Judith Johnson's Blog, page 11

Penny for them - a little light relief!

When Aunty Janet took me and my three cousins by train to Catalonia in the mid-1960s, we stopped en route in Paris. On visiting the Eiffel Tower, I retorted “Blimey, you’d think if they could build something like this, they could do a proper toilet!” This was the era when most loos in France were a hole in the ground with two footprints either side. My ten year old self was not amused!  

Since then I’ve always kept a keen eye on loos during foreign travels: Southern Italian bar and café owners clearly pride themselves not only on the quality of their coffee, but also the cleanliness of their toilets, however humble the establishment; in Dubrovnik I encountered a modern version of the hole in the ground, but this was stainless-steel, state of the art, and very regularly cleaned.

The 1st class rosette though must go to the Austrian Tyrol, where the toilets are universally spotless, even in the tiniest mountain hut. I found the following quote in my trusty Hammerton’s Peoples of All Nations (1920, so you’ll excuse the patronising language) – “In their habits the Austrian farmers and cultivators – the great majority of the people – are very particular about cleanliness, both in their dress and their surroundings. Some of the inns which cater specially for country-folk are as dainty and well-managed as any in the land. The rooms are light and airy, the tables are covered with tempting cloths, and have flowers on them, the food is excellent, and the beer beyond praise. To an English visitor who showed his surprise at finding an hotel of this character run for peasants, the manager replied: “The peasants would not come here if it were not perfectly clean and well arranged.”

I can vouch for the continuation of these standards a century on. My favourite of all must be the Gipfelrestaurant at the top of the Hohe Salve in Soll, where you can both ‘spend a penny’ and enjoy what has to be one of the finest views it’s possible to witness from a toilet seat anywhere in the whole wide world!

Despite this blog post, I am hopefully not more than averagely obsessive about toilets. I sometimes genuinely shudder to think what visitors to our sceptre’d isle, especially Austrians, must think of the mucky facilities on offer at most British attractions. The filthiest toilet I’ve ever seen was in a trendy coffee house in Chiswick a year or two back. Its elegant customers sat reading their broadsheets and munching patisserie – little did they know what horrors awaited them in the water closet. I only just resisted the impulse to let the manager know what I thought  of his  euphemism! 

Seriously though, at a time when many people are out of work, what’s the problem with paying someone a decent wage to keep your café’s toilet clean?  There’s a restaurant on Hastings sea-front serving good, reasonably-priced food in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere, and we’ve enjoyed going there on a number of past occasions, but the toilet is dirty and unkempt. It kind of begs the question, If they can’t keep the toilet clean, what’s the kitchen like?  

So, among my many Walter Mitty fantasy jobs (Blue Badge Guide, obituary writer, Studs Terkel’s personal assistant, paid travel blogger!) I can add Secret Toilet Policewoman.  

Beware – I may drop by to inspect the littlest room in your establishment very soon!
 

Julie Madly Deeply

When my Mum took me to see The Sound of Music at Cranbrook Regal, we both fell in love with the film. Mum was working summers in the Austrian Tyrol, and my brother and I had spent several holidays staying with her. Somehow, Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp fused for me with an idealised image of my mother.  I think we went back a couple more times to see the film, though we couldn't compete with the lady in Cardiff, who famously went every night for its whole run of years!  

The film has stood the test of time, and is still a magnificent example of story-telling of a very high quality, embodying something essentially valuable about the human spirit. If I ever find myself low in spirits (thankfully rarely!) I know that watching Julie and the cast will lift my heart.  Some years ago, when Martin and I visited Salzburg with our infant son, we may have tested our Bavarian friends' patience beyond endurance by bursting into song all over town, and I recently got very over-excited when I was told by a distant cousin that my father's five-times removed cousins actually live in a Schloss in Salzburg where part of the film was shot. Whoohoo!
 
I went to the EM Forster Theatre in Tonbridge last night to see Julie Madly Deeply, a wonderful evening of cabaret starring Sarah-Louise Young, ably supported on piano by Michael Roulston, her musical director. I'd have resisted anything that had a whiff of snideness about Julie Andrews, but on reading that "this is a delightfully funny, candid love letter to a true show business survivor", I booked right away! It was a great show. We went with two gay friends, seasoned devotees of musical theatre, and they too were so happy to have seen it. The show has been a huge hit in the West End, and is now on tour, opening in Belfast last week, and it was a tribute to Sarah-Louise that by the end of the evening she had warmed up a reserved Kent audience into a loved-up group, who floated out of the theatre on huge smiles!
 
