Judith Johnson's Blog, page 12

The Little Dancer

The band Virgin Soldiers were playing in the Fusion 2013 festival in Tunbridge Wells in the summer and I popped along to listen to their music live. It was good to hear them play, just before the heavens opened and a downpour sent the audience fleeing for cover, but what increased my joy was the appearance of a beautiful little soul – a child, who danced to the music with grace and complete lack of self-consciousness. Her parents were happy for me to take her photograph – their love, pride and acceptance were clear to see. There is something in our culture that seems to affect many of our children’s belief in themselves – is it the legacy of our English class-system that makes so many of us feel less than good enough, or perhaps something in the education process?  I hate to see the enthusiasm of a child squashed by censure and negativity. 
  
A friend of mine, Max, once said to me that he believed Down’s Syndrome children were sent to teach us about love. Max has a very particular view about love and hate – he is a Holocaust survivor, who came to England on a Kindertransport in 1939. His mother, a nurse and midwife, was a great one for songs and music, he recalls in a little memoir he gave me. She taught her children a new song every week. When Max left she had great difficulty keeping cheerful, and her last words to him were “Remember whatever happens to you in the future, wherever you go, father and I will always love you.” 
 
Max volunteered for the Commandos in 1944. The training was no picnic, he wrote, and he flinched a little when they had to learn to kill with their bare hands, but all of the former refugee boys in his troop wanted to do was to get the war over so that they could find their loved ones again. He realised that it meant killing or getting killed yourself, and at 18 years old, he says, you don’t worry too much about that. 

When the war finished, Max’s unit helped with the mopping up, busy in the POW camps, interrogating and releasing thousands of prisoners. He took compassionate leave to go and search for his people. Each search ended in the same way: last known in Buchenwald or Dachau or Oranienburg, then transported to Auschwitz. All of Max’s extended family had been murdered, it seemed. But in September 1945 he had a letter from the Red Cross informing him that his older brother was alive, had survived Auschwitz, been exchanged at the end of the War for German POWs and was convalescing in Sweden. At that time, the information saved Max’s sanity. When he was reunited with his brother, the first thing he said to Max was “You must learn not to hate, but to forgive them, Max”.
 
In the years since, Max married and brought up his own family, worked as a builder, and then latterly trained as a reflexologist and healer. He wrote “Most of my life I’ve had good innings. It was not always easy but between us we managed to achieve quite a lot. I am very proud of my family. It is they who gave me an identity again.”

Reading Germinal

View of colliery, South Wales I belong to a small local reading group which aims to rotate choices from the following categories: Modern British novels, Modern North American novels, World Authors, Biography/Non-Fiction, and Classic Novels. I have just finished reading our latest book in the last category: Germinal by Emile Zola. We were prompted to read this by our previous choice: Pure by Andrew Miller, a wonderful contemporary novel, which included in its cast a group of miners employed to clear a cemetery in 18th century Paris. We wanted to follow that thread further.
 
What makes a classic? For me, it is a book which writes of the eternal truths of life in a language that still speaks to the reader's condition, in whatever age it is read; when you're reading, the author's voice is as fresh as if he or she was still sitting round the camp-fire, telling you the story. It's interesting that some of the cutting edge contemporary novels acclaimed by literary judges can seem extremely dated after a very few years.
 
Germinal was not an easy read. Sticking with the long suffering of its characters was grim, but, apart from my compliant desire to finish the book-club read, I also felt compelled to honour that suffering by giving the story my full attention.
 
This edition, one of the marvellous Penguin Classics series, has an excellent introduction by the translator, giving the political, social and literary background of the book, but I read it after I'd finished the story, which is my habit, as I prefer to read any book initially as the first readers would have, without later analysis and context. Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Zola's great Rougon-Maquart sequence, and it deals with the exploitation of the mining community who subsist in dire poverty, in Northern France in the 1850s.
 
I feel as if my world has expanded after reading about the tragic Maheu family, their neighbours and fellow-miners, and the mine-managers and families. Zola draws you into their existence, using their relationships, pains and joys, to illustrate his larger theme of the struggle of the working class.
 
