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A Trip to Wales and Another Good Welshman

4/3/2015

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The wife and I spent the weekend in Wales - most appropriate of course, to be back home for St David’s Day! We stayed with a newly reacquainted long-lost relative in Cardiff. One of my first engagements as a professional actor was for a theatre company, long defunct, based in Cardiff, called the Welsh Drama Company. I enjoyed working in the city then and have continued to do so whenever work or play have taken me back there. It has continued to improve as a city. When I worked there initially the magnificent St David’s Hall was simply a building site and the whole shopping area around it was in the process of being redeveloped. A great deal of Cardiff was rather grey, just as much of post-industrialised Britain looked back then. Its heyday as a port, at one time one of the world’s largest exporters of coal, was past, and this once economically vigorous city was struggling to find a new role for itself in the world. Of course Cardiff  has seen many more great building projects since the late Seventies, including the redevelopment of the whole Bay Area which includes the Welsh Assembly Building and the Millenium Centre. And of course our national passion (bordering on obsession) for the game of rugby is now catered for at the magnificent Millenium Stadium, right in the heart of the city.

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Any visitor entering Cardiff’s Queen Street from the Castle end is met by the statue of Aneurin Bevan (1897 - 1960), or Nye as he’s more affectionately remembered in Wales. He was born and raised in the valleys town of Tredegar, the son of a coal miner. He left school to work in the pits himself at the age of thirteen, where he soon became active in the trade union movement, which sent him to Central Labour College in London. It was here that he gained in confidence as a speaker and began to overcome the stammer that he had been afflicted with since childhood. In 1929 he stood and became elected as the Labour MP for Ebbw Vale, and he was to remain in this seat for the next thirty-one years until his early death. He is perhaps best remembered as the founder of the National Health Service, which became fully operational on the 5 July 1948. He defined a civilised society as one that takes care of its weak and vulnerable. Those of us who have grown up in a happy time where health care was provided unquestioningly by the state have Nye Bevan to thank for this. The National Health Service wasn’t born without suffering the pangs of childbirth and was vehemently opposed by the Conservative Party, the British Medical Association and by some in Bevan’s own Labour Party.

The National Health Service is, we are currently told by too many of its workers to be just scare-mongering, splitting at its seams. It is one of the finest institutions this country has, and we would all be far poorer for its loss. I for one will almost certainly be considering it as one of the foremost issues to be considered when the time comes for me to cast my vote in the general election in May. My Great Aunt Mary had lived almost sixty years before the National Health Service and the Welfare State were fully in place for the protection of all British citizens. I was often amused as a young boy when she expressed her darkest fear of ending up in the workhouse - it seemed preposterous to me then; workhouses belonged to the world of Oliver Twist and Charles Dickens! Actually, the workhouse system was only abolished in 1930. But the kind of poverty experienced by the working classes of the past isn’t possible today, is it? Again, I am reminded of Food Banks and the 900,000 British people forced to resort to them last year.

In 2004 Aneurin Bevan was voted No 1 by the people of Wales in a poll to name 100 great Welsh men and women. After my recent visit to Wales, and seeing as it’s customary for this blog to present to its readers a Good Welshman or Welshwoman on St David’s Day - I give you Nye Bevan: “The National Health service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so it is not difficult to understand, if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic competitive society. A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.”


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First New Year Post

8/1/2015

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I’d wanted to tell you about the great Christmas we had, about the rich cache of actually wanted presents I received (I must be getting really good at getting my hints across to interested parties!), maybe relate the amusing disaster that happened to our turkey crown, which made it involuntarily a ‘poultry-lite’ Christmas as they say, or ‘zero-cal-turkey’ perhaps; I thought I might even set down some of my writing plans for the year ahead, discuss some of the books I’m planning to read in 2015. Then, yesterday, out of the blue as these things have an unlooked for tendency of happening, there came the apalling act of barbarous violence done to the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and suddenly everything had changed; it seemed difficult, if not improper, to talk of such trivia. 

I have no doubt the perpetrators of this act, and I don’t mean the puppets who fired the guns, but the vicious masterminds behind this atrocity, have their cold hearts set firmly on breeding more mistrust, more intolerance and more hate. I am certain that they are rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of those reactionary voices in our society who will now, as a result of yesterday’s action, do their utmost to incite and ferment racial hatred. 