At one point in the evening, Sarah-Louise asked if there was anyone in the audience who had seen Julie Andrews in the theatre. Last night there were two: a lady who had seen her in pantomime at the Palladium, when both she and Julie were 11 years old, inspiring her to sing in amateur choirs throughout the following decades, and another, who had seen Julie in My Fair Lady at Drury Lane, doubly memorable as it was on the eve of the Bay of Pigs crisis.

Most of us know Julie Andrews best from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music and, latterly, The Princess Diaries, but it was great to hear something about the intervening years. We were told that she will be visiting the UK in May. Sarah-Louise has never met her in person, and you can't help hoping that Julie might pop over before then to see the show incognito!

Meantime, if you're a SoM fan, I can highly recommend you  book up for a date on the rest of the tour  (see the website below for venues)  - I promise, you won't be disappointed!

www.juliemadlydeeply.com

 

Richard Cobden & Stanley Spencer

In Camden Town yesterday, I came across a gentleman whose statue has become a favoured perch for the local pigeon community. These tributes to men and women of the past so often receive nothing but an odd glance from people rushing by, it reminded me of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias – a reminder of our mortality, however high we may climb:





I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed
And on the pedestal these words appear –

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. 

When I got home, I looked up Richard Cobden (the man remembered by the statue) in my Chambers Biographical Dictionary, and found that he was an economist and politician, ‘the Apostle of Free Trade’. His father lost his farm in 1814, and Richard, the fourth of eleven children, was sent for five years to a ‘Dotheboys’ school in Yorkshire (was this like the school portrayed in Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, I wonder, run by the brutal Wackford Squeers?). Cobden was the most prominent member of the Anti-Corn-Law League. He opposed the Crimean War, and spoke out in favour of the North during the American Civil War. The statue was erected by public subscription, it tells us, whose principal contributor was Napoleon III, perhaps in tribute to the treaty of commerce with France which Cobden arranged in 1860.

What a lot of history you can learn when you’re out walking!  

We went to London primarily to see Stanley Spencer’s marvellous World War One paintings from the Sandham Memorial Chapel, at Burghclere. They were on loan from the National Trust and exhibited at Somerset House. The exhibition was free and the queuing well worth it. I found particularly affecting the panels set in the Beaufort War Hospital, where Spencer worked as an orderly after volunteering in 1915, such as the portrayal of a young shell-shock patient cleaning the floor compulsively with a cloth while orderlies rush by bearing coffee pots, or another wrapped up in quilts with his feet resting on a hot-water bottle. When Spencer was twenty-four he volunteered for service in Macedonia with the 68th Field Ambulance unit, and several of the paintings depict his experiences there. I was struck by the painting of an encampment where a shell has just landed, with stunned soldiers holding their hands over agonised ears.  

Lastly, as a devoted follower of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey & Maturin novels, I was intrigued to catch glimpses of Somerset House’s illustrious Naval history which may call for further investigation – another day out in London beckons!

New York - a box of delights

In my teens and early twenties, I happily read my way through the works of Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, Damon Runyon, Helen Hanff, Ed McBain and anyone else I could find who wrote about lives set in New York.  Cagney & Lacey and Telly Savalas’ Kojak were TV favourites, and I always wanted to see New York for myself.

I made a very brief working visit to NYC in the Spring of 2001 – among other things I broke a tooth on a Sourdough Pretzel Nugget, shuffled with beating heart round the top of the Empire State Building with my back to the wall, saw Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More at the Frick, Takashi Murakami’s installation in Grand Central Station, and Van Gogh’s Starry Night at MOMA, popped into the Marble Collegiate Church where Norman Vincent Peale had preached, and last but not least stayed a couple of nights after business was done with Sharon, an old friend living in the Bronx. We first met at a drama class at the City Lit in the mid-1970s, when I was a lonely teenager recently arrived in London.

Just after Christmas, I was fortunate enough to re-visit New York with my husband, when we stayed for a week with Sharon, who kindly invited us to stay, and whose hospitality and gift of her time was central to our enjoyment.

It was Martin’s first time in the city, and we were both excited to be there, not only for the sights, but also because of the joy of meeting up with old friends not seen for many years.  There’s nothing quite like that rush of warmth round the heart when you embrace, and stand back to scan each other’s faces for the superficial changes time has wrought.

