October 2014 – That's How The Light Gets In (2024)

Do the wallsof a derelict building hold the memories of those who once inhabited its rooms? Recently I visited the old Merseyside TradeUnion Communityand UnemployedResource Centre building at the top ofHardman Street which has been opened up for a Biennial exhibition. I wasn’t there for the art (least said about it the better) but because the building holds memories of mine, and I wanted to see inside before it is turned into a swanky hotel. Continue reading “The scandalous decay of a brilliant representation of Liverpool’s radicalpast” →

Martin Rowson in today’s Guardian

A few days ago I posted a piece about the photo of desperate migrants perched on top ofthe borderfence that surroundstheSpanish enclave of Melilla on the north African coast. Now we learn that the British government has supported, and the EU justice and home affairs council hasadopted a policy of leavingmigrants todrown.

For the past year the Italian navy, with EU financial and logistical support, has operated a search-and-rescue operation called Mare Nostrumfor migrants in danger of drowning in the Mediterranean which has saved the lives of an estimated 150,000 refugees.It is to be replaced with a much more limited EU ‘border protection’ operation codenamed Triton which will not conduct search-and-rescue missions. The justification given by both the UK government and the EUfor this inhumane decision isthat Mare Nostrum exercised a‘pulling factor’, encouraging economic migrants to set sail for Europe.

Amnesty International’s UK director, Kate Allen, said today that history would judge thedecision as unforgivable:

This is a very dark day for the moral standing of the UK. When the hour came, the UK turned its back on despairing people and left them to drown.The vague prospect of rescue has never been the incentive. War, poverty and persecution are what make desperate people take terrible risks.

Migrants are impelled bya potent combination of desperation and aspiration, global inequalities in work and freedom, and the insecurity created bywar and persecutionacross north Africa and the Middle East. The poor and oppressed will alwaysmove in search of work and freedom in aworld sounequal.

Refugee boat off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa

This morning’s Guardian editorialpulls no punches:

The British government’s refusal to support search and rescue missions to save refugees in the Mediterranean is an outrageous and immoral act. It suggests a government so alarmed by Ukip that it has lost all sense of proportion. The Italian-funded Mare Nostrum exercise, mobilised after 300 refugees drowned off Lampedusa a year ago, has saved thousands of lives. […] What a grotesque betrayal of the founding principles of the EU, an organisation built on the promise of peace, prosperity and asylum for the desperate. What an indictment of timid politicians.

On the letters page, the artist Anish Kapoor asks, ‘Have we lost our sense of common humanity? Are we to isolate ourselves to such an extent that we are unable or unwilling to reach out to our fellow human beings? These people find themselves in such dire difficulties that they see no choice but to take to the high seas and risk their lives in vessels that are woefully inadequate. Let us not forget that our government acts in our name and that each of us is implicated in this act of barbaric selfishness.’

Yesterday Nicholas Winton, theBritish man who saved 669 Jewish children from the Nazi concentration camps by arranging trains to take the children out of occupied Czechoslovakia to befosteredin Britain, was awarded the Czech Republic’s highest state honour.How does the morality of thedecision to end support for Mare Nostrum differ from that of European countries that turned their backs on the Jews in 1939? That was the year when WH Auden wrote‘Refugee Blues’, from which I’ve taken these extracts:

Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

[…]

The counsul banged the table and said,
‘If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead’:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

[…]

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

As Alex Andreou observes in ‘Random acts of kindness can make the world a better place‘this is all about ‘lack of kindness and meanness of spirit’.He continues:

There are lines which, if crossed, make us immoral as a country. This is one of them, especially considering our involvement in the conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa which fuel the surge in refugees. It leaves our allies with a choice to either make up the shortfall or let people drown in their waters. People – men, women and children – not migrants or refugees; not numbers. Families like mine and yours, fleeing in precisely the same way we would if we lived in a war zone.

We bewail the loss of our values, whether we call them civilised, British, western or Christian. We turn to a minority of migrants and blame them for ostensibly diluting them. But it is simply not true. The reason we are losing our values is that we are failing to nourish them, cherish them and hold on to them. It is a collective meanness of spirit.

The reason we are becoming less and less like the Britain we recognise is not the presence of Polish plumbers; it is the putting up of spikes to shoo away the homeless instead of offering them a cup of tea. The reason this is no longer a civilised country is not the presence of a smattering of mosques; it is the decision to let people drown in the sea to save a measly amount which will not make even the smallest dent in our budget. The reason we are turning uncivilised, un-British, unchristian, un-western – however you define it – is the lack of tangible kindness. We are simply turning into the worst version of ourselves.

Rocella near Riace abandoned sailing ship Kurds ashore 1999

In December last year I wrote about Riace,a poor village in Calabria that has welcomed migrants with open arms. For more than a decade, since two hundred Kurds scrambled ashore from their sinking boat on the nearby coas,t the villagers have opened their doors to migrants in a dramatic reversal of usual attitudes towards immigrants. The left-wing mayor encouraged the Kurds to settle in his village replacing the people who had left and reversing his village’s decline. Since then, more ‘people who come from the sea’, as locals put it, have been encouraged to settle in the village.

Yesterday on the Today programme an Eritrean migrant,Daniel Habtey, who is now a British citizen,described his ‘horrendous’ journey to Italy on a tiny boat. Hefled Eritrea with his wife and family ten years ago because the regime persecuted Christians and nowlives and works as a Pastor in Huddersfield.

The dead from the Lampedusa tragedy

It’s barely a year since more than 300 African migrants drowned when their boat caught fire and sank offthe Italian island of Lampedusa. Delalorm Sesi Semabiaresponded to the disaster by writingthis poem:

We have laughed before
On the morning when we were born.
I was not there but they told me I laughed.
With careless glee, taking all the world in my gums.
And these ones
I heard them laugh
That early morning when the midwife brought them here
Telling tales of shot mamas and arrested papas
Certainly never to return.
I did not see them but I heard them laugh
Laugh at the world, laugh at all our world
Which would not laugh back.

Why do you ask us to laugh now
Here, at the brink of this water
Coming and going, calling us?
Why do you ask us to laugh
With a burnt village behind us
And drowned brothers before us,
On our way to Lampedusa?
What is humorous about paddling over the place
Where your brother’s carcass lies
Grinning up above at you
On your way to freedom,
And Lampedusa, death.
Wherein is the humour of overtaking your brother?

We sail away, our heads full of dreams
Dreams that come to us only by daylight
For where we stand,
We cannot sleep at night
And try as we do,
We have forgotten how to laugh.

Rhodri Meillir as Spike in Bright Pheonix

‘Why is it only ever one shoe?’

At the end ofthe week in which the new Everyman building won the Stirling Prize for new architecture my daughter treated me to a meal at The Quarter and a ticket to see Jeff Young’s ‘love letter to Liverpool’, Bright Pheonix at the Everyman.

Young’s play opens with Spike, a one-eyed, shambling drunk haranguing asharply-suited woman – a member of Liverpool’s new networked elite, no doubt – who is promoting a vision of business redevelopment for theshabby scene of dereliction that greets visitors to thecity when they emerge fromLime Street station. Soon we are inside the building that symbolizes Lime Street’s decay, the derelict Futurist, Liverpool’s first purpose-builtcinema, now a mouldering shell in which the only thing that thrives is buddleia.

Encamped in the derelict cinema, kind of Occupy style, are a motley group who were childhood friends in the 1980s, and the play alternates itsnarrative between the present day and the 1980s in order to developYoung’s theme of a regenerated Liverpoolturning its back on the magic and mythic city of the past. Lucas (played by Paul Duckworth returns twentyyears after leaving Liverpool and meets up with the survivors of the gang of kids who scrabbled and fantasised inthe dirt and decay of 1980s Liverpool. Like Lucas, writer Jeff Young hasspent his adult life leaving and returning to Liverpool, most recently coming backforCapital of Culture year, since when he’s stayed.

For the8-year-olds playing games of make believe by the Leeds-Liverpool canal there are dreamsof travel to distant places,re-enactments of scenes from warfilms seen after bunking intothe cinema, home-made planes and fishing for rubbish in the canal (‘Why is it only ever one shoe?’), kisses and fa*gs. They dream of flying, likethe wartime bomber pilots, or the old Standard firework that gives the play its title. One member of the gang in particular isflying-mad – Alan (calls himself ‘Icarus’, played by Carl Au with Meccano wings strapped to his back. He’ll come to a tragic end. The other members of the group, who call themselvesThe Awkward Bastards, are Alan’s sister, Lizzie, with whom Lucas falls in love, Stephen (Mark Rice Oxley) who at eight years is alreadyuncertain about his gender identity,andSpike, an imaginative and impulsive boy whose (literal) entanglement with Lucas has terrible consequences. Rhodri Meillir’s terrific, lurchingperformance as Spike overshadows everything else in the play, makingthe sensitive but illiterate child, and the damagedalcoholic he becomes, a compelling, sympathetic figure around whom all the other characters revolve.

Carl Au as Alan ‘Icarus’ Flynn in Bright Phoenix

Twenty yearslater, Lucas, the only member of the gang to leave the city, returns, and is far from being welcomed by the others. Gradually we learn of the impact that Lucas has had on the lives of the others, includingaseries of tragic accidents that tore the groupapart. The survivors of the eighties fetch up in the derelict Futurist, where Lizzie (Penny Layden) is camped out, attempting tobring the cinemaback to life and revive the wild, rebel spirit of their childhood days.‘Do you live in magical places?’ she asks, a question that goes tothe core of Jeff Young’s visionin this play. Bright Phoenixhas been described asJeff Young’s love letter to his Liverpool, populated by the kind of people with whom he feels an emotional kinship, and set in a place for which he holds a genuine affection.In a recent interview, Young said:

My favourite people are people who live on the margins, in the shadows that might get overlooked, as you said, misfits, who are kind of forgotten. The play is about all these kinds of people. There are homeless characters in it, people who are rejected by the educational system. The characters of the play, when they were children, were really wild and rebellious. When we meet them as adults; we meet them three times: as kids, teenagers and grown-ups. When they are grown-ups, they’re still as wild and rebellious as when they were kids. They still don’t fit in, they still don’t belong. There’s a sense about it that they don’t want to. They deliberately live outside the system. It’s a celebration of that spirit, a celebration of that wild, anarchic spirit. They are non-conformist, they’re anti-establishment, and quite happy to cause trouble!

In the present-day scenes the old Futurist gradually comes to be populated by a motley crew of anarchic rebels. There’s Spike, learning to read and write, spray-painting poetry on the walls; Stephen (Mark Rice Oxley)is a cross-dressing torch singerwhoobserves of regenerated Liverpool: ‘We’ve got cafes. Cafes with chairs outside. You don’t get that in Paris’; and wandering in and out isCathy Tyson in an understated role as abag lady, Elsie, who remembers when she was beautiful. She has one great song in the production.

These scenes depend critically on staging that convinces the audience that, amidst the dereliction, there is magic in the air, but it has to be saidthat fewof the sequences really take flight. It ought to work, as Ovid ‘s poetry is graffitied on the walls, as gorgeously-dressedStephen sings swooningtorch songs from the balcony, and Lizzie’s Free Radio broadcasts rebellionacrossLiverpool ‘s airwaves.

But it never really comes together. The production feels sluggish,stuttering from one scene to the next and between the past and the present. The occupied Futurist seems under-occupied on stage: too few people, too many halting pauses between scenes. The music is good: compositions byMartin Heslop are playedwith panacheby flautist and singer Laura J Martin and multi-instrumentalist Vidar Norheim (who was, the Everyman notes, voted Norway’s most promising songwriter in 2011).

Jeff Young

In the aforementionedinterview, Jeff Young claimedthat Bright Pheonix was a metaphor:

It’s a metaphor for believing in certain values and those values are cultural and about community and that collective spirit. That kind of place is about bringing people together and the importance of the crowd, instead of living in isolation. What makes places like that really powerful is not just the films that are being shown on the screen. It’s the fact that there are 50 or 100 people collectively gathered in there and that matters. The energy of the people together in that room.

The trouble with this production was that the energy and collective spirit to whichYoung refers just didn’tcome across. When the police move in to close down the occupation, you don’t feel any sense of loss. Young has said (in a recent post on Seven Streets) that he wantspeople to look afresh at their city, and to re-connect with places that form part of his Liverpool mythology: ‘I want people to explore those places and spaces again. To consider what public space is – what is it and how should it be used.’

Dave Sinclair, Bibby’s shortly before closure

There’s certainly a debate to be had about the way the city has changed in the last decade or so – whether it is for the better,how much has really changed, and whether some things have been lost. But, in my view, Bright Phoenix did notcontribute very much to that debate. That Liverpool has changed since the 1980s is indisputable. Coincidentally, in News From Nowhere this week I came across a book of brilliant photographs of the city in that decade taken by Dave Sinclair, whowas working as the official photographer for the Militant newspaper in the city at the time. Hisbook, Liverpool in the 1980s, contains memory-jolting images ofthe people, streets, derelict factories, docks and protests that gave Liverpool a very different image nationally in those days.

Dave Sinclair, Tate & Lyles, 1980s

In a preface, Sinclair tells how, after leaving Alsop Comprehensive in 1976 half-way through his A-levels, he webnt to workat Kwiksave on County Road, stacking shelves. After three years he went to art college where he learned to draw, but most importantly became interested in photography, initially as a form of note-taking for his drawings. He found inspitation, too, in books:

Liverpool Central Library had a fantastic collection of photography books, and I’d spend many hours after college poring over photographs. Cartier Bresson was there, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, William Klein, Eugene Smith and many Europeans, too, including Don McCullin. Loads of brilliant books taking up some serious shelf space.

I wish those who now advocate library closures could read that. Sinclair became especially interested in Liverpool’s urban landscape while studying. In 1983, he went to Newport in South Wales to study photography and by the beginning of the Miners’ Strike in March 1984 he was spending a lot of time in the Welsh Valleys ‘which was going through something very similar to Liverpool economically, albeit with more hills and space’. Although his photographs of striking miners were being published in socialist newspapers,the college lecturers didn’t regard them as art. So he left, and was soon working for the Militant newspaper, travelling the country documenting struggles and strikes. But he was ciontinually drawn back to his home town where Militant councillors had taken over the leadership of the Labour council, and were coming into conflict not only with Margaret Thatcher’s government, but also with the Labour party leadership for refusing to set a budget. The book contains 160 superb photostaken during the hours thatSinclair spent walking around Liverpool, exploring the landscape of dereliction, but gaining increasing confidence in capturing people.

Dave Sinclair, Chucking rock in Leeds Liverpool Canal ’82

In the days before different attitudes toward photographing children in the street, many of the photographs feature children like the young ganginBright Phoenix – theoneabove could almost be a scene from the play.

Dave Sinclair went onto work as the official photographer for Tower Hamlets council in London. When he went part-time in 2007 he had the opportunity to cataloguehisarchive, which he placed on the photo-sharing site, Flickr. The photos in the book have been selected from his Flickr photostream.

Dave Sinclair, Everton drunks, 1980s

Liverpool has changed – our walk from my favourite restaurant tothe Everyman reflected this fact in microcosm: the bustling restaurants (with chairs outside!), LiPa, the street art, the Philharmonic Hall renovation, the huge student apartment block going up on the corner of Hardman Street, and the new Everyman itself. There’s a debate, of course, about how much this is for the better – there may be plenty of new jobs in the city centre in those restaurants, cafes and hotels that cater for the tourists who now flock to the city and the thousands who pour forth from the cruise liners that dock here weekly. Down river dredging works have started for theLiverpool2 superport which willallow access for post-Panamax size container ships, reversing Liverpool’s long decline as a port.

Surprisingly, much of Liverpool’s renaissance – symbolized by Capital of Culture year – has held up, despite the banking crash that started that same year. The rub is that in this new economy, many of the jobs in services and tourism are low-paid, part-time or on zero-hours contracts. But what is mostly taking the shine off the city’s renaissance is the government’s policy ofausterity and public spending cuts.

Meanwhile – does anyone want to buy an iconic but derelict cinema on Liverpool’s most mythical street?

The Futurist in 1954

Inside the Futurist today

The Futurist opened on 16th September 1912 as the Lime Street Picture House, an upmarket city centre cinema. Until its closure in 1982, the Futurist was considered to be one of the most luxurious cinemas on the circuit, originally housing a full orchestra to accompany silent films and a prestigious first floor café, with a foyer lined with Sicilian marble. It was the first in the city to show wide screen Cinemascope films. Witha Georgian-style façade and a French Renaissance interior, the auditorium was designed to have the effect of a live theatre with rich architectural detailing andplaster mouldings. Now the interior isprobably unsalvageable. Whether the façade can be preserved, and Lime Street rejuvenated is another matter. Perhaps we need some artistic and determined young people to occupy it?

