Shelter from the Storm

The young people who meet in the park in Halesworth, down by the skateboard area, needed somewhere to sit in bad weather. In response, the local crime prevention panel decided to launch a project to raise money to purchase a youth shelter. I was asked to help decorate the shelter, so at the end of May, 2007, I started going down to the park in the evenings to try to get the young people to draw or make suggestions about how the shelter might be decorated. Usually, I went with Lorraine and Hester, two youth workers who regularly liase with the young people. On our first visit, the young people asked when, exactly, the shelter would be installed. They'd heard rumours about it but were a bit sceptical about it actually happening. They declined to do any drawing, at first, until the shelter was actually there. They also said that they could build the shelter themselves. I pointed out some of the practical difficulties in building a shelter that might have to withstand some heavy use without collapsing, and so on.

At the next meeting of the crime prevention sub-committee that I had joined, I reported what the young people had said. I also said that I'd organise a workshop for them, at which they could draw or sketch their ideas for the shelter artwork. The following week I went to the park again to inform the young people about the proposed workshop. I displayed some flyers advertising the workshop, pasting them in places in and near to the skatepark, trying to ensure that they would be clearly visible to the young people. The workshop was to be to be held at the local arts centre, The Cut, which is just a few hundred metres from the park. I also printed out about 40 flyers. Lorraine said she'd give them out to the young people when she went to the park on her regular round.

The day of the workshop arrived. Monday July 30, 2007. I was looking forward to seeing the young people in The Cut arts centre- usually there are mostly older, middle-class people there. I had prepared the art materials and bought kit-kats (chocolate bars), mineral water, paper cups, etc. I arrived at The Cut at 7pm, prepared the room and the materials. Lorraine and Hester arrived at 7. We waited until 7.30 and, disappointingly, no-one showed up. When I mentioned this, some weeks later, to an experienced community worker, Iain Tuckett of Coin Street Community Builders, he was not surprised that no-one turned up. "It's a matter of culture", he explained. I had underestimated the power of this aspect of 'culture'. Although The Cut is just a few hundred metres away from the skatepark, in physical distance, in 'cultural distance' it is on the other side of the world.

We decided to pack up and take some pencils and paper down to the park. The young people were busy talking, drinking and smoking. To help 'establish rapport' I accepted a can of Carling from Westley. Some of the young people eventually did some sketches, one or two of them quite promising. When I got home that night, I had a look through the drawings. One boy had drawn a Burberry-patterned baseball cap and a doughnut. He's got a job cooking doughnuts somewhere. Another boy, who had been praised as being a good artist, drew a head with a penis and pubic hair coming out of it, with the word 'You" at the top. His way of saying "You dickhead". A third youth drew a bottle of beer. The label read 'Stella Actatwat', accompanied by the slogans 'Chavs Should Move To Beccles' and 'Drinking Is For Noobs'. A young man smoking a joint drew a nice rural landscape changing into a cityscape, to go on the inside of the shelter. A thin, pale girl drew some nice little graphic symbols - yin-yang, a cartoon face taking some ecstasy tablets, a couple of mushrooms and some clouds with lightning. One boy did some lettering saying 'Hendo' underneath which he wrote the word CORPZ, a skull taking the place of the O. Two girls did happy girlish pictures of sub-Manga style faces with the slogan 'Halesworth Engoy'. The mother of a two-month old baby drew a fly-agaric mushroom, her baby being passed around the young people while she drew. A boy boy drew some quite stylish squiggles which could be turned into a good decorative element, while another simply wrote on his sheet "Kangaroos - a nice colour like pink". Interesting, I thought, this is the sort of raw material I can work with.


I reported all this back to the sub-committee and learnt that the local council was delaying things and requiring full planning permission for the shelter, having earlier said that this would not be necessary. I continued to visit the young people in the park over the summer and into the autumn, every couple of weeks. It was good to get to know them better, although not many more drawings were done for the shelter. On September 24, a Monday, I went again to the park in the evening with Hester and Lorraine to chat with the young people and keep them informed about the project. We told them that the shelter was now due to be installed in mid-late October. Some of the young people were unable to speak because of the drugs they'd been taking. I had a chat with a young man called Ricky, who Lorraine and Hester were reluctant to approach, as he's a bit rough sometimes. Ricky said the shelter should be painted in blue camouflage colours. He was fairly out of it, too.

A couple of Saturdays later, the Four Towns Bus was in Halesworth. This is a double-decker bus which travels around providing services for the youth and other local groups. Whe it was first acquired, I had the job of decorating the outside of the bus using coloured vinyl. On the Saturday night I went on the bus to meet Eric and Hannah who run the youth centre here. As always, they were most helpful and invited me to go to the youth club on any Monday or Wednesday evening, which I did, on two occasions. Later I went down to the park with Hannah to talk to the young people. It being Saturday, most of them were busy binge-drinking and smoking dope. They weren't very interested in drawing but it was nice to see them. Hannah struck up a conversation with one young man and explained about the project. She introduced me and the youth, who was fairly well gone, said "That's funny, there's a famous artist called Bob Linney who lives in Walpole". I felt somewhat flattered for a moment but then he said to me "Your voice sounds like a retarded twenty-one year old". I told him I was not retarded and certainly not twenty-one years old.

On my first visit to the youth centre, Eric was again very helpful but the young people there were pretty scatty. A group of boys and girls sat round a table with pens and paper that Eric had supplied. Mostly they were just writing their names in graffiti tag style. I asked if they ever drew pictures and they said that they didn't. One boy said he wouldn't do a drawing for the shelter but would just come and paint it when it was installed. I said no thanks as, without planning, it would probably look a mess and the people who used the shelter would have to look at it for years.

Several of the youth club members took pieces of the thick A3 paper, scribbled on them with thick felt-tip pens, scrunched the papers up and chucked them in the middle of the table before throwing their pens on the floor and shouting something vaguely obscene. They got through lots of paper but not many useable drawings emerged from this process. I asked Eric afterwards who cleaned up. "Oh, we do", he replied cheerfully, picking up discarded felt-tips and balls of paper.

Like the older ones in the park, this group showed little aptitude or desire to concentrate on drawing designs for the shelter. There was so much noise going on, too much happening, a big TV set turned up to full volume, somebody banging out of tune on an old piano, others throwing pool cues onto the floor, music blaring out of the sound system. A cacophany. Short little spans of attention, all a bit depressing. When I did a second session at the youth club, a week later, it was a bit calmer. Several young people drew 'tags' with felt-tip marker pens. This is definitely the favoured art style among the youngsters. Not sure how popular it is with the sub-committee...

I drew out black and white line-drawings based on two of the tags - Max and Logo. I used these two because they were not just boys' names but might also suggest other meanings. I also put together a design for the inside of the shelter, based on the drawings that the young people in the park had made. On Friday October 12, I went down to the park but the only two people there were Alan, one of the sub-committee members and Finn, a young skateboarder. I took the opportunity of showing them the drawings I had prepared and both approved of the approach re. art style. This was nice, as there had been some discussion about using a 'graffiti' style, some committee members wanting to avoid the use of the word 'graffiti', preferring 'alfresco art' or, at my suggestion, 'street art'.

The next night I went onto the Four Towns Bus again, and was interested to meet Duker, one of the rural community/youth workers. I also spoke to Hannah, who had helped paint the mural we did in Halesworth four years ago, and which has survived remarkably well. I showed the drawings to Hannah, Eric and another youth worker, Jackie. I explained my preference for the 'tag' art style and they thought it was a good idea, too.

Monday October 15 was the big day. Three men arrived from Rekk, the company that manufactures and supplies these youth shelters, and proceeded to install the shelter. A sort of short Nissan hut on legs, benches along either side, with open ends, made from aluminium, much of which had been 'powder-coated' to produce a dark green colour. Not the best base colour from my point of view, but still. The only other option had been dark blue. I went to the park the following day - installation was complete, the shelter's legs having been cemented in. While I was there Alastair, the chairman of our sub-committee, and the driving force behind the project, appeared and we chatted a bit. At the base of the two front legs of the shelter two names had been scratched into the concrete - it must have still been wet when the young people went down there on Monday night. One was 'Josh' and the other 'Hog'. Alastair complained a bit about this so, trying to be positive, I said something like "Well, man has been wanting to make marks like this ever since the first cave paintings". "Yes", replied Alastair, "I just rather hoped civilisation had moved on a bit since then". We chuckled.

The next day I went down to do some tests with different paints. I had been informed by the man at Rekk that "any acrylic paint will be fine". I had my doubts. The inside surface of the shelter was incredibly smooth, while the outside had a similar surface except that it was covered all over with moulded bumps in a regular pattern. One of the more difficult things I've had to paint, and I've painted most things by now. I dabbed on a bit of acrylic and let it dry. It stood up on the surface, almost inviting you to pick it off. I tried some emulsion, which was better but still far from perfect, so decide to use, for the most part, acetone-based spray paint, just like the graffiti artists use. The latter adhered really well. While I was doing this, I chatted to three sad boys who were sitting in the shelter. One, whose name I forget, although he had been at school with my daughter, had just moved back to Halesworth after splitting up with his girlfriend after two years' living together in Ipswich; and Ricky was there, feeling sorry for himself as he's got nowhere to live at the moment and has been sleeping rough, being woken up by unfriendly policemen in the middle of the night; and Jacob, who announced that he had just that morning been kicked off the course in motor mechanics that he'd been doing at Lowestoft College. A sad group, plenty of swearing and rolling of roll-ups.

On that Wednesday, I started getting into the painting properly. I'd hardly started before a member of the anti-youth dog walking brigade rushed to judgement. "What does that mean?", asked the woman, not making any effort to say hello or introduce herself in any way. Several thoughts went through my mind in quick succession. I didn't reply, as I felt I should be diplomatic. After all, I was a responsible citizen and represented the sub-committee of the Halesworth Crime Prevention Panel. I didn't want to get them a bad name. After a pause, I said "Good morning. Lovely morning, isn't it?" She then delivered a short monologue about the ills of today's youth. I said I thought it was our generation, not the youth, who were the vandals since we had created such a commercialised society blah blah blah.




Later, four or five young people came along and watched what I was doing. Lorraine came and so did Hannah, who brought her pet ferrets in a large cage. She took them out and let some of the others hold them, if they dared. Soon the young people were saying "Can I have a go?" Cayley and Jacob sprayed a star each after I had demonstrated. Lorraine also did a star. When we'd finished it was funny because the one I'd done was the worst, drippy.

The next day, Patrick and Josh helped to spray the mountains and other elements in the landscape. A few of the others showed some interest, but didn't actually summon up the energy to do anything practical. "What time will you be here tomorrow?", Patrick asked, enthusiastically. 'Things are looking uo', I thought to myself. Tomorrow was the first day of half term.




So, the young people of school age were off school. This was good because, broadly speaking, the young people who had left school were less inclined to get into the painting while those still at school had not yet developed the skills required for doing nothing for extended periods. Patrick arrived soon after I got there. Then came James, Jacob, Ben, Neil et al. We did the sun. I had decided to use a stencilling approach in an attempt to make the images look fairly neat and respectable. This involved cutting stencils in my studio and then taping them up against the shelter walls before spraying through the open areas. So we masked round the sun with a stencil and carefully sprayed it to produce a blend or gradation from yellow, through orange, to red. We did a few coats, as one of the adages of spraying is "It's better to do several thin coats than one heavy coat". In my experience, it's actually very difficult to apply a heavy coat without the paint running more than you want it to. It drips too much. A little drip is quite cool. Lots of drips just look like you don't know what you're doing.

As we peeled the stencil away, Jacob and Patrick, who had done most of the spraying got excited. It was great - the sun looked good. "That sun's fucking phat", exclaimed Patrick. "Fuck, that look good", Jacob said, putting his arm round Patrick's shoulder. A few minutes later, they asked if they could work for me. Full-time assistants, getting paid lots of money. "Fuck, that'd be cool", fantasised Jacob. Nice thought, though. Don't know how I'd cope with non-stop swearing.

