Quantcast
Channel: The History Girls
Viewing all 2763 articles
Browse latest View live

Imagining Eglantyne, by Clare Mulley

July 27, 2015, 4:30 pm
$
0
0

‘We have to devise a means of making known the facts
 in such a way as to touch the imagination of the world.’ 
Eglantyne Jebb 


Poster for Anne Chamberlain's production, Eglantyne


Earlier this month I was fascinated to see a new one-woman play called simply, Eglantyne, written, produced and acted by the New Zealand artist Anne Chamberlain. Eglantyne Jebb, around whose life the play is built, was the remarkable founder of the independent children’s development agency Save the Children, and author of the pioneering statement that has since evolved into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history. She was also the subject of my first biography: The Woman Who Saved the Children, and it is wonderful to see that her life is still inspiring people, both to write, and to support the vital work of Save the Children today. Proceeds from both my book and Anne’s play are donated to the charity. You can read my History Girls blog on Eglantyne’s life and achievements here.




Among Eglantyne’s many skills was an extraordinary ability to communicate the facts in such a way as to inspire others. She had a very vivid imagination and clearly loved words, writing numerous poems and romantic-social novels, as well as her pioneering statement of children’s rights. She also wrote and gave speeches, published leaflets and press articles, and made pioneering use of photographs and film footage to win support for her cause, often from initially hostile audiences.

Anne’s play opens with Eglantyne’s very public arrest in Trafalgar Square in the spring of 1919, for distributing leaflets calling for an end to the economic blockade that was contributing to the starvation of thousands in Germany and Austria. These leaflets had not been cleared under the Defence of the Realm Act – it had never struck Eglantyne that they might need to be. The crown prosecutor did not mince his words, but Eglantyne chose to represent herself and focused on the moral case. By the end of the session she had been found guilty, but the court reporters had plenty to pad out their stories with, and the crown prosecutor insisted on paying her fine.

Eglantyne Jebb, c.1921
Anne Chamberlain, as Jebb 2015

Save the Children was swept into existence on the wave of publicity that followed this trial, culminating with an exciting public meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. After listening to Eglantyne and her sister’s speeches, the crowds, who had arrived armed with rotten fruit to throw at the traitor women who wanted to give succour to the enemy, were instead inspired to put their hands in their pockets and fund a herd of Swiss dairy cows to provide milk for the children of Vienna.

Eglantyne gained the support of factory girls and aristocrats, the Pope and the Mining Unions, the British aristocracy and the Bolshevik government. She even won the backing of the wife of the Prime Minister whose policies she had campaigned against. ‘When she spoke’, her friend and colleague Dr Hector Munro later wrote, ‘everything seemed to lose importance and one agreed to do whatever she wished.’

Little surprise then, that Eglantyne’s words are still inspiring people today. In her play, Anne manages to integrate many wonderful examples of Eglantyne’s own phrases, from speeches and letters, into her script:

- ‘Humanity owes to the child the best it has to give.’

- ‘Every generation… offers mankind anew the possibility of rebuilding his ruin of a world.’

- ‘The world is not ungenerous, but unimaginative, and very busy.’


As I often still give talks about Eglantyne, and use many of the same quotes, it was strange to hear these words in someone else's mouth, with different intonations. But it was also really lightening - and heartening. At the end of the evening I felt as though, in a way, I had been kindly exorcised of Eglantyne. She will always be an inspiration, but my relationship with her feels less intense – it feels shared.

Eglantyne Jebb, c.1925

Anne Chamberlain as Jebb, 2015

Before I saw Anne’s play, I had wondered whether I would see a very different Eglantyne on stage, to the one I had come to picture to myself, someone I might not recognise even. This happened once before when I went to a production of Tony Harrison’s play in verse, called Fram. Fram, which means ‘Forward’ in Norwegian, was the name of the arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s ship. As the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, Nansen became an associate of Eglantyne’s, helping to bring desperately needed relief to Russia during the famine of 1921. She greatly admired his spirit and energy, calling him a ‘solid viking’. Harrison’s play explored the relationship between art and aid, at times in quite provocative and painful ways. Eglantyne’s lines are the best in it, I think, and she was excellently played by Carolyn Pickles when I saw the production at the Royal National Theatre. But although Carolyn made me laugh by signing my programme ‘Eglantyne’, I did not feel a strong connection with the figure she had portrayed on stage. Perhaps, I thought for a while, I had imagined her wrongly...

Save the Children feeds starving Russian children, 1921 

As we slowly approach Save the Children’s centenary in 2019, the charity has asked whether it might be possible to re-imagine Eglantyne, to bring her story to a new and younger audience – with a picture book about her life, adventures and achievements. I think this would be wonderful, and look forward to seeing yet another interpretation of this wonderful woman on the page… If anyone has suggestions for brilliant and inspiring children’s illustrators I would be delighted to hear them!

Sadly there is no one alive today who knew Eglantyne. There are photographs and sketches, but no one who heard her voice, and no recording of her. However, much of her writing survives, her actions speak volumes, and her energy, spirit, determination and often rather dark sense of humour, are palpable throughout. When I watched Anne Chamberlain’s play earlier this month, I was delighted to discover that I felt very familiar with the Eglantyne that she brought to life, which makes me hope that perhaps we both found something of the truth in this remarkable woman.

Anne and me, holding each other's writing about Eglantyne Jebb 

I think that Eglantyne herself would have been fascinated by each reincarnation, and on the whole pleased, given that each helps to promote the cause – the welfare and rights of the world’s children – that she cared so passionately about. ‘A friend of mine once said to me that our minds, contemplating the truth, were like so many cameras turned towards the same building’, she once wrote. ‘No two cameras can be in the exactly the same position… so that no two precisely similar photographs can be taken; hence also, though some may be better than others, no single photograph, always supposing that it had not been faked, will be without its value.’

Sadly Anne’s play has now finished its British run, but it may be back next year and if so I will pass on the tour dates. I hope that between Eglantyne the play, my biography, and any new portrait, many more people, of all ages, may yet come to picture Eglantyne Jebb in their own way, and be inspired.


↧
Search
↧

A Want of Kindness by Joanne Limberg

July 28, 2015, 4:01 pm
$
0
0
Photo credit: Chris Hadley
Our July guest is Joanne Limberg, talking about her début novel, A Want of Kindness, about Queen Anne.

Joanne Limburg began her writing career as a poet, publishing two collections with Bloodaxe Books. She has also published a memoir, The Woman Who Thought Too Much and a book of poems for children, called Bookside Down. A Want of Kindness is her first novel, and is published by Atlantic Books. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and son.
www.joannelimburg.net


At the centre of my novel, A Want of Kindness, are a series of extraordinary letters – real letters – which Anne sent to her sister Mary, Princess of Orange. They were written in the years leading up to the Prince of Orange’s invasion in November 1688, and the subsequent deposition of the sisters’ Catholic father, King James II, events which the winning side were quick to call the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Anne would be on that winning, Protestant, side, and her letters show her to have taken as active a role in events as her circumstances allowed. Using a postal network of sympathetic ‘safe hands’, she was able to send her sister intelligence as to Catholic goings-on in the royal household – Latin Grace at meals and other such – to her – abominations. She could confirm that the King and her step-mother, the Queen, were most certainly under the influence of Jesuit priests, that the Earl and Countess of Sunderland had flattered their way into royal favour and that Sunderland in particular was encouraging her father the King in all his Catholic, tyrannical, most un-English excesses. In doing so, she was able to reassure her sister – and, in the process, herself – that England, its Church and its Liberties were indeed threatened and that, therefore, the momentous act they were contemplating would be entirely justified.

Anne’s most significant pieces of intelligence concerned the Queen and the progress of her pregnancy. For the Catholic Queen, or so it was claimed, was pregnant by the Catholic King. And if the child turned out to be a boy, then the Catholic succession would be assured, and, from the point of view of the fiercely Protestant Anne, England’s undoing – and her own –would be complete. She and Mary would be displaced from the succession.

Anne’s gender meant that many avenues of power and influence were closed to her. She could not wield a sword. She could not hold office. She could not make speeches to the Privy Council or to Parliament and was unable to attend Privy Council meetings. It would not have occurred to either her father or his ministers to consult her on any matters of policy. She could not take Holy Orders and preach either for or against him. Nevertheless, she was the highest-ranking Anglican in England, standing in for the King in the Royal Chapel, providing a royal presence in his Catholic absence; also, as a Princess at Court, she was often in attendance on the Queen when she dressed in the morning. She could, if she wished, vouch for two very crucial things: the King’s good intentions towards the Anglican Church and the genuineness of the Queen’s pregnancy. If she did, she would strengthen the King and Queen’s position significantly; if she did not – or even appeared not to – she would just as surely undermine it.

So, what did Anne do? Despite the fact that she sometimes put on the Queen’s shift herself and must – I am certain – have seen her pregnant belly with her own eyes, she was quite determined not to believe them. She told Mary that what she had seen was unconvincing, and, having done so, left London to take the waters at Bath – a place far more distant than her usual summer watering-place at Tonbridge – thus making it most unlikely that she would be with the Queen when he presence as witness would have been most useful to the King – that is to say, at the birth. After the baby was born, in her artfully-contrived absence, she was instrumental in spreading the now-notorious rumour that an imposter baby – the child of a Catholic brick-layer – was brought into the royal birthing chamber in a warming-pan, to take the place of what was either a stillborn or non-existent prince. She avoided attendance at Court, using her own supposed pregnancy as an excuse, but made sure that she could be seen at various Anglican houses of worship, avidly listening to sermons against the King’s religion.

The bedchamber in which the baby prince was born - or not
By the end of that Summer, Anne knew that the Prince of Orange was going to sail to England, and that she had to be prepared for what might happen. She had a staircase built at the back of her lodgings, providing her with a direct route from her privy chamber to the grounds of St James’s Park, and, once she had received word that her husband defected from the King on the battle-field, she descended it at the dead-of-night and fled London under the protection of Bishop Compton, one of the King’s most prominent opponents. After her father’s defeat, she returned to London and made her first public appearance, bedecked in Orange ribbons.