We have a saying in our house when anyone is moaning about their job: "Well, it's not as bad as being a miner, is it?" This is not looking down on miners, far from it, but a reminder that, whatever fault we can find with our current paid work, it doesn't bear comparison with the extreme physical effort made by miners in often appalling conditions. This was highlighted a couple of years back by the BBC Wales TV reality programme Coal House, which took several families to live in recreated Victorian conditions, where the men and boys went off to work in the mines. The men were shocked by the unrelenting slog of hewing coal and found it hard to believe anyone could keep that up on a diet which was very poor by modern standards. My husband is descended from coal-miners in the Welsh valleys, and his grandfather died of lung-disease contracted in the course of that work.
 
Of course, there are still miners at work around the world in less than ideal conditions. Occasionally there is an item on the news about miners being killed, in China, in the former USSR, in North America etc. And reading in Germinal of the mine's collapse, I wondered out loud, "What's happened to the Chilean miners?" How quickly we move on from the latest news and return to our preoccupations, but I remember how deeply moved I felt when those men, courageous, supportive of each other, stoical, were rescued after 69 days underground.
 
Thanks to the benefits of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's generous gift of the world-wide web to humanity, and search-engines, I found a Blog by the Chilean miners, with a very recent posting go about the closing of the case investigating the mine collapse in which they were trapped. I recommend it to anyone interested:  http://www.33miners.com   
  
And I intend to read more about miners worldwide. Perhaps I might first revisit another popular classic  - Richard Llewellyn's How Green was My Valley.
 
Further reading:
http://www.mj-johnson.com/1/post/2012/06/cartref.html -
Blog about October Sky by Homer H Hickam - son of a West Virginia mine-manager

Horse-Crazy!

Feeling a bit worn-out at Moat House! I'm not sure what triggered the revival in my breast of a longing to get back on a horse and start riding again. It may have been reading Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses, or my strange new love of cowboy films (see my husband's blog on that subject!). Or it may have begun a while back when I saw Monty Roberts in an extraordinary one-off demonstration onstage at the National Theatre, presenting a real live horse to the puppet-horse Joey from War Horse.
 
I was a horse-crazy little girl. I disdained to play with dolls - my tomboy childhood was spent saddling up Champion, the Wonder-Horse, tightening his girth, filling his saddle-bags with gold, and stroking his beautiful Palomino flanks. He stood at twelve inches high, but that was no problem: I could keep him on my chest of drawers and talk to him whenever I wanted. I had a horse-shoe alarm-clock, a bookshelf full of the Pullein-Thompson sisters' Pony Club books, My Friend Flicka, Black Beauty (over which I sobbed loudly), The Horse and His
Boy etc.
 
I had riding-lessons with Cherrie Hatton-Hall at the Moat, her Benenden riding-stables,  where Princess Anne, at boarding-school locally, also rode. I met Cherrie later in life, now become Sister Chiara, a Roman Catholic nun, but still working as Honorary Life Vice-President of Riding for the Disabled*. I loved my riding hat,  jodhpurs, riding-boots, and I was fearless over jumps, never minding falling off. 
 
My friend Joanna lived down the road from us in Cranbrook in a stunning Elizabethan manor-house, Goddards Green. Her father bred Arab horses, and they had a particularly beautiful stallion, Great Heart. I used to walk up to his field and breathe gently into his nostrils, and stroke his velvety nose. Bliss! I was usually mounted on little ponies at the Moat, so was quite envious when my Mum, courageously taking up riding in middle-age, was given a large and gorgeous chestnut mare to ride.
 
When my father's friend Philip Yorke inherited Erddig, near Wrexham, he invited Dad to bring the family up for a holiday. Phil had numerous enthusiasms and collections which had all fallen off when he ran out of cash - one of these was his little band of pet horses, all not quite properly trained. We kids loved them - they were naughty but spirited, and we used to gallop through the woods on the estate and the wide Maes Goch (translated from Welsh: red field, legend telling of a great battle once taking place there) in front of the house.
 
