writing, not drowning

The great and the good

So, just a few months away from blogging but the events of the recent weeks make me feel as if it has been a lifetime. Not laziness on my part, the reasons have been many and various; one potentially wonderful, which I hope to write about soon; at least two of great sadness (collective sadness - the murder of Jo Cox MP - and personal - the death of my beloved Dear Old Edinburgh Gent); a nasty and lingering bout of bacterial broncho-pneumonia, from which I have not fully recovered, although I am nearly there, and the shock and sadness of watching my country as it unravels, left to the mercy of a shifty bunch of politicians who clearly haven't a clue where we go to from here. 

The Dear Old Edinburgh Gent, my beloved Labrador, deserves a post to himself and I will write that in due course but his death came just a few days after my excellent GP told me that I was 'very ill indeed' and must rest. I took the medicine (conventional and then homeopathic), I stopped doing everything that I love - yoga, Pilates, singing (impossible when one has no puff) - and restricted myself to walking the dogs (my two and one guest) twice a day, and doing special breathing exercises. A few days later, there were just two dogs to walk . . . but at least the sun shone for most of the time, and I could sit out in my garden, watch everything spring into abundant life, and listen to the birds singing, all of which softened the blow a little.

The thoughtful Dear Daughter sent me not flowers but the box set of Spiral. 'When you're ill and can't concentrate, there's nothing better than a box set.' She was right; between dog walks, I stretched out on the sofa and lapped up every moment of all five series of Spiral (I managed to get hold of a very reasonably priced series 5 on eBay, to add to the box set of series 1-4.) I loved the characters (Laure, Gillou, Sami, TinTin . . .), the storylines, the themes; I learned a great deal about the French legal system (fascinating); I brushed up my French, and played 'spot the Parisian location'. Total immersion in a box set was, indeed, highly therapeutic and lasted longer than flowers would have, much as I love flowers. Spiral got me through the worst of those weeks, Spiral and my dear Miss P, my faithful Border collie-springer spaniel cross, who spent an inordinate number of hours alongside me on the sofa, with her head across my lap. I should also give an honourable mention to Little Miss P, the Shih Tzu, who was our house guest for a month, and who helped to take the edge off our sadness. The news that there is to be a series 6 of Spiral was a bonus.

And then the madness of the R-word . . . I watched the daily news output with increasing alarm. The Vote Leave brigade were all over the media and not in a good way. The front pages of the worst tabloids railed against immigrants; an over-excited and sweating Farage was everywhere; the rhetoric never went beyond 'taking back control', and Gove and Johnson played fast and loose with the country's future - and, as it turned out, with the truth (over the past 25 years or so in Johnson's case) - without ever once stopping to think that they might actually need a plan. Just in case their wishes came true.

I was at home when the first indication of what had happened to Jo Cox filtered through. Later that afternoon, I watched the news conference at which her murder was confirmed. We know that terrible things happen to very, very good people, every day, everywhere in the world, but this senseless act, whatever the motivation for it, was beyond cruel. For a few days, at the very height of pre-EU referendum fever, the country came together to mourn the life of a young woman who had already achieved so much but who had very much more to give, not just to the nation but to those who loved her, above all, her two young children. The words spoken by her husband and her sister left no-one in any doubt just what they - and we - had lost and what we could all do in Jo's memory. If only we could have bottled that feeling and drawn on it over the past few days.

I don't mind nailing my colours to the mast; I'm a Europhile, through and through. In 1959, when I was 11, my brother, who was old enough to have served in the armed forces towards the end of, and in the aftermath of, WWII, took me travelling across Europe: to Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. He shared his enthusiasm for other people, places, cultures, and food - and for working together for peace and prosperity. (He's almost 89 now and all this remains dear to his heart.) It was the best possible informal liberal education an impressionable British pre-teenager could have had. I went on to a more formalised version at a convent grammar school, founded in the 1800s by a French nun. We sang French songs and carols, and studied not only French but Italian, Spanish and German, not to mention Latin (for the judgin', as E L Wisty said), and Greek. Learning to speak other languages, and to be interested and at ease in other countries, felt like the most normal thing in the world. It still does. How lucky we were.