Despite James’s unpopularity, there were many who were shocked by the sisters’ behaviour. They were unnatural, ungrateful daughters, who in dishonouring their father, they had broken a Commandment. They were compared to Goneril and Regan, and to Tullia the daughter of the murdered King Servillius Tullius, who ran over her father’s body in her chariot. One poem of the time terms them the ‘Female Parricides’, and accuses the sisters of ‘ambition, folly, insolence and pride.’ Anne’s Victorian biography, Agnes Strickland, agreed, seeing Anne as entirely self-interested.


Anne & Mary and their parents by Peter Lely
P.F William Ryan, writing in the early 1900s, makes his disapproval very clear:
"Nature had apparently implanted in Anne no sense of duty, and art had done nothing to fill the void… It was… after her marriage, when entirely removed from the influence of the gentle Mary of Modena [her step-mother], that malice and envy began to flourish luxuriantly in the young Princess’s bosom. Surrounded by every luxury that her father could provide, his generosity seemed only to inflame the envy, which, with the perfection of art, was concealed by this Royal actress. "[from Queen Anne and her Court, Vol. I, p 84]

Such is Ryan’s disgust at Anne’s shocking character, that I am baffled as to why he chose her as his subject. If I agreed with him, I don’t think I could have stood to write a whole novel about her. His Anne is somewhat one-dimensional, her motives transparent and her actions predictable. But the Anne that emerges from later biographies, from her letters to Mary and to her friend Sarah Marlborough, seems to me to be far more complicated and a good deal more sympathetic. It is true that, if we consider her dealings with her father and step-mother in isolation, she seems two-faced, unkind and devious, but Anne had many other relationships in her life, and in these she behaved very differently.

Anne could be loving and loyal. She was concerned with the health of her husband and children, nursing them herself when they were ill. She was an extraordinarily generous friend, and a considerate mistress to her household. When she eventually became Queen, she would prove to be remarkably conscientious, taking part in all her cabinet’s meetings despite her continuing ill health, and attending Parliament whenever she could. She had her opponents, but unlike many of her predecessors, was not in habit of having them executed. Faced with the choice between prolonging the War of Spanish Succession and accepting a settlement, she chose the latter, being weary of bloodshed and other people’s suffering. It is not hard to see why the Duke of Marlborough described his patroness, simply, as ‘a very good sort of woman’.


Queen Anne Wikimedia Commons
When I looked at Anne’s life, then, the story it suggested to me was one in which a good woman does, knowingly, a bad thing. My sense is that Anne was not lying, precisely, when she said her step-mother’s baby was not her brother. I think she was deceiving herself, entertaining this cognitive dissonance, because she needed him not to be. She did what we are all capable of doing when our conceptions of ourselves and our worlds are put under extreme pressure, and constructed a truth she could live with: an England justly destined for Protestant rule. The thought that God might after all not be on her side, but with the Catholics, was simply too horrific to contemplate – if it were true, then the very ground under her feet would be rendered insecure, and, even worse, she would no longer be able to see believe a good person, on the right side of things. Anne’s moral thinking was not subtle, pragmatic or flexible enough to allow her to lie simply for political expedience’s sake, to make the ends justify the means. So she constructed a story, a false belief, to enable her to live with herself and what she would be doing.

And the story held together as long as it needed to, seeing her through the dangerous adventure of her defection from her father, but, it could not hold much longer. Faced with criticism from inside and outside Court, and their own increasingly uneasy consciences, the sisters would struggle with the consequences of what they had done.

↧

July competition

July 30, 2015, 4:01 pm
$
0
0
Our competitions our open to UK Followers only - sorry!

To win one of five copies of Joanne Limburg's A Want of Kindness, post an answer to the question below in the Comments section and send a copy of your answer to readers@maryhoffman.co.uk so that you can be contacted if you win.

"Which monarch  do you think has been unfairly neglected in literature until now?"

Good luck!

Closing date 7th August
↧

Cleo rides again or How to have a historical launch party by Mary Hoffman

July 31, 2015, 4:01 pm
$
0
0
You remember that our May guest was Lucy Coats? She talked about the masses of research she had done for her latest YA novel, Cleo (published by Orchard). Well, last month the book was thoroughly launched at the Thames-side apartment of a friend, which is rapidly becoming the go-to venue for all History Girls and their guests.



The first rule of any launch party: get a book cake made!

On the left, the fabulous cover of Cleo designed by Thy Bui. On the right, the equally fabulous cake made by a friend of Lucy's (this one was hand-painted but there are sites you can find in the Internet which will make you a cake topper based on a photograph).

The room was dressed with appropriate detail:
As was the author:
The inventive canapés were labelled things like "Bastet balls" and "Sobek Surprises" and the prosecco flowed. You can name the most ordinary nibbles acording to your book's theme - they don't have to be as spectacular as these actually were. Even a Twiglet will sound more exciting as a "Devil Stick" if your novel happens to be about the persucution of witches.

So, what to do if you don't have a friend with a fabulous apartment? Candy Gourlay recently wrote about book launches (and she has attended a couple by the Thames) and makes it clear that you cut your party coat according to your cloth. Those readers of this who aren't writers might be surprised to discover that we have been organising these things ourselves. "Isn't that what publishers' publicity departments do?" I hear you ask.

The fact is that publisher launches are increasingly rare and if you want a splash, you must part with some cash. Many bookshops, especially the independents will be having to host your party without charging room hire as long as you organise the food, drink and glasses. And your editor will graciously come and say a few words, relieved that you haven't thrown an author wobbly and deminded cocktails at the Ritz.

And if you've written a historical novel, so much the better, as these lend themselves best of all to a little room-dressing and indeed dressing up.


Nothing says Ancient Egypt like a few gingerbread pyramids on a tray of soft brown sugar sand! And a quick trawl of the Internet will bring you some essential items, like a pink plastic flamingo:

And if you are shy and averse to dressing up, you can usually count on some young people to do it for you. What you can't avoid is the "author reading" unless you have an actor friend to do it for you. Your public (i.e. all the happy friends at your party) will expect it.

And who are these people? You will invite some journalists and reviewers in a spirit of hope for some attention to your book but you will be lucky if one or two show up. Bloggers are usually happy to come so choose some who write about your genre or books for the age group your title is for. But paper the room with your nearest and dearest, family and close friends, who will be genuinely happy for your book and listen with rapt attention to the reading.

But beware of cultural differences when checking your RSVP list: I recently discovered it's customary to bring a "Plus One" to parties even when that hasn't been specified on the invitation - a complete no-no in the UK.

If your launch isn't in a bookshop, see if you can get an independent bookseller to come along with copies for sale. It spreads the word and people are very amenable to buying books when mellow with wine and charmed by your set dressing ideas.

Above all, enjoy yourself! You've written and published a full-length book, something that thousands of people dream of doing and very few achieve. Let your hair down - maybe twist it up into an elegant style or wear a hat or a wig, like the amazing Sarah McIntyre. (try the About or Events pages to see what I mean!)

My next launch will be of Shakespeare's Ghost and I'm definitely willing to dress up. But I need a beautiful young man and a baldy with a beard to be the bard. Any offers?






↧

Australia (and my family) from the 1920s - Gillian Polack

August 1, 2015, 4:30 pm
$
0
0


The anniversary of my father’s death is coming up. I will light a candle in his memory and I will tell bad jokes so that his sense of humour is not forgotten. I will miss him, as I always do. 

This year is different. Dad died in 1988, but a whole group of his friends died this year, in their early 90s. The last of his generation is fading. 

My parents


When I thought about this, I realised that the adults who were around when I was a child represent a world that’s almost alien to us. I’ll talk about other groups of them on other days, for they represent a variety of very different life experiences. People who were in their twenties and thirties when I was a child may have been Holocaust survivors or refugees from civil war. Some of them came from very poor backgrounds, made more parlous by the Depression. Some of them were new migrants to Australia, facing what was then a terrifyingly suburban and Anglo culture.

My father was part of the suburban and Anglo, but he was Jewish. He came from Melbourne, but grew up in small-town Victoria in the 1920s and 1930s. He grew up in the days of open fireplaces and outdoor toilets. Many houses still had coppers, which were only just now being replaced by electric machines. If washing machines were exotic, even electric beaters were something to be marvelled at. My father’s mother acquired on in the early forties and she apparently treasured very greatly for it made the best sponge cakes ever. 

I barely remember my father’s mother. I have one possible memory of her (and even that is hazy) for she died when I was two. There are big generations in my family, which is why my father’s memories go back to the twenties and his mother’s equivalent memories are late Victorian. Three of us cover well over a hundred years. Grandma Polack was born in Melbourne and moved out when she was the mother of a young family then moved back again when the marriage disintegrated. This is how my father had a semi-rural childhood.


Victorian rural house, 1970s

He had stories from that childhood. Milk, for him, was always better straight from the cow. He dealt with pasteurisation, but homogenisation made him livid (in a gentle, stubborn way) and the amount of cream at the top of the bottles left outside our door in the early morning was never enough. Just once in my life have I encountered milk the way my father described it, and that was at an old-fashioned dairy in the South Australian town of Strathalbyn, in the seventies. Dad poured himself a glass and drank it, then promptly poured himself another. Mum thought he’d make himself sick, because that milk was a third cream. I had a glass alongside him and it was rich and full of flavour. It was missing the odd aftertaste that we’re used t with pasteurised and homogenised milk. This surprised me, for I’d thought the stories of his childhood were simple nostalgia. Milk genuinely was different in Dad’s childhood. Dad’s childhood wasn’t as different to mine as mine is to anyone born since the 1980s, however. We’ve had so many big changes that the flavour of life is different, just as the flavour of that milk was different.

Dad was born before penicillin was discovered, and before cortisone. He was born when planes were new-fangled and telephones had manual switchboard operators who (in country towns) knew everything about everybody. There was no television: people listened to the radio in the evening. 

My father, in his fifties, learned to program computers using punchcards, which we then made into Christmas door ornaments and gave to our non-Jewish friends. Dad fell in love with the thought of transferring his card system onto computers, but computing didn’t advance quickly enough and he died before it was possible. He didn’t die before the Sinclair ZX80, however, and it was on that computer that I learned basic programming. It wasn’t an office machine, but it was a lot easier to program than the punchcards.