And does a building hold the memories of those who have spent time within its walls? Maybe so. I certainly have memories of seeing films at the Futurist in the seventies. But I have even stronger memories of times spent inside another of Liverpool’s iconic buildings, also now derelict, in the 1980s – a building I revisited last week. More in the next post.

Alex Cox gets into the Futurist

See also

• Liverpool, Bright Phoenix: a tour by Jeff Young: Seven Streets
• Jeff Young’s notebooks: his personal blog
• Liverpool’s Everyman theatre wins Stirling prize: Guardian
• How buildings learn: Evolving The Ev: A Sense of Place blog
• Great Expectations:A Sense of Place blog on the Stirling win
• The Futurist Cinema 1912 – 1982: aresource to promote & Inspire the restoration of Liverpool’s first purpose built cinema.
• Dave Sinclair’s photostream on Flickr

Antony Sher as Falstaff

Youth and age, the passing of time, are among the themes in explored by Shakespeare inHenry IV parts 1 and 2, and watching Gregory Doran’s production for the RSC at the Lowry last week the decades slidaway and I was a youth again, turning the pages of the play we studied forA-level, never imagining I could ever be as old as Falstaff or Justice Shallow.

Now freed from the chains of toil at desk or workbench, we canjoin the silver-haired throngs and spend anafternoon watching Part 1, and then see Part 2 in the evening. Seeing the plays back to back like this showed how much Shakespeare was on a roll: having kicked off hisseries aboutthe rise of the House of Lancaster withRichard II in 1595, a year or so later,inHenry IV Part 1, he produced one of his most popular plays, introducing comic characters whor*appeared in the equally successful sequels that followed in quick succession –Henry IV, Part 2 (1598) and Henry V (1599).

Bothof the Henry IV plays mix serious history and politics with riotouscomedy in a way that has probably never been done so seamlessly and so successfully. In fact, for most of us what lingers after seeing these plays isthe memory of the comedy scenes – and of the character of Falstaff in particular.Ever since their first performance, it has been the boisterous rowdiness of the tavern scenes presided over by that ‘ squire of the night’, that ‘sweet creature of bombast’ Falstaff that havewon the hearts of audiences.

In this production Falstaff is played by Antony Sher – not a man of great stature – who is bulked up and padded out in a fat suit and enormous wig of white flowing locks. Sher’s movements are not onlythose of a fat man (there’s an hilariousmoment on the battlefield when, legs waving in the air like a beetle, he struggles to get off his back), but also those of a gouty, arthritic old man. Sher’s Falstaff enunciates his wordswith an educatedprecision and a throatiness thatoften sounded as if he was gargling. Sher delivers Falstaff’s lines in a manner that eliminatesany sense thatthe fat man is at alllovable. Quite the opposite: Sher’s performance makes it abundantly clear that he is a schemer and a rapacious deceiver, every riposteand criticism answered with a sharp and deliberativewiliness. Not so ‘fat-witted’, then, but the ‘villainous abominable misleader of youth’ and ‘old white-bearded Satan’ that Prince Henry calls him. This means that any sympathy you might feel for Falstaff when he deliversthis speech is eliminated:

But to say I know more harm in him than in myself,
were to say more than I know. That he is old, the
more the pity, his white hairs do witness it; but
that he is, saving your reverence, a whor*master,
that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar be a fault,
God help the wicked! if to be old and merry be a
sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if
to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine
are to be loved. No, my good lord; banish Peto,
banish Bardolph, banish Poins: but for sweet Jack
Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff,
valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant,
being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him
thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s
company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.

Falstaff isalso quite clearly an alcoholic. While there’s obviously a great deal of sack quaffed in Shakespeare’s text, Antony Sher gives us aFalstaff whose hand shakes with delirium tremensas hepours yet another glass. One of the highlights of Sher’s performance is his delivery of Falstaff’s celebration of good sherry, and assertion that if he had sonsthe first humane principlehewould teach them should be ‘to forswear thinpotations and to addict themselves to sack’:

A good sherris sack hath a two-fold
operation in it. It ascends me into the brain;
dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy
vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive,
quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and
delectable shapes, which, delivered o’er to the
voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes
excellent wit. The second property of your
excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood;
which, before cold and settled, left the liver
white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity
and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes
it course from the inwards to the parts extreme:
it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives
warning to all the rest of this little kingdom,
man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and
inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain,
the heart, who, great and puffed up with this
retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour
comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is
nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and
learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till
sack commences it and sets it in act and use.
Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for
the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his
father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land,
manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent
endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile
sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If
I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I
would teach them should be, to forswear thin
potations and to addict themselves to sack.

As always, the Falstaff scenes are great entertainment. But I also particularly enjoyed the long scene in Part Twobetween Silence and Justice Shallow (a soulful Oliver Ford Davies) in which they reminisceabout the days that used to be.Shallow is wonderfully eloquent about the loss of youthand the rewards of friendship:

By the mass, I was called any thing; and I would
have done any thing indeed too, and roundly too.
There was I, and little John Doit of Staffordshire,
and black George Barnes, and Francis Pickbone, and
Will Squele, a Cotswold man; you had not four such
swinge-bucklers in all the inns o’ court again: and
I may say to you, we knew where the bona-robas were
and had the best of them all at commandment.

(‘Bona-robas’, by the way, were prostitutes.) At times I thought their exchanges sounded almost as if they might have been written byBeckett:

SHALLOW:
Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I
have spent! and to see how many of my old
acquaintance are dead!
SILENCE:
We shall all follow, cousin.
SHADOW:
Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure: death,
as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall
die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?
SILENCE:
By my troth, I was not there.
SHALLOW:
Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living
yet?
SILENCE:
Dead, sir.

Another scene of dissoluteness and debauchery in Part Two that caughtmy attention was the one in whichMistress Quickly – in a stream of consciousness torrent of words that might have come from the pen of JamesJoyce – rages about all Falstaff’sunpaid bills:

I am undone by his going; I warrant you, he’s an
infinitive thing upon my score. Good Master Fang,
hold him sure: good Master Snare, let him not
‘scape. A’ comes continuantly to Pie-corner – saving
your manhoods–to buy a saddle; and he is indited to
dinner to the Lubber’s-head in Lumbert street, to
Master Smooth’s the silkman: I pray ye, since my
exion is entered and my case so openly known to the
world, let him be brought in to his answer. A
hundred mark is a long one for a poor lone woman to
bear: and I have borne, and borne, and borne, and
have been fubbed off, and fubbed off, and fubbed
off, from this day to that day, that it is a shame
to be thought on. There is no honesty in such
dealing; unless a woman should be made an ass and a
beast, to bear every knave’s wrong. Yonder he
comes; and that errant malmsey-nose knave, Bardolph,
with him. Do your offices, do your offices: Master
Fang and Master Snare, do me, do me, do me your offices.

Time passing, and old age creeping on. Withmaturity comes responsibility, atheme explored by Shakespeare in his depiction of the central relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal (Alex Hassell) as hefrequents the taverns of Eastcheap. In some productions, Hal is portrayed as a dissolute youthLacking any sense of his future kingly role, but here Gregory Doran has JHassell playHal as much more self-aware:a young man whoknows he’s not being particularly princely, but fullyintends to changehis behaviour when the moment comes.

The most surprising feature of Doran’s productionofPart One is the treatment of Hotspur. Though Henry IVrebukes his son for haunting taverns and playing truant from honour while Hotspur isvaliant andbattle-hardened, Trevor White’s unusual performance presentshim as a near-autistic hothead, impatient to the point of derangement, who continuallyprances around inanger, unable to listen toother people. He is far from beingthe dutiful son King Henry wishes Hal would be:rather thanembodiment of chivalry and valour, he is more likea violent overgrown child.

Henry IV part I: tavern scene

What is so remarkable aboutthese plays is the way in which Shakespeare weaves together low-life scenes with serious themes of politics and kingship.What makes a ruler legitimate? Which qualities are desirable in a ruler? When it is acceptable to usurp a ruler’s authority? In the programme, there’s an interesting essay in which the historian Ian Mortimer notes how Shakespeare had to be very careful in how he approached that last question.Henry’s seizure of the throne from Richard II might have removed a tyrannous ruler, but he had been the rightful king of England:

Henry had saved England from tyranny by removing Richard from the throne but such a strategy was anathema to ElizabethI, who locked up one historian in the Tower of London simply for writing a book about Henry IV. To portray such usurpation as not only succesful but blessed by God was far too dangerous. So Shakespeare downplayed the role of Henry IV. He focussed on the people around the king. There was no danger in celebrating the king’s son, Henry V, the hero who led the English to victory atAgincourt.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. We might add that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Henry IV (played here byJasper Britton) is of a man wracked by guilt, determined – as soon asthe rebel alliance of Percy, Mortimer, Glendower and Douglas has been put down – to make a pilgrimageto Jerusalem (he only gets as far as the Jerusalem chamber in the palace of Westminster). In thedramatically-staged opening scene, with a candlelit background of chanting monks, Henry IV is a tormented usurper, seen beneath the figure of Christ prostrate in self-abasing prayer.Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set design was sombre throughout, the stage lined on all sides with wooden slats, like unplastered lathwalls, though perhaps not best suited to bringing out the rambunctiousness of the tavern scenes.

With recentpolitical events in Scotland and the growing restiveness in places far-flung from London fresh in mind, I found myself tuning intoShakespeare’s portrayal of akingdom not only disunited but also one of great diversity. Thepresentation of theaccents, culture and traditions ofthe North, and of Wales and Scotland forms a key element of Part One. Shakespeare incorporates into theplay many different languages, dialects and manners of expression, from Welsh and Scots dialect to the rough language Hal encounters in thetaverns of Eastcheap. Gregory Doran emphasises this beautifully in the scene from Part One in which the Welsh leader Owen Glendower is present with Lord Mortimer and his Welsh wife, Glendower’s daughter. She can speak only Welsh, her husband only English. Shakespeare’s stage directions read: ‘Glendower speaks to her in Welsh, and she answers him in the same’. Doran treats us to an extended interchange between the the three characters, with Glendower’s daughter speaking expansively in Welsh. This was a captioned performance and it was lovely to be able to see, as well as hear, the Welsh words.

Shakespeare was obviously fascinated with the accents, traditions, and legendsof the various nations of the British Isle, though his portrayal of theWelsh Glendower and the Scottish Douglas does also obtain laughs fromwhat would have been for his audience recognisablestereotypes–Glendower the magician (looking likeIan McKellen’s Gandalf complete with staff) and Douglas as thehotheaded warrior:

GLENDOWER:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Nevertheless, the rangeof language and forms of expression in these plays is astonishing: in addition to high speech and low speech, there is poetry and prose, as well as various regional accents.

In the first play there is a running debate about the nature ofhonour. For thequick-tempered Hotspur, honour meansglory on the battlefield and the defenceof hisreputation and good name against perceived insults:

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks;

For the troubled king, on the other hand, honour is bound up with the well-being of the nation and hislegitimacy asruler. It lies at the root of his anxiety about how usurpation ofRichard II, which won him the crown, might be seen as be a dishonourable act:

And is not this an honourable spoil?
A gallant prize?

Then there is the matter of a son bringing honour to his father, when the king speaks of ‘Hotspur, Mars in swathling clothes’ :

My Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son,
A son who is the theme of honour’s tongue;
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;
Who is sweet Fortune’s minion and her pride:
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonour stain the brow
Of my young Harry.

ThePrince attempts to calm his father’s fears in a speech that reveals his certaintythathe can regain his honour at will:

In the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son;
When I will wear a garment all of blood
And stain my favours in a bloody mask,
Which, wash’d away, shall scour my shame with it:
And that shall be the day, whene’er it lights,
That this same child of honour and renown,
This gallant Hotspur, this all-praised knight,
And your unthought-of Harry chance to meet.
For every honour sitting on his helm,
Would they were multitudes, and on my head
My shames redoubled! for the time will come,
That I shall make this northern youth exchange
His glorious deeds for my indignities.

The best speech on the subject is given to the man who has no honour, theamoral rogue Falstaff, for whom the idea is nothing but hot air:

Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks
me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I
come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or
an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is
honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what
is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?
he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no.
Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea,
to the dead. But will it not live with the living?
no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore
I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so
ends my catechism.

Alex Hassell as Prince Hal, trying on the crown in Henry IV part two

In the afternoon, inPart One, we saw the king preparing for war against the insurrectionists and Prince Hal coming to terms with hisresponsibilities as heir to thethrone. In the evening, in Part Two, the King’s health is fading and Hal finally chooses between duty to his country and loyalty to an old friend: ‘I know you not, old man’. WhileHenry IV Part IIlacks thepower of Part One, this production contained some wonderful moments and was asentertaining as the earlier play, especially in the comic scenes featuring Falstaff as well as the red-nosed Bardolph (Joshua Richards), Mistress Quickly (younger than I had imagined her to be, energetically played by a spikyPaola Dionisotti), the wild,anarchic, incomprehensible Pistol (Antony Byrne), and Justice Shallow.

Another scene that played well was when the dying king wakes to find Hal has takenthecrown. Angry at first, he is reconciled with his son before he dies. A new, mature Hal accepts the crown as King Henry V and turns his attention to war with France, having been urged by his father ‘to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels’. It’s a line that never seems to lose itspertinence.

The moment when Prince Hal, in procession to his coronation, finally denies Falstaff is quite shocking in the severity of Alex Hassell’s delivery of the line ‘I know you not, old man’ and the cursoriness of his manner. Doran dispenses with Shakespeare’s ending – an ‘epilogue spoken by a dancer’ – which reveals that the sequel was already planned:

One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too
much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will
continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make
you merry with fair Katharine of France: where, for
any thing I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat,
unless already a’ be killed with your hard
opinions.

Instead, after Prince John hasuttered the promise of foreign wars –

I will lay odds that, ere this year expire,
We bear our civil swords and native fire
As far as France: I beard a bird so sing,
Whose music, to my thinking, pleased the king.
Come, will you hence?

– Doran has the stage darken, a single shaft of light illuminating the figure of a small boy.

After nearly six hours of drama we emerged into the unusual warmth of a Salford Octobernight well satisfied with a production that had brought out the richness ofShakespeare’s plays and his remarkable ability to presentaudiences with the full range of human experience.

Sometimes there is a photograph that captures in one image an essential truth.

Jose Palazon is a resident of the tiny Spanish enclave of Melilla, a nick in the Mediterranean coastline of Morocco. The enclave is surrounded by a tall fence, built and guarded with the help of European Union money to try to prevent African migrants from reaching Spanish territory.Palazonruns anorganization called Prodein,which attempts to help immigrants who enter the enclave illegally. On Wednesday this week he took the photo aboveas more than 200 migrants attempted to cross the massive border fence.

In the photo, the migrants are attempting to escape into the Club Campo de Golf de Melilla, a public golf course where games can cost up to £20.The per capita income of Melilla is 15 times more than that of the surrounding areas of Morocco and astronomically higher than many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Thousands of African immigrants living illegally in Morocco try to enter Spain’s enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta each year, hoping to reach Europe.

Jonathan Jones writing in today’s Guardianmade this analysis of Palazon’s photograph:

The obscenity of this photograph lies in the willed indifference of the golfers. They play as if they could not see the desperate danglers so close to their pampered game. They are clad in expensive, well-laundered white clothes and equipped with caddies of top-notch gear. The creases and cleanness of their apparel are obvious even at a distance and contrast glaringly with the shabby garb of the migrants. The players shine in the African sun, their unwilling audience wears clothes that grimly repel it.[…]

See Also

Your Nashville Summer Music Review: 30 must-see concerts coming to Music City this summerThe Women of MormondomMusic Industry 40 Under 40: Execs & Power Players 2024

The enclosed garden they inhabit is an artificial paradise that luridly triumphs over nature. Out there, in that other world, nature itself looks poor and unforgiving. Wild grasses and raw earth on a sparse hillside. In here, in the paradise of the wealthy and the lucky, the grass is so synthetically fed, so monstrously cosseted that it glows with an unreal almost fluorescent lime beauty. It is like a Beverly Hills lawn transplanted to the moon. […]

It is a metaphor not just of Spain’s enclave in north Africa as an uneasy meeting place of two worlds, but of the rich and poor parts of humanity. The golf course is Europe itself, shutting out a common humanity clamouring for better lives. Your poor, your tired, your huddled masses? Wrong continent.

