Judith Johnson's Blog, page 9

The Urge to Purge

Penguin No 8 I found myself telling colleagues about my old autograph book this week. It somehow disappeared when we moved out of our house in Cranbrook in 1971. It really was quite a good'un, with autographs Dad had got for me when working at Pinewood, Elstree etc. It had loads of smashing British actors in it, as well as all four Beatles, Mick Jagger and Tom Jones!  With the advent of selfies etc, autographs seem to have lost ground, but I still treasure a reply I had from Peter Jackson to my appreciative letter posted to New Zealand after the first Lord of the Rings film came out.

When my parents moved to Spain, there was a lot of downsizing needed  after years spent in a big family house with eight children. There was an auction, and most went in job lots, including Grandpa Hayter's library of first editions. I particularly remember a rather beautiful turquoise-covered first edition of Oscar Wilde's Salome. But hey-ho, you can't have everything - where would you put it? And when I regret things gone, I think of my friend Max, who left Europe on a Kindertransport with  a tiny suitcase, and all the other refugees that have existed before and since, forced to leave everything behind.
 
It's good to declutter, but I've learnt to hold my fire when I get into a certain purging frame of mind, and a desire comes over me to throw everything out. I guess the balance is to consider and select only the truly precious things, and to give, sell, or take to the recycling centre a significant portion of the rest. Who would want to end up like the man whose basement, upon his demise, was found to contain a copy of every issue of the Radio Times published during his entire adult life?

Our son is getting married next spring, a significant turning-point for us all, and, looking forwards to the next stage of our lives, we hope to streamline all that stuff stored away in the attic. I never get rid of anything without consulting its owner, but this year finally washed, dried and gave away to the local church's tombola-stall, my son's childhood soft toys (well, most of them!). 

There's still a way to go! William Morris famously said that one should have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. Well, some of the items I've hung on to are lovely to me, but they sit on the shelves year after year lacking attention. Here are a few of them: These four rather beautiful door-handles are from our former home in London. They were made by Wilbec, and are 30s/40s Lucite/Bakelite. 


The cracked mug - Hackney, the 'radical Socialist borough' from where, to some of our friends' amazement, we moved to a village in East Sussex with a Tory MP.


A packet of Co-Operative Society sewing needles from Mam's sewing-box, and others kept on a half-torn ticket from the Coliseum, Trecynon for their production of Mud Diggers in aid of Aberdare Warship Week (I might keep the ticket for my scrapbook!) 

A bottle from the Thomas Niagara Works in Swansea. Thanks to the joys of the internet, I've just found this info about its origins on the web: http://www.jlb2011.co.uk/walespic/archive/000826z.htm

Some things, however, will be staying! My mother has knitted many marvellous things over the years, from Indian Chief cardigans (1960s) to Mr and Mrs Jack Frost (they come out every Christmas), and, especially treasured, my haunted castle pencil-pot.

At moments of crisis, like the illness or death of loved ones, you come to know, again, the truth that love is the most valuable commodity, and all else is passing.

Here's one more William Morris quote from Light from Many Lamps, another 'keeper', one of my favourite books, somewhat tatty now after much use:

"I'm going your way, so let us go hand in hand. You help me and I'll help you. We shall not be here very long, for soon death, the kind old nurse, will come and rock us all to sleep. Let us help one another while we may."

 

Seeing Kitty Fisher

Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra Dissolving the Pearl 1759 by Joshua Reynolds I have never seen a ghost myself, though I did on one occasion spend a creepy night at Kilmeston Manor. However, during the time I worked at a girls' boarding school in Kent several members of the domestic staff there claimed that they most definitely had.

I was walking back to my office early one afternoon through the main entrance-hall, where a sweeping red-carpeted staircase leads to an upper gallery and portraits of former Headmistresses gaze watchfully down.  I stopped for a chat with Sheila, one of the cleaning-ladies, by the large round oak table.

 

"Are you alright, Sheila?" I asked. It occurred to me that she seemed rather flustered and looked unusually pale.