His childhood, however, didn’t only predate desktop computing: it predated ballpoint pens. Dad was taught to write using a nib. There were no ink cartridges. The nib was not attached to a fountain pen, my mother reminds me (she says that fountain pens were luxury and that Jewish boys turning thirteen would joke on their Bar Mitzvahs “Today I am a fountain pen.”), it was just a metal nib on a wooden handle, and the inkwell was a small open pot, sunk into each desk. There was an inkwell monitor in each class, who had to make sure that there was ink in each desk. I suspect it was Dad who taught me that the seeds of the stink wattle made a very good addition to those inkwells. I was the last generation to use pens with nibs in primary school, you see. I remember when we switched over to cartridges and was very glad that, in early primary school, I’d followed my father’s thought and crushed a few stink wattle seeds and put them in a couple of inkwells. Time passes and opportunities can be lost forever…

My mother (who is – thankfully- still alive) is ten years younger than Dad and she noticed the differences between her world and Dad’s. Dad’s teen years were the Depression and he moved into adulthood during World War II. His parents lost a whole generation of friends during World War I, but my parents’ friends lost all their European relatives in World War II (my family had only a few European relatives by this time, since we’re of an older generation of Australians, but many other fountain pen boys lost most of their family). The two wars were very different experiences for Australians living through them. They marked their generations profoundly.

The Depression left its mark on Dad in a very particular way, and I seem to have inherited that mark. When things go wrong around me, I stock up on tinned food, bottled food, dried food and toilet paper, just like my father did. Even if I don’t have the money for a bus fare, my inner child says, I will have food. When I was a child we used to buy boxes of everything from beans to tissues, and we had extra storage space, just in case the world came to an end (or the grocer ran out, or the money ran out) and we needed all that food. 

We didn’t. It was the Sixties. It was the third decade of continuing prosperity in Australia. There was a generation (the Baby Boomers) that had never known that kind of need. But my father wasn’t a part of that generation. He lived through the many decades of prosperity knowing that it would come to an end (which it finally did) and he kept the habit of hoarding.

I was born in the year between the Baby Boom and the next generation, and so I needed my father’s caution. My habit of filling my cupboard when I have money has got me safely through some very lean times. This is how the habit of a generation becomes a family trait. For years this filling of the cupboards seemed a daft thing to do and right now, it’s wise again.

Mum’s mark on me was the habit of going to markets once a week and getting seasonal produce. Two very different food habits based on two very different childhoods, just ten years apart. The two habits came together every summer. We’d go to the orchards on the outskirts of Melbourne and spend a day picking cherries and berries and apricots and peaches and nectarines. Then we’d spend the rest of the weekend preserving them. Rows and rows of delicious conserves for winter, was Mum’s thought. More food to protect against the incoming scarcity was Dad’s. 

I recently gave the Fowlers’ kit to a friend: I found I’d reached my limits when it came to making food I’ll not eat. It turns out that bottles of fruit and jars of jam are not part of my personal safety net. And this is how we change our culture over time: I don’t have a sweet enough tooth to warrant three days’ labour in an impossibly hot kitchen during the Australian summer. Not all family customs survive the terror of time.


↧
↧

Meeting Mr. Punch, by Y S Lee

August 2, 2015, 4:00 pm
$
0
0
As one of the international History Girls, I didn't grow up with Punch and Judy. I knew vaguely who they were, and thought I understood what the show signified: children's street entertainment. What more was there to know?

But just a couple of weeks ago, while holidaying with extended family in Llandudno, I heard a raucous squawking voice that was louder even than the seagulls. I turned around and saw my first real Punch and Judy set-up!

Codman's Punch and Judy, using the original carved puppets from 1860
 My children (ages 7 and 4) immediately drifted over. While I was still reeling from the screeching voice – amplified by loudspeaker - and contemplating Mr. Punch's enormous nose, they settled in for the performance. (Children are such experts in the willing suspension of disbelief.) And while I was startled by the show's violence, the children screamed with laughter and were firmly on Mr. Punch's side. (I only fully relaxed when Jack Ketch, the hangman, appeared. I was on safer ground there, knowing Jack Ketch's reputation for "barbarous inefficiency".)

As my family watched the performance, a woman threaded her way through the crowds, shaking a bottle to collect donations - the main source of income for the show, although there were also souvenirs for sale. The woman turned out to be Jacqueline Codman, whose grandfather founded the Punch & Judy tradition in Llandudno.

There's a delightful story behind Professor Codman's proscenium and set of puppets:



In case you can't read the words in the photo, they say:

Codman's Punch & Judy started in Llandudno in 1860. Richard Codman, a travelling showman, was stranded in Llandudno after his horse died. He gathered driftwood from the beach and hand-carved the Punch & Judy puppets and the proscenium which you still see here today.
I love this kind of family legend, and reading it got me thinking specifically about the Victorian tradition of Punch & Judy. (Ann Swinfen has already blogged here about Punch's origin in commedia dell'arte, and I won’t re-tread that ground.) What I wanted to know was what happened to the character after Samuel Pepys saw "Polichinella" perform in the 1660s. What changed after he was anglicized as Mr. Punch? When did Judy join the show, and how did they migrate from theatres to the seaside?

Although the original Punch was a marionette (as opposed to a hand puppet), most of Punch’s other traits have remained consistent since the seventeenth century: the beaky nose and hunched back, his big stick (or batone, in Italian) – and, of course, that defining squawk. In the 1720s, Jonathan Swift mentions Punch’s “rusty voice” in a poem. Punch novices, like me, will be delighted to learn that the sound is produced by a “swazzle” held at the back of the puppet-master’s mouth. It’s used only for Punch’s voice, of course, which makes the performance of fast-talking multiple characters a miracle of timing and dexterity on the part of the puppeteer, or “Professor”.

In the eighteenth century, Punch acquired an overbearing wife named Dame Joan, who was renamed Judy some time before 1825. Their domestic strife was a central feature of the show – perhaps to give Punch yet another reason to exercise his batone? With Punch now transformed from exotic clown to embattled family man, it makes sense that towards the end of the eighteenth century, there was a dual shift: from marionette to hand puppet, and from formal theatrical settings to street-side performances. These changes are clearly linked. Marionettes are expensive and fragile; hand puppets less so. Marionettes tend to require at least one marionettist (puppeteer) per figure. Once you have sturdy puppets and only one performer, you can also transport a small stage, or booth, and take the show to the audience – or, at least, where you think the audience might be.

By 1828, there was enough interest in Punch & Judy to publish a script of the accepted play (although its accuracy has been challenged), with engraved illustrations by Cruikshank -- yes, the same George Cruikshank who illustrated many of Dickens’s novels. And setting Punch firmly in his new socio-economic context, Henry Mayhew interviewed a Punch & Judy man for his monumental series, London Labour and the London Poor.

Punch’s violently disruptive, anti-authoritarian stance also made him the perfect mascot for a publication that aimed to satirize English society. In 1841, Mayhew cofounded Punch magazine,  borrowing Punch’s energy, popularity, and street cred for his new publication. 
Mr. Punch and Jack Ketch, the hangman
With the expansion of the railways came the creation of seaside holiday resorts like Llandudno, Brighton, and Blackpool – and amongst the sea-bathing machines and donkey rides, there too was Mr. Punch. This brings us back to the Codman family history. Trapped in Llandudno with bills to pay, who better to come to a travelling showman’s rescue than the ever-popular Mr. Punch?

“That’s the way you do it!”, indeed.

---
Y S Lee writes the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.
↧

No Passareu! - Katherine Langrish

August 3, 2015, 10:00 pm
$
0
0


A few years ago we used often to stay with friends in Montpellier in the south of France (it's a fabulous city) and each time we went we would make a trip to the possibly even more fabulous walled mediaeval town of Aigues Mortes.



It's the perfect walled city, with a history that begins in the neolithic and runs on through the Romans to Charlemagne, who built the first tower - and on though the reigns of St Louis and his son Philip the Bold.  Once an important port, it silted up during the 18th century, so no significant modern expansion ever occurred, and the town still fits neatly within its massive rectangular walls like a nut inside its shell.

But this post isn't going to be about the town, rather something I found in the town, while browsing the fascinating little shops lining the narrow streets which lead into the central Place de St Louis.


 In a small antique shop, I picked up a little leather-bound book. It looked like a diary, with a lock and a key.



I opened it to find beautiful end-papers...



 ... and then, this hand-painted illustration: a sunburst inscribed 'FRANCE  CATALOGNE', rising behind a lozenge displaying the Catalan colours, framed in branches of laurel. Below that, a ribbon of the French colours, inscribed with the words ' HONNEUR A LA  7e DU 53e '



I turned the next page.  Here was a beautiful trail of ivy leaves and, written in French, these words (my translation), followed by a verse by the Catalan poet Apel·les Mestres i Oñós (1854-1936):

 
This album in which we have written our most noble thoughts, this flag upon whose silk our nimble fingers have embroidered 'La croix de guerre', imperishable glorification of your courage, we offer to you, Catalans from the other side of the Pyrennees, our heart's brothers. champions of all liberty, immortal heroes of the great war,  whom we will forever recognise as having fulfilled the cry of your poet: 


No passareu!, i si passeu,
quan tots haurem deixat de viure,
sabreu de sobres a quin preu
s’abat un poble digne i lliure.
Mes no serà! Per més que feu,
No, no passareu!

You shall not pass! and if you do,
When we all cease to be 
Then you shall know the price
Of beating a free and noble people.
But it shall not be! Despite all your efforts,
No, you shall not pass!

Barcelona, 28 May, 1918

(I'm indebted to a young Catalan friend of my daughter's for the translation of the verse.) Next came yet another elaborately decorated page, a dedication 'To Captain Barthés, Knight of the Legion of Honour, Commander of the 7th Company of the 53rd Infantry Regiment', above a drawing of the statue of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which is in the Louvre.




And after that, the book is full of signatures and dedications in both French and Catalan, praising brave Catalan men who sacrificed their lives in the defence of France and liberty.









What was all this about? - I wondered.  Well, Spain remained neutral during the First World War.  However, many Catalans felt alienated from the government in Madrid, which they felt did not fairly represent or defend their interests. Catalan industry had struggled after Spain lost Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Exports plummeted; they were unable to compete with British rivals on the overseas markets, while the domestic Spanish market was limited by its poverty.

