Monday 29 December 2014

More than half my life

Thirty years ago, I was already an adult. I had lived away from home and thought I knew something about life. But I had no idea little I knew. I found out, with a crushing blow, a never fully-healed blow, on this day in 1984 when I heard that my mother had died in the night. Cancer - yes, weak - yes, but still full of strong hope and prayer and love. We had no idea, my sisters and I, how this could have happened so suddenly, how there could be so brutally little warning. Thoughts of the shortening of her suffering were scant consolation in that cruel winter. Now - on just such a day of icy sun - I have the leisure to look back and consider how the scars have grown over. But  - when I think of my children, and the smallness of our Christmas - they are still there. I can only try and copy the warmth of her affection, and value my survival.
Gabriel Bergonzi, 1938-1984. 

Wednesday 17 December 2014

THE END IN VIEW


The morning mirror shows a gaunt visage, a man twenty years older than I ever feared I’d be, whilst icy wind whistles past the unlit glass behind my head, and children fretfully clatter over their breakfasts below – Medicine taken? PE kits remembered? Lunchboxes clean? A hundred cares upon cares, and a snoring form dozes before her worries coalesce. Let her sleep.
And on this morning, the cold grips and death seems close enough to put out your hand and stroke.
And yet – thirty lifetimes back, when cold was unvitiated by gas and dark by electricity, when my age was enough to be really dead, and the kids would be at work (none of this endless learning), and you had one blanket or a bit of fur and the fire on your face would turn your back to ice – then a bit of straw was enough, and a stable a sufficient shelter and yet – and YET – the light was born.

And the light will be back. 

Saturday 11 October 2014

Our Only Castle


 

The Chiltern Hills, were, in my personal geography, a barrier to be travelled through, on journeys between family home and study/work.  I seldom gave the area much thought. Later, much later, a home in Metroland Bucks chose itself for us as a map decision, a logical calculation based on research rather than experience. And on the whole it’s been a worthwhile move and we have a great family life. But the human continuity here is surprisingly limited. I’ve read that in the years before my house was built, the land where it lies was known as the Mushroom Field. It was only built in the 1950s, and an old neighbour remembers seeing combine harvesters working where now houses stand.
But I was brought up in an 1830s house on the edge of a medieval town.
It’s remarkable how neglected the Chilterns was over hundreds of years. My personal geography was everyone’s. In his enjoyable book ‘If Britain had Fallen’ Norman Longmate postulates a 1940 Battle of the Chiltern Hills. But in fact, it never happened and the area stays in its pretty obscurity, well-known only through its railways. This lack of pre-railway history was something of a disappointment to me, having grown up in a county with five or six standing castles including some of the country’s most famous.
That’s why Berkhamsted Castle was such a refreshing discovery when I finally saw it close to, rather than as a blur from the train. Its ruined state is due to stone thieves rather than sieges. Of course here in the Chilterns we have no workable stone, only endless jagged flints, both difficult to build with, and ensuring years of uneconomic farming.

The castle, and town, defend a strategic valley where the road was later joined by the canal and then the railway – the latter obliterated part of the castle, though it fared far better than its contemporary up the line in Northampton, which was destroyed without trace to build the ‘Castle’ station.
This is a scrap of medieval stone, water and earth, very beautiful, and surprisingly quiet, unless there are children running and climbing.

It’s also a lovely link to one of my favourite novelists. Early in The Human Factor, Graham Greene’s hero Maurice Castle wonders if his surname links him back to one of the medieval masons who worked in stone there in Berkamsted.
The castle English Heritage property but not an expensive one – in fact it’s free. There are no ‘facilities’ apart from the Castle itself and some simple display boards. Parking is difficult because of the draw of the railway station.

But then again, this is not a touristy area. Is it?

Tuesday 7 October 2014

Scenes in Pubs

'You love putting scenes in pubs' said my aunt Bernadine in one of our last conversations, one when she would have said, kindly, we were speaking author to author.
A quiet pub, busy, not too full, is a consulting room, exhibition gallery, human zoo. You sit quite comfortably with a drink that is refreshing rather than strong, and observe the scene around you, watching, joining (and overhearing) the banter, the illicit contacts, the phatic arguments, the endless competitive verities and massaged memories that make up the stories that fill the air.
There is a golden moment, maybe during the third round of drinks, when guards are down yet reactions are still sharp enough for conversation to flow with accurate listening as well as poetic speech.