"I'm feeling a bit funny actually," she answered. "I think I've just seen Kitty Fisher."

Kitty Fisher was reputedly the school's main ghost. "Really?" I asked, trying to dampen my excitement.

"Well, I was polishing the table, and I heard the front door open, and I thought, oh that's one of the girls coming back from lunch, so I didn't think anything more of it, I heard her going up the stairs, then I looked up and saw a woman walking up there. She was wearing a black cloak, and this sort of white frilly thing round inside the edge of her hood. Anyway, halfway up the second lot of stairs, she just vanished! ... Ooh, it did give me a turn ..."

There has been a house at Hemsted even before William the Conqueror gifted the land to his brother Odo. Queen Elizabeth I visited the Catholic recusant Guldeford family, whose house no longer stands, bar the old ice house well tucked away amongst the rhododendrons. 400 years on, two other Queen Elizabeths were to follow: our present Queen, who sent her daughter Princess Anne to school here, and her own mother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The three founders of Benenden School  bought the country mansion of Hemsted House in 1924 (future pupils included the daughters of Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton), and during the Second World War the school evacuated to Newquay in Cornwall, while Hemsted became a Military Hospital. Its patients included shot-down German Luftwaffe crew-members. The Free French pilot Captain Jean Maridor lost his own life when he moved in to tip the wing of a doodle-bug threatening the hospital, thus saving many others.


No surprise, then, that over the centuries, there may have lingered a memory of those who lived, and sometimes died, here. One of the groundsmen told me that he had once seen a girl in school uniform walking past a building, and initially thought nothing of it until he remembered it was the school holidays. The domestic bursar on several evenings glimpsed a lady silently approaching along the passage in the old Bachelors' Wing.

Then there was the occasion, in the 1960s, when ouija boards were in fashion, and a small group of girls in one of the boarding-houses gave themselves quite a fright. The glass had just commenced to move, and to spell out the word F-I-R-E, when, no more than a couple of seconds later, the school fire-alarm went off, and the whole school was evacuated while a blaze in the old stable-block was dealt with. The story went round the school rapidly, and the Bishop of Dover was brought in the following Sunday to give a strict sermon on the follies of messing with the supernatural.

The head of maintenance, whilst working alone, recalled a moment in the middle of repairing a sky-light at the top of the house when a cold hand had touched the back of his neck. He'd retorted "Don't be so bloody stupid, Kitty - this is dangerous!"

Kitty Fisher is of course still widely remembered in verse, as she is too in local folk history, and new girls are still encouraged by their peers on a certain night of the year to run through a brick tunnel in the grounds (no doubt Victorian!) where they are told the ghost of Kitty Fisher lurks.

Kitty was one of the most famous members of the 'fair and frail' ladies of the eighteenth century 'demi-monde', coming into prominence first at the age of nineteen in 1758.  It is believed that she was born in Soho, the daugher of  John Fischer, of German Lutheran extraction. She had many admirers, and was painted several times by Joshua Reynolds. She was also a greatly spirited horsewoman (I wonder whether Patrick O'Brian partly based the character of Diana Villiers on her?), and as mentioned above, recorded by name in the child's nursery-rhyme which begins "Lucy Lockett lost her pocket".

In the autumn of 1766, Kitty was happy to marry, with mutual affection, John Norris, the son of a Kentish landowner, grandson of Sir John Norris, Vice-Admiral of England, and the owner of Hemsted House in Benenden. Her sympathetic nature and readiness to offer assistance to anyone in distress was noted by the local working people, and had been chronicled earlier in life. In Ladies Fair and Frail by Horace Bleackley, the following story of her girlhood was reported:

 'While paying a visit to Paddington, a rural suburb much patronised by the jaded Londoner during the summer months, she chanced to lodge in the same house with a delicate boy named Henderson, who had been brought thither for change of air. He was a youth of great promise, apprenticed to Mr Clee, "the ingenious engraver of Oxenden Street", and he had fallen into a decline. Touched by his sufferings, and full of compassion for his widowed mother, the good-natured Kitty took an interest in the poor lad. It was a brief friendship. One day she heard him coughing violently, and knowing that he was alone she rushed to his assistance. Upon entering his room a glance told her that the attack was serious, and while she was trying to soothe him he died in her arms. Years afterwards the great actor, John Henderson, used to tell the tale, for although so much infamy was attached to her name, he remembered that Kitty Fisher had been a kind friend to his dead brother.'"

