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.
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, 12 August 2007
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
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
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Left at Twatt Church
Jacky and I came to Orkney once before, in 1978. We had no children and were living in Camberwell. We drove up in Jacky’s black convertible Morris Minor and stayed for a few nights in Mrs. Hourston’s B & B in Stromness. Now that we have no children again, we thought another visit was in order, with thanks to the prompting of our friend Maureen Minchin, the potter
I looked up Orkney on the internet and discovered that routine tests in Scapa Flow had recently indicated disturbingly high levels of certain phytoplankta there. This affected bivalve molluscs around the Orkney islands in such a way that, if eaten by humans, they induce the shits. In technical terms, paralytic shellfish poisoning,or diarrhoetic shellfish poisoning, We’ll avoid moules marinieres.
On the “Today” programme the day we left, there was a report about a survey which ranked supermarkets according to how eco-friendly they were. They gave a Top Ten. The Co-Op came out best, Somerfields worst. Morrisons had plenty of room for improvement while Marks & Spencers and Tesco’s were not too bad.
We were going to stay at Loons Cottage, next to Loons RSPB reserve. The only photo we had been sent of the cottage looked like it had been taken by an estate agent, the left hand edge of the building cut off to exclude whatever was immediately adjacent. What might it be? A nuclear power station?
The day before we left, we got Bramfield Garage to fit a new CD player, a real treat. We’d always had tapes.
Po’ Girls and Patriots
We set off at around 9 a.m. on our journey to Berwick. We were half way up the Bungay Straight, five or six miles from home, before I noticed that our speedometer, and hence also mileometer, wasn’t working. We carried on for a little way wondering if we could spend the whole journey not knowing how fast we were going or how much ground we had covered. In Bungay I discovered that our indicators weren’t working, either. We had no choice but to return to Bramfield Garage.
Jacky phoned Chris at the garage to warn them that we were on our way, moderately pissed off at starting our holiday like this. Chris, who is a very nice guy, started to say things along the lines of “It can’t be anything to do with the CD player” and “Was it like that when you drove home from the garage yesterday?”, a sort of garage person’s immediate, default response to anything.
The moment we arrived back at the garage the young bloke who had installed the CD player came straight over and checked out the fuse box, immediately both identifying and fixing the problem. Within ten minutes we were on our way again. Oh no, nothing to do with the CD player, I don’t think.
‘Hand Car Wash’. A sign on the Bungay Straight. We noticed similar signs in other parts of the country.
Establishments where the Englishman is boss and the workers are recent immigrants from central and eastern Europe. The one on the Bungay Straight was set up by an ex-professional footballer called Joe something. I know this because I met him at EPS Transfers on the Halesworth industrial estate when he was having his ‘Hand Car Wash’ sign made. Paul and Liz of EPS were a but nervous about his ability to pay for the sign. Some members of Joe’s workforce were from Lithuania, a country written about by Amos Oz in his wonderful autobiography ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’, a great title. One of the countries where Jews were treated disgracefully.
We passed, during the day, several interesting roadside eating places, some displaying, patriotically, the flag of Saint George, others favouring the Union Flag. One was a white van with ‘Full Breakfast’ emblazoned in large black bold letters above a Union Jack, applied in coloured vinyl, which filled the whole side of the vehicle/cafe. It was a way of ensuring that your male clientele got on with each other. There were also, of course, the fixed, as oppose to the mobile, eating places. One Little Chef displayed a large poster showing a photograph of a faded full English breakfast, on top of which was printed “Free Range”. The “Free” was very big and the “Range” very small. Such sophisticated sales techniques. I also noted that several places are now called ‘Diners’ instead of ‘Cafes’, in line with the implications of the “Yo, Blair” comment. As luck would have it, the great peacemaker resigned as Prime Minister the day before we left. Gordon Brown went to see the queen, who has been in office for so long that she remembers Winston Churchill, dressed in frock-coat and top-hat, handing in his resignation after the war.
During the day’s drive we also encountered a fine selection of white vans driven two feet behind us by young men with completely bald heads and sunglasses, talking on their mobile phones. We noticed, too, that some Eddie Stobart lorries were sporting a new livery, achieved through inkjet printing onto vinyl. Another lorry overtook us to reveal, on its rear end, a photograph of a bad-tempered man carrying a UPVC window. From his head came a speech bubble that said, in large letters, ‘BOGOF’. Underneath it read “I said buy one and get one free”. Further up the A1, our main road of the day, we saw two men of 17 or 18 dressed in camouflage gear, khaki helmets and orange goggles, driving a tank. They were on the inside lane. Later we passed RAF Wittering, outside which stands a rather delapidated Harrier jump jet (I think), as deployed so heroically by Mrs. T in the Falklands War, which has recently celebrated its 25th birthday. We’ve seen some extremely unpleasant images of today’s Iron Lady, who is now even more grotesque (hair-do and voice) than when she was saving the Empire from those Argies.
We were also pleased to notice, on our journey, that the art of graffiti, albeit almost entirely text-based, is not completely dead. In a field somewhere in Cambridgeshire stands an odd brick building on which Bimbo has left his tag in large, rounded yellow letters. Further along, we appreciated a spectacular, white art deco building liberally covered with black and red graffiti. The striking colours of political opposition in the days before dissent died and “Big Brother” took over.
We enjoyed a pleasant lunch in the gateway to a rape field, just a stone’s throw from the A1, a few miles north of Doncaster. The rape smelt unpleasantly leguminous. Having done the compulsory pee in a hedge, Jacky and I tucked into our home-made sandwiches. I particularly savoured the goats cheese and rocket, although the tallegio and lettuce ran it a close second. Just a few scraps that needed to be used up, you know. I surmised that the locals might refer to us as something like “soft, middle-class, southern wankers” for not choosing those freezing cold cheese ploughmans that you get in petrol stations.
After lunch we sped northward to the punchy tones of the Indigo Girls “Difference” album and the mellow airs of Po’ Girls’ “Vagabond Lullabies”, all in clear digital sound, from our new CD player, the front of which can be removed by pressing a button. We passed signs for places like Quernhow, Londonderry and Sinderby, this last reminding us of J.L.Carr’s hilarious story of “How Steeple Sinderby Won The F.A. Cup”, We caught fleeting glimpses of the licquorice fields around Pontefract, although I was disappointed to have missed a view of the River Nidd. Before too long we entered Northumberland. We’d had a holiday there, at Ross near Holy Island, a few years ago. A lovely county but one of my clearest memories is of the vast difference in size between the farmhouses of the landowners and the minute scale of the labourers’ terraces.
Another thought going up the A1 in Northumberland was of the occasion when a couple of policemen were doing speedchecks just as a jet fighter from some air base flew nearby and was automatically attracted by the radar that PC Plod was pointing at motorists. Apparently, the plane’s missile system locked on to the coppers standing in a lay-by who narrowly avoided being vapourised.
At around tea-time we bowled into England’s most northerly town, Berwick-on-Tweed. Or, more accurately, we bowled into Tweedmouth, the second most northerly town. More accurately still, The Old Vicarage Guest House. We were let in by a pleasant man with a rather unusual facial expression. Maurice McNeely had just got back from hospital, having had a mole removed from beside his left nostril. He explained that his face was still numb, hence the odd expressions. In our room, I studied the contents of a leather bound folder, and found some information about our room. “This large luxurious room overlooks a small courtyard and the rooftops of neighbouring houses - with its own private rooftop terrace for that
relaxing evening drink”. Piss off, mate, I thought to myself. It’s a fire escape and, anyway, it’s pouring with rain. We were required to fill in a form which would communicate to our hosts what we wanted for breakfast. I figured that prunes, local smoked kippers with scrambled egg, wheaten bread and all the tea I could drink would see me through, on the morrow, from one end of Scotland to the other.
In spite of the rain and all-pervading greyness, we went out in high spirits to explore our new, if temporary, surroundings. First stop was the churchyard opposite where we were having fun reading the inscriptions on the gravestones that hadn’t been weathered into illegibility. I was peering at one such when a loud female voice rang out.”Are you looking for anything in particular?” Approaching me, in a proprietorial sort of way were two women, the younger, plumper one puffing on a filter-tipped cigarette. I replied “Yes, I’m looking for the secret of eternal youth. Do you know where I can find it?”. To my surprise, the woman siad she did. “Yes, it’s with Jesus Christ”. That shut me up. The women had come to do a run-through of a forthcoming family service. The younger one stubbed her fag out at the church door. She was carrying a large soft puppet of a Muppet. A bit passé now. Among the gravestones was an inscription about a boy who died in his ‘Non-age’ on January 3, 1700.
The curate with the loud voice gave us a leaflet about the church. From it we learnt that, in the village of Spittal, next to Tweedmouth, ther had been a hospital for lepers. Hence the name Spittal and, presumably, others like Spitalfields in London. We checked out Dock Road, strolling wetly past A & J Robertson (Granite) Ltd.’s open air showroom of headstones and cemetery statues. A rainy evening, no hanging around. Having crossed the old bridge we went into The Barrel Alehouse. Very nice proper pub, lots of stuff on the walls, a marlin fish hanging from the ceiling, an enamel sign from the Berwick Labour Exchange from the time of George the fifth, an African mask, photos of Irish pub fronts and a good hum of all-male
conversation. One of the regulars was sitting at the end of the bar on an old dentist’s chair. Another bloke, in a baseball cap and carrying four large carrier bags, in which may have been all that he owned, came in, ordered a half of cider and went to sit in the empty room next door.
Later, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at wine-bar type eating, we decided we weren’t hungry and didn’t want to spend £40 getting overfull, for fear of spoiling the breakfasts we had ordered. In one hotel, we chatted with the receptionist. He was African and Jacky asked “How did you end up in Berwick?”. He said he was from Kenya and had first come to work in a hotel in the Channel Islands. Then he’d tried Inverness, after which he thought he wanted to be “in the centre of the UK” so decided to come to Berwick. “I like this town very much”, he said.
In the end we had fish and chips from Foulis’ fish and chip shop. Jacky thought Foulis was not a very
appealing name. We ate standing in a doorway on Dock Road with our hoods up. Delicious. A fiver for two meals - can’t be bad.
The North Country Fair
The next morning saw the arrival of the aforesaid prunes. Ruth McNeely looked as if she’d enjoyed several of her own ample breakfasts. Maurice was having a lie-in after the mole removal. I didn’t experience the faintest feeling of hunger until well beyond Inverness.
It was a sunny morning as we set out, soon passing the interestingly named village of Conundrum. Before we knew it, we were in Scotland, sailing through wide-open countryside, wondering if Pentland Javelin potatoes came from the Pentland Hills of from the Pentland Firth in the frozen north. Big sky and a place where you can visit goats, with a sign proclaiming “You’ve Goat To Be Kidding”. Next we passed the Torness Power Station, a huge white cube with tiny lights on the outside like single lightbulbs without lampshades.