I worked once with a girl who liked to stay in the Hilton whenever she travelled, but for us the anonymous homogenised luxury hotel is a cold dish – and staying in the Bronx was a fantastic accompaniment to Manhattan. It was great to meet neighbours, and a visit to the Riverdale Diner persuaded me that on any future trip I should ask for a child’s portion, or maybe just stick to a starter!  The size of the menu threw me into a paralysis of indecision. Apartments are heated super-efficiently throughout the winter, and Martin and I had to open the window at night in order to sleep, but it was great to spend time just sitting on the sofa after the day’s outings, chat, and catch the odd Judge Judy!

We visited The Cloisters, with its mediaeval tapestries and stained glass, and marvelled in particular at the stunning carving of a 16th-century Flemish boxwood rosary bead, the size of a walnut; we ate plantain and unlabelled exotic Dominican dishes at the 24-hour buffet on Dyckman and Broadway; we took the air in the New York Botanical Gardens, and queued for the Holiday Train show, featuring models of famous New York buildings made from seeds, stalks, and leaves, set amongst the jungle plants in the Haupt Conservatory, the pleasure enhanced watching children’s enchantment with the model trains that weaved in and out; we had coffee and macaroons at Egidio’s off Arthur Street, where a photo of the owner  meeting a visiting Cardinal during a parade day in Bronx’s Little Italy was proudly displayed; and lastly we hit another famous Bronx sight: the Garabedian family’s house, where for 40 years a Christmas tableau has been proudly displayed – truly unique!

We ticked off most of a short-list of attractions this time, though torrential rain and massive queues one day left some choices for a future trip – there’s no way you can get round this city in one eight day visit. Having stayed in Central Park West last time round, I wanted to see some of the Lower East Side, and a must was the Tenement Museum. We booked for the ‘Hard Times’ tour, and our guide Annie fitted in a fantastic amount in sixty minutes. The upper storeys of this amazing property were abandoned as rooms to let in 1924, when a new law made it mandatory for new banisters to be installed. Since it wasn’t economically viable, the owner shut up the floors above his shop and garment factory, using them only for storage, and they remained unchanged until the 1980s, when they were discovered by two women who set about founding the museum here. Annie explained the historical background to the tenements, and the particular stories of a German immigrant family from Prussia, the Gompertzes, and the Italian Baldizzis, and at the end we heard a brief recording of one of the Baldizzi daughters recalling her childhood. She remembered her mother weeping daily with homesickness for Sicily, but how eventually, when they made the money to visit Palermo, with little work and terrible poverty still the norm, her mother had knelt to kiss the pavement when they landed back in New York.

In years gone by, it was likely the case that many emigrants never saw their relatives or friends again unless they made good enough to pay for the travel home.  What a wrench it must have been to wave off your son or daughter at Cork, Liverpool, Bremen, Naples or Cherbourg.  I thought of Private Thomas Bellingham, who was killed in action on the Somme in July 1916, after sailing at the beginning of the year from Melbourne to Egypt, and from there to France. His parents had not seen him since the day in 1911 he emigrated from High Brooms, in Tunbridge Wells, to Australia.

Orchard Street today of course is somewhat changed in its population, though there are still garment stores, and we popped in to a trendy coffee house for a cup of English Breakfast tea, and then on to two places on Houston Street our Jewish friends had recommended, where their grandparents had taken them as children: Jonah Schimmel’s Bakery (we had knishes and pickles, and split pea soup) and Russ & Daughters, a deli where the New Year’s Eve queues precluded purchases!

When travelling, we’re always keen to see the local artists, and at the Metropolitan Museum we made a determined beeline for the American Wing. As well as the wonderful paintings, we also enjoyed the exhibition of Bronzes of the American West. We were tickled to spot one over-exercised 21st century man who had fallen asleep sitting on steps nearby, camera round his neck and mobile clasped in his hand.

Everyone back home asked us if we’d be celebrating the New Year in Times Square, but, having walked through it a few days earlier (an experience akin to Oxford Street at Christmas shopping time), we elected to see a film (American Hustle – excellent!) and have a meal in upstate Ridge Hill. As a Big Bang Theory fan, I was quite excited to be eating at the Cheesecake Factory, and couldn’t resist taking some photos of the American-sized cakes display, where one slice represented my calorie intake for a whole day. American service was as good as advertised: the waiting staff looked genuinely pleased to be serving us rather than spending New Year’s Eve out with their own pals!

On New Year’s Day we caught the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Although most of the museum on Ellis Island remains closed after Hurricane Sandy, it was still poignant to stand in the main Hall on the first floor and imaginine the feelings of those waiting on the threshold of their New World. Though life in America would be a huge struggle, it also offered the opportunity for one’s children to gain a better life not possible back home. A member of the National Park Service (uniform reminiscent of Yogi Bear episodes) told us that, amazingly, a century on, the number of daily emigrants to the USA is roughly the same – around 3,000 per day.

