KIEV EDITION - NOT

A Writer’s Notebook

No. 47, February2014

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com

 

James Watson

Friends and contributors

 KIEV EDITION: Not…

Having spent several months researching Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004 in preparation for a teen novel set in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities I felt the pull to put my oar in to what originally looked a simple tale of human rights protest. Then the orange turned to red. Complexity ruled; an elected, albeit authoritarian president was sent packing. Europe and the US dipped in their own oars, pontificating as usual about matters of which they had questionable knowledge. Russia was not amused; nor were Russia-leaning citizens south and east of the capital.

Then we are informed out of the blue that Ukraine is teetering on the abyss of bankruptcy: why has nobody in the European community mentioned this before? It’s all too complex for a blog which will be out of date the moment it is posted. Amazing, though, how the protestors stood the bitter cold all night, and night after night, fought off police and snipers, many dying as they did so. Shades of Occupy?

So in KIEV EDITION – NOT something that did happen and something that didn’t but surely might have…

 

A real-life journalist martyr

Little known in the West and long forgotten is the story of the journalist and outspoken critic of the government of the Ukraine, Georgiy (or Giya) Gongadze, editor of the online newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda. In those days the country was ranked by Reporters Without Borders as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists to pursue their trade. It still is.

    Giya disappeared on 16^th September 2000. On 2^nd November a farmer discovered a headless body on the outskirts of Tarashcha some 80 miles south of Kiev. The corpse was identified as being that of the 31 year-old Gongadze, murdered, many have claimed, with the approval of the then President.

Only in 2008 did the trial of three policeman, Mykola Protasov, Oleksandr Popovich and Valeri Kostenko, reach a verdict. Protasov was jailed for 13 years, Popovitch and Kostenko each for 12 years. The instigators of the crime remained, at the time of writing, unidentified.

 

Kiev: The body in the woods

Early morning, and to the north-west of the city, a man is calling to his dog. Yuri Semko has work to go to as an estate labourer, but every day without fail he walks the dog through the woods near his cottage. ‘Hey, Valeri – come on now.’

Valeri, his son, had been killed in the same week that Yuri’s black Labrador had appeared in his kitchen garden. It was starving, scarcely more than a skeleton on flimsy legs. ‘Strays,’ Yuri had decided, thinking of the kids who had recently walked into his lonely existence, ‘are my speciality.’

 Dogs, cats, birds with broken wings or missing tails, even a wounded fox once, they all seem to have tuned into a message carried on the wind: Try old Semko’s place. He never turns anyone, or anything, away.

And so it was a delight and a relief to him when three children appeared at his front door one afternoon recently, asked him for food and offered to do jobs in return for shelter for the night.

He had taken them in, out of the snow. Beggars. At first he had thought they were one of those gangs of kids that roam the city, stealing, breaking in to places, mugging folks. They’d slept in the loft for the first night. No parents, no friends. They’d run away from some institution. But then, he guessed, these three had been running away all their lives.

‘I’ll have to report it to the authorities. Or I’ll be in trouble.’

The bright one, the leader, called Katiya, had pleaded with him to give them a chance. ‘We can ’elp you round the house, Mister. Olga is ill sometimes, but Dmitri, well, he’s little, but he’s good at some things.’

Yuri had been persuaded. His only son had been called up for the Russian army only weeks before Ukraine had become independent. He’d been sent to the war in Chechnya. On his first day he had been shot dead by a sniper.

So Yuri had felt compassion for the Three Strays, befriended them and felt bitterly about a world that could treat its children so neglectfully.

‘I guess it’s either me saying yes, or you lot being sold into slavery. But if there’s any thieving – you’re out.’

Katya, Dmitri and Olga clean, chop wood, fetch water, help cook meals. In return, Yuri feeds them, shelters them, has bought second-hand clothes and shoes for them from the open-air market on the edge of town. Most importantly, in his view, he has begun to teach the younger ones to read, and Katiya to write.

‘If you read, you learn. If you learn, you advance. No one can make slaves of you.’

Yuri is standing now in the woods, calling once more for Valeri; and feeling upset and badly let-down. ‘Young wasters,’ he is saying to the trees. ‘Them skipping off like that, without a word. At least they didn’t steal anything, not that I’ve anything worth stealing. We were making out. Smart kids. Good company.’ He shakes his head. Melted snow is still dropping from the trees.

He had come home from work last night, in the dusk as usual. The fire had been lit but had gone out. The table was laid, but of the Strays there was no sign. That leaves just the two of us again, Valeri.

‘Come on, Boy! Come on!’

Whatever explanation Yuri has given himself for his young companions’ disappearance is wrong: it isn’t that he didn’t feed them enough; or that they were unhappy bunked down beside the fire; or that he bored them sick with his tales of the past. They had gone because they had been witnesses to an event. They had been chased away, and the explanation, at least in part, is about to be made clear to him.

‘Valeri, come on away from there.’ The dog’s barking is enough to wake the dead. Or rather, not enough.  Yuri steps off the narrow path through the trees. He notices the buds. How early they are this year. All the snow has melted, but snowdrops are sprinkled everywhere; and among them, here and there, are the first glowing heads of crocus.

