Next year, the Booker prize

Grandson decided to write a story. He enjoys actually writing the words but his inspiration was flowing too quickly for his penmanship, so he dictated it to his dad. He is, after all, only five.

To fully catch the atmosphere of this story, you have to pronounce the Ks in the names of the hero and secondary character: K-nooker and K-nacker.

He then illustrated it. The above picture shows Knooker - who is, incidentally, a hedgehog (that surprised you, didn't it?) - setting off from home with his anxious (hedgehog) mother saying goodbye to him.

This picture shows him being pursued by the dragon - whose cheerful expression shows that he thinks he's going to catch Knooker - the element of suspense - while Knooker's friend Knacker shouts  encouragement from his upstairs window. And - here's the twist in the tail - it turns out that Knacker is a biscuit. Knacker the cracker, as Grandson himself told me.


(PS Please don't think I'm trying to suggest that he's a genius! I just think it's a hoot.)

History 2

As I was crossing the road today I was musing vaguely about “A Pageant of History” and its English-centricity. (Why do I only ever muse vaguely, since I retired, I wonder? I really must start using the brain again one of these days.)

What I was musing about was whether Wales or Northern Ireland got much of a mention in this book. And the answer is: Wales got two whole pages (out of 348) and Northern Ireland got – none. And you can maybe see that the two pictures in the chapter on Llewelyn ap Gruffydd are: 1) the creation of the (English) Prince of Wales in 1911 - the future King Edward VIII (though the authors didn't actually mention him by name, since he didn't turn out to be a great British success story) and 2) the emblem of the Prince of Wales. Neither of these seem the Welshest possible illustrations that could have been chosen.

The rest of the world did get occasional mentions via explorers or poets, while Some Famous Dwarfs got four pages.

The book was written somewhat before the age of political correctness. The last paragraph of the "Dwarfs" chapter reads: “Meanwhile a perfectly proportioned midget is worth far more than his weight in gold to the showman today. For modern audiences are just as fascinated by these intriguing little people as were the kings and queens of old.” Can you believe that this was written in 1958?

As for the chapter on David Livingstone, “The man who opened up the dark continent”…

It's so interesting how attitudes change. And no doubt in 2060, people will be laughing and cringing at our way of looking at the world.

Words

In a comment on my previous post, Marcheline http://www.blogger.com/profile/11201825708442679157
(oh, must write down how to do that linky thing) said that she thought that a picture is worth a thousand words.

I don't really agree. Yes, there are some things that are better seen than described. A rose, for example. A baby. A house, maybe, especially if one's planning to buy it. But not a person, definitely not a person.

We have photos of various ancestors - great-grandparents and the odd great-great grandparent. And it's lovely and interesting and intriguing to have them. But they don't really tell us much. I'd so much rather have their words. Words give a far better impression of the person, don't you think? I have only one piece of writing from my father's father - who died a few months before I was born. It's a letter that he sent to my grandmother, his future wife, saying that he hoped to see her again. I have not a scrap of writing from that grandmother. I have two plates from her wedding china but that's it. (And quite a lot of her genes, I suppose. I look a bit like her.) I do have a few letters written to me by my other grandparents and they give at least a flavour of their personalities.

But I feel I know a lot about Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank and Nella Last and Virginia Woolf and lots of other people whose diaries I've read, and about Philip Larkin and Noel Coward and all the Mitford sisters and Joyce Grenfell and lots of other people whose letters I've read.

And then there are blogs, of course. Our children and grandchildren, if the blogs survive, will know a huge amount about us and our lives. And what an archive for historians - if our journals don't disappear when we do, or shortly thereafter.

What do you think? Words or pictures? If you could only have one of them?

Rain and tulips

My confused Aunt Jean, who is now in a care home, is a widow: her husband, my uncle by marriage, died about ten years ago. In some ways they were a remarkable couple. They had no children because as a girl, my aunt had both ovaries removed in separate operations, because they were … I don’t know, but infected in some way. It’s hard to imagine this happening now but this was in the 30s. Anyway, she and my uncle were very religious and decided that, since they couldn’t have children, they would be missionaries instead. His family were – indeed still are – Plymouth Brethren and my aunt became one too.

She was a doctor and he was a pharmacist and they spent their working lives in a hospital in Pakistan. But as well as this, they preached Christianity to the Pakistanis, which now seems rather… . Well, they did what they did with the best of intentions, I’m sure. My uncle was also quite a scholar and published learned commentaries on various Bible texts.