Years later, my professional life would involve me in working with colleagues from across the European Union, sharing information and advice, and in supporting legal cases that would be heard, in time, by the European Court of Justice. Cases that have made a difference to the lives of millions of women, not just here in the UK but across the EU. I am proud of that work and of what we achieved. 

During those years, I sometimes thought of my forebears and how amazed they would have been at all this because I am descended, in part, from economic migrants who came to this country almost 200 years ago, from Ireland and France. They came to escape destitution, to work and to provide for their families, something their descendants, including me, have been doing ever since and, in so doing, contributing to the wealth of the nation that took them in. Paying our dues and happy to do so.

So, if people ask me what I am - in terms of citizenship - I say European and British. Even better, as a friend of mine says, 'I am a citizen of the world.' The multi-lingual Dear Daughter, who benefited from the educational opportunities offered by our membership of the EU, thinks this way too.

That is not to say that I do not recognise the shortcomings of the EU. Of course I do. But I also believe in the old Fabian principle of orchestrating change from within, rather than standing on the sidelines and shouting slogans, chucking metaphorical Boris bricks, or, in that 21st century way, ranting at screens to nobody listening. 

A week after Jo Cox's murder, and 100 years after the events in Ireland that inspired W B Yeats's poem, we woke to a country 'changed, changed utterly', but not to the birth of 'a terrible beauty'. It was something quite other, quite alien, and I did not recognise it. We are only just beginning to understand the full import of what a slender majority of those who voted (a minority, in fact, of those actually registered to vote) have wrought. This wretched and ill thought-through referendum has divided families and friends; many of those who are eligible to do so are now applying to become citizens of other EU countries to protect their jobs, their careers, their futures. This includes at least one much-loved member of my own family, for whom I am helping to assemble the necessary paperwork. Surreal doesn't even begin to describe it.

We are going to need a great deal more than plasters to cover the wounds or fairy dust sprinkled over everything to make things even remotely better again. Perhaps we should start collecting old fiddles and send them to Messrs Gove, Johnson and Farage, the Gang of Three, who drove us into this mess. They can stand on the coastline - our only border, the control of which they are so keen to 'take back'  - and, like Nero, play, while everyone else burns. Or drowns.

I have read any number of media articles and comments and followed a good deal of social media, as the whole sorry saga has unfolded, and one of the phrases I keep seeing is along the lines of, 'I want to be proud of my country again; I want us to be Great Britain again.' I've thought about this and confess that I'm not sure what it actually means, other than a desire to turn back the clock to a semi-mythical past, a sort of Basil Fawlty view of how the country should be but never really was. Instead of worrying about becoming Great Britain (which, of course, constitutionally and legally, we already are and continue to be, for the time being at least), perhaps we should aim to become Good Britain. That would be a start.

'You may have the universe, if I may have Italy'

Who am I to disagree with Giuseppe Verdi? I am, in fact, in total agreement and have been for, oh, more than half a century. And every year, usually in spring, I long to be there. These days, however, I don't manage to visit as often as I would like so have to settle for spending some time with my nose in a book, or books, about Italy. This year, the Italy-yearning surfaced in late September and certain books in the waiting-to-be-read pile beckoned . . .

The first, a novel set mainly in Rome and which had garnered enthusiastic reviews, was somewhat disappointing, with characters whose dialogue I never found wholly convincing. I won't name it, not least because I do appreciate the effort that goes into writing a novel and then actually having it published, although you may be able to work out the title from the 'Read 2015' list on the right.  

So I moved swiftly on to Elena Ferrante, for whom I had been saving myself - and I was holding my breath. There had been so much publicity and speculation about the reclusive author and so much praise heaped upon her novels that I could hardly bear the thought of a second disappointment. My relief, as soon as I started to read My Brilliant Friend was palpable. I loved it and have ordered the second, third and fourth of the Neapolitan novels from my local library; Ferrante, I feel sure, will carry me through an English winter.

I did have one or two qualms about the occasional Americanism in Ann Goldstein's translation but, having read this interview with her on Lizzy's Literary Life blog, I now appreciate the challenges she faced in translating Ferrante.

My Brilliant Friend is a wonderful evocation of adolescence - and adolescent friendships - in post-war Naples. Some of its themes are particular to the time and the place; others are universal and I can understand, completely, how Ferrante's work has suddenly captured the imagination of so many readers beyond Italy. 