We managed to navigate our way round the Edinburgh by-pass and found the Forth Road Bridge. We looked across from the road bridge to the railway bridge which was, of course, being painted. After Edinburgh, we played the Rough Guide to Scottish Music, a highly recommended album. The highlights include Jack Beck singing “Fordell Ball”, Pete Clark playing “Coilsfield House” and Bob Hopkirk with the legendary Neil Gow’s “Lament for his Second Wife”.
Continuing northward, the only available direction, we passed the Scottish Licquer Centre and the Nae Limits Adventure Centre. As we approached Killiecrankie, crossing the River Garry, Alfie phoned to ask if he could use one of my boiler suits to dress up in for a friend’s party, the theme of which was ‘robo-chic’. Through Glen Garry we hit the Pass of Drumochter, sticks along each side of the road for when it’s deep in snow. Across to our left was a hill called the Sow of Atholl and a little further on, her partner, the Boar of Badenoch.
We approached some traffic lights on the A9 - roadworks. While waiting we noticed a bloke collecting up some signs for an event that had recently taken place. A midsummer festival of some kind. We watched him stuffing the signs into the back of his car, and were intrigued by the last one which read “The Outsider Is Coming”. Near Dalwhinnie, the Morrison’s lorry which had been holding everyone up, pulled over into a lay-by to let others pass. Brownie points to be set against Morrison’s No. 9 position in the eco-friendly Top Ten.
“What was that pub last night called?”, Jacky asked.
“The Barrel Alehouse”, I replied.
“The Bowel Alehouse - funny name for a pub”.
Still a great open road. I’m thinking of starting an A9 appreciation society. We passed The Muir of Hilton, The Storehouse of Foulis (a farm shop), the dead distillery of Dalmore and the Glenmorangie distillery. Across the beautiful Moray Firth, onwards, bagpipes blaring, to the delightful Firth of Cromarty. On the Black Isle we drove twice round the same roundabout and still took the wrong turning! “You’re concentrating on Bob Dylan too much”, Jacy observed. We were playing, on our new CDplayer, ‘Good As I’ve Been To You’, on which Bob plays folky guitar really well. Some great tracks, including “Canadeeio”, the song made famous by Nic Jones, one of Kate Rusby’s early influences. It’s also got “Arthur MacBride”, a tale of two Paddies who beat up a couple of English soldiers for trying to persuade Arthur and his cousin to join the British army. It being on Christmas morning, Arthur and his cousin took out their shilelaghs to the Englishmen and “lathered them like a pair wet sacks”. No wonder I went wrong at the roundabout.
The A9 follows the coast of north east Scotland and, on a clear sunny day like the one we experienced, presented us with wide vistas of Mediterranean blue sea, rolling hills and interesting cloud formations. We stopped at Brora, where we had stayed, or so we thought, on our 1978 trip. Memory Lane seemed to be unrecognisable and left us wondering what happened to our brains in the past 30 years. It was like a completely different place. A bit worrying. We stopped again at Helmsdale, having noted Golspie, which seemed like a perfect little town at the edge of the sea. At Helmsdale harbour we saw an old boy sitting on a bench next to a full washing line, and a fishing boat high in the air. It was being lifted up by a crane, to be deposited, thus, in the water of the harbour.
We took some refreshment at the Bridge Hotel. I ordered a bottle of organic ‘Red Kite’ beer, brewed at the nearby Black Isle Brewery. It took me about a quarter of a pint to realise that the ‘Red Kite’ was definitely off. I was given another without hesitation. It tasted only a little better. We sat at a table next to the ‘Offenbach’ grand piano, made by Bruce Miller of Aberdeen, and perused the News Chronicle songbook “Music for the Home” by Langdon Ronald, published in 1932 and sub-titled “Favourite Songs, Famous Waltzes, Renowned Pianoforte Pieces, Arias from Grand Opera, Cryes of London and Grand Marches”. In the Foreword, Mr. Ronald had written that “the habit of listening to music rather than performing it is deeply to be deplored”. I’m with Langdon on that one. Jacky was pleased to see that the volume included ‘Onaway Awake Beloved’, with words from ‘Hiawatha’ by Longfellow and music by Samuel Coleridge Taylor. A couple from Dundee came in and sat at the next table, quite old, the man with an extremely nasal voice that night have induced giggling, something to do with his palate, I think. They had stayed at the Bridge Hotel before and insisted that we should go upstairs and check out the drawing room, little changed since Victorian times, except for a domineering 36-inch television set on which two children were watching an American cartoon. It was quite amazing - dozens and dozens of deer skulls with associated antlers, a
massive elk or moose head with lovely sad eyes sticking out from the wall above the fireplace, together with several other examples of the taxidermist’s art.
On the last leg, after we had turned inland, we were overtaken by a van that belonged to a dog-kennel boarding set-up. On the back, it read “Dogs In Transit” and we noticed that its number plate was K9 OME. At Halsary we stopped in a lay-by in open moorland, in order to look at the 20-odd very tall windmills of a wind farm. It was certainly breezy up there. Their sails all went round differently, much more interesting to watch than if they’d been choreographed. I had a quick pee up against a memorial to 6 airmen killed nearby, on February 1, 1945, when their Fortress aircraft crashed on returning from a weather reconaissance mission over the Norweigian Sea. Below their names, it said “who flew beyond the storms - into the
sunset”. Just before Thurso we passed through another village called Spittal. Funny how that happens.
We booked into The Station Hotel and then went out to explore Thurso, possibly named after the Norse God Thor, on a Friday night. Just around the corner we noticed a pleasing neo-classical building, with a dome and a portico, called The Miller Institute, which had been the first school in Thurso. In the rather one-horse town, a group of kids were hanging out. One girl opened a conversation with us and showed us the way to the Y-Not Bar. On the way we passed a dingy Lounge Bar, outside which were three or four middle-aged men, smoking. As we, Sarah-Jane and her friend, went by one of the men called “You’ll be ready in a couple of years”, then his mate shouted, in a smokey, drunken voice, “You’re ready now!”. A bit shocking for us well-brought-up southerners from above the poverty line.
There were about a dozen twenty-somethings in the Y-Not. The young barmaid had an interesting, friendly face and broken front teeth. Quite rough looking people, but that’s just appearance, which is different, more earthy, in Scotland. Jacky had a red wine and I couldn’t decide. There were seven different kinds of draught lager, two ciders and one Guiness pump. I plumped for a pint of Old English - it seemed appropriate. There was a DJ playing only thumping dance music but not too loud. Also two amazing Jim Beam advertising objects. 3D versions of Gibson guitars, lit up with red neon lines that followed their contours. They had the characteristic Gibson lozenge fretmarks and the Gibson logo on the headstock. They probably cost as much as the real thing. Various stages of inebriation amongst the young men, most of whom were wearing black t-shirts. Made-up girls, some fat, with low-cut tops, showing their bellies. We had pizza, drank our Shiraz that came in small bottles like those you get on the train, and admired the large photoss of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, as the relentless thumping of dance music continued unabated, making me wonder why they didn’t have large photos of drum and bass stars instead of Dylan and Co. After pizza, the broken-toothed barmaid persuaded us to try the cheesecake with fresh raspberries. It was huge.
On the way back to the hotel I photographed a statue with a seagull sitting on his head. He turned out to be a local politician of days gone by who may or may not have deserved a seagull shampoo. Back in our room at the Station Hotel, we noticed that it contained an ironing board, a trouser press and a sturdyumbrella. We didn’t need any of them.
The Fiddlers of St. Magnus
Saturday brought another kipper for breakfast. We shared the dining room with a party of Italian tourists who had come on a coach, on the back of which was the slogan “travelling through the new millennium”. We got the ferry across sparkiling water, a large cloud sitting on Hoy and its old man. Passengers stood on the sundeck, calm like the sea, and in a sort of trancelike state as we magically entered the harbour of the fairy-tale settlement of Stromness. First, we bought groceries from E. Flett’s shop, where Orkney potatoes cost more than twice as much as potatoes that had travelled up from the Channel Islands. A granny was standing outside the shop, cuddling two beige young girls with nice Afro features and broad Scottish accents.
I said “You’ve got your hands full, to which Granny, referring to the girls, replied “They’re cold”. That was hardly surprising as the girls both had sleeveless tops. We walked back down into the town, looking for a jar of Marmite. In the grocery shop I asked one of the girl shop assistants if they sold it. She looked as if she’d never heard of Marmite so I thought maybe Marmite hasn’t reached Orkney yet. But I wasn’t convinced - the violin, for example, had managed to get here. I tried to describe it to the girl “It’s black stuff that you put on bread”. All became clear when the softly spoken girl murmured “I don’t know. I’m Hungarian” “Oh, sorry”, I said, feeling somewhat old and confused.
As we drove out of Stromness, I noticed a man with long grey hair and sandals, standing at the bus stop. He’d been in Flett’s at the same time as us. He had a thin, sort of Celtic snake tattooed on his arm, going up like a peeled orange skin from his wrist until it disappeared under the short sleeves of his shirt. I think he may have been interested in standing stones.
I’d seen, on a noticeboard in Stromness, a poster announcing that the Orkney Traditional Music Project was about to perform a lunchtime concert in Kirkwall, so we drove the few delightful miles between Orkney’s two biggest towns, past standing stones, burial mounds, cairns and visitor centres. We drove through Finstown, which pleased us as we’ve got a friend called Finn.
In Kirkwall, three cheerful looking young men strode jauntily along the main street. One of them had a white t-shirt with lettering on it like an eye test. The letters got smaller from top to bottom - “You read this while I check out your tits”. By the time you got to tits the letters were very small.
Half an hour before the concert was to start, so we took the chance to buy some whisky. In an old-fashioned shop in a narrow, paved street I saw an advertisment for “Old Orkney”. A lady in front of me was buying a bottle of gin, so I asked her about the local whiskies. She recommended Famous Grouse. Of Old Orkney she could only comment “Aaaargh, it’s rough”. That decided it - I ordered a half bottle of Old Orkney. It’s now made in Elgin by Gordon and MacPhail and has, as a sub-title, “The Islands’ Peedie Dram”. Peedie means little.
The concert was held in St. Magnus’ cathedral, which had been founded in 1137 by the Viking Earl Rognvald-Kali. It is home to the earthly remains of St. Magnus who had inherited the Norse earldom of Orkney. The cathedrals’ great, massive pillars. No fuss. And several beautifully carved tombstones. The lettering on these had been carved in relief, rather than being chiselled out, which is the more common way, I think. Lovely letterforms. One stone was for a woman called Mary Young, who died around 1680, wife of one of Kirkwall’s magistrates. “She lived regarded and died regreted”. As well as the words, the tombstone showed a picture of a woman, a skull and crossbones and an egg-timer. Another tombstone had a carved image and the motto “Ad hoc, Ab Hoc, Per Hoc”. Ad Hoc was illustrated by carved angels, Ab Hoc by a human figure, Per Hoc by a skull and crossbones. To this from this through this. All these tombstones had been carved in the same style, all from the 1670s and 80s. A small notice informed us that they were mostly the work of James Adamson, Mason Burgess, who died on April 23, 1682, aged 74. He “left alyve” his son Patrick who carried on his father’s work. Heir Rests, Heer Rests.
