Luzon Raid

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I see on the WordPress site http://pacificparatrooper.wordpress.com several mentions of Luzon and a raid to rescue internees in February 1945. Some of the POWs rescued were Brits, one of them was Signalman Thomas Potter of the Royal Corps of Signals, 27 Line Section. Potter was one of the men in my father’s section and after being repatriated was interviewed by the war office and also by my mother, who was trying to get news of all the men in 27 Line Section. I have put together a book about my parents and the wives and mothers of the men in 27 Line Section from the many letters I have. I am interested in making contact people who might have relatives from 27 Line Section or know of any other internees rescued in the same raid and still with us.

Dodging Robins

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Spent this afternoon dodging Robins and being blatantly ignored by blackbirds. I was working hard on the new paths lifting turfs and either piling them up to fill the new bank or taking them elsewhere in the garden to fill in edges. I couldn’t move without the rush of wings close by as the robins leap in to grab the worms and larvae. As I shovelled sand into the spaces, unseen robins would fly up. No doubt there were only two, but they worked non-stop shifts. The blackbirds never even bothered to fly up. If in danger of actually being hit by a spadeful, they would hop in inch or two left or right, but made it clear that it was my problem to avoid them.

Made some progress on the brick paths, but am regretting my failure to use string and measure out from the wall. Having bricked round a small rectangular bed, I find the gaps slightly bigger on the other side. Of course the old path I made alongside the house path may not be dead straight.

Frost again tonight. Someone coming to wash the bricks on the old bit of drive that we are keeping on Tuesday. We think it was laid 20 years ago, so it is doing quite well as all it has had in the way of cleaning is me, EG and a trowel in all that time. The giant concrete slabs that are to go are now at least a 100 years old, broken, and very ugly. There is so much work to be done before the new bricks go in, it is difficult to imagine being ready. I guess we will be working all weathers by the time they start. I have to admit, though that I enjoy the challenge and feel better for the exercise.

Will get more fun exercise tomorrow night as Amy will still be here and will come Lindy hopping with me.

writing – never give up hope

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A writing friend has, after years of persistence, found a publisher for her third very interesting non-fiction book. This is a lesson in hanging in there. Her writing on historical subjects, that might otherwise lie untold, is lively, readable and scholarly and she continued to research, knock on doors, send in submissions, give talks and hang on, however often she had her manuscript turned down. It is truly and example to us all.

I have a small green shoot too. An agent (whose submissions are closed) has kindly agreed to look at the opening of my Far Eastern POW letters book.

L’Élisir d’Amore

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Last night we had six people round to watch L’Élisir d’Amore (Donizetti). This was the 2005 Vienna production with Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon. Much agreement that it would be difficult to improve on this cast. Newcomers found it relatively gentle after the drama of Traviata last month. Request for Tosca next. Still struggling a bit with the picture and the sound balance. Colours too bright and voices somehow behind the orchestra. EG has worked on this today and may have fixed it. I think it is because the sound bar is trying to make us think we are in a cinema.

Feel better for my opera fix and it is great to share it with neighbours.

Arandora Star

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Finished the Arandora Star (Maria Serena Balestracci) at last. A very moving account of the less than glorious rounding up of enemy aliens in WWII, sending them to camps in or around England or even to Australia or for the most unlucky to Canada on the Arandora Star. The ship was torpedoed. It was unmarked, had too few lifeboats and rolls of barbed wire impeding escape. A large proportion of the enemy aliens were Italians, they had emigrated and settled in Great Britain, many had children born in England, Wales or Scotland, some of them serving in the British Armed Forces. They were often middle-aged or even elderly. Some of the other aliens were Germans and Austrians, many of them elderly, many of them refugees. No attempt was made by the British authorities to determine if any of these men posed a national security threat. 446 Italians lost their lives leaving widows and children behind who never had an explanation, or apology, or a body to bury. Balestracci has researched the whole subject over many years and bought some comfort to the still grieving relatives.

One of the strongest consequences of such a catastrophic piece of mismanagement and injustice, especially for relatives left without explanations, is the lasting pain and knock on effect on communities. It is now 70 years since the event, yet it is clear that people are still suffering. It is difficult not to feel depressed about the new resentments and years of suffering being created under the umbrella of war on a daily basis.

Sad post, but I am glad I read the book and for those relatives Balestracci contacted, there have been great benefits in making sure the Arandora Star and its victims are not forgotten

What spring?

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Flat out in the garden for the last two and a half days. The weather very unfriendly on the hands, but we have had some periods of sunshine. Trying to lay brick paths before the old slabs of concrete are lifted to revamp the drive. There is a great bag of sand on the old drive and I have to use enough of it be able to move it before the 16th April, so conditions that I would normally think of as indoor only, are suddenly possible. EG worked hard on clearing weeds off the drive that will remain and gathering the piles of pebbles that are in the path of the new drive. We still have to take out some shrubs and cut down others. In the midst of this I had a call from the local nursery to say that they had some bare-rooted box for me after all. Today has been a tricky series of gymnastics in the tiny knot garden we made when the girls were small. I dug up the worst plants and trimmed them back to live growth, replanted them and put in the ten new ones. It looked fine a few years ago.

knot garden 2008

But it had become very thin and full of dead wood. If spring ever arrives we may see it restored. The ground is strangely dry, yet I am reluctant to water, given the nightly frosts. All the buds on the fruit trees and the japanese quince are ready to burst open. I fear they are going to go ahead any day now, frost or not. I have continued to bed the granite setts into the edge of the old dragon bed (There is a pile of giant granite boulders through the middle of the bed hiding an old stump). I am not sure about the look of this – a bit contrived, but it will give a hard edge for the mower and I can’t think where else to put them. We are still baffled by the vast quantity of granite and other stones all over this garden.