Let’s not give them what they want! There’s already enough hate in this poor old world without adding to its burden. Just a week into the New Year, naive though it may seem, let’s cling to the Christmas message of peace and goodwill to all; I know we live in an increasingly secular society, but surely this most simple wish can’t seriously offend anyone, can it? And, when we find our tolerance tested in the face of incomprehensible savagery, the like of which Paris witnessed yesterday, when cartoonists became the targets for gunmen, let us hold firm to our values and our belief in law and democracy, imperfect though these may seem at times, and the right of everyone to freedom of speech.  

Finally, returning to Christmas and its message of compassion: at the end of one of my most loved books, once Scrooge has been redeemed, Dickens tells us that he (Scrooge) kept the spirit of the season in his heart three hundred and sixty-five days a year, “... and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!”

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Christmas 2014

19/12/2014

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As we approach the final few weeks of 2014 and another year appears to have mysteriously flown by, I find myself (quite customary at this time), in a reflective mood. I suppose this was inevitable, especially as I’ve just been listening to a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his marvellous A Child’s Christmas in Wales, recorded at Steinway Hall, New York in 1952 (You’ll find it on You Tube). If you don’t know this work, then take my word for it, it is pure joy! 

As Christmas in the UK has become increasingly secular and commercialised, I wonder whether it is a happier occasion now than it was in former times? It certainly seems to have become increasingly more stressful; I don’t recall hearing about people being trampled by over-zealous shoppers, or of fist-fights breaking out over goods in our shops. My family’s Christmas when I was a boy was divided mainly between chapel and home. The children’s Christmas party in the Chapel vestry was a definite highlight. Father Christmas inevitably made an appearance and passed out presents to each of us; some of the bigger boys suspected it was a deacon dressed-up; I for one never believed this, though come to think of it, for a man who spent three hundred and sixty four days a year in isolation at the North Pole he did have a remarkably strong Valleys accent! However, the seeds of commercialisation had already been sown even back then, and although the pile of presents I was given might seem modest compared to the personalised Aladdin’s cave the average British child seems to be presented with these days, compared to my parents’ generation who got little more than a tangerine and a few brazil nuts, we were generously provided for. 

It has always been a Johnson family tradition that a certain percentage of stocking fillers (always wrapped in newspaper when I was little) are booby prizes. My Dad (I learnt later on to recognise his packing style and handwriting) meticulously wrapped up for us, under numerous tightly packed layers: a broken pen, in fact anything broken might appear, carrots, potatoes, often a solitary brazil nut, and I generally received one or other of the small brass candlesticks off the mantlepiece (being a matching pair, brother Ian got its pal!). Dad’s written messages always urged us on, “Almost there!” “You’re going to love this!” “Something really good!” “This is just what you’ve always wanted!”. In a way the boobies, and their attention to detail, spoke as much to me about the love in my family home as did the ‘good stuff’. Yes, the Matchbox, James Bond Aston Martin DB7, complete with tiny man and ejector seat was a jaw-dropper, but I would have been awfully disappointed if my parents hadn’t taken the time to wrap up a few really misleading ‘duds’ that year. Judith and I continued the tradition with our own son. 

I think what I want to say is that Christmas isn’t solely about receiving, it’s about sharing too; a time for each of us to be gathered into ‘the fold’. It’s a time for inclusion and for expressing love; a time that makes me grateful for my family and friends; and causes me to remember too that I belong to a far wider human family. Henry James said: “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”


Have a lovely Christmas everybody!


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Henry Rider Haggard

28/9/2014

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Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856 - 1925) was one of the most succesful adventure story writers of the late nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century. He is credited as being the founder of the Lost World literary genre, and I suppose today he’d be classified as a writer of popular or commercial fiction. He certainly belongs to the breed of author who writes to make his way and earn his keep rather than one who sees profit as beneath them and seeks only to attain literary greatness. However, Rider Haggard wrote skilfully without obfuscation and possessed an ability to make his readers picture the setting he wished to communicate to them clearly. He spent a few years as a young man in southern Africa and this appears to have furnished him with ample material for his subsequent literary career. He was quite prolific, and appears to have produced at least one book a year (often more) over the span of his writing career.