The Orkney Traditional Music Project started in 1998, its aim to keep alyve the music of this place by encouraging younsters to play the fiddle and accordion. It seems to be very successful as there’s lots of traditional music, mostly fiddle, going on and also some young composers of new tunes. The concert was played by six musicians aged 14 - 18, three boys, three girls, five fiddles, one accordion. We sat in the front row so that I could study their vibrato. Two of the girl players were extremely shy and neither looked up at the small audience, on cathedral seats, nor tapped their feet throughout the performance. They played simple but beautiful music, all tunes from Orkney, some written quite recently. The two boy fiddlers wore shirts advertising alcoholic drinks. One sported the Scotland football shirt, sponsored in large letters by “Famous Grouse”. The other read “Vive Cuervo Tequila”. How the contradictions of capitalism enrich our lives. They’ve got to advertise energetically up here to persuade the locals that Tequila sunsets are tastier than the islands’ peedie dram.
The music project has also produced a tunebook, “The Orkney Collection”, that contains 55 local jigs, reels, airs and waltzes. It includes “The Birsay Reel” by G.Flett of Birsay. (We’re staying in Birsay, in case you were wondering why this bit is Birsay-oriented). Also compositions by Ronnie Aim who worked in a bank in Kirkwall until his parents died, after which he ran the shop, drove the van and delivered the letters in Holm, as well as composing tunes, playing confidently and founding the’Orkney Strathspey and Reel Society’. Tommy Mainland, too. Mainland’s a funny name for an island, by the way.
I bought a CD by The Selkies, three local girls. The album’s “Gaan Wae The Flow”, on which they play half a dozen of the tunes in The Orkney Collection book. The CD notes say “Carrie, Dawn and Tina, who are all valued members of the Orkney Amateur Swimming Club, first played together two years ago at a concert at Pickaquoy Sports Centre”. The notes also explain SELKIE: (n) a mythical creature, which comes from old Orkney folklore, who was able to change from a seal into a person. Now the word selkie is used in common Orkney dialect for the Grey Seal. Great name for a band - ‘The Grey Seals’.
So it’s not until mid-afternoon that we head for Loons Cottage, our holiday accomodation, of which we have an estate-agent’s photo and some directions which include taking a left at Twatt Church. Beyond the left edge is the house of Phyllis and Ronnie Ballantyne, a good five yards away. Phyllis comes out to show us the ropes and apologises for being in a hurry but she’s late for a ‘henny party’. “See you in the week”, she says. It’s a tiny cottage, the bed more or less filling the bedroom. Bit of a larf looking out of the French windows in the kitchen/sitting room looking out over Loons RSPB reserve. Never seen so many curlews. Keen songs.
We went to the hide and saw.....we heard a car pull up outside and decided to leave in case some serious twitchers came in and made us feel inadequate. Outside, we couldn’t politely avoid a gent, recently exited from a Ford Ka, in plus fours, a floppy hat and a hare-lip. He was from Darlington and his dad had been stationed at Twatt aerodrome in 1945, when Herr Lipp was only three years old. Maybe those dead airmen at Halsary were given duff advice by air controllers at Twatt ‘drome, I don’t know. We had what I thought was a brief conversation but, with hindsight, was actually a tolerably wide-ranging monologue. Before we knew it, he was telling us about his trip to Zimbabwe to visit a land-owning English friend who should never have fuckingwell been there in the first place. I mentioned something about the current inflation rate in that country, which is predicted to reach 1.5 million per cent (no, I haven’t got it wrong) by the end of the year. “The blacks just sit around doing nothing”, he explained, and went on to tell us how he has attended the RSPB members dinner every year for the past twelve. “Very generous with the champagne and some interesting speakers. Gives you a glimpse behind the scenes.”. Who the fuck wants a glimpse behind the scenes of the RSPB, I was thinking to myself. Jacky was pulling at the sleeve of my jacket but I was rooted to the spot like I’d just downed a pint of vallium. He then gave us mad directions involving ley-lines between barns and hilltop cairns to an area where you can find the elusive Primula scotica, a tiny purple primrose only found up here. “I took a photo but I don’t know if it will come out - they’re very small”. I hope he had an enormous telephoto lens otherwise his friends (?) are going to be bored rigid. Anyway, for his next holiday he’s thinking of going to the Isle of Wight, as he’d seen a TV programme about it. “You’ll have been to the top and bottom of Britain then”, I said, dully. So dully that the only option was to say goodbye and breathe a sigh of relief at escaping this person of under-developed listening skills. Didn’t he realise I had lots of really interesting things to say? I’ve just about had enough of orally-challenged people with nasal voices already and we’ve only just arrived.
We spent the evening drinking our box of Namaqua wine from South Africa, eating our fish-head soup, made from the large cod-head that I’d bought earlier from the farmers’ market in Kirkwall, with cauliflower, listening to the Selkies followed by the Archive Hour on Radio 4 about polio-victim Michael Flanders of Flanders and Swan. I’m hoping that our culinary experience improves after Jacky has banned me from making any more fish-head soup. Lesson 1 - How to get the Missus to do the cooking.
Not Dark Yet
When we woke up on Sunday the sun had gone in and we were in a cloud. Grey and rainy all day - great. To begin with I made an attempt to murder ‘The Stronsay Waltz’ by J. Chambers on my fiddle. It says in The Orkney Fiddle Collection that it’s the first tune students are taught. Even so, it was beyond me, mainly because of a mistake on The Selkies CD cover.They’ve got Track 12, The Stronsay Waltz going into the Tenessee Waltz, rather than the other way round. So here I am listening to the Tenessee Waltz, trying desperately to fit what I’m hearing to the score of The Stronsay Waltz. Jacky soon sorted out the confusion for me. Having done so, she said I was a pillock. What a racket.
Later on we went to Birsay in the rain, right up in the north west corner of Mainland, had a quick look at a ruined palace and bought some Marmite from the shop run by a woman from London who’s going to move back down south because the winters are too long. We walked across the causeway to the Brough of Birsay, where there are remains of Viking houses which we didn’t visit. On our return we bought cups of tea from a nice lady selling refreshments out of the side of a K-reg white Leyland DAF van parked at the Point of Buckquoy. Her husband sat in the passenger seat reading the paper. I asked if they knew anything about the West Mainland Strathspey and Reel Society. She didn’t - “I’ve no music in me” she said apologetically. I ordered a bere bannock with cheese from Craigie Farmhouse. Bere is a cereal a bit like barley but even hairier and the grain grows on four sides of the ear instead of just two.
It hasn’t got dark here yet. It’s light when we go to bed and still light when we get up in the morning. On Monday we went again to Kirkwall to buy a CD of the recent Orkney Folk Festival. Nice acronym - OFF. We soon discovered the Wrigley sisters’ music shop and cafe, called ‘The Reel’. Hazel and Jennifer Wrigley, guitarist and fiddler, also teach upstairs. A lovely establishment. Fiddles and accordions everywhere and a piano in the cafe. Anyone was invited to play on the instruments but only if they played a proper tune all the way through. “We don’t want to hear you practising”, it read. We had tomato soup, wrote our postcards and listened to Orkney fiddle on their CD player.
The Kirkwall Museum starts with a random group of very old looking quern stones sitting in a corner of the courtyard. The first display to catch our attention was a collection of crocheted items done, in mid-twentieth century, by a lady called Hettie Scott of Harray near Dounby. Hettie, we read, had been born with no hands and no legs but could, nevertheless, crochet, embroider and paint. She wrote her autobiography holding the pen between her toes. I wondered how she could have toes but no legs but I’m sure it’s possible. Thalidomide?
On the Westray stone are some of the first spirals ever drawn in Britain - somewhere around 2000 BC. Another old stone, from Sanday, had a design of chevrons while, from the 6th and 7th centuries were some Pictish symbol stones. One had a form of simple yet indec=pherable writing scratched into it. It’s called Ogham and reminded me of the linear symbols in some of Tony’s paintings. Another stone had drawings on it, including a quite well drawn eagle which, we read, represents St. John, the one who got part of the royalties for the New Testament.
Later we learned that between 1595 and 1643 forty eight women were tried by the church courts in Kirkwall for witchcraft. At least twelve of them were executed. Then a bit about piracy. “In 1725 John Gow from Stromness ended his short but murderous career on the pirates’ gibbet at Wapping”. We then perused some snuff ‘mulls’ made from ramshorn, a birch rod for “whipping young offenders” and some gutta-percha golf balls.
Lastly, we visited an exhibition of paintings by Stanley Cursiter, an Orcadian who went to Edinburgh art school in the 1920s and later became director of the Scottish National Gallery. Great paintings of landscapes and seascapes and portraits of Scottish people in local knitwear. A particularly nice one entitled ‘The Fair Isle Jumper’ showed a lady called Roberta Farquharson. I’ve always liked that name and enjoy pronouncing it Far-Kwoo-Har-Son. Stanley had also written a biography of the famous Scottish painter Peploe who I’d first encountered recently while reading the truly dreadful ‘44 Scotland Street’ by Alexander MacCall-Smith in Liberia. On leaving the museum we went straight into Judith Glue’s shop selling Fair Isle and other knitwear where we purchased an orange pullover with runes around the cuffs and waistband. That evening Jacky said “There are no supermarkets here”. Great to be uncommercialised for a short time.
Up the Khyber
Tuesday was another day in a thin cloud, curlews warbling, fiddles playing and the landscape exuding a
timeless calm. The calmness of the landscape stops people getting angry, we thought. In the morning Jacky finished off “Labyrinth” by Kate Moss which she enjoyed very much but damned with faint praise -“excellent holiday reading”. I continued to murder The Stronsay Waltz in the spare bedroom with the door closed.
We went into Stromness, passing a sign for hand-crafted bodhrans which we were not, I have to say, in need of at that point. Stromness has a lot going for it. The name for a start. Also, it has just walked out of a fairy tale and is still a bit misty. Amazingly quiet and empty as the lobster pots. I bought a Wrigley sisters CD and Jacky bought a book by St. Aubin. We noticed a Victorian barometer and thermometer set into a wall next to the bookshop. It had been made by Negretti and Zambra of Hatton Garden London EC2, “instrument makers to her majesty”. It had a couple of meteorological epithets e.g. “Long Foretold, Long Last; Short Notice, Soon Past”. Meandering along the paved main street, the sea down little alleyways where washing hung on washing lines, we soon came to Mrs. Humphrey’s house, on which the plaque said it had been used as a “temporary hospital in 1835-6 for scurvy-ridden whalemen who had been trapped in the ice for months”.
Then on to Rae’s Close, named after the Orcadian arctic explorer Dr. John Rae who, in 1854, ‘discovered’ Rae Strait (how’s that for a coincidence?), the last link in the North West Passage. We then passed the house of a harp maker in whose front window stood a banjo with a great gash in its skin. At Login’s well we read that “There watered here The Hudson Bay Coy’s Ships 1670 - 1891. Capt. Cook’s vessels Resolution and Discovery 1780. Sir John Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror on Arctic exploration 1845”.