When we moved my aunt out of her flat into the home last August, we found lots of photograph albums. I’ve been gradually taking them to her room in the home. She and my uncle travelled a lot, both from their base in Pakistan and during their furlough years. And, happily for the current circumstances, they were very good at labelling their albums, so that I often look at them with her and can say, “Oh look, this is Baghdad – you went there in 1947” and she can agree.

One album that I haven’t taken there yet is actually a notebook, a sort of diary kept by my uncle and illustrated by photos and postcards. There’s nothing intensely personal in it; it’s mainly just an account of their travels and other activities during a few years at the beginning of their marriage. But I never knew it existed and am touched to read it. I never knew my uncle particularly well - we never saw all that much of them because they were so involved with the Brethren. He was quite fun, but not someone who was interested in children. And of course they were abroad throughout my childhood and young adulthood.

Here’s the first page:

The Wedding 24th February 1945

The place: St Philip’s Church, Joppa
Time: 2.15 pm on a dull, cold day
Officiating: Rev. J. E. Adam and A. Hutchison, Craigmillar
Guests: [and he lists them]
Best man: John [his brother] Bridesmaids: Effie and Gracie
Organist: Jim [my father]

We arranged for a taxi for Jean but it didn’t arrive so walked to church [it’s only a couple of streets from where my grandparents lived]. The wedding went smoothly. Thence to photographers – photos turned out pitiful. The guests went by special tram to Darling’s Hotel, Regent Place. A splendid occasion – speeches by Uncle Tom, Uncle Andrew, Wm Campbell, Jean’s father and Reg as well as the two ministers. Finally the singing of Psalm 23 and some choruses suggested by Mother brought the proceedings to an end. A delightful and very happy occasion.

Then we went by train to Glasgow. Taxi, in a most tempestuous storm of rain and wind, to Mayfair. At Mearns next morning Mrs Connell announced us as a honeymoon couple. Lunch at John Smith’s. His mother vastly amused at honeymoon couple.

My mother always says that the reception was like a prayer meeting - and you'll notice that none of the wedding party is exactly glamorous, though of course it was wartime and clothes were difficult to get. (My mother is a very pretty and elegant person.) She also laughs at the corsages, which are made of tulips - quite unusual even then!

But it was a very happy marriage.

I feel a bit odd having this notebook but there's no one else closer to them and though I shall take it in to read to my aunt, I don't know how much it will mean to her. I wouldn't like it to get lost so I suppose I'll bring it back here again. The ink's a bit faded so I shall type out the rest of the words to preserve them. The last entry is July 15, 1947.

I do like having this link to my uncle.

Words. There's nothing like them. As we bloggers know.

Essays on my desk

We have a range of students at our college. For example, I asked two classes to write essays about topical issues of their choice.

Here are the first sentences of two essays:



First student: “Anthropocentrism is an interesting concept.”


Second student: “Yessss it’s the weekend, time to get steaming.”


("Steaming", by the way, means "extremely drunk".)


As I said, a range of students.

I love Dylan Thomas

My little camera can't cope with so much brightness. Most of my snow pictures are just blindingly white blurs. This photo was taken yesterday before Mr Life and I dug out the drive, the street and quite a lot of the street at right angles to ours. Then it snowed a lot more. This morning I did it all again - not good for a woman with a bad back. But we're keen not be be left with solid packed snow-turned-to-ice on the road. Last time, we didn't take it seriously because, as I keep claiming, we don't really get much snow. (Hollow laugh.)

My brother, wife and offspring are supposed to be coming up from Surrey (near London) on Christmas Eve. They did plan to drive but have now bought train tickets. Darling Daughter 2 and her fiancé are coming from London by train on the 23rd, fingers crossed, and Son on Christmas Day. I don't see all of this happening. Son currently lives north of here and will have to drive. Anyway, this is why I'm trying so hard to make our streets passable.

Meanwhile, here's a bit of Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales", which I LOVE. No one uses language as he did. I've read this with classes at Christmas for thirty years. It makes me squirm with pleasure - and at least while I'm reading it, I'm reconciled to the Arctic scenes outside.

Years and years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlours, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor-car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.

But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"

"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all the children could hear was a ringing of bells

"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat and the doors rang?"

"I mean that the bells that the children could hear were inside them."

"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."

"There were church bells, too."

"Inside them?"

"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged towns, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy beneath my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

"Get back to the postmen."

"They were just ordinary postmen, fond of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on doors with blue knuckles..."

"Ours has got a black knocker..."

"And then they stood of the white Welcome mats in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out."

