FOOTPRINTS
A lovely sunny day, but cold. The tide was out and I walked with Ada down to Three Cliffs Clefts Bay, or Three Clefts Bay according to an old man who told us where and how to park, which path to take. From the wide, wet sandy beach we walked up winding paths of deep dry sand to the headland above. Piles of flowering gorse on either side, waves of scent across our path. Vanilla, I thought, but Will on the phone ‘Coconut’ and I think he was right. What’s in a smell?
Looking down from the headland, back onto the beach we’d walked across, we could barely make out our own footprints. What did stand out were two firm dotted lines of hoofmarks. We’d seen the horses ahead of us, turning when they reached the waters edge to splash along the line of the surf. The prints set me wondering. ‘Light footprint’ is a phrase in vogue, with the special reference to carbon emissions, and the assumption that the less mark we leave on the world the better. Does that go, I wondered, for the mark we leave on other people?
In the last Weekly Guardian, Monbiot gave a frightening forecast of global warming, which, he said, is now unpreventable. Too much talk – hot air – since Kyoto, and not enough action. Now temperatures likely to rise by 4 degrees, not the 2C maximum envisaged at Kyoto. And the hotting up will last another 1000 years.
I assume that the heating and drying will hit hardest in warmer areas, with deserts expanding north and south into more temperate grainlands of
Mid-West and Mediterranean. In our hemisphere, cultivation, if not cultivators, would be driven northwards. The developed, mainly northern, countries would expand food production, keep what they needed for themselves, export any surplus in aid or for profit, and combine to defend themselves against starving immigrants. As already happens, but less.
A terrible irony: those most responsible for famine best placed to survive it, while those who never did much harm are left to die. The northern peoples had to keep warm, turned to fossil fuels when the firewood ran out. The difficulties of making a living in a colder climate compelled them to innovate, industrialise.
Left to themselves, older, more relaxed economies might, but probably wouldn’t, have survived: even without colonial exploitation. New ways have ways of jumping gaps.
Apart from noting that, what would I do, what do I do? Drive less, heat less, foreswear cheap flights, or long journeys in general. Eat local, seasonal foods, fresh, not frozen (Polar bears are getting smaller, Ada read. Weigh one third less and eat each other when there’s nothing else in diminishing icelands)
If I assume that human populations will also have to shrink, how much to I care if this comes about through starvation, war and disease on other, unfamiliar continents?
We were talking over lunch a couple of days ago about the boundaries of empathy, how they expand and contract. How much can we feel for other people, over distances and differences? Or under pressure, in time of scarcity or frear. Primo Levi concluded from his concentration camp experience that great hardship did not breed solidarity, did not make people nice, and that it was not the good who survived.
What do I feel? Richard once had a dream of life breaking down at Fawler, our parents manor in what’s now Oxfordshire, after a nuclear attack on London: starving survivors fanned out across the countryside, breaking in, taking whatever they could. Why not? And what were we to do?
I remember the hardline Zionist, Zabotinsky, who warned that the Palestinians, like the Jews, would never give up their land, that there would have to be a fight. When I read that, it was almost a relief: not that he was showing mercy, but at least respect for his enemy. I can imagine feeling, even as I raised my gun to shoot, ‘My brother, my like…there but for the grace of God – what God? – go I.’
Monday 30 March 2009
Sunday 29 March 2009
About Mary, my mother...
updated six months after her death
Mary was born into the First World War and bore her own children into the Second. Between those times she followed her mother Elsie into the Society of Friends. Unlike her mother, she became and remained a pacifist.
Mary was the third of five children, born in Trinidad where her father Eric, was resident judge. Next born were twin boys. A year into the war, one of them, Christopher, died. Their mother took the other four children home to England, the advantages of modern medical care outweighing the danger of German torpedoes on the Atlantic crossing.
This was the first of several separations that marked Mary’s life, and later ours. Now I realise how much family break-up, like family fortune, stems from our traditional matrix of empire, war and class. (With the difference that marriages so divided by continents require no divorce.)
Mary’s father stayed in Trinidad and for the next ten years his children didn’t see much of him. When he came home, the family had learned to live without the gruff old bigot: an Ulster protestant, Eric walked out of any Sunday service that smacked to him of Papism; lipstick was for Scarlet Women not his daughters. Mary remembered having to kiss him, the porridge in his moustache, before leaving for school. Only later did she begin to feel for the poor old prodigal, returning as a stranger to his own family. She just remembered his big hands bathing her as a baby, before they left Trinidad. How many British judges bathed their babies then?
My own father George walked out when Mary grew fat with me. Men often fall in love with images, and now his image of her was spoilt. I wonder how much of her heartache then fed through to me. After days, or weeks – Mary never told me - George came back. When I was born, he liked me, though maybe I too was not quite what he expected. They’d chosen the name David, but, according to Mary, George looked at me and said ‘We cant call him David… Gregory, Gregory Grunt.’ His elder brother, Gerald, had called him Grunt when they were boys, and for years my father called me Grunt, which I still associate with his laughter and affection. George’s behaviour may have left much to be desired, for Mary at least, but for us children his was the lighter, happier presence. Perhaps he had the advantage of the prodigal, feted whenever he returned – from work, the war, or sailing holidays. She was fated to be always with us – except when we were sent away to school. Odd that parents of their class found it normal to put their children in care. Was it that they attached so little importance to childcare, or lacked confidence in their own abilities. My theory is that prep- and public schools were designed less for happy families than for nation-building: children were systematically removed from intimate family and local community, and the gap filled with more abstract vocation, institutional loyalties and duties. William of Wickham founded Winchester to produce reliable and competent functionaries, as distinct from clerics. And the system extended to a whole range of other professions, institutionalised substitutes for more direct humanity.
As young children in England, Mary and her brothers and sister spent a lot of their time in the nursery with scolding nannies and mutual bickering relieved by what Mary remembered as rather formal meetings with their mother in the drawing room. Elsie was a highminded and public-spirited woman, but little bodies – perhaps all bodies - bored her. She had little interest in day to day childcare, let alone childsplay. For Mary, getting away to Downe House, founded and run by her mother’s sister Olive, was a liberation. Elder sister Erica was already there and Anne Bradby, later Ridler, became a friend for life.
At school Mary was quite bright and read a lot. She regarded herself as hopeless at games and wanted to become a nurse. That was vetoed by her family, backed by her father’s doctor brother, Almroth Wright. Reasons given were poor pay and unsocial hours, but there may also have been fears for her health – when infections were more common and effective drugs more rare - or her virtue.
Were nurses easy game to doctors then, and is this something that her famous uncle would have taken into account?
Perhaps the great doctor should have known better, or perhaps he did, and a few years later George and Mary were married from his house in Paddington. By then, Mary had suffered another setback. She got to Oxford and read English for a year or two at St Hilda’s before announcing her intention to marry George. Then her father – who always felt poor in his big house on Blackheath – stopped paying her fees. ‘You’ll have a husband to support you and wont need a degree.’
This was a terrible come-down, and Mary felt it all her life, never quite confident of her own ability or social standing in a class where Oxbridge educations was the norm. What would she have done if she HAD gone on to get her degree? Would George have been any more willing to let her out to work, or she more able to overcome his opposition? As we knew them, Mary was always the more downright and forceful in her beliefs and opinions, but it seems to have been George who mostly got his way. And that was so from the start. Mary said she’d been incredulous when he asked her to marry him; she’d not taken him seriously at all. But he seemed quite undeterred and later remarked, in a matter of fact sort of way, ‘You will, you know.’
Mary always liked reading and read to us. As a teenager she and her friend Ann were spellbound by a writer, Charles Williams (precursor of magical realism? ) who they met on holiday at Aisholt in the Quantocks. Among Mary’s papers are several beginnings of journals, a first few handwritten pages in otherwise empty exercise books. Her sister had been secretary to TS Elliot, Ann Ridler became a respected poet, and Mary may have been too much in awe of Writing to believe in her own or keep at it. If so, I know how she felt.
But, unlike me, Mary kept reading. She read fast, and, in her later years at least, indiscriminately. I sometimes felt she never quite adapted to real life, the bitty mundanity of things, her own and other people’s inadequacies. In later life, again, gardens were an exception. She always loved flowers, but, once there were no more children to tend to, she took to the practical business of gardening with a new enthusiasm.
Perhaps Mary should have been a nurse. Just before the war, she had plans to open a children’s home and they rented a large house. But money ran out before the bombing and evacuations began. In my childhood memories, it was when we were ill, hurt or in danger that Mary excelled herself. She may have found everyday housework demeaning, but in emergency she was transformed. She was calm and capable, gentle and cheerful: with such a mother and nurse, how could we be upset or afraid or ill for long? Nor was it only when we were ill or in danger. Although Mary was often cross with us, especially me, her eldest, this was made up at bedtime. It wasn’t just the comfort of a story or nursery rhyme and prayers by the bed. Somehow I was also made to understand that whatever we’d argued over wasn’t all my fault. At the end of the day, Mary was humble, understanding and honest with us.