"The First World War may not have involved Spain, but it resonated for many Catalanistas. One of the subtexts of that War was the right of small nations to self-determination in the face of predatory imperial powers. In addition, the Irish revolt of 1916 not to mention the growing voice of Basque separatism, had an emotional impact on more vocal Catalanists...". (From 'Spain Then And Now'  http://www.spainthenandnow.com/spanish-history/catalonia-1900-1923/default_258.aspx)

The result was that significant numbers of young Catalan men - estimated at between 12,000 - 15,000 - volunteered to join the French army. The majority were killed; it is thought only 2000 or so ever returned home.



Frustratingly, that's as much as I can find out. I'm sure if I read Spanish or Catalan, I could discover more. I'd love to know who Captain Barthés was, and what he did to be awarded the Legion d'Honneur.  I'd love to hear the story of the young men who went north to fight for their ideals. If anyone reading this post can point me in the right direction, I'll be very grateful.  In the meantime, all I can do is turn the pages of this beautiful tribute to the bravery of the young men who went away to fight and who probably never came back.  I read the names of those who signed it.  Lolita Perez y Meila, Maria Carjinell, Rosita Sala, Angela Coch, Paquita Pascual, Conchita Pascual...


And Dolores Soler,  Presentacion Roldan, Conchita Panas, and Carmen Boliva, whose brief Catalan messages are to me only partly decipherable, save for one. 'Oh guerra malahida!' - 'Oh, cursed war!'









↧

Favourite Finds by Joan Lennon

August 4, 2015, 4:30 pm
$
0
0
Charity shops - second-hand bookstores - you never know what you might stumble across in them.  Books you didn't even know existed but that still somehow manage to draw your eye from in amongst all the other titles on display.  I'd like to tell you about just one of the books that did that to me, and now lives on my own book shelves:


Peter Goodfellow's Shakespeare's Birds 
illustrated by Peter Hayman
published in 1983 by Kestrel Books

This is not an earth-shattering book.  It is not a weighty, academic study.  It is gentle and unassuming, with the flavour of a pleasant conversation about it.  


The illustrations are detailed and thoughtful.


I learned some stuff I didn't know - like, for example, some of the old country names for birds, such as ouzel for blackbird, throstle for song thrush and puttock for the red kite.  Some of the conventions and stories Shakespeare would have drawn on in his use of bird imagery I knew, such as the swan who only sings as she dies, or the barnacle goose being born from barnacles and therefore being okay to eat during Lent (because it was technically a fish ...)  But others were new to me - the kingfisher, for example (known as the halcyon as in halcyon days) was thought to build its nest out of fish-bones, floating on a calm sea.  And a dead owl, nailed over a door, kept evil away.  

But it isn't at heart an I'm-going-to-teach-you-stuff book.  What it boils down to is, Goodfellow really likes birds, and he really likes Shakespeare, and he hopes you do too.  And the one thing Shakespeare's Birds achieved above everything else was to remind me of just how utterly mellifluous the plays and sonnets are.  It made me want to go back and re-read them.

So thank you to the second-hand bookshop I found this book in, and here's to many more pleasant surprises in the future.  What would I quite like to find next?  Well, J.E. Harting's The Ornithology of Shakespeare critically examined, explained and illustrated, published in 1871, and listed in Goodfellow's "Suggestions for Further Reading" would be nice.*

And how about you?  Tell us about your favourite finds, in the random and serendipitous world of charity and second-hand bookshops - the books you maybe didn't even know existed, that now have a new home on your book shelves.


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.


(*After typing those words I had a bash at googling Harting's book and lo and behold, I can read it on the Guggenheim online archive here - so that's my distraction for the day organised, without even leaving the house!) 
↧
Search

Ravilious: War Artist by Lydia Syson

August 5, 2015, 4:02 pm
$
0
0
On 31st of this month, a wonderful and rare Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery comes to an end.  Since this summer is also the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, I hope nobody will mind that I'm revisiting a post which first appeared on my own website early last year. 

Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) was probably the best known of the three British Official War Artists who were killed during the Second World War, despite the unofficial hope on the part of Kenneth Clark, who created the scheme, that it would serve to preserve the lives of Britain’s best artists. (Thomas Hennell disappeared in Java in 1945; Albert Richards, who fought as well as painted, was blown up by an enemy mine in Belgium in March the same year.)


© IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 284)
This picture, HMS Ark Royal in Action, 1940, is a watercolour made on June 9th from the deck of HMS Highlander and it shows the ship’s anti-aircraft guns at full-blast in the last moments of the Allied withdrawal from Narvik after the fall of France. 

In July 1940, the National Gallery mounted its first exhibition of war art, and Ravilious was embarrassed by quite how many of the paintings were by him. He’d taken up the invitation to become an Official War Artist as soon as he was offered it in December 1939, after an autumn spent volunteering with the Observer Corps, watching for enemy aircraft from a post on the top of Sudbury Hill, near his home: “We wear lifeboatmen’s outfits against the weather and tin hats for show. It is like a Boy’s Own Paper story, what with spies and passwords and all manner of nonsense.” (p. 8)
This sense of unreality – the idea almost of playing at soldiers – was remarkably widespread in Britain in that first year of the war, and something I tried hard to capture in That Burning Summer.  Equally strong was a sense of growing threat to a particular, pastoral kind of Englishness, a vision of England which Ravilious arguably helped to create.  It comes across strongly in the book he illustrated for the Curwen Press book,The Story of the High Street.

In a painting called ‘Observers’ Post’ Ravilious conveys the incongruity of sandbags, duckboards and telephone wires appearing suddenly beside rustic wooden fences and reassuring hedgerows, and under blue skies. His sandbags have a plumped up, pillow-like feel to them, and glow quietly in the last rays of the sun.  Another watercolour of 1940, showing Barrage Balloons Outside a British Port is darker, greyer, and the two lone figures at the end of a quay are leaning forward with a greater sense of urgency, but there is a similar tension between the bravely comic whale-shaped monsters (whose accidental escapes Ravilious had frequently sighted from his Observers’ Post) and the reassuringly straight lines of harbour buildings and railings.  Meanwhile, the extravagant curve of the quay in the foreground suggests that the land itself is on the verge of becoming as stormy as the sea and sky beyond.

Balloons, ships and aircraft are often given as much, if not more, character than the few people depicted in Ravilious’ war pictures. They come across as plucky creatures.  Here, in HMS Glorious in the Arctic, 1940, Hawker Hurricanes and Gloster Gladiators circle the aircraft carrier as they prepare to land on her deck, before leaving Norway.
© IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 283)
© IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 283)

In the course of his posting to the Royal Navy, Ravilious discovered his fascination with flight.  At the Royal Naval Air Station in Dundee he was enthralled by the eccentricities of a lumbering amphibious biplane called a Supermarine Walrus, which could be launched by catapult from a warship, and became very effective in air-sea rescue operations.  ’I spend my time drawing seaplanes and now and again they take me up…I do very much enjoy drawing these queer flying machines…what I like about them is that they are comic things with a strong personality like a duck…You put your head out of the window and it is no more windy than a train.’ (p.36)

© IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 1712)
© IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 1712)
He soon graduated from the co-pilot’s seat to the rear-gunner’s position, which offered a much better view – along with some slightly alarming duties involving hatches and such: ‘How trusting they are!’

When Ravilious began his next War Artist contract, it was with the RAF. ‘These planes and pilots are the best things I have come across since this job began.  They are sweet and have no nonsense (naval traditional nonsense and animal pride).’ (p38)  The luminosity of Ravilious’ watercolour technique was perfectly suited to conveying the peculiar joys of simply being airborne.  Over the course of the summer of 1942, he flew regularly in Tiger Moths from a modest airbase in Hertfordshire, at Sawbridgeworth, where the runway was made of coconut matting and living conditions were equally basic. Yet, as it wrote home:  ”It was more lovely than words can say flying over the moors and the coast today in an open plane, just floating on great curly clouds and perfectly still and cool . . .” (p. 44)

© IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 2123)
© IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 2123)
One of my favourite pictures in this book took me back to some of my early research for That Burning Summer.  From a long and fascinating conversation with Edward Carpenter, local historian and author of Romney Marsh at War, I confess I stole his story of rescuing a lost homing pigeon, for which – if I remember rightly – he was given a medal.  During World War Two, thirty-two pigeons were awarded medals themselves, as James Russell writes in the short essay accompanying this atmospheric watercolour of Corporal Stediford’s Mobile Pigeon Loft.  Thousands of lives were saved by birds flying home bearing the co-ordinates of a crash site, and every bomber crew carried one.  The pigeons here are full of life and character, with their bright red eyes and distinctive markings. By contrast, the distant group of soldiers who can just be seen through the open doorway are barely there at all. Like the ghostly figures in the painting Morning on the Tarmac, in which sailors or airmen who aren’t even given the solidity of the reflections granted to the aircraft, these men seem on the point of vanishing altogether.  Ravilious disappeared himself in Norway on 2nd September.  His own plane never returned from a mission to search for survivors after a previous aircraft had gone missing.

From 'Ravilious in Pictures: The War Paintings' by James Russell.
From ‘Ravilious in Pictures: The War Paintings’ by James Russell.
(N.B. If you want to see more Ravilious, and are anywhere near Eastbourne, I thoroughly recommend the Towner Gallery's 'behind the scenes' private tours.)
↧
↧

TWO ALICE ANNIVERSARIES by Adèle Geras

August 6, 2015, 11:00 pm
$
0
0

"And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversation?"

This has long been one of my favourite quotations from a favourite book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.  I agree with it completely. I can't promise you conversations in this post but I do have a lot of pictures to share.

This year is a double anniversary. It's 150 years since Carroll's book was published and it's 50 years since I appeared (or rather took part...I didn't appear.  I was hidden. More of that later!) in a production of a play directed by Adrian Benjamin to celebrate the centenary of the publication, in 1965. This passage of time makes me feel almost as old as Alice herself. 

 Nigel Rees, who now hosts shows on BBC Radio such as Quote Unquote, was the organising force behind the 50th anniversary tea party in the Dean's Garden at Christ Church College. He played the White Rabbit in the play, and has kept an extensive archive of photographs, some of which I reproduce below.