Later of course, there is the inevitable, enjoyable slide. Poetry and sometimes song take over, then all becomes a little too subjective, solipsistic and self-parodying. Though there is continuing fascination in observing, joining, the endless range of effects the same number of pints can have on different people sitting around the same table.
Of course it's all very expensive and can be ruined by the intrusion of music or food (both necessities of life, of course, but not necessities of pub life). It can still, though, be bloody brilliant. Both in life and in writing.
 

Sunday 14 September 2014

Not just 'reassuringly' expensive

Reassuringly is a clever word to use for a product that is knowingly expensive. Stella Artois no longer markets itself under that label, but lots of other people do. Thames Valley Farmers Markets is a company, or franchise, that seems to encourage its vendors  to ramp up prices to sometimes eye-watering levels, and for products that are not so very different from the better supermarket lines. But sometimes you do get something really unique, something genuinely worth double the price. Like


 this cheese. Two years old, a bit crumbly but incredibly powerful. The market's monthly visit to my village is the only time you can get cheese with your ploughmans that tastes stronger than your pickled onions.  It makes 'Seriously Strong Cheddar' taste absolutely mild. There's a kind of noble rot going underneath all the other tastes. Great if you like that sort of thing.  And it's not *that* dear!
They don't normally misspell the label, either.

Monday 8 September 2014

Aaron Kosminski - ????

So someone is using DNA evidence to try and track the Ripper again. The work that Russell Edwards has done seems, from what I know so far, to be more convincing than Patricia Cornwell's efforts to nail Walter Sickert via DNA on an envelope flat. And, unlike her multi million dollar extravaganza, Edwards has proceeded with refreshing English amateurism - enlisting a scientist from John Moores University to work on the DNA 'during his spare time.' So good luck to him and his book. Of course we can ask lots of questions about  contamination of  Catherine Eddowes' scarf over the years, about DNA not being totally unique in fact, and about whether be semen and the blood can be definitely shown to have been deposited on the same night.
But leaving those questions aside, I am a little troubled by Edwards' reliance on Melville Macnaghten's notes. 'Kosminski, the insane Jew, Michael Ostrog, the Russian doctor, and Montague Druitt the sexually insane teacher', are three names that have been trotted out again and again over the years. If any of them were *really* the Ripper, would Macnaghten, only writing in 1894, simply have left their names in a secret notebook and done nothing about prosecuting them? This was only three years after the death of Frances Coles, after all - and who knows, really, whether or not Frances is canonical?
No.  I think these names were listed in an attempt to exonerate Thomas Cutbush. And as we can read in David Bullock's interesting little book, 'The Man who Would be Jack', Cutbush had to be exonerated as he was a close relative to a senior policeman.
Whether it was really Cutbush, whether it was someone else... No, I don't think the case is closed quite yet. 

Sunday 12 January 2014

Too good looking for their cars


Ian Fleming's outlook on life was unashamedly elitist. Towards the end of On Her Majesty Secret Service, James Bond sees a Maserati at a filling station and observes of the passengers 'It was too far away to see if they were good looking enough for the car, but the silhouette of the woman wasn't promising.' He is proved right, tragically, when they turn out to be Blofeld and the hideous Irma Bunt.

The opposite applies to some people and some cars.
Andy Thompson's Cars of Eastern Europe (Haynes 2011) tells a fascinating story of how political doctrine, and the lack of a raft of small versatile component makers, sidetracked development for fifty years. East Germany's  Wartburg and Trabant  were lumbered with two stroke power plants  long after sumpless engines had been abandoned elsewhere. The Czechs stuck with tail-heavy rear engined layouts, including the extraordinary air cooled V8 in the Tatra (a more powerful engine than the water cooled V8 in our contemporary Rover).



The poor Poles had to squeeze whole families into Fiat 126s, rear engined and agonisingly tiny. Twenty years ago I drove one of these across much of Poland and I remember well its slowness and the discomfort of the offset pedals. However there was something perversely fun about it. My daily drive today is its natural successor, the Fiat Panda (made in the same Polish factory.)

And yet the people who drove these cars are shown here to be glamorous and extremely good-looking. Much more promising than their cars, in fact.
Stylish attractive and gallant people rising above ugly settings - that's the romance of Eastern Europe.