At this point the woodland thickens. There are enough fallen branches to keep Yuri’s fire cheerful through any winter. He stops. Valeri races to him, then about-turns, charges back into a thicket of brushwood. ‘What’ve you got there, then – rabbit?’

There used to be wolves in these woods.

Yuri pulls back the bush, steps into undergrowth, and halts. ‘Oh my God!’ He reaches forward, pulls away loose branches from a naked corpse. ‘No!’ He wrenches away his gaze, shuts his eyes, for a moment never wishes to open them again: the body lying before him, its limbs tangled like the undergrowth, is headless.

Yuri steps back, jamming his hands to his face, almost trips over the branches he has removed. He opens his eyes. He wants it all to have been a mad vision.

Valeri seems to share the trauma of this discovery. He has gone silent, pants, mouth open, staring at his master.

In the early light, the skin of the male corpse resembles the flesh of mushroom, and like mushrooms it is flecked with streaks of earth.

Yuri gags, turns, clutches a tree for balance. Horrified at the sight at his feet, he retches, though only saliva gushes from his lips. His hand beats his forehead. He backs away, hears the pounding of his breath, sees it rise through the cold morning air.

Valeri watches his master, seeks a signal to retreat, to go on with the walk; perhaps continue as if nothing had happened, as if nothing this morning were different from every morning. He begins to bark.

 ‘Shsh, shsh, Valeri.’ Yuri gazes about him, nods. ‘Dumped.’ He gathers together his nerves. It won’t bite. He is standing over the corpse, reaches down, then decisively rolls the body over on to its chest. The victim’s wrists are tied behind his back with cord.

‘An execution. Here I was thinking the bad old days were over.’

What’s for sure, this body was not here yesterday morning; otherwise Valeri, on their usual walk through the woods, would have found it.

But what to do now? Of course, in a civilised country, you call the police.

 Yuri hesitates, for his first thought is – they could arrest me for this. I’m the only witness to my innocence. What’s it to them if they accuse me of murder, bang me up, execute me, if they end up with a clean sheet; crime solved?

Got to think about all this. Not got to rush. Keep a cool head, for I’m in trouble, no question. Which is worse, though, reporting it or not reporting it? Yuri steps out from the corpse’s brushwood grave. He tidies up the site so that from the path nothing can be seen.

He pauses, sorry for the dead man, racked by the callousness of his execution. ‘Poor sod, whoever he is, whatever he’d done, there’s no way he could have deserved such a dying!’

 Extract from Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa (Spire Publishing and Kindle e-reader).

 Regretfully the Ned Baslow correspondence has been held over for another month, but readers can follow Ned’s campaign to put the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Grand Festival of the Arts on to the world map of cultural excellence in previous editions the WRITER’S NOTEBOOK. Here are a few gems from Ned’s tireless pen: Florence Nightingale (December 2013), Inspector Morse (November), Marcel Marceaux (October), Vincent v G (September), Agamemnon (May), King Harold (April) and Capability Brown (March).

 THANKS ALL!

 

BANNING BOOKS, BURNING BOOKS

A Writer’s Notebook

No. 46, January 2014

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com

 

James Watson

Friends and contributors

 

CONTENTS

Editorial: Bravissima, PJ!

Guantanamo: The Banning of books

Chile: The Burning of Books

A brace of haikus

 

Bravissima, PJ!

Regular listeners to BBC Radio 4’s morning news programme, Today, might well have thought they had been transported to a  different planet during January 2014 as the programme had been handed over to a new editor-of-the-day.

There’s nothing new about these occasional forays into the semblance of broadcasting independence. Usually the guest editor’s take so resembles the usual day to day content and approach that one fails to notice the difference.

But not with singer/composer P.J. Harvey’s editorship. As a measure of her innovative and utterly surprising stint, the Daily Mail’s outraged response was praise enough for something welcomely different.

Naturally the Mail spotted where P.J. was coming from, wafting in on clouds of double-dyed left wing prejudice. Forgotten, predictably, was the editorship granted to the new CEO of Barclay’s bank who took care to permit a flicker of blame for past banking  practices before proceeding to to inform listeners that the way forward was a garden of roses: pure propaganda reflecting Today’s own daily cow-towing to the world of big business.

The producers who opted for P.J. Harvey probably didn’t have the slightest notion of what they were letting themselves in for. A singer? Good idea. Educated, too; with a touch of the intellect in her songs.

Suddenly the Radio 4 airwaves were bristling with the radical, subversive comments of speakers who, in the normal course of programming, would not be allowed within a mile of the microphone; and that included the better-known: John Pilger, scourge of Left as well as Right, author of Hidden Agendas? Were we crazy?

 P.J. – your programme was like emerging from the ‘same-old’ and breathing in the fresh air of unmediated truth; for a few moments, dramatically illustrating the difference between what should be said about issues and what is permitted to be said. Alas, I doubt whether the editor’s chair will be waiting for you in the foreseeable future. Thanks for the memory!