The we did the river. I left most of this to the boys. Ben joined in and it was great to see them really getting into it. Ricky came along with his continuing tale of woe. He'd slept in the church with only the doormat as a blanket and was still shivering. He said that the police took his shoes away to check their sole-print against some prints found at a crime scene. Some of the shops in town had been burgled, including, confusingly, the shoe shop. Ricky was a suspect mainly because he had been caught, a few weeks back, after stealing a load of alcohol from the local supermarket. Apparently, one night he'd staggerred down to the park carrying a massive box full of all sorts of goodies - beer, vodka, alcopops. He'd been generous with it, and the young people had had a bit of a party down there. A community of sorts. Ricky was supposed to appear on bail in Lowestoft that day. I said he'd better go otherwise it would all get worse for him. "I don't want to spend my last fiver getting a fucking train to Lowestoft. I've had enough", he said, being tough but very upset. He said he might go up to see his aunt in Yarmouth. She's a heroin addict. He could get an overdose from her and commit suicide. He's come off heroin fairly recently - to prove it he showed me several pin pricks in his arms. "Do you want to see my groin?". he asked me. "No thanks, I believe you", I replied.

At the weekend, I worked in the studio preparing stencils, still for the landscape image on the inside of the shelter. It's amazing how much longer everything takes when you work on a large scale. After a morning's work, I'd look at what I'd done - maybe drawn up half of one side. Big is slow. Remember that, all you budding community artists. Very slow. This was the bit with large fly agaric mushrooms, snow-capped mountains and Tibetanish clouds. In my mind it was the Jianjinshan or Snowy Mountains of western Sichuan, over which Mao and his depleted troops struggled on the Long March - I've recently been reading a book about the LM. Nice to be drawing these simple shapes in the warmth of the studio listening to Gypsy Jazz, trying not to put my back out of joint bending, kneeling, stretching to draw it correctly, getting the lines to have some grace and style.

I went down to the park on the Monday morning - October 22, 2007. It was too damp to do any painting. A bit of unimaginative real graffiti had been added to the image over the weekend. Someone called Conor and another called Chopper had written their names in rather babyish, uninteresting lettering over the urban clouds that we had sprayed so carefully with their blends from red to yellow to white. More or less impossible to correct without starting again. I was a bit disappointed but, later in the day, when things had dried out a bit, happiness returned as several boys and girls worked enthusiastically on the image. The girls, Cayley and Ellie, actually said that they'd cleaned off as much as possible of the crappy 'graffiti' yesterday, which explained why it looked so faint. That made it feel much better for me. It seems that most of the young people thought the 'graffiti' was crap. Chopper turns out to be a boy I know reasonably well and Conor is his mate Conor. Harmless pratts, really. Small town not very tough tough guys.

Ricky turned up, still alive. Actually, I'd been quite worried about him. He was much happier and said that he's got the chance of a flat. Later, Jacky, the Community Support Officer came down to tell Ricky that he's not allowed to sleep in the church. While she was there, Jacky offerred him some not very friendly advice like "Get a life" and "Get a job". Afterwards, Ricky commented wryly that she had not exactly offerred him much 'Community Support'.

Tuesday was a cold, bright day but again condensation was a problem to begin with. I corrected a stem of one of the mushrooms and later we were able to get on better. Ben worked hard with me all day and it was good to get to know him a bit. Working with someone is one of the best ways to get to know them, I think. Several others also did a bit - a girl called Charlie, Jacob, Patrick. Max, who had drawn the original Max tag at the youth club came down and was impressed with the coloured version of Max that I showed him as a computer printout. He didn't get involved, though.

There's an older bloke who spends time down at the skatepark, maybe in his late forties. Whenever I, or any of the youth workers, appear he melts into the background and wanders off. Lorraine and Hester have never really managed to engage him in conversation. The general suspicion is that he sells drugs to the young people but I don't know. Anyway, he strolls around with his Doberman dog. The dog wears a muzzle and the man doesn't say much. One day, he and I were the only two people down there, so I thought I'd have a go at a conversation. "Hi, nice dog. What's his name?", I asked. I was a bit freaked out when he replied "Max". I said something about painting the Max tag on the shelter. "That's a coincidence", added the man and then melted away again, leaving me feeling a bit odd.




We did the sun's rays, which meant climbing up and down the stepladder and standing on wobbly benches holding on to the end, spray can in hand. Patrick and Ben did most work on it - 16 year olds. They constantly play 'music' on their mobile phones and are particularly enthralled by a song that teaches the listener to 'suck dick'. It has charming lyrics, like "Do your girlfriend's teeth get in the way?" at which the lads usually roar with laughter. The young people seem to swear an awful lot. They shout a lot, too. Jacob's amongst the loudest and specialises in shouting things like "What ho, old boy" at the top of his voice whenever frightened looking OAPs come within range.

On Wednesday Patrick, Ben, Liam and George did most of the work with several others hanging around. Ricky turned up to report that his meeting with the potential landlord, and other guy with whom he'd be sharing, had been disastrous.The other lodger, apparently a woman-beater by repute, didn't want Ricky staying there, so Ricky had to sleep rough again. Someone from the church bought him a meal of fish and chips at lunchtime. "I've had enough", he said again. "I might just go and hang myself". He'd been to the surgery in the morning but his doctor had not been there. I asked him why he wanted to see the doctor. "'Cos of all these thoughts going round in my head, man".

The work went well, although I discovered that one of the older boys had chucked a can of spray paint into the nearby river without me seeing. Jacob was there again, although he didn't do much work. He announced in a loud voice that one of the smaller boys, George had "lost his anal virginity". I hadn't heard that one before. Lots more swearing but a good working atmosphere. My friend Julia, walking her dog Miff in the park came over to have a chat and a look at the shelter.

Started Thursday by doing a small cloud with George. Soon a group of 12 year old girls came by. I knew three of them quite well and they each had a go at spraying a bit on the cityscape - Nancy, Freda, Matilda, Freya and Eleanor. I added some details on the buildings. Later, a man came and made some comments about the shelter. He was carrying a Guardian newspaper, which I usually take as a promising sign. "So now they'll have somewhere comfortable to do their binge drinking" was his opening, and somewhat disappointing, remark. He went on to predict that the painting wouldn't last long before it was spoiled by graffiti. I pointed out that the mural in the underpass had lasted for about four years without being seriously disfigured and added that I thought that most of the young people here are fine and not a threat to society. He complained about the litter the young people leave. I said that the Crime Prevention Panel is planning to raise money so that a sturdy bin can be put next to the shelter. "They won't use it", he said, immediately. I think his glass is half empty.




I spent the weekend and Monday cutting stencils for the Max image and went to the park on Tuesday to make a start on painting it on the outside of the shelter. Ricky turned up, limping and on crutches. "What have you been up to?", I asked him. "I went to Bungay at the weekend and got shot in the leg", he replied. "Shit", I said, "Do people carry guns in Bungay?". "Oh no, I went round me mate's house on Saturday and we were messing around with his air rifle. He shot me in the leg by mistake. I had to go to hospital - they kept me in overnight". He showed me a small hole towards the top of his inside leg where the pellet had gone through his track suit bottoms". "That was close", I laughed. "Yeah, just a few inches higher it would've got me in the nuts". He'd enjoyed the warm bed.

On Wednesday a boy called Henry came and had a chat. He was the one who Lorraine had said was very interested in art/graphics and was supposed to be a good artist. The only thing of his that I'd seen was his representation of 'You Dickhead', which I referred to earlier. He asked if he and some of the others could paint the remaining side of the shelter. They didn't want to plan anything, just to be given some spray paint and allowed to get on with it. I said it would look a mess unless they planned it a bit. I also said that I didn't really want to buy the paint for that out of what I was getting paid. I thought it would be great, from an ownership point of view, if they did the remaining side, so tried to be as accomodating as possible. We made an agreement that if he produced a rough design before the next sub-committee meeting the following Tuesday, I would put it to the committee and recommend it. I gave him my phone number and said to give me a ring whenever he had prepared the sketch and I would come to Halesworth to collect it. I also asked why he hadn't shown any interest in the project before now and reminded him that I'd been down to the park regularly since June with art materials. He said he'd been busy. Very frustrating, actually, because, of course, the meeting came and went and Henry didn't re-appear.

Max started to take shape on Thursday. Not many young people down there, half-terms finished and my helpers are mostly back at school. Nevertheless, it was a lovely, bright autumn day and I'm up on the stepladder masking out when I become aware that there's someone else nearby. I looked round to my left to see a large man, maybe in his 60s, standing there shaking his head from side to side, as if tut-tutting. When I looked round, he said "That's terrible. Really bad. Really bad stuff" and then just walked off before I had taken it in. "Cheers, mate", I thought to myself, a bit shocked, "Now fuck off and read your Daily Mail". Not a very encouraging start to the day.

Later, the Guardian-carrying complainer returned, as well. He definitely sees the project's main aim as being to provide the young people with a comfortable place in which to drink copious quantities of alcohol. I pointed out that I thought part of the idea was to provide a focal point for the youth to gather so that they didn't congregate in other parts of the town, like near the war memorial or near peoples' houses. Philip (we were on first name terms by now) asked me a series of questions about how the park is policed, what the Crime Prevention Panel does, etc. I was as helpful as I could be but had to tell him that I was not really the person qualified to answer his enquiries. I was just the artist - don't shoot me nor the piano player. I told him I'd ask someone from the CPP to give him a ring, which they did later that evening.

On Friday, I carried on with Max. I had quite a long chat with PC Phillips who's got an arrest warrant for Ricky, who didn't go to court yesterday. I haven't seen Ricky since Monday. The PC also said, interestingly, that he's met Ricky's mum and that she appeared to be a perfectly nice lady. Ricky, on the other hand, has been ranting on about what an effing cow she is for not letting him stay at her house. Two sides to every story.

Later, I had a chat with Neil, who shambled up in his baggy trousers. One of the more wastery looking boys that hang out down there. This was the first decent conversation I'd had with Neil and I was pleased to discover that he has much more going for him than appears at first sight. He's doing an 'Access to Music' course in Norwich, for which he has to get up at 6.30 three mornings a week to get the bus. He told me that his class is currently studying Bob Dylan's 'Blowin' in the Wind', and learning about protest songs. I thought this was a good subject to be learning about. Worth getting up early for. We talked about the young people doing one side of the shelter and I showed him a book called 'Spraycan Art', pointing out illustrations of cool black graffiti dudes in New York sketching out their designs before starting to spray.




Oh yes, and going back to the policeman, he quite liked the tree on which the skaters have hung several dead skateboards. It looks good. I had a chat with Finn about Nina Simone's 'Strange Fruit", which was nice.

The following Monday was a damp day and as my daughter Jo was going back to Brighton , I decided not to go to the park. Instead, I made a start on the stencils for 'Logo', the design I have in mind for the last side of the shelter. On Tuesday I worked on Max. A woman came along with her poodle while I was working. I turned round to look at her, wondering what to expect, and she exclaimed, enthusiastically, "This is wonderful!". She looked around the inside and came out saying "It's lovely". I thanked her and said how encouraging it was to get such positive comments.

An older man with his greying dog approached, a bit later. "Comin' on, innit?", he observed cheerily. We had a chat during which I learnt that his father had never hit him or his siblings during his childhood. He nevertheless respected his father and always did what he was told. He said something favourable about David Cameron but quickly apologised - "I don't want to get political". After pointing out the importance of the traditional family he took his dog off for a shit on the Millennium Meadow. A little while later, Stephen, who used to run the Dunwich Ship pub, came along. "You're not Banksie, are you?" I was quite impressed that he knew who Banksie was.

I then chatted with Rob, the local dealer, and Hogwart. Rob phoned Henry to see if he'd done the design yet, because the meeting is about two hours away. He'd done nothing - no change there, then. Rob and Hog were happy about the way the designs were coming along, although they didn't offer to do any work on it.

I went to the meeting that afternoon, where I received a vote of thanks for working successfully "under difficult conditions". One of the committee members said "It's an object lesson watching the way Bob relates to the young people", so I was pleased. I said we should try vinyl for the Awards for All logo, although Steve, another committee member, thought it would be peeled off straight away. I said lets try the cut vinyl - I can get two copies done at cost price and if, in the end, they're damaged, we can think of something more permanent. I've also got to get permission from the kids/parents in the photos I took, so that they can be used as publicity.