The pictures above and below show some of the rehearsals in Christ Church Meadow, where the production took place. These must have been rehearsals quite late on in the process because we also used the Dean's Garden and I do remember thinking: Alice, the real Alice Liddell, the Dean's daughter, would have played here, where we're lying about and declaiming. 

The seven Alices in the photo below were part of the rather 60s ish aspect of the show. I can no longer remember (it was half a century ago!) what the purpose of those seven young women was, but it looked wonderful when they were all together on the rungs of a ladder, as I recall. 








The real Alice, the embodiment of Carroll's quiet and determined young heroine, was Tamara Ustinov. She was quite spectacularly good and looked just like the Tenniel illustrations when dressed in her costume. 




There are no photos of me in action from that production.  I am in the programme under a pseudonym: Rosamund Ackworth.  This was because I didn't have acting permission. I had done 'too much acting' according to my tutors and failed my Preliminary exams (the only scholar of the college ever to have done such a thing in living memory) and so the powers that be decided that I couldn't be in Alice....defying those powers and taking part anyway was the one naughty thing I did while at St Hilda's. And the director made sure I wasn't caught. As well as appearing under a pseudonym, I was placed on a kind of platform up a tree with only my skirt and shoes showing. My role was as Alice's sister,  and all I had to do was sing. When a song like "You are old, Father William"was sung on ground level, there I would be, singing the original hymn or Victorian parlour song of which it was a parody. It was a perfect arrangement. Once the production went on to the Minack Theatre in Cornwall after the term had ended, I could be visible and sang my songs from the top of a rock.






That was in 1965. The tea party was early in July. And you can see, from the picture below, that Tamara Ustinov is still looking very Alice-like. Age cannot wither her, etc. To her left is the Dean of Christ Church who very kindly let us use his garden for our revels. The person with their back to the camera is Nigel Rees.






Oxford was full of Alice memorabilia. Here's a window that's typical of many I saw. 







This is the Dean's garden. Just as I remember it, but bigger.  This was where we rehearsed quite often.






The food was most appropriate for the occasion, as you can see.



I haven't put up photos of the cast today.  They looked, spookily, much older and still exactly the same as they were at 20. But here below is Alice's nursery. The Dean allowed us to go up there and photograph it, too. It's the sitting room for him and his young family, but this was where Alice Liddell spent a great deal of time and it was wonderful to be there and see what it was like, imagine what the room must have been like in her day.



I went to the window and looked out. This must have been something that Alice, from what we know of her, did over and over again. I took a picture and this is it. The plants may have been different, but it was strange looking out just in the same way as she did. I have no doubt that this place is haunted in the best possible way: full of echoes of the book. And the  book is one that will live forever, in  spite of some modern misgivings about its author. 





Some of us went to evensong in the Cathedral before leaving. It was a perfect end to a wonderful occasion and many thanks are due to the Dean for letting us celebrate our anniversary in such grand style.  
↧

HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW by Karen Maitland

August 7, 2015, 4:30 pm
$
0
0
Entrance to the synagogue on Rhodes
Photo: Wkinght94
In recent months the attention of Europe’s finance ministers has been focused on Greece and I was delighted to see a letter in the national papers signed by authors and academics reminding the world of the huge legacy Greece has bequeathed to the world, from art and architecture to science, maths, astronomy, philosophy and literature. But we forget it gave us something else too. In spite of the periods of bitter civil war, there have been many centuries when Greece and Greek island people have shown us how it is possible for communities from different religions and backgrounds to live together in peace and tolerance, and with compassion for one another.

On holiday in the Greek Islands last summer, with five minutes to spare before the bus left, I managed to find the Square of the Martyred Jews in Rhodes city and, wandering into the street behind it, stumbled across one of the loveliest synagogues I’ve ever visited – Kahal Kadosh Shalom (Holy Congregation of Peace). Built in 1577, it is thought to be the oldest surviving synagogue in Greece still in use. I managed to return a few days later and spend several hours looking round the synagogue which has beautiful mosaic floor made from sea-pebbles and an amazing Jewish museum.


The Palace of the Grand Masters, Rhodes
Jewish presence on the island of Rhodes dates back to 2nd century BCE and is mentioned in the book of Maccabees. In 1500, the Grand Master of the Knights Templars expelled the Jewish community living on the island. But in 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire invited Jews to come to Rhodes and start a new community. Many of the Jews who came were Sephardim fleeing the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and they found a life of peace and acceptance on the island, developing their own unique form of music and song which is heard nowhere else. By 1920’s, the Jewish population on Rhodes was around 4,500 people worshipping in six synagogues.

But in 1944, the island was occupied by the Nazis and on 23rd July, a roundup of Jews began with 1673 Jews arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Only 150 survived the death camp. Today only a few Jewish families still live on Rhodes.
Interior of the Rhodes synagogue. Photo by Sailko


But through the darkness of that dreadful time, two stories from that period blaze with light. In 1944, when the Rabbi of the synagogue realised the Jews were about to be rounded up, he was fearful for the safety of their 800 year old Torah scroll and other holy manuscripts, so he took them to a close Muslim friend of his on the island - the Mufti of Rhodes. The Muslim leader said that it gave him the greatest joy in the world to cradle the precious sefer torah in his arms, and he laid it in the one place he knew the Nazis would never look for a Jewish scroll – the pulpit of the mosque! There it remained safely hidden in plain view for the whole of the war, until finally it could be restored to the Jewish Community. You can still see it in the synagogue today.
Interior of the synagogue on Rhodes showing the
floor mosaic of pebbles. Photo by Sailko


The second story concerns Bey Selahattin Ulkumen, the Muslim Consul-General of Turkey, who risked much to rescue 39 Jews from Rhodes and 13 from Cos who would otherwise have been deported to Auschwitz. In 1990, in gratitude and recognition for the Jewish lives he saved, B’nai B’rith and Yad Vashem declared him ‘Righteous among the Nations’. When the Muslim leader was asked why he had done it he simply said ‘I have to do my duty for my people and the Jews of Rhodes are my people.’

If you find yourself in the city of Rhodes this summer you can take a fascinating tour of the ancient Jewish quarter either doing it yourself using the guide book on sale in the synagogue shop or as a historical walk led by a member of the congregation. But even if you don’t have time for that, do stop in at the synagogue which is open all throughout the summer for tourists and visitors. You’ll be assured of the warmest of welcomes.



↧

Numinous by Caroline Lawrence

August 8, 2015, 4:02 pm
$
0
0
numinous
(adj) having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.
e.g. “the strange, numinous beauty of this ancient landmark”
Sunset at Lake Tahoe, California
I am fascinated by the numinous, that is to say by places or incidents where people have had a positive experience of something spiritual or supernatural without looking for it. 

The word numen is Latin. It means a nodding of the head. Later it came to mean a nodding of Jupiter’s head in approval and thus: divine will. Today we use the adjective numinous to mean a positive sense of god’s presence in a place or situation. 

I have been surprised by the numinous twice in my life. (I’m not counting church or church-related events where my whole being is focused on the spiritual.)
Sacre Coeur at Night
The first time was when I was 19, backpacking around Europe on my gap year. My friend and I went into Sacre Coeur Church in Montmartre one night. It was candlelit and there might have been people singing. I can’t recall. But what I do remember is being surprised by something I couldn’t identify. I felt a presence: a kind, loving, benevolent presence. At that point in my life I considered myself an atheist but I’d been inside many churches and never felt anything like this in any of them. I was actually surprised to sense something beautiful, enlightened, spiritual. 

The next time I was surprised by the numinous was about ten years after I had converted to Christianity. But I wasn’t in church and I wasn’t looking for it. I had been travelling around Turkey with my ten-year-old son, a fellow scholar and two female grad students. One afternoon the grad students and my son and I took a taxi up into the hills near Ephesus on the spur of the moment. They wanted to see the a place called Meryem Ana where Mary the mother of Jesus was supposed to have spent the last years of her life. The site was reputed to be very scenic so my son and I tagged along.
Mary's House near Ephesus in Turkey
I wasn’t expecting anything, but as I stepped out of the taxi into the late afternoon light I felt something envelop me. The word that springs to mind is bittersweet. It was like being bathed in a strong yet subtle poignancy. Tears sprang to my eyes and everything seemed intensely beautiful. It was so unexpected that I said to the others, ‘Do you feel that?’ That sad, tender presence stayed with me strongly the whole time we were there. 

I returned to Mary’s House near Ephesus a few years ago. It was still beautiful and peaceful, but this time I didn’t feel a presence as intensely as I did that afternoon two decades previously. 

Was my first experience at Maryem Ana shrine just the result of a chance combination of afternoon light, jet lag and whatever hormones were present in my body at that time? Maybe. Maybe not. 

I often ask people if they have ever experienced the sense of something other, something divine, without looking for it. 

Some people say they have never felt anything like that. But many others have. They tell me about a place – often a place of beauty – where they have sensed God’s presence, or the presence of something beyond this world.

path through a forest
Once the wife of the head teacher at a school in Herefordshire was driving me back to the train station after an author event. I asked her if she had ever experienced the numinous and she told me about just such an experience. She was walking her two dogs on a country footpath when she felt a sort of power surge up from the grassy earth into her feet. The sensation was so unexpected, so strange, that she froze where she was. She felt connected to everything, not just the earth but the trees and shrubs. She lost sense of time. She might have stood there for seconds, minutes or even hours before she came to herself. ‘Did the dogs sense it, too?’ I asked. She laughed. ‘Oh, no. They were bounding around, oblivious.’

Story told in a night time taxi...
Another time I was being taken back from a library sleepover event and I raised this topic with the taxi driver. He told me about the most amazing mind-out-of-body experience he experienced one night. In a dream, his uncle came to him and took him flying around the world, showing him the places from his (the uncle’s) life. ‘It was unlike any dream I have ever had before,’ he said. ‘It seemed to go on for days and days,’ he said. ‘Everything about it seemed so real.’ 

‘It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ I said. ‘Captain Picard gets zapped by a beam and lives a whole life on another planet, but when they bring him back only a few minutes have passed on the Enterprise. He remembers everything, including how to play a flute.’ 

‘I know that episode,’ he said. ‘My experience was very much like that. I told my wife about my dream as soon as I woke up, but she scoffed. Later that day,’ he added, ‘my mother phoned to say my uncle had passed away the previous night.’