Sadly, Kitty had very little time left herself. Only months after her wedding, during the winter of 1766, a hollow cough grew deeper and more painful, while an accompanying hectic blush in her cheeks betrayed the presence of consumption. An immediate visit to the Bristol Hotwells was prescribed, and Kitty, resigned and patient, embarked on her final journey, a three day coach-ride in bleak weather. She died en-route, at the Three Tuns tavern in Stall Street, Bath, and was buried, on 23rd March 1767, in the Norris family vault in the chancel of Benenden Parish church.

John Mayall - Master of Music, lover of the Blues

We saw John Mayall at the Assembly Hall in Tunbridge Wells this week. Notwithstanding it’s not the cosiest venue - he really rocked it! It’s great when you look round you and see so many faces in the audience wreathed in smiles, eagerly anticipating the brilliant sounds coming their way.  

I used to listen to John Mayall’s Blues from Laurel Canyon and Turning Point albums in the late 60s when I still lived at home. Most of my own pocket money went on books, as I recall, but I benefited from listening to my siblings’ albums, which included John Mayall, The Incredible String Band, Cream, Free, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan - you know, all the good stuff!  John Mayall was already 40 in 1970, and Tuesday night was the 7th gig in his 80th Anniversary tour. To use a popular adjective of the 70s (the word ‘awesome’ only applied to things like the Northern Lights back then), he was amazing.

Mayall’s opening support band, King King, was pretty stonking - fronted by Alan Nimmo, their kilted lead guitarist. We looked at each other when they went off with eyebrows raised: if the level of blues they were belting out was anything to go by, we must be in for something even more spectacular to follow! And so it was - John Mayall’s voice may be a little diminished at 80 years old, but his playing, and that of his band (Rocky Athas, Greg Rzab and Jay Davenport) was of the highest quality. They played a set of over 90 minutes, with an encore, before greeting fans in the foyer (every band has to come out and sell CDs these days). After that they would no doubt have been getting on the road for the next venue, St David’s Hall in Cardiff.  We peered at the punishing schedule for the rest of the tour - 39 dates, kicking off in Moscow and every night a different town with only Mondays off. Good Lord, a 20-something might find that schedule hard-going. John Mayall is obviously a man of steel!

There is something really impressive and deeply satisfying about watching or listening to a master, who has done their 10,000 hours, and more, in perfecting their art. I’ve seen a few veterans in the last year or so, including John Renbourn,  Robin Williamson, Martin Carthy, Dave Swarbrick, L’il Jimmy Reid, and they can all still cut the mustard.

If you want to get off your sofa and get those feet tapping, I recommend you make the effort to go and see John Mayall for some live music joy - you won’t regret it!

For more on John Mayall:

http://www.johnmayall.com/

http://globalrocklegends.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/john-mayall.html

For Those in Peril on the Sea - 100 years on

George Henry Penfold Chief Petty Officer George Henry Penfold 164841, Royal Navy, died 100 years ago this week, on 15 October 1914, age 37. He is commemorated on both the Southborough War Memorial and the Chatham Naval Memorial, Kent.

George was born in 1877 and christened on 11 March at St Peter’s Church, Southborough. The family, resident then at 7, Holden Corner, included his father George, a labourer (53 when his son George was born), and brother John, also a labourer (older by 17 years than his brother). Dee’s Directory 1915 listed, under Men Serving, a J Penfold, of Modest Corner, with the Royal Field Artillery, and if this was George’s brother John, he would have been 54 by this time.