On Wednesday I spent a cold day painting Max. Getting to the end, just adding highlights and finishing touches. Several complimentary comments from passers by. One man came up and said "Graffiti artists don't usually take so much trouble over their work". I had a chat with another man who had a stammer. We talked briefly about 'ownership', although none of the young people were able to help today. As he went off, he said "Well, it's g-g-g-great what you're d-d-d-doing". Later, Finn, Rob and Hog moved the dead skateboards to another tree, in case one fell on someone walking along the path underneath the tree.

I put the final touches to Max on Thursday, then spent the following weekend preparing stencils for the last side which is based on the word 'Logo', one of the tags done at the youth club. After a short holiday in Venice, I went down to the park on Thursday but it was too wet to do anything. The next day was bright and sunny but even at 1.30 p.m. there was a heavy layer of condensation on the shelter, so again I did no painting.




Saturday was a dry day, for once, although I still had to wipe off some condensation at around 12.30. Managed to do the first big stencil for Logo - blue background using the groovy 'Montana' paints, which are really nice to use. Two girls, Olivia and Sally helped with some spraying. Patrick, Jacob, Hogwart and a few others were down there rolling joints and generally having a laugh. Patrick also did quite a lot of spraying. He and Jacob, at one point, climbed onto the childrens' play equipment and did some really cool stoned scat singing. Very musical - actually, Jacob plays drums.

Despite forecasts of heavy rain for Monday from three different websites (BBC Weather; the Met Office; UK Weather), we had no rain, so I was able to do a couple of hours painting on Logo. Westley, Maria, Jacob and Hogwart were in the shelter. Wes and Maria had been to court this morning re. the fight in Halesworth several weeks ago. As it turned out, all charges against them were dropped. Wes was much relieved, as he would have got a prison sentence if found guilty. He was celebrating with a box of twenty Carlsberg Export beers. He offered me one but I declined, mainly because I wasn't feeling too good with 'man-flu'.

I did the L and O backgrounds. Alan came along with his dog Jasper and told me that the commissioning ceremony would be at 10.00 a.m. on December 5. This means that I've got a bit more time than I thought, which is good, in view of the inclement weather. Wes went off to get a kebab and left the half-full box of Carlsberg Exports under a bush in the park, telling Jacob and Hogwart to look after it. As I was leaving, they were also leaving the park, carrying Westley's beers. I was just getting in the car when I noticed Jacob, Hog and another boy coming up the lane, Jacob in the lead. He suddenly turned round and said something to the boy carrying the beers, who immediately put the box down behind a clump of weeds, hiding them from view. Next, a police van approached and the driver wound down the window and had a word with Jacob, who told me later that the policeman had said "Don't get run over - it makes too much paperwork for us".

Wednesday was a nice morning after yesterday's rain. I continued with Logo on my own. The only people I chatted to were Alan (and Jasper) and Josh. Alan talked about various things while I applied a stencil. Regarding litter, he said "The only things I really object to are broken bottles and vomit". I said "The two things go together, don't they". Josh is a pleasant, laid back boy who is hoping to study catering at the new college which used to be the local Middle School. I know Josh's dad, who is called Keon Joy. I wondered what Josh's surname was - he lives with his mum, the parents being separated. It could have been Josh Joy. I finished the G and one of the Os, again impressed with the nice colours in the Montana Gold range of spraypaints.

Later, I e-mailed Steve to tell him that the lottery logo can't be done in vinyl after all. The lettering is to small for the cutter at EPS Transfers to handle. We'll have to get by with the metal plaque supplied by the Lottery people. I'll mount it on wood and it can be held up by someone when photos are taken at the opening ceremony.




On Friday, I only managed about an hour painting before a hail and sleet storm forced me to stop. The following Monday, I finished painting Logo and stencilled an additional figure onto the empty area of the landscape on the inside of the shelter. Had a chat with an 80 year old gentleman who had been a senior local government officer (Superintendent General) in Hitchin.




For me, that was about it. The commissioning ceremony took place on a very rainy morning in the park. None of the young people who might use the shelter were in attendance - presumably, nobody had thought to invite them. There was no shortage of people from various civic and police bodies, on the other hand. I had seen only one or two of them in the park before. They had their tea and biscuits in the shelter and had their photograph taken in the rain. A few journalists braved the weather and interviewed some of us who had been involved. On the Friday of that week, we made the front page of the Beccles and Bungay Journal, with a large colour photo of people standing in front of the shelter and quite a good article entitled 'Shelter From The Storm'. It reminded me that there are still a couple of small jobs to complete at some point - "Bob now wants to cover the shelter in a transparent anti-gravity coating, and also plans to add some glow-in-the-dark stars on the inside of the roof". I had mentioned anti-graffiti paint to the young reporter, but I quite like the idea of anti-gravity paint. I have nice visions of Patrick, Jacob, Finn, Hogwart, Josh, Wes, Ricky and crew floating away, stoned, swearing, arguing, drinking beer, shouting and laughing.....

The Longest Strike in History

Last Sunday I was taken to the Burston Rally by Miles Hubbard, a friend from Walpole. Miles is a trade union organiser working for Unite in our region. The village of Burston is a few miles from Diss in Norfolk.

On arrival at Burston, we had a cup of tea. I had a look at the exhibition in the little school building. It gave a brief history of events that took place in this village in the first half of the last century. It tells the story of Christian Socialist schoolteachers, Tom and Annie Higdon, their pupils and the village community all working together to bring about social change.

Tom Higdon was born in Somerset in 1869. He married Annie Katherine Schollick and the couple moved to Norfolk in 1902 to work as headmistress and assistant teacher at Wood Dalling County School. From the start they didn't get on with the school managers, mostly local farmers. The Higdons definitely identified themselves more with the interests of farm labourers than with those of landowners. Farmers took children out of school to work in the fields whenever they needed them. Tom Higdon thought child labour was a bad idea. So much so that one day he assaulted a farmer who had persistently taken boys out of school. He supported the recently-formed trades unions in Norfolk, which also got up the noses of the farmers and school managers.

The Higdons were insubordinate, a characteristic of socialists. In 1910 Tom, Annie and some farm labourers were brazen enough to stand for election to the parish council. They were all elected and the old farts were outraged. Relations became so bad that Tom and Annie were transferred. On February 1, 1911, they went to Burston.

After a couple of years at Burston, Tom again organised a group of labourers to join him in standing for election to the parish council. Surprise, surprise, they were all elected and, as it says in the information booklet, "the village establishment received its marching orders from the people". But the Rector, Reverend Charles Tucker Eland, and his farmer friends were still managers of the school.

One day, Annie lit the school fire to dry out the clothes of pupils who had walked to school in heavy rain. This action was said, by Rector Eland, to be "grossly discourteous" to the school managers, as Annie had not asked their permission to light the fire. She was also falsely accused, on another occasion, of beating two girls. The school managers demanded that the Higdons be transferred. After an enquiry by the Education Committee, the Higdons were given three months notice.

Their dismissal took effect on April Fool's Day in 1914. A day on which the sounds of children marching and singing rang around Burston's 'candlestick', or circular route round the village. Sixty-six of the school's seventy-two children had gone on strike, in protest against the treatment of the Higdons. They carried placards saying things like 'We Want Our Teachers Back' and 'We Are Out For Justice'. This wasn't an April Fool's joke, it was for real. The kids demonstrated daily until the Higdons started giving lessons on the village green.

Six children at the County School, sixty-six on the village green - something devilish going on. Parents were fined by the authorities for not sending their children to the County School, managing to pay the fines from collections made for the purpose. A tax for going on strike. The first strike school building was a redundant carpenter's shop.

A year later, the lease on the carpenter's shop was running out. A national appeal was made to raise funds for a permanent Strike School to be built. Many trade unions gave financial support. Some of the contributors are commemorated on the stones on the Strike School's front wall. The Rugby Co-Operative Society, the Wolverhampton Trades and Labour Council, The Mountain Ash Deep Dufferin Miners' Lodge, the Ipswich Branch of ASLEF, the Maesteg District Miners, the Optical Glass Workers Society, the Coventry Typographical Society, the Barcoed ILP and several others all gave generously.

On May 13, 1917 the new school was ready. Violet Potter, the leader of the children who went on strike in 1914, addressed the thousand or so people assembled on Burston village green that "With joy and thankfulness I declare this school open, to be forever a school of freedom". The Strike School functioned until 1939, the year in which Tom Higdon died. He and Annie, or Kitty as she was also known, are buried in the churchyard next to the village green and only a couple of hundred yards, if that, from the Strike School itself. The strike lasted for twenty five years, said to be the longest strike in history. On the back of the information booklet is a great drawing of a rather stubborn and probably insubordinate 'Norfolk Pig' Underneath it is the epithet "You may push me, You may shuv, But I'm hanged if I'll be druv, From Burston".

In the churchyard I first noticed the gravestones of Lilian Alice Cattermole, Peter Haden Cattermole and Ivy Ellen Cattermole. Norfolk folk, Norfolk names. Rudd, Cross, Nichols, Coe, Turner, Potter, Howlett, Last, Wilby, Stevens, Lewis and Maud Anne Coffee. Flowers on the graves of Tom and Annie today.

Back on the village green I worked my way round the stalls on a fine and sunny Sunday morning. I photographed a young man who had a face like the face of Che Guevara printed on his t-shirt, manning the Solidarity with Venezuela stall, the front of which was draped with the Venezuelan flag with its yellow, dark blue and red horizontal stripes with eight white stars. I thought about buying the book 'Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution'. One day. An Amnesty stall, a Socialist Bookshop stall, from which I bought John Pilger's latest 'Freedom Next Time', The Anglian Pensioner, Unite, Stop the Fascist BNP, the Womens' International League for Peace and Freedom, the CND, Norwich Stop the War Coalition, Respect 'Don't Attack Iran', the Cuba Solidarity Campaign 'Get Your Free Che Tattoo Here', the British Communist Party selling Lenin's 'Socialism and War' for £1.20, the word 'Sixpence' printed clearly on its front cover, 'Essays in Insurrection' by Edmund and Ruth Frow, the Morning Star with its headline 'Prison Officers: We Wont Back Down', the Socialist History Society with its books like 'Kier Hardie in West Ham' and 'Marx, Engels and the Irish', the National Pensioners' Convention, Eastern Region, the Dereham and District Branch of the Labour Party selling raffle tickets for a ridiculously large teddy bear, a stall full of badges, old and new, bearing slogans like 'Nationalise Water Now' and 'Hands Off the ILEA', for those who wanted to wear their hearts on their sleeves, the Norwich Humanist Association stall where I overheard a young man rabbitting on about Jehovah's Witnesses to the stallholder, the Socialist Worker with a poster of Bush and big letters proclaiming him as 'The World's No. 1 Terrorist'. Also larger groups of people around the face-painting, loads of fun being had on the 'Cool Bouncers' bouncy castle, big queues for burgers and beer. A small stage with rows of chairs arranged in front of it and the customary difficulty with electrics for the sound system. Such a classic when the technology stumps the anxious organisers!

A folky band called The Red Flags played first - two mandolins, guitar and vocals, fiddle and accordion. Their opening number 'Be Reasonable - Demand The Impossible Now' was about re-housing homeless people in Buckingham Palace and nicking all the cops. Half way through their set, the banner parade returned to the village green, having gone round the candlestick. Colourful textiles, printed and appliqued, in the great tradition of the union banner. The Cambridgeshire NUT 'Unity Is Strength', Thompsons solicitors banner 'Justice For Working People', the T and G Workers Ipswich Branch said 'One Big Union', Hammersmith and Fulham Trades Union showed a hammer, a chain and an anvil, Trunch District Agricultural and Allied Trade Group had a picture of two shire horses pulling a plough and a small ploughman.

