SPARTACUS, AGAIN…
Watched bits of Bolshoi Spartacus on TV Friday night, because I remembered being moved by final scene nearly 50 years ago. I saw the same company do it, in a very similar production in Cairo. I was teaching in a government school, on a year out from Oxford, at a time when the Soviet Union was courting Nasser’s Egypt. Most people in Cairo were not that keen on Russian ballet, and nor was I. But I’d heard of Ulanova and now Plissetskaya, and tickets were cheap enough for me to risk it.
Seeing it again, I’d forgotten how formulaic it was, this Spartacus, with its alternating solos and choruses, virile slaves and camp legionaries, sincere young lovers and cynical coquetry. But the Cuban lead dancer believed in what he was doing, and at the end – after missing most of the battle scenes for Have I got News for You – I was moved again by the final set piece.
Spartacus dead, mourned by his lover and the remnants of his army. Earlier his body has been hoisted aloft, like a dead animal, on the points of Roman spears. Now he is lifted gently by his followers, raised slowly on a human pyre of upstretched arms. The light picks up the whiteness of the arms and fingers that almost hide the body they support. From behind, there rises the body of the bereft woman, vertical, eyes and arms raised in supplication, then folding forward over the body, head down, dark hair like a waterfall onto the bearers’ hands and arms…
Except that this production was not quite as I remembered it. The curtains closed while the woman was still reaching up with a halo of round shield behind her. I prefer to remember it as it was... Isn't memory always as it was?
Now I realise that this is one of several related images I bear in mind and recall from time to time. A couple come from other people’s art, a couple from my own life and this is the first time I’ve made the link between them all.
In the first London production of West Side Story there was a dance sequence marking the death of the young lovers, and what might have been their meeting again. The two bodies rise, as if flying in a dream, lifted, one from each side out of the dark wings. Their paths, orbits, cross, through a pool of light high above the middle of the stage and sink back into darkness. A rainbow drained of its colour and promise, no sweet sorrow, bottomless despair.
Antonioni, in Red Desert, I think, has a young woman driving through the desert inb an old car, hearing the radio report of her lover’s death as the police close in on a plane he’s hijacked then returned to base. Act gratuit… She stops the car by the road, switches the engine off and stands, back to camera, in silence at the side of the road. Beyond her is a scrubby bush, its tangled branches in contrast to the long, smooth hair that hangs down her back. She stands for what seems a long time, then her hair, and the wiry bush begin to move, stirred by a sudden breath of wind.
Only now it occurs to me that these images have engraved themselves on my mind in tribute to an actual memory. I remember, or have reinvented, the sight and sound of my mother as she heard the news of Tony’s, her younger brother’s, death not long before the end of the war. He, I learned later, was killed by a booby trap as the Germans retreated from the Ardennes. We were back in London, in the basement of our house, when she got the news on the phone, from her mother perhaps. All I remember is the wail or groan my mother made, unlike any sound I’d heard from her, and the way she slumped against the wall. It must have been a wall-mounted phone. If I’m not imagining it, she crumpled, slid down into the angle of wall and floor.
My mother had thick, dark hair and her name was Mary. Now I wonder if religious pictures – all those images of Virgin Mary and her crucified son – helped link that early experience of mine, and hers, to later images of stage and film. Images fresh images beget, or hook up like trucks on a train. We seem to need those images, to know what it is we might be feeling or have felt. The images can be received, or made up in our own heads, by mistake, as it were, in dreams or on purpose in words or paint or dance. And music? I’m never sure how that works, carrying so much feeling with no image to speak of…
I was going to say we may need some image between ourselves and a reality we cannot quite face head-on, and some mirror to catch and hold it in. Perseus was given a bright shield, looking into that he could see enough of the head with the snaky locks, to cut it off before it turned him to stone. Perhaps it’s not just monsters we need to contain in images, but things, people, we may have loved.
Not just mothers, or lovers snatched by death. I loved Beatrice, but we parted alive and in good health. She died very young, but it was nearly 20 years after we split up that I heard about that. I had written to her c/o her mother, in the hope we might meet. Not to pick up where we left off, but lay the ghosts of eternal youth, each other all those years ago. Malheureusement, Beatrice est decedee. Her mother's letter shocked me, although she wrote affectionately and enclosed pictures of her daughter's two teenage children. I was shocked not only that Beatrice was dead, but that she'd been dead for four years with me imagining her alive, since just before Will was born. Besides, grief was new to me. I remember walking out of our house in Swindon, going nowhere in particular, and seeing a woman with a child in a pushchair coming towards me. They looked nice, and I was half ashamed to find myself noticing that. Half a minute later, when they were ten yards away from me that I realised that the woman was Ada and the boy in the pushchair Will.