Spain’s Interior Ministry said 2,000 migrants have made it across Melilla’s border fence in roughly 60 attempts so far this year. Those that make it head for the city’s temporary migrant accommodation centre. They are eventually repatriated or let go. There are more dramatic photos of the Melilla fence on the International Business Times website (!?) here.

Seumus Milne commented in theGuardian earlier this month:

Given the escalating scale of global inequality, the only surprise is that migration pressures are not greater still. In the late 19th century average income in the richest countries was around five times that of the poorest. By the early years of this century, it was more than 18 times higher – in the US it is now around 25 times that of the poorest.

The champions of capitalist globalisation insisted that the power of global markets would change all that. But, if you strip out China – which has delivered the fastest growth and poverty reduction in history, albeit at high environmental and social cost, by ignoring the neoliberal Washington consensus – poverty and inequality has continued to grow between as well as within countries.

As the catechism of ‘free market’ deregulation has been imposed across the world under “free trade” and “partnership” agreements and the destructive discipline of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, capital and resources have been sucked out of the developing world and tens of millions of people have been driven into urban poverty by corporate land grabs.

That is why the number living on less than $2 a day in sub-Saharan Africa has doubled since 1981 under the sway of rich world globalisation. Africa’s boom has been in resource exploitation, not in most people’s living standards. So it is hardly surprising that migration from the global south to high and middle-income countries has more or less tripled over the past half century.

Add the impact of multiple wars over the past two decades, sponsored or fuelled by rich world countries – from Iraq and Afghanistan to Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali and Libya – and the pressures on Europe’s borders and off its coasts are not hard to understand.

The Melilla fence

The Immigrants by Margaret Atwood

They are allowed to inherit
the sidewalks involved as palmlines, bricks
exhausted and soft, the deep
lawnsmells, orchards whorled
to the land’s contours, the inflected weather

only to be told they are too poor
to keep it up, or someone
has noticed and wants to kill them; or the towns
pass laws which declare them obsolete.

I see them coming
up from the hold smelling of vomit,
infested, emaciated, their skins grey
with travel; as they step on shore

the old countries recede, become
perfect, thumbnail castles preserved
like gallstones in a glass bottle, the
towns dwindle upon the hillsides
in a light, paperweight-clear.

They carry their carpetbags and trunks
with clothes, dishes, the family pictures;
they think they will make an order
like the old one, sow miniature orchards,
carve children and flocks out of wood

but always they are too poor, the sky
its flat, the green fruit shrivels
in the prairies sun, wood is for burning;
and if they go back, they towns

in time have crumpled, their tongues
stumble among awkward teeth, their ears
are filled the sound of breaking glass.
I wish I could forget them
and so forget myself:

my mind is a wide pink map
across which move year after year
arrows and dotted lines, further and further,
people in railway cars

their heads stuck out of the windows
at the stations. drinking milk of singing,
their features hidden with beards or shawls
day and night riding across an ocean of unknown
Land to an unknown land.

A Melilla fence ends in the Mediterraneanat the border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave

See also

• Ten myths about migration: writers from the Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Süddeutsche Zeitung and La Stampa address some common claims about migration
• Migrants’ tales: ‘I feel for those who were with me. They got asylum in the sea’:Who are the people who die in the Mediterranean on an almost daily basis? The Guardian has worked with a team of reporters from five other European newspapers to track a very 21st-century odyssey
• The trouble with Fortress Europe: openDemocracy

CF Tunnicliffe, Badgers

The badger is one of ourbest-loved animals – and yet, despite the fact there are more badgers per square mile in Britain than any other country, few of us have seen one(our one, magical encounter is described here). I have just finished reading Badgerlandsin whichPatrick Barkhamsets outto trace the strange history of our relationship with badgers and find out why it is so vexed: why some people devote their lives to feeding or rescuing badgers while others risk jailbytorturing and killing them for their own pleasure.

Patrick Barkham is a Guardian journalist andBadgerlandshas the feel of a series of disparate reportsstitched together to form a book. That’s not to belittle it, but to draw attention to its scope. For Barkham examines every aspect of the British badger, from the place the animal occupies in our imaginations to theculture clashbetween countryside and city represented bythe ferocious debate over the badger’s contribution to TB in cattle and whether it merits the cull of badgers that has now begun in Gloucestershire and Somerset. In addition to an informative, even-handed survey of those issues (some might say: a little too even-handed),Barkham also enters the badger’s nocturnal world, spending initially fruitless evenings trying to catch his first glimpse of a badger. Eventually, his persistence pays dividends and we get delightful accounts of his observations of badger families foraging around their setts.

Every aspect of the badger is explored by Barkham. He spends time on either side of the barricades in the badger wars dividing town and country – talking to dairyfarmers and government officials in favour of the cull, out in the dead of night with activists attempting to disrupt it, exploring the shady underworld ofbadger-baitingpopulated bytough working-class men with tough working dogs.He visits people who care for wounded badgers, and people who watch and feed them. He talks to Brian May, the Queen guitarist, who now devotes much of his time to issues of animal welfare, especially the question of the badger cull.In one chapter (nauseating for this vegetarian) he findsa man who lives on road-kill badger and together they butcher a large boar and eat a plateful of stir-fry badger ham.

Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (Sodoma), ‘Life of St Benedict’ (detail), 1505: a rare depiction of badgers as pets

Barkham begins with the badger’s considerableimpact on the British landscape. He writes:

Our country has not only been named after badgers; it has been shaped by them. spectacular earthworks of their setts higher density of badgers here than anywhere else in the world.

The places named after badgers include anywhere with a variant of brock, pate, gray, bawson, billy in the place-name: ‘all the old badgery place names’, such as Brocklebank, Broxbourne, Grayswood, and Pately Bridge.

Despite their presence all around us, as Barkham makes clear, we still don’t actually know that much about them: not even how many of them there are. It mightbe 200,000, but then again it could be 600,000, of which a staggering 50,000 end up as road-kill every year. And who knew that a badger’s living quarters were so sumptuous?

When the government dispatched seven men to measure a badger sett in the Seventies, they took eight days to get to the bottom of it, unearthing a ‘typical’ sett featuring 16 entrances, 57 chambers and a maze of tunnels nearly a third of a kilometre in length. The badgers had excavated 25 tonnes of soil to create it.

Barkham describes the badger’s cleanliness (those setts are maintained in immaculate condition), their catholic tastes in food (they are omnivores who will scoff anything they are offered – as he observes when visiting those who feed badgers on their lawn or patio nightly. They’ll happily munch grapes as much as meat, sandwiches or sausages. He informs us, too, about the latest scientific observations of their social behaviour which have overturned some long-established myths.Because they tend to forage alone, they havebeen regardedas ‘primitive’ animals with basic social instincts. Yet the truth is that they live harmoniously in complex groups, groom each other, care for each other (Barkham tells of one badger, born blind, which was shepherded by family members), and they burytheir dead. He concludes thattheir successful, largely harmonious social structures present a striking alternative to our world – and it baffles us.

Sketch of five badger cubs at play by Eileen Soper

One night, as part of his exploration of whether vaccination offers an alternative to acull, Barkham joins a vaccination project. He sees how the badgers trapped for vaccination all react differently. Some were naturallyvery stressed, attempting to dig their way out of the cage in which they were trapped; but others were calm, evenlaid back. When found, one was so deeplyasleep it only woke up when being vaccinated. Anotherhad managed to pull an old plastic feed sack into its cage as a bed, while a third badgerhad pulled grass into its cage, made a nest and gone to sleep. Having been vaccinated, it didn’t want to leave its cage.

In his exploration of the cultural landscape of Badgerland,Barkham traces the history of badger-baiting through the centuries. At one time, pursuit of the badger was an aristocratic pastime:

To do battle with a badger, a 16th century treatise advised, a man must find the following: adozen strong men to dig; a dozen good dogs to work underground and, for each, a collar with a bell attached; broad and narrow picks; a large spade; wood and iron shovels; a stout pair of long-handled tongs; sacks to stow the captured animals; a water bowl for the dogs; half a dozen rugs to lie on and listen, ear to the ground, for barking; Indian game fowls, hams and beef tongue to eat; copious flagons of alcoholic refreshment; and a little pavilion to light a fire for warmth in winter. ‘Further, to do the thing properly,’ wrote our badger hunter, ‘the Seigneur must have his little carriage in which he will ride, with a young girl of sixteen to seventeen years of age, who will stroke his head while he is on the road’.

But, badger-baiting was mostly a hidden, peasant activity. Barkhamquotes Richard Jeffries, writing in 1879 of the Wiltshire village of his childhood as ‘a republic without even the semblance of a Government’, venerating the ideals of liberty, equality and swearing. ‘Betting, card-playing, ferret-breeding and dog-fancying, poaching and politics, are the occupations of the populace. A little illicit badger-baiting is varied by a little vicar-baiting.’ Obviously, Barkham can’t fail to note that themost vivid account of baiting occurs in John Clare’s poem, ‘Badger‘, written in the 1830s, which ends thus:

He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and crackles, groans, and dies.

Barkham also cites Mary Wollstonecraft who, writing in 1792, claimed that blood sports such as badger baiting were a natural result of social oppression, the oppressed takingtheir frustrations out on the only outlet they had available:

It may be unspeakably cruel, it may be an expression of our basest instincts – man as bully and coward and thrill-seeker – but it is an expression of autonomy and freedom, and of one class’s contempt for the laws made by another.

CF Tunnicliffe, A Badger with Three Dachsunds

In 1835 the Cruelty to Wild Animals Act made it illegal to bait badgers with dogs, though badger digging continued. In 1833, four years before she became queen, Victoria wrote in her diary: ‘I dressed dear, sweet, little Dash for the second time after dinner in a scarlet jacket and trousers’, Dash being her beloved dachsund, the short-legged dog bred by German and Austrian aristocrats to go underground in pursuit of the badger.

Barkham pursuesthe history of badger-diggingand nocturnal badger hunting into the 20th century. He findsthat badger-digging, unlike baiting, ‘was sufficiently respectable to be enjoyed by members of the ruling classes for much of the twentieth century. It was a Sunday activity, carried out after church’. The tradition persisted, the result of widespread ignorance ofthe animal (regarded as foe, vermin,sheep-killer) and of its continued persecution by men from the lower classes. Today it remains a white working-class male pastime (few, if any, females are present at a badger dig).

But in the first half of the 20th century, the badger’s relationship with the human population of Britain was ‘turned on its head’; Barkham writes:

The badger was transformed from an object of fear, superstition and rural torture into a cuddly hero for children and a revered symbol of conservation for adults.

Badger, Toad, Ratty and Mole from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Illustration by EH Shepard

One man, and one badger, largely responsible:far more people have encountered Mr Badger in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows and EH Shepard’s illustrations than have ever seen a badger living in the wild:

In 1908, Mole caught sight of Badger peering from a hedge. Badger trotted forward, grunted, ‘H’m! Company’, and disappeared again. ‘Simply hates Society!’ explained the Water Rat.

Barkham devotes a whole chapter of Badgerlands to an exploration of the background to the book. He discusses the passage – ‘the very heart of Grahame’s Arcadian dream’ – in which we are introduced to Badger’s kitchen, ‘a child’s fantasy of warmth and safety’.Toad is terrorising the neighbourhood with his new obsession for motor vehicles, and Badger decides he must be ‘taken in hand’. Without Badger, Grahame seems to suggest, his bucolic idyll of the English countryside would be lost for ever.

The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burnt a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney-corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draught. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodations for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Badger’s plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.

Badger cubs by Eileen Soper

In anotherchapter Barkham tells ofthe women – including his maternal grandmother – who have been compelled by badgers to write about them, draw and paint them, observe them or protect them. One such wasEileen Soper, dedicated badger-watcher who illustrated Enid Blyton’s adventure stories – and whose drawingsof badgers illustratethis post.

The cover of Eileen Soper’s ‘When Badgers Wake’

When Eileen Soper died in March 1990, executors found a profusion of watercolours and a large number of her drawings at her home in Hertfordshire. Shehad beenhailed as a child prodigy when she had two etchings hung by the Royal Academy at the age of fifteen. Later she had a successful career as a book-illustrator, enjoying a long partnershipwith Enid Blyton. Yet it was as an observer and painter of wildlife that she really came into her own. Hundreds ofhours of patient study went into her book When Badgers Wake,much of her work done in the half-wild garden which surrounded her home near Welwyn.

A double page spread from EileenSoper’s ‘When Badgers Wake’

In the same chapter Barkham writes of his maternal grandmother, Jane Ratcliffe, and wonders what she would have made of his initially fumbled and futile attemptsto watch badgers. She wrote a book, Through the Badger Gate, that Barkham describes as ‘a love letter to Bodger, her first badger’ (you can read Barkham’s Guardian obituary of his grandmother here).Ratcliffewas a vocal supporter of badgers, nursing them back to health and releasing them into the wild. She and her husband volunteered for the local Wildlife Trust on the Wirral and recorded badgers at 27 setts in Cheshire, 15 of which were destroyed between 1969 and 1971 by badger diggers who travelled from the Potteries with their terriers. By 1973 only one of the setts was still occupied.

In 1970, Jane took in her first badger, an orphaned and desperately-ill cub she called Bodger. The previous day she had been in London at the Women’s Institute AGM where she hadspoken in support of aresolution she had submitted to her local WI branch calling for legislation to prohibit any killing of badgers other than under licence. It was supportedoverwhelmingly, and after a successful lobbying campaign,resulted in the Badgers Act of 1973 being passed, for the first time in British history giving a land mammal specific protection from persecution by making it an offence to ‘cruelly ill-treat’ any badger.

But even as the legislation reached the statute book, a new threat to Britain’s badgers had emerged: bovine TB. Badgers were now in direct conflict with the interests of farmers and consumers.Barkham points up the ironies: that it happened to becows that first passed the disease to badgers, and that the disease materialised in badgers just months before they finally gained full legal protection.

An illustration from EileenSoper’s ‘When Badgers Wake’: ‘The Lean Days’

This leads Barkham into an even-handed examination of the bovine TB question. He records the anxieties and despair of people on both sides of the culling debate, and picks apart the confused mess of governmentpolicy. Those in favour of culling say that badgers spread contagion, that it’s impossible to fence them out of farms, and that they’ve been legislatively overprotected for years. Those against say culling only promotes the wider distribution of TB and that it’s not just badgers that are responsible for the disease. He notes theconfusion over the actual numbers of badgers in the cull areas – a matter that is crucial because to be successful a cull must achieve the target ofkilling70% of the badger population. It was that confusion over the actual size of the badger population in Gloucestershire and Somerset that led to the initialpostponement of the cull.

Barkhamdiscusses the evidence that culling can actually make things worse by pushing surviving badgers out to surroundingareas – a process labelled ‘perturbation’ – and comparesthecosts of culling with thecosts of vaccination (now being implemented by some landowners, including the National Trust).The cost of the proposed cull seems likely to outstrip the putative benefits, at the same time asdriving badgers from their current territories andspreading the incidence of bovine TB.

The 2013 cull singularlyfailed the test of being able to kill sufficientbadgers to meet criteria set by the government. The cull failed to kill at least 70% of the local badgers within a six-week period, and even though the culling period wasextended, the total number of badgers slaughtered rose only marginally. The government was also forced to admit that only 24 % of the badgers killed were by controlled shooting, which was precisely the method that the pilots were supposed to be testing. The rest were cage trapped, which is much more expensive.

The 2013 culls were branded an ‘epic failure’ by Professor David Macdonald – the chief scientific adviser to Natural England, the organisation that had authorised them. He said: ‘It is hard to see how continuing this approach could be justified’. Yet this year, the government announced a repeat. Barkham points out how misleading isthe term ‘cull’, sincethe vast majority of badgers killed will be healthy and free of the disease. (On the subject of this Orwellian use of language – and how itspreads to the way governments talk about human beings, do read today’s Guardian piece, ‘‘Cleansing the stock’ and other ways governments talk about human beings‘, by George Monbiot, in which he argues that those in power don’t speak of ‘people’ or ‘killing’, but employ dehumanising euphemisms that help them pursue policies that we might otherwise consider unpalatable.)