George Penfold was an acting gunner in 1914, and had by then seen 22 years’ service in the Royal Navy, having joined at 15 years of age. A tragic coincidence: his first voyage, after joining the Navy, and his last, were both aboard HMS Hawke. He had served two or three years in the Mediterranean and three years in China, returning from the latter for Christmas, 1913.  In addition to the Hawke he served on HMS Illustrious, HMS Irresistible and HMS London.
HMS Hawke HMS Hawke was an armoured cruiser operating as part of the 10th Cruiser Squadron assigned to the Northern Patrol. She was one of the oldest ships still in service (launched at Chatham in 1891) and was being used as a training ship with many cadets on board. She had been re-commissioned in February 1913 with a nucleus crew and had come up to her full complement at the outbreak of war in August 1914.

On October 15th 1914 she was in the northern waters of the North Sea with a similar ship, HMS Theseus. They were operating without a destroyer screen when they were attacked, and unfortunately both slower than the submarine U9  tracking them. At the time of attack, HMS Hawke had just turned to intercept a neutral Norwegian collier. Their position was some 60 miles off Aberdeen.

U9 Lieutenant Otto Weddigen The U-Boat Commander was Lieutenant Otto Weddigen. He missed the Theseus with his first torpedo but unfortunately hit HMS Hawke amidships near a magazine. The detonation was followed by a second terrific explosion, in which a large number of the crew was killed. The ship sank within 5 minutes and was only able to launch one boat. Five hundred and twenty five perished and only 49 men in the long boat were saved. They were picked up three hours later by a Norwegian steamer. Had they had sufficient time to launch more lifeboats from the Hawke, then undoubtedly more lives would have been saved.

HMS Theseus was under strict Admiralty orders not to attempt to pick up survivors, as several weeks earlier there had been a disaster.

 On that occasion, on the 22nd September, both HMS Hogue and HMS Cressy had also been torpedoed when going to pick up survivors from HMS Aboukir (Aboukir’s Chief Yeoman of Signals Alfred Assiter, also aged 37, died on that day and is also commemorated on Southborough War Memorial ). The submarine that sunk these three ships had again been commanded by Weddigen.  Lieutenant Weddigen was commander of U29, the following year, when on March 18th he was caught in Pentland Firth. HMS Dreadnought managed to ram the submarine and sink her with the loss of all hands.

There are two other connections between HMS Hawke and the small Kent community of Southborough, Tunbridge Wells:Private George William Walton (Bedford Road), Royal Marine Light Infantry, also died on HMS Hawke, and Private JE Corke (Elm Road) survived the sinking.

(Extracted in part from Southborough War Memorial by Judith Johnson)

BBC Radio - Constant Companion

Dad recording Time To Laugh, BBC Radio, 1939 If televisions stopped working and we had to go back to only seeing films at the cinema, I wouldn’t get too aerated about it (I don’t watch films or TV programmes on computer screens), but I would be lost without BBC Radio.  It has been a constant companion throughout my life, and I don’t begrudge the BBC a single penny of my licence fee - it’s worth it!

I’ve stopped buying the Radio Times, as the happy half hour or so ticking everything in the radio listings I fancied listening to just became too frustrating, as there is never enough time to listen to all the good stuff that’s broadcasted weekly - an embarrassment of riches if ever there was one!

My alarm clock is set to Radio 3, and on Sunday morning I leapt up from bed to increase the volume on Gavin Bryars’ marvellous Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me. I first heard this a few years back when I was ironing on a Sunday evening and my son was doing some homework. We looked at each other after a few minutes and said “What is this?”, as the theme endlessly looped, going on for over 25 minutes (the original goes on for 74 minutes). But we were captivated, and still share a love of it. Bryars based the piece on a recording he made of an old tramp, living rough, who sang the hymn for him.

Another long-time Sunday evening ironing-time favourite which featured in Tom’s childhood was Alan Keith’s 100 Best Tunes. Tom would listen from his bedroom upstairs to "that man with the nice voice". Alan Keith carried on until he retired, at 94 years old, and died a couple of weeks after that. I have just discovered, to my amazement, thanks to the internet, that he was the brother of David Kossoff, one of my own childhood favourites. You learn something every day!