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My maternal grandfather, born in 1891, and a lifelong avid reader, had a large selection of Rider Haggard’s novels on his bookshelves. He loved a thrilling tale, and I daresay as a youngster he would have adored the hugely exciting ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ with its boys’ own adventure story. The book’s description of a vast civil war battle between Haggard’s invented Kukuanas (clearly modelled with some respect on the Zulu culture) with the corpses of many thousands of their courageous warriors littering a plain stained red with their blood is still very affecting, and somehow, sadly presaged for me the terrible slaughter my grandfather and his generation would meet and know all too well as young men on the Western Front. A fact about Rider Haggard that I find of particular personal interest is that he spent his winters in Hastings. In 1917 he bought the North Lodge on Maze Hill, St Leonards-on-Sea, and apparently used the room sited just above its archway for writing until 1923. I think I’d have to put this location forward on a list of most coveted workrooms, although I confess that I haven’t seen inside. He was chums with fellow author Rudyard Kipling, another East Sussex resident who lived in the village of Burwash at a house called Batemans. Kipling also had a pretty nice writing room - one that I have seen, as Batemans is a National Trust property and is definitely worth visiting. 

King Solomon’s Mines is a well written, highly thrilling adventure. However, the modern reader has to take into consideration when it was written before approaching it. Rider Haggard was a conservative Victorian and held Imperialist ideals consistent with the times in which he lived - views that most of us, I am pleased to say, find utterly repellent today. Most modern readers will I imagine also be horrified, as I was, when they read the chapter where the book’s narrator and main protagonist Alan Quatermain leads his white companions and their native bearers on an elephant hunt - the ensuing slaughter of ‘the brutes’ is quite shocking, and clearly shows the terrible disregard for the natural world prevalent amongst Europeans as they settled new territories. Having said this, and if you are able to get beyond these lamentable truths and see the book within its time frame and take along with it a large pinch of salt, then it is, I think, a very good read and a wholly ripping yarn.  

Rider Haggard’s novel ‘She’ is reckoned to be one of the most widely read books ever written, and fifty years ago was estimated to have sold over eighty million copies. It has been translated into numerous languages and made into several film versions. I recall getting a little hot under the collar myself when as a lad I saw Ursula Andress in the titular role. Like King Solomon’s Mines it is difficult for the modern reader to encounter views that are now considered to be quite unequivocally racist. The European world powers at the end of the nineteenth century were obsessed by the fearful idea of racial degeneration; Rider Haggard may have been influenced by this concept after witnessing the ruins of ‘Great Zimbabwe’ which were explored and excavated in the 1870s; they may have been, at least in part, responsible for the ancient lost city in She and his imagined native Armahagger people who live amongst the ruins and have, it must be said, very little to recommend themselves (incidentally, the white ruled Rhodesian Government for many years put political pressure on archaeologists to deny that such a city as ‘Great Zimbabwe’ could have been built by any black races). The book also touched on the rapidly changing role of women in the industrialised world. It was a hugely influential book in its day; its female protagonist Ayesha - the She of the title - has been cited as a female prototype in the works of Freud and Jung; the White Queen, Jadis, in C.S Lewis’s Narnia books owes a debt to her; as too does the character of Shelob in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Like King Solomon’s Mines it is without any shadow of doubt a very good example of the lost world literary genre, however its often racist and Imperialist ideals are sometimes quite unpalateable - and any modern reader has to bear this fact in mind before proceeding.


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Thunder 'n' Lightning

19/7/2014

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PictureGreat Aunt (Bopa) Mary's little chair
There’s a right-angled cloud up in the sky looking down at me as I sit at my desk by the window in the corner of what used to be (and occasionally still is) our dining room. Right-angled clouds appearing in the sky, what next, I ask? Perhaps it’s there in the sky as a precursor to the mega-storm we’ve been warned to expect in the UK sometime this afternoon. The treetops are somewhat billowy and there are ominously dark clouds fast approaching - I’m on my guard! Judith instucted me to be off the computer before the storm strikes - good sense, of course, and I shan’t disobey her. Judith is not a fan of thunder and lightning. She is of course not alone in this: my Great Aunt Mary at the first thundrous drum roll would immediately gather her favourite little chair and head for the cupboard under the stairs; my father, generally a sanguine type, used to turn quite pale and become unusually silent during thunder storms. He’d seek out a quiet spot in a dark room and sit the thing out.

Dad said he’d never been troubled by whatever the weather had thrown in his direction, until, in his early twenties, he’d experienced storms in the Himalayas. He was taken to Darjeeling to a nursing home to convalesce after first having undergone some weeks of hospitalisation and treatment for amoebic dysentery during World War Two. He was stationed on an RAF base in Mumbai (then Bombay), where he’d fallen prey to the ‘bug’. The treatment for this form of dysentery in those days required being filled-up with a pink foam that Dad said smelt like disinfectant. I shall spare you, gentle reader, a fuller description of exactly how a pink foam might wend its way along to find the small intestine of a British serviceman during WW2. Apparently, the treatment demanded that the foam had to be retained incrementally - initially for perhaps only fifteen minutes or so, gradually increasing to several hours. Dad always made me laugh when he described the joyous agony this experience could be at times. It’s not difficult to picture the scene - a ward full of bright-eyed young servicemen all attempting to retain the pink foam that had been inserted in their nether regions - the banter and waggish humour, and in the face of this, the Herculean effort required to avoid laughter and the bubbling gurgles that must inevitably follow any muscle relaxation.