Later, when I got into trouble at school or gave up what looked like a good job, or brought back a partner who might have seemed unsuitable (that word again!), neither Mary nor George turned their backs on us. This wasn’t because Mary didn’t care about convention or what other people thought, but when it came to it – out of love for us or for underlying truth – she never sided with the enemy. The last time I saw her, a week or so before she died, I said I would like to tell her some of this, the nice things I remembered about her, rather than save it in memoriam. She was pleased, thanked me for thanking her. I also asked if she’d sometimes have been disappointed in me, and she said she had. But for once we were happy together, and it didn’t matter any more.
Mary often longed for a career in the wider world, but at home she was rarely just a housewife. In the war, once we got our own house, we shared it with a Jewish refugee family. Then, after the war, when the Wachters went back to Austria, their place was taken by the widow and children of Mary’s younger brother Tony. A succession of au pairs became friends, grannies and great aunts moved in next door and for some years, about when I was leaving home, Mary became a sort of foster mother to half a dozen nephews and nieces, sent back to school in England from overseas bases and colonies.
News of Tony’s death in the Ardennes came as a terrible shock. He and Mary had been very close, but when war broke out Tony joined up and had little time for her pacifism. Direct experience of war may have changed his mind, and his last letters from the front were thoughtful and affectionate. Mary had told him she was worried about losing George, to the enemy or other women. Now Tony told her not to worry, he knew how it felt, for both of them, and George would be back.
George came back and Tony didn’t. Tony’s Tanya came to live in our house with her two children. Tanya’s mother had painted the portrait of George that I now have on the wall. It was commissioned, Mary said, so that we would have something to remember him by if he was killed. As it was, George came safely home and – unless Mary imagined it – fell in love with Tony’s widow Tanya.
Whatever wounds the war opened up between them remained hidden from us. There must have been ideological differences too. Now I wonder how they felt, even before George was called up, when he brought home little boxes of sten-gun parts for us to assemble on the dining room table. (No wonder those guns were unreliable!) Later, I asked my mother why she had seemed so calm one afternoon in London when a flying bomb bumbled overhead. We were having a picnic tea in the big garden, the Kensington square behind our house, and we all stayed put. We may even have had malt bread. When I asked Mary, half a century later, why she’d taken it so calmly, she couldn’t remember the occasion ‘By then I may have felt we had nothing to lose,’ she said. For me that picnic stood out as a happy time with her, along with a bicycle ride in the country years later, when we stopped for a glass of cider, at a wooden table in the sun outside a pub.
After the war, ideological differences became less important. Mary remained a Quaker and a pacifist, George an agnostic with a shelf full of orange New Left Bookclub books – which disappeared as the Cold War set in. (Did the ripples of McCarthy extend this far?) George and Mary shared the outrage and pity of Suez and Hungary, Prague and Vietnam, and some of that got through to me. As time went on, they also shared more happiness. When George’s elder brother Gerald died, he left them enough for George to stop work and buy Fawler Manor. It was only now that George had given up his job that Mary felt able to go out to work. It may have been simply that with children gone she had more time, but it was also clear that they were now comfortably off; her voluntary work was acceptable, not like a paid job when people might have thought he couldn’t afford to keep her. Mary committed herself to Quaker business and Marriage Guidance.
She also took to gardening. As a child, I remember it was George who dug and planted vegetables at weekends. Now he’d retired, the vegetable patch slowly reverted to grass and it was Mary who took up spade and trowel, planting and weeding long herbaceous borders, head high with daisies and delphiniums.
When George died, 11 years ago, he left a letter with his will in which he said that Mary had made a better man of him. With him gone, after 60 years together, she often wished she too were dead. I found it hard to answer when she said that: how can such gaps be filled, such an intimate absence, large as life?
In her childhood, before meeting George, Mary didn’t get much tender loving care or playfulness. George brought a lightness and humour new to her. She had the courage of her moral convictions, but he had a more primitive confidence in his own feelings, impulses right or wrong. Without him, on her own in a ‘sheltered’ Oxford flat, there was little that we, the rest of her family, could do with our dutiful visits and telephone calls. Mary didn’t find it easy to make new friends – as distinct from Friends – or float on casual acquaintance.
Among Quakers, Mary was confident, capable, even authoritative. Perhaps it was the egalitarian simplicity of the Society of Friends that freed her, or a shared moral commitment absent in other social gatherings – in which Mary often felt ill-at-ease. Perhaps she also had a class advantage, even without an Oxford degree. People recalled her principled effectiveness in committee work, and the beauty of her voice in ministry… Whereas, as a teenager, I would hear her speak in meeting, serene, eyes closed, and think ‘If you could see her at home!’
Several times in the last few years of her life, Mary became seriously ill – a fall, a minor stroke or infection, sometimes all combined. Several times we thought she would die and talked of living wills, but each time she clung to life and revived. On one occasion, as she was leaving hospital in a wheelchair, a tall black male nurse called across ‘Hey, Mary, aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ She turned and they shook hands. She said ‘I hope you have a very happy life.’
Afterwards she remarked how strange it had been to be washed and changed by a big black man. I remembered her talking of her father’s big hands bathing her, and wondered if there were also black hands then, a nursemaid’s perhaps, in Trinidad. More recently, when Mary stayed with us in Wales, it was Ada’s Papist hands (do
these things come out in the wash?) On one occasion, when Mary was taken ill in Oxford, it was I, with help from Janet, her grand-daughter, who was privileged to do the washing and changing. Good for us, if not for Mary who was barely conscious.
Maybe Mary should have been a nurse, but it wasn’t just good nursing, in the technical sense – or even good NHS medicine – that brought her back to life, or helped her die so peacefully. I think what made the difference had more to do with kind hands and hearts, and that what she got from her carers in hospital and nursing home was a new, very basic, but life-giving confidence in her own existence
Mary’s class and upbringing had led her to believe that what mattered in life as how she performed and appeared. Not quite Manners makyth man – George’s Winchester motto – but righteous behaviour and belief. For 90 years she had
tried to do and think aright, to live up to high standards and ideals. Then, with old age and sickness… All fall down! Sick to death non-compos and fit for nothing, why should anyone care for such stinking mess?
Except they did, even strangers, who cared enough to feed, wash, change, bethere at her side to welcome her back. Smiling, embracing her.
It seems to me that Mary had a new lightness about her last summer at St Katharines in Wantage. I don’t think it was just a loss of memory that freed her to be happy, made her eager to get up, out and about again. What she’d learnt, or relearned, late in life was this: if people could bear and care for her at her worst, and greet her with a smile or caress when she opened here eyes, she MUST be worth something. If that was true, then life could be worth living too. Good enough to be going on with!
Greg Wilkinson 21.11.08
(with additions 29.3.09)
updated six months after her death
Mary was born into the First World War and bore her own children into the Second. Between those times she followed her mother Elsie into the Society of Friends. Unlike her mother, she became and remained a pacifist.
Mary was the third of five children, born in Trinidad where her father Eric, was resident judge. Next born were twin boys. A year into the war, one of them, Christopher, died. Their mother took the other four children home to England, the advantages of modern medical care outweighing the danger of German torpedoes on the Atlantic crossing.
This was the first of several separations that marked Mary’s life, and later ours. Now I realise how much family break-up, like family fortune, stems from our traditional matrix of empire, war and class. (With the difference that marriages so divided by continents require no divorce.)
Mary’s father stayed in Trinidad and for the next ten years his children didn’t see much of him. When he came home, the family had learned to live without the gruff old bigot: an Ulster protestant, Eric walked out of any Sunday service that smacked to him of Papism; lipstick was for Scarlet Women not his daughters. Mary remembered having to kiss him, the porridge in his moustache, before leaving for school. Only later did she begin to feel for the poor old prodigal, returning as a stranger to his own family. She just remembered his big hands bathing her as a baby, before they left Trinidad. How many British judges bathed their babies then?
My own father George walked out when Mary grew fat with me. Men often fall in love with images, and now his image of her was spoilt. I wonder how much of her heartache then fed through to me. After days, or weeks – Mary never told me - George came back. When I was born, he liked me, though maybe I too was not quite what he expected. They’d chosen the name David, but, according to Mary, George looked at me and said ‘We cant call him David… Gregory, Gregory Grunt.’ His elder brother, Gerald, had called him Grunt when they were boys, and for years my father called me Grunt, which I still associate with his laughter and affection. George’s behaviour may have left much to be desired, for Mary at least, but for us children his was the lighter, happier presence. Perhaps he had the advantage of the prodigal, feted whenever he returned – from work, the war, or sailing holidays. She was fated to be always with us – except when we were sent away to school. Odd that parents of their class found it normal to put their children in care. Was it that they attached so little importance to childcare, or lacked confidence in their own abilities. My theory is that prep- and public schools were designed less for happy families than for nation-building: children were systematically removed from intimate family and local community, and the gap filled with more abstract vocation, institutional loyalties and duties. William of Wickham founded Winchester to produce reliable and competent functionaries, as distinct from clerics. And the system extended to a whole range of other professions, institutionalised substitutes for more direct humanity.
As young children in England, Mary and her brothers and sister spent a lot of their time in the nursery with scolding nannies and mutual bickering relieved by what Mary remembered as rather formal meetings with their mother in the drawing room. Elsie was a highminded and public-spirited woman, but little bodies – perhaps all bodies - bored her. She had little interest in day to day childcare, let alone childsplay. For Mary, getting away to Downe House, founded and run by her mother’s sister Olive, was a liberation. Elder sister Erica was already there and Anne Bradby, later Ridler, became a friend for life.