Although I try to avoid too much self-referential thinking when reading, the setting for some of the most significant moments in the narrative - the shoeshop owned by Lila's father - took me straight back to a particular time in my own post-war adolescence. It was 1961, I was 14, staying in Liguria in northern Italy, and made friends with a girl of my age called Marisa. Her family owned a shoeshop in a narrow street in the centre of the town and I had visited the shop with my mother to buy some sandals. Marisa served us and we embarked on a  fractured conversation, she in her limited English and I my limited Italian. But the spark of friendship was there and I was soon spending every spare moment that I could with Marisa, initially at the shop, and then with some of her friends and family, including Alfredo, who worked at a nearby hotel and, a cousin, Giacomo, who was a student at the University of Turin. We went to an open-air cinema and although I can't remember what film we saw - and my Italian certainly wasn't up to the task of following the dialogue - it was all very heady romantic stuff for a impressionable young teenager from the west London suburbs . . . and it left an indelible mark.

I had grown up listening to fragments of Italian; my father had been a prisoner of war in Italy during WWII. He and his sergeant had escaped after bribing a guard, then lived a hand-to-mouth existence in the mountains, moving from safe house to safe house, sheltered by partisans for four months - until they sought shelter in a house that turned out not to be safe. (They ended up in another prisoner-of-war camp, this time in Germany.) It's amazing how proficient one can become in a foreign language when it is a matter of life or death.  

So, I was already familiar with a cluster of familiar words and phrases, although 'we're exhausted'; 'is there somewhere we can sleep?'; 'we are very, very hungry'; 'can you spare something to eat?', and 'we have nothing' were not going to get me very far on the Italian Riviera in 1961 . . .*

I learned more with Marisa and, at 16, I had the opportunity to study Italian O-level and A-level at school. If it is possible to fall in love with a language, I did; I'd already enjoyed studying French and Spanish but Italian was something else. It became a passion. Something similar happened to my daughter a couple of decades later when she spent a summer as an au pair in Florence and took Italian language classes; she went on to read Italian at university.

I try not to let my Italian turn to rust and, despite Ann Goldstein's mention of the challenges of Ferrante's language and sentence construction, I'd like, some day, to attempt to read Elena Ferrante in the original. 

Reading about Lila and her family and the calzature made me wonder what had happened to Marisa; we stayed in touch for a while, via postcards but, by the time my Italian was up to letter-writing standard, we had lost contact. However. . . it seems that the family still has a shoeshop in the same town but it is larger, grander and in a more fashionable location. A very smart sign hangs above the entrance to the shop. 

+++++++++++

*Although I was aware of the bare bones of my father's escape from the prisoner of war camp, I knew few of the details, and I certainly did not appreciate how gruelling those four months hiding out in the mountains would have been. Not until, that is, I read Iris Origo's War in Val d'Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944 a few years ago. I realised that I had had no idea but, by then, it was too late to ask the questions . . .

 

Who by fire?

In 1994, I met someone who was to become - and who remains - one of my closest friends. We had embarked the previous year, but at different colleges, on a demanding and challenging journey of learning - studying homeopathy - and, at the end of the first year, she joined our college. We discovered that we lived near each other, she at the time in Kensington, I in Notting Hill, and, given the enormity of what we had to understand and learn, we decided to get together twice a week for study sessions. We did this for three years . . .

We were very disciplined but rewarded ourselves at the end of each session with the telling of stories: our stories, the stories of our lives. And, despite having grown up in very different circumstances, in different parts of the world, we soon discovered degrees of synchronicity and resonance in those stories and in the way that we had responded to our life experiences. Those study sessions became the crucible in which our friendship was formed. In the ensuing years, we have become ever closer; we have travelled together - journeys of deep significance for each of us - and we have continued to tell our stories, which are now inter-woven.

Hers is extraordinary and it made a great impact on me when I first heard it. But, although I am familiar with that story, to see it written down, as it now is - or as it is beginning to be - the impact is, if anything, even greater. For my friend has now started a blog and is recounting her story, many decades after it began, although the word 'blog' seems hardly to do it justice because it is that rare combination: perfectly crafted words and images. Visual poetry, on a screen.

You will find it at still point, world turning - coming through fire, and I would recommend that you start at the beginning and read on . . .