The first cabinet I fixed on in the truly wonderful (c.f. Pitt-Rivers) Stromness Museum concerned lighthouses. Robert Louis Stevenson “came from a family of lighthouse engineers who served the Northern Lighthouse Board for 130 years...Between 1788 and 1915 they provided Orkney with eleven major lighthouses, by far the largest number in any British country”. They were at Auskerry; Sule Skerry; Helliar Holm; Noup Head; Westray; Copinsay; Start Point, Sanday; North Ronaldsay 1 and 11; Hoy Sound, Low and High; Cantick Head, which made for a safe entrance to Longhope and Scapa Flow; Pentland Skerries and the Brough of Birsay. Hoy Low and High are, confusingly, on the small island of Graemsay if you were wondering. Next my attention turned to a fiddle made of tin. “After his wooden fiddle got broken on board a herring boat, James Foubister of Newbanks in Deerness made this tin one, which survived”. Then a small display about Old Orkney whiskey. Originally, it was made at the Man O’ Hoy distillery here in Stromness, founded in 1828 and demolished in the early part of the twentieth century.
And on to the history of Eliza Fraser who lived in Stromness with three children and a ship’s captain for a husband. Leaving the kids with her mum, she decided to accompany the old man on one of his journeys. She was pregnant when they sailed away from St. Katherine’s Dock in London in 1835 on ‘The Stirling Castle’, the name, as luck would have it, of my local pub when we lived in Camberwell. George, Harry, Neville and other Jamaican acquaintances slamming down their dominoes like cracks of lightning. Eliza was eventually shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef the following year and was taken as a slave by Aborigines. She watched her husband being speared to death and her pregnancy came to an end. She was taken to a
“corroburee”, a large gathering, festival of Aboriginal tribes, where she was the main attraction. Incredibly, she was rescued by a ‘trusted Irish convict’ by the name of John Graham. She’d had a bad time. “Although only 38 years of age, she looked like an old woman of seventy, perfectly black and dreadfully crippled....Her legs were a mass of sores where the aborigines had tortured her with firebrands.” A couple of years later, she tried to make some money by being exhibited in a booth back in London. The poster explained “Stirling Castle wrecked off the coast of New Holland, Botany Bay. All killed and eaten by sausages - sorry, I misread my notes - savages. Only survivor a woman. To be seen: 6d admission”.
Another cabinet, this one about the Hudson Bay Company and Orkney’s connection with Canada which has left lots of genetics to be unravelled. Some Orkney surnames - Garson, Inkster, Norquoy, Hourston. The display also talked about an Orcadian called Magnus Twatt who worked for the Hudson Bay Co. 1770 - 1800. He was sometimes a hunter and trapper, sometimes a canoeist, transporting furs. He “took for a wife” a Cree Indian woman. In 1978, Bob MacLeod came to Stromness from Moose Factory, along with Ray Spencer of Fort George, Canada, to play in Orkney. “Their Cree Indian fiddle music included fiddle tunes that would have been played in Orkney centuries ago”.
Up the stairs was a life-size diorama of Dr. John Rae kneeling in a rubber dinghy, doing something manly in the Arctic. We saw his fiddle, which he took with him on four expeditions to the Arctic between 1846 and 1854. Next to him was George Mackay Brown’s rocking chair, an interesting contrast.
Upstairs we marvelled at the six-foot long leathery turtle caught by Westray fisherman Edwin Groat who, in the photograph, looked not a little shell-shocked. I pulled open drawers of birds’ eggs - the guillemot eggs were a funny shape and very blotched. There were also displays of tropical butterflies, pinned down and shining, brought to Stromness by Orcadians on gap years and above them the splendid Stanley Cursiter oil painting of Linklater and Greig entering Yesnaby Noust.
The entry ticket to the museum lasts a week so we’ll go back for a bit more. You can only take in so much before you need a nice cup of tea.
Walking back we noticed a narrow street named Khyber Pass. We walked up it so that we could say we’d been up the Khyber. At the top was a great view over rooftops to the harbour. Three men with brooms were sweeping some rubbery stuff across a flat roof. Their vans said ‘Firestone’, the only company in Liberia.
We watched the ferry leave. It backed out of the harbour and turned completely around very very slowly before passing between bouys. Very slowly.
We had a drink in The Stromness Hotel, in a bay window upstairs overlooking the harbour. Back at Loons we met Phyllis’ blue-eyed husband, Ronnie, who had been born in the farmhouse 300 yards away.
Teen Session at ‘The Reel’
On Wednesday we visited Sandwick church in the Bat of Skaill. In the graveyard we saw more Orkney surnames - Gaudie, Johnston, Marwick, Linklater, Merriman, Garson, Cursiter, Wishart, Loutitt, Irvine, Groundwater. It seems that the women up here hang on to their maiden names, at least for the purpose of identifying their gravestones. Examples are “In memory of Isabella Brass, wife of William Kirkness” and “In memory of Hugh Stockan and his wife Catherine Flett”. A bare, elegant building. The leaflet reads “even well into the twentieth century sermons might last over an hour and those who were inattentive were publicly scalded”.
We failed to locate the Geo of Snusgar, mainly because we don’t know what a geo is. There are several of them around the coast. I photographed the Hole o’ Row, a natural arch formed under a hill, the Knowe of Row, by the sea. Skara Brae is the most famous archaeological site in Orkney, in a beautiful spot in the Bay of Skaill. It was a neolithic village 5000 years ago and was discovered one day in 1850, after a storm and high winds had blown away the topsoil, by William Graham Watt, the seventh Earl of Breckness, who lived in the nearby Skaill House. As we walked up to the Visitor Centre, we saw Gandalf in lycra, a cyclist with flowing white hair, a bit thin on top, and very short shorts. Inside we looked at the small exhibition about Skara Brae. In the visitors’ book someone had written ‘Queen Victoria’ address ‘Windsor’ and in the comments column ‘One was very much amused’.
After the neolithic village, the visitor is directed to Skaill House. In contrast to the rather basic stone decor of the neolithic houses, the 1950s interiors of Skaill House made me think how much more interesting life was in 1950 than 3000 BC. In the dining room, we looked at a set of plates and dishes that had belonged to Captain Cook. They were described as ‘Oriental Lowestoft’, while the large dinner table itself was laid with ‘Copeland Spode’. The next room was the library. I spotted on one of the many shelves a guidebook to Lowestoft that had cost one shilling. Most of the other volumes were about hunting, shooting, fishing and sailing.
The house had been renovated by Colonel Scarth, the eleventh Earl of Brackness. In the drawing room was a flattened tiger, like in cartoons, spreadeagled on the floor as a rug, but still with its entire head, looking up at you. It had clearly not been to the dentist’s of late. The ‘rug’ had been brought back by the present Laird’s grandfather, Robert Scarth Farquhar (FAR-KWOO-HAR) Macrae, who had once been inspector general of police in Bihar and Orissa. We had a peep into the bedroom of Colonel Scarth’s wife, Katherine, who outlived her husband by about 17 years, during which period she lived her life almost entirely in her bedroom. By the bed was a book entitled, steamily, “Nights In Bombay”. She also had had a Pifco Electric Massager. Its box was on display. The painter Stanley Cursiter had been friendly with Colonel Scarth to whom he’d given a painting called “Odness”, which is on Stronsay.
A slight digression about the Scottish ten pound note. On the front is a picture of a lady called Mary Slessor. On the back is a sailing ship and a white woman with four African children. In the centre a small map with places on it like Nkanga, Ikotobong, Ekenge and Amasu. These places are located in larger areas called Ekoi and Ibibio. I concluded that Ms. Slessor went to Nigeria to do good work and was awarded a tenner by the Scottish Executive. I won’t digress further by describing the seven-sided Orcadian nine bob coin, currently protected by UNESCO.
We had a drink in Flatties Bar - a Red MacGregor for me, brewed in Quoyloo. Later we went over to Kirkwall for one of the Teen Sessions at the Wrigley sisters’ cafe. Several young people played fiddle together. A man from the Highlands tried to join in with the locals on guitar and started singing and playing loudly a Highland song. The yougsters just looked at him impassively and cuddled their fiddles to their chests, protecting their tradition. Wonderful, if not for Jock. He stopped after one verse and said, desperately, “Do you do any Dylan songs - Bob Dylan?...” One of the kids said “Who’s he?”. The Highlander gave up and the locals continued with their impregnable Orkney agenda. The Deerness Reel, Scapa Flow, The Stronsay Weaver. Ronnie Aim would have been proud of them.
Venus Hourston’s Plastic Rainforest
On Thursday we had a coastal walk from Marwick to Birsay and back. At the summit of Marwick Head is a plain stone tower, a memorial to Earl Kitchener of Khartoum who ‘perished’ in the sea nearby on HMS Hampshire in June 1916. The vertical cliffs at Marwick are quite spectacular and high rise apartments for thousands of kittiwakes, black-backed gulls, razorbills, guillemots, puffins, great and Arctic skuas, many of them wheeling over the sea, enjoying their fly. To the south we could see the coastline of Hoy and the Old Man, to the north the Brough of Birsay and further round the island of Rousay. We strolled down an area called Mount Misery, passing the Point of Snusan and crossing, on foot, the Burn of Broadhouse before
arriving at the settlement of Birsay. We bought a loaf of bread, four cans of McEwens Export and a half ounce of Golden Virginia at the local shop, outside which we met a very peculiar looking three legged cat.
On the return journey we did a bit of birdwatching from scary positions as near to the cliff edge as we dared. We got good views of the graphic faces of three puffins perched on a ledge. It was a classic, if rather smelly, coastal walk, the aroma of guano dominating the cliff parts and the perfume of decaying seaweed spicing the beach sections.
In the evening we went into Stromness for a meal. Before eating we called into a B & B place that we thought must belong to Venus Hourston, the lady at whose previous house we’d stayed back in 1978. Then we had been struck by the way Mrs. Hourston had decorated her interiors with every kind of plastic flower, glass figurine, candles that worked by electricity. The large garden of her new place bears all the hallmarks of Venus’ decorative genius. In it, several resin-moulded Greek figures, plastic ducks and geese, four stone squirells climbimg up a false tree trunk, a cat, a fox and a four-foot high white plastic windmill. Most of the ground in the sloping garden was covered with red granite chippings. “Thirty tons of chips”, she told us. In her new foyer were several large plastic trees in plastic pots, like a plastic rainforest. In some of the trees were perched artificial, brightly coloured birds made of feathers. She told us where her previous B & B place had been, so we went to look at 15, John Street and had some vague recollections of our 1978 lodgings.
We dined in the Scapa Flow Restaurant in the ancient Hamnavoe Lounge of The Stromness Hotel. We could see the islands beyond. My starter of cream of chicken soup arrived with a wrinkled skin on top. Jacky maintained her happy mood despite her shrimp dumplings. I followed up with vegetable moussaka while Jacy tucked into her seafood pie, blatantly ignoring my earlier warning about high phytoplankton levels at Scapa Flow. We had a jolly time but neither of our meals included anything that had been alive in the recent past. The house red was very drinkable.