One day I was out with my brother Jonny when his horse Major bit mine hard on the backside. Roddy complained loudly and set off at a fast gallop along the road. I was about thirteen, I think, and didn't know that losing the other stirrup would have given me a better chance of balance. It was terrifying, and more so because I wasn't sure of where Roddy was going - I pictured him taking the fork towards the road out of the park, and colliding with an oncoming car, or crashing into the tall wrought-iron gates. But Roddy was aiming for the stables, and as we approached, a man came out and grabbed him briefly by the reins as I slid off, shaking. My Dad appeared then, and bravely went into the paddock off the stables, where Roddy had fled, and tried to catch the horse so that I could get back on. But Roddy kicked out at him, catching his ankle, an injury which would leave lasting painful effects for Dad.
 
They say that after a crash or an incident of this kind, you should always get back in the seat or the saddle as soon as possible, to overcome the shock. Sadly, because we couldn't catch Roddy, by the time the next morning came, I had completely lost my nerve, and even getting up on another of the horses for a photo made me tremble with fear.
 
Ever since then, I have never got back in the saddle. Aside from losing my nerve there has also been the question of funding for riding while bringing up baby and paying the bills. But taking up running in my mid-50s has shown me that it's never too late to follow your bliss, so I'm hoping to enrol soon for some riding-lessons at our local stables. The inner warrior is raring to go!


* When I met her in 2001 Sister Chiara Hatton-Hall told me some fascinating things about her work with Riding for the Disabled. She told me that the benefits for people with disabilities has been recognised for over 3,000 years since the time of Hippocrates, and research shows that the movement of a horse at a walking pace encourages and develops the coordination and balance of the rider and stimulates every part of the body, rotating the pelvis, so it reproduces, for those unable to walk, the same movement as if they were themselves walking. In Munich, France and Denmark, amongst other places, riding is used in psychiatric cases, with autistic children, children who have never spoken, and people with cerebral palsy. The medical profession, she told me, was becoming increasingly aware and accepting of the benefits of this therapy, especially in Europe, where it was professionally practised with remarkably successful results.

The Passion Play of Oberammergau

Two of the seven ages of woman! I first heard of the Passion Play of Oberammergau in my childhood. My Mum worked for five summers as a courier for a British tour operator in the Austrian Tyrol, and my younger brother and I went out each summer for a two week holiday. There were the usual excursions on offer, and in the late 1960s we visited the Bavarian sights of Schloss Linderhof, one of King Ludwig's palaces, and the nearby Oberammergau. If you bought an item in one of the gift shops in the village, you could get your passport stamped, and if it was a year when the Play was not being performed, you could have a tour of the theatre, the costumes, and see the local woodcarvers at work.
 
The Passion Play was first performed in the village of Oberammergau in 1634, in thanks for the villagers' lives having been spared in the bubonic plague which killed many of the surrounding population. They vowed to continue performing the play regularly.  Ever since then, the play has been performed roughly every 10 years, with the exception of 1940, when the Second World War intervened. Over half of the population of more than 5,000 men, women and children of Oberammergau take part in it, as cast members, singers, instrumentalists and technicians. 
 
Martin and I were fortunate enough to be given two places on a trip to see the Passion Play in 2010. We would be travelling with stops en route in Baden-Baden and Kaufbeuren, and we had an amazing escape, as did all of the passengers on the coach, not an hour out of Calais, when a lorry driver, whose attention was briefly not on the road, wrote off our coach by driving into the back of us.  The French emergency services were astonished that there was not one single casualty in our group, aside from a few drops of blood on my husband's face caused by the shower of safety glass that fell on him as he slept. Another coach came out from England, and we carried on with our journey, though delayed (as were thousands of other people on the motorway) for several hours. When we arrived in Kaufbeuren, staying in the Goldener Hirsch, a stunning 14th century inn, we were invited to visit the adjacent convent church, where the nuns sang the 23rd Psalm from the balcony above us, and blessed our onward journey.
 