We ended the day with an Indian meal, shared with friends living on 30th Street and 3rd. New Yorkers are always pleased to show you the local delights, and in this case we went on a mini-tour of the local delis including a shop that seemed to sell every possible spice, sauce or dried fruit you could think of.

We were lucky with our flight – having exited the UK just before another wave of wind and rain coming in from the West, we got away from JFK on a snowy morning an hour or so before cancellations began.  Auf Wiedersehen & arrivederci New York !

It's a Wonderful Life

We’ve quite a few family favourites among Christmas movies: Scrooge, with the marvellous Alastair Sim, Bill Murray’s updated Scrooged, Elf of course, and, dare I say it, the first two Die Hard movies! As a child, White Christmas was one of my favourites, with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. But perhaps the most meaningful to me is It’s A Wonderful Life. A box of hankies becomes more essential with each viewing – we are all generally sniffling after a few scenes.

I understand that Frank Capra’s film was not a big success when it was first released. Like one of my other long-time favourites, The Sound of Music, it is accused by its detractors of being clichéd and sentimental. But for me, like all good tales, it simply heightens the life of the story it portrays, and speaks to the heart.

Dickens does this too for me. The more life I experience, its joys and sorrows, successes and failures, the more I am moved by stories like those of Ebenezer Scrooge, and George Bailey. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum – Ebenezer having lived only for himself, closing his heart to generosity and love, George having foregone his hopes and dreams in the service of others, a man who could not put himself first when he perceived others were in need. They are both saved by a ministering supernatural being: the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, and the Second-Class Angel Clarence. They share a common experience and their eyes are opened. Ebenezer Scrooge is transformed, redeemed, and becomes a man who loves to give. George Bailey sees that the love of his family, friends and fellow man is all that really matters.

I saw James Stewart once talking about It’s A Wonderful Life – how a number of people had written to him saying that they were at the end of their inner resources, and contemplating suicide, that they had seen the film, and how it had encouraged them to go on.

It’s a beautifully crafted film with a fantastic cast of actors – I understand Capra hand-picked every extra, such was his attention to detail. Some scenes, like the one where Signor Martini and family bundle into the Bailey car and drive to their new house, are reminiscent of a Brueghel painting.

Joseph Campbell said that we need myth to help us to fully understand ourselves. At this time of year, having grown up in mid 20th century Britain, not in a particularly religious family, but certainly influenced by the legacy of Christian teaching and customs, I like to set out my mother’s hand-knitted Nativity set and remember the Christmas story, make an effort to see loved ones, listen to sacred music and sing-along-a Handel’s Messiah.

Sometimes when I’m rushing around like ‘Roadrunner’ in that pre-Christmas build-up, I need to remember that presents, whether big or small, are not as important as giving someone your full and undivided attention – a thing children need above all else.

Whatever your spiritual practice, I hope you enjoy this festival of light at the darkest time of the year, and that 2014 will be a healthy and happy one for you.

Shanks' Pony

At the end of last week I was due at a meeting down in the town. As I was expecting a low turn-out, my husband, who wasn’t going to be able to pick me up till later, suggested I might walk back if no-one appeared. I transferred the necessary items from my crazy-big shoulder-bag into a small rucksack, donned my trusty water-proof Lidl boots, picked up my Cormac McCarthy, and got dropped off at the meeting-place. I set up, waited half an hour, read my Cities of the Plain, then closed up and headed back home.

Samuel Johnson once said “To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.” I’ve been feeling a tad tired and grumpy the last day or so, cooped up in a small office with five others looking at a screen and making tiny wrist movements with a mouse, and under other circumstances I might have looked at a half hour walk on a damp winter evening as a drag, but luckily I saw it as a blessing.

Martin and I always walk on our holidays, and when courting, spent many happy days walking on the Gower coast. I took up running just under two years ago, and this has become a wonderful part of my life – I feel so much more connected to my body, and often feel it’s thanking me for taking it out into the fresh air and giving it a chance to breathe and get out of breath, to allow the blood to flow and the heart to beat faster.

My mother, now nearly ninety, used to walk three miles to school and back as a small child, and I’ve met others of her generation who had similar experiences. When our son was small we often drove up to High Beeches, in Epping Forest, on Sundays for a walk through the beautiful tall trees followed by a snack at the biker’s hut. Walking is a great joy – you can do it alone or with friends, and it’s free. There are so many public footpaths in the High Weald – I know I’d rather be walking under trees, looking across fields and listening to birdsong than tramping on a static running-machine. If I manage to get a little walk in before work, it always helps me get my day in proportion, and to right-size me in relation to the world around me. After all, I’m an integral part of the natural world, a human animal.