One of the things I love about BBC Radio 2 is the way that many presenters carry on into old age, their output still pleasing their listeners - currently including Desmond Carrington’s groovy Friday night The Music Goes Round and Brian Matthews’ Sounds of the Sixties. When I was heavily pregnant in the early 1980s and suffering sleepless nights on the sofa (not wanting to interrupt my husband’s beauty sleep with my endless trips to the loo!) it was the friendly comforting voice of Radio 2 that helped me through, reassuring me I was not alone in the night with the unknown prospect of labour looming.

There’s not enough room here to go into all the glories of Radio 3 and 4, but I particularly value all the documentary content, eg the wonderful From Our Own Correspondent, and am really looking forward to Neil MacGregor’s new series Germany: Memories of a Nation. It’s typical of the kind of programming that American friends envy, and which we should never take for granted. The only station I have never been a fan of is Radio 1, which launched on this day in 1967. Even then I found it too much of a vexation to the spirit, and they didn’t play the kind of cool hippy tunes (think Incredible String Band) we favoured at Hayter Towers!

Harold Nicolson, the husband of Vita Sackville-West, once said that "one of the minor pleasures of life is to be slightly ill". I would add "and to lie in bed all day with cups of tea listening to Radio 4"! 

Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

The changing of the seasons is one of life’s many quiet joys. I love the signs of autumn: spiders spinning webs in the hedges, blue-black scarab beetles on Southborough Common, skeins of wild geese flying high, toadstools in the forest.

My primary school was a converted oast-house in Rolvenden, where John Wesley had once preached under a nearby oak. In September, the beams were always hung with hops, and at home there were apples drying in the attic. I loved the harvest hymns, and often whistle “We plough the fields and scatter” now as I walk along the lanes through Bough Beech’s fields and woods.

I treasure my copy of Ladybird Books’ What to Look for in Autumn, published in 1960. The page pictured here shows women picking up potatoes in the field. When we lived in the Sussex village of Robertsbridge, I met a lovely old lady in her nineties, who had farmed there since 1947. She recalled that when she and her husband first moved there, they employed almost everyone in our lane of about thirty houses to pick the potato crop. By the 1990s, none of the residents worked on the land.

Some things change, and some things stay the same, thank goodness. There are still hops, apples, blackberries and conkers to be found in the hedgerows of the High Weald.

Another perennial pleasure is the annual scarecrow competition in Speldhurst. I drive through the village on my way to work, so it’s always fun, in the first week of September, to come upon this year’s entries. I don’t know which one won the prize at the Village Flower Show last weekend, but Bertie Bassett, sitting on the bench by St Mary’s Church lych-gate, was probably my personal favourite, made with great attention to detail from biscuit tins. Fantastic!

The Inheritors

Dad and friend at Stonehenge, 1920s I found William Golding's The Inheritors a most marvellous read. Golding, enters, and leads us into, a prehistoric world, a place and time where a small group of Neanderthals encounter a larger party of 'the new people', Homo Sapiens. The vivid, masterly writing, issuing from Golding's creative imagination, is told from the point of view, for most of the book, of the Neanderthals, and we see how they struggle to make sense of what they are experiencing for the first time. The reader is included in this process, and I and my son, in discussing the book, found that we had both needed to go back over a page sometimes to fully comprehend what was being described.

The violent disruption of their lives by the savagery of strangers, who have the advantage of  better technology, is a sad fore-runner of  conquests to come throughout mankind's ensuing history; yet, the new people are not two-dimensional baddies - Golding concludes the book with a chapter from their viewpoint.

The writing is captivating - all the more amazing, when you read in John Carey's introduction, that Golding wrote this (published in 1955) and each of his first four novels during lunch hours, breaks and holidays while teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's school in Salisbury.

