The pink hydrangeas at the bottom of this picture were blue when I bought them and have flowered blue for the last three years – a great combination with the orange lilies. I shall have to give them some strong medicine before next year.
Rather pleased with the artichoke harvest. I know they are very small, but I am hoping to cook them and eat the hearts. I cropped the first runner beans yesterday and we are eating french beans too.
There is a great article in the Guardian by a new Canadian novelist about what makes writer’s mad. I agree with every word. AND it’s a smashing read.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/25/anakana-schofield-how-to-write?CMP=twt_gu
I didn’t have a category for theatre, but our experience two days ago requires its own category. We saw an ‘encore’ of the live performance of Macbeth relayed to the cinema from a deconsecrated church in Manchester and starring Kenneth Branagh and Alex Kingston.
The stage was the central aisle and the apse of the church. The floor of the body of the church was a muddy heath and the sides were wooden hoardings, with the audience raised and confined behind them (I was reminded of the barreras in a bullfight). Witches appeared from windows and doors let into a wooden screen at one end. At the other, the apse (with a hard floor), was an oasis of calm lined with banks of candles and the stained glass windows soaring above.
The action, hemmed in by the hoardings on that narrow stage, on the mud, gave us ambition, love, power, anger, despair and spiritual agony. The noise of men and arms rebounding off the wooden sides created a real sense of physical effort and danger in the battle scenes. Emotions seemed heightened by being confined and channeled by the spaces.
The comic elements and the witches were introduced without destroying the tension. Every word was audible every line comprehensible, casting brilliant. The whole was potent and compelling beyond any production of Macbeth I have ever seen.
This was a short run for the Manchester Festival only, but I understand that the live recording will be going out internationally in cinemas in October. See it.
I am more than half way through Anna Karenina now, and I had an ongoing draft blog about several things that struck me. However, this morning I read Tolstoy’s description of an artist letting visitors into his studio to look at his latest painting. Tolstoy writes about the moment that the artist, unveiling the painting, sees it anew from another’s point of view. “…he saw it with their indifferent, estranged, new eyes and found nothing good in it.” He saw banality and a “heap of defects”.
The idea of their attention excites the artist, the smallest praise, the slightest suggestion of defects affects him deeply and alters his own judgement of his work. The fact that he had assessed his visitors fairly accurately on sight and knew that they were unlikely to offer him constructive comments does not alter their effect on him.
Although Tolstoy is talking about painting, every word can be translated to written work. Since I started writing I have been baffled at how one day you can read a piece you have written and be surprised how well it reads and a few days later the same passages will strike you as banal or defective in some way. Pick up the book a year later and you could have either of these reactions. It is as if some malign optician is forever changing your glasses until you have no idea when you are seeing straight.
In October I will be meeting a reading group to discuss a novel about an opera singer I published in 2008 (Unseen Unsung). I will have to re-read it. Will I be appalled, amazed, embarrassed? I really wish I knew.
In case anyone was as curious as we were about what this might be. I believe it is also called a coffer. It is a characterful (and useful) memento of our equally characterful neighbour (see earlier post).
Although I have seen bats joining in on stage at Glyndebourne, this was the opera La Rondine – the Swallow at the Royal Opera House, London.
EG said that, as usual Puccini’s female lead was a victim. But as we talked about this, we realised that this is not the case. The story, like Traviata, is of a courtesan finding true love with an innocent boy. In Traviata, the boy, Alfredo, knows all about Violetta’s past, but she is persuaded by his father into sacrificing her happiness to free Alfredo’s family from the shame of associating with her. In Rondine, Magda deceives her innocent lover into thinking of her as equally innocent, and then when he wants to marry her, freely decides to renounce her him and return to her courtesan life, rather than pollute the expectations of his pure family. She is distraught, but she is a free agent and it is her lover, Ruggero, who is the weeping victim at the end.
The setting, in charming detail, was the 1920’s. The direction was so detailed that the singers gestures brought the period to mind as much as the costume. All the characters continued to act their roles (with some very funny by-play), while the main singers carried the story. It was an evening beautiful to watch and listen to and especially moving at the end. It was the last of three performances by the two singers of the main parts – Magda and Ruggero – and they both ended in tears at the final onstage parting.
And in this opera there are no bodies on stage, everyone lives, though not necessarily happily, ever after.
The lilies are opening and the air is heady. The lawn is brown and crisp underfoot and the lettuces are a withered heap every evening, no matter how much water I give them.
The rhododendrons, that I am foolish enough to grow, are limp in their pots and the underground rainwater harvester has run out.