Camilla in the numinous woods of Laurentum
There is a line from Jane Eyre that I love: Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere... 
One of the best parts of being a writer is that I have a good excuse to ask people about their experiences of the numinous. If you have had any, please share them in the comments section below. 

Caroline Lawrence is author of historical fiction for middle grade students: The Roman Mysteries, The P.K. Pinkerton Mysteries and The Night Raid. Her next project is a Barrington Stoke book about Virgil's Warrior Queen, Camilla, followed by a new series called The Roman Quests, set in Roman Britain. It will probably include Druids. 

↧

Mouths of Truth - Michelle Lovric

August 9, 2015, 4:30 pm
$
0
0
It is so hot in Venice that the cats are melting.

 
The usual silly season stories abound in the city's press. But one story caught my eye this week, seeming more profound: the Gazzettino newspaper reported on the opening of a new ‘Sportello Antiabusivi’ in September.

This translates as a counter for denouncing people who are working ‘in nero’– for cash that is not declared in any tax return. The state position is that this is about greed, basically: taking without giving. Officials point out that those who work in nero accept Italy's excellent free education and hospitals, policing and other services. But they choose not to contribute. Of course this position ignores the plight of those who are trapped without citizenship and paperwork, who are themselves exploited by employers.

Venice’s local government estimates that there are 20,000 living in nero in the city. Their number includes plumbers, hairdressers, and taxi drivers.

‘Spuntano come funghi’ says one official. ‘They are springing up like mushrooms.’

 But now it is promised that these tax dodgers will be ‘in mirino’– in the mire.

A ‘sportello’ is hardly a romantic object. Nevertheless, it was strange to me that none of the Venetian newspapers drew any comparisons with a very similar institution in Venice’s past – the Bocche di Leone, the Lions' Mouths.

Several of these stone reliefs were placed around the city. Through the aperture of the lions’ jaws, citizens were encouraged to post denunciations of those who were committing frauds or crimes, who swore, or who posed a threat to public health – always a great issue in Venice whose capillaries of narrow streets efficiently transmitted any kind of disease, notably the great plague of 1575, which may have carried off a third of her citizens.

While these sculpted holes in the wall were called 'Lions’ Mouths', in fact they were not always in a recognisably leonine form. The allusion to the lion is thought to connect the righteous practice of outing wrong-doers with the city’s symbol – the lion of San Marco. Certainly the faces have the ferocity of lion, discouraging any idle or mischievous approach.

The magistrates of the city held the keys to the post-boxes behind the lion mouths. The denunciations inside would be investigated by the Savi (the Wise Men), the Inquisitors and the Council of Ten.

Anonymous denunciation were not taken seriously. Only if the salvation of the city was at stake would such letters be accepted, and then only by a majority vote by the officers. From 1387, the Council of Ten ordered the burning of letters without the signature of the accuser and without credible evidence. From 1542 onwards the denunciations would be accepted only if three eye-witnesses were also cited.

Otherwise, of course, anonymity might have masked those who were jealous or malicious. Letters that were anonymous or unsupported by proper evidence were simply burnt.

This one is inside the Palazzo Ducale. The text explains it is for secret denunciations against those who practice or collude in corruption in hiding real income. (Photograph: Wikimedia Commons)


This one is on the Zattere in Dorsoduro, by the old church of Santa Maria della Visitazione.

 
It is for anyone who wants to denounce health crimes. In fact, these days one can get behind the wall that hosts this mouth. When I did, I was rather hoping to find a basket full of current denunciations (sexually transmitted diseases, emotional abuse, drug peddling?) but there’s nothing there – not even the basket. (Photograph: Wikimedia Commons)

There’s nothing left of the special task for this lion’s mouth on the wall of the church of San Martino in Castello. (Photograph: Wikimedia Commons)


Why lions? It seems that lion mouths were our first lie detectors.

Here you see one working in a painting called The Mouth of Truth by Lucas Cranach the Elder, or his workshop. (Painting courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)


A woman accused of infidelity swears that she is chaste. She puts her hand in the mouth of the lion who refrains who biting it off because she has told the truth. Except in this case, she has actually fooled the lion, apparently.

The mouth lie detector can also be seen in a stone mask in of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome, – the Bocca della Verità– which according to legend bites off the hand of every liar.


You may know this lion from the 1953 film Roman Holiday in which Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck play characters with things to hide. She flinches from putting her hand in; he makes a terrifying prank of it. There’s a clip here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6af1dAc9rXo

Frankly, I think it would be a grand idea to reinstate the idea of a fearsome test for emotional and financial liars, the greedy types with both hands in the honeypots of money and love. Something to scare the hands off them! It’s a good start that we can soon walk up to a sportello in Venice and denounce those who cheat on their taxes.

But what about the heart-cheats and the callous people who mistreat those who love them? Shouldn’t they be denounced too?

That public official in Venice, describing the need for the Sportello Antiabusivi, describes the cheating as ‘a wound that spreads a stain everywhere’.

We’ve all known people who inflicted those.

I wrote about one such, a certain Minguillo Fasan, in my novel, The Book of Human Skin. Doctor Santo observes, ‘There are people who are a disease, and it is purely our indulgence that makes a plague out of them.’

So should we cease in our indulgence of unmitigated villainy?

Public denunciation will be a good start. The internet has plenty of virtual denunciations but I see a need for something tangible, something which must be approached righteously, in a physical sense. A wall with photographs of philanderers? A column of infamy on which names could be carved? A tree hung with poems of heartbreak, naming names? Even a public counter in Trafalgar Square, manned by someone fierce as a lion?

Or does anyone have a better idea?



Michelle Lovric's website




↧
↧

All Aboard! by Laurie Graham

August 10, 2015, 5:30 pm
$
0
0


Today’s post will be the first in a series linked to my new novel, The Night in Question, which will be published in October. The book deals tangentially with the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 and researching it was an interesting mix of surprise and familiarity. My great-grandmother, whom I knew briefly, would have been 12 years old at the time of the murders. I wonder whether they talked about Jack the Ripper in rural Wiltshire?

Not being a Londoner one of my research surprises was the discovery that  in 1888 Whitechapel already had two Underground stations  -  Aldgate East and St Mary’s,  with another (Whitechapel station) under construction. In fact Underground travel was already old hat by then  and much improved from this 1860s prototype. 



St Mary’s station no longer exists. It was closed to passengers in the 1930s and only reopened briefly at the start of WW2, to be used as an air raid shelter. The station building took a direct hit in 1940 and was demolished but the platform apparently still exists, walled off from view as the Upminster trains rattle through. A ghostly relic of Victorian London.

So in 1888 how did most people get around? In an impoverished area like Whitechapel shanks’ pony was the norm. People walked miles every day even if they’d had to pawn their boots and go barefoot. Being a pedestrian was anyway hardly a pleasure. Pavements were narrow, streets were crowded with wheeled vehicles and the Highway Code was still a distant prospect. The great stone/asphalt argument swung back and forth too. Carriage wheels on granite created a lot of noise. Asphalt was much quieter but was dangerous for horses. All it took was a light coating of rain and asphalt became a skating rink beneath horseshoes. And then there was the smell. In the 1880s London had around a thousand tons a year of horse dung to deal with.

The hansom cab so beloved of period movie makers would have been an affordable option for my protagonist, Dot Allbones, but hardly a luxurious one. It was a jolting kidney-shaker, carrying two passengers, three at a squeeze. With just two wheels it didn’t hold the road well and you were at the mercy of a driver who sat in a high, rear seat and who might well have had a drink or two.  The four-wheeled growler, or clarence as it was sometimes called, was more commodious and more stable. It had room for four passengers and luggage too. You would have easily found a growler for hire outside Liverpool Street station for instance.

The other options were horse buses and horse trams. In the early 19th century the buses had reigned supreme although the top deck, reached by ladder, was used by only the most determined of females. By the 1880s, buses had improved greatly, with proper stairs to the upper deck and seats that faced forward instead of rudimentary bench seating. Nevertheless buses were losing trade to the trams. It was matter of Newtonian physics. A tram glides on its track more easily than a horse bus trundles on its wheels. Less effort was required of the horses which in turn meant that a tram could carry more passengers and fares became more competitive.   


At just a penny a mile market forces were at work. The horse tram became the commuter's  preferred mode of transport and a practical choice for Dot Allbones on the morning she needed to travel from Hackney to the Golden Lane mortuary on a sad and sobering errand.  
↧

The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo A review by Tanya Landman

August 11, 2015, 4:30 pm
$
0
0

I’ve always been fascinated by the real life story of Caraboo – a warrior princess from the tropical island of Javasu, captured by pirates, taken half way around the world before she escaped from them by jumping ship in the Bristol Channel and swimming to shore.  Homeless in a foreign country she was taken in as a house guest by the Worrall family of Knole Park, Almondsbury, in 1817. There she spent weeks speaking in an incomprehensible language, hunting with a bow and arrows, swimming naked in the lake, climbing trees and praying to a pagan god.

 

This strange, exotic beauty was a sensation, charming everyone she met until she was recognised and exposed. In reality she was Mary Willcox, a cobbler’s daughter from Witheridge in Devon.


The story of Princess Caraboo is an intriguing one not least because no one really knows what Mary’s motivation was.  As Catherine Johnson points out in her author’s note this wasn’t a con trick as such – Mary Willcox didn’t profit financially from it.  She was never prosecuted for fraud – in fact Mrs Worrall obviously cared deeply about Mary, paying for her fare to America after her identity was revealed and treasuring the letters Mary sent back.


So why did Mary Willcox do it?


Catherine Johnson’s answer to that question is a piece of genius:  it’s brilliantly simple and makes perfect psychological sense.

She wasn’t pretending.


Set in the early 19th century,  the book opens with the brutal ‘end’ of Mary Willcox.  The very first chapter sees her raped at the side of the road - after having been betrayed and abandoned by her lover and having given birth to a stillborn child.   To escape the trauma, to save her own sanity this damaged girl retreats into a place of safety inside her own head: she is no longer Mary Willcox, but becomes instead the invincible warrior princess Caraboo.