Stane Pies and P.scotica
We went to the Stromness Museum again on Friday morning to take a second look at the cabinet about Dr. William Balfour Baikie. Born in Kirkwall in 1825, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University before joining the Royal Navy. In 1854 he went to West Africa to explore the Niger River as Mungo Park, another Scot, had done before him. Baikie made another trip to West Africa in 1857 but the ship hit a reef and was destroyed. Baikie and the rest of the company were stranded for a year before being rescued by another British vessel. According to the information card, “Baikie refused to leave until he had paid the local people for the food they had received. He caught up with the (rescue) ship a few days later in a canoe that was overflowing with gifts”. Baikie actually stayed in Africa and “founded the town of Lokoja” while his “anti-slavery beliefs brought him in conflict with the local chiefs”. He decided to take a trip back home in 1864 but, having called in at Sierra Leone, unfortunately caught a fever and died. Apparently, his name lives on in the Ibo word for white man - ‘beke’. In his cabinet were several interesting artefacts from Africa, including a leather and raffia belt with Juju ‘blokes’ to protect the wearer from evil. It had come from northern Nigeria.
I checked out a cracked portrait of a man called Hugh Miller, who lived from 1802 until 1856. He was a stonemason, geologist, theologian, journalist and poet who came from Cromarty. His father, a sea captain, was drowned when Hugh was in his early teens. The night of his father’s death, the door of thefamily house suddenly burst open in the wind. Hugh went to the door and saw “the severed hand and arm of a woman, dripping with water, hovering (not hoovering) in the doorway”. Not long afterwards he had a fight with his schoolteacher and became a stonemason. He got interested in the fish fossils that occur in the Old Red Sandstone on Orkney, became a journalist on “The Witness” newspaper in Edinburgh and proceeded to publish some books of the poetry he had written.. After many fossil-collecting visits to Orkney he wrote, in 1847 (four years before The Origin of Species) a study with the charming title of “Footprints of the Creator or the Asterolepis of Stromness”. Miller was actually a devout Christian, beleiving in the Biblical creation myth rather than in evolution. I was shocked, reading the info about this interesting man, when I came to the following - “Tragically, Miller took his own life on Christmas Eve in 1856. He had just finished correcting the proofs of his final book when, in the small hours of the morning, he shot
himself. He was suffering from a probable brain tumour which caused terrible headaches and hallucinations. In one of these attacks, he had chased imaginary burglars with his revolver”. One of his poems mentions the fossilised Old Red Sandstone fish as having been “baked in stane pies before Adam”, which I thought was a nice way of putting it.
Downstairs I found Jacky looking through a big folder about pirates. The main man is John Gow, who I mentioned earlier as having been treated to the gibbet at Wapping Steps. Gow was put into the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, London. The trial was at the Old Bailey but Gow, understandably, held up proceedings by refusing to enter a plea. A bit like Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague. Gow was ordered to be tortured until he entered a plea. “His thumbs were squeezed between a whip-cord by two men, until they broke. They were then bent double and broken again. Even after they had been bent and broken a third time, Gow refused to plead.” He was then ordered to be “pressed”, which meant that they put “so much iron and stone weights on his body as he could stand”. After a few days of being pressed, Gow pleaded guilty and was immediately sentenced to death.
We took a trip to Yesnaby to see the amazing rock formations and to search for Primula scotica. We saw Yesnaby Noust into which Linklater and Greig entered in Stanley Cursiter’s painting. We walked all around the cliffs nose to the ground trying to walk the line between a distant barn and the nearby cairn, as advised by Herr Lipp. It made us notice all sorts of other wild flowers that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen - the grass of Parnassus, buttercups, bladder campion, marsh orchids, bog asphodel. Having given up the search, disappointed, we wandered back to the car park. Jacky’s sudden shreik made me jump. “There it is - that’s it!!” And there it was, the miniature primrose with red-violet petals. And, of couse, once you’d seen it you couldn’t not see it. It was everywhere but nowhere outside a 15 yard radius.
It didn’t take long to pack up after our week at Loons Cottage. We drove slightly sadly to the Saturday morning ferry in the rain and waited in a queue of cars opposite Venus Hourston’s garden before checking in. Bye-bye to Stromness and the barely visible Old Man, down the gangplank at Scrabster, heading south to the sounds of Devon Sproule keeping her silver shined and young Orcadians playing their fiddles. Back again in 30 years’ time?
I looked up Orkney on the internet and discovered that routine tests in Scapa Flow had recently indicated disturbingly high levels of certain phytoplankta there. This affected bivalve molluscs around the Orkney islands in such a way that, if eaten by humans, they induce the shits. In technical terms, paralytic shellfish poisoning,or diarrhoetic shellfish poisoning, We’ll avoid moules marinieres.
On the “Today” programme the day we left, there was a report about a survey which ranked supermarkets according to how eco-friendly they were. They gave a Top Ten. The Co-Op came out best, Somerfields worst. Morrisons had plenty of room for improvement while Marks & Spencers and Tesco’s were not too bad.
We were going to stay at Loons Cottage, next to Loons RSPB reserve. The only photo we had been sent of the cottage looked like it had been taken by an estate agent, the left hand edge of the building cut off to exclude whatever was immediately adjacent. What might it be? A nuclear power station?
The day before we left, we got Bramfield Garage to fit a new CD player, a real treat. We’d always had tapes.
Po’ Girls and Patriots
We set off at around 9 a.m. on our journey to Berwick. We were half way up the Bungay Straight, five or six miles from home, before I noticed that our speedometer, and hence also mileometer, wasn’t working. We carried on for a little way wondering if we could spend the whole journey not knowing how fast we were going or how much ground we had covered. In Bungay I discovered that our indicators weren’t working, either. We had no choice but to return to Bramfield Garage.
Jacky phoned Chris at the garage to warn them that we were on our way, moderately pissed off at starting our holiday like this. Chris, who is a very nice guy, started to say things along the lines of “It can’t be anything to do with the CD player” and “Was it like that when you drove home from the garage yesterday?”, a sort of garage person’s immediate, default response to anything.
The moment we arrived back at the garage the young bloke who had installed the CD player came straight over and checked out the fuse box, immediately both identifying and fixing the problem. Within ten minutes we were on our way again. Oh no, nothing to do with the CD player, I don’t think.
‘Hand Car Wash’. A sign on the Bungay Straight. We noticed similar signs in other parts of the country.
Establishments where the Englishman is boss and the workers are recent immigrants from central and eastern Europe. The one on the Bungay Straight was set up by an ex-professional footballer called Joe something. I know this because I met him at EPS Transfers on the Halesworth industrial estate when he was having his ‘Hand Car Wash’ sign made. Paul and Liz of EPS were a but nervous about his ability to pay for the sign. Some members of Joe’s workforce were from Lithuania, a country written about by Amos Oz in his wonderful autobiography ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’, a great title. One of the countries where Jews were treated disgracefully.
We passed, during the day, several interesting roadside eating places, some displaying, patriotically, the flag of Saint George, others favouring the Union Flag. One was a white van with ‘Full Breakfast’ emblazoned in large black bold letters above a Union Jack, applied in coloured vinyl, which filled the whole side of the vehicle/cafe. It was a way of ensuring that your male clientele got on with each other. There were also, of course, the fixed, as oppose to the mobile, eating places. One Little Chef displayed a large poster showing a photograph of a faded full English breakfast, on top of which was printed “Free Range”. The “Free” was very big and the “Range” very small. Such sophisticated sales techniques. I also noted that several places are now called ‘Diners’ instead of ‘Cafes’, in line with the implications of the “Yo, Blair” comment. As luck would have it, the great peacemaker resigned as Prime Minister the day before we left. Gordon Brown went to see the queen, who has been in office for so long that she remembers Winston Churchill, dressed in frock-coat and top-hat, handing in his resignation after the war.
During the day’s drive we also encountered a fine selection of white vans driven two feet behind us by young men with completely bald heads and sunglasses, talking on their mobile phones. We noticed, too, that some Eddie Stobart lorries were sporting a new livery, achieved through inkjet printing onto vinyl. Another lorry overtook us to reveal, on its rear end, a photograph of a bad-tempered man carrying a UPVC window. From his head came a speech bubble that said, in large letters, ‘BOGOF’. Underneath it read “I said buy one and get one free”. Further up the A1, our main road of the day, we saw two men of 17 or 18 dressed in camouflage gear, khaki helmets and orange goggles, driving a tank. They were on the inside lane. Later we passed RAF Wittering, outside which stands a rather delapidated Harrier jump jet (I think), as deployed so heroically by Mrs. T in the Falklands War, which has recently celebrated its 25th birthday. We’ve seen some extremely unpleasant images of today’s Iron Lady, who is now even more grotesque (hair-do and voice) than when she was saving the Empire from those Argies.
We were also pleased to notice, on our journey, that the art of graffiti, albeit almost entirely text-based, is not completely dead. In a field somewhere in Cambridgeshire stands an odd brick building on which Bimbo has left his tag in large, rounded yellow letters. Further along, we appreciated a spectacular, white art deco building liberally covered with black and red graffiti. The striking colours of political opposition in the days before dissent died and “Big Brother” took over.
We enjoyed a pleasant lunch in the gateway to a rape field, just a stone’s throw from the A1, a few miles north of Doncaster. The rape smelt unpleasantly leguminous. Having done the compulsory pee in a hedge, Jacky and I tucked into our home-made sandwiches. I particularly savoured the goats cheese and rocket, although the tallegio and lettuce ran it a close second. Just a few scraps that needed to be used up, you know. I surmised that the locals might refer to us as something like “soft, middle-class, southern wankers” for not choosing those freezing cold cheese ploughmans that you get in petrol stations.
After lunch we sped northward to the punchy tones of the Indigo Girls “Difference” album and the mellow airs of Po’ Girls’ “Vagabond Lullabies”, all in clear digital sound, from our new CD player, the front of which can be removed by pressing a button. We passed signs for places like Quernhow, Londonderry and Sinderby, this last reminding us of J.L.Carr’s hilarious story of “How Steeple Sinderby Won The F.A. Cup”, We caught fleeting glimpses of the licquorice fields around Pontefract, although I was disappointed to have missed a view of the River Nidd. Before too long we entered Northumberland. We’d had a holiday there, at Ross near Holy Island, a few years ago. A lovely county but one of my clearest memories is of the vast difference in size between the farmhouses of the landowners and the minute scale of the labourers’ terraces.
Another thought going up the A1 in Northumberland was of the occasion when a couple of policemen were doing speedchecks just as a jet fighter from some air base flew nearby and was automatically attracted by the radar that PC Plod was pointing at motorists. Apparently, the plane’s missile system locked on to the coppers standing in a lay-by who narrowly avoided being vapourised.