As Barkham notes, there are less than 300,000 badgers in Britain. Although protected by laws to prevent badger baiting, licences can be granted by the Government for ‘disease control’ and ‘research’ reasons. It is believed that only between 11-15% of the national population of badgers has bovine TB. Some argue thatbovine TBin badgers has been accelerated by the increased movement of cattle around the country by the farming industry.Barkham represents both sides of the argument, but signs off with the case presented bya group of vets, as reported in the Veterinary Times. Their view is that the spread of bovine TB is more a symptom of unhealthy, overbred cattle herds with low immunity than it is of any wild animal acting as a carrier. The authors argue that bovine TBhas become more prevalent in the UK because of increasingly intensive cattle breeding and farming. In particular,artificial insemination (AI), widely used in the dairy industry since the 1950s, has selectively bred ‘mutant cows’ that produce large quantities of milk but have little resistance to diseases such as bovine TB and BSE. ‘Dairy cows stopped co-evolving with TB more than 50 years ago, due to AI’, they say. They continue:

TB is often a disease of poverty, in humans as well as animals, and many of our dairy cattle live in poverty equivalent to that of a workhouse during the industrial revolution. Most importantly, there is poverty in the lack of any normal relationships around breeding and calf rearing. The only long-term solution is a paradigm shift in favour of cattle welfare, small farmers and wildlife – not mega-dairies and money. We need to start looking, right now, at the economic and genetic background to the dairy industry, and fix it, before it’s too late. We support the long-term restructuring and de-intensification of the dairy industry to better support the health and welfare of cattle, as well as small farmers and consumers.

At the end of his journey through Britain’s Badgerlands, Patrick Barkhamvisits Judy Salisbury, a woman in her eighties, who has been feeding badgers on the patio of her lonely house on the edge of the Camel estuary for years. On her patio, the badgers’ absorption, their utter contentment in the fine dining they found nightly in Judy Salisbury’s garden reminds him of ascientist’s comment he had recorded earlier that foraging badgers were like shoppers in a supermarket: different family groups foraging and eatingtogether, tolerantly stepping around ‘shoppers’ from other social groups. He has an awful thought:

My admiration for this feeding fraternity was suddenly halted by a thought so vivid it was as if I had seen it. At some point soon, this exact scene would be played out at apparently generous and benign badger supermarkets built conveniently close to setts in Gloucestershire and Somerset. Having taken all the usual precautions, a dozen badgers would be browsing the aisles together and then a barrage of shots would ring out. Most, hopefully all, would perceive a flash of light, a punch in the guts like nothing they had ever experienced, before darkness descended for ever. A few unlucky animals would stagger off, nursing horrendous injuries, if they were not wiped out by the second, or third, volley of shots.

During themonths he spent exploring Badgerlands, Barkham came to understandhow we view the badger as quintessentially British because of its long presence on our lands – and yet we do not take it for granted because most of us rarely see it. The badger manages to be both native and exotic. No matter how hard farmers try to persuade us, Meles meles will never beviewed as a pest like the rabbit, magpie or rat. The badger’s visual qualities should not be underestimated either. No jury, he writes, would ever find such an appealing criminal guilty.

See also

• Encounter with a badger: most ancient of English beasts
• The badger is the true king of this land
• Badgers observed by Mark co*cker
• Slaughtering badgers is not the answer to bovine TB: article by Patrick Barkham, Guardian 2011
• Scapegoats: Badgers and Bovine TB: a detailed, annotatedViva! report by Justin Kerswell
• My hero: Mr Badger: Guardian piece by Patrick Barkham

An exhibition ofRembrandt’s late worksfeaturing this painting,on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, has just opened at the National Gallery. I hope to see it in November and, while I would not go asfar as Vincent van Gogh who, in 1885, remarked that he ‘should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting in front of this picture for ten days with only a dry crust of bread’, I am certainly looking forward to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with great anticipation.

In the meantime, I have beentransported by one of the best art documentaries I have seen on television in a long time: Simon Schama on Rembrandt Masterpieces of the Late Years, shown on BBC2 on Saturday (and available on iPlayer for three weeks). The author of Rembrandt’s Eyeswas an obvious guide for a tour of the greatmaster’s late paintings, and his surveywas bothinformed and impassioned, culminating in a bravura assessment of ‘The Jewish Bride’ that just took my breath away. Continue reading “Simon Schama on Rembrandt’s latemasterpieces” →

Remains of Palestinian homes in al-Ramle today (photo by James Morris, That Still Remains)

They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You’re a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You’re a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You’re a refugee.

–Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Refugee’

I was ten years old when a small branch library opened in the Cheshire village where I grew up. Week after week I devoured novels, many of them beyond my childish comprehension. One of the books that did made a powerful impression on methat year was Exodus by Leon Uris.

Published in 1958, Exodus was a hugely influential book, and I was one of those who were deeplyaffected bythe romance of itsstory of Jews fleeing from post-Holocaust Europe and struggling to establish a newhomeland against tremendous odds. However, as I learned more about the origins of the state of Israel and watched as the Arab-Israeli conflict intensified I discovered that Exodus was little more than duplicitous propaganda.

In Exodus, the story of 1948 is exclusively one ofthe heroic establishmentof Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust. There is no sense of the corresponding catastrophe ofuprooting and exile that Palestinian Arabscame to call the Nakba. Writing last year in Jewish Journal,Alan Elsner found re-reading Exodus a disquieting experience:

When I first read the book at age 16, I responded to it mainly with my heart — whereas now I read it mostly with my head. Then, I fell in love with Uris’ Israel, which was populated by healthy, strong, lusty young men and women, the latter invariably described as ‘high-breasted’, which was thrilling in itself at that point in my development. They spent their days wearing blue shirts and short pants, working the land and fighting off Arab marauders, and their nights dancing the hora and making love while murmuring verses from the Song of Songs.

‘There was an aggressiveness and pride about them … and they were always filled with the songs and dances and ideals of the redemption of the homeland … These were the ancient Hebrews! These were the faces of Dan and Reuben and Judah and Ehphraim. These were Samsons and Deborahs and Joabs and Sauls,’ Uris breathlessly tells us.

Uris’ Israel is very much the Israel of Labour Zionism and the kibbutz and moshav (agricultural co-op) movements. He buys into the concept of the ‘new Jew’ – the independent fighter so unlike the weak Jews of the Diaspora who had been left defenceless against the Nazis. Ari Ben Canaan himself is a ‘strapping six-footer with black hair and ice blue eyes who could be mistaken for a movie leading man. He doesn’t act like any Jew I’ve ever met. You don’t particularly think of them as fighters,’ one British character says.

The most disturbing facet of the book is Uris’ depiction of Arabs. In fact, the word ‘Arab’ rarely appears without the adjective ‘dirty’ or ‘stinking’ appended. Twoexamples:‘Nazareth stank. The streets were littered with dung and blind beggars … filthy children were underfoot. Flies were everywhere.’‘How pathetic the dirty little Arab children were beside the robust youngsters of Gan Dafna. How futile their lives seemed in contrast to the spirit of the Youth Aliya village. There seemed to be no laughter or songs or games or purpose among the Arab children.’

Like many others, I have madea long journeyfrom Leon Uris’s racist fairytale in my understanding of the Israel – Palestinian question, a journey whose way-stations have been events on the ground such as the occupation and illegal settlement of the West Bank and the indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza,but also films and books which have documented the origins of the state of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and land.

I recall5Broken Cameras, a superb documentary shot entirely in and arounda Palestinian village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank andPalestinian Walks,Raja Shehadeh’sbrilliant amalgam of a walker’s lyrical account of the landscape he loves and of the unfolding political tragedy of occupation that has transformed the landscape, making him and many other Palestinians exiles in their own country. Both film and book share a similar approach to the subject of the Israeli occupation but approach the issue at a tangent. Raja Shehadeh comes at it by way of seven walks through the landscape he loves; for Emad Burnat in the film it’s watching how his youngest son Gibreel, born in 2005, is shaped by growing up in a village in theoccupied territories while the Israeli Army builds a section of the Security Wall between their village and a nearby Jewish settlement. In both book and film, Palestinians reveal their profound emotions for the land that has sustained them for generations.

Perhaps the most remarkablenovel published after the 1948 ‘War of Independence’ aka Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, was written by an Israeli.Khirbet Khizeh (The Ruins of Hizeh), published in 1949, tells the story of the expulsion of Palestinian villagers from their home and land in1948. The book was published under the nom-de-plume S. Yizhar, who was actually Yizhar Smilansky, an an intelligence officer in the Israeli army.

Two more books have made a deep impression on me.In Palestine: A Personal History, Karl Sabbagh combined his own family story with a historical outline of the Palestinian case against the Zionist project. WhileSabbagh’s mother was English, his father was Palestinian, the descendent of a long line of Christian Arabs whose history he traces in the book as far back as the 18th century, when Palestine was an Ottoman province and his ancestor Ibrahim served at the Ottoman provincial court. Sabbaghwants to demonstrate the continuity and richness of the Palestinian Arab presence, both Christian and Muslim, in the region, and reject the Zionist assertion of title to ‘a land without people for a people without land’.

The book is humane, compelling and meticulouslywritten using both Jewish and Israeli sources. At the outset, Sabbagh writes ironically, ‘I am the son of a Palestinian father, but… I am not poor, unshaven or a speaker of broken English. I do not know how to use a gun or manufacture a bomb. I have little to do with camels, sand or palm trees. But I both sympathise and identify with the Palestinian people.’

Adam LeBor’s City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa covers similar ground.Through the stories of six families – three Arab and three Jewish – LeBor tells the story of the ancient city of Jaffa, for centuries the main port of the eastern Mediterranean, home to Muslims, Christians and Jews, famed for the produce of itsorange groves.

LeBor begins his narrative in 1920, when the British took over the administration of the city under the Mandate. He tracesJaffa’s transformation from the second city of Palestine to a crumbling, semi-derelict and neglected suburb of the Israeli capital, and then its revivalduring the last two decades as an artist’s colony and a possible model of Arab-Jewish co-existence. LeBordraws upon hours of interviews with several generations of Jaffa families,on memoirs, letters and personal archives to tell the story of six families, three Arab, three Jewish. In the process he illuminates the underlying complexity of the makeup of modern Israel, by telling the story from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic perspectives, as well asfrom Christian Arab and Muslim points of view. Through the eyes of these families LeBor builds as picture how the founding of the state of Israel was simultaneously a moment of jubilation for the Jews, and a disaster for the 100,000 Arabs who fled Jaffa in 1948, most of them never to return.

Reviewing City of Oranges for the Guardian, Mark co*cker noted why, apart from common humanity, British citizens should have a particular interest in supporting progress towards a just settlement of the Palestinian question:

It is salutary to reflect that the 75 years of political strife, civil conflict and outright war that LeBor covers in his book were the result of a promise made by a British politician, Arthur Balfour, former Conservative prime minister, to the then leader of the Jews in London, Lord Rothschild. Known as the Balfour declaration, these 69 words of contradictory obfuscation offered the same land to two different peoples, and was the very moment that the dark genie of Arab-Jewish conflict was released from its bottle. A British administration then presided over the ensuing troubles for 30 years until they abandoned it, exhausted and baffled that the peoples of Palestine had not thanked them for the confusion and injustice. Not least for these reasons it is important that Britons remain morally engaged with the fate of the region. A good place to start would be to read Adam LeBor’s excellent and courageous book.

This brings me to the most recent book that I have read aboutthis seemingly intractable conflict. Highly recommended by several friends, Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Treewas published in 2006. Tolan is an experienced American journalist and his book is a meticulously-researched workof intelligent journalism. What he has attempted in The Lemon Tree – and has largely succeeded in achieving – is to present an accurate history of the Palestine-Israel conflict through the true story of a Palestinian family driven from their ancestral home in the town of al-Ramla in 1948 by the Palmach, the elite Israeli fighting force, following an order fromYitzhak Rabin, (decades later to be awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the signing of the Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian National Authority and granted it partial control over parts of the Gaza Strip and West Bank before beingassassinated a year later by aright-wing Orthodox Jew who opposed the signing of the Oslo Accords).

Tolan’s good fortune was not only to find a dispossessed Palestinianfamily, but also to discover the story of how, in 1967 following the Six-Day War which had overnight made him a citizen of the newly-occupied territory on the West Bank,Bashir Al-Khairireturned with two cousins to his childhood home, lived in since 1948 by theEshkenazis, Jewish refugees from Bulgaria. There they were met by DaliaEshkenaziwho welcomedtheminto the old family home, anencounter that is the starting point for Tolan’sstory of a relationship forged against the odds between two families, one Arab, one Jewish, and specifically between Dalia and Bashir, two individuals with very differentperspectives on the conflict.

Refugees being removed from al-Ramla in 1948

I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the origins and courseof the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a balanced, even-handed narrative Sandy Tolan weaves the stories of Israeli Dalia Eshkenazi and Palestinian Bashir Khariri into a readable history of the conflict. Bashir’s father,Ahmad, was the scion of a prominent Arab family. In 1936 he had built a home from cream ‘Jerusalem stone’ in the ancient town of al-Ramla:

Before long, Ahmad would turn his attention to the garden. In the corner of the yard behind the house, he had chosen a spot for a lemon tree. Once the tree was in the soil, Ahmad knew it would be at least seven years, and probably more, before the strong Palestinian sun and sweet waters of the al-Ramla aquifer would nurture the tree to maturity. The act of planting was thus an act of faith and patience.

But, in July 1948,when Bashir was six years old, theKhariri family were amongst the thousands of Palestinians forced to flee from their homes in al-Ramla as war eruptedbetween the Arab and Jewish populations of Palestine in response to the UN Partition Plan to divide Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. On 15 May 1948 the civil war transformed into a regional conflict between Israel and the Arab states when a combined invasion by Egypt, Jordan and Syria entered Palestine andtook control of over halfof the area allocated for the proposed Arab state, including the Jaffa, Lydda and the al-Ramla area:

At home the Khairis … and the rest of the people of al-Ramla had left behind their couches and tables, rugs, libraries, framed family pictures, and their blankets, dishes and cups. They left their fezzes and gallabiyas, balloon pants, spare keffiyehs, sashes, and belts. They left their spices for maklouheh, grape leaves in brine, and the flour for the dough of their date pastries. They left their fields of wild peas and jasmine, passiflora and dried scarlet anemone, mountain lilies that grew between the barley and the wheat. They left their olives and oranges, lemons and apricots, spinach and okra and peppers. They left their silk and linen, silver bracelets and chokers, amber, coral, and necklaces with Austrian coins. They left their pottery and soaps, leather and oils, Swedish ovens and copper pots, and drinking goblets from Bohemia. They left their silver trays filled with sugared almonds and sweet dried chickpeas; their dolls, made with glued-together wood chips; their sumac; their indigo.

The people of al-Ramla were among around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who were expelled from the area that became Israel and became Palestinian refugees. On 15 July 1948, notes Tolan, while the families from al-Ramla and Lydda were trudging through the hills in blazing heat, David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish leader, wrote in his diary:

The Arab Legion has wired that there are 30,000 refugees moving along the road between Lydda and Ramla, who are infuriated with the Legion. They’re demanding bread. They should be taken across the Jordan River’.

In other words, removed from Palestine to the Kingdom of Jordan – ethnically cleansed if you will. In mid-July, the Khairis arrived in Ramallah, along with thousands of other refugees. Ramallah ‘had been transformed from a quiet Christian hill town in northern Palestine to a depository of misery and trauma’, writes Tolan. This was where the family would remain, and where Bashir would grow up, eventually training to be a lawyer.

Dalia Landau Eshkenazi

Meanwhile, in the three years following the war, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel – one third of them having fled, or having been expelled, from countries in the Middle East, while others came from the countries of Europe ravaged by the Holocaust. Moshe and SoliaEshkenazi were Bulgarian Jews whom*oved to Israel in the autumn of 1948 – beneficiaries of an emigration scheme agreed between the Bulgarian government and the Jewish Agency. (The story Tolan tells of how the Bulgarian Jews survived the war in a country allied to Nazi Germany only because of the decency of a handful of Gentiles formsone of the most interesting chapters of his book, and was certainly a revelation to me.)

On 14 November 1948, Moshe and Solia were among a busload of immigrants (mostly Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians and Poles) who arrived in al-Ramla:

They were greeted by a representative of the Jewish Agency. … It was a simple procedure, immigrants would recall; they were free to enter a house, inspect it, and claim it. The paperwork would come later. Moshe and Solia cameupon a house to their liking. It was in good shape and virtually empty, though not brand-new. Clearly, someone had lived there before. It was a stone house with an open layout and plenty of space. … In the yard in back there was a lemon tree.

Sothe empty Khariri house became the Eshkenazi ‘s new home, and the housewhere Dalia grew up:

In a black and white photograph taken in the backyard of the stone house in Ramla, Dalia stands beside a lemon tree, looking into the camera with tears in her eyes. The image was taken in the summer, perhaps of 1950; Dalia would have been two and a half. She’d been crying briefly, offended by the sparrows who had chosen to fly away rather than stay and eat bread crumbs out of her hand. ‘Why should they fly?’ she cried to her aunt. ‘Why? I love them.’ It is her earliest memory.