At school Mary was quite bright and read a lot. She regarded herself as hopeless at games and wanted to become a nurse. That was vetoed by her family, backed by her father’s doctor brother, Almroth Wright. Reasons given were poor pay and unsocial hours, but there may also have been fears for her health – when infections were more common and effective drugs more rare - or her virtue.
Were nurses easy game to doctors then, and is this something that her famous uncle would have taken into account?
Perhaps the great doctor should have known better, or perhaps he did, and a few years later George and Mary were married from his house in Paddington. By then, Mary had suffered another setback. She got to Oxford and read English for a year or two at St Hilda’s before announcing her intention to marry George. Then her father – who always felt poor in his big house on Blackheath – stopped paying her fees. ‘You’ll have a husband to support you and wont need a degree.’
This was a terrible come-down, and Mary felt it all her life, never quite confident of her own ability or social standing in a class where Oxbridge educations was the norm. What would she have done if she HAD gone on to get her degree? Would George have been any more willing to let her out to work, or she more able to overcome his opposition? As we knew them, Mary was always the more downright and forceful in her beliefs and opinions, but it seems to have been George who mostly got his way. And that was so from the start. Mary said she’d been incredulous when he asked her to marry him; she’d not taken him seriously at all. But he seemed quite undeterred and later remarked, in a matter of fact sort of way, ‘You will, you know.’
Mary always liked reading and read to us. As a teenager she and her friend Ann were spellbound by a writer, Charles Williams (precursor of magical realism? ) who they met on holiday at Aisholt in the Quantocks. Among Mary’s papers are several beginnings of journals, a first few handwritten pages in otherwise empty exercise books. Her sister had been secretary to TS Elliot, Ann Ridler became a respected poet, and Mary may have been too much in awe of Writing to believe in her own or keep at it. If so, I know how she felt.
But, unlike me, Mary kept reading. She read fast, and, in her later years at least, indiscriminately. I sometimes felt she never quite adapted to real life, the bitty mundanity of things, her own and other people’s inadequacies. In later life, again, gardens were an exception. She always loved flowers, but, once there were no more children to tend to, she took to the practical business of gardening with a new enthusiasm.
Perhaps Mary should have been a nurse. Just before the war, she had plans to open a children’s home and they rented a large house. But money ran out before the bombing and evacuations began. In my childhood memories, it was when we were ill, hurt or in danger that Mary excelled herself. She may have found everyday housework demeaning, but in emergency she was transformed. She was calm and capable, gentle and cheerful: with such a mother and nurse, how could we be upset or afraid or ill for long? Nor was it only when we were ill or in danger. Although Mary was often cross with us, especially me, her eldest, this was made up at bedtime. It wasn’t just the comfort of a story or nursery rhyme and prayers by the bed. Somehow I was also made to understand that whatever we’d argued over wasn’t all my fault. At the end of the day, Mary was humble, understanding and honest with us.
Later, when I got into trouble at school or gave up what looked like a good job, or brought back a partner who might have seemed unsuitable (that word again!), neither Mary nor George turned their backs on us. This wasn’t because Mary didn’t care about convention or what other people thought, but when it came to it – out of love for us or for underlying truth – she never sided with the enemy. The last time I saw her, a week or so before she died, I said I would like to tell her some of this, the nice things I remembered about her, rather than save it in memoriam. She was pleased, thanked me for thanking her. I also asked if she’d sometimes have been disappointed in me, and she said she had. But for once we were happy together, and it didn’t matter any more.
Mary often longed for a career in the wider world, but at home she was rarely just a housewife. In the war, once we got our own house, we shared it with a Jewish refugee family. Then, after the war, when the Wachters went back to Austria, their place was taken by the widow and children of Mary’s younger brother Tony. A succession of au pairs became friends, grannies and great aunts moved in next door and for some years, about when I was leaving home, Mary became a sort of foster mother to half a dozen nephews and nieces, sent back to school in England from overseas bases and colonies.
News of Tony’s death in the Ardennes came as a terrible shock. He and Mary had been very close, but when war broke out Tony joined up and had little time for her pacifism. Direct experience of war may have changed his mind, and his last letters from the front were thoughtful and affectionate. Mary had told him she was worried about losing George, to the enemy or other women. Now Tony told her not to worry, he knew how it felt, for both of them, and George would be back.
George came back and Tony didn’t. Tony’s Tanya came to live in our house with her two children. Tanya’s mother had painted the portrait of George that I now have on the wall. It was commissioned, Mary said, so that we would have something to remember him by if he was killed. As it was, George came safely home and – unless Mary imagined it – fell in love with Tony’s widow Tanya.
Whatever wounds the war opened up between them remained hidden from us. There must have been ideological differences too. Now I wonder how they felt, even before George was called up, when he brought home little boxes of sten-gun parts for us to assemble on the dining room table. (No wonder those guns were unreliable!) Later, I asked my mother why she had seemed so calm one afternoon in London when a flying bomb bumbled overhead. We were having a picnic tea in the big garden, the Kensington square behind our house, and we all stayed put. We may even have had malt bread. When I asked Mary, half a century later, why she’d taken it so calmly, she couldn’t remember the occasion ‘By then I may have felt we had nothing to lose,’ she said. For me that picnic stood out as a happy time with her, along with a bicycle ride in the country years later, when we stopped for a glass of cider, at a wooden table in the sun outside a pub.
After the war, ideological differences became less important. Mary remained a Quaker and a pacifist, George an agnostic with a shelf full of orange New Left Bookclub books – which disappeared as the Cold War set in. (Did the ripples of McCarthy extend this far?) George and Mary shared the outrage and pity of Suez and Hungary, Prague and Vietnam, and some of that got through to me. As time went on, they also shared more happiness. When George’s elder brother Gerald died, he left them enough for George to stop work and buy Fawler Manor. It was only now that George had given up his job that Mary felt able to go out to work. It may have been simply that with children gone she had more time, but it was also clear that they were now comfortably off; her voluntary work was acceptable, not like a paid job when people might have thought he couldn’t afford to keep her. Mary committed herself to Quaker business and Marriage Guidance.
She also took to gardening. As a child, I remember it was George who dug and planted vegetables at weekends. Now he’d retired, the vegetable patch slowly reverted to grass and it was Mary who took up spade and trowel, planting and weeding long herbaceous borders, head high with daisies and delphiniums.
When George died, 11 years ago, he left a letter with his will in which he said that Mary had made a better man of him. With him gone, after 60 years together, she often wished she too were dead. I found it hard to answer when she said that: how can such gaps be filled, such an intimate absence, large as life?
In her childhood, before meeting George, Mary didn’t get much tender loving care or playfulness. George brought a lightness and humour new to her. She had the courage of her moral convictions, but he had a more primitive confidence in his own feelings, impulses right or wrong. Without him, on her own in a ‘sheltered’ Oxford flat, there was little that we, the rest of her family, could do with our dutiful visits and telephone calls. Mary didn’t find it easy to make new friends – as distinct from Friends – or float on casual acquaintance.
Among Quakers, Mary was confident, capable, even authoritative. Perhaps it was the egalitarian simplicity of the Society of Friends that freed her, or a shared moral commitment absent in other social gatherings – in which Mary often felt ill-at-ease. Perhaps she also had a class advantage, even without an Oxford degree. People recalled her principled effectiveness in committee work, and the beauty of her voice in ministry… Whereas, as a teenager, I would hear her speak in meeting, serene, eyes closed, and think ‘If you could see her at home!’
Several times in the last few years of her life, Mary became seriously ill – a fall, a minor stroke or infection, sometimes all combined. Several times we thought she would die and talked of living wills, but each time she clung to life and revived. On one occasion, as she was leaving hospital in a wheelchair, a tall black male nurse called across ‘Hey, Mary, aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ She turned and they shook hands. She said ‘I hope you have a very happy life.’
Afterwards she remarked how strange it had been to be washed and changed by a big black man. I remembered her talking of her father’s big hands bathing her, and wondered if there were also black hands then, a nursemaid’s perhaps, in Trinidad. More recently, when Mary stayed with us in Wales, it was Ada’s Papist hands (do
these things come out in the wash?) On one occasion, when Mary was taken ill in Oxford, it was I, with help from Janet, her grand-daughter, who was privileged to do the washing and changing. Good for us, if not for Mary who was barely conscious.
Maybe Mary should have been a nurse, but it wasn’t just good nursing, in the technical sense – or even good NHS medicine – that brought her back to life, or helped her die so peacefully. I think what made the difference had more to do with kind hands and hearts, and that what she got from her carers in hospital and nursing home was a new, very basic, but life-giving confidence in her own existence
Mary’s class and upbringing had led her to believe that what mattered in life as how she performed and appeared. Not quite Manners makyth man – George’s Winchester motto – but righteous behaviour and belief. For 90 years she had
tried to do and think aright, to live up to high standards and ideals. Then, with old age and sickness… All fall down! Sick to death non-compos and fit for nothing, why should anyone care for such stinking mess?
Except they did, even strangers, who cared enough to feed, wash, change, bethere at her side to welcome her back. Smiling, embracing her.