 

THE BANNING OF THE BOOKS…

A recent edition of The Guardian noted that not a lot of books are available for prisoners in the cells of Guantanamo Bay. Those banned seem as inexplicable as most codes of censorship allow. Take four: Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots, Cinderella and The Merchant of Venice. Jack has aspirations: he kills an evil giant: could prisoners see something of Uncle Sam in this tale? Puss’s ambitions are brought about by his killing rats and mice. Sounds like pure terrorism. Obviously it’s a No to Puss; and, despite the Merchant being by the Bard, it does smack of anti-Semitism: best not to play in the hands of suspected Islamist extremists.

No need to guess, however, that Kafka’s The Trial gets the thumbs down, or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, especially in the light of what happened to Bradley Manning and what awaits Edward Snowden if he ever sets foot again in the Land of the Free.

Some contemporary authors will be pleased and relieved that their work has been under the cosh. John Pilger’s Hidden Agenda really asks for the blue pencil as does, predictably, Lord Thomas Bingham’s The Rule of Law. Breath again George Galloway and Clare Short: you’re banned.

Which seems to leave us with an embarrassed Jeremy Paxman: his The English is permitted, though the same charity is not extended to The New Dinkum Aussie Dictionary…

Finally it is a mystery whether Anna Perera’s outstanding teen novel Guantanamo Boy (Penguin) is accessible, except under the counter, to young American readers. Any stories about how it has fared in the US?

 

…AND THE BURNING OF THE BOOKS

Forty years ago in September 1973. Democracy was overthrown in Chile. A period of arrests, mass shootings, torture and terror began under the generals, the most prominent of whom was General Pinochet. Forty years later, into the second term of President Obama, the promise to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has not been kept. Further, as this blog’s editorial suggests, the American state is as scared of the content of books as the Generals were.

 

In this short extract from teen novel TALKING IN WHISPERS, Andres, hunted by Security, cannot resist returning to the house of his popular ballad-singer father Juan who has been arrested and taken to the House of Laughter.

 

As he reached the Via Rivadivia, Andres stepped back in shock. In his mind’s eyes he had expected to see the street as he remembered it – friendly and quiet, whitewashed, with the occasional balcony adorned with baskets of flowers; a sleepy street with blue-grey cobbles and trees casting tranquil shadows.

Instead, he witnessed a street under siege. Directly in front of him were a jeep and a military van. Beyond, in the centre of the street, a raging bonfire. He glanced up and saw blankets spread over window-sills like signal flags. There were at least ten soldiers on guard. Others were moving from one house to the next. So far there were no blankets hanging from the windows of Juan Larreta’s house.

Our turn, I think. A crowd had gathered in the street and Andres had no difficulty concealing himself.

Weak sunshine had succeeded the rain, kindling steam from the pavements into a visual echo of smoke from the bonfire. Juan’s bedroom window was thrown open. A second later – out came the books, the whole of Juan Larreta’s library, and Andres’ collection too, no doubt, hurtling through the sky, a rainstorm of knowledge, of ideas, of songs and poetry; flittering, soaring, smacking the pavement, sometimes shedding pages, sometimes falling as neatly as if placed there by a loving reader.

And the books were shovelled towards the bonfire.

Andres spied a few titles as they ploughed into one another on the ground: The Eagle and the Serpent, War and Peace, Neruda’s poems, a biography of Mozart, the story of the Beatles, the drawings of William Blake, Film Directors of Chile, a life of Bolivar and, to Andres’ momentary amusement, momentary grief – Alice in Wonderland, given him by his mother years and years ago.

Andres wanted to laugh. So the Junta is even afraid of Alice in Wonderland. One day I’ll write a song about this: ‘The Junta through the Looking Glass’. Yet he did not laugh. The scene before him of vicious and insane destruction was no laughing matter.

All Juan’s songs in manuscripts were being burned.

The officer supervising the book-burning called to the crowd above the crackle of the bonfire. ‘This, by order of the Junta, the property of all enemies of the state will be seized and destroyed.’

He paused for his words to sink in to the heads of his listeners. He watched the crowd whose eyes remained fixed upon the continuing avalanche of books, upon the flames, upon the pages curling, turning black, dissolving.

‘The entertainer Juan Larreta was a traitor – to the nation, to the Holy Church and to the name of decency. The Interior Ministry has banned the publication of his work and the performance of his songs.’

The officer waited, as though half-expecting a backlash of protest. Like the others, Andres silenced his opinion and saved his skin. Like the others, he felt cowed, ashamed, almost unclean.

He had listened to lies and he had not responded. He had not even whispered a protest.

The silence pleased the officer. He chose to interpret it as assent. Perhaps for a moment, in his heart, he had expected the crowd to defy him. Perhaps also in his heart he knew the lies he spoke. Yet he had won. He had declared injustice to be acceptable, and the crowd had let him get away with it.

Except, that is, for an old man at the rear of the crowd. He cried out, lonely, shrill, but courageous: ‘Larreta was a good man. He spoke to the people’s hearts.’