In another passage we get a glimpse of the settlers from eastern Europe easing into their new life:

In the evenings, Moshe and Solia would invite Bulgarian friends for gatherings in the backyard. They laid out plates of black olives, watermelon and Bulgarian chees, pouring glasses of boza, a sweet Balkan drink made from wheat. They’d talk of news from Bulgaria, and Dalia would hear them telling off-colour jokes in Ladino, the fading language of earlier generations that she could understand only slightly.

It is important to note, when reading passages such as these, with their fictionalised tone, that Tolan has been meticulous in ensuring that everything in the book, down to the smallest detail, isfact, gained from the journalist’s tools – interviews, archival documents, published and unpublished memoirs and diaries, newspaper clippings, and primary historical accounts. ‘I have not taken liberties with the history, no matter how minor’, he writes. ‘At no point do I imagine what probably happened, for example at a family event in 1936 and state it as fact; nor at any moment do I describe what someone was thinking unless those thoughts are based on a specific recounting in a memoir or interview’.

So, when we read a passage such as this, in which Tolan describes Dalia’s growing awareness – and confusion – about the place where she has been born, we can sense the truth of how a generation of young Israeli’s came to see their place in the world:

Growing up, Dalia would frequently askher parents and teachers: ‘What are these houses weare living in?’

‘These are Arab houses,’ she was told. ‘What are these Arab houses that everyone talks about?’ shewould reply.

Dalia’s school was in an Arab house, and there she would learnIsrael’s history. She learned about the creation of the state of Israel asa safe haven for the Jews. She studied the War of Independence asthe story of the few against the many. The Arabs had invaded, Dalia would read,in order to destroy the new state and throw the Jewsinto the sea. Most nations confronted with such hostilities wouldhave been paralyzed, but tiny Israel had withstood five Arab armies.Little David had defeated Goliath. As for the Arabs, Dalia’s text-books would report that they ran away, deserting their lands andabandoning their homes, fleeing before the conquering Israeli army.The Arabs, one textbook of the day declared, ‘preferred to leave’ once the Jews had taken their towns. Dalia accepted the history she wastaught. Still, she was confused. Why, she wondered, would anyoneleave so willingly?

One afternoon when she was about seven or eight years old, Daliaclimbed up the black metal gate that Ahmad Khairi had placed atthe end of the stone path in the front yard. Atop the gate perched adelicate piece of wrought iron in the shape of a star and crescent: thesymbol of Islam. It bothered Dalia. ‘This is not an Arab house,’ shesaid to herself, and she grasped the delicate crescent and beganwrenching it back and forth, back and forth, until it came loose inher hands. She clambered down and threw the crescent away.

Tolan sets the story of his two families againstthe background of thehistory of the conflict, told in the clearest way. Every statement is supported by references, not in footnotes in the text itself, but in a 70-page appendix and extensive bibliography which togetherconstitute a quarter of the book. Tolan skilfully shows how Dalia and Bashirare both swept up in the fates of their people, and reveals their lives as a personal microcosm of more than half a century of Israeli-Palestinian history.

Iyad Rafidi, left, principal of the Arab Evangelical Episcopal School in Ramallah, West Bank, talks with Bashir Khairi in 2011

Meanwhile, the Khairis had lived as exiles in their own land – first in Ramallah, then in Gaza, and finally returning to Ramallah when Bashir was fifteen years old. In the early 1960s, in Cairo studying law, Bashir had become deeply involved in activist politics, and particularly with the Arab Nationalist Movement led by George Habash, himself a refugee from Lydda who had been among the refugees who had walked in the heat through the hills to Ramallah in July 1948.

In June1967, Bashir was practising law in Ramallah when news came of Israel’s surprise attack on Egyptian airfields following a period of rising tension between Israel and its Arab neighbours. When the Six Day War was over, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank meant, paradoxically, that it was now easier for Palestinians exiledin 1948 to visit their oldhomeland. That is how Bashir and his cousins found themselves in al-Ramla in the summer of 1967, ringing the doorbell of the house where Bashir had lived as a child. ‘Come in, feel at home,’ said Dalia:

It was a universal welcome – Make yourself at home; Mi casa es su casa; Ahlan wa-sahlan; Baruch habah – yet these particular words seemed especially strange to Bashir as he approached the front door: Feel at home.

As the cousins are shown around the house they see the bedroom that is now Dalia’s but was once Bashir’s. On the wall above her bed Dalia has tacked a posterof an Israeli soldier celebrating in the Suez Canal after the overwhelming Israeli victory in the Six Days War of 1967. For Israelis the image stood for liberation and survival, but standing with Bashir in the doorway to the bedroom, Dalia suddenly realises, for the first time, that Bashir might see the poster differently.In his childhood home, in the lemon tree his father planted in the backyard, Bashir sees dispossession and exile; Dalia, who arrived as an infant in 1948 with her family from Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, from this unpromising encounter a long friendshipdevelops,even though Bashir becomes a senior member of the politburo of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and ischarged with being involved in the bombing of asupermarket in Jerusalem in 1969. Bashir spends two decades in a total of 17 Israeli prisons, detained after hearings in closed Israeli military courts on suspicion oflinks toacts of terror carried out by the PFLP, and for helping to organize the first intifada.Bashir remains committed to a programme of resistance togainfor dispossessed Palestinians the right to return to their homeland.

Despite Bashir’s circ*mstances and politics, Dalia maintains a friendship with the Palestinian, and begins to understandBashir’s grievances about his family’s lost home. In 1991, she donates the house as a kindergarten for Arab children in al-Ramla and as a peace and educational centre called Open House which is still operating today.

Writing in the Huffington Post in 2008, following publication of The Lemon Tree, Sandy Tolan commented on the central place of 1948 in both Israeli and Palestinian narratives. ‘In Exodus,’ he wrote, ‘ the story of 1948 is exclusively about the heroic birth of Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Arabs are alternately portrayed as malicious or pathetic’. But for Palestinians, 1948 was the Nakba, or Catastrophe, a story not of survival and re-birth, but dispossession and loss:

The Nakba remains little known in the West, despite the rivers of ink and forests of newsprint that have chronicled the last six decades of struggle between the two peoples. Yet it is as central to Palestinian identity as the Holocaust is to the identity of Israel.

Seen through a Palestinian lens, the creation of Israel, sanctioned by the United Nations vote, in November 1947, to partition Palestine into two states – one for the Arabs, and one for the Jews – was not ‘western civilization’s gesture of repentance for the Holocaust,’ as the historian Michael J. Cohen has written. Rather, Palestinians saw themselves as ‘the indigenous majority on its ancestral soil,’ as the Harvard scholar Walid Khalidi has noted, and therefore ‘failed understand why they should be made to pay for the Holocaust.’ Neither did they grasp why the Jewish side, with one third the population, should be awarded 54 percent of Palestine and more than 80 percent of its cultivated citrus and grain plantations. This helps explain why the Arabs of Palestine, in peace talks five and six decades later, would fail to see Israeli concessions as ‘generous’: From their perspective, they lost 78 percent of their land to Israel in the 1948 war, and are ill-inclined to make further compromise on the 22 percent that remains.

Curiously, although Tolan’s book takes as its focus 1948 and the story of one house that changed hands in that year, I gained a greater sense from his historical account of the greater significance, not of the Holocaust, but of Zionism as being fundamental to understanding Israeli justifications for policies of territorial conquest and occupation. A liberal delicacy often surrounds the question of Israel, rooted quite naturally in the idea of the state as a refuge for Jews who had survived the Holocaust in Europe. But the historical background sketched in byTolan (or containedin many other histories) confirmsthe origins of the problem: the Zionist dream ofJewish homeland, a religious state in whichJews wouldbe a majority in their own nationin aterritory closely approximating the historicalEretz Yisrael. With its roots in 19th century Europe, and gathering pacefollowingthe British acceptance of ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ in the 1917Balfour Declaration,the Zionist project clearly pre-dates the Holocaust. The Zionist belief that the settlers were returning to a ‘land without people for a people without land’ soon provoked the first stirrings of nationalism among the Palestinian Arab population.

Remains of Palestinian buildings in al-Ramla today (photo James Morris, That Still Remains)

The house and the lemon tree. However the history is interpreted, the evidence is plain: in 1948 some 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes. Although they maintain their friendship and shared commitment to the Open House,Bashir and Dalia cannot come to any kind of agreement about the ‘right of return’:in other words, the right for Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel and have access to their stolen property. Dalia can understand the right to return as a recognition of a past injustice, but for her itcan never be, practically speaking, put into place because of the suffering it would cause Israelis and its implication for the state of Israel. For Bashir, return is simply everything he has believed in and worked towards.

In the most recent encounter between Bashir and Dalia that Tolan records in his book, in 2006 Dalia travels the short distance from Jerusalem to Ramallah, through military checkpoints and in the shadow of the Wall – the ‘security barrier’ that in the previousfouryears has been constructed to separate the West Bank from the rest of Israel. When the pair meettheir differences are revealed in apassage in which Dalia urges Bashir to recognise the value of negotiation and compromise, exemplified by the peace process established under the Oslo Accords of 1993-5:

Bashir leaned forward. ‘For Palestinians it didn’t change the daily life. It went from bad to worse. I didn’t go back to al-Ramla. We don’t have our independent state, and we don’t have our freedom. We are still refugees moving from one place to another place to another place to another place, and every day Israel is committing crimes. I can’t even be on the board of Open House. Because I’m Palestinian, not Israeli. If somebody comes yesterday from Ethiopia but he’s Jewish, he will have all the rights, when I’m the one who has the history in al-Ramla. But for them I’m a stranger.’

Dalia’s arms were folded tightly across her chest. She unfolded them and took a breath.

‘Bashir. Maybe I have no right to say what I’m going to say. We need to make sacrifices if both of us are to live here. We need to make sacrifices. And I know it’s not fair for me to say that. I know. I mean, you cannot live in your house in Ramla. I know it’s not fair. But I think we need to strengthen these people who are willing to make some compromise. Like Rabin, who paid with his life. … By not accepting the state of Israel or by not accepting the state of Palestine, I think none of us has a real life here. Israelis don’t have a real life here, either. But if you’re not okay, we’re not okay. And if we’re not okay, you’re not okay.

Now in his seventies,Bashir Khairi continues to live in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, barred from the country of his birth. Jerusalemis only10 milesfrom Ramallah but given Bashir’scirc*mstances it might as well be Timbuktu. I tried to findhow the relationship between Bashir and Dalia has evolved since the publication of The Lemon Tree, but there isn’t much to go on. This isDalia, quoted in ‘Enemy at the door‘, an article on the Sofia Echo website, in 2011:

The last time I saw Bashir was with Sandy Tolan in about 2006. He can’t come to Israel; he doesn’t have a permit because he was allegedly involved in an act of terror (a supermarket bombing) in 1969.

Has he ever admitted his crime?

I don’t know what he admitted or didn’t admit in court because it was behind closed doors. I have confronted him with this and he has never said that he did NOT do this. He just said ‘why do you call these people terrorists? They are freedom fighters’, so what do you understand from this?

But he’s still your friend and that’s how you see him?

I see him as something that grows from the same earth, from the same hole, in a way somehow part of my fate, shall we say, like family. It’s a very strong connection, to know that you’ve been living in someone else’s house.

That same year, Bashir Khairi was quoted by Noozhawk columnistKaren Telleen-Lawton in ‘Sustainable Peace and The Lemon Tree’:

She has an extraordinary conscience. She offered me back the house because it released her conscience from having a house belonging to someone else.

‘Dalia was willing to sell and give me money, or rent and give me rent,’ he said. ‘My reaction was that the house represented Palestine and Palestine was not for sale or rent. I suggested this house go for Arab children and be called ‘Dalia Kindergarten for Arab Children’ to appreciate and mark her high-class humanitarian position.’

Daliasupports a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This is the official U.S. position despite the Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza that put to question its feasibility. Khairi disagrees.

‘I still back a one-state democracy for both, with everyone having the same rights and duties,’ he told us. ‘I believe this is the best guarantee for future peace living together. Palestinian land is available for all — Christians, Muslims, Jews — all can live here. We have previously. Thoughts that we can’t live together on one land — this is a short-sighted vision that doesn’t serve peace.’

For me, too, one state seems the solution. Though it might appearas much pie in the sky as a democratic South Africa with a black president would have seemed 40 or 50 years ago, I have believed it to be the only outcome that guarantees any justice and security since reading the late TonyJudt’s Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. This week the House of Commons voted overwhelming in favour of recognition for the state of Palestine. Buthow can there be a viable Palestinian state when Israel refuses to relinquish control of the occupied territories where illegalJewish settlements continue to spread? Surelythere is a matter of principle here? When the world demandedthe dismantlingof apartheid in South Africa, there was nosuggestion that a just outcome would be white control of the greater part of the territory while granting black South Africans independence in the bantustans or homelands. Like Bashir, I believethat only a single secular, democratic state will guarantee peace and justice for all.

Remains of the tomb of Ali imam, al-Ramla (photo: borisfenus.blogspot.com)

Write down!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth…will come after a summer
Will you be angry?

Write down!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks..
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?

Write down!
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew
My father.. descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather..was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house is like a watchman’s hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!

Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks..
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!

Therefore!
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate poeple
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware ! Beware ! Beware !
Of my hunger
And my anger!

– Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Identity Card’ (1964)

See also

• The Lemon Tree: opening chapter
• Sandy Tolan’s The Lemon Tree – Bias and Misinformation Cloaked as Fact: the Zionist rejection ofthe book (Stand With Us)
• Sixty Years After the 1948 War: Sandy Tolan’s article for Huffington Post, 2008
• The Open House in Ramle: official website
• ‘A Letter to a Deportee‘: Dalia’s open letterpublished in The Jerusalem Post, January 14, 1988 following Bashir’s deportation to Lebanon
• That Still Remains: portfolio by photographer James Morris of images of Palestinian remains
• Broken Cameras: healing is achallenge
• Palestine: A PersonalHistory: review of Karl Sabbagh’s book
• Palestinian Walks: the extraordinary patience ofthings
• The Palestinian Nakba: an Israeliperspective: review ofKhirbet Khizeh
• One state for Palestinans andJews?: review of Tony Judt’s Reappraisals
• The Life and Times of MahmoudDarwish
• Under Seige: poems for Gaza by Mahmoud Darwish

Ida, directed byPawel Pawlikowski: Ida leaves the convent

Ida is a filmby the Polish director,Pawel Pawlikowski, who now works in the UK. Pawlikowski’s quiet, slow-pacedfilm, beautifully shot in monochrome, sets its storyagainst the background of thedarkest days in the recent history of his country.

There are two central characters, and at first we don’t really know who they are. In Poland in 1961, Anna(Agata Trzebuchowska) is a youngnun preparing to take her finalvows in the convent where shewas left as an orphan baby in 1945 by persons unknown. Before Idamakes herirrevocable decision the Mother Superior insists that she visit her only living relative, her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), who turns out to be an abrasive,chain-smokingmagistratewith a decided taste for alcohol and men.

While Wanda soon informs Anna that she is Jewish,bornIda Lebenstein, we begin to piece together something of Wanda’s background (her first words on meeting Anna are, ‘They didn’t tell you who I am – and what I do?’). In the aftermath of war and revolution, shewas a Stalinist state prosecutor, and admits to havingsent ‘enemies of the people’ to their death for the good of the revolution.

Ida: Wanda and Anna embark ona road trip in search of the truth

Wanda proposes to Anna that theyembarkon a road trip together to discover what became of her parents during the war. As they get closer to the truth it becomesclear that, for her own reasons,Wanda herself has been dreading what they may find.

In many ways Wanda is the most interesting character in the film. WhilstAgata Trzebuchowska brings an intense stillness to her role and her face is beautifully photographed by Ryszard Lenczewski, Trzebuchowska’s performancerarely allows us to penetrate further than her watchful stare. But Agata Kulesza’s performance as Wanda is mesmerising. As she questions the people who knew Ida’s parents inthe war about their knowledge of the family’s destruction, she is both Stalinist interrogatorandJewish avenger. She raps on theirdoors with the force of one who has known no restraint on her authority.

Ida: Agata Kulesza as Wanda

But Wanda is a woman who has her own double burden ofguilt to bear – the twin burdens of Poland’s 20th century history you might say. Inwartime, with the best intentions, she made a decision that had terrible personal consequences, while in communist postwar Poland, as ‘Red Wanda’, she destroyed others as a leading agent of theStalinist regime. By 1961, beneath a tough veneerof bitterness and contempt she survives, helped by booze, sexual hunger, and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.