It wasn't long before I remember the story of the other Mary, Magdalen, walking desolate in the garden and mistaking the risen Jesus for a gardener. Religious images, romantic images, have a lot to answer for. What would we do without them?
Monday, 27 April 2009
Wednesday, 15 April 2009
‘Wots left?’ Beginning with Love...
LEFT = Love, Equality, Freedom, Truth and Love comes first. So what might it mean?
A feeling for somebody or something. Need or desire for others, pleasure in their company. Seeking what’s best in and for them. Kinship and communion in a world we share. Love thy neighbour as thyself, do as you would be done by etc/
BUT what if we DON’T love ourselves, or cant count on others responding as we would?
Virtuous and vicious circles: given love, we learn to love; unloved, we don’t… Kinship, familiarity, goes with closeness, mutual understanding and sharing – looking after each other as we look after ourselves. Abused, we're inclined to abuse, but sometimes, mercifully, dont (a restorative mutation?)
Love’s not just a feeling, but a fact of life, a capacity built in. We are born dependent, survive only when cared for. Caring is at once physical and emotional. What we get becomes us, the feeling and responses along with the weight we gain from our mother’s milk.
From mothers and sons to sons and lovers, dependency mutualised. And daughters? More complicated perhaps... As sons become fathers and daughters mothers, we become each other as we become ourselves.*
We’re shaped by what's done to us and what we do. We understand each other – and the world - through our interactions. We’re formed, transformed, imprinted as we engage, reach out, take hold and register. Our hand takes the shape of what it can grasp and bears it to mind.
What we perceive, the image we recall, is not neutral or coincidental: we see what we’re looking for, what strikes or is shown to us. Five senses, plus one equals six. Seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching plus the stirrings inside ourselves - 'heart' or 'gut' feelings, an amorphous sixth sense, no less physical than the rest.
Infants depend on mothers and fathers, adults on a wider material world. As we grow up, we can no longer be rely on food and warmth being brought to us. But with our growing abilities, and a bit of luck, we can find more or less what we need. The world as we know it, need it and love it, is at once physical and human, economic and social and…
And what? Good? Beautiful? Loveable? I can neither dismiss those words, or know what to make of them, unless it’s a tautology – circular, with one leading to the other and back.
We don’t just see the world for ourselves, or as it is, but through the images and language of others. Some images are held up, over our heads as it were, for special reverence. Meanwhile we learn from each other and get to know each other as we make our living together. Our world-view, skills and circumstances, like our languages and landscapes, towns and villages, are common property.
Now we begin to realise that our world, like our parents, is not immortal. As we grow stronger, and our world in some ways weakaer, it too depends on us.... What am I saying? My parents are already dead, I am the endangered one! Which doesn't matter if people and places I love live on. My now, their then, if not quite interchangeable.
By nature and nurture, we have more in common than we have to set us apart. BUT that doesn’t make us identical. In our genes and upbringing, history and circumstances we are also, inevitably, different. Often we are encouraged to hide or ignore this difference – sometimes to exaggerate its importance, in ourselves or others. If familiarity breeds contempt, this is usually because we take each other, or the world, for granted, fail to register difference and change.
CONTRADICTION: I am me and you are you, a tree is a tree and a forest a forest. Although in fact none is the same, from one to another, or moment to moment, life is not long enough to mark the differences. We’re bound to label, class, prejudge, assume. We take what is to be as what has been, for granted...'til Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane.’ The unmoveable moves, or the worm turns, whatever that may mean, and we’re taken by surprise. For better or worse.
True love, like survival, treads a narrow and uncertain line between known and unknown, an act of faith or tentative presumption, between what we most fear and desire. Like driving at night, when what looks like a road ahead, a familiar pattern of light, could be almost anything.