The old man’s words were as petrol to the flames. ‘Step forward – that man, step forward!’

The crowd was reluctant to open up for the old man. Andres recognised him. An Indian, who worked at the bakery down the road. Juan had sung at his grand-daughter’s wedding.

He stood forward, bare-headed, in a suit that had grown old with him. He was bundled, without protest, without words, into the army van.

The officer delayed returning his pistol to its holster. He wagged it in the face of the crowd. ‘Any more heroes?’

 

A brace of haikus

 

   EARLY MORNING WALK HAIKU

            A flotilla of slugs

            Heads for the allotments

            Intent on mayhem.

 

 

            HAIKU FOR TODAY

              Eleven soup kitchens

              In Coventry alone;

              Tory Britain now.

 

Our star correspondent Ned Baslow is on holiday with his wife Bette, son Benjie, twin girls Beatrice and Barbara and Grandad Barnie in Benidorm.  Hurry back, Ned! We have an email from Elvis that needs a swift reply.

 

Kindle editions (4)

JUSTICE OF THE DAGGER

The machines are yellow like the morning sun.

At first Muyu’s people thought them gods. They glowed, they glistened, they roared. No forest ears had ever heard such sounds. Not even the gunfire of the soldiers from the Distant Masters could match them…

How can young Muyu and his beautiful friend Lyana stop the hated soldiers and the timber companies from destroying the forests?

 Their friend ‘Greenboots’, whose book about their people’s plight has focused the eyes of the world on East Timor, now has a price on his head and they are on the run together, in a desperate bid to outwit Captain Selim, the Butcher in Shades…

 

‘Watson’s pedigree as a writer of political novels for young adults is impeccable…This is a powerful and intelligent book which uses its chosen genre both to grip and incite its teenage audience.’ Books for Keeps [5-star rating].

 

This was a Waterstone’s Book of the Month.

 

See more at http://tinyurl.com/ka7gbnd

 

 As ever, comments and contributions are welcome. Please email to Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading this!

 

 

BANNING BOOKS, BURNING BOOKS

A Writer’s Notebook

No. 46, January 2014

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com

 James Watson
Friends and contributors

 CONTENTS

Editorial: Bravissima, PJ!

Guantanamo: The Banning of books

Chile: The Burning of Books

A brace of haikus

Bravissima, PJ!

Regular listeners to BBC Radio 4’s morning news programme, Today, might well have thought they had been transported to a  different planet during January 2014 as the programme had been handed over to a new editor-of-the-day.

There’s nothing new about these occasional forays into the semblance of broadcasting independence. Usually the guest editor’s take so resembles the usual day to day content and approach that one fails to notice the difference.

But not with singer/composer P.J. Harvey’s editorship. As a measure of her innovative and utterly surprising stint, the Daily Mail’s outraged response was praise enough for something welcomely different.

Naturally the Mail spotted where P.J. was coming from, wafting in on clouds of double-dyed left wing prejudice. Forgotten, predictably, was the editorship granted to the new CEO of Barclay’s bank who took care to permit a flicker of blame for past banking  practices before proceeding to to inform listeners that the way forward was a garden of roses: pure propaganda reflecting Today’s own daily cow-towing to the world of big business.

The producers who opted for P.J. Harvey probably didn’t have the slightest notion of what they were letting themselves in for. A singer? Good idea. Educated, too; with a touch of the intellect in her songs.

Suddenly the Radio 4 airwaves were bristling with the radical, subversive comments of speakers who, in the normal course of programming, would not be allowed within a mile of the microphone; and that included the better-known: John Pilger, scourge of Left as well as Right, author of Hidden Agendas? Were we crazy?

 P.J. – your programme was like emerging from the ‘same-old’ and breathing in the fresh air of unmediated truth; for a few moments, dramatically illustrating the difference between what should be said about issues and what is permitted to be said. Alas, I doubt whether the editor’s chair will be waiting for you in the foreseeable future. Thanks for the memory!

THE BANNING OF BOOKS...

A recent edition of The Guardian noted that not a lot of books are available for prisoners in the cells of Guantanamo Bay. Those banned seem as inexplicable as most codes of censorship allow. Take four: Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots, Cinderella and The Merchant of Venice. Jack has aspirations: he kills an evil giant: could prisoners see something of Uncle Sam in this tale? Puss’s ambitions are brought about by his killing rats and mice. Sounds like pure terrorism. Obviously it’s a No to Puss; and, despite the Merchant being by the Bard, it does smack of anti-Semitism: best not to play in the hands of suspected Islamist extremists.

No need to guess, however, that Kafka’s The Trial gets the thumbs down, or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, especially in the light of what happened to Bradley Manning and what awaits Edward Snowden if he ever sets foot again in the Land of the Free.

Some contemporary authors will be pleased and relieved that their work has been under the cosh. John Pilger’s Hidden Agenda really asks for the blue pencil as does, predictably, Lord Thomas Bingham’s The Rule of Law. Breath again George Galloway and Clare Short: you’re banned.