On our arrival in Oberammergau we were met by the owner of our guest-house. She told us that she would normally greet guests in her dirndl, but that she was in the crowd scene at the opening of the play, and was dressed in jeans so that she could make the necessary quick change. The play is in two parts, with an evening meal in between. After lunch we made our way to the theatre, and en route were passed by a number of villagers pedalling along with small children on the back  of their bicycles. Every family in the village has members taking part in this enormous production, and once the cast has been decided, men are required to let their hair and beards grow during the long rehearsal and playing period. One young man told us that he was pleased to be cast as a Roman character, as these are all clean-shaven. When you visit Oberammergau during this period, you will see bakers, builders, policemen etc looking like sixties hippies - quite a sight! Carsten Luck, one of two men playing Judas in 2010, played Jesus in the 2000 production, which must surely be a strange juxtaposition of roles for any actor.
 
I knew that I was in for a treat with the Passion Play, but even so, I was not fully prepared for the impact of its beauty, the obvious sincerity and devotion of its cast, the stunning Baroque music, and the performances. I am not a practising Christian, but I have a faith in a God of my own understanding, and as a product of my times and culture, the figure and teachings of Christ are a significant part of this.
 
The Play is spectacular. When Christ drives the traders out of the Temple, there are 1,000 people on stage, sheep and goats running around and doves, released by Jesus, fly up into the sky. The Crucifixion scene is harrowing. As a mother of a much-loved son, putting myself in Mary's shoes, I wept. The actor playing Christ (one of two) carries the cross onto stage, heavy, though made of hollow pine. Bracelets with welded nails slot around his hands and feet, but give no support, as they rest on tiny ledges, and he hangs, arms outstretched, for more than 20 minutes. Both actors, though keen sportsmen, needed to train for this physical ordeal.
 
But there were two other moments in the play when I felt deeply moved and tears sprang to my eyes. The first was the opening scene, when the stage is filled with a huge crowd of men, women and children, and Jesus rides in on a donkey, dismounting to sweep a child up into his arms, smiling: the humble Christ of my childhood Bible stories come to life. The second was in the scene where Jesus is invited to give his judgement of the woman, caught in adultery, surrounded by a crowd who are ready to put her to death by stoning. He says, with such natural authority, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," that the crowd just melts away. For me personally, this is one of the most profoundly beautiful sentences in human history, and to see it enacted in this way was a powerful experience. 

There is a long social history of the Passion Play and Oberammergau, which is well-covered by James Shapiro's book Oberammergau, and there have been accusations of anti-semitism in the past, but the current director Christian Stuckl has striven to make changes. Jesus is portrayed as the Jewish Rabbi he was. He carries a scroll of the Torah into the Temple. The
villagers playing the main roles travelled with the director to Jerusalem before rehearsals started, visiting the holy sites.
 
Tickets to the play were sold in packages including accommodation, so we didn't know where we would be seated until our hotel gave us the tickets they'd been allocated. Our coach was split into two groups, and while we were delighted to find we had seats two rows back from the front, the other group found themselves so far back that they thought the living tableaux featured in the play were actually paintings. I understand that the ticketing system may be under consideration for change.
 
I was moved by the devotion of this community to their ancient promise. The rehearsals and length of the performance season are arduous, and there is no heating in the cast's dressing-rooms. Our young guide told us that the weather in 2010 had been uniformly cold since the play opened on 15 May, and it had snowed on the Monday before we saw it at the beginning of June. Most of the cast had suffered from chills, heavy colds and even flu, but had all soldiered on regardless. In days gone by, taking part in the play meant losing your job. Today, these are usually kept open, and alternating casting in the main roles makes this more possible.
 
If you have a chance to see the Passion Play in 2020, I can recommend it. For us it was the chance of a lifetime to see something truly extraordinary.

Click here for the official website

Restless and dissatisfied - a kind of lunacy

Bedtime reading! I woke up this morning feeling restless and dissatisfied
– a horrible state of mind that comes to visit from time to time. Not too often, thankfully – most of the time I’m pretty grateful for each day, and keenly interested in people, places and things. But now and then this tips over into a negative state of mind – when the huge amount of stuff available becomes an overwhelming flood, and I can’t decide what to do
next.
 