Hope I get some more outdoor time over Easter.

Dealing with writing criticism

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I love the randomness of existence; so Monday morning there was a knock on the door and a great lorry craned a large bag of sand onto our driveway. The snow cover and the icicles everywhere make laying brick paths unwise. Instead I managed to send an email to an agent, who felt like the right person for my Prisoner of War non-fiction book – though the firm is closed for submissions, so I have probably just annoyed him. I also finally posted a submission to an agent for my fiction book Border Line.

An interesting post on How I Handle Rejection on Shannon’s blog http://shannonathompson.com made me reflect on how I handle both rejection and praise. I went to a recent email from a friend who had read Border Line critically for me and realised that I had lapped up the praise and not paid enough attention to the criticism. I had dealt with the post-it notes on the manuscript, but not really listened to a more fundamental worry in the covering email. So I spent a happy few hours – and I mean happy – addressing the problem. It is so much easier when someone has kindly identified the sticky patch or the unreal person. When you are writing you tend to have your nose up against the leaves and the shape of the trees get lost.

My mood underwent some yo-yo transformations as I tried to alter the picture for the (imaginary) cover of Border Line on my website. I learnt, as I always do on these occasions, a lot about how not to work in iWeb, but finally I got it sorted. Then, having published the new version, I was maddened to find that one page uploaded the new version, but another stuck to the old. Much trial and error later, I could get the new pages correct only of I used the www. before my address. Today it works properly. There are some gnomes working hard behind the scenes and I just don’t quite speak their language.

The Agent Dilemma

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Made myself concentrate on submissions today. It it just laziness that makes me go on looking for an agent instead of self-publishing? I broke even with Unseen Unsung, so I can do it and I have learned so much on that road… and yet… I feel an agent will do well all those things I just scrape through inefficiently. In the meantime another year has passed. Border Line is a much improved book over that year, so I cannot regret the time and effort, but I ache to get on with the new project.

If I were a brilliant writer, I would be writing poetry. This has, in my view to be perfect or nothing. However in the world of fiction, writing across a vast spectrum of quality can be enjoyed. There are happy readers for works from Byatt or Attwood all the way to Mills & Boon’s prescribed plots. So, assuming an interesting enough story, and writing skills somewhere between the two ends of the spectrum, there should be no bar to attempting a novel. However, even with the story in the bag, and enough skills to gain several hundred readers  (for two novels) on a shoestring, finding and agent – let alone a publisher – is like playing a bad game of Snap.

Agents have full books and enough friends (and friends of friends) who write, never to need to trek further afield for new material. They don’t mind being sent new material, but for all their claims about looking for a ‘good read’, they give off a clear vibe of hoping to spot the next Harry Potter or nothing. They have jaded palates when it come to subject matter – and who shall blame them, given the writing they must wade through. They have to predict the reading public’s next year’s flavour. They have to squeeze any author they take on into a pre-recognised genre. Ideally they want a personality to sell as well as a book. Oh, and they don’t much like subject matter (such as assisted dying) that will frighten the horses/publishers.

I could go on. I can see the problem. I’m just too bloody-minded to give in. Even knowing that, should I find an agent via this crazy blind date system they then have to sell my story to a publisher, doesn’t stop me looking. Am I mad?

Opera in the snow

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Last night even though it was late, I felt starved of opera, so I watched the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland, filmed at the MET in 1982. The sound quality and the filming were way off current standards, and La Stupenda is a stage animal not a close-up film one. For the audience though, it was clearly the performance of a lifetime. Her voice was like watching gymnasts performing, there seemed to be no moves beyond her range. I did find the jewel-encrusted Scottish courtiers distractingly absurd. I must watch the whole to become properly absorbed.

I went on to watch the whole scene again in a more modern production, aware all the time that I I should have been doing other things, like getting to bed at a sensible time.

By the time I finished the predicted snow had started.

socks and bricks

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The other day EG was baffled by an advert talking about the number of slices of toast made in a life time or noses wiped or… you get the picture. It made me think of socks. Am I the only woman to have sat down one day and calculated the number of socks I washed as the girls were growing up. Let’s say 4 pairs, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year for 16 years… = 46,720 individual socks. That is not counting life before children or the 16 years since that calculation (or of course the rest of the garments we all wore in those years). So yes, I understood and felt at one with the woman in the advert – though I have no memory of what they were selling.

Happy moment today – a gift chosen purely by instinct, a garment with a label I had never heard of before – turned out to be a make known and worn by the recipient.

Much brickwork in the garden today, though when the sun vanished all that was left was a biting wind. EG and I started to chisel out the granite setts from the side of our 100-year-old drive. I rather enjoyed having both of us there in goggles bashing away at the old wall. We have relocated the setts. Heaven knows what the original owners of this house needed with the tons of pink granite brought into this garden. This project is definitely in the labour phase, but the delight of seeing a path emerging out of the designs never fails.