This is Santa

I really enjoyed those little snapshots of the commenters' lives - thank you so much for them. A sort of Comment-Twitter.

From a student, discussing a writer's style : "The writer uses a long list to emphifly the dangers of overeating."

"Emphifly" is a good word, don't you think? Sort of a mixture between "emphasise" and "exemplify", maybe? By the look of him, my Santa is a fine emphiflication of the dangers of too many mince pies.

Wee, sleekit, cowerin', timorous beastie

I went to a book launch yesterday; not a common experience for me. The book, called “Addressing the Bard”, is an anthology to celebrate the 250th birthday of Robert Burns. Twelve of Scotland’s best-known poets were asked to write a poem inspired by one of his poems.

The launch was held in the National Trust headquarters in Charlotte Square in the elegant and leafy New Town. (“New” as in built between 1792 and 1820.) I was given the invitation to this event because I’m in charge of our Higher English programme; however, when I got there it was clear that the majority of those attending were bigwigs. I was very conscious of the smallness of my wig, but stood around leaning on an antique sideboardy thing (I have a bad back) talking to a nice lady who’s the head of something important as we drank our wine or juice and waited for something to happen. After a while, though, I had to go and sit down on a chair at the side of the room. I can’t stand for more than a few minutes (though I can walk perfectly well). Chaps in suits stood in front of me, with their backs to me, so I had ample time to admire the intricate plasterwork on the ceiling.

Then there were two speeches, but since the chaps in suits didn’t move, I just had to listen without being able to see the speakers. There was a bit of a gap between them so that I had a good view, side on, of an oldish lady who looked a bit familiar. Scotland is a small country – 5 million people – and Edinburgh is a small city – half a million. Though half a million sounds like quite a lot, I’m likely to come across a much smaller number than that: teachers, people who go to bookshops or walk in the Botanic Gardens, students at the college and so on. So by the time I’ve got to my age, 59, many people I see look vaguely familiar - if rather older than I feel they used to look.

Then I realised that she was Liz Lochhead, one of the poets. I did once see her at a poetry reading in the days when she looked like this

rather than this. (She's shrunk, clearly.) And of course I’ve seen photos of her since. Still, I was surprised to see her looking as if she was in her 60s. But then, as I later reflected, she’s older than I am, so…

Since my view was so limited, I studied her. It’s not often that I get a chance to really stare at a poet. She was about two yards in front of me but she was looking forward at the speakers while I was looking at her sideways. She was wearing jeans, a fawn baggy blouse and silver trainers. (It was the silver trainers which first caught my attention.) She occasionally tugged the blouse down over her bottom; it’s nice to know that even poets worry about their bottoms. Throughout the speeches, she was obviously listening carefully because she smiled and nodded and at one point, when a speaker complimented his assistant for liaising so well with the poets, she murmured, “Hear, hear.” Neither speaker mentioned her, which I thought they should have since she’s arguably Scotland’s premier living poet (and playwright) and as far as I could see – though of course that wasn’t far - she was the only one of the twelve poets present, apart from one who read his poem, invisibly to me, after the speeches. But she just continued to nod and smile. I thought she looked like a really nice person.

Liz Lochhead’s poem is inspired by Burns’s “To a Mouse”. I have no idea if this poem is well-known outside Scotland, but it’s very famous here. Burns was a ploughman (at one point) and one day he ploughed up a mouse’s nest by mistake. The poem addresses the mouse and apologises to it.

Her poem starts:

It’s me. The eponymous “the moose”.

We’re having eleven people to lunch tomorrow – all family – to celebrate our boy’s 25th birthday, and I’ve been making food so I must now go and tidy the kitchen.

Daughter 2 has just emailed me from her bedroom a few yards away. “Watch this. It’s cool.”

http://ow.ly/j4Pa

It certainly is.

Writing to the future

One of the reasons that I value writing so highly is that it’s the only thing we leave behind us when we die that conveys, very directly, quite a lot about our personalities. I suppose that composers and architects and painters might also feel that their art reveals who they really are, but I don’t think it’s the same. Handel’s “Messiah” is all sorts of wonderful things but it doesn’t tell us what Handel liked for breakfast, how much he enjoyed going for a walk or how funny he was.

Of course we can lie with words; give a false impression of ourselves. But as I’ve discovered by meeting various bloggy people, a lot of our real selves comes through in our words.

A few months before my father died, which was two years ago, he gave me a letter written by his father to his mother, in what seems to have been the very early stages of their relationship. Though she lived in Edinburgh, my grandmother seems to have been visiting Glasgow when they met; my grandfather was living in Glasgow at that time though doesn't seem to know it well. I think he was brought up in Edinburgh too.