I once heard the German film director Werner Herzog talking on the radio about his love of walking, and how he had walked across the Alps to propose to his girlfriend. He also, when he heard in 1974 that an old friend was seriously ill and on the verge of death, walked from Munich to Paris to visit her, honouring his hope that she would still be alive when he arrived. He wrote of this journey in Of Walking in Ice , but sadly it’s out of print in the English version. If I ever get round to improving my German, I’ll buy it!

 

Battlefields of the Marne

Christmas box sent to WW1 German troops Most British people are aware of the World War One battlefields of the Ypres Salient and the Somme, which have been immortalised in literature and art as well as in our history books, but many may not have much knowledge of the Marne battlefields. I certainly didn’t, so was grateful to be included in a familiarisation trip for a small group of battlefield guides, journalists and tour operators to the Marne last week. 

As I understand the Battle of the Marne, the larger force of the French army was assisted by the remnant of the British Expeditionary Force in preventing the oncoming German army from taking Paris. The BEF had been reduced to two-thirds of its strength after Mons, and General French had intended to return with them to England, but was ordered by Kitchener to go to the aid of their French allies.

Our first stop was a visit to the wonderful Musee de la Grande Guerre, in Meaux. This stunning collection of artefacts and original vehicles is based on over 55,000 items amassed by a local collector. The museum has worked hard to give a context to its displays, but to keep it accessible – they have clearly given a lot of thought to the exhibitions. For example, the mannequins have been modelled in white and stylised, to signify that this is not an attempt to make them wholly realistic, since nothing can truly convey the horror of the soldiers’ experience. Visiting children are also encouraged to touch the exhibits, and there is a marked route for primary school children which features the role played by animals in the war. As well as some excellently restored large vehicles and reproduction trench sections, there are a number of themed rooms in the museum: displays of uniforms, colonial troops, daily life of soldiers, armaments etc.

Highlights for me included: the original double-decker carrier-pigeon transport and 1908 Bleriot airplane, the stereoscopic slide show (3D glasses provided) of photos  on various themes eg gas, the Battle of the Marne; the Body & Suffering room, a smaller, more intimate and darkened space, with deeply moving films of shell-shocked patients, pictures of “les gueules cassees (broken faces)”, amputees etc
the trench-art, including musical instruments made from tin hats, Christmas boxes sent to German troops (not much German metal trench-art – this had to be sent home, desperately needed because of the blockade on imports by the allied navies); early attempts at metal body-armour, rejected because too heavy, looking more Roman/medieval than modern; flechettes, the first airborne weapon, little metal arrows dropped by hand from the early lightweight airplanes.

The next day we were conducted round a section of the battlefields by Frank Baldwin, a superb guide, steeped in knowledge, who also trains other guides, and is Chairman of the Battlefields Trust. When you have someone like this with you, it becomes possible to look at the fields and copses, the distant ridges, which today are restored to farmland, and understand the detail of how a long-ago battle was conducted. The Battle of Ourcq was bigger than Waterloo, with around 100,000 German troops versus around 250,000 French across a 10-mile front.  We visited the memorial to Charles Peguy, an internationally renowned poet and essayist, who died here on 5 September 1914 at the age of 41, and the mass grave where his remains lie with those of 200 other war-dead.

Among our party was a French writer and military historian. I asked him if he could recommend a French book portraying the First World War. I had long intended to read Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, but Francois suggested instead Maurice Genevoix’s  Ceux de 14, and Jean Norton Cru’s Temoins, which analyses the collective oeuvre of memoirs by French authors.

We drove on through the beginnings of champagne-growing country, and stopped in Le Petit Morin valley, where nearly 20,000 British troops crossed. The German troops here were aiming to delay their advance, and they captured thousands of exhausted, starving soldiers who, after the retreat from Mons, blowing up bridges as they went, having scant time to stop, rest, and eat, simply fell asleep so deeply they could not be woken by their companions.

We stopped at La Ferte sous Jouarre to see the British Memorial to the Missing there, which commemorates nearly 4,000 officers and men of the British Expeditionary Force who died in August, September and the early part of October 1914 and who have no known grave.

And last, but not least, I was grateful to have the opportunity to visit the graves in the Montreuil-Aux-Lions British cemetery of two Southborough men, Charles Pankhurst and Stephen Funnell, both of whom died on 10 September 1914, fighting with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. It wasn’t until I stood in the cemetery that I saw they were among a number of Royal Sussex men who died that day.