Straw hats, red faces with white hair, a few Afro and Indian people, quite a few old ones' ladies with long grey hair, about 50 50 male and female. A nice version of Dylan's 'The Man In Me' on the sound system preceded Tony Benn. Tony talked about the Diggers' saying that the earth is 'a common treasury for all'; the Tolpuddle Martyrs being sent to Australia where, apparently, you are no longer not required to have a criminal record to be allowed entry. He quoted Norfolk's Tom Paine's 'My country is the world, my religion to do good', pointing out its current relevance. He mentioned one of his former constituents saying "I see the Russians have put a man into space; is there any chance of a better bus service in Bristol?" Tony Benn is 83 now.

Billy Bragg, the big-nosed bard of Barking, was next. He's got a way with words, too. His first song started "I've had relations, With girls from many nations, I've made passes, At girls from all social classes". A great song about the Diggers, too, called 'The World Turned Upside Down'. It contains the words "The sin of property we do disdain", which got me thinking about our ten acres. Billy explained, between songs, that he had been politicised mainly by attending the Rock Against Racism concert in Hackney in 1978. Another song went "Take the money from Trident, And spend it on the NHS" and "I don't believe we can get rid of the axis of evil, By putting smart bombs in the hands of dumb people". He also described this country as being "up the arsehole of the United States of America". I told you he had a way with words.

Last but not least Bob Crow, leader of the RMT union. Bob made an uncompromising speech in which he said "All private schools should be abolished" and "In my view, as well, private hospitals should also be banned". Quite exciting, his delivery passionate, his voice from the East End. The sort of oratory that you don't hear very often from present-day politicians. He told us how one night the LEB man came to his house. "Mr. Crow" he says, "I'm floggin' gas. Can I interest you?". Next night, the gas man knocked at his door. "Mr. Crow", he says, "I'm floggin' electricity. Do you want some?" The night after that a bloke from Thames Water turned up, also floggin' electricity. Bob's voice rose to a crescendo - "When I was at school, I was taught that water and electricity don't mix. Well, when there's big profits involved, apparently they do!" He complained about the way the Labour government had carried on the Tory ideas about public/private finance and questioned whether or not trades unions should continue supporting Labour. "I'm not prepared to give money to a Labour Party that goes out and mugs you in the middle of the night", he bellowed. "And I'll tell yer what, I got more in common with a Chinese coolie than I 'ave with a stockbroker in Liverpool". Stirring, rabble-rousing stuff that was heartily applauded by the folk on the village green.

Milling around at the end of the day, I introduced myself to the man I had seen carrying the Hammersmith and Fulham banner. I asked if he knew our politically active friends from Hammersmith, Louanne and Chris Tranchell. It turned out that he was attending a meeting with Louanne the next day and knew them very well. Alwyn Simpson, the banner carrier, had recently started some work helping a school in the Gambia so was very interested in our Health Images work and also asked me to design a logo for the ERASE Foundation that he has founded. ERASE stands for 'Ending Reliance and Supporting Empowerment'.

All in all, a rather inspiring and refreshing sort of day for me.The only negative aspect was that the beer tent ran out of Adnam's before the end of the rally. Thankfully, nothing's perfect.

Songlines and Sausages

I Am The Path

We took a bus from the airport into Schwedenplatz, alongside the Danube Canal. Round the corner is the Post Hotel on a street called Fleisch Markt, not far from the headquarters of Vienna's postal service. We checked into the Post and, up in our spacious room, read that, over the years, Mozart, Haydn, Janascek and Nietzche had all lived in houses on this site. It seemed a good spot.

On our way to meet Jacky's aunt we saw a big slogan sprayed on a wall - "Stop The War On Drugs". This was mildly puzzling. Next there was a fine example of the art of stencil graffiti in the form of a large, black, well-defined fish which we admired for a couple of minutes before continuing on our way.



Edith Elias and Fritz Gerrard were married more than sixty years ago. They lived together in the same apartment on Untereweissgerber Strasse from 1949 until March of this year, when Fritz passed away. The flat is in a typical Viennese apartment block. High ceilings, parquet floors, plenty of room for two, some serious furniture and a grand piano. They used to have a lady who cooked for them, called Frau Mitzi, whose unforgettable plum dumplings I once sampled.

Fritz has sufferred from a degenerative illness since the late 1970s, his mobility declining until, in recent years, he had to use a wheelchair and then, finally, became unable to leave the apartment. He put up with all this with great dignity and seldom complained. Fritz liked facts. He enjoyed reading popular science. He and I shared a liking for the books of Richard Dawkins.

Edith, at the age of 85, is still very much in demand at the Viennese law courts, where she is a legal translator. She usually works on asylum or drugs cases, most involving Nigerians on legal aid. She is very experienced in this work although has no legal qualifications. This does not stop her from giving advice to both highly qualified lawyer and heavy heroin dealer. "Now, you've got to understand. You're committing murder by instalment. Think about it - it's not a good way for a young man to spend his life".



We walked a couple of hundred metres along her street to the restaurant at the Hundertwasser Kunsthaus. Hundertwasser was a wonderful graphic artist who shaped this large house as a space in which to show his work. The building now contains no straight lines and has a lovely organic feel, brightly coloured ceramic tiles forming rounded shapes on walls, columns and any other handy surface. I was really impressed with Hundertwasser's work when I first saw it back in the mid 70s. Edith is a regular at the restaurant and good friends with the man who holds the lease. "He's in terrible financial trouble", she explained. "He owes a lot of money in unpaid tax". Apparently this guy spent 700,000 schillings on flowers and plants when the restaurant opened. She thinks he won't last more than a few months. She also told us that the Kunsthaus itself was sold to the Vienna Corporation for one euro after Hundertwasser died about ten years ago. This was also to do with unpaid tax. Anyway, Edith comes here often as it's just down the road and she can get her favourite food, croquet potatoes.

Edith has been reading Bruce Chatwyn's 'Songlines' and made several references to her concept of songlines over supper. Talking about the path of her long life, she said "That's my songline, you see" and, of others, "That's where their songlines crossed over". She is also very aware of the constant change that carries us through our lives and how we are different people at different times. A bit like not being able to step twice into the same river, as Heraclitus put it. She also explained that she thinks a bit like Eastern philosophers who talk about the journey being more important than the arrival. (They never flew on Ryan Air). Her perception of all this, now, is that she is more than just the journey. "I am the path", she announced as her croquet potatoes arrived.

After the meal, and further stimulating conversation, we walked back to the Hotel Post where I noticed lines of thin wire spikes sticking up from all its window ledges. No Perching.


Good Breeding

Vienna has wonderful, imposing architecture in abundance. Many of the buildings, with their double-headed imperial eagles, were, formerly, palaces because of Vienna's position as capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The emperors all came from the von Hapsburg dynasty, starting with Rudolf in 1278. The empire lasted until after the first World War. One of the reasons for this endurance was that the Hapsburgs consistently allied themselves through marriage with other powerful European families. That's good breeding.

For several centuries the Austro-Hungarian empire covered much of Europe and managed, on various occasions, to stop the Turks from moving into Europe. The Turks attacked Vienna itself in 1529 but the central part of the city, the Innere Stadt, was successfully defended. The Turks attacked again in 1683 and were again defeated.

Leopold was emperor when most of the great Baroque architecture and music was created in Vienna. Maria-Theresa (1740-80) also found time to encourage Mozart and Haydn, despite having sixteen children. In 1805, Napoleon turned up on his way to Austerlitz and was accomodated at Maria-Theresa's former palace at Schonbrun. After Napoleon had finished his warring and fighting, the Congress of Vienna took place in 1815, during which Europe was carved up into new spheres of power.

The empire prevailed. The last emperor, Franz Josef, ruled for sixty eight years from 1848 until the end of the empire in 1916. He must have suffered terrible grief in his life. His son committed suicide in Mayerling, his wife was assasinated in Geneva and his other son, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Hapsburg was famously shot in Sarajevo, the event triggering the first World War.


Expressiv! at the Albertina

Walking through the centre of Vienna I noticed some well designed skulls carved on tombstones on the front wall of the Stephansdom. We passed Kapuzin House where most of the Hapsburgs are buried. We saw fiacres, young men dressed and hairstyled like Mozart, chocolate Mozart balls and posters showing Mozart's silhouette. Poor old Mozart himself lived and died more or less a pauper. One of the greatest crimes against humanity.



We were on our way to a beautiful art gallery in the Albertina Palace, founded in 1781 and named after Maria Theresa's son-in-law Duke Albert of Saxony-Teschen. The exhibition was called Expressiv! First we had a drink in the cafe. My tea came in the form of a Darjeeling tea bag and a glass teapot containing hot water. That was a first for me, the glass teapot. We took our time, looking across at the imposing imperial buildings, roofs and eagles green with verdigris. Across to our left was a huge statue of Feldmarschall Erzherzog Albrecht von Oesterreich (1817 - 95) on horseback.



Inside the Albertina we walked through a white marble hall of mirrors, lots of Jackys everywhere. In a spacious side room, again white, classical and hyper-refined, were ten statues of the Greek Muses and an amazingly ornate candelabra. We gave the Prunkraume a miss, not liking the name very much.

The exhibition was an unusually extensive one about the artists who belonged to the Kunstlergruppe 'Die Brucke' - 'The Bridge'. It included many works from the private collection of a man called Hermann Gerlinger. The Brucke group was founded in Dresden by Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmitt-Rotluff and friends in 1905. Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde joined in the following year. The group's manifesto was refreshingly idealistic, including statements like "We intend to obtain freedom of action and of life against the well-established older forces". Still quite a good idea.

It's one of life's rare treats to have nothing to do but wander around a large art gallery on a weekday morning. I loved Schmitt-Rotluff's 'Morgen an der Elbe', Nolde's 'Boot Im Scilf' (Boat in the Reeds') and Kirchner's woodcut 'In Einem Atelier, 1905'. A couple of Kirchner's wood printing blocks were on display. He took prints from both sides of the block, presumably for reasons of economy. In German, these double-sided panels are called 'Doppelseitiger Holzstock'. One of Nolde's colour lithographs shows a group of people in a bar with a piano. It's called "Tingel-Tangel", which was translated as "Honky-Tonk". Jacky drew a thumbnail sketch of Kirchner's "Tanzarin mit Gehobenem Rock" - "Dancer with a Raised Skirt".

We enjoyed Heckel's woodcuts of figures with mask-like heads at right angles to their bodies, Kirchner's "Bathing Scene with Hanging Branches", Schmitt-Rotluff's "Woman with Open Hair" (Aufgelostren Haar). Several of the works showed influences from African tribal art and from Gauguin, like whom most of the artists here seem to have shared thoughts about freedom, noble savages and nubile young brown girls. The last room was taken by Otto Mueller, whose paintings almost exclusively depicted female nudes, euphemistically referred to as 'bathers', lolling about in Arcadian tropical paradises. This rather confirmed our suspicions that the delightful paintings we had been admiring were strongly imbued with a sort of northern European male fantasy.

"There don't seem to be any noble savage blokes", I observed.
"No", replied Jacky, "And there aren't any old people either".

Despite this, we had both found the exhibition rather beautiful and happy. I was, however, jolted out of this happy state on reading about what happened to Kirchner. After a short time in a military unit, the sensitive Kirchner was freaked out by the idea of violence and shooting guns. In 1917, the information sheet informed us, Kirchner "retired to absolute solitude, living in an alpine hut on the Stafelalp". Later, after the Nazis had become popular, Kirchner's paintings were pronounced to be "un-German". In a letter from the 1930s, he had written "War is in the air. In the museums, the culture that has been achieved with great effort over the past twenty years is now being destroyed". On the 15th of June, in 1938, Ludwig Kirchner shot himself. He had become addicted to alcohol during the First World War.



We met Edith for lunch at the Mozart cafe opposite the Albertina not far from a series of sculptures made as a 'Memorial Against War and Fascism'. I was disappointed that we arrived too late for the lunch of the day, Rindsuppe mit Champignonschoberl followed by Schweinskarreebraters im Krautermantel mit Erdapfelgratin. Instead I had a typical Viennese meal of three kinds of Austrian sausages, two jars of mustard and a pot of vicious grated horseradish.