My son lent me his copy of The Inheritors. He is fascinated by prehistoric man.  I sometimes wonder if this interest was sparked by a weekend jaunt we had when he was a small boy. We had, at that time, little cash, but we spent lots of time in free museums, walking in woods, visiting old churches etc. One summer Saturday morning we set off early for Salisbury, where we ate lardy cake in the bustling market, looked round Salisbury Cathedral, visited Stonehenge, looked for Hayter ancestors in the graveyard at Winterbourne Stoke, and spent the night in Amesbury. The next day we saw Silbury Hill, the Neolithic tomb at West Kennet Long Barrow, and Avebury Circle before driving back to East Sussex. Enough to fire any child's imagination if he or she is lucky enough to possess an unspoilt capacity for wonder! My son is an artist and art teacher today, and this year his pupils have made their own cave paintings and clay facsimiles of prehistoric tools, and were treated to a demonstration by a master flint-knapper. While they painted, Tom read instalments to them from Michelle Paver's Wolf Brother , a wonderful evocation of a boy's adventure 6,000 years ago.  I understand the children were captivated by the story.

The Inheritors is a book that demands one's full attention, which it richly deserves. It whets the appetite for more of the good stuff: I've been to my bookshelf to look out my copy of Golding's Lord of the Flies, read at school but not for decades, and also Clive King's classic Puffin Stig of the Dump, about a caveman encountered by a small 20th Century boy.

Long live story-tellers!

Bummeln in Bavaria

Over the last few years we have met plenty of people who are drawn back, year after year, to the Austrian Tyrol, with its clean air, friendly people, peace and quiet, and beautiful lakes and mountains. We seem to have joined them, but this year we opted to stay over the border in Ruhpolding, Bavaria. We were lucky in our small hotel, half an hour’s walk from the town centre, among quiet meadows.

A hundred yards or so from where we stayed was a spring, where all comers can fill their bottles (a contribution is requested, and honesty box provided). We went most evenings, and often met locals who had driven there for their weekly supply. My German is rusty, but it’s always a pleasure to be able to exchange some friendly words, though so many Germans are keen to practise their English!

We wandered further on one evening and found a signpost for a 3¾ hour walk to the top of Hochfelln, which seemed like a good idea for the next day. We packed our rucksacks with water and a Seed Stacked Flapjack bar (top emergency snack!), rain jacket and trousers, and set off. It was an uphill hike, with no easy downhills to speak of, through meadows, woods, and at one point our very narrow track ran along the edge of a steep hillside (I avoided looking down!). The simple pleasures of looking up through green leaves, of standing below ancient rock-faces, of exerting your legs, lungs and backs to the point of breathlessness, of watching a butterfly land on your hand to taste the salt in your sweat, of standing by a mountain-stream and listening to it rushing along, are profound. There is something joyful about hiking – human beings aren’t built to sit at computer screens in stuffy rooms all day!

When we finally got to the top of the Hochfelln we were intrigued to see Alpine Choughs for the first time, patrolling the café tables like so many Trafalgar Square pigeons!

Alpine Chough We took a different route down, and for the last leg found ourselves on a zig-zagging road. The storm clouds seen in the far distance from the top of the Hochfelln were catching up. A car went by, stopped and reversed. A couple on their way home to Reit in Winkl, who had seen us further up the mountain (two British people in shorts, socks and sunhats, surely inconspicuous!!), asked if we would like a lift for the last couple of miles to Ruhpolding. “Oh yes please!” I said.

The majority of local folk we encountered were charming and friendly. Some of our fellow British guests at the hotel expressed surprise at how warm, amiable and humorous they found the Germans they met. Well, they say travel broadens the mind – another national stereotype happily disproved!

Wherever we venture, I always like to search out any local war memorials. We found one halfway up the hill to St Georg’s Church, which apparently had recently been renovated after some years of neglect. There was a beautiful pieta inside the chapel, and a mural on the wall showing a young soldier taking his leave of his family – a reminder, if one was needed, that in all the countries involved in the two World Wars, there were homes in places like this where sons, husbands and fathers would never again be returning home to help bring in the harvest.  In the Heimatmuseum there are two more panels remembering the war-dead, and these feature enamelled photographs, as do so many graves in mainland Europe.