At around tea-time we bowled into England’s most northerly town, Berwick-on-Tweed. Or, more accurately, we bowled into Tweedmouth, the second most northerly town. More accurately still, The Old Vicarage Guest House. We were let in by a pleasant man with a rather unusual facial expression. Maurice McNeely had just got back from hospital, having had a mole removed from beside his left nostril. He explained that his face was still numb, hence the odd expressions. In our room, I studied the contents of a leather bound folder, and found some information about our room. “This large luxurious room overlooks a small courtyard and the rooftops of neighbouring houses - with its own private rooftop terrace for that
relaxing evening drink”. Piss off, mate, I thought to myself. It’s a fire escape and, anyway, it’s pouring with rain. We were required to fill in a form which would communicate to our hosts what we wanted for breakfast. I figured that prunes, local smoked kippers with scrambled egg, wheaten bread and all the tea I could drink would see me through, on the morrow, from one end of Scotland to the other.
In spite of the rain and all-pervading greyness, we went out in high spirits to explore our new, if temporary, surroundings. First stop was the churchyard opposite where we were having fun reading the inscriptions on the gravestones that hadn’t been weathered into illegibility. I was peering at one such when a loud female voice rang out.”Are you looking for anything in particular?” Approaching me, in a proprietorial sort of way were two women, the younger, plumper one puffing on a filter-tipped cigarette. I replied “Yes, I’m looking for the secret of eternal youth. Do you know where I can find it?”. To my surprise, the woman siad she did. “Yes, it’s with Jesus Christ”. That shut me up. The women had come to do a run-through of a forthcoming family service. The younger one stubbed her fag out at the church door. She was carrying a large soft puppet of a Muppet. A bit passé now. Among the gravestones was an inscription about a boy who died in his ‘Non-age’ on January 3, 1700.
The curate with the loud voice gave us a leaflet about the church. From it we learnt that, in the village of Spittal, next to Tweedmouth, ther had been a hospital for lepers. Hence the name Spittal and, presumably, others like Spitalfields in London. We checked out Dock Road, strolling wetly past A & J Robertson (Granite) Ltd.’s open air showroom of headstones and cemetery statues. A rainy evening, no hanging around. Having crossed the old bridge we went into The Barrel Alehouse. Very nice proper pub, lots of stuff on the walls, a marlin fish hanging from the ceiling, an enamel sign from the Berwick Labour Exchange from the time of George the fifth, an African mask, photos of Irish pub fronts and a good hum of all-male
conversation. One of the regulars was sitting at the end of the bar on an old dentist’s chair. Another bloke, in a baseball cap and carrying four large carrier bags, in which may have been all that he owned, came in, ordered a half of cider and went to sit in the empty room next door.
Later, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at wine-bar type eating, we decided we weren’t hungry and didn’t want to spend £40 getting overfull, for fear of spoiling the breakfasts we had ordered. In one hotel, we chatted with the receptionist. He was African and Jacky asked “How did you end up in Berwick?”. He said he was from Kenya and had first come to work in a hotel in the Channel Islands. Then he’d tried Inverness, after which he thought he wanted to be “in the centre of the UK” so decided to come to Berwick. “I like this town very much”, he said.
In the end we had fish and chips from Foulis’ fish and chip shop. Jacky thought Foulis was not a very
appealing name. We ate standing in a doorway on Dock Road with our hoods up. Delicious. A fiver for two meals - can’t be bad.
The North Country Fair
The next morning saw the arrival of the aforesaid prunes. Ruth McNeely looked as if she’d enjoyed several of her own ample breakfasts. Maurice was having a lie-in after the mole removal. I didn’t experience the faintest feeling of hunger until well beyond Inverness.
It was a sunny morning as we set out, soon passing the interestingly named village of Conundrum. Before we knew it, we were in Scotland, sailing through wide-open countryside, wondering if Pentland Javelin potatoes came from the Pentland Hills of from the Pentland Firth in the frozen north. Big sky and a place where you can visit goats, with a sign proclaiming “You’ve Goat To Be Kidding”. Next we passed the Torness Power Station, a huge white cube with tiny lights on the outside like single lightbulbs without lampshades.
We managed to navigate our way round the Edinburgh by-pass and found the Forth Road Bridge. We looked across from the road bridge to the railway bridge which was, of course, being painted. After Edinburgh, we played the Rough Guide to Scottish Music, a highly recommended album. The highlights include Jack Beck singing “Fordell Ball”, Pete Clark playing “Coilsfield House” and Bob Hopkirk with the legendary Neil Gow’s “Lament for his Second Wife”.
Continuing northward, the only available direction, we passed the Scottish Licquer Centre and the Nae Limits Adventure Centre. As we approached Killiecrankie, crossing the River Garry, Alfie phoned to ask if he could use one of my boiler suits to dress up in for a friend’s party, the theme of which was ‘robo-chic’. Through Glen Garry we hit the Pass of Drumochter, sticks along each side of the road for when it’s deep in snow. Across to our left was a hill called the Sow of Atholl and a little further on, her partner, the Boar of Badenoch.
We approached some traffic lights on the A9 - roadworks. While waiting we noticed a bloke collecting up some signs for an event that had recently taken place. A midsummer festival of some kind. We watched him stuffing the signs into the back of his car, and were intrigued by the last one which read “The Outsider Is Coming”. Near Dalwhinnie, the Morrison’s lorry which had been holding everyone up, pulled over into a lay-by to let others pass. Brownie points to be set against Morrison’s No. 9 position in the eco-friendly Top Ten.
“What was that pub last night called?”, Jacky asked.
“The Barrel Alehouse”, I replied.
“The Bowel Alehouse - funny name for a pub”.
Still a great open road. I’m thinking of starting an A9 appreciation society. We passed The Muir of Hilton, The Storehouse of Foulis (a farm shop), the dead distillery of Dalmore and the Glenmorangie distillery. Across the beautiful Moray Firth, onwards, bagpipes blaring, to the delightful Firth of Cromarty. On the Black Isle we drove twice round the same roundabout and still took the wrong turning! “You’re concentrating on Bob Dylan too much”, Jacy observed. We were playing, on our new CDplayer, ‘Good As I’ve Been To You’, on which Bob plays folky guitar really well. Some great tracks, including “Canadeeio”, the song made famous by Nic Jones, one of Kate Rusby’s early influences. It’s also got “Arthur MacBride”, a tale of two Paddies who beat up a couple of English soldiers for trying to persuade Arthur and his cousin to join the British army. It being on Christmas morning, Arthur and his cousin took out their shilelaghs to the Englishmen and “lathered them like a pair wet sacks”. No wonder I went wrong at the roundabout.
The A9 follows the coast of north east Scotland and, on a clear sunny day like the one we experienced, presented us with wide vistas of Mediterranean blue sea, rolling hills and interesting cloud formations. We stopped at Brora, where we had stayed, or so we thought, on our 1978 trip. Memory Lane seemed to be unrecognisable and left us wondering what happened to our brains in the past 30 years. It was like a completely different place. A bit worrying. We stopped again at Helmsdale, having noted Golspie, which seemed like a perfect little town at the edge of the sea. At Helmsdale harbour we saw an old boy sitting on a bench next to a full washing line, and a fishing boat high in the air. It was being lifted up by a crane, to be deposited, thus, in the water of the harbour.
We took some refreshment at the Bridge Hotel. I ordered a bottle of organic ‘Red Kite’ beer, brewed at the nearby Black Isle Brewery. It took me about a quarter of a pint to realise that the ‘Red Kite’ was definitely off. I was given another without hesitation. It tasted only a little better. We sat at a table next to the ‘Offenbach’ grand piano, made by Bruce Miller of Aberdeen, and perused the News Chronicle songbook “Music for the Home” by Langdon Ronald, published in 1932 and sub-titled “Favourite Songs, Famous Waltzes, Renowned Pianoforte Pieces, Arias from Grand Opera, Cryes of London and Grand Marches”. In the Foreword, Mr. Ronald had written that “the habit of listening to music rather than performing it is deeply to be deplored”. I’m with Langdon on that one. Jacky was pleased to see that the volume included ‘Onaway Awake Beloved’, with words from ‘Hiawatha’ by Longfellow and music by Samuel Coleridge Taylor. A couple from Dundee came in and sat at the next table, quite old, the man with an extremely nasal voice that night have induced giggling, something to do with his palate, I think. They had stayed at the Bridge Hotel before and insisted that we should go upstairs and check out the drawing room, little changed since Victorian times, except for a domineering 36-inch television set on which two children were watching an American cartoon. It was quite amazing - dozens and dozens of deer skulls with associated antlers, a
massive elk or moose head with lovely sad eyes sticking out from the wall above the fireplace, together with several other examples of the taxidermist’s art.
On the last leg, after we had turned inland, we were overtaken by a van that belonged to a dog-kennel boarding set-up. On the back, it read “Dogs In Transit” and we noticed that its number plate was K9 OME. At Halsary we stopped in a lay-by in open moorland, in order to look at the 20-odd very tall windmills of a wind farm. It was certainly breezy up there. Their sails all went round differently, much more interesting to watch than if they’d been choreographed. I had a quick pee up against a memorial to 6 airmen killed nearby, on February 1, 1945, when their Fortress aircraft crashed on returning from a weather reconaissance mission over the Norweigian Sea. Below their names, it said “who flew beyond the storms - into the
sunset”. Just before Thurso we passed through another village called Spittal. Funny how that happens.
We booked into The Station Hotel and then went out to explore Thurso, possibly named after the Norse God Thor, on a Friday night. Just around the corner we noticed a pleasing neo-classical building, with a dome and a portico, called The Miller Institute, which had been the first school in Thurso. In the rather one-horse town, a group of kids were hanging out. One girl opened a conversation with us and showed us the way to the Y-Not Bar. On the way we passed a dingy Lounge Bar, outside which were three or four middle-aged men, smoking. As we, Sarah-Jane and her friend, went by one of the men called “You’ll be ready in a couple of years”, then his mate shouted, in a smokey, drunken voice, “You’re ready now!”. A bit shocking for us well-brought-up southerners from above the poverty line.
There were about a dozen twenty-somethings in the Y-Not. The young barmaid had an interesting, friendly face and broken front teeth. Quite rough looking people, but that’s just appearance, which is different, more earthy, in Scotland. Jacky had a red wine and I couldn’t decide. There were seven different kinds of draught lager, two ciders and one Guiness pump. I plumped for a pint of Old English - it seemed appropriate. There was a DJ playing only thumping dance music but not too loud. Also two amazing Jim Beam advertising objects. 3D versions of Gibson guitars, lit up with red neon lines that followed their contours. They had the characteristic Gibson lozenge fretmarks and the Gibson logo on the headstock. They probably cost as much as the real thing. Various stages of inebriation amongst the young men, most of whom were wearing black t-shirts. Made-up girls, some fat, with low-cut tops, showing their bellies. We had pizza, drank our Shiraz that came in small bottles like those you get on the train, and admired the large photoss of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, as the relentless thumping of dance music continued unabated, making me wonder why they didn’t have large photos of drum and bass stars instead of Dylan and Co. After pizza, the broken-toothed barmaid persuaded us to try the cheesecake with fresh raspberries. It was huge.