The review of Ida inNew Yorkermagazine summarized in one stark paragraph the context against which this film’s story unfolds:

Between 1939 and 1945, Poland lost a fifth of its population, including three million Jews. In the two years after the war, Communists took over the government under the eyes of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. Many Poles who were prominent in resisting the Nazis were accused of preposterous crimes; the independent-minded were shot or hanged. In the movie, none of this is stated, but all of it is built, so to speak, into the atmosphere: the country feels dead, the population sparse, the mood of ordinary conversations constrained by the sure knowledge that many who survived have committed acts of betrayal or indulged willful ignorance.

Ida is but one story from millions, then. While theNazi occupation led to the murderof 3 million Polish Jews, and the killing of 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians, the number of of Stalinist victims following the Soviet invasion ofPoland is estimated at 1.8 million, including the 21,000 Polish officers killed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in the Katyn Forest.The most violent period of communist rule lasted until the death of Joseph Stalin in1953. During this time, the Polish communist regime led by President Boleslaw Bierut imprisoned orexecuted soldiersof the non-communistHome Army resistance, Catholic priests andcommunists who challenged the official line aftershow trials whicheven reached as far asWladyslaw Gomulka, vice-president in the first post-war government.

In her book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56, Ann Applebaum notes the wide ranging nature of the repression, which embracedthe Polish Women’s League, a group of volunteers set up to feed refugees in train stations; the Warsaw YMCA (closed down because of its large collection of jazz records which weresmashed with hammers); pub owners, tobacco sellers, and barbers who ‘due to their regular contacts with the public were the primary disseminators of fascist propaganda’ and the Polish Boy Scouts (targeted because they had joined the Home Armyduring World War II).

Destroying Catholic church groups was regarded as a high priorityand in 1950 Caritas, the Catholic charity, which operated orphanages and soup kitchens, was targetedfor having connections to ‘aristocrats’ and Nazi sympathizers. 1950 was the year of the ‘war against religion’, in which a total of 123 Roman Catholic priests were jailed bythe Department 5 of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland. Since the late 1940s, the department,ledby interrogator Julia Brystiger, had specialized in the persecution of Polish religious figures. Brystiger personally directed the operation to arrest and detain the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński.

In a biography that echoes the story of Ida – but inverts it – interrogator Brystygier had beenborn to a Jewish family. Nicknamed ‘Bloody Luna’ by hervictims, Brystygierleft the Ministry of Public Security in 1956. In 1975, at the age of 73, she converted to Catholicism. She died the same year.

Anna dances withthe saxophonistLis

On the road, Anna – ‘the little saint’ in Wanda’s estimation – isexposed to worldly wickedness by her aunt, happy to describe herself as a ‘slu*t’ andfar fromshy about her appetite for booze, cigarettes and men. A chance meeting with hitch-hiking jazz musician Lis (Dawid Ogrodnik) offers temptation for Anna, who finds herself attracted to the handsome young man who introduces her toColtrane’s ‘Naima’.

Agata Trzebuchowska asAnna

If you go to the cinema to see Ida, before the film begins you will seeaBBFC alert that constitutesa spoiler, warning of ‘ a suicide attempt’. It’s annoying because you can’t help but beaffected by it as the narrative unfolds: who will it be?The last act of Pawlikowski’s film is concerned with the impact on the two women of what they learn at the end of their quest. Ultimately, for both Wanda and Anna,it becomes a question of faith. For Wanda, the faith she once had in the righteous justice she meted out for the Party has beenshattered already, but what she learns in a forest piles even more guilt upon her shoulders.

Moment of truth in the forest

Anna’s choice in some respectsseems more puzzling. After samplingthe temptations of sex, music, cigarettes and alcohol, she retreats from the wildernessshe has found in her history and the society around her, reinforced in her faith.

Pawlikowski’s film looks as if it was made when it was set, and isdeeply evocative of time and place. Beautifully photographed in monochrome by Ryszard Lenczewski and framed in classic 4×3 ratio, it echoes Polish films of the 1950s such as Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (indeed, there is a scene in the characters walk between white sheets hanging from a washing line that reminded me of the famous final scene in Wajda’s film). With its measured pace and slow cutting, you can also sense theinfluence of European directorsofthe sixties and early seventies such as Robert Bresson and François Truffaut.

The film’s monochrome cinematography and unusual framing whichrepeatedlyplaces its characters at the bottom of the screen generates apowerful sense ofcharactersisolatedin a harsh, unyieldinglandscape, ravaged bywar and haunted by unwanted memories. Theweight of history bears down,forcing a coming to terms withthe past and truth.

Trailer

‘The harp and the kora appear to us like old instruments, designed for quieter sparser times’, instruments which ‘can seem out of place in this cacophonous world’, writes Andy Morgan in the sleeve-notes to Clychau Dibon, the album that took the folk-roots world by storm last year. In the magnificent surroundings of the Concert Room in Liverpool’s St Georges Hall the gorgeous music created by these two musicians from superficially-different cultures enthralled a rapt audience as they braided together notes and songs from each of their traditions to reveal unexpected commonalities between the mountains and coastsof Wales and the shores of Senegal.

Around 5,000 years ago a hunter sat idly twanging the string of his bow and the ideaof the harp was born. Egyptian tomb paintings show musicians playing various size and style harps. andremains of early harp-like instruments have beenexcavated at the siteof the Sumerian city of Ur (the Golden Lyre of Ur) and in Babylonia.From Egypt, the harp migrated along trade routes across northAfrica and, in the form of the West African kora – an instrument with 21 strings made from the tough gourd of the calabash –gave rise to a rich musical traditionperpetuated to this day by descendants of thegriots of Gambia, Senegal, Guinea and Mali – the equivalents of the Welsh bards.

The harp occupies a centralplace in the rich cultures of both West Africa and Wales and both nations share a bardic tradition of oral history expressed through music, song and verse.The frame harp first appeared in medieval western Europe in the 8th to 10th centuries; inWales there has an unbroken tradition of of harp playing for nine centuries. Like the West African griots, Welshbards, accompanying themselves on the harp, sang, recited poems and narrated storiesthat have transmitted the legends of Wales down the generations. The Robert ap Huw manuscript from the late 16th century is the oldest written collection of harp music in the world.

Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita had beenbrought together byTheatr Mwldan, Cardigan, in 2012 in a project designed to braid musicof the kora with that of the Welsh harp – vibrant threads envisaged as a multicoloured tapestry. To begin with, the plan was for a recording on which Catrin wouldpartner Toumani Diabate, the world’s greatest exponent of the kora. But circ*mstancesintervened and at short notice Seckou was drafted in for the project. (You can readmore about the origins of the project inAndy Morgan‘s feature for fRoots magazinein June 2013).The album, Clychau Dibon, was released in 2013 and by the end of the year had wonthe album of the year award fromfRoots magazine.

The duo’s concertin Liverpool on Wednesdayeveningwas, weagreed afterwards, one of the best we had ever attended. Catrin and Seckou came out onto a stage on which two koras and two Welsh harps (one concert size, one smaller electro harp) stood waiting. The lights dimmed, and the two musicians began to develop the blissful melodies heard on their album. The wayit works in each of the pieces they have developed together is that one partner takes the lead with a tune from their native tradition, while the other fills and improvises around the edges; then, almost imperceptibly, the other musician begins to develop a theme from their own culture. By the end of the piece the melodiesare so entwined that it’s almost impossible to distinguish where on ends and the other begins, or who is playing which theme.

‘Les Bras De Mer’ (live at Theatr Mwldan, March 2013):

Writing about ‘Les Bras De Mer’ in the CD sleeve notes, Andy Morgan explains how the pair braid Welsh and West African themes to createtheir music:

The island of Carabane at the mouth of the Casamance River and the wide Bae Aberteifi, or Cardigan Bay, are magical places for Seckou Keita and Catrin Finch. Those Bras de Mer (‘Arms of the Sea’) inspire the currents that flow through their fingers.

When they were working on the song Bras de Mer, Seckou remembered this old Welsh tune that he’d once played with another Welsh harpist by the name of Llio Rhydderch, but he couldn’t remember its name. Producer John Hollis found it on the Internet. It was called‘Conset Ifan Glen Teifi’, ‘The Concert of Ifan Glen Teifi’. Teifi is the name of the river that runs through Cardigan. It’s a lush and beautiful Welsh waterway and the tune fitted Seckou’s Manding melody ‘Niali Bagna’, named after an old Wolof king, like a hand fits an old glove. Seckou then added an old Manding melody called ‘Bolong’, meaning ‘The Arms of the Sea’. Finally Catrin overlaid ‘Clychau Aberdyfi’ or ‘The Bells of Aberdovey’. Everything found its place in the whole without coercion, like the pieces in a puzzle or the water of many rivers flowing into each other for their final journey to the sea. That’s how most of Clychau Diboncame together. Strange symmetries. Strange coincidences.

Seckou Keita was born in southern Senegal, in Ziguinchor,a town on the banks of the great Casamance River. He’s a descendant ofone of the great West African griot families: his mother was the daughter of a griot whose lineage stretched back centuries, while hisfather was a Keita, a descendent of the great Manding king Sundiata Keita, who founded the Mali Empire in the 14th century. Catrin Finch, meanwhile, was born in Aberystwyth, of English and German parents, and grew up in a tiny village near Aberaeron, on the shores of Cardigan Bay.

By the time Catrin and Seckou joined forces, both were recognised as among the finest players of their chosen instrument. Andy Morgan again:

Harp and a kora, woman and a man, Celt and Manding, European and African, written scores and word of mouth; you might expect Seckou Keita and Catrin Finch to be separated by unbridgeable cultural chasms, but you’d be wrong. Go deep and you’ll find strange symmetries and fabulous coincidences that bind West Africa and Wales; bards and griots, djinns and faeries, the Casamance River and the Teifi, Sundiata Keita and the 10th century Welsh King Hywel Dda, the list goes on.

Both players draw upon their ancient traditions. One songfrom Clychau Dibonperformed at the Concert Room was ‘Bamba’, a tune dedicated by Seckou to Amadou Bamba, the early 20th century mystic and Sufi religious leader from Senegal wholed a pacifist struggle against French colonialism:a man who devoted his life to the welfare ofothers, whosedeeds have been praised in numeroustales, poems – and songs by West African musicians such as Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal and Orchestra Baobab.

‘Bamba’ played atCardiff WOMEX in 2013:

Another example of how Catrin and Seckoubuildbridges between Welsh melodies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the traditional music of Senegal, Gambia and Mali ofroughly from the same periodcame with their performance of ‘Robert Ap Huw meets Nialing Sonko’. This was acollaboration that began when Finch dug out a melodycalled ‘Caniad Gosteg’ fromRobert Ap Huw’s 16th century manuscripts of transcripts for harp.Keita listened and responded with a tune henamed afterthe Manding king Nialing Sonko (famous for collecting too much tax from his people, as Seckou explained at the concert)because the tune echoed the pure Casamance kora style of his youth and Sonko was a Casamance king. Finally,Seckou added to the mix an exercise that all aspiring kora players have to master, ‘Kelefa Koungben’. More history there, too: Kelefa was another Manding leaderfrom the time whenthe kora itself was born. What’s remarkable, on CD and in liveperformance, is howseamless wasthe fit between acourtlytune frommedieval Wales and the elegant dignity of akoramelody from a bygone age.

One of the most thrilling moments in thisenthralling concert was the duo’s performance of the most inventive piece on their CD,‘Future Strings’. This began in the region of European classical music asFinch exploredthe theme from ‘Prelude from the Asturias’ by the Spanish composer Albéniz, but soon spiralled off into something almost avant-garde as Finch ran her nail down a bass string andperformed a47-string-long glissandi before knocking out rhythms on the frame of her harp as if it were a conga drum. These gymnastics were then echoed by Keita, performing all kinds of tricks on his strings beating the gourd of the kora. At one point in the piece, Finch was plucking both harps simultaneously.

Here’s an official video of Catrinand Seckou performing ‘Future Strings’ live:

Though most of the pieces performed by Finch and Keita at the concert were from the Clychau Dibon CD, they did introduce several new tunes, including two which – unlike those on the CD – included vocalisations. Introducing ‘Tryweryn’, Finch insisted that – as a Liverpool audience – weshould not takeit personally. For this was apiece inspired by the construction,in 1965, of a reservoir (we’ve passed it many times, on the from Bala to Trawsfynydd) which floodedtheTryweryn valley to provide water for Liverpool. The residents of Capel Celyn, one of the last monoglot Welsh-speaking villages were forcibly removed from homes and land owned by families there for centuries. It was the end of bitter nine-year long struggle to save the village aftera private bill sponsored by Liverpool City Council was passed byParliament despite bitter opposition by 35 out of 36 Welsh MPs.

Protest in Liverpool againstthe flooding of the Tryweryn Valley, 1965

Catrin spoke of how Tryweryn ushered in a period ofbitter conflictin Walesduring whichthe reservoir dam was bombed by Welsh nationalists. Bessie Braddock, a Labour MP for Liverpool at the time, dismissed the plight of Capel Celyn as something that would, ‘make some disturbance of the inhabitants inevitable…but that is progress.’ The remnants of that time can still be seen as you drive through Wales, she said, in fading Welsh Nationalist slogans.

‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ -‘Remember Tryweryn’ – Welsh nationalist sloganon a roadside wall near Llanrhystud, Ceredigion

Welshanger over the drowning of Capel Celyn arose again in 2005 when Liverpool City Council issued an apology for its actions: ‘We realise the hurt of 40 years ago when the Tryweryn Valley was transformed into a reservoir. For our insensitivity we apologise and hope the historic and sound relationship between Liverpool and Wales can be completely restored.

This new piece was superb, and represented a quite extraordinary performance by Catrin Finch who at one point simultaneouslyplayed both electro harp and the concert harp whilst vocalisingmemories of the lost homes and flooded valley while Keita added a wordless, soulful vocal.

Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita pla ‘Tryweryn’at WOMAD 2014

For their encore the duo returned to perform another new number with vocalisations, preceded by a short tutorial about their two instruments. It left you with the realisation that both are incredibly complex instruments – the concert harp, for instance, as well as having 47 strings, has seven pedals (compared to the two on a piano) which each modulate an octave’s strings in three different ways.

This was an enthralling concert in which Finch and Keita successfully created a blend of two different, yetsimilar, musical cultures tocreate a joyous experience. ‘Some people spend a lot of money on illegal substances in order to attain the kind of mood this music evokes’, commentedfRoots magazine when reviewing the CD. Couldn’t put it better!

Afterwards long lines queued for the CD. I bought one, having enjoyed the album up to that point from a download. But here was something that madedownloads irrelevant: the CD comes packaged inside a with beautiful hard cover,32 page full colour booklet, with photos and a knowledgeableintroduction bywriter and journalist Andy Morgan.

Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita at the Luminato Festival in Toronto, June 2014

This is a full concert lasting one hour – but note that the performance does not begin until the 15 minute point:

See also

• The Drowning Season: excellent post about the Tryweryn on the Footless Crow blog
• Flooding the Tryweryn Valley: BBC Welsh history clip
• The village drowned to give another nation water: Independent, 2010
• Tryweryn: 50 years since bombing of reservoir dam: BBC News
• How the kora came to mankind: extract from Andy Morgan’s book, Finding the One

Charles Dickens, photographed aroundthe time he was writing David Copperfield

Reading the opening chapters of David Copperfield again for the first time in more than half a century brought vividly to mind the memory myfirst encounter with Dickens’s own favourite novel, teeming with some of Dickens’s most familiar characters. I was a child, like Copperfield; I was off school and ill in bed, dirty chunks ofsnow piled in moundsalong the roadside outside, and the delicious feelingof drowsy bedroom warmth and nowhere to go but follow where Dickens leads as his narratorsees ‘the phantoms of those days go by me, accompanying the shadow of myself, in dim procession’.

That such a long-forgotten memory should come flooding back as I turned the pagesseems entirely appropriate for a book in which the narrator records the memories and early experiences which shaped his life and led him towards a deeper understanding ofthe world and his own inner feelings:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

Now a grown man, David Copperfield looks back on his life, tracing his personal growth and achievements but also recognising, with sadness, mistakes he has made and friends he has lost. The novel falls into three broad sections, of which the first two – telling of his early childhood,youth and early manhood – are undoubtedly the most memorable, approaching a state of literary perfection.

Throughout the first part of the novelDickens brilliantly combines two points ofview: the reader seesDavid’s childhood experiences as if throughthe boy’s eyes –the writing plain andpared-down – whilst at the same time the tone and occasional commentary by the older David offer amaturereflection by the narrator:

As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and lounged about at meal-times in obscure streets, the stones of which may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish feet, I wonder how many of these people were wanting in the crowd that used to come filing before me… When my thoughts go back, now, to that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts! When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things!