Aubrey & Maturin

Lord Nelson On this day in 1798, Lord Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile, cutting off supplies to the army of Napoleon in Egypt.  Although Nelson’s Column still stands in the centre of Trafalgar Square, and his magnificent tomb can still be seen in the Crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, with the passing of over 200 years since his death during  the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, few babies, if any, are now named after Britain’s once most adored hero (though of course, one of the world’s other most adored heroes, the eponymous Nelson Mandela, passed away and was universally mourned last December).

Patrick O’Brian’s fictional hero Jack Aubrey was wounded at the Battle of the Nile, and often expresses his great reverence for Nelson, with whom he once dined as a young officer. I think I first came across O’Brian’s series of Aubrey & Maturin novels at the Hawkenbury Allotment Holders’ summer show in Tunbridge Wells’ Dunorlan Park, when a little pile of crisp paperbacks on a book-stall with enticing pictures of sailing-ships on the covers called to me and I handed over a couple of quid.

I was hooked from the start. There’s something about these books that makes me feel deeply happy. I can’t really explain it - I don’t know how to sail, and crossing the English Channel on a P&O ferry in only the slightest choppy weather turns me a light shade of green. I‘m ignorant of any significant naval ancestors (though surely practically every British citizen must have them!); the nearest I can get to a family connection is Dad’s role in The Onedin Line as James Onedin’s crusty old father-in-law.  And yet I have re-read these books more than any others in my possession. I guess though, that there’s no big mystery here - what catches at my heart and imagination is the superb quality of Patrick O’Brian’s writing.

Many people say that there’s something of Jane Austen in these naval adventures set in the early nineteenth-century, and certainly, the subtly-layered portraits of characters and situations bring her to mind, but there is also the deep learning behind the work, the thrilling accounts of dangers at sea, the references, through Maturin’s character, to politics, scientific and philosophical developments, and last but not least, the enduring friendship, through many difficulties, of its two main protagonists. 

I met an older lady once at a book club meeting who rolled her eyes when I mentioned the Aubrey-Maturin books. “Oh,” she said, “My husband has all of them on top of his dresser in our bedroom, never stops reading ‘em...”. And I heard once of a Patrick O’Brian ‘Widows’ Club in the West Indies, whose members’ husbands are always off re-enacting the book’s battles and manoeuvres in their sailing boats. My ambitions don’t stretch that far, but I must make an effort to bump The Victory at Portsmouth and the Chatham Historic Dock-Yard off my wish-list.

When I was younger, you could wait years for a movie to come round on the box. These days you can have an allocated shelf for favourite DVDs, and surely most of us has a film we put on when the old man or woman is away, and we’re free to watch in contented solitude. My husband, a man of discernment and wit in so many ways (tee hee), often reaches for There’s Something About Mary once I’m out of the way. I always watch Peter Weir’s wonderful rendition of Master and Commander. I saw it first on the big screen, thankfully, as it deserves at least one viewing at the size it was made for, but it still thrills me every time I see it on my old tv.

A couple of weeks ago we drove down to Hastings to see my Mum, and stopped off in the town to get some shopping. I was delighted to realise, seeing all the booted and tri-cornered families streaming towards the Old Town, that it was Dress Like a Pirate Day,  and even more excited to find, in a secondhand bookshop, a copy of The Thirteen-Gun Salute, the next unread Aubrey-Maturin book in the series.

Roll on Summer Holidays and uninterrupted reading time! 

Be Ye Kind - a Russian Story

I jotted down a quote from the Dalai Lama recently for my notebook: Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

There was some discussion on Facebook this week after one of my cousins posted a quote: Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be Kind. Always.

The consensus was that it is easier said than done. After all, we're only human, not angels.

News-wise, this year continues with its heavy load of war, killing, beheadings, kidnappings, sexual abuse, dishonesty, etc, and sometimes it's tempting to think that the human race is sinking under the weight of its own wrongdoing, but I am also constantly reminded of the possibility of acts of love and kindness, however small.