What has begun as a simple survival mechanism starts to get complicated when other people become involved. Caraboo arrives at an inn and is then taken home by Cassandra, the rich, bored daughter of the Worrall family. Her mother – whose interest in anthropology is something of an obsession – is fascinated by the new arrival. Soon the whole family is caught up in Mary’s fantasy not because Caraboo is particularly cunning or conniving, but because they so desperately want to believe she is real.


Catherine Johnson’s novel is a crackingly good read:  a thoroughly gripping story in which all the characters – even the spoilt rich ones – are so warmly drawn and engaging you really mind about what happens to them. The love story that slowly develops between the Lady Caraboo and Fred Worrall is so tenderly written it made me cry.


The nature of lies and deception, fantasy and reality, love and honesty is explored in a book that says so much about the power of stories and our desire for exotic fiction rather than prosaic truth. There are moments of bleakness, moments where we seem to be in a world where love is nothing but self-deception, where all human relationships are a sham. 


But there’s a wonderful paradox at the heart of the novel – the fictional creation of Princess Caraboo takes the characters on a journey that brings them closer to their true selves. What begins as a lie actually redeems Mary Willcox and Fred Worrall and offers both real hope for a happier future.






↧
Search

Manda Scott's INTO THE FIRE reviewed by Elizabeth Fremantle

August 12, 2015, 10:00 pm
$
0
0

Manda Scott wrote a number of critically acclaimed crime novels before turning to historical fiction but with her latest release, INTO THE FIRE, she appears to have created a work that perfectly amalgamates both genres, with an impressive story that interweaves gritty contemporary crime and revelatory medieval history.

A Scott trope, across both genres, is ballsy women and who could be more ballsy than the figure who lies at the heart of INTO THE FIRE, Joan of Arc? Joan is depicted here as, rather than the somewhat whimsical saintly figure we learned about in school, a proper warrior woman. Scott hasn't plucked this idea from the ether – her Joan is based on groundbreaking historical research, a version of which becomes the focus of the modern day thriller that is threaded through the historical narrative.

The novel opens with modern day Orleans ablaze. A group called Jaish al Islam are setting buildings alight. But when a the charred remains of a scientist, who has hastily swallowed a memory chip, is found in the burnt out shell of a hotel, police detective Ines Picaut (another seriously ballsy woman) believes there is more to the conflagrations than meets the eye.

The narrative slips effortlessly back and forth between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries, with each thread feeding into the other and both equally compelling. The potent symbol of the Maid, on the battlefields of medieval France and in the hearts and minds of the modern day French, is the link that ties the separate periods and stories together and the city of Orleans, both medieval and modern, provides the backdrop for the action.

In medieval France the English, more accurately a hotch-potch of mercenaries and Bergundians, are struggling to hang onto the territory won by Henry V. But with the old king dead and a child on the throne the French are gaining back Northern Franc battle by battle with alarming rapidity. It is The Maid who girds the men on with her singular courage, inspiring and leading the French army from the front and it is the supernatural belief invested in her by her own and the opposing army that makes her so powerful.

Modern day Orleans is in the throes of a different kind of power struggle. With mayoral elections imminent, the far right are gaining ground and capitalising on the fear that Jaish al Islam is spreading with its deadly fires and they are using the iconic figure of The Maid to promote their cause. Their flame haired female candidate is on billboards all around town. Picaut finds herself at the heart of this political conflict as the husband from whom she has recently separated, Luc Bressard, is running against the far-right for mayor and the Bressard family, a tight knit mafia style network, mean business.


Just as the Bressards have to use all their whiles to overcome their political opponents, so the medieval English must resort to drastic measures prevent their army from being entirely overwhelmed by the French. So seasoned fighter Tod Rustbeard is sent to infiltrate the French and assassinate The Maid. But nothing is as straightforward as it seems for Rustbeard or Picaut and so begins a gripping, twisting and turning, quest to uncover the truth, not only about Joan of Arc but also about Jaish al Islam.

Scott remains in complete control of her complex material throughout and this makes for a thoroughly absorbing and page-turning read as we follow the narrative through to its final series of revelations. But beyond that her impeccable research makes both periods spring vividly to life. The depiction of medieval France at war, with its brilliantly choreographed scenes of combat, feels as gritty and vibrant as the present day politics of Orleans. It is the attention to detail that achieves this with two entire and believable worlds separated by seven-hundred years emerging from the page, but also in the little quirks and tics of her characters – Scott invests them all with passion and originality and for that reason we care deeply about their fate.

INTO THE FIRE is a thrilling read that is both a fascinating exploration of an iconic historical woman and a masterclass in suspense. It is the kind of novel you will be compelled stay up all night to finish.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel WATCH THE LADY, set in Elizabethan England, is published by Penguin.
↧

The Day The World Turned Day Glo Catherine Johnson

August 13, 2015, 10:27 pm
$
0
0
The first punk gig I went to was X Ray Spex at Hornsey School of Art. The college had closed down for good and the building was empty. I have tried to check the year but can't find it, 77 I think, I'd started buying punk records by then,  but seeing Poly really kicked it off for me. There was a girl, not much older than me and brown like me and she was brilliant. I mean, the woman wore a crochet blanket on her head on Top of the Pops!
This is my favourite X Ray Spex song. The Day The World Turned Day Glo....


I've been in the 1970s a lot lately. More work on a script, I know you've heard it all before, but what also triggered this post was reading Viv Albertine's enjoyable and superbly readable autobiography, Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys. Viv Albertine was a member of the The Slits, an uncompromising female band, and a lot of the early part of the book is about that time in London.  I came to punk too young to take part but old enough for it to change my world.  And this lovely woman above Poly Styrene was instrumental in changing everything for me.





There was before punk, a world of flared everything and bands with songs that went on forever, and then there was punk and excitement and being part of something and trawling across London to second hand clothes shops, looking for the exact item you needed to make your outfit.

Albertine paints a familiar picture of pre mobile phone, pre internet, life, friendship, and sex. One thing that really resonated with me was the way she talked about clothes. Perfecting your look those days took a huge amount of effort, you needed to be able to run away from Teds or Skins, (I carried knitting needles they served me well) just your look was enough to send straights (this had nothing to do with sexuality) into a rage. Most of the time though we weren't about engendering rage, we needed to signal to our people that we knew. That we were like minds.

Albertine's book took me back to my mid teens, it's an interesting read and full of wonderful detail, of clothes of attitudes, of always being right.

There's a wonderful postscript in which she lists her favourite clothes of any particular time. Some of mine from the mid seventies were these.
Blue suede Chelsea boots
A black PVC Mackintosh
A cream silk beaded flapper dress (I wore it torn - it was original and every time I wore it it tore. This makes me cringe thinking about it now)
A skirt made out of a pillow case (!)

I must admit I wasn't a big Slits fan, I preferred The Ramones and Poly and The Buzzcocks. But Viv Albertine's book's a great read. If you don't think so well, as  Poly (who died far too young of cancer in 2011) would say, Oh Bondage! Up Yours!



Catherine's latest book is The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo. Buy it now or it's the knitting needles....

PS. I re read this when I posted it and realised I did 'do' something. I took pictures and blagged free gigs by pretending to be a 'proper' photographer (there was a risible fanzine I think) and even though I am the worst photographer in the world, I thought I might want to make films that sent me to art school eventually and from there 10 years later, to writing.

↧
↧

The Church that was Buried

August 14, 2015, 6:00 pm
$
0
0

by Marie-Louise Jensen

One of the characteristics of northern Jutland in Denmark is that the peninsula is formed of sand, not bedrock. And sand shifts with wind, tide and currents.

Just south of Skagen, lies an area which is dunes from coast to coast:

It's a beautiful, windswept area. In the summer, wild flowers and heather bloom; autumn and spring, migrating birds stop on the wet areas.

In the 14th century, a large church was built just two kilometres south of Skagen. It was in use for several hundred years, but the dunes began to drift. The congregation grew weary with digging the entrance free every time they wanted to hold a service there and eventually, in 1795, it was finally abandoned and partially demolished. The sand was free to drift and now only the tower remains free of the engulfing dunes


From a distance it looks for all the world like a complete Danish church. But when you reach it, there is just the tower:
:

Drifting sand isn't a thing of the past up here in the north of Denmark, either, This summer I was over on the West coast where a different church, once several miles inland, is now on the point of falling into the sea as the sand cliffs it stood on are gradually eaten by the North Sea. (This church is called Maarup kirke and was a location for the filming of the Danish film Babette's Feast). Several summer-houses out near the coast are being slowly buried by dunes too, as the sand drifts and the sea draws nearer.



There is also a wandering sand dune in this area south of Skagen. It moves some 15 metres a year and it's hard to convey in photos how vast an area it covers in its slow march from west coast to east with the prevailing winds:



Not a beach; a cool Nordic desert formed of millions of cubic metres of sand:

 
At the top there's a view from coast to coast Sadly, I couldn't get that in the shots with my camera, so here's some more inland sand-dune:
The dune is called Raabjerg Mile and is correctly known as a migrating coastal dune. Most of these dunes, which caused so many problems for the population in the 16th and 17th centuries, have been tamed with plantations and other measures. But this one is still allowed to roam free.

@jensen_ml



↧

Adventures in Europe with Patrick Leigh Fermor: by Sue Purkiss

August 15, 2015, 6:00 pm
$
0
0
In 1933, Paddy Leigh Fermor was eighteen. The son of separated parents - his father was a scientist working in India, his mother had brought him up by herself in London. He had  virtually no money - he had an income of a pound a week, and though he was so young, he already had debts.

He had been expelled from school The culminating incident occurred when he was caught out of bounds holding the hand of a very pretty grocer's daughter, but there had been lots of others. He was a daredevil, and what was more, he was a charismatic one, so he led the other boys into trouble too.

Far away in India, his father puzzled over how Paddy was going to earn a living. He went to a crammer's, but he was never going to get into university. He showed no aptitude for his father's speciality, science. At length it was decided he should go into the army. However, Paddy soon realised that he didn't have enough money to lead the life he'd want to as a junior officer. He was having a high old time meeting bright young things, going to clubs, drinking and spending money he didn't have; but underneath it all, he was beginning to wonder what on earth he was going to do. Summer passed, and London was less attractive in the winter.

Then he had his big idea. He would walk 'from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople' - right across Europe - on his pound a week. He would sleep in barns, he would eat bread and cheese, he would meet lots of people, he would write about his travels.