So, this post is a tribute to my brave, bright, deep-thinking, deep-feeling, and stalwart friend; the photograph is of a place of spiritual and emotional pilgrimage for both of us: the Paradesi Synagogue in Kochi.

Where is love?*

 

I have been thinking about my mother a good deal in recent days, not because there has been a significant anniversary but because I have found myself longing to discuss with her the plight of the Syrian - and other - refugees.  

My mum was the most compassionate person I ever met. She didn't judge people on the grounds of their gender, sexuality, race or religion. She was forever helping people in distress, often simply by listening to their stories. Listening without judging, she believed, was one of the most compassionate things we can do for another human being.

There certainly was an absence of compassion in some of the posts I read on Facebook this week. To be honest, I'm a relative newcomer to Facebook, having been put off by much of what I read about it, and having therefore resisted for several years. But, eventually, it became apparent that this was probably the only way of keeping in touch - and keeping in touch simultaneously - with many members of my large, extended, and international family, not to mention several friends. Today, however, I came very close to leaving Facebook; instead, I simply 'hid' posts and 'unfollowed' people. 

I'm not sure what my mum would have made of Facebook; she would have been shocked and saddened by the vitriol and ranting that was pouring out this week but gladdened by the positive connections that people were making, sometimes with complete but like-minded strangers. She would have been moved, this week, by the kindness of strangers. She would have loved looking at photos of family and friends and hearing their news but would have had no hesitation about deleting anything that distressed or disappointed her.

My mum loved reading, wrote brilliant letters, and never had any difficulty finding the right word at the right time. If she were still alive, I think that these are the words she would have chosen to put on Facebook today:

*My mum, who was a professional singer and dancer when she was young, loved musicals; Oliver was one of her favourites and this, one of her favourite songs.

(And I put this post on Facebook . . . )

Is it safe to . . .?

. . . step out from behind the curtain, after such a long absence?

Of all the events that might have caused me to scurry back to the laptop, the one that I would not have predicted was the reappearance of someone else - Kate Bush, to be precise.

The Dear Daughter had tried to get tickets for Kate's re-emergence. I tried to get tickets. No joy; sold out in just 15 minutes. We had to settle for the Guardian live-tweeting throughout the opening night and watching old video clips on YouTube. 

And then, a couple of days ago, the DD sent me a link to an eBay page, where someone was selling a poster advertising Kate's first tour in 1979.

'Remember this?' said the DD.

'Would you like it for your birthday?' I asked, in a moment of madness.

'I've already got it,' she replied. And so she had. It had once adorned a wall of her bedroom.

'I think I've got one of these too.' Attached was a copy of a 1978 Christmas card, courtesy of the Kate Bush Fan Club. 

In the 1970s, Kate was a significant presence in our house; well, her voice was, along with various Kate-related stuff.  The DD was a HUGE fan; I was pretty much of a fan too. So we could not possibly miss going to see Kate on that first tour and we did see her - at the London Palladium. No frustrating hours spent endlessly reloading internet pages in those days; it was all very civilised: a phone call or a trip to the box office. And affordable tickets.

We loved every minute and, 35 years later, I was amazed at just how much I could remember of that concert. It was one of the high points of a year during which other things in our world were beginning to unravel.

'I think I've still got my ticket,' said the DD. 'I just have to find my Kate Bush memorabilia . . .'

I spent the rest of the day playing four of Kate's early albums (vinyl, of course). They belong to the DD but live here because I am the only member of the family who still possesses an ancient hifi with a turntable, so that I can play my substantial and much-cherished collection of LPs and 45s, not to mention EPs. I was transported back to our flat in Marylebone, still young(ish) at 31 - which seems very young when one is nearer 70 than 60 - and the mother of a daughter on the cusp of her teenage years. As Sandy Denny once sang, 'Who knows where the time goes?'

But I couldn't find Hounds of Love. I searched everywhere. I could see the cover. I emailed the DD. 

'I think I had it on cassette,' she answered. 'What year was it?'

'1985.'

'Oh yes, I already had a Walkman by then.'

Ah, the refuse heap of technology.

But the disappointment of not bagging any tickets this time round in no way detracts from the wonder of being there the first time and seeing my daughter's face light up when Kate appeared. It was, almost, unbelievable . . . 

There was one final email from the DD, normally a very private woman. 'You can blog about this, if you like.' So I did.