I know having too much choice is a high-class problem. I hate it when I am saddled with the monkey-mind and  can’t enjoy anything because I’m looking at all the other things I should/could be doing. It reminds me of when I was in my teens, and whichever party I was at, the action always seemed to be at the next one …
 
There are various antidotes for this – I can get out of my head and do something nice for another person, I can be still and connect with my Higher Power, I can decide on one thing to do and choose to be happy with that. Usually the first step in all of this is acceptance. Railing against myself doesn’t help!
 
I have a quote from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now on  my fridge door:
 
“The modalities of awakened doing are acceptance, enjoyment and enthusiasm. Each one represents a certain vibrational frequency of consciousness. You need to be vigilant to make sure that one of them operates whenever you are engaged in doing anything at all – from the most simple task to the most complex. If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.”
 
I heard someone say once that the amount of information in a Sunday newspaper (and its tree’s worth of supplements!), is as much input as the average person in the Middle Ages would have known in a lifetime. No wonder the top of my head sometimes feels like it’s going to explode! My bedtime reading is a good example of the too-much-itis to which I am prone. I’m currently reading five books: What the Grown-Ups Were Doing by Michele Hanson, Man and God by Victor Gollancz, Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, The Diary of Samuel Pepys – Volume III, and Waiting for the Night-Rowers by Roger Moulson. Recipe for over-stimulation? No wonder I couldn’t sleep one night this week!
 
The full moon was up that night, and there was an interesting item on Radio 4 about new research, which indicates we may be more connected to the phases of the moon than previously thought. Not news to me – I’ve always noticed how crazy some people’s driving gets around the full moon. And I’ve met a number of nurses who say how much more disturbed psychiatric patients are at these times. But what really caught my attention was a writer who talked about the old lunar-time modules for living, still in use in some parts of the world, and how much slower and more attuned to nature they were, and how perhaps today people just stuff too much into their days. That really spoke to me. I am a list-maker, my To Do List frequently has over 25 items. There are things on there that more often than not just get transferred onto the next list. My current one includes quite a few of these victims of procrastination: 
  
Re-pot basil, lavender, rosemary, plant pink
Sign up for Brighton 10K
DUST!
Tidy and file piles
TAX RETURN! 
 
Perhaps it’s time to pick up my battered old copy of Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much by Anne Wilson Schaef. My dear husband, who knows me so well, bought me this some years back, and wrote on the inside cover: “When I picked up this little book it said ‘Buy me for Judith’. Hope you enjoy.” He drew my attention to the entry for August 15th; it’s still a favourite, and I hope Ms Wilson Schaef won’t mind me quoting from it here:
 
“Some of us have modelled our lives after the roadrunner cartoon character: jump out of bed – beep, beep. Throw in a load of laundry so it can wash while we do our exercises and shower – beep, beep. Nine minutes for make-up and hair – beep, beep. Seven minutes for starting the coffee, getting dressed, and popping in the toast. Five minutes for eating breakfast and making out a list of things that must be done today – beep, beep. Throw laundry into the dryer, grab coat, purse, and briefcase, and burst through the front door – beep, beep. By the time we have finished our morning routine, most people would be exhausted, and we have just begun – beep … beep …
 
Perhaps it is important to remember that I was not created to be a roadrunner, even if we have some features in common.”
 

Running in the Olympic Park

The pink wave on its way! When a fellow Sarah's Runner put a link on the group's Facebook page about the forthcoming National Lottery Anniversary Run in the Olympic Park in Stratford, which would finish its 5 mile course (the last 300 metres) in the Olympic Stadium, I signed up immediately! Too good a chance to miss, and it was a way of making amends to myself for not having been to any of the Olympic or Paralympic events there.  A whole bunch of us travelled up to London yesterday, and I started off the run with friend Gareth, who is wearing his SRs t-shirt in the picture. I'm the half-pint next to him! We were in the pink wave, which was the last to go, part of a mass of 12,500 runners taking part. It was wonderful to take part, and especially to be among a great stream  of runners winding its way alongside the River Lea, and, for me personally, probably the first time I've ever run in a stadium, let alone such an illustrious one! Big shout out to all my fellow runners, it was fab seeing you all there!