We wondered why it was that those lost on the Marne are not as significant a part of the Great War memory in Britain, and whether it was perhaps that they were part of the professional army and reserves, not the ‘butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers’ who came after? Charles Pankhurst had enlisted in 1906, had served in India for six years, and had the honour of being the gymnastic leader of the Battalion. Stephen Funnell’s parents, who lost their son when he was only 20, had his name inscribed on their own gravestone in Southborough Cemetery.

If you are visiting Paris, or taking the family to Eurodisney, you may find it worthwhile to include a day visiting the Marne battlefield and Great War Museum.

Further information:

Musee de la Grande Guerre, Meaux
http://www.museedelagrandeguerre.eu/en

The Doings of the Fifth Brigade by Edward, Lord Gleichen – e-book available free online thanks to Project Guttenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22074/22074-h/22074-h.htm

Frank Baldwin, Battlefield Guide
http://www.frankbaldwin.co.uk

Nothing in this World by Charles Peguy

Remembering Mam

I have lost a number of loved ones, among them three of my brothers and my father, and most recently, my mother-in-law. In each case, the things that bothered me about that person, their shortcomings as I perceived them, the small injuries they had done me, were, on their death, very shortly put into a different perspective: the long view of a life once it has ended. Any grievances rose to the top of my feelings about them and floated away – I could see these old judgements for what they were – nothing like as important as I had held them in my mind. What was left was the fondness in my heart for people, the essence of who they truly were. 
 
I first met Mam when I was nineteen. She and Dad, on hearing that Martin’s new girlfriend would be spending Christmas on her own in London, invited me down to their home near Swansea. Dad was there at Swansea Bus Station to meet us, looking smart and shoe-polished, warmly shaking me by the hand and saying “Welcome to Wales!” Mam and Nan waited back at the bungalow with a hot meal. Mam cared for Nan, her elderly mother, until Nan's death.
 
Mam became  like a second mother to me – my own Mum being largely absent in those years, living in Spain. Mam taught me how to wrap my baby son Welsh shawl style so that I could carry him round for as long as I needed to, swaddled against my heartbeat, and leaving my right arm free. She showed me so many small things, which gathered together, comprised what I had not been taught in my own home. And she was a wonderful grandmother to our boy. She came up to London to help out when he was born, she was always willing and ready to assist when needed. I had an ectopic pregnancy only weeks before we moved to Sussex, and she travelled up on the train to fetch our five year old son down to Wales while my husband packed up the house and finished the tasks involved in closing down my theatrical agency. When my son had febrile convulsions in the second year of his life, she was a calm and reassuring presence at my side. She herself suffered from some OCD issues, yet in spite of this, she was in many ways a sure and steady person to have with you in frightening times. She and Dad were generous, though they had never had much money – unasked for, they would pay for new shoes for our son, coal in a hard winter when interest rates had soared, took us for a week’s holiday to their beloved Blackpool when funds were low. And they were always kind and scrupulously fair in their gifts to all their grandchildren. 
  
We had many wonderful summer holidays in Wales – Mam would pack up sandwiches, crisps, fruit and a bottle of pop for our outings to the beach on the Gower, or trips to Carreg Cennen etc. We never came back up the M4 towards home without provisions for the journey. And Mam faithfully sent cards for birthdays, tests passed, anniversaries etc. 
 
There’s an old story that the Welsh people is the lost tribe of Israel, and Mam certainly had some things in common with the archetypal Jewish Mama: her two sons were the apples of her eyes, and could do very little wrong, and naturally enough, that rankles with daughters-in-law from time to time! We had a joke that if Martin or my son asked for a special dish, whatever hour it was, e.g. gammon, egg and chips at midnight, if remotely possible Mam would happily oblige, whereas if I asked for muesli for breakfast when toast was the norm, I
was blinkin’ awkward!
 
We got on each other’s nerves from time to time – we both had quite strong wills – and we had one or two quarrels, but we got through them.
 
Like I said ,Mam suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. She used to say that I couldn’t know how bad “her nerves” were, and although I sympathised, as a young woman I also felt annoyed by her odd ways – always having to check a certain number of times that the gas cooker was off, that the door was locked, every time she left the house. It’s only with hindsight and experience of my own ‘funny’ ways, with years of struggling with my own character defects and bad habits, that I see how hard it is to overcome these things.
 
But Mam was also very brave. After Dad died, she worked hard to get out and about on her own, join classes, take the bus to Llanelli, Swansea, Aberdare and Carmarthen to eat in cafes, and do her shopping with her little rucksack. And she had some great qualities – she was patient, caring, constant in her affections and loving in very practical ways. 
 