It seems to me that Mary had a new lightness about her last summer at St Katharines in Wantage. I don’t think it was just a loss of memory that freed her to be happy, made her eager to get up, out and about again. What she’d learnt, or relearned, late in life was this: if people could bear and care for her at her worst, and greet her with a smile or caress when she opened here eyes, she MUST be worth something. If that was true, then life could be worth living too. Good enough to be going on with!
Greg Wilkinson 21.11.08
(with additions 29.3.09)
Thursday 26 March 2009
Blogger this!
It's one thing to write a blog, what's hard work is reading them, especially other peoples! Like archaeology, you start at the top and go backwards in time... coming across bits and pieces it would have helped to know from the start.
Cold turkey flying high
I cut down on my steroids a couple of days ago: 10mg to 7.5. No great pain or stiffness in arms or legs yet, but tingling hands and feet, raw nerves and funny dreams.
Last night we – who else? - were travelling in what might have been the Massif Central. We came out of a scrubby wood into the sun and found ourselves on a rocky headland, looking down, far down, into a deep ravine. Then we seemed to take off, not just us, but a thick wad of turf and soil from under us. We lay on our fronts and clung to this magic carpet or mattress s best we could, soaring and dipping. Far below were forests and fields, bare crags and lakes. I couldn’t tell how high we were, or what was the scale of the landscape below (looking close-up through long grass you can imagine yourself in a forest; look down into a clear pond and the forest is there below you in the weed.) So it was as we planed and dipped, though we seemed to be getting closer to the ground. Suddenly, quite gently, we were there, come to rest on the edge of a lake, our bed of turf half in and half out of the water, like a boat hastily drawn up on a sunny beach. I lay on my front, a foot in the water, face close to the gritty ground, and wept. With relief, and joy and gratitude, not just to be back on earth but for the gift of flight.
This freedom of the sky is one of the freedoms Nina Simone longs for in her song ‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.’ It’s a dangerous freedom, the tempting ambition of Neitzch’s superman and the plunging Icarus. Perhaps what I wept for was my luck.
This dream came in my sleep, but I feel the freedom it points to is not just the escape prescribed by Piaf in ‘Je sais comment.’ Dreams can be also be markers of a waking consciousness, or confidence. Freedom for, or freedom from… Another dream I had, perhaps 30 years ago, seemed important at the time and still does. It had less to do with ambition, more with Janis Joplin’s nothing left to lose – a freedom from fear. Before that memorable dream, I had often awoken with a start, as if to save myself. I would be falling, drowning, running away; the blow or the bullet would be aimed at my head. But always, at the point of impact – or death – I had woken up, as if to spare myself the worst. This time I fell, like Icarus, from a great height into a deep sea. As I sank I knew I wouldn’t make it to the surface. I held my breath as long as I could, then breathed in. Instead of waking, I dreamed on. The water that filled my lungs wasn’t deadly cold, but warm and light. Everything, including me, was light, weightless, bright as in dazzling sun. I surface, no longer a mortal lump but in a blaze of light. The dazzling sunlight tht was also me danced across the water, bounced off cliffs and echoed from headland to headland. The light that included me found its way into a great domed sea-cave, reflecting off the waves and dappling the dark walls and roof. And in the light was a sound, essential as the highest and clearest soprano voice. I couldn't have been happier.
A long-before-death experience.
I cut down on my steroids a couple of days ago: 10mg to 7.5. No great pain or stiffness in arms or legs yet, but tingling hands and feet, raw nerves and funny dreams.
Last night we – who else? - were travelling in what might have been the Massif Central. We came out of a scrubby wood into the sun and found ourselves on a rocky headland, looking down, far down, into a deep ravine. Then we seemed to take off, not just us, but a thick wad of turf and soil from under us. We lay on our fronts and clung to this magic carpet or mattress s best we could, soaring and dipping. Far below were forests and fields, bare crags and lakes. I couldn’t tell how high we were, or what was the scale of the landscape below (looking close-up through long grass you can imagine yourself in a forest; look down into a clear pond and the forest is there below you in the weed.) So it was as we planed and dipped, though we seemed to be getting closer to the ground. Suddenly, quite gently, we were there, come to rest on the edge of a lake, our bed of turf half in and half out of the water, like a boat hastily drawn up on a sunny beach. I lay on my front, a foot in the water, face close to the gritty ground, and wept. With relief, and joy and gratitude, not just to be back on earth but for the gift of flight.
This freedom of the sky is one of the freedoms Nina Simone longs for in her song ‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.’ It’s a dangerous freedom, the tempting ambition of Neitzch’s superman and the plunging Icarus. Perhaps what I wept for was my luck.
This dream came in my sleep, but I feel the freedom it points to is not just the escape prescribed by Piaf in ‘Je sais comment.’ Dreams can be also be markers of a waking consciousness, or confidence. Freedom for, or freedom from… Another dream I had, perhaps 30 years ago, seemed important at the time and still does. It had less to do with ambition, more with Janis Joplin’s nothing left to lose – a freedom from fear. Before that memorable dream, I had often awoken with a start, as if to save myself. I would be falling, drowning, running away; the blow or the bullet would be aimed at my head. But always, at the point of impact – or death – I had woken up, as if to spare myself the worst. This time I fell, like Icarus, from a great height into a deep sea. As I sank I knew I wouldn’t make it to the surface. I held my breath as long as I could, then breathed in. Instead of waking, I dreamed on. The water that filled my lungs wasn’t deadly cold, but warm and light. Everything, including me, was light, weightless, bright as in dazzling sun. I surface, no longer a mortal lump but in a blaze of light. The dazzling sunlight tht was also me danced across the water, bounced off cliffs and echoed from headland to headland. The light that included me found its way into a great domed sea-cave, reflecting off the waves and dappling the dark walls and roof. And in the light was a sound, essential as the highest and clearest soprano voice. I couldn't have been happier.
A long-before-death experience.
Wednesday 25 March 2009
Troserch Wood Newsletter – April 2009
It’s three years since we launched the campaign to secure the Troserch Woods for public enjoyment, wildlife and restoration of ancient woodland. The Troserch Woodlands Society (TWS) was set up after a public meeting in April 2006. Nearly 200 people paid their £5 membership subs and a few months later we were lucky enough to receive a Cyd Coed (Forestry Commission) grant to cover the purchase of 80 acres, north of Llangennech, up the Morlais river valley. Oddly, it was this same Forestry Commission which, 15 years earlier, had sold off the same bit valley with its standing crop of conifers.
For us, it was one thing to buy a wood, another to know what to do with it. The woods were ours, a community asset, but the business of management, maintenance and insurance required funds and expertise. Luckily, the committee was soon to include a financial adviser, a forester and a woodland owner with management experience. To save individual members from liability, the elected TWS committee doubles as a not-for-profit limited company, Troserch Woodlands (Property) Ltd. None of the members are paid, and one of our first tasks was to beg and borrow the money we needed for immediate costs. The National Pipeline company, then working nearby, came up with one grant, and others covered wildlife surveys and disposal of accumulated rubbish. The Coal board was called in to start making safe the many mine-workings in the woods, but before that could be done, there had to be check for bats. Greater Horseshoe bats, as it turned out.
The TWS committee includes a wildlife group and a history group, and here as often the two came together. Forty birdboxes have been nailed to treetrunks and fold-out nestboxes strung to hazel branches for dormice (some of the little prefabs have been lived in, but it’s not yet clear what by!). Goshawks, another rarish breed, have begun nesting in the wood, and taking a neigbours’ hens. Buzzards and owls, badgers and foxes go about their daily and nightly business. There are trout in the river and an otter recently left the remains of a salmon on the bank.
The history group has compiled a history of the woods and tracked down people old enough to remember living and working in the valley - a family who lived in the mill and a man who worked as a boy with his father down one of the mines.
Human nature, and industry, have helped to shape the wood and the evidence is vsible here and there among the greenery. Trees were felled and coppiced, for building, fencing and burning, charcoal and tannin. The valley sides were reshaped by quarrying and mining, the river dammed and diverted for watermills.
After the timber shortages of the Second World War, the Forestry Commission felled most of the old broadleaved wood and planted conifers. This past winter has seen another round of felling, by us. This time it was the conifers' turn: nearly ten acres east of the river has been cleared, fenced and replanted with native broadleaved trees. This required improved tracks, a new bridge, payed for with more help from the Forestry Commission, which also subsidises replanting. The income timber sales, though reduced by recession, will help with future management and project costs. And the felling has enabled us to extend the network of tracks and paths around the eastern side of the river, linking up across the bridge to old rights of way.
It hasn’t always been sweetness and light. The byeway that runs along the top of the wood gives access to joy-riders and flytippers, burnt-out cars and piles of old tyres. When we suggested gates, there was an outcry: ‘They're closing our Roman Road.’ (though the legions managed without four-wheel drives and motorbikes). Now mechanised roughriders resent our decision to ban motors from the rest of the woods: in the interests of safety and wildlife and because most visitors say they value peace and quiet. Horseriders are represented on the committee and we welcome cyclists. We don’t keep anyone out for the sake of it, nor do we want to turn a wild wood tame and clutter it with bossy signs.
Troserch Wood is a rare wild space in an unspoiled river valley and we want to keep it that way. The recent felling has left a mess, but thousands of young trees have been planted and the churned-up ground will soon be green again. Now that the big machines have gone, we can restore the carpark and put up signs and maps at entrances.
