gallery of Scotland,
the Museum of Art, Dublin and the front windows of Mrs. Grant’s Millinery Shop
in Folkestone, where Vincent spent many happy months.
Kindle editions (1) The Freedom Tree
The year is 1936.
The rise of fascism has plunged Spain into a bloody civil war. Ever since his
father died fighting for the republicans in Spain, Will has felt strongly drawn
to their cause; but when he tries to join up as a volunteer in the
International Brigade he is told he is too young.
.JPG)
So Will travels to London where he meets a
group of young men fanatically committed to the Republican cause. Together they
embark on a perilous journey through France in an armoured truck crammed full
of smuggled guns and ammunition. They narrowly escape the clutches of the
French authorities and finally reach the Spanish border.
Will is horrified by the conditions he
finds. The Republicans are hopelessly ill-equipped and disorganised and most of
them have never been trained to fight. He is equally struck by their idealism
and determination. Thrown in at the deep end, Will soon finds his own courage
and endurance are tested to the utmost.
To follow: Talking
in Whispers,
Ticket to Prague, Justice of the Dagger, Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa and Pigs Might Fly. In preparation: Media
History From Gutenberg to the
Digital Age and Besieged: The Coils of the Viper.
See NOTES IN PASSING, Derry's Protestant protest. Tried and failed to get this picture in the right slot.