Which seems to leave us with an embarrassed Jeremy Paxman: his The English is permitted, though the same charity is not extended to The New Dinkum Aussie Dictionary…

Finally it is a mystery whether Anna Perera’s outstanding teen novel Guantanamo Boy (Penguin) is accessible, except under the counter, to young American readers. Any stories about how it has fared in the US?

 ...AND THE BURNING OF BOOKS

Forty years ago in September 1973. Democracy was overthrown in Chile. A period of arrests, mass shootings, torture and terror began under the generals, the most prominent of whom was General Pinochet. Forty years later, into the second term of President Obama, the promise to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has not been kept. Further, as this blog’s editorial suggests, the American state is as scared of the content of books as the Generals were.

 In this short extract from teen novel TALKING IN WHISPERS, Andres, hunted by Security, cannot resist returning to the house of his popular ballad-singer father Juan who has been arrested and taken to the House of Laughter.

 As he reached the Via Rivadivia, Andres stepped back in shock. In his mind’s eyes he had expected to see the street as he remembered it – friendly and quiet, whitewashed, with the occasional balcony adorned with baskets of flowers; a sleepy street with blue-grey cobbles and trees casting tranquil shadows.

Instead, he witnessed a street under siege. Directly in front of him were a jeep and a military van. Beyond, in the centre of the street, a raging bonfire. He glanced up and saw blankets spread over window-sills like signal flags. There were at least ten soldiers on guard. Others were moving from one house to the next. So far there were no blankets hanging from the windows of Juan Larreta’s house.

Our turn, I think. A crowd had gathered in the street and Andres had no difficulty concealing himself.

Weak sunshine had succeeded the rain, kindling steam from the pavements into a visual echo of smoke from the bonfire. Juan’s bedroom window was thrown open. A second later – out came the books, the whole of Juan Larreta’s library, and Andres’ collection too, no doubt, hurtling through the sky, a rainstorm of knowledge, of ideas, of songs and poetry; flittering, soaring, smacking the pavement, sometimes shedding pages, sometimes falling as neatly as if placed there by a loving reader.

And the books were shovelled towards the bonfire.

Andres spied a few titles as they ploughed into one another on the ground: The Eagle and the Serpent, War and Peace, Neruda’s poems, a biography of Mozart, the story of the Beatles, the drawings of William Blake, Film Directors of Chile, a life of Bolivar and, to Andres’ momentary amusement, momentary grief – Alice in Wonderland, given him by his mother years and years ago.

Andres wanted to laugh. So the Junta is even afraid of Alice in Wonderland. One day I’ll write a song about this: ‘The Junta through the Looking Glass’. Yet he did not laugh. The scene before him of vicious and insane destruction was no laughing matter.

All Juan’s songs in manuscripts were being burned.

The officer supervising the book-burning called to the crowd above the crackle of the bonfire. ‘This, by order of the Junta, the property of all enemies of the state will be seized and destroyed.’

He paused for his words to sink in to the heads of his listeners. He watched the crowd whose eyes remained fixed upon the continuing avalanche of books, upon the flames, upon the pages curling, turning black, dissolving.

‘The entertainer Juan Larreta was a traitor – to the nation, to the Holy Church and to the name of decency. The Interior Ministry has banned the publication of his work and the performance of his songs.’

The officer waited, as though half-expecting a backlash of protest. Like the others, Andres silenced his opinion and saved his skin. Like the others, he felt cowed, ashamed, almost unclean.

He had listened to lies and he had not responded. He had not even whispered a protest.

The silence pleased the officer. He chose to interpret it as assent. Perhaps for a moment, in his heart, he had expected the crowd to defy him. Perhaps also in his heart he knew the lies he spoke. Yet he had won. He had declared injustice to be acceptable, and the crowd had let him get away with it.

Except, that is, for an old man at the rear of the crowd. He cried out, lonely, shrill, but courageous: ‘Larreta was a good man. He spoke to the people’s hearts.’

The old man’s words were as petrol to the flames. ‘Step forward – that man, step forward!’

The crowd was reluctant to open up for the old man. Andres recognised him. An Indian, who worked at the bakery down the road. Juan had sung at his grand-daughter’s wedding.

He stood forward, bare-headed, in a suit that had grown old with him. He was bundled, without protest, without words, into the army van.

The officer delayed returning his pistol to its holster. He wagged it in the face of the crowd. ‘Any more heroes?’


A brace of haikus

    EARLY MORNING WALK HAIKU

            A flotilla of slugs

            Heads for the allotments

            Intent on mayhem.

 

            HAIKU FOR TODAY

              Eleven soup kitchens

              In Coventry alone;

              Tory Britain now.

 

Our star correspondent Ned Baslow is on holiday with his wife Bette, son Benjie, twin girls Beatrice and Barbara and Grandad Barnie in Benidorm.  Hurry back, Ned! We have an email from Elvis that needs a swift reply.

KINDLE EDITIONS (4) Justice of the Dagger
 The machines are yellow like the morning sun.

At first Muyu’s people thought them gods. They glowed, they glistened, they roared. No forest ears had ever heard such sounds. Not even the gunfire of the soldiers from the Distant Masters could match them…

How can young Muyu and his beautiful friend Lyana stop the hated soldiers and the timber companies from destroying the forests?