We trust our members and visitors to the woods to take care of themselves, each other and the place as they find it. If anyone has time and energy to spare, we have working parties every few weeks, to improve the paths, clear rubbish and brambles, thin and plant young trees. We would also welcome groups with new ideas and skills for projects or activities. Get in touch! There’s more on our website http://www.troserchwoods.co.uk/, but no substitute for the real thing.
An earlier draft noted that the green wood could also be the dark wood, and mentioned the death of a young man on the road not far from the carpark. He had spent the evening in the woods with a group of friends, and we planted a tree for him, or his family, near the picnic site.... I cut the reference because some committee members felt it too offputting. I censored myself when it came to costs, particularly the £40,000 for a bridge. On environmental grounds, we were not allowed to haul timber across the river, or to improvise a temporary tree-trunk bridge - the traditional method. Although the cost was mainly covered by grants, I wonder if fish and animals could have survived at less public expense - especially since there's already a footbridge 20 yards upstream. Now we'll see if we can move that, to make a new circular walk.
Did I say dark wood? There's a new dark space, where the concrete cap has been broken on an old mine shaft. The story is that the mine closed down when a miner put some sticks of gelignite to dry on the boiler that powered the winding gear. And forgot it. Nobody was killed but the works were beyond repair. Now there's dark water a few yards under the concrete hole. How deep, or not?
That aside, the amazing thing about the felling is how much light it lets in, not just to the denuded ground but sidelong into the untouched woods along the river banks below. A brave new world, of our own making - except that it wasn't us, but the men we paid, with money that wasn't ours.
It’s three years since we launched the campaign to secure the Troserch Woods for public enjoyment, wildlife and restoration of ancient woodland. The Troserch Woodlands Society (TWS) was set up after a public meeting in April 2006. Nearly 200 people paid their £5 membership subs and a few months later we were lucky enough to receive a Cyd Coed (Forestry Commission) grant to cover the purchase of 80 acres, north of Llangennech, up the Morlais river valley. Oddly, it was this same Forestry Commission which, 15 years earlier, had sold off the same bit valley with its standing crop of conifers.
For us, it was one thing to buy a wood, another to know what to do with it. The woods were ours, a community asset, but the business of management, maintenance and insurance required funds and expertise. Luckily, the committee was soon to include a financial adviser, a forester and a woodland owner with management experience. To save individual members from liability, the elected TWS committee doubles as a not-for-profit limited company, Troserch Woodlands (Property) Ltd. None of the members are paid, and one of our first tasks was to beg and borrow the money we needed for immediate costs. The National Pipeline company, then working nearby, came up with one grant, and others covered wildlife surveys and disposal of accumulated rubbish. The Coal board was called in to start making safe the many mine-workings in the woods, but before that could be done, there had to be check for bats. Greater Horseshoe bats, as it turned out.
The TWS committee includes a wildlife group and a history group, and here as often the two came together. Forty birdboxes have been nailed to treetrunks and fold-out nestboxes strung to hazel branches for dormice (some of the little prefabs have been lived in, but it’s not yet clear what by!). Goshawks, another rarish breed, have begun nesting in the wood, and taking a neigbours’ hens. Buzzards and owls, badgers and foxes go about their daily and nightly business. There are trout in the river and an otter recently left the remains of a salmon on the bank.
The history group has compiled a history of the woods and tracked down people old enough to remember living and working in the valley - a family who lived in the mill and a man who worked as a boy with his father down one of the mines.
Human nature, and industry, have helped to shape the wood and the evidence is vsible here and there among the greenery. Trees were felled and coppiced, for building, fencing and burning, charcoal and tannin. The valley sides were reshaped by quarrying and mining, the river dammed and diverted for watermills.
After the timber shortages of the Second World War, the Forestry Commission felled most of the old broadleaved wood and planted conifers. This past winter has seen another round of felling, by us. This time it was the conifers' turn: nearly ten acres east of the river has been cleared, fenced and replanted with native broadleaved trees. This required improved tracks, a new bridge, payed for with more help from the Forestry Commission, which also subsidises replanting. The income timber sales, though reduced by recession, will help with future management and project costs. And the felling has enabled us to extend the network of tracks and paths around the eastern side of the river, linking up across the bridge to old rights of way.
It hasn’t always been sweetness and light. The byeway that runs along the top of the wood gives access to joy-riders and flytippers, burnt-out cars and piles of old tyres. When we suggested gates, there was an outcry: ‘They're closing our Roman Road.’ (though the legions managed without four-wheel drives and motorbikes). Now mechanised roughriders resent our decision to ban motors from the rest of the woods: in the interests of safety and wildlife and because most visitors say they value peace and quiet. Horseriders are represented on the committee and we welcome cyclists. We don’t keep anyone out for the sake of it, nor do we want to turn a wild wood tame and clutter it with bossy signs.
Troserch Wood is a rare wild space in an unspoiled river valley and we want to keep it that way. The recent felling has left a mess, but thousands of young trees have been planted and the churned-up ground will soon be green again. Now that the big machines have gone, we can restore the carpark and put up signs and maps at entrances.
We trust our members and visitors to the woods to take care of themselves, each other and the place as they find it. If anyone has time and energy to spare, we have working parties every few weeks, to improve the paths, clear rubbish and brambles, thin and plant young trees. We would also welcome groups with new ideas and skills for projects or activities. Get in touch! There’s more on our website http://www.troserchwoods.co.uk/, but no substitute for the real thing.
An earlier draft noted that the green wood could also be the dark wood, and mentioned the death of a young man on the road not far from the carpark. He had spent the evening in the woods with a group of friends, and we planted a tree for him, or his family, near the picnic site.... I cut the reference because some committee members felt it too offputting. I censored myself when it came to costs, particularly the £40,000 for a bridge. On environmental grounds, we were not allowed to haul timber across the river, or to improvise a temporary tree-trunk bridge - the traditional method. Although the cost was mainly covered by grants, I wonder if fish and animals could have survived at less public expense - especially since there's already a footbridge 20 yards upstream. Now we'll see if we can move that, to make a new circular walk.
Did I say dark wood? There's a new dark space, where the concrete cap has been broken on an old mine shaft. The story is that the mine closed down when a miner put some sticks of gelignite to dry on the boiler that powered the winding gear. And forgot it. Nobody was killed but the works were beyond repair. Now there's dark water a few yards under the concrete hole. How deep, or not?
That aside, the amazing thing about the felling is how much light it lets in, not just to the denuded ground but sidelong into the untouched woods along the river banks below. A brave new world, of our own making - except that it wasn't us, but the men we paid, with money that wasn't ours.
Thursday 19 March 2009
Such a lot of things to write about:
- my mother, again, now it's six months since she died and I'm troubled by the bland version of her life I produced, but didnt read out, for her memorial service. How to reconcile demands of love and honesty? Not that I have any problem loving her, but with other people who might be hurt by what I say. Love, to be worth anything, must embrace the worst as well as the best of us; and honesty requires that we dont skip or blur the bad bits. It might be interesting to take the rather formal eulogy as a framework, and cut into it with the things I didnt say...
- Then there's Richard and his Spirit Level, my pride and jealousy, and the questions his book raises: if unequal wealth and incomes cause so many problems, what causes unequal wealth and incomes? To get things more equal we must get at the dynamics and structures that have widened the gap in countries such as ours. Will Hutton hinted at that when he suggested that our present government might find it difficult to redistribute when the most needy are also the most despised (though that bit of his Observer piece was left out when the Guardian Weekly reprinted it). Why do we, more than some other peoples perhaps, want to kick the people below us, not lift them up?
- An annual newsletter for the Troserch Woodlands Society - since I'm a director of the not-for-profit company that manages the woods, and such a lot's been happening with felling, fencing and replanting. Pity most of the material I need are locked up in the computer the police took away.
- Two songs: Janis Joplin's Freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose, and Nina Simone's I wish I knew how it would feel to be free: what's this freedom thing, and how does it relate to love, equality etc?
Wide blue yonder: police cells and Tesco dates
The walls and ceiling are a pleasant sky blue, this police cell in Bridgend reminds me a bit of Azmi’s house in the refugee camp. Lebanon, 1956. Azmi was a Palestinian student, we worked together on an earthquake reconstruction site, he took us back to his home in the camp and his mother made a meal for us. Later Azmi gave me a book called ‘Palestine is our business,’ but that took some years to sink in.
It was nearly half a century later that I went to the West Bank as an observer for British Quakers (although I’m not one). I saw enough there to convince me that the business was seriously unfinished. Then early this year, a few days after the assault on Gaza, I got an email from an Israeli peace group, the text of a boycott-Israel call from a Palestinian committee in Ramalla.
Prompted by this, I went down to the nearest big Tesco store in Swansea and confiscated some ‘West Bank’ dates. ‘King Solomon’ dates, nine to a see-through container, each soft date in its own little crib of frilly white paper. I auctioned them, one by one, in aid of Gaza appeals from Oxfam and Islamic Relief. I wrote to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy telling him what I was doing and offered to refund the price of the dates if he could assure me that they were not the product of illegal settlements. In the correspondence that followed, Tesco stressed its commitment to ethics, legality and local sourcing but said nothing about settlements. They did not take up my refund offer, or prosecute.