Isn’t it strange where a right-angled cloud up in the sky can take you? Actually, in the time it’s taken to write this blog post the sky has totally cleared and it is now a gorgeous clear blue, not a storm cloud in sight - not even a pink bubble!


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The Complete Maus

22/6/2014

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Occasionally, but very occasionally, a piece of literature or a work of art pops up that grabs you by the ruff and shakes you up.  It sends a shiver down the spine and sets off an echo that goes on reverberating through the depths of your being. It’s the kind of response that sadly seems to occur less frequently as one grows older, possibly because our field of vision has broadened; at least I hope this is the case and it isn’t simply because we’ve become jaded by years of exposure to all the various stimuli that constantly bombard us! I’m not talking about the current swift-hit flavour-of-the-month - the must-see book, play, film or exhibition that five years on is barely recollected. Anyway, all I really know is what pure joy it is when you discover a piece of work that can still stun you in this way, that has power to alter your perception of place and time, make you reassess something you believed was understood and assimilated long ago.

For me The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman was just such an experience. It traces Spiegelman’s own parents’early lives in Poland and their journey through the Holocaust. It won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1992 - becoming the first graphic novel ever to do so - in my view an accolade very well deserved. Spiegelman depicts his comic-book cast as animals: Jewish people are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, Swedes are reindeer. By impersonalising the characters in this way and with a deceptively simple drawing style, Spiegelman in Maus manages to achieve something utterly remarkable, he makes us look at and see again stuff that most of us will have encountered with open-mouthed horror many times before, but in a totally new way. It becomes one of the most powerful personal testimonies I have ever read, as he, Spiegelman, interviews his not always endearing father in Rego Park, New York for his planned account of the Holocaust. We understand something of Spiegelman junior’s guilt about his mother’s suicide in 1968 shortly after he’d experienced a nervous breakdown, and the lifelong angst he felt about the death of a brother he never knew - at one point in Maus he starts drawing himself as a man hiding behind a mouse mask. He very cleverly conveys to the reader the extremely long-cast shadows of Auschwitz and Dachau, and the power of these camps to go on souring the lives of those who not only survived their inhuman cruelty, but were not yet even born.

I would simply run out of superlatives explaining this book’s worth.


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Father's Day

14/6/2014

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Tomorrow is Father’s Day in the UK, and I’m fortunate enough to have a son who has planned something for us all to celebrate the occasion. My own father died prematurely almost nineteen years ago because of a very bad medical diagnosis. It was a tragic end to a worthwhile life and my family and I have greatly missed having him around all these years. He’d be ninety-two if he was still with us.

As explained here before, I’ve formatted both my books ready for their various e-book versions and print editions. And I have to admit, although I certainly enjoy reading on Kindle, nothing beats the buzz of leafing through your own printed book if you’re satisfied with the outcome. When the shipment of books arrives, I invariably think of Dad. I always think of him too when I’m formatting, because apart from the years robbed from him and his generation by Adolf Hitler and his megalomaniac pals, he remained a printer all his working life. He did a seven year apprenticeship from the age of fourteen. He once told me how on the fresh-faced first day of his working life he’d been sent out by the experienced men of his printing office to a local chemist shop for a pot of ‘elbow grease’. The chemist had chuckled when he’d placed his order and gently informed him, “They’re pulling your leg, boy.”

Dad loved his job and was highly skilled at it. He was bi-lingual and used to set books in Welsh and English on a Monotype machine. For the technical know-how, justifying of text, kerning etc that we now rely on computers to organise and beautifully arrange for us, Dad had nothing else to depend on but skill and experience. He was however no Luddite, and I can easily imagine he’d be fascinated and impressed by the kind of technology that makes the abilities he’d acquired over years being available to his son by utilising a very straightforward piece of software. I think the digital revolution would have found my Dad thoroughly mesmerised. When you think of it, the actual idea behind printing, basically using reversed lead letters to make an imprint on a piece of paper, was pretty much the same in Dad’s day as it had been at the time of William Caxton.