 Their friend ‘Greenboots’, whose book about their people’s plight has focused the eyes of the world on East Timor, now has a price on his head and they are on the run together, in a desperate bid to outwit Captain Selim, the Butcher in Shades…

 ‘Watson’s pedigree as a writer of political novels for young adults is impeccable…This is a powerful and intelligent book which uses its chosen genre both to grip and incite its teenage audience.’ Books for Keeps [5-star rating].

 This was a Waterstone’s Book of the Month.

 See more at http://tinyurl.com/ka7gbnd

  As ever, comments and contributions are welcome. Please email to Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks for reading this!

PS: System said No to photos this month!

 

 

 

NUMBER 45 CELEBRATES 'THE 45' AND THE WORK OF RADICAL JOURNALIST JOHN WILKES

A Writer’s Notebook

No. 45, December 2013

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com

James Watson

Friends and contributors

CONTENTS

Notes in passing: The Birthright of the Briton
Review: An Imitation of Life
Poems of place (21): The rows of icon
Ned to Nurse Nightingale

THE BIRTHRIGHT OF THE BRITON

Number 45 on ‘The 45’

A timely moment to praise a pioneer of press freedom

In Douglas Adams' radio and subsequent TV series The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy the meaning of life turned out to be – 42. If we were to look for a similar answer to the question, when did freedom of speech truly make its mark on British shores, we might offer the answer – 45, and the date when John Wilkes (1727-97) brought out the first edition of his radical paper The North Briton. In the first editorial Wilkes wrote, 'The liberty of the press is the birthright of the BRITON, and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country'.

Issue No.45 attacked European peace terms then being discussed by the government of the day. Wilkes was an MP, but as editor of what the general warrant called 'a seditious and treasonable paper' he forfeited his right of parliamentary immunity, for this did not cover 'the publication of a libel, being a breach of the peace'.

As was to happen so often in the next century, and the one after that, government acted as though surrounded by warriors intent on overthrowing them and the system they represented. Wilkes was arrested and sent to the Tower of London.

What was interesting in Wilkes' case was the degree of popular support he had in his struggle for freedom of speech, not the least from the so-called under-classes or, as the writer and parliamentarian Edmund Burke later termed them in his Reflections on the French Revolution (1792), 'the swinish multitude'.

Wilkes' plea for liberty was for all, not just the privileged and the educated:

My lords, the liberty of all peers and gentlemen and, what touches me more sensibly, that of all the middling and inferior set of people, who stand in most need of protection, is in my case this day to be finally decided upon a question of such importance as to determine at once whether English Liberty shall be a reality or a shadow.

         
At the first court hearing in Westminster Hall a huge audience composed of supporters from the City cheered Wilkes to the rafters when he announced that the liberty of an Englishman 'should not be sported away with impunity'. As he left the court, the air rang with the call, 'Liberty, Liberty, Wilkes for ever!'

A public burning

The government shifted its ground. A proof copy of part of an Essay on Women by Wilkes was obtained and judged by the House of Lords a 'most scandalous, obscene and impious libel'. Wilkes was in the dock now for two publications. Following a Commons vote of 273 to 111, No.45 was condemned to be publicly burnt by the official hangman at Royal Exchange.

It was a bitter December day, just right for a bonfire of 'false, scandalous and seditious libel'. As the sheriffs arrived at Cornhill a vast crowd of the 'middling and inferior' blocked the way. The fire party turned on its heels and the crowd – so the story goes – rescued the North Briton from destruction by urinating on the flames.

Such were the attempts by government to destroy Wilkes that he went into exile. The Annual Register wrote of the 'ruin of that unfortunate man'; a little prematurely because Wilkes returned to London in 1768 and was hero of the capital. He was returned as MP for Middlesex.

 Light you your windows

There followed two days of joyous celebration which included the chalking of 'No.45' on every door from Temple Bar to Hyde Park Corner and a demand for those who supported Wilkes and his cause to light up their windows at night in celebration. The Austrian ambassador was dragged from his coach and had 'No.45' chalked on the soles of his boots.

Heady days! There was, of course, much smashing of windows. In terror at what was happening when a huge assembly waited to greet Wilkes in St. George's Fields, the government ordered the presence of troops. Several volleys were fired, leaving eleven dead.

The story of Wilkes suggests a more complicated popular response than merely that of calling for Liberty. Wilkes himself was prone to journalistic exaggeration. 'English liberties' were as much in his head – he was from a wealthy and privileged family – as identifiable in the real world, and much of the tenor of his support was characterised by a harsh, chauvinist nationalism: after all, No.45 was attacking a peace initiative rather than urging peace not war.