To bring things to a head, this time with a group in support, I wheeled a trolley- load of dates out of theTesco store and into a little battery of press and TV cameras. A woman companion, D Murphy,followed with a trolley full of other West Bank and Israeli goods. We marked the goods in red emulsion and ketchup as ‘unfit for sale’ and D made a speech to people crowding round. In posters and leaflets we explained what we were doing and we also wrote to Tesco staff to apologise for any inconvenience.
D and I were arrested, charged and held for seven or eight hours at Swansea police station. I was amazed how quickly I lost track of time, stripped of watch, with nothing happening, nothing much to focus on, no daylight through the glass-tile window. At midnight, I was told the charge against me would be dropped for ‘lack of evidence.’ What more did they need? Embarassingly for me, my companion was formally charged.(She has since pleaded not guilty to theft at Magistrate’s Court and bailed to Swansea Crown Court on April 1st.)
In defence, we argue that sale of settlement goods in these stores is unlawful because the UK government is signatory to Geneva Conventions and Security Council resolutions that make both occupation and settlements illegal. Our removal of these goods is no more theft than a citizen’s arrest is assault; we are simply upholding the law in the absence of its professional guardians. As for other Israeli goods, they should not be on sale because the European trade agreement that governs their import is subject to a human rights and democracy clause.
Meanwhile we and other boycott activists have been picketing other Swansea stores. On a rainy vigil outside the Swansea branch of Sainsbury’s, police were called. There were only two of us there at the time, myself and a friend called Maggie. After a friendly discussion we agreed to leave at one pm, the time we’d planned on anyway.
Last Wednesday (March 11th) morning, as my wife Ada and I were finishing breakfast, the police came banging at the door, one vanload, then another with a plainclothes car or two. They brought a warrant to arrest me and search the house ‘on suspicion of conspiracy to commit racially aggravated criminal damage.’ What damage now? Not in Swansea, it turned out, but in Bridgend, where – unknown to us - another Sainsbury’s store had been visited with red paint. A hit and run job, not our style! And the racial aggravation? This, we were told, referred to the word ‘Israeli’ in the slogan ‘Boycott Israeli goods’ – as stencilled on the floor of the Bridgend store. D Murphy, my partner in the Tesco stunt, was not in when her snatch-squad knocked at the door, so her lot came on to join the others in our house, or chatting and laughing in the street outside - the Bridgend policemen and women having nothing better to do in Swansea that morning. My wife was still able to slip out with the mobile phone, while I was asked some questions and the searchers rummaged around indoors. I was then driven off to Bridgend, a place I’d often passed but never visited. My wife got back to find our visitors working through bank statements and underclothes, secure in their blue latex gloves.The other person arrested was poor Maggie, who had just dropped in to hand out leaflets in the rain. She too was whisked away to Bridgend. I didn’t know who else they’d got, but she guessed I was there from the shoes outside my cell.
I was angry about the racist slur. I told the CID men who questioned me that Israel was a state, not a race, and that lots of Jews, including some Israeli Jews, were supporting the boycott. I forgot to mention that it was an email from an Israeli anti-occupation group that prompted me to take the dates.The arresting officer’s notebook has me saying ‘I have many friends in the Jewish community.’
The men who questioned me showed a great interest in red paint.They picked up a sample-pot of red emulsion from our house, and some cardboard posters I’d made saying ‘Don’t buy Israeli goods’, ‘Israeli goods are bads’ and ‘Stolen goods from stolen land.’ Why red, they asked, and I really didn’t know, but was relieve when they showed me pictures of the Bridgend Sainsburys incident. The Israeli peppers and stencil on the floor were clearly done in spraypaint, not emulsion. Later I learned they’d take my wife’s craftknifes and cutting mat, in case we’d been making stencils with them. I asked why it needed a conspiracy for such a simple task, when the Swansea show with theTesco dates had been all over the local press and round the world on Youtube.
Back in my cell, I tried and failed to eat a microwave shepherds pie. It was kind of the Group 4 guards to think of it, but much too hot and horrible. I’m not usually fussy, but the potato-pulp topping was submerged in brown gunge, like dirty snow in a puddle. A ‘COMPLEAT’ meal, best before 2010 but already uneatable. Bring back Azmi’s mum, bless her sould, with her lamb with rice: we didn’t know at the time we were eating the family’s meat ration for two weeks. And Azmi, who hated to be thanked – brothers share, you said – are you still alive? On this other pale blue wall, in my South Wales cell, there’s a brown splashmark high up on the wall, just below the eye of the surveillance camera. Someone else’s shepherds pie? I used the box from mine to begin this writing on, with a paper and pen brought in at my request – after reading the card about my rights.
The desk sergeant had told me I would be allowed to ring Ada, my wife. But when I asked I was told they were too busy. On my way to and from questioning, I could see all the pairs of shoes outside cell doors, like an old-fashioned hotel corridor, but mostly trainers (mine were brown leather, which is what Maggie recognised) If the police had told me my solicitor had rung, alerted by Ada, I wouldn’t have said ‘No’ when they asked me if I wanted one for my recorded interview. I was worried about Ada and eager to get home; I felt I had nothing to hide and didn’t want to bring him all the way from Cardiff to Bridgend.
About five hours after the raid began, Maggie and I were released – though still not allowed to see or speak to each other – and driven home. She and Ada were more upset than I was by the invasion of our homes. I was more upset by the loss of my computer, with so much writing and other business unbacked up. On reflection, I’ve got angrier. We know they’ve taken a lot of papers about Israel and Palestine, but will only gradually discover what else is missing. Now I feel the Bridgend desk-sergeant was out of order with his crack about Viagra: he’d asked me about medical conditions and drugs, and I mentioned a muscular complaint. At the time I said ‘Not that localised,’ but on reflection it’s more like insult upon injury. What the hell were all those public servants doing? There must have been at least 20 on the day, in the cars and vans and back at the station. And then the paperwork, and fishing through hard-drives and emails. All over a bit of red on some fruit and veg, a harmless slogan on a floor! At what point does prudent policing become disproportionate, intimidation? What will they do with all the other addresses they pick up? Are we hearing, or imagining, new clicks and echoes on our phones? If the racially aggravated conspiracy doesn’t stick – and I got the feeling the detectives were beginning to have their doubts – will the claw back something else to charge me with?
If not undue force, can the police be prosecuted for wasting their own police time, and our public money? And when will I get my computer back, the tool of such trade as I have at my age? But who am I to moan? At least our houses were left intact and more or less tidy, not like some I’ve seen after raids in Palestine. None of us has been hit in the head, skull smashed open by a souped-up teargas shell.* Maybe that’s why I chose red paint: red for solidarity, real blood and bloody ridiculous.
*As happened to an ‘international’ last week, near the West Bank village of Ni’lin.
Every Friday for a couple of years now, villagers have been joined by foreign volunteers and Israeli anti-occupation groups in a demonstration against the separation Wall that divides the village from much of its land.
The walls and ceiling are a pleasant sky blue, this police cell in Bridgend reminds me a bit of Azmi’s house in the refugee camp. Lebanon, 1956. Azmi was a Palestinian student, we worked together on an earthquake reconstruction site, he took us back to his home in the camp and his mother made a meal for us. Later Azmi gave me a book called ‘Palestine is our business,’ but that took some years to sink in.
It was nearly half a century later that I went to the West Bank as an observer for British Quakers (although I’m not one). I saw enough there to convince me that the business was seriously unfinished. Then early this year, a few days after the assault on Gaza, I got an email from an Israeli peace group, the text of a boycott-Israel call from a Palestinian committee in Ramalla.
Prompted by this, I went down to the nearest big Tesco store in Swansea and confiscated some ‘West Bank’ dates. ‘King Solomon’ dates, nine to a see-through container, each soft date in its own little crib of frilly white paper. I auctioned them, one by one, in aid of Gaza appeals from Oxfam and Islamic Relief. I wrote to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy telling him what I was doing and offered to refund the price of the dates if he could assure me that they were not the product of illegal settlements. In the correspondence that followed, Tesco stressed its commitment to ethics, legality and local sourcing but said nothing about settlements. They did not take up my refund offer, or prosecute.
To bring things to a head, this time with a group in support, I wheeled a trolley- load of dates out of theTesco store and into a little battery of press and TV cameras. A woman companion, D Murphy,followed with a trolley full of other West Bank and Israeli goods. We marked the goods in red emulsion and ketchup as ‘unfit for sale’ and D made a speech to people crowding round. In posters and leaflets we explained what we were doing and we also wrote to Tesco staff to apologise for any inconvenience.
D and I were arrested, charged and held for seven or eight hours at Swansea police station. I was amazed how quickly I lost track of time, stripped of watch, with nothing happening, nothing much to focus on, no daylight through the glass-tile window. At midnight, I was told the charge against me would be dropped for ‘lack of evidence.’ What more did they need? Embarassingly for me, my companion was formally charged.(She has since pleaded not guilty to theft at Magistrate’s Court and bailed to Swansea Crown Court on April 1st.)
In defence, we argue that sale of settlement goods in these stores is unlawful because the UK government is signatory to Geneva Conventions and Security Council resolutions that make both occupation and settlements illegal. Our removal of these goods is no more theft than a citizen’s arrest is assault; we are simply upholding the law in the absence of its professional guardians. As for other Israeli goods, they should not be on sale because the European trade agreement that governs their import is subject to a human rights and democracy clause.