Beschwipserl In The Judenplatz

The information board for the Memorial Against War and Fascism read 'After 12 May 1938 Jewish citizens of Vienna were forced to scrub the streets that had been smeared with slogans'. One element of the memorial is a life-size bronze figure of a crouching Jewish man, presumably scrubbing the pavement with a toothbrush. On his back are some lengths of barbed wire, suggesting to me the concentration camp. But no. "They put the barbed wire there to stop people sitting on it", Edith explained. She said sometimes when you talk about this period Viennese people say "Oh, why are you going on about that - it was a long time ago, I wasn't around when that happened". Edith usually responds something like "Well, you weren't around when Mozart was alive but you don't mind talking about him".

I glugged on my glass of red wine and Edith promptly explained that the Austrian word for tipsy is 'beschwipserl'. Makes you wobble just to say it and onomatapoeic as well. After lunch we wandered through the city, stopping for a schnapps at the Lederhof tavern. Round the corner was the Judenplatz, the heart of the former Jewish area, where two hundred Jews were burned alive in 1421. Some sort of barbecue. During this particular pogrom, the Vienna synagogue was dismantled and its stones used to build part of the university. Jews were expelled from the city for a couple of centuries until in the 1620s they were allowed to come back and settle in a ghetto on marshland by the Danube in Leopoldstadt.

1938 was the annus horribilis, the year of the 'Kristallnacht' pogrom, when twenty three of the city's twenty four synagogues were smashed up, along with all Jewish shops, windows shattered, and many Jewish homes. On March 13, Hitler drove triumphantly into Vienna, to the cheers of several hundred thousand Austrians. They were celebrating the 'Anschluss', the German annexation of Austria.

There were about 180,000 Jews living in Vienna at that time. 65,000 of them were killed. One of them, Rella Eltes, was Jacky's paternal grandmother. One day in 1938, the SS visited her apartment. They took Rella and her husband, Josef, away. Jacky's dad Erwin and his brother 'Uncle Fred', then aged 15 and 16, were left behind in the flat to wait, worry and wonder. After a day or two their father returned. Rella had been detained and they never saw their mother again. Jacky's dad had a nervous breakdown at the age of twenty. The main charge against Rella was that she had lined her underwear drawer with an old newspaper on which there was a photograph of Hitler. "You have insulted the Fuhrer by putting your nasty Jewish knickers on his photograph". Rella died in a concentration camp, possibly Belsen, possibly Auschwitz, possibly an establishment near the French border. We are not sure. Erwin, Fred and their father made their way, after many months of travel across Europe, on a journey that took in Marseilles, to England. They were interned on the Isle of Man, just in case they were enemy aliens. Yeah, highly likely....

Jacky's parents always said that the Austrians behaved even worse than the German Nazis. The Berlitz Pocket Guide to Vienna says that "The expulsion and extermination of the Jews left a great stain on the city and a gaping hole in the cosmopolitan culture in which the Jews had played such an important role". A great stain. Rella's spotlessly clean knickers on Hitler's dirty face.

There is a memorial in the Judenplatz to the sixty five thousand Viennese Jews killed by the Nazis. It is a large cube of concrete which you could be forgiven for mistaking for a public convenience. It is actually a powerful work of art by Rachel Whiteread. It is an idea, set into a concrete reality, that reverberates around your mind for a long time afterwards. It's like a library, rows of concrete books on concrete shelves, but with their spines on the inside, so you see only the opposite edges to the spines. You cannot see their titles. You do not know the names of their authors. At the front of the cube are two large concrete doors which have no handles. This is a library that you can never enter. You can discover nothing about the people who wrote these books, these lives, these memories, feelings, experiences. But you will know that they were there.

On the way back to the Post we passed the Greek Orthodox Church along the Fleisch Markt. A lovely, Byzantine building, on the ground floor of which is a shop. Orient Teppisches. S.P. Issakides, Import Export. "Oh yes", said Edith, "Mr. Issakides was one of Pappi's best customers". Edith's father had traded in oriental carpets. He ran away from his home in Baghdad ( as lots of people are doing now) to Istanbul and later moved to Vienna where he met Mutti, Edith's mother, who was working in a shoe shop.

Later, we went round to Edith's flat and had sauerkraut with Frankfurters. I tried on several pairs of Fritzl's shoes. None of them were right. A bit strange putting on the shoes of a man who couldn't walk.


Minerals and Deathsuckers

More skulls the next morning. Two young men came into the breakfast room dressed identically in shorts and black t-shirts on which there were white skulls, crossed swords and the words 'Naked Riders'.



We passed Goethe on the tram to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, at the bottom of Goethegasse. He was covered in verdigris like the statues in London are covered in bird lime. Harry Lime. Getting off the tram we saw lots of people smoking as they walked along in the fresh air. "They're sucking on death", Jacky observed. Deathsuckers. I took a snap of a crocodile at the base of a fountain and noticed, also, that Anthony Gormley had been busy installing standing figures on the top of the museums.



We went first to the Naturhistor Museum. Jacky wanted to show me the stones that make up the marvellous Systematische Mineraliensammlung, the systematic minerals collection. It must have contained many thousand bits of rock, most about the size of a fist, all displayed in wood-framed glass cases, dozens of which ran, in serried ranks, across several rooms. At first sight, it all looked incredibly boring. But when I started looking carefully, it gradually became totally amazing. Things like a psychedelic block of malachite next to a huge lump of translucent aragonite which looked as if it should have been in a bathroom.

In one room there was a large block of pale pinky-orange material, as tall as me, entitled 'Steinsalz von Pendjab. Geschenk des Hrn. T. Oldham in Calcutta 1873'. It reminded me of a poster made at a workshop I did with art students in the Punjab. Chandigarh 1985. Many people in the southern part of the Punjab could only get very saline water to drink from their wells. Prolonged drinking of this water gave people pains in their joints, back ache, bladder stones and yellow teeth. I was looking at a small part of the problem. It was pinky-orange. Next to it stood an even taller obelisk of salt from the Banya Saline Mine. Then bright yellow smithsonite from Sardinien and magenta spharocobaltit from Shaba , Zaire. Rhodocrosite from Mine Capillitas, Argentina, azurit from Medjankes in Poland. Malachite that looked like a brain, from Falkenstein in the Tirol, more malachite from Burra Burra in Australia, from Katanga in the Congo, from Durango in Mexico, Guangdong in China, Tsumeb in SW Africa, Siberien in the USSR, Arizona and Elba. Malachite everywhere.

Incredible what the earth is made of, such diversity. Some charming pieces of baryt from Frizington in England. A football-sized geode of coelestin from the Vallee de la Sofia in Madagaskar. Turquoise and azure blue krohnkit from Chuquicamata in Chile. A huge block of gypsum from Utah and a small, pale yellow piece of beaverit from Beaver County, also in Utah. A knob of krokoit from Congohas do Campo in Brasil. Metavoltin from Madeni Zakh in Persia. Olivenite from Redruth in Cornwall next to herderit from Gilgit in Pakistan next to vayrywenit from Viitaniemi in Finland. Lime green pyromorphit from Roughtengills in England, gypsum with hoar-frost on it from Murcia in Spain, babingtonite from Zhougguo in China, hiddenit from Nuristan in Afghanistan, apatite from Salzburg, vivianite from Anoua in Cameroon, lazulith auf quartz from Big Fish, Yukon, Canada, sapphirius from Bakersville, North Carolina and nephritic jade from British Columbia. Fluorescent aragonite from Derbyshire and anglesit from Leadhills in Scotland, all fluorescing in glorious technicolour - yellow, orange, blue-violet.

I was pretty 'stoned' by the time I reached Saal IV, another palatial room with a parquet floor and decorated ceiling. Around the upper part of the walls were twenty large, legless figures each holding a big crystal, a lump of rock or supported by an outcrop of quartz or examining slabs of granite. The sculptor must have had a great time. In between the statues were grand paintings of landscapes showing different types of rock in their natural environment.

That was the only Natural History Museum I've visited without seeing a single plant or animal. They were there, of course, but we were full up with minerals.


In Breughel's Room

One of Vienna's greatest treasures is the Breughel room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Despite being full up with stones, we needed a quick shot of Breughel. On the way, we looked at Breughel's son Jan the Elder's painting of a vase of flowers against a black background. It shows around 130 different types of flower. Before farmers started using chemical sprays. Round the corner were some Archimboldos including 'Wasser', a face made up of eels, crabs, fish, lobsters, octopi and squid. He'd have loved Photoshop. I was surprised to learn that Archimboldo had been appointed court painter, in 1562, for Vienna and Prague.

Pieter Breughel lived in The Netherlands, some of which we saw from our KLM flights into and out of Amsterdam on the way here, between about 1525 and 1569. So, he died when Shakespeare was five. His room is absolutely awesome but still very human and comforting. That feeling of being in the presence of something great. 'Hunters In The Snow', blue lead grey icy colours, hunters returning to their village with knackered dogs and just a single dead fox. Cold crows in beautifully painted bare branches dark against the wintry sky. The landscape spreading itself out below the hill in the foreground, on which a bramble seems to be shooting out defiantly, as if spring were coming. Looking as close at it as I could (Jacky had already been told off for drinking out of her mineral water bottle) I could see for miles and miles to the furthest village.

Then the wonderful and wonderfully entitled 'The Gloomy Day'. One of those days when you just don't want to get out of bed. A few blokes half-heartedly pollarding willows or gathering faggots for the fire. A day to be endured. One of the six seasons in Breughel's series about the rolling round of the year. Then the 'Turmbau zu Babel' where all the languages of the world are spoken, so much confusion that the builders can't finish their work. The famous 'Kinderspiele' in which two hundred and thirty children are painted playing eighty three different games. "The Fight Between Carnival and Lent', two halves of human nature. At Carnival time a pig roasting on a spit, a man playing a guitar. In Lent only fish and cripples, beggars, blind men, polio victims, amputees. A tavern on the left, a church on the right. The "Bauern Tanz', the peasant dance, podgy bagpiper, couples leaping, getting pissed in the warm glow of a country fair. And, of course, the most famous of all 'Bauernhochzeit', a high old time at the 'Peasant's Wedding'. According to Flemish tradition, the bridegroom was not invited to the wedding feast. Saal X.


Leberknodel at the Prater

Third Man territory. Big wheel, big meadow, pasture, prater so Edith says. This is near where she lived until she was ten. She had spent that morning in prison talking to a Sierra Leonean heroin dealer/addict and his legal aid lawyer. We had lunch outside at the park restaurant, hot and sunny. I thought I'd try the Rindsuppe mit Leberknodel mainly because of the words. Edith explained that the knodel, or dumpling, was made from the liver and lung of a cow. It was fine for a vegetarian.

And that was about it. That evening we were confined to barracks because of a long-lasting thunderstorm. We sat in the bar of the Hotel Post with the windows open to try and cool the place down a bit while the rain poured down against the light from the streetlamps on Fleisch Markt. On the flight back, I finished 'Don Quixote' which I had started several weeks and 940 pages ago.

Edith goes on being the path. We bring our songlines back with us and, sitting here at home I try to imagine how lonely it must be at number 17/12 Untereweissgerber Strasse.

Lion Mountain Rag

Last night John and I were relaxing in the studio here at Holly Tree Farm, him playing chess with a stranger from a distant land and me drawing in my sketchbook, trying to bring my Handiman logo into the twenty first century. On the jukebox was a cd of music from Guinea, entitled 'Cultural Revolution', on which there are some wonderful songs, including one of my favourites 'Talking Flute' by the Ensemble Instrumental de Guinee, recorded in 1981. On it, a guy plays a flute while simultaneously singing, which is fairly mad. After finishing the Guinean cd, during which I had been thinking about my two visits to Sierra Leone, I put on 'Palm Wine Guitar Music' by the wonderful S.E.Rogie whose other album 'Dead Men Don't Smoke Marijuana' we also enjoy. I particularly like the track 'I Wish I Was A Cowboy', thinking of Sooliman in Freetown in the 60s listening to early Country Music. Lots of other nice titles e.g. 'Advice To Schoolgirls'.