The celebrity runners included Paula Radcliffe and Victoria Pendleton, and Sir Chris Hoy opened the proceedings, but the most memorable thing for me was shaking the hands of the Paralympics medal-winners who sat waiting in their wheelchairs at the finish line to congratulate the runners coming in. That was something special.

The Sorrow of the Moons

Henry Moon I think there's a Chinese saying that goes something like "May you never have sons in times of war". 
 
Walter and Anne Moon, of Western Road, Southborough, had four sons away fighting in the Great War. 
  
Henry, a Gunner in the 4th Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery, died, aged 22, on 2 June 1916. 
  
After he left St Peter's School at the top of Southborough Common, he had first worked locally as a telegraph messenger at Southborough Post Office, and the local press reported he was "the first member of the Hand and Sceptre Lodge of Oddfellows to give his life for his country".

He had been in Canada when war broke out, one of many young men who had left Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century, hoping to make a life for themselves in the Dominions, as they were known at the time. When he signed up in Toronto at the end of 1914, he gave his trade as Fixture Builder. In a letter to Mr and Mrs Moon, written on the day Henry (referred to as Harry) was injured, a Canadian chaplain wrote: "I know you will be very much disturbed and anxious to hear that Harry has been wounded.  He asked me to write and tell you about it, as he will not be able to write himself for some time. The Battery where Harry was, was heavily shelled today at noon, and Harry, unfortunately, was hit by a small splinter on the lower part of the chest on the right side.  Our Medical Officer was away when the word came to our Brigade Headquarters only a few hundred yards away. I got the Medical Sergeant, and we went over with a stretcher. We put a dressing on his wound and carried him on the stretcher down the road, where an ambulance and doctor met us. The doctor redressed his wound and sent him off to the Hospital, where I think they will operate to remove the splinter. He was very brave and bright, though he was suffering a good deal. He will probably be laid up for quite a while, but the doctors do not anticipate any danger."  But Henry died the following day in hospital, and was buried in the adjacent cemetery at Lijssenthoek, near Poperinge in Belgium. Walter Moon Henry's older brother Walter had signed up in September 1914 and was serving as a Lance Sergeant with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in February 1916, when the local paper reported on Walter's close shave: "...home from the Front on leave ... his first experience under fire was at the Battle of Loos ... while walking through a wood he paused a moment to  speak to a Sergeant of the Canadians, and a German sniper fired at them. The bullet struck sideways on a pocket-book in Sergt Moon’s breast pocket, was deflected by the frame of a miniature in his pocket book, and wounded the Canadian in the lung.  Our representative was shown the pocket book and the miniature with the mark of the bullet. Sergt Moon is full of praise of the arrangements for the comfort and health of the men in the way of food, clothes and baths. He had only once been short of food, which was during the Battle of Loos, when it was impossible for the convoy  to come up owing to the heavy fire. They had then to depend on the emergency rations carried with them, and Sergt Moon says that that meal of “bully beef” and biscuits was the best and most welcome he had ever had." 
  
But Walter's luck didn't last - he died aged 23 on 4 July, a month after his brother Henry, several days after being wounded, and is buried in Heilly Station Cemetery, Mericourt-L'Abbe, in the Somme.   Charles Moon Mr & Mrs Moon's third son, Charles, worked before the War as a footman for the Nicholsons, of Bidborough Court, a local 'big house'. He joined up in August 1914, and in a letter to his mother in June 1915, while serving with the 6th Battalion of the Queen's Own (Royal West Kent Regiment), enclosed a card he had received from the Major-General commanding the 12th Division, on which he stated his pleasure at hearing how Corporal Moon (then Private) had distinguished himself by his conduct in the field. Charles had been given special leave earlier, in April because of his Military Medal.
John Moon Henry and Walter's younger brother John was employed after leaving school by Mr H Hemsley, bootmaker, of Crescent Road, Tunbridge Wells. He joined the Royal Naval Division in October 1915, a week after his 18th birthday, and was initially attached to the 5th Nelson Battalion in the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, “somewhere at sea”. He joined the Anson Battalion at Mudros, Turkey, and then served on the Western Front.