Meanwhile we and other boycott activists have been picketing other Swansea stores. On a rainy vigil outside the Swansea branch of Sainsbury’s, police were called. There were only two of us there at the time, myself and a friend called Maggie. After a friendly discussion we agreed to leave at one pm, the time we’d planned on anyway.
Last Wednesday (March 11th) morning, as my wife Ada and I were finishing breakfast, the police came banging at the door, one vanload, then another with a plainclothes car or two. They brought a warrant to arrest me and search the house ‘on suspicion of conspiracy to commit racially aggravated criminal damage.’ What damage now? Not in Swansea, it turned out, but in Bridgend, where – unknown to us - another Sainsbury’s store had been visited with red paint. A hit and run job, not our style! And the racial aggravation? This, we were told, referred to the word ‘Israeli’ in the slogan ‘Boycott Israeli goods’ – as stencilled on the floor of the Bridgend store. D Murphy, my partner in the Tesco stunt, was not in when her snatch-squad knocked at the door, so her lot came on to join the others in our house, or chatting and laughing in the street outside - the Bridgend policemen and women having nothing better to do in Swansea that morning. My wife was still able to slip out with the mobile phone, while I was asked some questions and the searchers rummaged around indoors. I was then driven off to Bridgend, a place I’d often passed but never visited. My wife got back to find our visitors working through bank statements and underclothes, secure in their blue latex gloves.The other person arrested was poor Maggie, who had just dropped in to hand out leaflets in the rain. She too was whisked away to Bridgend. I didn’t know who else they’d got, but she guessed I was there from the shoes outside my cell.
I was angry about the racist slur. I told the CID men who questioned me that Israel was a state, not a race, and that lots of Jews, including some Israeli Jews, were supporting the boycott. I forgot to mention that it was an email from an Israeli anti-occupation group that prompted me to take the dates.The arresting officer’s notebook has me saying ‘I have many friends in the Jewish community.’
The men who questioned me showed a great interest in red paint.They picked up a sample-pot of red emulsion from our house, and some cardboard posters I’d made saying ‘Don’t buy Israeli goods’, ‘Israeli goods are bads’ and ‘Stolen goods from stolen land.’ Why red, they asked, and I really didn’t know, but was relieve when they showed me pictures of the Bridgend Sainsburys incident. The Israeli peppers and stencil on the floor were clearly done in spraypaint, not emulsion. Later I learned they’d take my wife’s craftknifes and cutting mat, in case we’d been making stencils with them. I asked why it needed a conspiracy for such a simple task, when the Swansea show with theTesco dates had been all over the local press and round the world on Youtube.
Back in my cell, I tried and failed to eat a microwave shepherds pie. It was kind of the Group 4 guards to think of it, but much too hot and horrible. I’m not usually fussy, but the potato-pulp topping was submerged in brown gunge, like dirty snow in a puddle. A ‘COMPLEAT’ meal, best before 2010 but already uneatable. Bring back Azmi’s mum, bless her sould, with her lamb with rice: we didn’t know at the time we were eating the family’s meat ration for two weeks. And Azmi, who hated to be thanked – brothers share, you said – are you still alive? On this other pale blue wall, in my South Wales cell, there’s a brown splashmark high up on the wall, just below the eye of the surveillance camera. Someone else’s shepherds pie? I used the box from mine to begin this writing on, with a paper and pen brought in at my request – after reading the card about my rights.
The desk sergeant had told me I would be allowed to ring Ada, my wife. But when I asked I was told they were too busy. On my way to and from questioning, I could see all the pairs of shoes outside cell doors, like an old-fashioned hotel corridor, but mostly trainers (mine were brown leather, which is what Maggie recognised) If the police had told me my solicitor had rung, alerted by Ada, I wouldn’t have said ‘No’ when they asked me if I wanted one for my recorded interview. I was worried about Ada and eager to get home; I felt I had nothing to hide and didn’t want to bring him all the way from Cardiff to Bridgend.
About five hours after the raid began, Maggie and I were released – though still not allowed to see or speak to each other – and driven home. She and Ada were more upset than I was by the invasion of our homes. I was more upset by the loss of my computer, with so much writing and other business unbacked up. On reflection, I’ve got angrier. We know they’ve taken a lot of papers about Israel and Palestine, but will only gradually discover what else is missing. Now I feel the Bridgend desk-sergeant was out of order with his crack about Viagra: he’d asked me about medical conditions and drugs, and I mentioned a muscular complaint. At the time I said ‘Not that localised,’ but on reflection it’s more like insult upon injury. What the hell were all those public servants doing? There must have been at least 20 on the day, in the cars and vans and back at the station. And then the paperwork, and fishing through hard-drives and emails. All over a bit of red on some fruit and veg, a harmless slogan on a floor! At what point does prudent policing become disproportionate, intimidation? What will they do with all the other addresses they pick up? Are we hearing, or imagining, new clicks and echoes on our phones? If the racially aggravated conspiracy doesn’t stick – and I got the feeling the detectives were beginning to have their doubts – will the claw back something else to charge me with?
If not undue force, can the police be prosecuted for wasting their own police time, and our public money? And when will I get my computer back, the tool of such trade as I have at my age? But who am I to moan? At least our houses were left intact and more or less tidy, not like some I’ve seen after raids in Palestine. None of us has been hit in the head, skull smashed open by a souped-up teargas shell.* Maybe that’s why I chose red paint: red for solidarity, real blood and bloody ridiculous.
*As happened to an ‘international’ last week, near the West Bank village of Ni’lin.
Every Friday for a couple of years now, villagers have been joined by foreign volunteers and Israeli anti-occupation groups in a demonstration against the separation Wall that divides the village from much of its land.
Friday 6 March 2009
Imaginary Gods
In her Magnificat, the Virgin Mary thanks God for lifting her from her low estate. The God she has in mind will pull down the mighty and raise the meek, feed the hungry and dismiss the rich. His mother's son, Jesus tells a rich questioner that if he wants to get to heaven he must give his money to the poor. But the rich man, preferring the bird in hand, walks sorrowfully away.
A lesson for those who rely on the generosity or enlightened self-interest of the haves. There are two sides to our common humanity: give and take. A generous understanding bv the haves is part of the equation, but that must be at least matched by the enlightened self-interest of the have-nots. The have-nots have numbers as well as right on their side: in the mathematics of an unequal society, those with less than the average are in the majority.
Rereading that story in the gospel of St Luke, I wondered if Mary could have refused God’s generous offer, or whether He would have caught up with her somehow, like Hardy’s poor Tess in the woods. Could Cinders have turned her back on the prince, could Tolstoy’s peasant girls have said ‘No thank you, sir’? Leo believed in peasant simplicity, would pluck a wench between meals and note it in his diary.
Noblesse oblige shades so easily into droit de seigneur! A half-amiable lordling doesn’t have to get away with murder, or even rape, when seduction comes so easily. With wealth and power to speak for him, the slave driver may not have to raise his voice.
In the 1830s, Fanny Kemble, a leading young English actress, was on tour in the United States. She fell in love with a courteous American lawyer, they married and had two children before he inherited his family’s estate in Sea Island Georgia. On the slave plantation, she watched her husband revert to type and realised that she too was a chattel. As a young mother, she felt especially for slave women, who she found giving birth in filth and sent back to work. But she also found that she too was powerless: to teach reading was a crime, for instance, but it would be her husband, who disapproved, not her who answered for it in court.
Unusually for a woman, Fanny Kemble was prepared to go out alone. Perhaps she felt freer away from the house. When she entrusted herself to a slave crew, in an open boat on a stormy river, they registered their astonishment. In another passage, she described the undercurrent of fear she discerned beneath the airs and graces of Southern society, fear of the dark majority. Frances Kemble was not above racism herself. She compares a crippled black boy running across a field to the legs of the Isle of Man. But sympathy overrides conditioning and she defies convention again when she invites the slaves, plantation as well as household workers, to join a Sunday service in the house. This time it is she who seems amazed. She notes a transformation in her unfamiliar guests. For a moment, under one roof with a common intent, all are equal in the eyes of God. Scales of deference and pretence fall away, and they can speak naturally, look each other in the eye.
Ms Kemble left her husband, the plantation, and – I think – her children. Divorced and returned to England, she admired Dickens, gave magisterial readings from Shakespeare and was admired by Henry James. Her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-9 was published years later in support of the anti-slavery movement. Like Dickens, Fanny Kemble saw free enterprise as a creative, liberating force. Now, recognising capitalism as a driver of new inequalities, we can also note how inequality drives much of 19th century literature. Heathcliff’s implacable revenge in Wuthering Heights has strong elements of class war as well as unrequited love. Dorothea in Middlemarch confronts a combination of gender, age and academic superiority. Across the ocean from Mansfield Park, behind a benefactor’a wealth and the dissolution of his son, lies another slave plantation. And in Mansfield Park, as in Jane Eyre, we have a problem with gratitude. Poor relation and governess-companion might agree that it’s better to give than to receive, as they sink ever deeper in moral debt.