So, it’s Father’s Day tomorrow. I’ll be thinking of you Dad.


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Old Chums and Great Passions

1/6/2014

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PictureA Midsummer Night's Dream (Nov 1970) - Ogmore-by-the-Sea
The wife’s gone off to London for the day (Saturday). She just rang - she’s having a coffee with Bob Mason , an old chum of mine from my teenage years in Wales (see photo left of the Glamorgan Schools' Theatre Company production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream - Bob played Bottom and is photographed with donkey ears, end of third row on right - that’s me seated on end of second row left). We met up again in London about a decade later, around the time my son was born; my wife got to know him then too. Unbeknown to either of us, we’d both trained as actors at different schools in London. We saw a lot of him for a while and then he disappeared from our lives again until about three years back - he tracked me down through my website. He rang yesterday to say he was on a flying visit from Sweden and were we around to meet up? I wasn’t able to get up to London myself today as I had a pre-arranged appointment this afternoon with someone who is going to be doing some work for us. Judith however was actually visiting London today to see her lifelong hero Julie Andrews, who’s appearing on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo.  Sadly, she no longer sings of course, but I think she tells anecdotes and is interviewed by Aled Jones. What’s for certain is that Judith will love it! And when I imagine the audience of two thousand odd adoring fans and think of my wife’s rapturous expression surrounded by all those like minded ‘brothers and sisters’, without being in any way snide, somehow I can’t help smiling.

We should all have at least one thing in this life that we really adore!

Judith and I consider ourselves extremely blessed because we’re enthusiastic about literally dozens of things. Reading is of course a shared lifelong passion. I’m currently reading Jane Eyre, which I’m almost ashamed to say I’d never picked up before, although I have seen numerous adaptations. When I was a boy the BBC took its remit to educate its audience very seriously, and every Sunday afternoon we were introduced to the Classics through various serialisations - I suspect Jane Eyre was first experienced in this way. I know the characters and story in the book very well, so unfortunately there are no great surprises as there might have been, however it is still a great book and remains after more than a hundred and fifty years a total page-turner.

On the subject of books: I am really pleased that lots of people have taken advantage of the ‘Pre-Summer Madness’ low-price promo for Niedermayer & Hart and Roadrage on Amazon Kindle and Smashwords (if reading on my website, full details in the column to the right of this blog post). I plan to allow this offer (especially as it’s not officially summer yet!) to run for a little while longer before putting the price up again. Thanks very much to everyone who has posted a review - this is an invaluable promotional tool and always greatly appreciated.

Enjoy your week!


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Richard and Jane

24/4/2014

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The elderly pair at the heart of this family portrait were my Great-Grandparents, Richard and Jane. They were the parents of my my maternal grandmother Gwenllian - who was generally just called Gwen. That’s her, my Nan, in the back row on the far left. She had long auburn hair and was considered quite a beauty in her day. However you never think about your own Nan in such terms. As far as I was concerned she was simply very kind and perhaps more importantly, because of the sometimes slightly mercenary nature of children, always generous. By the time I got to know her, her hair was totally white, just like mine is today. The only other person in the picture that I knew personally was Richard and Jane’s other daughter, Mary. She’s also in the back row, in the middle. Mary, or Bopa Mary (Bopa being Valleys’ dialect for Aunty) as I always called her, lived with us (as did my grandparents) from the time I was five.

This photograph is the only known entire family group of Richard and Jane and their four children. Their youngest son William is next to my grandmother, and the eldest son Tom is over on the far right. Richard and Jane had nine children, but infant mortality was particularly high in the South Wales Valleys during the Victorian era, and only these four survived to adulthood. They look proud of their family, and so they should be, because only a generation or so before their families were illiterate, itinerant labourers, who marked a cross for their names. Richard, who had been a collier himself as a young man, ended up with his own small butcher shop, and he and Jane between them produced two teachers - my Nan and her brother Tom, who actually ended up a Headmaster.The other brother William was an accountant. Mary, a real character, wasn’t very taken with learning, and was happy to leave school at eleven, but she was literate and numerate and had her own little shop in Trecynon, Aberdare. The lady seated beside Richard and Jane is Tom’s wife and the mother of their first three grandchildren. The pretty young girl standing next to Tom in the back row is his eldest daughter, who was sadly to die of appendicitis very shortly.