There is a fine example of this approach in chapter 11 when, in another incident adapted byDickens from his fragmentary autobiography, Copperfield recalls himself as a young innocent entering a pub not far from the Thames:

I remember one hot evening I went into the bar of a public-house, and said to the landlord: “What is your best—your very best—ale a glass?” For it was a special occasion. I don’t know what. It may have been my birthday.

“Twopence-halfpenny,” says the landlord, “is the price of the Genuine Stunning ale.”

“Then,” says I, producing the money, “just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.”

The landlord looked at me in return over the bar, from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer, looked round the screen and said something to his wife. She came out from behind it, with her work in her hard, and joined him in surveying me. Here we stand, all three, before me now. The landlord in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They asked me a good marry questions; as, what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I was employed, and how I came there. To all of which, that I might not commit nobody, I invented, I am afraid, appropriate answers. They served me with the ale, though I suspect it was not the Genuine Stunning: and the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door of the bar, and bending down, gave me my money back, and gave me a kiss that was half admiring, and half compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.

Hablot Browne (Phiz), ‘My magnificent order at the public house’

In DavidCopperfield,Dickens employs thefirst person narrative for the first time, and in the process he transmutes his own life experiences into a story rich in both comic and sentimental passages, and populated by some of his most memorable characters. In her study of Dickens,Jane Smiley notes that the incidents of Dickens’s early life were quite different to those in the novel, but that David Copperfield ‘seemed to evoke the feelings he had had as a child, and therefore to be true to his life as he had experienced it’.Smiley observesthat David Copperfieldevokes Dickens’s life without relating it:

The fiction frees him to contemplate not only his boyhood and young manhood, but boyhood and young manhood in general.

Dickens had begun writing an autobiography in the late 1840s which he shared with his friend and future biographer, John Forster. However, hefound the processtoo painful, and abandoned the project. He opted instead to follow Forster’s advice and work his own story into a first-person fictional narrative. Much of the detailcontained in Dickens’s lost autobiographical fragment forms the basis of chapter 11 in the novel, ‘I Begin Life on my Own Account, and Don’t Like It’.

It’s here – in Copperfield’s account of being taken from school and separated from his friends Steerforth and Traddles to work at Murdstone and Grinby’s warehouse–thatDickens draws upon his own painful memories of the time when, afterhis father had beenimprisoned for debt, he was set to work at Warren’s Blacking Factory:

A period of my life, which I can never lose the remembrance of, while I remember anything: and the recollection of which has often, without my invocation, come before me like a ghost, and haunted happier times.

Here, too, that we meet the Micawbers, whosefinancial troubles – and Micawber’sperennial hope that ‘something will turn up’ – mirror those of Dickens’s parents.When David is asked by Mrs Micawber to take some of their treasured possessions to the pawn shop to help meet their obligations, Dickens is recalling his own painful memories of having to pawn the books he read and treasured as a child.

Hablot Browne (Phiz), ‘Mrs. Gummidge casts a damp on our departure’: Barkis and Peggottydepart the upturned boat house on Yarmouth shore

In a superb passage in his monumental survey,Dickens,Peter Ackroydsuggests that David Copperfield ‘is both a novel of memories anda novel about memory’:

Memory brightens: ‘. . I have neverseen such sunlight as on those bright April afternoons . . . ‘;memory creates in the mind fresh associations: ‘ . . the Martyrsand Peggotty’s house have been inseparable in my mind ever since,and are now’; memory revives the clearest and most detailedimpressions: ‘… the scent of a geranium leaf, at this day, strikes mewith a half comical, half serious wonder as to what change hascome over me in a moment . . . ‘; memory retains the sharpestof all impressions: ‘ the face he turned up to the troubled sky, thequivering of his clasped hands, the agony of his figure, remainassociated with that lonely waste, in my remembrance, to thishour. It is always night there, and he is the only object in thescene.’ And memory brings back the earliest and most permanentimpressions of childhood, like the occasion when David sees hismother for the last time:

‘I was in the carrier’s cart when I heardher calling to me. I looked out, and she stood at the garden-gatealone, holding her baby up in her arms for me to see. It was cold,still weather and not a hair of her head, or a fold of her dress, wasstirred, as she looked intently at me, holding up her child. So Ilost her. So I saw her afterwards, in my sleep at school – a silentpresence near my bed – looking at me with the same intent face –holding up her baby in her arms.’

But there is also the mysteryof other memories, preconscious memories: ‘. . . a feeling, thatcomes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doinghaving been said and done before, in a remote time . . .’ Memory,then, as a form of resurrection and thus of human triumph; asDavid Copperfield looks out of the window he had known somany years before and sees the old sorrowful image of himself as child.

‘Long miles of road then opened out before my mind;and,toiling on, I saw a ragged way-worn boy forsaken andneglected, who should come to call even the heart now beatingagainst mine, his own.’

Thus does memory recreate the self outof adversity, linking past and present, bringing continuity andcoherence, engendering peace and stillness in the very centre ofthe active world. It is the purest and best part of Dickens’s self,the source of his being, the fountain of his tears.

Yet memory here is also such a troubling force. It is associatedwith ‘the old unhappy loss or want of something . . .’ as if inthe act of remembrance the narrator must confront and once againexperience some central bereavement; it is linked, too, with thefear and sense of ‘change in everything’; and somehow memoryis associated in Dickens’s imagination with the pain which mencause women.

Introducing the 1997 World Classics edition, Andrew Sanders describedDavid Copperfield as ‘a key text of mid-Victorian civilization, a text in which the self-fashioned hero is redefined for a post-Romantic generation’, one that combines an exploration of the moral and imaginative growth of the individualwith the contemporary concern with change and doubt. In David Copperfield there are obvious similarities with earlier novels – in thefocus on an individual hero’s adventures and on childhood, as well as itscast of comic and grotesque characters. But now there is a concern with individual development, a strain of pessimism and more carefully-planned structural development which foreshadows the later novels.

Hablot Browne (Phiz),I fall into captivity (David meets Dora)

The last time I read CopperfieldI was barely a teenager; this time I was struck by the centrality of Dickens’ views on marriage – orperhaps a better word would be uncertainties. The nub of the novel’s argument comes in chapter 45 where Annie Strong remarks to her husband, Doctor Strong, ‘There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.’ Annie’s wordshaunt the rest of the novel as David, in his marriage to Dora (the ‘child-wife’), slowly comes to realize that his and Dora’s characters are irreconcilably different:

I was thinking of all that had been said. My mind was still running on some of the expressions used. ‘There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.’ ‘The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.’ ‘My love was founded on a rock.’ But we were at home; and the trodden leaves were lying under-foot, and the autumn wind was blowing.

It will take David a painfully long time to truly understand that the feelings he has for Agnes are more than those ‘for a sister’. At certain points in the story, Dickens insertsintimations of the mature Copperfield’s understanding of his true feelings:

Oh, Agnes, sister of my boyhood, if I had known then, what I knew long afterwards – !

[…]

There was a beggar in the street, when I went down; and as I turned my head towards the window, thinking of her calm seraphic eyes, he made me start by muttering, as if he were an echo of the morning: ‘Blind! Blind! Blind!’

This is only one aspect of the clear moral thrust of the novel, which also emphasisesvalues such as: hardships in life can be overcome by hard work and an honest behaviour; goodness has nothing to do with social position; greed and ambition corrupt people’s judgement and behaviour; and suffering is part and parcel of the process of gaining maturity.

Hablot Browne (Phiz), Steerforth and Mr Mell

Throughout David Copperfield, the powerful abuse the weak and helpless–orphans, women, and the mentally disabled. Exploitation – not pity or compassion – is shown to be the rule in society. Dickens could draw on his own experience as a child for the passages thatdescribe the inhumanity of child labour and the indignities of the debtors’ prison. Murdstone can endDavid’s education and send him to work in the wine-bottling factory because Davidis too small and dependent to resist. Virtually all of thecharacters suffer at the hands of the hard-hearted or due to forces beyond their control, even though they are morally good people. Emily is ruined and spirited away by Steerforth whileher uncle Peggotty tramps Europe to find her and bring her home. Ham loses Emily and dies trying to foreign save sailors in the great storm. In a perceptive passage, the older and wiser Copperfield recalls how Steerforth causes the likeable but ineffectual teacher Mr Mells to lose his job. Traddles (‘the most unfortunate boy in the world’) is the only one to see theinjustice in Steerforth’s action, while David and the other boys continued to admire and respect Steerforth:

Poor Traddles, who had passed the stage of lying with his head upon the desk, and was relieving himself as usual with a burst of skeletons, said he didn’t care. Mr. Mell was ill-used.

‘Who has ill-used him, you girl?’ said Steerforth.

‘Why, you have,’ returned Traddles.

‘What have I done?’ said Steerforth.

‘What have you done?’ retorted Traddles. ‘Hurt his feelings, and lost him his situation.’

‘His feelings?’ repeated Steerforth disdainfully. ‘His feelings will soon get the better of it, I’ll be bound. His feelings are not like yours, Miss Traddles. As to his situation—which was a precious one, wasn’t it?—do you suppose I am not going to write home, and take care that he gets some money? Polly?’

We thought this intention very noble in Steerforth, whose mother was a widow, and rich, and would do almost anything, it was said, that he asked her. We were all extremely glad to see Traddles so put down, and exalted Steerforth to the skies: especially when he told us, as he condescended to do, that what he had done had been done expressly for us, and for our cause; and that he had conferred a great boon upon us by unselfishly doing it.

A Will Office, from ‘Picturesque Sketches of London’ by Thomas Miller, 1852

But this wouldn’t be Dickens if, amidst the serious moral lessons there were not high comedy. My favourite part of the story is the chapter entitled ‘My First Dissipation’ in which Copperfield, newly-establishedasan articled clerk in Doctors’ Commons(a ‘common house’ of ‘doctors of law’ practising civil law) and settledin his accommodation – ‘a singularly desirable, and compact set of chambers… with a view of the river’, decides to invite his friends round for‘a little house-warming’:

I abandoned myself to enjoyment.

I began, by being singularly cheerful and light-hearted; all sorts of half-forgotten things to talk about, came rushing into my mind, and made me hold forth in a most unwonted manner. I laughed heartily at my own jokes, and everybody else’s; called Steerforth to order for not passing the wine; made several engagements to go to Oxford; announced that I meant to have a dinner-party exactly like that, once a week, until further notice; and madly took so much snuff out of Grainger’s box, that I was obliged to go into the pantry, and have a private fit of sneezing ten minutes long.

I went on, by passing the wine faster and faster yet, and continually starting up with a corkscrew to open more wine, long before any was needed. I proposed Steerforth’s health. I said he was my dearest friend, the protector of my boyhood, and the companion of my prime. I said I was delighted to propose his health. I said I owed him more obligations than I could ever repay, and held him in a higher admiration than I could ever express. I finished by saying, ‘I’ll give you Steerforth! God bless him! Hurrah!’ We gave him three times three, and another, and a good one to finish with. I broke my glass in going round the table to shake hands with him, and I said (in two words)

‘Steerforth—you’retheguidingstarofmyexistence.’

I went on, by finding suddenly that somebody was in the middle of a song. Markham was the singer, and he sang ‘When the heart of a man is depressed with care’. He said, when he had sung it, he would give us ‘Woman!’ I took objection to that, and I couldn’t allow it. I said it was not a respectful way of proposing the toast, and I would never permit that toast to be drunk in my house otherwise than as ‘The Ladies!’ I was very high with him, mainly I think because I saw Steerforth and Grainger laughing at me—or at him—or at both of us. He said a man was not to be dictated to. I said a man was. He said a man was not to be insulted, then. I said he was right there—never under my roof, where the Lares were sacred, and the laws of hospitality paramount. He said it was no derogation from a man’s dignity to confess that I was a devilish good fellow. I instantly proposed his health.

Somebody was smoking. We were all smoking. I was smoking, and trying to suppress a rising tendency to shudder. Steerforth had made a speech about me, in the course of which I had been affected almost to tears. I returned thanks, and hoped the present company would dine with me tomorrow, and the day after—each day at five o’clock, that we might enjoy the pleasures of conversation and society through a long evening. I felt called upon to propose an individual. I would give them my aunt. Miss Betsey Trotwood, the best of her sex!

Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as ‘Copperfield’, and saying, ‘Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn’t do it.’ Now, somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair—only my hair, nothing else—looked drunk.

Somebody said to me, ‘Let us go to the theatre, Copperfield!’ There was no bedroom before me, but again the jingling table covered with glasses; the lamp; Grainger on my right hand, Markham on my left, and Steerforth opposite—all sitting in a mist, and a long way off. The theatre? To be sure. The very thing. Come along! But they must excuse me if I saw everybody out first, and turned the lamp off—in case of fire.

Owing to some confusion in the dark, the door was gone. I was feeling for it in the window-curtains, when Steerforth, laughing, took me by the arm and led me out. We went downstairs, one behind another. Near the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation for it.

Hablot Browne (Phiz), The Emigrants

One interesting aspect of David Copperfield that reflects Dickens’s tendency to incorporate contemporary details in his novels is that he has several of the major characters emigrate to Australia: the Micawbers, Mr. Peggotty, Emily, Martha, and Mr. Mell, the wronged school-teacher. Each of these characters issuccessful in beginning a new life in the English colony.

Whilst writing David Copperfield, Dickens had developed a keen interest in Australian emigration, believing that it represented the possibility of starting a new life abroad for families with few prospects in Britain. In the first issue ofHousehold Words, the two-penny weekly magazine of original short fiction and crusading social journalism launched by Dickens on 30 March 1850, there had appeared a‘Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters‘ which consisted ofa number of emigrants’ letters passed onto him by the founder of the Family Colonisation Loan Society, Mrs. Caroline Chisholm, whom Dickenslater satirized for her ‘telescopic philanthropy’ as Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House.

In apreface to the letters, Dickens stated the case in favour ofthe Society’s scheme for transferring the poor, unemployed, and starving from the slums of London, Liverpool, Manchester, and other blighted urban areas to the ‘Bush’ and the new townsof Australia, where they could contribute their energies and skills to the greater good of the Empire and build prosperous futures for themselves.

Five months later, in the 17th number of David Copperfield, Dickens despatches a number of his characters to the antipodes,resolving the Micawbers’ financial difficulties, and enabling MrPeggotty, Emily and Marthato make a new life. Micawber’s initial reaction to the idea is less than enthusiastic:

‘Why, what a thing it would be for yourselves and your family, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, if you were to emigrate now.’

‘Capital, madam, capital,’ urged Mr. Micawber, gloomily.

‘That is the principal, I may say the only difficulty, my dear Mr. Copperfield,’ assented his wife.

In the illustration by Phiz we see the figures of Micawber, Peggotty, and David Copperfield as they shake hands before the departure of the emigrant shipat Gravesend. It’s a scene of working class men, women, and children crowdedinto restrictedquartersbelow deck in which Phiz has drawn uponDickens’s allusion to the 17thcentury Dutch genre painter Ostade, notable for painting the gloomy interiors of working class homes and taverns:

It was such a strange scene to me, and so confined and dark, that, at first, I could make out hardly anything; but, by degrees, it cleared, as my eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, and I seemed to stand in a picture by Ostade. Among the great beams, bulks, and ringbolts of the ship, and the emigrant-berths, and chests, and bundles, and barrels, and heaps of miscellaneous baggage – ‘lighted up, here and there, by dangling lanterns; and elsewhere by the yellow daylight straying down a windsail or a hatchway—were crowded groups of people, making new friendships, taking leave of one another, talking, laughing, crying, eating and drinking; some, already settled down into the possession of their few feet of space, with their little households arranged, and tiny children established on stools, or in dwarf elbow-chairs; others, despairing of a resting-place, and wandering disconsolately. From babies who had but a week or two of life behind them, to crooked old men and women who seemed to have but a week or two of life before them; and from ploughmen bodily carrying out soil of England on their boots, to smiths taking away samples of its soot and smoke upon their skins; every age and occupation appeared to be crammed into the narrow compass of the ‘tween decks.

In this departure scene, the figures of the two fallen and homeless women,Martha and Emily, are hidden in the shadows. They, too, reflect Dickens’s active concern with working class conditions and his active involvement in a project to rescue prostitutes from exploitation and destitution.While he waswriting David Copperfield, Dickens was actively involved in the day-to-day operation of Urania Cottage, a home for homeless women, which he administered on behalf of his friend, the philanthropist Angela Burdett Coutts. The home aimedto separate homeless, and ‘fallen’ women from their formerlifestyle, to educate them in the execution of household duties and self-discipline, and then help them emigrate to Australia to begin new lives.