On the other hand we have finally tackled the failed seal round the bottom of the big shed/garage. We raked out all the rotten wood and there has been enough serious heat to really dry out the timbers. I have started to refill with fresh sealant (including, I notice, my shirt). This sealant, once dry, is proof against sun, rain, rot, mice, cats, goats and probably acts of god. We shall see.
It has been so hot in the middle of the day, that I have stayed in the cool and finished the revised draft of my book of Far East POW memoirs and letters. Tackling the index has left me cross-eyed and may require a week’s repose.
For Phyllis, and the other relatives in England of the men who vanished in Singapore on 15 February 1942, their greatest fear was that their men had died or been wounded in the fighting. The best news they could hope to hear was that they were prisoners. They might be bored or hungry, but they would be safe from death until the end of the war. In addition they could be sent comforts, they would be able to communicate (when the authorities had sorted a route out) and all would eventually be well. So Barry’s father wrote to him:
“I know that you will understand how important it is in spite of the many difficulties of being a prisoner to try and keep fit in mind and body. I hope you will try and find some special interest. You have a real gift for languages try if possible to keep up your French and Malay to learn to write in Arabic characters, and if possible also to learn to speak Japanese. Also learning good verse will be a help and writing and composing yourself. Also if possible work with your hands. I’m afraid that as yet we cannot send you any parcels but perhaps you can get some books in Singapore.”
Relatives have no information about those who have already died. Relatives of these men would go on writing into the blue, waiting and hoping, sometimes as long as three years. The War Office struggled to get reliable data, from any source. Sometimes relatives heard before they did. One wife wrote to Phyllis on 5 January 1943:
“I have had no official news of my husband, but a friend of his, serving in the Middle East, sent me an airgraph, telling me my husband was a prisoner, he wrote as though I had already heard the news, so each day I hope the good news will arrive, and as soon as it does I will let you know.”
The situation never improved. On the 5th of November 1945 nearly three months after the end of the war in the Far East, one of the mothers wrote to Phyllis:
“I am sorry to trouble you, but I wonder if you could try & find out any information about my son, we have not heard a word about him, & as they are nearly all home, makes us wonder if anything has happened to him.”
I have been smiling all day. This morning I received a letter such as one can only dream of.
The letter notified me that my next door neighbour (for more than thirty years) had made me a specific legacy of “a small oak hutch”. I have no idea what this is exactly, but I am honoured that my neighbour should have thought of me in this context. She was an original, someone for whom both the words feisty and refined seem to be designed. She was never seen without brave lipstick. She was genuine, frank, demanding, warm and sometimes terrifying.
In WWII she worked for the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), by the time we moved in next door she worked in local government. She lived from the age of two in the house her father built – and, with the help of devoted friends, she had her wish and died there at the age of ninety-two.
I shall cherish my hutch whatever it turns out to be.
In late autumn of 1942 we were told of a new delight to come. We were to be moved north into Siam [Thailand] where we would be engaged in light healthy labour with good food and pleasant sunny weather, housed in well-built camps in open country. We couldn’t wait for this promised treat.
We marched to the station carrying our backpacks and were there entrained in metal-sided cattle trucks, about 40 to each truck. […] We took it in turns to sit in the better places and arranged our packs in rows so that we could sit on them with our legs pointing towards the middle of the truck. […]
There were no latrine arrangements at all, not even a bucket. One could pee through the open sliding door and the train stopped twice a day at some point well away from a village so that we could get out and ease ourselves squatting over a ditch or under a hedge. As many of us were already suffering from dysentery, these two stops were not nearly enough and we got over the problem by rigging a rope across the doorway at a convenient height so that one could hang on with both hands, bottom outwards and shit on to the track.
We arrived at Ban Pong, all 800 of us soon after the start of the rainy season. Ban Pong was a substantial small town of about 5000 and the camp was a very disgusting place. As a transit camp there was no senior British officer in command who could see that the place was kept in order. […] After a few days we marched out of the pigsty of Ban Pong.
Ban Pong in Thailand was the starting point for the railway designed by the Japanese to link Bangkok with Moulmein in Burma. The planned stretch between Ban Pong and Thanbyusayet (roughly 400 km) ran through barely charted territory following the river Kwai Noi. Designing the railway posed an enormous engineering undertaking; building it, in wartime, with no mechanical aids, required enormous manpower and resulted in over 100,000 deaths, the majority of which were forced gangs of Chinese, Indians and Malays, but also included around 13,000 Allied POWs.
Green Writing Room 