The picture has numerous stories to tell and I am so glad that my own son Tom took the time to sit down with my mother, (not yet born at the time it was taken) and get her to accurately name everyone in it. I calculate that the photograph was taken shortly after the First World War - perhaps as a reminder of how fortunate they had been to all come safely through it. I suspect the picture was taken by my grandfather - also called Martin like myself, who was a keen amateur photographer and who would have already been courting my Nan by this time. What I particularly love about the photograph is how relaxed and happy everyone looks - unusual for the rather stuffy group portraits more generally seen from this era. Another thing that makes it unusual is that it was taken outdoors in beautiful natural sunlight - most photographs from those times were shot inside against a studio backdrop.

Last weekend my wife Judith and I went for a long weekend to Cardiff. We met up with two descendants of Richard and Jane, themselves great-grandchildren like me. It was exciting and a little strange because I hadn’t seen them since I was ten or eleven. They are the children of the small boy in the sailor suit in the foreground. Like myself they were born several decades after both our great-grandparents had passed away.

When I do a quick calculation I reckon there are now something like twenty-four people currently alive who are directly descended from Richard and Jane.


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Someone Called Round for a Book

27/2/2014

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This morning someone called round for a book, not one of mine I hasten to add. Generally when people call by to make a purchase it’s almost invariably someone local who has come round for a copy of my wife’s book Southborough War Memorial. It was the first book we brought out under our Odd Dog Press trading name in 2009. Actually, at that moment in time, although I’d already written Niedermayer & Hart, Southborough War Memorial seemed like the only book we’d ever be likely to do. I know digital printing and e-books were already around, but they weren’t well established, and it didn’t seem at all practical or even possible back then to bring out a work of fiction without losing a stack of money and ending up with a vast number of yellowing copies of your book stacked-up under the bed!

Judith spent seven years meticulously researching and writing Southborough War Memorial. She abhors every sort of war and violence, yet she had always felt deeply moved by the personal histories of the ordinary men and women (one woman on Southborough War Memorial) who suddenly discover themselves caught up by world events and carried off to a hitherto undreamed of world where killing is organised and systematic, and human suffering and cruelty is on an unimaginable scale. Yet for all the filth and hate and degradation, there is often immense courage, kindness, and powerful demonstrations of selflessness and generosity of the human spirit. Judith took up the task in 2001, suddenly realising that the last living connection to those who had fought and died in Gallipoli, Ypres, the Somme, and many other battlefields in foreign lands were themselves fading fast; she began interviewing in earnest. In fact, by the time the book was published quite a number of  the most elderly of these ‘interviewees’ had sadly passed away. She has often spoken of the eagerness of these people to relate family stories of an older brother, father or adored cousin. As the interviews concluded many of them thanked her for what she was aiming to do. When someone has a relative who has died in a war, that loss never seems to be fully mourned, the grief is never completely come to terms with - least that’s how it seems to me.

Judith planned to do her best to find a photograph and if possible something of the life and death of the two hundred and fifty-two names on our local war memorial. In most cases she succeeded, sometimes the result was beyond reasonable expectation, however, sadly, a few names beat her completely. The book is 254 pages long and its comprehensive indexes list each person by regiment and where they were laid to rest. I saw her break down in tears after setting the whole book and realising she had scanned every image (about 250) at the wrong resolution. For an hour or two I think she actually said she was giving up! It was probably Judith’s determination to finish this massive project, all done in her spare time (as I said, over seven years) whilst holding down a full time job, which in turn encouraged me to pick up my own pen again. I had been utterly discouraged and disheartened by the world of publishing after they’d initially shown so much interest in N & H - but the only thing I got in the end was a couple of free lunches and a lot of hot air and promises! A bit like Scarlett O’Hara I vowed I’d never put myself in such a vulnerable position again - well a little bit like that!

Anyway back to the morning’s book sale. I’d spoken to a bookshop owner yesterday who was ringing to order some books, and he asked if we’d mind someone calling by to get a copy of SWM as they were returning home to Wales. The lady, although originally from Kent, had lived in South Wales for the past twenty years, which of course prompted a nice little chat about home. She said she already owned the Kindle version of SWM which she liked very much but I could tell that she was very pleased to be holding the print version in her hand - book lovers are so transparent! She was also related to one of the names on the memorial - hence her very keen interest in Judith’s book. She asked me what I did and I told her that I wrote stuff too. She went on to ask if she might find my writings on a shelf somewhere and I said there were copies on the shelf directly behind her head.

I pictured another cash sale as she leafed through N & H and Roadrage. She looked very interested. I tried to look nonchalant.

She said she’d check them out on line!

Heigh ho!


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