Dickens signature on a first edition of David Copperfield (full story here)

There are moments in David Copperfield when Dickens’s writing approaches the poetic. I was taken, especially, with thispassage from the introduction to chapter 43 (you can imagine itbeing translated in a filmed adaptation) in which Dickens evokestime passing:

Weeks, months, seasons, pass along. They seem little more than a summer day and a winter evening. Now, the Common where I walk with Dora is all in bloom, a field of bright gold; and now the unseen heather lies in mounds and bunches underneath a covering of snow. In a breath, the river that flows through our Sunday walks is sparkling in the summer sun, is ruffled by the winter wind, or thickened with drifting heaps of ice. Faster than ever river ran towards the sea, it flashes, darkens, and rolls away.

David Copperfield was published in instalments from 1849 to 1850 and in book form in 1850. Dickens wrote in the preface to the first edition of being deeplyaffected by its completion:

An Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever.

‘Dickens’s Dream’:Robert Buss’s unfinished posthumous painting of the author in his chair, dreaming of his creations, who flutter in outline around his head.

The completion of the novel coincided with a tragic period in Dickens’s life. Histhird daughterwas born in August 1850, just asDickens had decided that Dora in the novel must die. Curiously, he named his new daughterDora. Hiswife Catherine was unwell for months after the birth.

Dickens finished writing David Copperfield on 21 October 1850. He wrote to Forster:

If I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.

In the coming year Dickens would suffer two devastating losses: first the death of his father, and then in April 1851, the death of his baby daughter, Dora. In these monthsof the year‘in which all the bleakness of Bleak House descend[ed] upon him’ (Ackroyd), Dickens began work on possibly his greatest novel, and certainly my own favourite.

Re-reading Dickens

• The Pickwick Papers
• Oliver Twist
• Nicholas Nickleby, the most scrumdiddlyumptious story
• The Old Curiosity Shop
• BarnabyRudge
• Martin Chuzzlewit
• The Christmas Books
• Dombey and Son

• Charles Dickens: a bicentennial fanfare
• In Dickens’ footsteps (1): Doughty Street
• In Dickens’ footsteps (2): Dickens and London exhibition
• In Dickens footsteps (3): a walk through the City

Lucinda Williams:Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone

Today’s post celebrates a career masterpiece from Lucinda Williams, purveyor ofcountry-soul, rock’n’roll blues – call it what you will – who for the past thirty years has been writing passionate andfiercelyconfessional songs rich inflawed and brokencharacters and rooted in the landscape ofthe AmericanSouth. I’ll also trace connectionsbetween the albumand two photographers whose images also portray in intimate detail the landscapes and people of the South.

LucindaWilliams first came to my attention in 1988 when Rough Trade released her eponymous second album of original songs (actually, her third collection, but the first to get any attention over here). Mixing country, blues, and folk and with a voice all heartache, Lucinda Williamsdefiantly proclaimed– in the words of one of its stand-out songs – ‘Am I too blue for you?’ Anotheralbumhighlight was ‘Passionate Kisses’ in which Williams sang that she ‘shouted out to the night’:

Give me what I deserve, ’cause it’s my right!
Shouldn’t I have this,
Shouldn’t I have all of this, and
Passionate kisses?

Through seven succeeding studio albums Williams continued to recordsongs of broken relationships and tragic loss, many apparentlydrawnfrom episodes in her own life: songs ofgrief and joy in which she fearlesslyexposed herself inmoments of rage, excess and self-disgust. Triumphant albums such as Sweet Old World, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Essence and World Without Tearswere filled withstark responses to flawed men and failed love affairs. Who could forgetthe startling image, from ‘Ventura’ fromWorld Without Tears of the singer as she ‘lean[s] over the toilet bowl’ and ‘throwsup [her]confession’?

Those early albums were chock-full withbrutally honest songs ofsorrow andgrief in the face of personal tragedy, the death or the suicide of a close friend. Sweet Old World opened with two such songs. One of them, ‘Pineola’, was stark and got straight to the point:

When Daddy told me what happened
I couldn’t believe what he just said
Sonny shot himself with a 44
And they found him lyin’ on his bed

I could not speak a single word
No tears streamed down my face
I just sat there on the living room couch
Starin’ off into space

Mama and Daddy went over to the house
To see what had to be done
They took the sheets off of the bed
And they went to call someone

Both songs were aboutFrank Sanford, a poet Williamsknew in Austin who committed suicide in the early 1990s.Lucinda Williams’ albums have never beenuniformly dark, thoughneither have they constitutedlight listening. But the payback for spending time with them hasalways been her defiantsearch for meaning and her assertion that it is possible totranscendthesorrow in our lives.

Lucinda Williams

Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is a double album of20 songs, nearly all of them classics, delivered bya 61-year old woman rechargedand at the height of her creative powers. This isWilliams’ most expansive collection, not just in terms of length and number of songs, but in two other senses as well. In many of these songsthe personal becomes angrily political, while nearly all are allowed to develop over five or six minutes, allowing the excellentroster of assembled playersthe space to create a a rich musical backdrop for the singer’s spare lyrics. As Paul Rice observed in his review forSlantmagazine:

There’s poetry in music, but it’s never found in words alone. Perhaps no living artist exemplifies this better than Lucinda Williams: She isn’t a poet, and her lyrics are often sparse almost to the point of cliché, but she enlivens them with the specificity of her vocal delivery. Her range is limited, but she uses her voice’s eccentricities to maximum emotional effect.

Lucinda Williams isn’t a poet – but her father is, and for the first time she has adapted one of his poems as the album’s opener.Miller Williams is a poet, translator and editor of some renown in the Stateswithover thirty books to his name. He recently retired from teaching at the University of Arkansas, and is perhaps best known for reading hispoem ‘Of History and Hope’ at BillClinton’s secondinauguration.

‘Compassion’ by Miller Williams

For the opening track, Lucinda has chosen to perform her father’s poem ‘Compassion’, playing it solo – just vocal and her acoustic guitar.‘You do not know what wars are going on/Down there where the spirit meets the bone,’ shesings, her voice as rough as sandpaper. It makes an interesting case study of the difference between poetry and song:Lucinda repeats key line’s from her father’s poem – ‘Always a sign’ and ‘Down where the spirit meets the bone’ – to build the rhythm that a song needs.This is her father’spoem on the page:

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.

The rest of the album doesn’t sound like this track at all, but itsmoral imperative – the importance of empathy – surfaces again and againin subsequent lyrics.

After this,the band kicks intoaTom Petty-style rocker, ‘Protection’, with Williams’ short-to-the-point lyricpropelled forwardby thedriving guitars of Greg Leisz and the Wallflowers’ Stuart Mathis. ‘Living in a world full of endless troubles, where darkness doubles’, Williams sings, she needs protection – from the enemies of love, goodness, kindness, rock’n’roll. And then the punchline:

But my burden is lifted when I stand up
And use the gift I was given for not giving up

The backing musicians on this album are superb – they includePete Thomas and Davey Faragher of Elvis Costello’s Imposters, Southern soul legend Tony Joe White, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan, and and Jakob Dylanall making appearances, alongside regulars Greg Leisz, Jonathan Wilson, Pete Thomas and Davey Faragaher.

Another song of simple, yet powerful, repetitions is ‘Foolishness’ on which Williams rails against ‘All of this foolishness in my life’. Against relentlessly pulsingpiano, bass and electric guitar that eventually builds to a crescendo, the singer rejectsall the fear-monger and liars ‘talking trash and offering pie in the sky’ she is beset by. She vows tostand her ownground: ‘What I do in my own time/Is none of your business and all of mine’. She could be talking about intrusions into her personal life, but this has the universal feel of, say, Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’; I sense that she is raging against intolerance, bigotry and the politics of hate.

The joys and sorrowsof personal relationshipshave always been central toWilliams’ concerns, and there are certainly songs that pursue that theme on this double set, but she has a lot more to say about the world around her this time. Another fine song which illustrates this is ‘East Side of Town’ in which she identifies with the marginalized, inhabiting the persona of someone living in poverty on the wrong side of the tracks, spitting venom at a politician venturing from the bubble inhabited by politicians these days into anareahe can never understand. Although ‘East Side of Town’ was written and recorded before the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri the fatal shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, it could bea soundtrack for the violence that reflects a country stilldivided by prejudice and inequality. And you don’t have to be American to feel the power of the track:

I hear you talk about your millions
And your politics
You wanna crosss the poverty line
And then you wanna come have a look around …

You don’t know what you’re talking about
When you find yourself in my neighbourhood
You can’t wait to get the hell out
You wanna see what it means to suffer
You wanna see what it means to be down …

You got your ideas and your visions
And you say you sympathise
You look but you don’t listen
There’s no empathy in your eyes
You make deals and promises …

On ‘West Memphis’ Williams recounts a real-life storyof injustice, singing from the perspective of a falsely accused convict, indicting America’s broken criminal justice system with a simple line: ‘That’s just the way we do things here in West Memphis’.

Recently,in an interview with the American website poets.org,Lucinda’sfather said:‘My poetry and her songs – you could say they both have dirt under the fingernails. In my writing, I try to get down to the nuts and bolts of living, and there’s no question that Lucinda does that, too. Her music is not abstract. There’s real sweat in every song.’

Birney Imes, ‘The Social Inn, Gunnisson’,1989

The dirt and the sweat – so much a feature of earlier albums – can still be foundhere as Williams extracts some sort of wisdom from the wreckage of failed relationships.On what is perhaps the album’s catchiest number, ‘Burning Bridges’, Lucindawatches as a friend careers toward self-destruction. But this is also an album filled with the strength of hope, the determination to overcome hurt and pain, and the joy of living. She sings of the hard work that’s neededto hold a relationship togetheron ‘Stand Right By Each Other’, while ‘Stowaway in Your Heart’ is one of her most affecting love songs. ‘Walk On’ addresses a young woman, urging her to recognise that though ‘life is full of heartbreak’, yet ‘it’s never more than you can take’:

You’ll win with a little struggle
‘Cause you’re really not that fragile
So walk on

At the end of the first CD is ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, the loveliest andmost fragile songof this collection, full of defeat and resignation. But three songs into the second CD we encounter‘When I Look at the World’, where Williams sings:

I’ve been locked up, I’ve been shut out
I’ve had some bad dreams,
I’ve been filled with regret
I’ve made a mess of things, I’ve been a total wreck
I’ve been disrespected,been taken for a ride
I’ve been rejected and had my patience tried

‘But then,’ she continues, ‘I look at the world and all its glory – and it’s a different story’.

On ‘Temporary Nature (Of Any Precious Thing)’ Williamsnotes all of the things that ‘love might cost’, beforeasserting that love ‘can never live without the pain of loss’. Life’s never fair and it can be rough, she sings, but ‘the temporary nature of any precious thing’ just makes it more precious, ‘butnot easier to lose’. The album’s central message of personal responsibility for others is emphasised in ‘Everything But the Truth’ where Williams sings that ‘You got the power to make/this mean old world abetter place’

Before you can have a friend
You gotta be one

The album opened with Lucinda’s version of her father’s poem ‘Compassion’; it closes with another cover – a gorgeousten-minute account of JJ Cale’s ‘Magnolia’. This is exceptional, a slowly-evolving, mesmerising performance in which Williams slows the pace of Cale’s original,her languorous vocal drawing out the depth of longing in Cale’s lyric:

Whippoorwill’s singing
Soft summer breeze
Makes me think of my baby
I left down in New Orleans

Lucinda’s soulful vocal is embroideredwiththe delicate interplay between the guitars of GregLeisz and Bill Frisell, drifting and serene.

‘Magnolia’ makes a fine conclusion to an outstanding album – adocument in whichLucinda Williams bares her soulto the world, as she has always done.It’sa masterpiece.

Birney Imes, ‘Turks Place, Laflore County’, 1989

The photos on the album cover caught my attention, and reading the small print I learned that they are by Birney Imes, a photographer from Mississippi. The images are from his collectionJuke Joint, an iconic masterpiece originally published in 1990 in whichImes documentedthevanishingblack juke joints of the Mississippi Delta in haunting and evocative photographs. Juke Joint is the same book that provided the cover for Lucinda’s Car Wheels On A Gravel Road (above), a photo that inspired the song ‘2 Kool 2 Be Forgotten’ on that album:

You can’t depend on anything really
There’s no promises there’s no point
There’s no good there’s no bad
In this dirty little joint
No dope smoking no beer sold after 12 o’clock
Rosedale Mississippi Magic City Juke Joint
Mr. Johnson sings over in a corner by the bar
Sold his soul to the devil so he can play guitar
Too cool to be forgotten
Hey hey too cool to be for gotten
Man running thru the grass outside
Says he wants to take up serpents
Says he will drink the deadly thing
And it will not hurt him
House rule no exceptions
No bad language no gambling no fighting
Sorry no credit don’t ask
Bathroom wall reads is God the answer yes:
Too cool to be forgotten

Birney Imes, ‘The Social Inn, Gunnisson’,1989

For Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone,Lucinda returned once again to Imes’ photographs, selecting two for the album cover. She told one interviewer that she ‘really loved the way colours popped’ and thought the idea ofjuke joints as places where the spirit meets the bone was a perfect fit for the album’stitle.

Birney Imes, ‘The Black Gold Club, Durant’, 1989

For more than 20 years Birney Imes roamed the countryside of his native Mississippi photographing the people and places he encountered along the way. Working in both black and white and colour, Imes’ photographs documentedjuke joints and dilapidated restaurants scattered across the Mississippilandscape.

Birney Imes, ‘Royal Crown Cafe, Boyle, Mississippi’, 1983

One reviewer observed thathe introduces the viewer to ‘the characters and locales that linger in the margins of Southern memory and culture.’

Birney Imes, ‘King Club, Glendora, Mississippi’, 1984

‘Sometimes the hair on the back of my neck literally stands up when I enter these places’, Imes once remarked. ‘There are some really rough people in them. But I’ve always believed you should photograph what you’re scared of.’

Birney Imes, ‘Juke Joint’

Imes’ photographs have been collected in three books: Juke Joint, Whispering Pines and Partial to Home, and have been exhibited in solo shows in the United States and Europe. Imesowns the local newspaper in Columbus, Mississippi.

Birney Imes, ‘Emma Byrd’s Place, Marcella’, 1989

In the Afterword to Juke JointBirney Imes writes:

Growing up white in the segregated South of the 1950s, I was only vaguely aware of another culture, another world that existed in the midst of my own. As a child I saw things out of the corner of my eye, but the question of race was one I never had to face straight on. When my high school was integrated in the late sixties, the veil began to part, and I started to see the richness and diversity of a culture that till then had been hidden from me. When I began photographing six or seven years later, it was in part my wish and my need to overcome this ignorance that helped make my choice of subject an obvious one.

Birney Imes, ‘Blume with T.P., Summer, 1986’

One of the delights of Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is hearing the guitar ofBill Frisell – and therein lies another connection with a photographer of the South. Some five years ago Frisell released an album with the strange-sounding title, Disfarmer. Ithad been inspired by the story of Mike Disfarmer a small town eccentric from Heber Springs, Arkansas. (When Lucinda Williams was a child, her father, after teachingat various universities across the South finally settled in Fayetteville, Arkansas, havingbeing appointed to teach at the University of Arkansas.)

Disfarmer is an unusual name – because Mikemade it up, changing his name to indicate a rift with both his kin and his agrarian surroundings. He was born Michael Meyer in 1884 and legally changed his name to Disfarmer to disassociate himself from the farming community in which he plied his trade and from his own kinfolk – claiming that a tornado had accidentally blown him onto the Meyer family farm as a baby.

Disfarmer set up a portrait studio in Heber Springs and photographed members of the local community, producing portraits that endowed his subjects with a sense of dignity. His photographs capture the essence of a particular community at a particular time with solemnity and a touching simplicity. After his death in the 1950s the negatives and glass plates recording his portraits were rescued and eventually became widely known: the full story is here.

Disfarmer’s photos were described by Howard Smith in Village Voice as, ‘portraits that are spectacularly profound…visual genius…’ Hereis a small selection of hisastonishing portraits:

The tunes on Bill Frisell’salbum had beencommissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio to accompany a retrospective of the work.

There’s a documentary film about Disfarmer (which I haven’t seen); this is a trailer for it:

There’s also a documentary aboutBill Frisell’s Disfarmer project; this is a trailer:

And this is a YouTube clip of examples of Disfarmer’s photographs set to Bill Frisell’s tunes:

See also

• Miller & Lucinda Williams: All in the Family: interesting piece aboutfather and daughter
• Compassion Play: Lucinda Williams Is on the Double (Huffington Post interview)