One of the dragon’s teeth

Just the same, Wilkes deserves his place in the pantheon of those British writers (such as Thomas Paine, William Cobbett and Richard Carlile) who risked much to declare freedom of expression a human right. He was a worthy successor to the poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1606-74) who had penned the most famous argument in English for the liberty of speech and publication. In his Areopagitica (1664), Milton wrote of books and their significance in words that have resonated down the centuries:

I know they are lively, and vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost to kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

Wilkes and the generation of editors and writers who followed him took Milton's words as their creed. The issue which Milton raised, which Wilkes and others fought for, is of course as alive in the 21st century as it was then: censorship is in the air we breath. Governments are as scared of exposure as ever.

After Leveson, we are witness to the freedom of the British press being placed under the interdict of a royal charter, a move not greeted by street protests but with public complacency, yet a blow to liberty of expression that would have had Wilkes roaring his protest, not sparing his tabloid vitriol, and railing at privilege, secrecy and a raft of censorial legislation; but not, readers, censorship by royal charter.

An extract from Media History: From Gutenberg to the Digital Age, to be published as a Kindle Reader in 2014.

REVIEW: A DREAM OF MONSTERS

Issues 42 and 43 carried extracts from Laura’s novel, reviewed below.

Laura Solomon’s Imitation of Life (Solidus, 2009) is a very singular novel. Its central protagonist, Celia Doom, arrives in the world a grotesque. Delivered in a banana box, she falls into the category of ‘unmentionable things’ with one black eye and one white; her teeth are fangs and her craving is for insects, butterflies, spiders and moths, and for Fanta in gallons. At the age of three she is five feet in height; at six she stands 6’3” and weights 150 kilos.

For those around Celia, destruction and death are commonplace; even the locality of Provencia suffers devastation on her watch. Befriended by Jacob who wreaks havoc with his chemistry set, she learns the art of explosions. Molotov cocktails become their plaything; what they blow up (including Celia’s adoptive parents, Lettie and Barry) they film on super 8. ‘This one’s for you, Celia,’ says Jacob as he blows himself up.

The event that puts Celia on a meaningful track is the gift of a camera from her Uncle Ed – ‘the instrument I would cling to for the rest of my days’. Ed we eventually discover is her real father; a conjurer of remarkable powers (of appearance and disappearance) and worrying proclivities.

Celia proves herself a photographer of vision, focusing on the everyday, and a career develops until those that market her work exploit it, and her, to the point when they use a rival, a stripper, Lucinda Fortune, whose photos are so uncannily reminiscent of Celia’s that both images and careers shape themselves into double-focus; until, that is, Lucinda removes her dark glasses – and reveals one black eye and one white. Welcome to Celia’s Mum.

Celia confesses to have lived a ‘muddle old stew of a life’. Her talents as a photographer are duly exploited by relatives and ‘carers’. Arty pampers her with Fanta and bags of bugs at the same making a good living for himself out of her work. Then there’s George, her critical friend, selecting her photos for exhibition: ‘Where’s the sense of flow? Where’s the continuity?’ Such questions the author takes on board arguably as comments on the novel itself, and it’s true that at times the switching, in a scenario teeming with characters, most of them eccentric and bordering on the grotesque, is often abrupt and momentarily confusing.

It is a tale, then of the unexpected, the core of it treating the reader to an account of the life, talents and exploitation by others of a photographer, eventually to the point when we get used to, and momentarily forget, the physical grotesqueness of our heroine.

Imitation of Life treats us to a galaxy of originals, such as Celia’s two grannies, united by mutual loathing, Uncle Ed, careless with snakes in the company of kids, not averse to setting himself on fire but who invites his own demise by entering a glass house containing 300,000 bees, applauding himself as he dies.

It’s a story teeming with eccentrics, though its message is not easy to locate. Perhaps Ed sums it all up in his final letter to his daughter Celia: ‘Blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.’ It’s a rumbustious text and on film the novel would take off as a piece of surreal effects that might shock as it surprises.

The writerly talent demonstrated in this novel is impressive, prompting the reader to wish to reach beyond the narrative to the author herself, the creator of a macabre scenario that walks the edge between comedy and tragedy, defying a commitment to either. The critical question might be – what’s next?

H.C.

 Poems of place (21)

                                          THE ROWS OF ICON

                               You can walk the rows of icon.

                               Witness the changeless centuries:
                                Not a sliver of evolution, except
                               An arresting detail, a tentative risk
                               Withheld; always solemn, pursed lipped.

                               The saints George and Mamas

                               Awkwardly perched on horse and lion,
                               Close down all narratives but one.

                               After marvelling at occasional line and colour,

                               An eye or a hand well-wrought
                               And jewel-fresh in dry Cyprus air,
                               The mind cries out for sensations of another sort,
                               A return of greater gods and better tales.

                                With respect it has to be admitted

                               The sombre story of Christ crucified
                               Never matched the wild absurdities of Olympus.

 Dear Nurse Nightingale

Pardon me, Madam, for rushing straight in to things, without even a by-your-leave, but we are in considerable trouble; and I thought, as I was at one time a near neighbour of yours, albeit separated by a good three miles as the crow flies, I would appeal to you; as it were, throw myself on your mercy.