I spent nearly two months in Sierra Leone in 1987, working as a 'consultant' to UNICEF, helping to develop visual materials for use in their Expanded Programme of Immunisation. Some of the time, I was up country at Njala, where workshop participant Sonny Beaboy introduced me to the joys of early morning (9.30 am) palm wine, usually drunk with village chiefs in villages where we were pre-testing our EPI images. But now's not the time for that.....

The reason my thoughts had turned to Sierra Leone was that yesterday was polling day there in the first national election organised by Sierra Leoneans since the end of the civil war. Most of the peacekeepers have left the country, too. Allafrica.com showed pictures of amputees struggling to put their ballot papers in the boxes in the 2002 election, and reported that queues had started at dawn yesterday at polling stations. There are three main candidates, all men. Solomon Berewa is, I think, the favourite. He's known as 'Solo B', is from the Mende ethnic group and is the preferred choice of President Kabbah, the man elected in 2002. Solo represents the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP). Ernest Koroma, a Temne nicknamed 'Mr. Clean', stood for the All Peoples Congress (APC) in 2002 when he got 22% of the vote as compared to Kabbah's 70%. The third main candidate is Charles Margai of the Peoples Movement For Democratic Change (PMDC). Charles is the nephew of Sierra Leone's first prime minister and son of the second.

It will be interesting to see who comes out on top. Whoever it is won't have much spare time - there's a lot to do. Allafrica.com is displaying several articles about current affairs in Sierra Leone, for obvious reasons. One, entitled 'Elections Bring Hope For A Former Failed State' and written by journalist Donald Steinberg reads "Absolute levels of poverty and suffering in Sierra Leone remain staggering. The country ranks second to last among 177 countries in the UN Development Index". We haven't yet heard any reports of violence, so let's hope it stays that way...

In the meantime, I thought this was a good time to add 'Lion Mountain Rag' to my blogsite. I wrote it in 2004 after a short and, sadly, unsuccessful trip to Freetown to try to arrange a workshop for Health Images. Here it is.....


Diamond Jubilee

It is sixty years since The British Council started work in Sierra Leone. It is their Diamond Jubilee. I went to Freetown with the help of a Diamond Jubilee Travel Grant, awarded to me by a nice gentleman called Rajiv Bendre who had previously been posted to Jordan, Iraq and Nigeria.

Diamonds have, of course, been at the root of much trouble, violence and corruption in Sierra Leone for many years. When I was there in 1987, I was told that the IMF had just offered financial assistance. The usual conditionality applied – free market economics, reduction of public spending, that sort of merciless punishment of the poor. One additional condition was applied, on that occasion. That was that government ministers had their passports confiscated for a while. It was they who were smuggling diamonds out of the country, for personal gain.

From the airport at Lunghi I took the hovercraft across the mouth of the wide river, in the dark, into Mamy Yoko. It’s run by a company called Diamond Airlines. Around town there are lots more references to diamonds. A hoarding reads “Diamond Rum”, a sign says “Diamond Drilling”. The country is, indeed, rich in natural resources – bauxite and other minerals, as well as diamonds. In theory, agriculture should be successful. The climate is like the inside of one of the big greenhouses at Kew Gardens. And there are fish in the sea, right off the empty, palm-fringed, singing-sand beaches. The Koreans are catching them now. When I was last there it was the Russians. With all these natural riches, the country is one of the very poorest in the world. As it was in ’87. In between times, there’s been 8 years of a very African civil war. Over diamonds.

On the way into town from Mamy Yoko, I got a lift with a relative of the woman I’d sat next to on the plane. To my surprise, the car was a shiny, new Mercedes Benz. Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” came from the sound system as we drove past shanty towns of rusty corrugated iron and tarpaulins. I’d never before noticed the Wes Montgomery style guitar solo on “Hello”, using octaves. “Is it me you’re looking for?”

I asked about the guy’s job. He said he was in banking so I tried hard to think of some polite conversation. What do you say to a banker, after all? Lend us a fiver? I asked a pathetically general question about how the economy was doing after the war. The answer was staring me in the face as poor people came up to the car every time we stopped. “Is it me you’re looking for?”. “Things are picking up”, he said. “We’re exporting minerals again now”. During the rest of my visit, I was to learn that the economy was not picking up for most Sierra Leoneans. The price of basic foodstuffs like rice and palm oil were going through the roof.


Friday Prayers

I only spent one Friday in Freetown on this trip, which meant that I only missed one guitar session in the barn at home. “Imagine no religion, it’s easy if you try”.

The waterfront in Freetown is a scene of dilapidated go-downs, markets, traders sitting on bags of spices, women and children carrying six or eight baskets of charcoal, one stacked on top of another, on their heads, and other cargoes. I drifted through it all to cries of “White Man”. Nearby were the Portuguese Steps down which slaves had passed on their way to the trading post of Bunce Island, a few miles offshore. A very dark mentally ill woman sat as still as a statue, perched on a crumbling brick wall in front of the police headquarters. Dark like a poor Indian.



At the eastern end of the waterfront can be found a large and spacious old mosque. This is the New Mosque. A busy, bustling Friday morning, people walking fast, the faithful responding faithfully to the instructions of the tinny voice coming from a holy green loudspeaker. At the top of the steps into the mosque were a few stalls, like a market. One sold little muslim hats, many of them in a sort of reflective white, like a pearloid scratchplate on a Stratocaster. Another sold only Korans. Their covers were decorated with the complicated and intricate patterns of fine lines weaving in and out of each other, reflecting, perhaps, a labyrinthine content.

In front of and on the steps were a couple of dozen beggars. Young boys led their blind fathers by the arm, women sat displaying hands deformed by leprosy, pained and pitiful exaggerated expressions on their faces. Affluent worshippers stuffed 500 leone notes into the hands of those who possessed them.

Coming back down the steps on my way out, a man on crutches held out the stumps of his arms to me, in supplication, as if to say “Look, no hands”. I did not give him alms, thinking that, had I done so, I would have been mobbed. I feel bad about that now. Next time I go I should take a wad on 500L notes and distribute them.

There are many people in Sierra Leone now with no hands. Some of them have no feet. Cutting off hands and feet was a favourite punishment dished out by the rebels, usually for no real reason. Another trick was to get people to execute their own family members. I have been trying to imagine what life with no hands would be like. No playing guitar on Fridays – eating, writing, scratching, making love.

I have talked to a couple of organisations about doing art therapy work with people traumatised by their experiences in the war. It made me think of those Christmas cards made by people holding the paintbrush in their mouths or between their toes. Or Ramadan cards.

Another place where hands and feet were chopped off was, of course, nineteenth century Congo. That was punishment for not collecting enough rubber during a day's work. Somewhere I have seen a photograph of a large pile of severed hands. Two or three wheelbarrows full. In "King Leopold's Ghost” there are similar pictures. A particularly sad image shows a man sitting on the ground gazing at the small hand and foot of his 5-year old daughter. They were cut off by the militia of the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company.


The Cost of Living

Rather unusually, for an African country, the staple food in Sierra Leone is rice. Six days of rice and, if you’re lucky, fufu on a Saturday night. Fufu is cassava stodge, not a bar-girl. In ’87 I had some freshly harvested rice up in Njala. It’s really delicious, like new potatoes. A bit before that time, I think I’m right in saying that Sierra Leone had been self-sufficient in rice. On this visit I saw bags of rice imported from China and India. The locals don’t like this imported rice but often there’s no choice now.

In the provinces, the war more or less destroyed everything. I was discussing this one day with Fatmata, one of the waitresses at the Korean Guesthouse where I was staying. She believed that the main reason for the drop in rice production was that so many people in the provinces had had their hands or feet cut off that there were not enough people able to work on the land.



“One cup rice 400 leones” was a cry I heard often. 400L is about 10p. At home we can buy a cup of very good Basmati rice from Tesco’s for 20p.In relation to average earnings, Sierra Leoneans are now paying twenty times as much for their rice as we are. Large numbers of people are unemployed. I had a drink with a bloke at a street kiosk in Brookfields one evening. Opposite the Youyi building, one of the biggest in Freetown. “Youyi” apparently means “friendship” in Chinese. It was built by the Chinese and used to be the home of UNICEF, for whom I worked on my previous visit. For old times sake I wandered in there one day and passed by stagnant offices and dereliction. It was still being used as one or other government ministry but none of the staff had been paid for months. Looking into one office I saw a fat man asleep at the wheel, in the next a jolly bloke listening to music on the radio and reading the newspaper. Broken air conditioners hang from the walls by their wires. The air was soporific. Sorry, I digress. Back to the beer kiosk. The man kept showing me a battered photocopy of a City and Guilds certificate that he had obtained some years earlier through a postal course. He asked me if I knew the examiner who had signed his certificate. After all, he was English too. “Even with this”, he said, sadly, “there is no work”. “No work, man”, said his friend. Somewhat unhelpfully, I bought them another beer at 1500L a bottle. The Africans who work at my guesthouse earn around 80,00L per month – about £4 a week. I think the majority of people earn less.

Palm oil and petrol are other basic commodities that are shooting up in price. On my last day there, my taxi driver twice went into petrol stations and came away without buying any. Petrol was due to go up the following day from 7600L to 10,000L per gallon. So petrol stations were hoarding it and motorists were trying to panic-buy it and everybody was becoming bad-tempered. This is the free market of Tony and his cronies at the GATT/World Bank/IMF. But people can take just so much. Everybody has a breaking point. The better off may have to stay in their mansions before long, the sunlight glinting off the broken Coca Cola bottles set into the mortar along the tops of their walls. Downing Street has railings.


Angry Young Men

One day I got a ride back from town in a shared taxi. The driver charged me 4000L, while other people who got in and out were charged 500L. At one point I turned round to the two young men in the back and said “He’s charged me 4000 leones”. They looked at me unsympathetically. One said “That is between you and de driver”. I said ok but I still thought it was a bit much. “It shoulda bin ten tousand. You people colonised dis country”. “I didn’t fuckin colonise anybody” and so on. A slightly heated argument during which I pointed out that they had been independent since April 27, 1961 i.e. forty three years ago.. They were reluctantly impressed that I knew the exact date. This was because, a few weeks before, I had turned up at the Sierra Leone embassy in Oxford Street to hand in my visa application form, only to be told by the security man that the place was closed because of Independence Day.



Anyway, we continued arguing. One of them said, in a voice full of hatred, “If I had de power I would kill dis president”. Rather shocked that he should say this after the years of brutality, I said “So you think violence is the answer?”. He was a bit taken aback and agreed that more violence was not really needed. Displaying my ignorance, I said something about democracy. “There is not democracy here”, they both shouted at me. “Corruption, corruption. Corruption, no work, life is rough here.For most people life was better durin de war. Yea, man, better dan now. Better still in de time of Johnny Paul- he in London now”.

John Paul Koroma had led a coup in 1997, after which the war got even worse, Sierra Leone was expelled from the Commonwealth and an oil and arms embargo put in place. Koroma’s group is referred to as a junta in the Rough Guide to West Africa. A rough guide. They were driven out of Freetown with the help of British arms dealers Sandline, who had broken the arms embargo while Tony looked the other way and said a prayer - “Oh God…”.

“Look at dis place” said the young man, with disgust. “It just like village but it is de capital. Look – rubbish everywhere” he continued, pointing to piles of garbage at the roadside being sifted through by the poorest of the poor. I encountered this kind of loathing of their own country from several of the poorer people in Freetown.

The taxi stopped and the angrier of the two men, who had not known each other, got out and strode off, his muscles rippling. The other continued to tell me, slightly more calmly, more about how awful life is there at the moment. I thought about this episode later and assume that they were supporters of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front). Of course they are angry. Of course they are right to refer to the inequity of colonial rule. I even agree that it shoulda bin ten tousand. My attitude towards taxi fares changed after this and I was grateful to the angry young men for telling me so passionately about their lives. That was when I got real on this trip.