I never knew this paternal grandfather, who died five months before I was born. There only a few photos of him and these are mainly of a white-haired old chap in snaps of family groups. But Dad also gave me this photo of Grandpa S as a young man. How old is he? 25, maybe? Much the same age he was when he wrote the letter and much the same age as our son. He also looks a bit like our son, I think.

The letter was written in 1905, when Grandpa S was 25 and the future Granny S was 19 and a half. My mother says that he was a quiet man. He was some sort of engineer, I think – he worked for Scottish Motor Transport at some point – and he played the violin. Indeed he made a violin which we still have. I played it when I was a girl and then Daughter 1 did also. What else did he like? What were his thoughts, fears, ambitions? I don’t know. But here’s the letter.

24th September 1905

30 Dunchattan St

Glasgow


Dear Isa,

I was very sorry for not being able to see you last Wednesday evening as promised, but of course it could not be helped as I went away in the morning. I tried to see you on Tuesday evening on your way home, but I must have missed you somehow. I spent Saturday afternoon with my Uncle and Aunt in Cathcart, and in the evening one of my cousins took me along to Langside, which is not very far from Cathcart. We found Kildonnan Ter, after a few hours searching for it, and after a few dozen people had told me that there was no such place in Langside. Annie had not arrived home when we called, so we waited for her, and in the interval of waiting my cousin (Miss Grey) made the discovery that she had worked in the same workroom with Annie Mackendrick in Kirkcaldy, and I also think that Tom had worked in the same place too. You should have heard them after that as they brought up old mutual acquaintances, and asked each other if they remembered this one and the next one. Annie had arrived by this time, and after a bit of supper my cousin and I left with an invitation to come again. I was at church this forenoon, and I suppose will be there tonight again but it is not very nice going to a strange church yourself. I had intended asking Annie if she was free to go to church or for a walk today, but I could not get a chance to ask her, and I felt shy before all the rest. It is Glasgow holiday tomorrow, but of course I do not get it, Annie and Mr Boyd both have it. I hope you will have a nice holiday next week and that you will enjoy your visit to Glasgow. I do not know if your programme for the weekend is all made up, but if it is not, I shall be pleased to meet you any time during the weekend and although I cannot guarantee myself as a guide in Glasgow, still, I have no doubt we could find someplace to go to. I hope you are none the worse of your walk on Review night and that Mrs Thomson did not think you were too late. Hoping you are well, also Mrs Thomson and the bairns. I am Yours Very Sincerely

James S

Clearly he was quite shy and wasn’t at all sure that she would want to see him at the weekend. It then took them another four years to get married, perhaps because she was younger than he was. According to my mother, my Granny S was a fairly lively and determined person who came from quite a poor family and so she was able to escape poverty by marrying a man with a good job. She was a pretty lady (and I think he’s quite handsome). She must have kept the letter all her life so presumably she was very happy to receive it.

Though they married in 1909, their three children weren’t born till 1920, 1922 and 1925. I wonder what that story is?

When my father gave me the letter there was no such thing as Google Street View. But now there is, and it shows that Dunchattan Street, where Grandpa S wrote his letter, still exists but now consists of blocks of modern flats. There does in fact seem to be no Kildonnan Terrace, which possibly explains why he had such trouble finding it, but there is a Kildonan Drive. Kildonan Drive is a red sandstone tenement block, the sort found a lot in Glasgow – they’re rather nice. It fascinates me that I can find this out, sitting at my computer in Edinburgh.

You can see Kildonan itself, on the island of Arran, in my previous entry.

That’s all I have of Grandpa S; the only piece of his handwriting. A whole life lived and if you’ve been reading this, you know nearly as much about him as I do. He died when he was 70.

And this is one reason why I write. Why I blog. To leave something behind. If I ever get round to printing my blog and putting it in a folder, and if my children ever get round to procreating, this might be my way of communicating with future generations.

(Waves hand.)

Not being dead

My third blog-birthday passed the other day, without my realising it.

I've been rereading "The Thirteenth Tale" by Diane Setterfield - it's nonsense, really, but very good nonsense and I'm enjoying it a lot.

This is a quotation from it, and it expresses very well one of the reasons why I like writing: letters, diaries, the blog. It's also one of the reasons that I like reading. In case you haven't read it (and I recommend that you do) you need to know that the narrator works in a second-hand bookshop.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humour, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines on pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.