And that's exactly what he did. Forty years later, he finally wrote up his notes in a trilogy of books about this journey, beginning with A Time of Gifts. It's a fascinating story. Of course, it tells of a lost Europe: a Europe which was as yet only just becoming aware of the growing threat of the Nazis. He managed to meet diplomats and members of the old nobilities, who gave him letters of introduction to others of their ilk; so although he often did sleep in barns or haystacks, wrapping himself up in his long warm coat, he also slept in castles and conversed with cultured intellectuals. (He was naturally gifted at languages, and took care to learn new ones as he went along.) He romanced village girls and aristocrats, finally falling in love with Balasha Cantacuzene, a beautiful Rumanian who was sixteen years older than him. They met in Athens in 1935, and after spending a few months in Greece, he went back with her to her family's estate in in Besserabia in Rumania. In 1936 when he was 21, he had an unexpected windfall - a gift of £300 from a godfather he had never met, Sir Henry Hubert Hayden. He learnt Rumanian, he translated books and poetry, he travelled. But Besserabia was under a different shadow from Western Europe; Soviet Russia wanted to claim it as part of the Ukraine. When the Ukraine had been collectivized in the early thirties, millions had died.

Paddy in 1934

Paddy was happy with Balasha. But when, in 1939, she heard on her car radio that war had been declared, she knew their time together was over. Paddy left for England immediately and joined the Guards. (After the war, of course, the Iron Curtain came down; the consequences were dire for most of the friends Paddy had made, and he wasn't to see Balasha again until many years later. She and her family had suffered greatly, and it was a sad reunion.)

He didn't find it easy to conform to the discipline and routine of military life. But after a few months, the Intelligence Corps became aware of his fluency in French, German, Romanian and Greek, and realised that he would be useful in the Balkans. As ever, he did not shine in a conventional situation; but once he found his way into the resistance movement in Crete, he came into his own. The incident he became famous for was when, with a small group of partisans, he kidnapped the German commanding officer on the island, General Kreipe. It's not clear that this achieved any strategic purpose - but it became a legend, and probably the thing Paddy became most famous for. It says a lot about the kind of person he was that, as the little group was climbing a mountain on its way to the coast of Crete, where Kreipe was to be picked up by ship and taken to Cairo, the exhausted general gazed at the view and murmured a line from an ode by Horace. It happened to be one that Paddy knew, and he carried on the quotation.

The General's blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine - and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: 'Ach so, Herr Major!' It was very strange. 'Ja, Herr General.' As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.
(Quoted in Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artemis Cooper, p 184)

Years later, there was a reunion of those involved in the kidnap - including the general.

Paddy (right); the General (centre)


There are so many stories about Paddy Leigh Fermor - enough for a whole series of books. (A film was made of the Cretan incident, with Dirk Bogarde as Paddy. Paddy liked Bogarde very much, but was rather embarrassed by the way the film portrayed him.) Although we have had A Time of Gifts on our shelves for years - it used to belong to my mother-in-law - I had never read it. I'd glanced at it, but never been drawn in. Then, a few weeks ago, I came across a collection of letters between Paddy and Debo, Duchess of Devonshire: In Tearing Haste. I found this enchanting - and a perfect summer read - and I wrote about it here. The two obviously got on very well, but they were tremendously different - Debo hardly ever read anything, not even Paddy's books. They only became friends some years after the war, and I was so intrigued by this warm, flamboyant, charismatic character that I wanted to find out more about him. So first I read A Time of Gifts, and then I went on to Artemis Cooper's excellent biography.

So if there needs to be a moral to this post, it could be that there's a right time to read a book (so you should never get rid of any!). Or it could be that failing at school doesn't mean failing at life. Or it could be that even if something looks ridiculously foolhardy, it might still be worth doing.

But really, there isn't a moral. I just wanted to tell you about someone who had a really interesting life, and sounds as though he was a very charming person.
↧

THE FACE OF AN ICON by Penny Dolan

August 16, 2015, 10:00 pm
$
0
0



Some faces haunt you for life. Near my desk, among a variety of women’s pictures and portraits, hangs a small icon of the Virgin. She was a prize won at my convent school, where the nuns ran a class raffle each month. 

The prize was always a holy picture, framed using a cheap technique known as “passe-partout”. Originally, this term referred to a bevelled cut-out cardboard “mat”, which saved an etching or drawing from damage by contact with the glass. A gummed paper tape held the picture in place on the underlay. Later on, passe-partoutwas sometimes used to describe the tape and the framing technique itself.   

It was simple and cheap and, back before the age of clip-frames and large posters sticky-tacked to walls, passe-partout was a popular craft, used for pictures cut from magazines or for valued sketches and paintings. The tape had now become a narrow band of gummed paper or cloth tape, neatly mitred at the corners, and glued around the edges of the “glass sandwich” to hold the sections together.

My Virgin is clearly a cheap copy of an icon. I’d kept her because of her beautiful expression - neither coy nor plaintive - even though that frame is scuffed and torn and a dangerous glass splinter marks the damage when the icon once fell on its corner. She’s an image that has always been there in my life, a reminder of a time when the people spent their leisure hours on such small crafts and teenage girls were pleased to win such objects as prizes for a charity raffle. I liked her being there. That was all.

However, as I sat idly watching Joanna’s Lumley’s “Trans-Siberian Train Trip” series on tv, my very same Virgin appeared on the screen. After the surprise, and the nostalgia, I started trying to find out more about her. Known as The Virgin of Vladimir, she is a famous Russian icon and in the programme, she seemed linked to a pretty Romanesque church at Vladimir. However, the Virgin – or Theotokos - is quite a well-travelled lady. 

One devotional story claimed that the icon was painted from life by St Luke himself, in Jerusalem, and that the wooden panel came from the supper table used by the Virgin, Jesus and St Joseph.

Historical studies, however, suggested that the icon was painted in the early 12th century and later sent by the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople to the Grand Duke Dolgoruky of Kiev, who placed the Virgin within the Mezhyhirskyi monastery 

Unfortunately, when Prince Andrew, the Duke's son, stole her and tried transporting her past the city of Vladimir to Rostov, the horses refused to move. That night he had a dream where the Virgin ordered him to build a church in her honour. The city seemed to be under her protection, although she got little honour when the Mongol hordes attacked in 1238.

However, her reputation went before her. When Tamerlaine invaded in 1395, the Virgin was taken from Vladimir to the new capital Moscow in a great procession. After the huge welcome, King Vasili I spent the night weeping in front of the image. By morning, so the legend says, Tamerlaine’s hordes had withdrawn: the city - and Russia - was saved. 

Naturally, the Muscovites were unwilling to return the icon; instead she was placed in the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, and she is reputed for saving Moscow from Tatar hordes in 1451 and 1480 and on other occasions.  

Reading this, I recalled the tv programme and realised that "my" Virgin attracted legends. Even the worldly oligarch, showing Miss Lumley around his family church at Vladimir, recounted a more modern miracle. Back in 1941, he said, during the Great Patriotic War, Stalin was afraid the city would fall to Nazi forces. Although religion had been strongly discouraged, Stalin was desperate enough to turn to the faith of his childhood. He gave orders that the Virgin of Vladimir was to be placed in an aircraft and flown three times round the city. Needless to say, the Nazi troops suddenly retreated, and the people of Moscow were saved, he said.
 

Restored again and again, only the Virgin's face and hands seem to be original and she has been repainted after fire damage. Part of the surface has been concealed under a metal cover, probably of gold or silver and heavily layered with jewels but there was no suggestion as to when or where this valuable treasure was removed and disappeared. .

Recently, the Orthodox Church has had a more visible role within the Russian state structure and the Virgin of Vladimir has become an acceptable national symbol. Even so there must be complications to this whole history that I do not understand, especially as Vladimir itself is part of the Ukraine.. 

Nevertheless, back before I saw the programme, and started investigating the Virgin of Vladimir’s history, I knew her not as a national or even a political figure but only as an inspiring image. I have kept my cheaply-framed icon, tattered and cracked, all these years because the Virgin’s eyes have a kind and sympathetic intelligence, a gaze that is good to have by you while you work. I was also pleased to learn the icon is known as the Virgin of Tenderness.

Others have been drawn by the Virgin of Vladimir's powerful gaze. You may well have seen her eyes on screen too: in the logo of a film production company.
Penny Dolan.

↧
Viewing all 2763 articles
Browse latest View live
More Pages to Explore .....
Search

Latest Images

Photographer Gifts for Clients / Print Packaging / 4x6 Photo Box by...

Photographer Gifts for Clients / Print Packaging / 4x6 Photo Box by...

April 17, 2024, 6:48 pm
Deepfake Video of Aamir Khan circulates Online

Deepfake Video of Aamir Khan circulates Online

April 17, 2024, 3:07 am
Very Hungry Caterpillar™ Shirt: World of Eric Carle™+ Little Goodall by...

Very Hungry Caterpillar™ Shirt: World of Eric Carle™+ Little Goodall by...

April 14, 2024, 8:14 am
Have you seen Michael Wines? Burien man has been missing since Saturday,...

Have you seen Michael Wines? Burien man has been missing since Saturday,...

April 12, 2024, 3:59 pm
Stay Salty POTS Awareness Stretchy Stacking Bracelets | Set of Three|...

Stay Salty POTS Awareness Stretchy Stacking Bracelets | Set of Three|...

April 11, 2024, 5:27 pm
19 Reader-Favourite March Purchases — From Steals To Splurges

19 Reader-Favourite March Purchases — From Steals To Splurges

April 11, 2024, 5:07 am
Fake lip ring, silver lip ring, simple lip ring, unisex lip ring by AIRlab

Fake lip ring, silver lip ring, simple lip ring, unisex lip ring by AIRlab

April 9, 2024, 4:00 pm
First Pictures of the Eclipse ! ! !

First Pictures of the Eclipse ! ! !

April 8, 2024, 1:08 pm
People's Blog • First Pictures of the Eclipse ! ! !

People's Blog • First Pictures of the Eclipse ! ! !

April 8, 2024, 1:08 pm
People's Blog • First Pictures of the Eclipse ! ! !

People's Blog • First Pictures of the Eclipse ! ! !

April 8, 2024, 1:08 pm