Keepers of the Peace

On the Sunday I decided to take a taxi up into the centre of the peninsula, into the hills. My destination was a village called Regent. I had been there 17 years ago, it would be cooler than Freetown and it would be better than sitting around at the guesthouse with other people sitting around watching other people sitting around. The climate down in town is such that just lying on a bed makes you feel tired. There was an awful lot of sitting around going on at the Korean guesthouse. I was able to observe several different styles of sitting and slumping among both Africans and Koreans. I was the only guest at the guesthouse all week. I got better at it but I never really developed my sitting around skills to any great extent. I was sitting aroundly challenged, to be honest. One day I said to Mr. Kang, one of the guesthouse family, “So what are you doing today, Mr. Kang?” He hesitated before replying and then said, with a nice smile, “Today lest”.

We drove up into the hills at the back of the rickety rickety town and passed through the village of Hill Station where the colonial folks used to live in large wooden houses of a unique design, now occupied by lots of local families. A mile or so up the road, I spotted two figures in shorts running up a hill. They could only be British. As we overtook them I admired their closely shaven heads, their stocky muscular bodies, their pointed English noses. Out for a Sunday morning jog before a pint of Stella in the pub. A little further up we came upon the IMATT gulag. A walled fortress of blue-grey concrete complete with gun turrets at the corners and signs saying “Military Area No Parking No Waiting”. Like if you were walking past and stopped to light a lucifer (if you had hands) you would be shot at. Cheers lads, pint of Stella? Any crisps? I think IMATT stands for “International Military and Training Team”. Get your ‘air cut, son.

The British forces are actually very popular in Sierra Leone, since it was they who drove out the rebels in 2000. The scale of the fighting diminished drastically although, as the guidebook puts it “sporadic clashes with rebel forces were finally halted in February 2002”. Most people think that it is because the Brits are there that the peace is holding and most are keen for them to stay. Several people I met said things like “You are our colonial masters – you must stay and stop us fighting each other”. Bai Burreh must be turning in his grave. He was a nationalist hero who organised a large uprising against the colonial power in 1898 and fought a guerrilla war to resist the imposition of the ‘Hut Tax’, a sort of Thatcherite poll tax. There’s a very weird, life-size statue of Bai in the National Museum. It’s badly proportioned and crudely painted so that Bai’s eyes look fairly crazy as he stares madly into the room opposite at a nice photo of the young Queen Elizabeth meeting the mayor of Freetown circa 1960. I believe that the IMATT mandate has now been extended from December 2004 to June 2005.

The United Nations is also helping to keep the peace. In what is said to be the largest and most expensive peacekeeping mission in its history, the UN has something like 18,000 troops there and nearly as many white four-wheel drive Pajeros or Land Cruisers. Peace is great business for motor manufacturers. It’s not a problem that you have to have a war first. The UN troops have their duck-egg blue helmets and when off duty their duck-egg blue baseball caps, a sort of pro-American Freudian slip. In recent years a new process of colonisation has taken place in Sierra Leone, involving baseball caps and hip-hop music.The mission is called UNAMSIL – you’ve got to have an acronym even if it’s ungainly. The United Nations Mission to Sierra Leone. Their headquarters is what used to be the very expensive Mamy Yoko hotel down near the beach in Aberdeen. I had a chat about nothing much with a Ghanaian soldier in his baseball cap over the river at Lunghi to background noises of crickets and very loud bullfrogs. There must be a role for them in hip-hop. Like most of them who are not in the Mamy Yoko, this guy was camping in a khaki tent. Six months tour of duty then back to Accra.

I was supposed to have a meeting with the UNICEF IEC officer on Monday May 31 but it was cancelled because he had decided to attend the opening of the ‘Special Court’ which has now been set up to try to deal with war criminals. It will be a big task and, no doubt, will drag on for years. Charles Taylor, ex-President of Liberia and ally in diamond deals with rebel leader Foday Sankoh, will have to be nabbed. They let him slip through their hands when he was in Ghana ayear or two ago. Johnny Paul Koroma is another and lots more – some still in positions of power in Sierra Leone.

Beyond IMATT we carried on to the village of Regent, through spectacular hilly countryside covered with primary rainforest. War is evidently good for rainforests too. By the time we got to Regent the taxi driver was convinced that I was a complete nutter as I wanted to take snaps of some of the houses there. And not even the new houses – the old ones! He was impatient and in a hurry even though I was paying him a generous hourly rate. A townie. He moped around near his car, kicking his heels, while I wandered slowly and very happily up the laterite path to the white church of St. Charles on top of a small hill above the village that looked like something out of Mark Twain. Just at the moment I got to the top beautiful singing with great harmonising began. It took me completely by surprise. It was a sort of magical moment, religion being magical by nature. “Lamb of God”, they sang, “Take away our sin”. Delightful. Scarey. War. Chaos.



I then wandered back down to the village, noticing a sign which read “Hot Sweet and Jumpy Relaxation Guesthouse Wine Beer and Provisions 100 yards”. I was tempted but it was still a bit early. I soon met a young man who took me to his house to say hello to his dad, who was not Lionel Ritchie. In fact, both of them were called David Pearce. They pointed out a nearby hillside where the rebels had had a base and showed me the bullet holes on the outside walls of their house – theirs was a new house. David the younger went inside and brought out the casing of a large shell that had also hit the house. His dad said, with an air of incredulity, that the rebels had used shells made to bring down aircraft to shoot at houses and people. They showed me one hole where a bullet had gone right through their thick metal kitchen door. I get quite a shock when the cat comes through the catflap unexpectedly!





In Ingoland

Rajiv pointed out to me that local Sierra Leonean organisations are called NGOs as distinct from international organisations which are called INGOs. It was really interesting to meet a number of INGOs and one NGO and to hear about the work they are doing now. Most had programmes going before the war came. Unfortunately nearly all the good work that had been done was spoilt, destroyed or terminated by the war. It was sad to hear people describe how years of work was wiped out and how, at this point in time, they are starting from scratch all over again. As well as community health work, there’s a certain amount being bone on rehabilitation and rebuilding of houses, hospitals and wells and some work on detraumatisation of both war victims and ex-combatants, who were often street kids when they joined the rebels.

The Christain Health Association of Sierra Leone works all over the country on community based health care. They’re also doing some detraumatisation work, training people in counselling skills. We might collaborate with them on using art therapy in this context. Concern Worldwide, an Irish INGO, is doing community health stuff in Magburaka, in the north-central region. Annie Devonport, their health programme officer, told me about the difficulties of working up-country. There has been so much devastation of infrastructure and people.

Ellie Kemp of Oxfam explained how they were working on community development and health in about fifty communities in Kailahun, a south-eastern province on the border with Liberia and not far north of the dreaded diamond mines. The peace there is kept by Pakistani UN troops. I told her how I thought things in Freetown looked pretty bad for people, poverty-wise. And she said “You wait till you go into the provinces”. Like “You ain’t seen nothing yet”.

Peter Beckley of Action Aid has worked in an inspired way with poor communities, both urban and rural, using participatory video to help people look at the issues that they want to look at and plan how to change things. They’re also trying to get an ICT project going in the south.

Dennis Williams of Sightsavers International (formerly The Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind) was an older-style INGO director. I’ve always been interested in their work, generally, since the days I when I worked on xeropthalmia in the Bombay slums. The idea of using visual aids to help save days I when I worked on xeropthalmia in the Bombay slums. The idea of using visual aids to help save vision is appealing. Soon after I started to describe our work to Dr. Williams, he interjected, stating “Yes, this is Training of Trainers. We would be very interested to be involved. This could be very useful for us.” Training of Trainers is the old, ineffective, top-down way of working which I have spent my life trying to avoid! Earlier, as I had been waiting in the Sightsavers office, I had heard him shouting in a terribly authoritarian way at his colleagues. His administrative secretary, his closest co-worker, was required to knock timidly on his office door and wait until Dr Williams shouted “Come in”. Most of their work seems to be on cataract and glaucoma. They are also concerned with River Blindness, which is an area in which we might usefully collaborate, as long as he doesn’t shout too much.





The Egalitarians

I was keen to hire or borrow a guitar. But no music shops no sign of guitars anywhere. One day I asked my taxi driver to help so we checked out a few places, had a chat about S.E.Rogie and Palm Wine Music, and ended up meeting Eddie Kwalu, owner of a Tele-Centre in Walpole Street. Eddie’s Tele-Centre is a wooden kiosk, painted green, standing on the pavement, the words ‘Tele-Centre’ brushed on the side in the style used in England on signs advertising car boot sales or horse muck – not exactly Gil-sans, in other words. Eddie’s equipment consisted of four different makes of mobile phone, from which members of the public could make, or try to make, local or international calls. It was a bit hit and miss, as one couple trying to phone Dakar discovered when I was in the kiosk one time.

Eddie, a tall guy of about thirty, with a closely shaven head, told me he had a band and would, of course, lend me a guitar. “No problem”, he smiled. He kindly promised to bring it over to the Korean guesthouse that evening – quite a distance from town. Sure enough, that night Eddie arrived with a guitar, having phoned me three times on the journey (he was definitely into mobile phones!). I was really pleased to see it, music therapy, and although it was more or less unplayable, even by the keenest guitarist, it was great to fiddle about on. At the twelfth fret the strings were approx. one centimetre above the fretboard. The strings themselves were so old and dirty that the low E gave out no more than a near-inaudible, incredibly unbright sound. It was an Eko and its weight suggested it was made of extremely dense wood – I think it was mahogany. Just what I needed.

Eddie and I had a couple of beers and chatted and I kept waiting for the conversation to turn to the cost of hiring the guitar for a week. In the end I wanted to resolve it, and avoid later complications, so I asked how much. “No, man”, said Eddie. “You are a musician, you need to have a guitar with you. I am just lending it to you”. He told me about the band, The Egalitarians, and I began to see what a lovely bloke he is. It’s a struggle for everybody in Sierra Leone, including musicians. He said he could borrow another guitar but it only had five strings on it. I asked if you could buy strings in Freetown and he said there is one place but you have to buy a whole set, they don’t sell string singly.

Despite the difficulties, they have managed to record some tracks for an album. Eddie brought me two compilation albums of Sierra Leonean music with one Egalitarians track on each. Not bad at all, although rather spoilt by the inability of the studio to record live guitar – so it’s all done on a keyboard which gives an artificial sound so much less attractive than acoustic guitar and bass. I said I would design the cover for their forthcoming CD, if they wanted, so a couple of nights later Eddie brought round the two other main band members, Warren and Latimus, for a photo-shoot outside the guesthouse. When I got my little camera out, they immediately struck various poses and adopted slightly mean expressions, which was a bit difficult as they are so nice. The photos have come out quite well and hopefully we’ll get a reasonable cover out of it.



After the photo session we all sat on a bench outside the guesthouse under a bush. While I got eaten by mosquitoes, The Egalitarians performed a short acoustic set for me. It was great, tuneful voices harmonising together with guitar and bass. One of the songs reminded me very much of Desmond Dekker. We went for a beer afterwards and it turned out that Latimus is the driver for a German psychotherapist, Marguerite, who I had met the day before at CHASL. Small world, music therapy, heavy Eko…Eko…


Money in Football

A number of times in the last few years I’ve overheard myself speaking like a right old fart.”There’s too much money in football these days. It’s ruined the game”. That sort of thing. Well, I mean.

Down the street from the guesthouse was one of those large, once-grand concrete mansions with balconies and rough-cast balustrades and that black stuff running down them that give them an interesting texture and must be some sort of algal or fungal bloom. (Incidentally, I’ve got a fungal bloom on my neck from Freetown’s climate). I’ve washed that stuff off the walls of our house using diluted Domestos. Around that big house a wall, of course, similarly run-down. Some not very well off people and kids wandering around the ‘garden’. A scene of moderate dereliction with, incongruously, a large satellite dish on one of the balconies visible through the frayed banana trees and ragged palms.

Leaning against the gatepost, a small blackboard with words in white chalk “England vs. Japan k.o. 6.30. 500L”. It’s a place where they show football matches on telly to interested young blokes who can afford the 12p entrance fee. I didn’t go to the England match but later in the week thought I’d pop down to check out France vs. Turkey. (These were friendlies in advance of Euro 2004).