Idolatry, Romantic love, and Hate. In romantic love, we idealise, imagine an other from afar. We may prefer a ready image to what we cannot, or will not face or handle in the flesh. Sometimes we carve up the world itself between imaginary Heaven and Hell, a higher Spirit and a load of material mechanics. Then, somewhere between these higher and lower orders, the baby is lost with the bathwater. As God is Good, Eveil - the devil as lived - becomes possesses some hapless neighbour. We tar and feather a class or race as Monsters, Beasts – anything to disguise the likeness to ourselves.
And sex? How could I have got so far without it? Sex is central to love, where two become one, then three: as single cells meet, combine and multiply to become someone else. But sex may also be at odds with love in its other forms. Sex tends to be exclusive, while Love - as in Christian love - is open to all. That's a contradiction I've tried and failed to solve at least once in my life.
*QUESTION ARISING:
Women can bear and feed babies, men cannot. Where does that leave our aspirations to freedom and equality? For all the gender overlaps and cross-overs, men and women are different. And the same may go for races!) The point is not to deny the statistical evidence, the norms of male and female body and mind, but to see that those norms dont confine or subordinate un-necessarily. Contrary to the scripture, we are not created free and equal. Some are bigger, stronger, cleverer than others, just as some are gentler, more patient or imaginative (it's not either/or, the combinations and permutations are infinite!) The point is to recognise that no statistical generalisation need apply to any individual: the fact that most men are more like this, most women more like that, must not be allowed to prevent any man or woman from breaking free, diverging, combining and crossing imaginary lines. Nor must a generalised difference be translated into assumptions of superiority and inferiority: we may say, in the most general terms, that one sex or other may be better at this or that, in this or that setting; but not that one set of abilities or qualities outranks another over all. With the future uncertain, we cant know which of all those abilities and qualities we will most need. We may need all our options to survive, recognised, understood and freely available between us.
It may not even be a question of yours or mine: the dividing lines may run across us, not between us. The bit of my mind that registers arm or leg, or fear or pleasure may register and assimilate a movement observed before it registers it as yours or mine. Empathy doesnt begin with the heady business of Me imagining I'm You. It's a reflex rooted in the nature of perception and physiology. If I see a footballer kicked in the balls, my body reacts before I know it. Even men have phantom pregnancies.
We're not created free and equal, but the freer and more equal the better - recognising and drawing on all we've got.
Friday, 3 April 2009
From waft to waft
Images that yet fresh images beget, if only smells. This time the leap is from gorse, coconut, to orange, from South Wales to Western Algeria. It's 1962, soon after the Algerian independence war, and I'm driving through the night from Tlemcen, near the Moroccan border, to Algiers. We've been told to get someone there by tomorrow. It's a long drive, after work, and I'm on a threadbare high, between coffee and exhaustion. There's nothing else on the road, economy flat and people still afraid, the line blurred between the freedom fight and banditry, the struggle to survive. I dont feel afraid, unless it's the fear of a rabbit, mesmerised by the beam of my own headlights and compelled along the long straight road ahead.
A bit of open window helps me keep awake, and suddenly I feel myself relax.
Orange blossom, the scent from unseen orange groves is everywhere. I can feel the trees nearby in the darkness and the same sweet air running through them, the car, my lungs and heart, whatever that may mean. On the wings of a smell, all's well.
In a few months the oranges will be ripe, then overripe, in piles beside the road. The colons have gone, and with them the markets that would have taken them, turned them into money, solid food not Midas oranges.
Images that yet fresh images beget, if only smells. This time the leap is from gorse, coconut, to orange, from South Wales to Western Algeria. It's 1962, soon after the Algerian independence war, and I'm driving through the night from Tlemcen, near the Moroccan border, to Algiers. We've been told to get someone there by tomorrow. It's a long drive, after work, and I'm on a threadbare high, between coffee and exhaustion. There's nothing else on the road, economy flat and people still afraid, the line blurred between the freedom fight and banditry, the struggle to survive. I dont feel afraid, unless it's the fear of a rabbit, mesmerised by the beam of my own headlights and compelled along the long straight road ahead.
A bit of open window helps me keep awake, and suddenly I feel myself relax.
Orange blossom, the scent from unseen orange groves is everywhere. I can feel the trees nearby in the darkness and the same sweet air running through them, the car, my lungs and heart, whatever that may mean. On the wings of a smell, all's well.