On the way back to the hotel I photographed a statue with a seagull sitting on his head. He turned out to be a local politician of days gone by who may or may not have deserved a seagull shampoo. Back in our room at the Station Hotel, we noticed that it contained an ironing board, a trouser press and a sturdyumbrella. We didn’t need any of them.
The Fiddlers of St. Magnus
Saturday brought another kipper for breakfast. We shared the dining room with a party of Italian tourists who had come on a coach, on the back of which was the slogan “travelling through the new millennium”. We got the ferry across sparkiling water, a large cloud sitting on Hoy and its old man. Passengers stood on the sundeck, calm like the sea, and in a sort of trancelike state as we magically entered the harbour of the fairy-tale settlement of Stromness. First, we bought groceries from E. Flett’s shop, where Orkney potatoes cost more than twice as much as potatoes that had travelled up from the Channel Islands. A granny was standing outside the shop, cuddling two beige young girls with nice Afro features and broad Scottish accents.
I said “You’ve got your hands full, to which Granny, referring to the girls, replied “They’re cold”. That was hardly surprising as the girls both had sleeveless tops. We walked back down into the town, looking for a jar of Marmite. In the grocery shop I asked one of the girl shop assistants if they sold it. She looked as if she’d never heard of Marmite so I thought maybe Marmite hasn’t reached Orkney yet. But I wasn’t convinced - the violin, for example, had managed to get here. I tried to describe it to the girl “It’s black stuff that you put on bread”. All became clear when the softly spoken girl murmured “I don’t know. I’m Hungarian” “Oh, sorry”, I said, feeling somewhat old and confused.
As we drove out of Stromness, I noticed a man with long grey hair and sandals, standing at the bus stop. He’d been in Flett’s at the same time as us. He had a thin, sort of Celtic snake tattooed on his arm, going up like a peeled orange skin from his wrist until it disappeared under the short sleeves of his shirt. I think he may have been interested in standing stones.
I’d seen, on a noticeboard in Stromness, a poster announcing that the Orkney Traditional Music Project was about to perform a lunchtime concert in Kirkwall, so we drove the few delightful miles between Orkney’s two biggest towns, past standing stones, burial mounds, cairns and visitor centres. We drove through Finstown, which pleased us as we’ve got a friend called Finn.
In Kirkwall, three cheerful looking young men strode jauntily along the main street. One of them had a white t-shirt with lettering on it like an eye test. The letters got smaller from top to bottom - “You read this while I check out your tits”. By the time you got to tits the letters were very small.
Half an hour before the concert was to start, so we took the chance to buy some whisky. In an old-fashioned shop in a narrow, paved street I saw an advertisment for “Old Orkney”. A lady in front of me was buying a bottle of gin, so I asked her about the local whiskies. She recommended Famous Grouse. Of Old Orkney she could only comment “Aaaargh, it’s rough”. That decided it - I ordered a half bottle of Old Orkney. It’s now made in Elgin by Gordon and MacPhail and has, as a sub-title, “The Islands’ Peedie Dram”. Peedie means little.
The concert was held in St. Magnus’ cathedral, which had been founded in 1137 by the Viking Earl Rognvald-Kali. It is home to the earthly remains of St. Magnus who had inherited the Norse earldom of Orkney. The cathedrals’ great, massive pillars. No fuss. And several beautifully carved tombstones. The lettering on these had been carved in relief, rather than being chiselled out, which is the more common way, I think. Lovely letterforms. One stone was for a woman called Mary Young, who died around 1680, wife of one of Kirkwall’s magistrates. “She lived regarded and died regreted”. As well as the words, the tombstone showed a picture of a woman, a skull and crossbones and an egg-timer. Another tombstone had a carved image and the motto “Ad hoc, Ab Hoc, Per Hoc”. Ad Hoc was illustrated by carved angels, Ab Hoc by a human figure, Per Hoc by a skull and crossbones. To this from this through this. All these tombstones had been carved in the same style, all from the 1670s and 80s. A small notice informed us that they were mostly the work of James Adamson, Mason Burgess, who died on April 23, 1682, aged 74. He “left alyve” his son Patrick who carried on his father’s work. Heir Rests, Heer Rests.
The Orkney Traditional Music Project started in 1998, its aim to keep alyve the music of this place by encouraging younsters to play the fiddle and accordion. It seems to be very successful as there’s lots of traditional music, mostly fiddle, going on and also some young composers of new tunes. The concert was played by six musicians aged 14 - 18, three boys, three girls, five fiddles, one accordion. We sat in the front row so that I could study their vibrato. Two of the girl players were extremely shy and neither looked up at the small audience, on cathedral seats, nor tapped their feet throughout the performance. They played simple but beautiful music, all tunes from Orkney, some written quite recently. The two boy fiddlers wore shirts advertising alcoholic drinks. One sported the Scotland football shirt, sponsored in large letters by “Famous Grouse”. The other read “Vive Cuervo Tequila”. How the contradictions of capitalism enrich our lives. They’ve got to advertise energetically up here to persuade the locals that Tequila sunsets are tastier than the islands’ peedie dram.
The music project has also produced a tunebook, “The Orkney Collection”, that contains 55 local jigs, reels, airs and waltzes. It includes “The Birsay Reel” by G.Flett of Birsay. (We’re staying in Birsay, in case you were wondering why this bit is Birsay-oriented). Also compositions by Ronnie Aim who worked in a bank in Kirkwall until his parents died, after which he ran the shop, drove the van and delivered the letters in Holm, as well as composing tunes, playing confidently and founding the’Orkney Strathspey and Reel Society’. Tommy Mainland, too. Mainland’s a funny name for an island, by the way.
I bought a CD by The Selkies, three local girls. The album’s “Gaan Wae The Flow”, on which they play half a dozen of the tunes in The Orkney Collection book. The CD notes say “Carrie, Dawn and Tina, who are all valued members of the Orkney Amateur Swimming Club, first played together two years ago at a concert at Pickaquoy Sports Centre”. The notes also explain SELKIE: (n) a mythical creature, which comes from old Orkney folklore, who was able to change from a seal into a person. Now the word selkie is used in common Orkney dialect for the Grey Seal. Great name for a band - ‘The Grey Seals’.
So it’s not until mid-afternoon that we head for Loons Cottage, our holiday accomodation, of which we have an estate-agent’s photo and some directions which include taking a left at Twatt Church. Beyond the left edge is the house of Phyllis and Ronnie Ballantyne, a good five yards away. Phyllis comes out to show us the ropes and apologises for being in a hurry but she’s late for a ‘henny party’. “See you in the week”, she says. It’s a tiny cottage, the bed more or less filling the bedroom. Bit of a larf looking out of the French windows in the kitchen/sitting room looking out over Loons RSPB reserve. Never seen so many curlews. Keen songs.
We went to the hide and saw.....we heard a car pull up outside and decided to leave in case some serious twitchers came in and made us feel inadequate. Outside, we couldn’t politely avoid a gent, recently exited from a Ford Ka, in plus fours, a floppy hat and a hare-lip. He was from Darlington and his dad had been stationed at Twatt aerodrome in 1945, when Herr Lipp was only three years old. Maybe those dead airmen at Halsary were given duff advice by air controllers at Twatt ‘drome, I don’t know. We had what I thought was a brief conversation but, with hindsight, was actually a tolerably wide-ranging monologue. Before we knew it, he was telling us about his trip to Zimbabwe to visit a land-owning English friend who should never have fuckingwell been there in the first place. I mentioned something about the current inflation rate in that country, which is predicted to reach 1.5 million per cent (no, I haven’t got it wrong) by the end of the year. “The blacks just sit around doing nothing”, he explained, and went on to tell us how he has attended the RSPB members dinner every year for the past twelve. “Very generous with the champagne and some interesting speakers. Gives you a glimpse behind the scenes.”. Who the fuck wants a glimpse behind the scenes of the RSPB, I was thinking to myself. Jacky was pulling at the sleeve of my jacket but I was rooted to the spot like I’d just downed a pint of vallium. He then gave us mad directions involving ley-lines between barns and hilltop cairns to an area where you can find the elusive Primula scotica, a tiny purple primrose only found up here. “I took a photo but I don’t know if it will come out - they’re very small”. I hope he had an enormous telephoto lens otherwise his friends (?) are going to be bored rigid. Anyway, for his next holiday he’s thinking of going to the Isle of Wight, as he’d seen a TV programme about it. “You’ll have been to the top and bottom of Britain then”, I said, dully. So dully that the only option was to say goodbye and breathe a sigh of relief at escaping this person of under-developed listening skills. Didn’t he realise I had lots of really interesting things to say? I’ve just about had enough of orally-challenged people with nasal voices already and we’ve only just arrived.
We spent the evening drinking our box of Namaqua wine from South Africa, eating our fish-head soup, made from the large cod-head that I’d bought earlier from the farmers’ market in Kirkwall, with cauliflower, listening to the Selkies followed by the Archive Hour on Radio 4 about polio-victim Michael Flanders of Flanders and Swan. I’m hoping that our culinary experience improves after Jacky has banned me from making any more fish-head soup. Lesson 1 - How to get the Missus to do the cooking.
Not Dark Yet
When we woke up on Sunday the sun had gone in and we were in a cloud. Grey and rainy all day - great. To begin with I made an attempt to murder ‘The Stronsay Waltz’ by J. Chambers on my fiddle. It says in The Orkney Fiddle Collection that it’s the first tune students are taught. Even so, it was beyond me, mainly because of a mistake on The Selkies CD cover.They’ve got Track 12, The Stronsay Waltz going into the Tenessee Waltz, rather than the other way round. So here I am listening to the Tenessee Waltz, trying desperately to fit what I’m hearing to the score of The Stronsay Waltz. Jacky soon sorted out the confusion for me. Having done so, she said I was a pillock. What a racket.
Later on we went to Birsay in the rain, right up in the north west corner of Mainland, had a quick look at a ruined palace and bought some Marmite from the shop run by a woman from London who’s going to move back down south because the winters are too long. We walked across the causeway to the Brough of Birsay, where there are remains of Viking houses which we didn’t visit. On our return we bought cups of tea from a nice lady selling refreshments out of the side of a K-reg white Leyland DAF van parked at the Point of Buckquoy. Her husband sat in the passenger seat reading the paper. I asked if they knew anything about the West Mainland Strathspey and Reel Society. She didn’t - “I’ve no music in me” she said apologetically. I ordered a bere bannock with cheese from Craigie Farmhouse. Bere is a cereal a bit like barley but even hairier and the grain grows on four sides of the ear instead of just two.
It hasn’t got dark here yet. It’s light when we go to bed and still light when we get up in the morning. On Monday we went again to Kirkwall to buy a CD of the recent Orkney Folk Festival. Nice acronym - OFF. We soon discovered the Wrigley sisters’ music shop and cafe, called ‘The Reel’. Hazel and Jennifer Wrigley, guitarist and fiddler, also teach upstairs. A lovely establishment. Fiddles and accordions everywhere and a piano in the cafe. Anyone was invited to play on the instruments but only if they played a proper tune all the way through. “We don’t want to hear you practising”, it read. We had tomato soup, wrote our postcards and listened to Orkney fiddle on their CD player.