It is awful to imagine how desolate their parents must already have been feeling after the deaths of two sons in June and July, when the following month, on a Tuesday morning in August, Mrs Moon received a letter informing her that Charles had died on 14 August, aged 21. She had already had news of his wounding from Corporal Jenner, from High Brooms, who had been serving as a stretcher-bearer out in the Somme, and had picked up Charles, who had lost a leg, and carried him to the dressing-station.

What Mrs Moon was not to know until four days later was that her youngest son John had been killed in action on the same day that Charles had died. She heard the news in a letter from Lieut J Gilliland, OC “C” Company, Anson Battalion, BEF: “Dear Mrs Moon, I am awfully
sorry to have to write and tell you your son John was killed during a bombardment this afternoon. I know how terrible this news must be to you, but in your great grief it must be a consolation to you to know what a splendid soldier your son has proved. He joined us on the 22nd March, and we all very soon got to know his cheerful and manly disposition. It will console you, too, to know his death was instantaneous, and that he had no suffering. He will be remembered by his friends in “C” Company, who are very numerous."

Like so many of these endless letters home which weary officers were duty bound to write,  it may have tried to paint a kinder picture than the reality. One account  stated that John was killed by a rifle-grenade, and another that it was a German shell in the front trenches that brought about his death.
 
The local newspaper reported that "Mr Moon has been ill himself for some months, and is now in Bath Hospital, where Mrs Moon will have to travel to break this terrible news".
 
John's grave is in Tranchee de Mecknes  Cemetery, Aix-Noulette, Pas de Calais, and Charles was buried at Warloy-Baillon Communal Cemetery Extension, Somme, some 40 miles south 
west.
 
I walk past their former home in Western Road often, and wonder at how much sorrow there must have been within those walls in the following years, and sadly, how much grief is still felt in soldier's homes today, when bad news arrives from Afghanistan.
 
The Moons lost two nephews, Christopher Moon and William Moon, in the following years, and, in September 1944, another member of the extended family, Ronald , then serving with the Parachute Regiment, was to die in action, aged 23, in Holland. These, and the Moons of Western Road, are all commemorated on  Southborough War Memorial .
 
Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of World War One, who died in 2009, memorably said: "Why did we fight? The peace was settled round a table, so why the hell couldn't they do that at the start, without losing millions of men?"

Wedding on a Shoestring

Cutting the cake! We popped down to Hastings today to see my Mum, and did some shopping en route. As I sipped a latte, I had a leaf through the Times and read the piece entitled Billionaire rants at media over hobbit wedding insults. I have no axe to grind with Sean and Alexandra Parker, who are entitled to have the marriage ceremony they choose – but I thought I would offer an alternative -   a wedding on a shoestring, which was a very happy occasion and kicked off a  marriage which has so far lasted, through its inevitable ups and downs, for 33 years!
 
We got married in 1980. We had shared a home in Islington for several years by then. We just decided one night that it was time to get hitched, shook hands on it, and wasted no time in putting our plans into action! We got in touch with the Minister of Capel Kings Cross, a Welsh Congregationalist chapel on Pentonville Road, to fix a date. We were invited to  attend two services at the Capel, and shared a very friendly cup of tea afterwards in the basement with the regulars. We then got on the blower (no mobiles or internet!) to invite our friends and family. We didn’t get round to printed invitations! We didn’t have a large income  – Martin was working as an actor, mostly theatre, and I was working as PA to a  theatrical agent in the daytime, and waitress/barmaid/box office evenings at the Kings Head Theatre Club round the corner. 
  
I already had a wedding ring – Mum had given me her original wartime ring when I was fourteen when Dad bought her a new one – and an actress friend of mine gave me an intro to a number of rag-trade contacts she had. I found a pretty dress at a trade price of £10, and a pair of cream shoes at Chapel Market in Islington. A friend who shared the house with us French-plaited my hair for the wedding and I had no make-up – I was 23 years old and had been a teenager in the 70s, at which time young women didn’t go in much for cosmetics! My sister Caroline (pregnant at the time) was my matron-of-honour and wore her own flower print dress.
 