After my father-in-law's death in 1995, Mam missed him dreadfully – she used to sigh and say “Oh Judy, I miss that man”. They met when she was fourteen and she said she could never think of being with another man. Towards the end of her life, when Mam suffered more and more with loneliness, she would always end telephone conversations with the philosophical words “Dyna fordd y mae” (that’s how it is).
 
When Mam was dying in hospital, my son and I drove down to Wales to see her. We sat with her and held her hands, stroked her forehead, gave her kisses. We had no idea how long it would be before her heart gave out, and regretfully I returned to work in Kent while Martin stayed with her. He sat alone with her through her last night, only two days later, and rang the next morning to tell me that she had just passed away. On Wednesday it will be a  year since she died. I miss her.



Loving and cherishing those around us is a very worthwhile practice to
aim for. As someone once wrote: “Any good that I can do, or any kindness that I
can show to any fellow-creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer it or
neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again”.


 

Berlin in October

Pretzel seller in the Pariserplatz, Brandenburg Gate Last week I popped over to Berlin for a quick few days which included escorting a school group for the day. This was my third trip – each of them a flying visit –
but as a history and people buff, I always strive to see as much as I can of this amazing place. Like all cities, you could spend weeks in the German capital, and not discover all there is to see, but physically being there encourages me to read more about its history. I am an avid history reader, but for me the role of fiction and memoir is equally important in learning about a place or time: Judith Kerr’s wonderful When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit illuminates what it was like to be a child in Berlin and fleeing from oppression, Paul Dowswell’s excellent Auslander is a great read for teenagers studying Nazi Berlin. I can recommend two witness accounts by non-natives about Berlin during the war years, Christabel Bielenberg’s The Past is Myself and Marie Vassiltchikov's Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945. And last but not least, there is Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, based on his father’s experience of the Holocaust.
 
I can’t speak too highly of the tour guides I’ve encountered in Berlin: at the Wannsee Villa, Topography of Terror, German History Museum etc. They are clearly dedicated to presenting 20th century German history for visiting schoolchildren with as much clarity as possible. So what did I see this time? We had a guided tour of the Olympic Stadium in Charlottenburg. The ideology behind the building of the Stadium was explained: how Hitler rejected the glass structure first suggested and brought in Speer to devise the monumental, classical final version; how the stand where Hitler stood to view the games was cut out and removed to avoid it becoming a  neo-Nazi shrine; how the 1936 Olympics were used as a massive, and mostly successful, propaganda campaign for Hitler’s regime (nothing changed there then?); how the signs saying No Dogs, No Jews were put back up as soon as the athletes and journalists had gone home. Recently a new modern roof has been built, and Berlin’s much-loved football club Hertha BSC commissioned a special blue running-track in their colours. The surrounding sports fields, once parking-place for the British Army’s tanks when this area was part of the British Occupation Sector after the War, have now been returned to Berlin residents for their recreational use.
 
On Saturday evening I went to see a German friend in an amateur production of Agatha Christie’s The Unexpected Guest. I followed quite a lot of the play in my now less than fluent German, and just managed to work out who-dun-it in the last few minutes! The venue was a beautifully restored 19th century covered market hall – the Arminiusmarkthalle – in Moabit, and the evening was enlivened by a small diamante t-shirted miniature dog in the company of a large adoring lady, who barked at crucial moments (dog not the lady!), and a drunken man who laughed and commented very loudly throughout the first half. The man was gently persuaded to leave at the interval, the dog stayed for the denouement! 
 
On Sunday we took the school group round some of the WW2/Cold War sights, using Berlin’s superb public transport system and shanks’ pony. We paused in front of the Reichstag for a quick revision of Hitler’s take-over of power and then on to a circuit of the Brandenburg Gate, the Jewish Memorial, the old Nazi Ministry building in Wilhelmstrasse, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, the Dom and the German History Museum. The students had visited Bergen/Belsen en route to Berlin, and the little museum underneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was a good counterpoint, an excellent visit for people of all ages, but particularly for schoolchildren. With its quiet, darkened rooms, illuminated by large lit facsimiles of postcards and letters, its photographic displays taking you right into the centre of some of the personal family stories behind the terrible massive numbers and facts of the Final Solution, and the room filled  only with benches, where the short facts of lives of those murdered in the Holocaust are spoken by an aonymous recorded voice, one after the other (apparently it would take over 6 years to read them all), this is a place that goes right to the heart. I had to wipe a tear from my eye, and one of the teachers had a similar experience when he read a letter written from a young man to his father en route to Auschwitz.