In Dickens Tale of Two cities, repayment is instantaneious. A carriage is caught up in the Paris crowd, something happens - a child run over perhaps - and the aristos in the carriage toss a handful of coins into the crowd. A moment’s pause, then ping as a coin comes back through the carriage window… In Paris 1968, the streets were taken over first by students and intellectuals, then by young people from the suburbs. Cars and busses made better barricades than cobble stones, and the young voyous were good at that. About ten years before, in the battle of Algiers, young criminals rose quickly through the ranks of the FLN, rebels who’d found a cause.
-------------------------
*Happily or unhappily, sex, even rape, is a longterm leveller, genes oblivious to inequalities of wealth, rank or race. Otherwise apartheid might have worked; slaves, other races or classes might be for ever separate, subordinate, condemned to perpetual servitude or extermination.
A lesson for those who rely on the generosity or enlightened self-interest of the haves. There are two sides to our common humanity: give and take. A generous understanding bv the haves is part of the equation, but that must be at least matched by the enlightened self-interest of the have-nots. The have-nots have numbers as well as right on their side: in the mathematics of an unequal society, those with less than the average are in the majority.
Rereading that story in the gospel of St Luke, I wondered if Mary could have refused God’s generous offer, or whether He would have caught up with her somehow, like Hardy’s poor Tess in the woods. Could Cinders have turned her back on the prince, could Tolstoy’s peasant girls have said ‘No thank you, sir’? Leo believed in peasant simplicity, would pluck a wench between meals and note it in his diary.
Noblesse oblige shades so easily into droit de seigneur! A half-amiable lordling doesn’t have to get away with murder, or even rape, when seduction comes so easily. With wealth and power to speak for him, the slave driver may not have to raise his voice.
In the 1830s, Fanny Kemble, a leading young English actress, was on tour in the United States. She fell in love with a courteous American lawyer, they married and had two children before he inherited his family’s estate in Sea Island Georgia. On the slave plantation, she watched her husband revert to type and realised that she too was a chattel. As a young mother, she felt especially for slave women, who she found giving birth in filth and sent back to work. But she also found that she too was powerless: to teach reading was a crime, for instance, but it would be her husband, who disapproved, not her who answered for it in court.
Unusually for a woman, Fanny Kemble was prepared to go out alone. Perhaps she felt freer away from the house. When she entrusted herself to a slave crew, in an open boat on a stormy river, they registered their astonishment. In another passage, she described the undercurrent of fear she discerned beneath the airs and graces of Southern society, fear of the dark majority. Frances Kemble was not above racism herself. She compares a crippled black boy running across a field to the legs of the Isle of Man. But sympathy overrides conditioning and she defies convention again when she invites the slaves, plantation as well as household workers, to join a Sunday service in the house. This time it is she who seems amazed. She notes a transformation in her unfamiliar guests. For a moment, under one roof with a common intent, all are equal in the eyes of God. Scales of deference and pretence fall away, and they can speak naturally, look each other in the eye.
Ms Kemble left her husband, the plantation, and – I think – her children. Divorced and returned to England, she admired Dickens, gave magisterial readings from Shakespeare and was admired by Henry James. Her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-9 was published years later in support of the anti-slavery movement. Like Dickens, Fanny Kemble saw free enterprise as a creative, liberating force. Now, recognising capitalism as a driver of new inequalities, we can also note how inequality drives much of 19th century literature. Heathcliff’s implacable revenge in Wuthering Heights has strong elements of class war as well as unrequited love. Dorothea in Middlemarch confronts a combination of gender, age and academic superiority. Across the ocean from Mansfield Park, behind a benefactor’a wealth and the dissolution of his son, lies another slave plantation. And in Mansfield Park, as in Jane Eyre, we have a problem with gratitude. Poor relation and governess-companion might agree that it’s better to give than to receive, as they sink ever deeper in moral debt.
In Dickens Tale of Two cities, repayment is instantaneious. A carriage is caught up in the Paris crowd, something happens - a child run over perhaps - and the aristos in the carriage toss a handful of coins into the crowd. A moment’s pause, then ping as a coin comes back through the carriage window… In Paris 1968, the streets were taken over first by students and intellectuals, then by young people from the suburbs. Cars and busses made better barricades than cobble stones, and the young voyous were good at that. About ten years before, in the battle of Algiers, young criminals rose quickly through the ranks of the FLN, rebels who’d found a cause.
-------------------------
*Happily or unhappily, sex, even rape, is a longterm leveller, genes oblivious to inequalities of wealth, rank or race. Otherwise apartheid might have worked; slaves, other races or classes might be for ever separate, subordinate, condemned to perpetual servitude or extermination.
spirit level
Richard’s Spirit Level book comes out this week. I’m proud and jealous. Proud because it’s a good, important, timely book, and because he’s my brother. Jealous because he’s made a name for himself and I have not… (Why this craving for distinction, when I know that’s not what matters most, for day to day happiness or in the long run of history – where big things sink without trace and any little straw may break the camel’s back?) This book of Richard’s, with his partner Kate Picket, is about inequality, and the damage that does to health and society. The publication, after thirty years of dogged research, comes at an opportune moment, what the old Left would call a Crisis of Capitalism. Rightly as often.
The book’s appearance also coincides with these first blogs of mine. No mere chance: although I’ve been wondering for a long time what to do with my writing, his book prompted me to launch a virtual counterpart. Not to be outdone, a case of inequality driving emulation, but in counterpoint, not counterblast!
Equality is crucial, but I don’t much like the word. Set among Love, Freedom and Truth, it stands out as a latin sore thumb: the first three translate into Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and I wondered about Fairness in place of Equality. But a lot of people think of themselves as fair – not to mention free and loving – without much movement towards Equality.
Fraternity? I’m happy with, and committed to, the broad thrust of my brother's argument. Any criticism - and what else would you expect from an overtaken elder brother? - is aimed at adding to, not taking from his work. What's needed now is:
1. To get the information out to those who have most to gain for it: have-nots and have-lesses, the people who do not keep up with social sciences, read the Guardian or listen to Radio 4.
2. To broaden the campaign medium beyond statistical reasoning to a more emotive - and motivating - range of experience and image, art and literature, comedy and song.
3. To nail Capitalism as main driver of economic and social inequality – setting haves over have-nots, dependent on differentials and binding us all to its rack of Profit and Loss. (We'll never all be equal, but Capitalism feeds and feeds on inequality.)
In this blog of mine, I will relate Equality to those other LEFT words above, not so much in argument as through my own life, and occasional other reading (but I read so slowly!). Maybe I’m like the Moliere character who suddenly realises he’s speaking Grammar, but it seems to me that I’ve been wrestling with Equality – or rather Inequality – for much of my life. Both in my work and in my family, where class and income differences come home to roost. I am White Anglo-saxon Protestant Middle Class. Ada, and my first wife Kath, both come from working class Irish families. How far can a Wasp change his stripes – to red and green for instance?
And Humour - GSOH? Like Beauty, that didnt get a mention on the banner, but may also pop up, if only by mistake.
The book’s appearance also coincides with these first blogs of mine. No mere chance: although I’ve been wondering for a long time what to do with my writing, his book prompted me to launch a virtual counterpart. Not to be outdone, a case of inequality driving emulation, but in counterpoint, not counterblast!
Equality is crucial, but I don’t much like the word. Set among Love, Freedom and Truth, it stands out as a latin sore thumb: the first three translate into Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and I wondered about Fairness in place of Equality. But a lot of people think of themselves as fair – not to mention free and loving – without much movement towards Equality.
Fraternity? I’m happy with, and committed to, the broad thrust of my brother's argument. Any criticism - and what else would you expect from an overtaken elder brother? - is aimed at adding to, not taking from his work. What's needed now is:
1. To get the information out to those who have most to gain for it: have-nots and have-lesses, the people who do not keep up with social sciences, read the Guardian or listen to Radio 4.
2. To broaden the campaign medium beyond statistical reasoning to a more emotive - and motivating - range of experience and image, art and literature, comedy and song.
3. To nail Capitalism as main driver of economic and social inequality – setting haves over have-nots, dependent on differentials and binding us all to its rack of Profit and Loss. (We'll never all be equal, but Capitalism feeds and feeds on inequality.)
In this blog of mine, I will relate Equality to those other LEFT words above, not so much in argument as through my own life, and occasional other reading (but I read so slowly!). Maybe I’m like the Moliere character who suddenly realises he’s speaking Grammar, but it seems to me that I’ve been wrestling with Equality – or rather Inequality – for much of my life. Both in my work and in my family, where class and income differences come home to roost. I am White Anglo-saxon Protestant Middle Class. Ada, and my first wife Kath, both come from working class Irish families. How far can a Wasp change his stripes – to red and green for instance?
And Humour - GSOH? Like Beauty, that didnt get a mention on the banner, but may also pop up, if only by mistake.
Tuesday 3 March 2009
just beginning
Nervous, nothing ready yet. How to start, and who on earth would want to read it? Maybe I should have included Beauty in the title. Now she'll pop up unexpected, with her nose out of joint because she wasnt invited earlier. Like the fairy in Sleeping Beauty... When we left our smallholding in the woods a year ago, I felt a bit like Sleeping Beauty in reverse, a wrinkly old babe in the wood. We'd decided to get out before we got too old or lazy to cut the brambles back and stop them growing over us.
Now we live in town, a little terrace house overlooking the sea, happy as pigs in clover.
Now we live in town, a little terrace house overlooking the sea, happy as pigs in clover.
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