We put on a spread, again helped by friends and family, in the basement of our rented house. We bought a home-cooked ham from Chapel Market, sliced meats and quiches from the nice sandwich-bar near my work place off Baker Street, and made ratatouille, potato salad, and other party foods at home. My in-laws (and Martin!!) spent the evening before the wedding cooking chicken portions while I went out to Joe Allen’s in Covent Garden with my sisters and mother for a girls’ night out! Mam and Aunty Olwen brought the wedding cake up from Wales. The local pub lent us glasses, and we bought the wine and beer wholesale. We had sparkling white for the toast. In those days, champagne wasn’t available discounted at supermarkets. 
  
A friend drove us to the chapel and back, so no wedding-limousine needed either! The orders of service were printed by my father-in-law, and in a typically generous Welsh gesture, given to us gratis by his employers Ty John Penry Press of Swansea. My boss at the time kindly offered to take the wedding photos.
 
Friends and relatives travelled up from Wales, from Spain, from the USA, and if anyone had looked up at the large first-floor window of our flat, it must have looked like a tightly-packed goldfish bowl! A hundred and twenty guests sat with their paper plates and cutlery on their laps or squeezed together with new friends and drinks in their hands.
 
Many people said to us afterwards that it was the best wedding they’d ever been to – relaxed, friendly, and great food! By 9pm there was a good-natured singing stand-off between the English and the Welsh which ended with most of the guests de-camping to the Prince Regent opposite, and by the end of the night, when Martin came up to our bedroom after a last look round the flat, he found me (in my bridal chamber as ’twere) surrounded by
late-stayers, still laughing and chatting!
 
I think, as I recall, my parents gave us £150 towards the wedding expenses, augmented on the day by my sister Liz, who, following Catalan tradition, cut the bridegroom’s tie into pieces and took them round on a plate, selling bits off to the guests.
 
We hadn’t planned a honeymoon as such, but we did have two Persil tickets. These were an offer, very unusual in those distant days when buy-one-get-one-free was unheard of, whereby you saved up tokens from packets of Persil washing-powder, and sent off for a Persil ticket. This enabled you to have two rail tickets for the price of one to anywhere in the UK. 
  
Martin thought we might take our bicycles to Inverness. His Dad had been there in the war and Martin remembered him saying it was flat. So, after spending a day clearing up after the party, we got on our bikes (sit-up-and-begs with no gears), wearing walking boots, with cycling capes and army-surplus rucksacks, and waved goodbye to our housemates. Apparently, they told us later, they had only just been able to conceal their mirth until they  closed the front door. We caught the night-sleeper from Kings Cross, spending the first night of our honeymoon on bunk-beds, and waking to see the purple heathery slopes of Scotland!
 
We hadn’t planned anything much (the confidence of youth!) or booked ahead – we stayed in bed and breakfasts as we cycled round Loch Ness. It took us almost all of the first day to get the first six miles to Drumnadrochit, battling against a ferocious wind funnelling up the Loch in our direction. And it wasn’t flat (Martin disremembered!). But we were also extremely lucky – that week in early March was mostly fine, whereas the week after our return brought heavy snow.  
  
I have to say that we had a great wedding and honeymoon, and I’ve never felt the slightest bit of envy about anyone else’s. And since we had our wedding in central London, it meant that for most of our friends and family, it was possible to attend without taking precious holiday time or needed money to travel to a foreign destination.

We didn’t have a wedding-present list – 1980s consumerism and Thatcherist ideals were yet to come, and we were grateful for the modest gifts, some of which have worn out now, but many are still with us. We have a very nice Norman Rockwell plate from an American friend, and a pair (Lion and Fish –Leo and Pisces) of water-pistols from another New Yorker. To this day, we haven’t used them as weapons – so far, so good! Cycling round Loch Ness