There is currently a fantastic display on the street corner by Checkpoint Charlie of the background to the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall. Particularly touching was a photograph of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich playing for passers-by following the fall of the Wall in 1989.
It would take too long to list everything seen even on this very short visit to Berlin. If you have an interest in history, in Germany, in people, in architecture, in politics, in art, in film or music – you would not be disappointed here. I met a couple on the train to Schoenefeld Airport who’d travelled to see their favourite rock band, The Editors, in Amsterdam and then
Berlin. Their train journey from Amsterdam had been interrupted for 8 hours by a WW2 unexploded German bomb under the line. Not an uncommon experience even now seventy years on apparently in an area of Holland that was severely blitzed. The two young women catching up on their sleep in the seats next to me on the flight back had gone to Berlin for the ‘clubbing’.
 
I hope to visit many more times, and with a bit of luck and a fair following wind, the Berlin Marathon would be a nice cherry on the top of my running ambitions! 

Tea with a Wild Mountain Man

Our host and the pot & pan We returned to the beautiful Wilder Kaiser mountains region this summer for another two weeks of walking, talking and taking in the Alpine air. We generally like to go somewhere different every year but the Wilder Kaiser seems to affect people in a very particular way – this will be our third visit, and we’ve met so many people who've gone back time and time again. The local tourist board honours guests who are returners, and this year presented a gift to a couple who have been visiting Scheffau for 50 years, but our hostess at Pension Aloisia told us that one family who stays with her, and who first stayed with her late mother, have been coming for over 60!
 
The Tyrolean mountains and valleys are wonderfully fresh and green, and with this comes, naturally, a certain amount of rain. Our German friend Petra wisely suggested we might like to take rainwear the first time we went, and so we always pack waterproofs along with our walking-boots. Sunshine is most welcome, but wet weather doesn’t put us off – especially if there is a “gemutlich” Stuben at the end of the walk. This year we set off on a very rainy morning to walk the ‘11’ route, stopping en route at Ellmau to buy our ‘snap’ at Billa (excellent supermarket full of fresh food and friendly faces). We caught the chairlift at Going (we’re suckers for chairlifts!) up to the Astberg, and set off for Brandstadl – about 4 and a half hours’ walking up and down some substantial slopes. We were enjoying ourselves, but we’d missed our morning kaffee, and were on the lookout for a suitable Alm. The word Alm seems to cover various degrees of pit-stop – sometimes it’s a little hut where you can buy refreshments, but sometimes, we found, it’s not! There was one ahead on the map, and after negotiating our way through a herd of curious bullocks, we came to a charming establishment with “Komme gleich!” written on the door. Now, although my O level German grew fairly fluent in my 20s, it’s not been regularly taken out and exercised enough since then. I can get by, and I love the language, but with every passing year the holes in my vocabulary get larger. I read the sign as “Come right in!”, whereas it means, I found out later, “I’ll be right back!” We walked boldly in and found ourselves in a storage area. On the left were some steps and another little door. I knocked and a very nice man opened it. He had silvery hair, ruddy cheeks and an enquiring smile – the very picture of a Grimm fairy-tale woodcutter! I asked if it was possible to buy something to drink and he invited us in to his kitchen/living space, where he was writing at a long wooden table. We sat around it on benches, and our host produced some herb teas. I plumped for Baerentraubenblatter (bearberry – good for urological conditions I discovered later!) and Martin had chamomile. Our host bought out a copper round-bottomed pan, opened the top of his wood-burning stove and placed it over the flame. While it came to the boil we had a look at some photo albums he showed us of farms he had worked on.
 
We enjoyed an hour or so’s welcome break from the cold and wet with this lovely man. He told us that he was a seasonal herdsman from Tegernsee in Bavaria. I just about kept up with his strong accent – Petra, who’s from northern Germany, tells me that they call Bavarians the wild mountain-folk! We had a lively chat about the Celts, and connections between this part of the world and the Celts in Wales. He would soon be taking his bovine charges down the mountain for the Alpine cattle drive day, a Saturday at the end of September, when the cows are adorned with paper flowers - as a symbol and thanks for an incident-free summer on the alpine pasture. Then he would be moving to the nearby town of Kufstein for the winter.
 
We asked him what the drinks cost, and he said that you if one wished one could offer a voluntary contribution when given hospitality at an alm. We crossed his palm with silver, thanked him, shook hands and went on our way, stomachs and hearts warmed by our
serendipitous encounter.