I still remember a man, many years ago, who opened his door to ask if I was alright as I sat one night, howling with pain, on the steps of a church on Hastings' West Hill, having just learnt that my flat-mate was having a clandestine relationship with my then boyfriend, and had been for some time. His small act of kindness and consideration helped.

A friend, who spent some time in prison in her youth, had the words Love and Hate tattooed across the upper surface of her fingers. Every day we're given fresh opportunities to choose between those two things, and I feel sure that on some level, every single choice makes a difference.

I've referred before in my blog to Victor Gollancz's marvellous anthology A Year of Grace. Here is an account from that book of  a Russian woman who manifestly chose love over hate, even to her last day:

Elizabeth Pilenko came from a wealthy land-owning family in the south of Russia. She went to the Women's University of St Petersburg and began at the age of eighteen, while still a student, to teach in the evening courses at the great Putilov factory. She published two books of poems and was a close friend of some of the best-known younger Russian poets.

She became a keen socialist revolutionary, and during the years 1914-1917 her life was taken up with revolutionary activities. After the October Revolution she worked with extraordinary skill and audacity in rescuing victims from the Terror.  Later she became Mayor of her own home town, working for justice between the Whites and the Reds, both of whom had resorted to violence against their opponents. She was denounced as a Bolshevist, tried and acquitted.

In 1923 she came to Paris. The excesses of the Revolution as it developed revolted her, though she remained to her death a staunch advocate of its principles. She found her way back to religious faith largely under the influence of Serge Bulgakov, who had been a Marxist.  She presented herself to the authorities of the Russian Church in Paris and announced that she wished to become a religious, "beginning at once, today," and to found a monastery. She had her way, but she was not the traditional Russian Orthodox religious. She was accused by some of neglecting the long services and the traditional contemplation. "I must go my way," she said. "I am for the suffering people". In the early morning she was at the markets buying cheap food for the people she fed, bringing it back in a sack on her back. She was a familiar figure in the slum, in her poor black habit and her worn-out men's shoes.

The many Russian refugees in France in those days were stateless persons, many of them poverty-stricken, without privilege, without claim on any of the services which the country provided for the poor. Mother Maria worked among the poorest. She discovered that Russians who contracted tuberculosis were lying in a filthy hovel on the banks of the Seine into which the Paris police used to throw those syphilitic wrecks which they picked up along the riverside. With ten francs in her pocket she bought a chateau and opened a sanatorium.

Then she found that there were hundreds of Russians in lunatic asylums all over Europe. They had just "disappeared" into these institutions, where no questions were asked about them. She raised a public outcry and got many of them released. In those days the Russian congregations in and around Paris were living examples of what the early apostolic communities must have been. They were real homes for the poor and the unwanted. Russians living in tenements could find there comfort and friendship. The Churches had their own labour exchanges, clinics and many other services, and the convent, over which Mother Maria presided, was central to their life.

When the German occupation took place Mother Maria summoned her chaplain and told him that she felt that her particular duty was to render all possible assistance to persecuted Jews. She knew that this would mean imprisonment and probably death, and she gave him the option of leaving. He refused. For a month the convent was a haven for Jews. Women and children were hidden within its walls. Money poured in to enable them to escape from France and hundreds were got away. At the end of a month the Gestapo came. Mother Maria was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. Her chaplain was sent to Buchenwald, where he died of starvation and overwork.

The story of her life in the camp is only now being pieced together. She was known even to the guards as "that wonderful Russian nun", and it is doubtful whether they had any intention of killing her. She had been there two and a half years when a new block of buildings was erected in the camp, and the prisoners were told that these were to be hot baths. A day came when a few dozen prisoners from the women's quarters were lined up outside the buildings. One girl became hysterical. Mother Maria, who had not been selected, came up to her. "Don't be frightened," she said. "Look, I shall take your turn," and in line with the rest, she passed through the doors. It was Good Friday, 1945.

CHRISTIAN NEWS LETTER, April 17th, 1946