In a few months the oranges will be ripe, then overripe, in piles beside the road. The colons have gone, and with them the markets that would have taken them, turned them into money, solid food not Midas oranges.
HINDSIGHT
You should be reading this from the bottom up, because the poem below follows from the shooting reference in my last piece. It also links to a poetry-reading we went to in Swansea the other night, with a former US soldier Brian Turner reading from his book Here Bullet. One of his poems (In the Leupold scope) sees life in Iraq through the site of a gun and reminds me of mine from Bethlehem. It's addressed to an Israeli conscript. I call it Just Looking, but its power, if any, lies in the possibility of not just looking. In a village near Nablus two years earlier I was introduced to a little girl with a bandage round her head. Her scalp had been grazed by a bullet from an Israeli settlement high on the hill above. The bullet could not have come her way by chance. Not a ricochet, or crossfire: there had been no battle going on. I photographed the girl where she had been standing, in the back yard of her family home. Now it seemed like a game, but behind her I could also see the outline of settlement buildings atop the ridge. Someone up there must have found her in his sight, and pulled the trigger. As a child with an air rifle, I was shocked when I hit a robin perched high on a tree. I must have been about 15, old enough to know better, but the robin had seemed so small and far away, the odds against hitting it so high.
JUST LOOKING
My flat in Bethlehem looked down on a curious religious site called Rachel's Tomb. A small domed building overlooking a Muslim cemetery has been squared up and fortified as a Jewish pilgrimage venue. From my balcony I can watch the changing of the guard and soldiers taking up positions as coaches full of pilgrims pull up in the dust. One soldier covers the main road, another the smaller road that leads down past the cemetery to the Aida refugee camp. Sometime boys throw stones and the soldiers shoot teargas and soundgrenades to drive them off. On this occasion, a boy's head appears above the cemetery wall and a soldier raises his gun.
Just looking, you say,
And I,
In hindsight
Reply:
A cat
May look at
A queen
But not down the scope
Of an M16...
Soldier, reflect
As you watch
The boy
Behind the graveyard wall
Watch you.
Your gunsight sees
What he cannot.
His features,
Shaving mirror sharp,
So much
Like yours.
Eye for eye?
If looks could kill...
Your other self
He knows
A bullet
From a stone.
You should be reading this from the bottom up, because the poem below follows from the shooting reference in my last piece. It also links to a poetry-reading we went to in Swansea the other night, with a former US soldier Brian Turner reading from his book Here Bullet. One of his poems (In the Leupold scope) sees life in Iraq through the site of a gun and reminds me of mine from Bethlehem. It's addressed to an Israeli conscript. I call it Just Looking, but its power, if any, lies in the possibility of not just looking. In a village near Nablus two years earlier I was introduced to a little girl with a bandage round her head. Her scalp had been grazed by a bullet from an Israeli settlement high on the hill above. The bullet could not have come her way by chance. Not a ricochet, or crossfire: there had been no battle going on. I photographed the girl where she had been standing, in the back yard of her family home. Now it seemed like a game, but behind her I could also see the outline of settlement buildings atop the ridge. Someone up there must have found her in his sight, and pulled the trigger. As a child with an air rifle, I was shocked when I hit a robin perched high on a tree. I must have been about 15, old enough to know better, but the robin had seemed so small and far away, the odds against hitting it so high.
JUST LOOKING
My flat in Bethlehem looked down on a curious religious site called Rachel's Tomb. A small domed building overlooking a Muslim cemetery has been squared up and fortified as a Jewish pilgrimage venue. From my balcony I can watch the changing of the guard and soldiers taking up positions as coaches full of pilgrims pull up in the dust. One soldier covers the main road, another the smaller road that leads down past the cemetery to the Aida refugee camp. Sometime boys throw stones and the soldiers shoot teargas and soundgrenades to drive them off. On this occasion, a boy's head appears above the cemetery wall and a soldier raises his gun.
Just looking, you say,
And I,
In hindsight
Reply:
A cat
May look at
A queen
But not down the scope
Of an M16...
Soldier, reflect
As you watch
The boy
Behind the graveyard wall
Watch you.
Your gunsight sees
What he cannot.
His features,
Shaving mirror sharp,
So much
Like yours.
Eye for eye?
If looks could kill...
Your other self
He knows
A bullet
From a stone.
Monday, 30 March 2009
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.’
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.’
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.
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