The building in which the matches are shown is at the bottom of the garden. It has a timber framework, the roof and door are made from brand new silvery corrugated iron and the walls from large sheets of ‘tarpaulin’, complete with eyelets, with the UN logo and the letters UNHCR printed on it in duck-egg blue. There’s a place on the way to Aberdeen called ‘Amputee Camp’ where there’s a market. Many of the stalls there have piles of UNHCR tarpaulins for sale.

I never saw France vs. Turkey as, in spite of the impressive satellite dish, the technology, as is its wont, failed and frustrated everybody. Instead I had a long conversation with two fellow football fans. They were teachers and we discussed the vexed question of how on earth Sierra Leone will ever get on its feet and how long this might take. Our entrance fee was refunded.


Bobson

Getting around to different INGO offices in Freetown, I spent a lot of time in taxis, some shared, some not. The roads are in pretty bad shape and were, to me, surprisingly full. It would often take me half an hour to get down Wilkinson Road to the Congo Cross roundabout, a distance of a mile or so. At Congo Cross there’s a garage with hand-painted hoardings saying things like “Havrix – lubrication for the older car” and “Change your oil not your car”. “The older car” can be roughly translated from advertisingese to “a car that is a falling apart beaten up wreck kept running by desperately poor people through amazing mechanical ingenuity against all the odds”. Driving around I saw a minibus, absolutely stuffed full of people, driving along with a completely flat front tyre. I also saw a ‘pickin’ or child cross the busy road at Congo Cross and very nearly get mown down by a minibus. Poor little thing was really scared and just made it to the other side, straight into the path of an adult who immediately started shouting at her and smacking her for nearly causing an accident. This seemed to symbolise something about Sierra Leone.



My most regular taxi driver was a man called Bobson – no relation – who lived near the guesthouse. He had a beard under his chin and on his neck but not on his face. I noticed that this was a style for some men there – the lazy shavers? He drove a hard bargain and was very surly most of the time. I don’t really know why I kept hiring him but he did soften somewhat by the end of the trip (not much actually). There was a low patch on Wilkinson Road that collected water (this was the start of the rainy season and it absolutely bucketed down several times when I was there), making this stretch even worse than the rest of the road. One day as we drove along there, I noticed that there were workmen mending the road, filling in potholes with a rough mix of sand and ballast that they shovelled out of old wheelbarrows into the holes. I said, rather chirpily, to Bobson “Ah, at last they’re mending the road”. He carried on looking straight ahead and said “No, dey are makin it worse”. On closer inspection, I could see what he meant. They were putting the wet mortar/gravel mix more or less straight into puddles and in the dry areas had not flattened things very well. Subsequently, it was the bumpiest stretch of road.

“Na look dere dese one”, Bobson said one day, pointing at a blue-uniformed policeman at the roadside.”You mek one small small mistek dey no giya chance. Tek ya straight to de polis station – ya ha to gi dem money”.

I got to quite like Bobson – we got close at times, especially when he leant across me to close the passenger window by turning a pair of pliers on the stump where the winding handle had been. He gave me a hard time, though, on what I thought was to be my last night. I had booked him to take me to the hovercraft on my journey back home. We agreed on 10,000L. When we got there I discovered, to my slight consternation, that the flight was delayed by at least a day. So he drove me back to the guesthouse, where I was met by a family of surprised Koreans to whom I had bade farewell less than an hour earlier. I paid Bobson the 10,000L whereupon he said “What about the return journey”, meaning that our agreement was that he would take me to the hovercraft for 10,000L but we had said nothing about him bringing me back! I felt that, under the circumstances, this was a trifle unreasonable and said, raising my voice a little, “I didn’t know I was coming back”. Add to this the fact that, on other occasions, I had hired him by the hour at the rate of 9000L per hour and we had, on this occasion, taken less than an hour, I said I thought he was being unfair. He said he could see my point but it was not the agreement we had made. Mr. Kang joined in on my side and Bobson reluctantly accepted the 10,000L.

On my last trip in his taxi, I got a good photo of him standing next to a great piece of graffiti that I had been wanting to photograph. There he stands next to a low concrete wall on which is written, in big letters, “Deathrow Lovers”, a weird concept and a wonderful name for a band. What kind of music they’d play I’m not sure. Grateful Dead covers?




One-hour business

I was walking along Lumley beach one day, minding my own business, recalling a swim I had had there in 1987 when I had been body-surfing and turned over by a wave and dragged along the sea floor. It was like having a sheet of coarse sandpaper rubbed quite hard down my back. I met another man walking and struck up a conversation. His name was James. He told me he was an artist. We went for a beer at one of the beach bars whose only other customers were a group of pink Russian blokes in swimming trunks. I showed James some of my graphics, which I happened to have with me, and he explained that he was a woodcarver and had a stall not far from the Mamy Yoko. He had grown up right there in Aberdeen.

Along came a young woman wearing a floppy hat with what I think is calle a ‘burberry’ design on it. Also on her head was an enormous tray of fruit. Her name was Anna, she was a friend of James, having also grown up in Aberdeen village. She was most insistent that I buy something so I gave her 1000L for four bananas. We somehow got onto the subject of condoms and she said she would give me Creole lessons if I wanted. I declined the offer and James helped her put the tray of fruit back on her head and she carried on down the beach. A terrible shame what such poverty can do.



Another day I was down by the waterfront when, on entering the Big Market, a woman shook a polythene bag full of woodchips at me, saying “jiggy-jig”. She told me that the contents enabled you to make love for a long time, traditional medicine’s answer to Viagra. I said “No thanks, I haven’t got a girlfriend”. “You can have me”, she replied. Her fellow saleswoman confirmed it. “Yes, you can have her. She is girlfriend”.

Now and again, the room next to mine at the guesthouse was used by a large lady who had lots of curves and a big West African bum. Her trade was an old one. The Koreans called it “one-hour business”. The only time it really disturbed me was in the middle of the night when I began to hear the unmistakable sounds of jiggy-jig. Forunately, almost as soon as it got underway a huge storm blew up. Very high winds and lashing rain that, to my relief, more or less drowned out the noise of my neighbours’ exertions. I slept the sleep of the righteous.


God Is God

The guidebook says that there are about eighty churches and two dozen mosques in Freetown. The oldest place of worship is St. John’s Maroon Church. The Maroons were five hundred or so Asante slaves who escaped their slavery and set up an ‘independent state’ in the mountains of Jamaica. They arrived via Nova Scotia in Freetown in the early 1800s and the little white church in the centre of town was built around 1820.

One day I visited the Maroon Church, pushing open the stiff churchyard gate which felt as if few people had passed through it in recent times. I went into the church – nice and light and full of pews. Four young children, ranging in age from about 3-8 years old, were lying on and underneath the pews, naked except for underpants. On seeing me they jumped up looking half frightened half amazed. After a little while they came over to me, huge eyes wide open like Bai Burreh’s statue, and held my hand and felt my arm. The oldest said “White man”. I said “Yes, white man”. Then they got happily excited and started to laugh and cry out. Their mother appeared at the back of the church. We introduced ourselves. She told me her name was Christianna (honest) and that her childrens’ father had been killed in the war. We chatted for a few minutes while I nosed around a bit. She invited me to the Whit Monday service. Not being a Methodist, I didn’t think I would attend. I gave her 500L for the kids and wandered off into the busy Siaka Stevens Street.



There are no mosques in the old commercial centre of Freetown, although there are sixteen or so churches. Plenty of mosques around the town, though, of various shapes, colours and sizes. On Wilkinson Road, there’s a Muslim Institute. On the long white wall outside it, painted in green letters, it says “The prophet Mohammed (praise his name) wrote that ‘Seeking Knowledge Is Compulsory To Every Muslim’”. The religion of many of the taxi drivers I met during my stay.

Minibuses advertise their owners’ religious convictions by the slogans painted on them. “God Is Great”, “God Is Good”. I kept expecting the ultimate tautological nonsense “God Is God”. The first morning I was there I saw, in quick succession, “Allah Is Supreme” and “Christ Is Lord”. Others read “God Bless Islam”, “To Allah Be The Glory”, “Destiny” as well as secular ones that, personally, I preferred – “Don’t Give Up”, “Thinking Ahead”, “Mother Blessing”.



I met a lady at the airport on the way back by the name of Haja Madina. It happened to be her 60th birthday that day. During an eight hour overnight wait in the airport canteen, she told me that the majority of people, 65%, in Sierra Leone are Muslim. She said that this is not widely known because most of them are “illiterate” and don’t have a voice to proclaim their faith (or something similarly garbled – I didn’t quite follow it). She asked what had been my business in Sierra Leone and,
after I had told her, she said, as if quoting the prophet Mohammed, praise his underpants, “There is no point teaching illiterate person about health – it is just like sending a blind man to the mirror”. It was nice to hear this sort of wisdom but I’m afraid that, having spent a large part of my life trying to help non-literate people in various countries learn about health through pictotial media, I was unable to agree with Haja Madina on this point, even though it was her 60th birthday. Apparently, her daughter works for DFID and visited Sierra Leone not long ago to check out nineteen health centres that DFID are building. Her mum says she wears a ‘hijab’ to work. I’m planning to try to contact her to say salaamu alekum.


Check-in Cashpoint

Sierra National Airlines does not, sadly, own any aeroplanes. On the way over, we flew in a crate owned by Slovakian airlines. The pilsner beer was tasty but the air hostesses were rather stern.

My flight home was delayed by a day and a half because the Slovakian plane had conked out at Gatwick. SNA eventually managed to strike a deal with a French outfit and sent an airbus to bring us home. The airport was littered with photocopied letters of apology from SNA. I quote:
“We at Sierra National Airlines wish to express our sincere regrets for the delay of our flight LJ 053 of 1st June 2004. As you are aware, this was due to a technical problem relating to the aircraft’s Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) which was beyond our control. As we believe you are very important to us, and we cannot tolerate any further delay or further inconveniences to our customers, we have leased a replacement aircraft from France, at a very high cost to our own company, to operate our flight whilst the technical problems on our own aircraft are being rectified. We thank you for exercising patience and understanding through the period of the delay and the stress this has brought”.
Later it says “Contrary to rumours you may have heard, SNA has concluded a long term lease for a high quality aircraft to support all of our scheduled flight services.”
There were far more of these letters, piles of them, than passengers on the packed flight.

The check-in procedure lasted from 11 pm to 1am the next morning. It was nice and warm in the terminal building, designed by some architectural masochist to induce even more perspiration than usual. To check in you had to go through five distinct stages. A middle-aged Sierra Leonean lady, who lives in High Barnet, turned round to me and said “It gives them five chances to take money from you”. One of several dodgy looking passport checkers scrutinised the passport of this woman’s niece and conclude, theatrically, that the photo did not look like the girl. She was led off into an office. I didn’t see her again but assume she eventually got out by paying an exit fee. Pretty weird at one o’clock in the morning to have someone tell you that a photograph of you is not actually you after all. Too late for philosophy – just give us the cash.

At the other end back knackered in Gatwick our exit from the plane was painfully slow. Immigration officials were checking documents zealously at the end of the tunnel from the plane to the terminal. In front of me a man showed the young female immigration person a Liberian ID card. “You don’t seriously expect me to accept this do you?” she scoffed in her East Croydon accent. The downtrodden Liberian feigned incomprehension. “You must be joking’ continued Miss Croydon. Turning to one of her terminally serious looking male colleagues, she held out the ID card and said in a long suffering sarcastic way “’Ere, “av a look at this”. I don’t suppose she was too well up on the recent history of Liberia or even cared that all the poor sods still in the tunnel had been up all night before boarding the plane for a seven hour flight.

So, for a while I have seen the last of signs that say “Camp Womens Training Centre”, “Fatty Dums Enterprises”, “My Pretty Woman Boutique”, “Sweet Looks Hairdressing Salon” and “We Sell Cool Water Here”. No more needing three shirts a day, nobody asking me at breakfast time “Tea? Copy?” No more laughing, singing brightly coloured people in the street saying “Good evening-O” or “How de self?” No more thoughts of home from a long way away. For a while.

Written (mostly) June 2004