The situation is thus: arrangements are being made for the most notable event in the history of the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Pantomime and Light Opera Society – but virtually at the last minute, the St. John’s Ambulance service in these parts have only discovered a prior arrangement with the Lower Beasley (in my frustration I might be tempted to say ‘Beastley’) Gymkhana which has been switched from June to July on account of a variation of swine flu among the horses.

The local constabulary have informed us – no medicals, no Miguel Cervantes! In short, it is the hope of our committee, and of our chairman, Councillor Gilbert Stokoe, whom we affectionately refer to as Lord Gilbert, that the Heroine of Scutari will come to our aid; and such is your reputation for getting things done in the teeth of prejudice, inertia, downright ignorance of the importance of cleanliness, using swabs only once and generally being antipathetic to swarms of flies and other undesirables, that we feel you will be pleased once more to be the darling of all that is wholesome in the life of the nation.

 The committee can assure you that you and your team of ministering angels will encounter none of the horrors that greeted you during the Boer War. On the contrary, we are hoping that there will be little for you to do other than to look pretty in your blue costumes (Mrs. Stokoe is assembling these at this very moment).

Usually our shows pass without incident or injury, though my boy Benjie fell through a poorly erected marquee at the Annual Flower, Vegetable and Livestock Show, quite without intention destroying Lord Gilbert’s prize exhibit of Icelandic Nasturtiums. (He was, nevertheless, presented with the first prize in compensation, Lord Gilbert that is, not our Benjie – who, you will I know be pleased to learn, sustained only a bruised elbow and a telling off from his Mum).

We are fully aware of how busy you must be lobbying parliament for a decent health service, but confident that you, the Soldiers’ Sweetheart, will not only receive a warm welcome from the crowds that will be coming to Wickerstaff from far and near. Now that we have buried the hatchet with the Russians, we hope a few who have settled in the area will take time out from property speculation and even bring along their ballylayakers to serenade early arrivals.

 In fact, the only worry we have with regard to possible injuries concerns how the Russians, the Poles, the Bulgarians, the Romanians and the Geordies will get on with each other. With regard to this, we are still in two minds whether to go ahead with the five-a-side soccer tournament which ended up last year with a set-to the like of which hasn’t been seen in these parts since Peterloo.

 Dr. Ivan Arbuthnot, a committee member, and incidentally my wife Betty’s tutor – she is at present studying for an Open University degree – believes that your presence, Miss Nightingale, will bring about peace and harmony. Dr. Arbuthnot, by the way, is an expert in 18^th and 19^th century corantos and chapbooks, but he has also written a slim volume entitled ‘Why The Invasion of Iraq Was The Stupidest Action in British History Since The Charge of the Light Brigade’. We plan to sell this, as it were, ‘under the counter’ in order not to upset certain arms manufacturers who have second homes in the vicinity and who recently generously contributed to the parish church roof fund.

 Madam, we are fully aware that the challenge we are offering, which carries no remuneration except for the satisfaction of doing a good, Scutari-style job of work, means your coming briefly out of well-earned retirement. We are confident, however, that you might regard as ample compensation the fact that none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is likely to write the incidental music and that the show’s scenery will be the work of Mr. Billy Blake, who has promised not to read any of his Proverbs from Hell in public.

Oh, I had almost forgotten: our musical play which features Lord Gilbert as Don Quixote and your humble servant as Sancho Panzer (my Betty was planning to audition for the part of the fair Dulcy Naya, only for it to be awarded to our next door neighbour and Lord Gilbert’s half-cousin, Jill), will be followed by The Epic Battle of the Titans, The Greeks versus the Anglo Saxons, Robin Hood and his Merry Men doing the honours for the Saxons (along with King Harold if he can make it).

We have positively banned bloodshed, but once these warriors get the scent of battle in their nostrils you cannot be sure what excesses may scupper their good resolve.

As you will see, Nurse Nightingale, we have every need of your good services. Refreshments for the ‘workers’ are being provided at her personal expense by Lord Gilbert’s wife who also auditioning for Dulcy Naya (though in confidence I confess that not only is she too old for the part, but too round). Ideally, we’d have cast Helen of Troy for the part but since the shinanegins over the Wooden Horse and that, her husband doesn’t let her out at nights, and we’ve only got the village hall for rehearsals between seven and nine.

 Mind you, with reference to Mrs. Gilbert, there’s nobody in Wickerstaff, or in adjoining villages, who can make scones, rock cakes, plate custards or Chorley cakes like Beryl. In fact, a display of her specials would, I have no doubt, have stopped your Lord Raglan in his tracks before he led the poor Brits into the jaws of death and glory.

Please write to the above address as a matter of urgency. Without your assistance in this matter, The Charge of the Light Brigade will be nothing in comparison to the cancellation of what Joe, the captain of our pub team, has called ‘the biggest thing in Wickerstaff since sliced bread’.

Yours etc.

Ned Baslow
Hon.Sec.

PS: My Grandad Barney used to rent a house just outside Crich, home of the Tramway Museum, which is just up the road from your stately manse. He often used to say, ‘Why don’t we drop in at Florence’s place for a cuppa tea?’ But we never did. I think he was joking.

 

Happy Christmas!