The Kirkwall Museum starts with a random group of very old looking quern stones sitting in a corner of the courtyard. The first display to catch our attention was a collection of crocheted items done, in mid-twentieth century, by a lady called Hettie Scott of Harray near Dounby. Hettie, we read, had been born with no hands and no legs but could, nevertheless, crochet, embroider and paint. She wrote her autobiography holding the pen between her toes. I wondered how she could have toes but no legs but I’m sure it’s possible. Thalidomide?
On the Westray stone are some of the first spirals ever drawn in Britain - somewhere around 2000 BC. Another old stone, from Sanday, had a design of chevrons while, from the 6th and 7th centuries were some Pictish symbol stones. One had a form of simple yet indec=pherable writing scratched into it. It’s called Ogham and reminded me of the linear symbols in some of Tony’s paintings. Another stone had drawings on it, including a quite well drawn eagle which, we read, represents St. John, the one who got part of the royalties for the New Testament.
Later we learned that between 1595 and 1643 forty eight women were tried by the church courts in Kirkwall for witchcraft. At least twelve of them were executed. Then a bit about piracy. “In 1725 John Gow from Stromness ended his short but murderous career on the pirates’ gibbet at Wapping”. We then perused some snuff ‘mulls’ made from ramshorn, a birch rod for “whipping young offenders” and some gutta-percha golf balls.
Lastly, we visited an exhibition of paintings by Stanley Cursiter, an Orcadian who went to Edinburgh art school in the 1920s and later became director of the Scottish National Gallery. Great paintings of landscapes and seascapes and portraits of Scottish people in local knitwear. A particularly nice one entitled ‘The Fair Isle Jumper’ showed a lady called Roberta Farquharson. I’ve always liked that name and enjoy pronouncing it Far-Kwoo-Har-Son. Stanley had also written a biography of the famous Scottish painter Peploe who I’d first encountered recently while reading the truly dreadful ‘44 Scotland Street’ by Alexander MacCall-Smith in Liberia. On leaving the museum we went straight into Judith Glue’s shop selling Fair Isle and other knitwear where we purchased an orange pullover with runes around the cuffs and waistband. That evening Jacky said “There are no supermarkets here”. Great to be uncommercialised for a short time.
Up the Khyber
Tuesday was another day in a thin cloud, curlews warbling, fiddles playing and the landscape exuding a
timeless calm. The calmness of the landscape stops people getting angry, we thought. In the morning Jacky finished off “Labyrinth” by Kate Moss which she enjoyed very much but damned with faint praise -“excellent holiday reading”. I continued to murder The Stronsay Waltz in the spare bedroom with the door closed.
We went into Stromness, passing a sign for hand-crafted bodhrans which we were not, I have to say, in need of at that point. Stromness has a lot going for it. The name for a start. Also, it has just walked out of a fairy tale and is still a bit misty. Amazingly quiet and empty as the lobster pots. I bought a Wrigley sisters CD and Jacky bought a book by St. Aubin. We noticed a Victorian barometer and thermometer set into a wall next to the bookshop. It had been made by Negretti and Zambra of Hatton Garden London EC2, “instrument makers to her majesty”. It had a couple of meteorological epithets e.g. “Long Foretold, Long Last; Short Notice, Soon Past”. Meandering along the paved main street, the sea down little alleyways where washing hung on washing lines, we soon came to Mrs. Humphrey’s house, on which the plaque said it had been used as a “temporary hospital in 1835-6 for scurvy-ridden whalemen who had been trapped in the ice for months”.
Then on to Rae’s Close, named after the Orcadian arctic explorer Dr. John Rae who, in 1854, ‘discovered’ Rae Strait (how’s that for a coincidence?), the last link in the North West Passage. We then passed the house of a harp maker in whose front window stood a banjo with a great gash in its skin. At Login’s well we read that “There watered here The Hudson Bay Coy’s Ships 1670 - 1891. Capt. Cook’s vessels Resolution and Discovery 1780. Sir John Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror on Arctic exploration 1845”.
The first cabinet I fixed on in the truly wonderful (c.f. Pitt-Rivers) Stromness Museum concerned lighthouses. Robert Louis Stevenson “came from a family of lighthouse engineers who served the Northern Lighthouse Board for 130 years...Between 1788 and 1915 they provided Orkney with eleven major lighthouses, by far the largest number in any British country”. They were at Auskerry; Sule Skerry; Helliar Holm; Noup Head; Westray; Copinsay; Start Point, Sanday; North Ronaldsay 1 and 11; Hoy Sound, Low and High; Cantick Head, which made for a safe entrance to Longhope and Scapa Flow; Pentland Skerries and the Brough of Birsay. Hoy Low and High are, confusingly, on the small island of Graemsay if you were wondering. Next my attention turned to a fiddle made of tin. “After his wooden fiddle got broken on board a herring boat, James Foubister of Newbanks in Deerness made this tin one, which survived”. Then a small display about Old Orkney whiskey. Originally, it was made at the Man O’ Hoy distillery here in Stromness, founded in 1828 and demolished in the early part of the twentieth century.
And on to the history of Eliza Fraser who lived in Stromness with three children and a ship’s captain for a husband. Leaving the kids with her mum, she decided to accompany the old man on one of his journeys. She was pregnant when they sailed away from St. Katherine’s Dock in London in 1835 on ‘The Stirling Castle’, the name, as luck would have it, of my local pub when we lived in Camberwell. George, Harry, Neville and other Jamaican acquaintances slamming down their dominoes like cracks of lightning. Eliza was eventually shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef the following year and was taken as a slave by Aborigines. She watched her husband being speared to death and her pregnancy came to an end. She was taken to a
“corroburee”, a large gathering, festival of Aboriginal tribes, where she was the main attraction. Incredibly, she was rescued by a ‘trusted Irish convict’ by the name of John Graham. She’d had a bad time. “Although only 38 years of age, she looked like an old woman of seventy, perfectly black and dreadfully crippled....Her legs were a mass of sores where the aborigines had tortured her with firebrands.” A couple of years later, she tried to make some money by being exhibited in a booth back in London. The poster explained “Stirling Castle wrecked off the coast of New Holland, Botany Bay. All killed and eaten by sausages - sorry, I misread my notes - savages. Only survivor a woman. To be seen: 6d admission”.
Another cabinet, this one about the Hudson Bay Company and Orkney’s connection with Canada which has left lots of genetics to be unravelled. Some Orkney surnames - Garson, Inkster, Norquoy, Hourston. The display also talked about an Orcadian called Magnus Twatt who worked for the Hudson Bay Co. 1770 - 1800. He was sometimes a hunter and trapper, sometimes a canoeist, transporting furs. He “took for a wife” a Cree Indian woman. In 1978, Bob MacLeod came to Stromness from Moose Factory, along with Ray Spencer of Fort George, Canada, to play in Orkney. “Their Cree Indian fiddle music included fiddle tunes that would have been played in Orkney centuries ago”.
Up the stairs was a life-size diorama of Dr. John Rae kneeling in a rubber dinghy, doing something manly in the Arctic. We saw his fiddle, which he took with him on four expeditions to the Arctic between 1846 and 1854. Next to him was George Mackay Brown’s rocking chair, an interesting contrast.
Upstairs we marvelled at the six-foot long leathery turtle caught by Westray fisherman Edwin Groat who, in the photograph, looked not a little shell-shocked. I pulled open drawers of birds’ eggs - the guillemot eggs were a funny shape and very blotched. There were also displays of tropical butterflies, pinned down and shining, brought to Stromness by Orcadians on gap years and above them the splendid Stanley Cursiter oil painting of Linklater and Greig entering Yesnaby Noust.
The entry ticket to the museum lasts a week so we’ll go back for a bit more. You can only take in so much before you need a nice cup of tea.
Walking back we noticed a narrow street named Khyber Pass. We walked up it so that we could say we’d been up the Khyber. At the top was a great view over rooftops to the harbour. Three men with brooms were sweeping some rubbery stuff across a flat roof. Their vans said ‘Firestone’, the only company in Liberia.
We watched the ferry leave. It backed out of the harbour and turned completely around very very slowly before passing between bouys. Very slowly.
We had a drink in The Stromness Hotel, in a bay window upstairs overlooking the harbour. Back at Loons we met Phyllis’ blue-eyed husband, Ronnie, who had been born in the farmhouse 300 yards away.
Teen Session at ‘The Reel’
On Wednesday we visited Sandwick church in the Bat of Skaill. In the graveyard we saw more Orkney surnames - Gaudie, Johnston, Marwick, Linklater, Merriman, Garson, Cursiter, Wishart, Loutitt, Irvine, Groundwater. It seems that the women up here hang on to their maiden names, at least for the purpose of identifying their gravestones. Examples are “In memory of Isabella Brass, wife of William Kirkness” and “In memory of Hugh Stockan and his wife Catherine Flett”. A bare, elegant building. The leaflet reads “even well into the twentieth century sermons might last over an hour and those who were inattentive were publicly scalded”.
We failed to locate the Geo of Snusgar, mainly because we don’t know what a geo is. There are several of them around the coast. I photographed the Hole o’ Row, a natural arch formed under a hill, the Knowe of Row, by the sea. Skara Brae is the most famous archaeological site in Orkney, in a beautiful spot in the Bay of Skaill. It was a neolithic village 5000 years ago and was discovered one day in 1850, after a storm and high winds had blown away the topsoil, by William Graham Watt, the seventh Earl of Breckness, who lived in the nearby Skaill House. As we walked up to the Visitor Centre, we saw Gandalf in lycra, a cyclist with flowing white hair, a bit thin on top, and very short shorts. Inside we looked at the small exhibition about Skara Brae. In the visitors’ book someone had written ‘Queen Victoria’ address ‘Windsor’ and in the comments column ‘One was very much amused’.
After the neolithic village, the visitor is directed to Skaill House. In contrast to the rather basic stone decor of the neolithic houses, the 1950s interiors of Skaill House made me think how much more interesting life was in 1950 than 3000 BC. In the dining room, we looked at a set of plates and dishes that had belonged to Captain Cook. They were described as ‘Oriental Lowestoft’, while the large dinner table itself was laid with ‘Copeland Spode’. The next room was the library. I spotted on one of the many shelves a guidebook to Lowestoft that had cost one shilling. Most of the other volumes were about hunting, shooting, fishing and sailing.
The house had been renovated by Colonel Scarth, the eleventh Earl of Brackness. In the drawing room was a flattened tiger, like in cartoons, spreadeagled on the floor as a rug, but still with its entire head, looking up at you. It had clearly not been to the dentist’s of late. The ‘rug’ had been brought back by the present Laird’s grandfather, Robert Scarth Farquhar (FAR-KWOO-HAR) Macrae, who had once been inspector general of police in Bihar and Orissa. We had a peep into the bedroom of Colonel Scarth’s wife, Katherine, who outlived her husband by about 17 years, during which period she lived her life almost entirely in her bedroom. By the bed was a book entitled, steamily, “Nights In Bombay”. She also had had a Pifco Electric Massager. Its box was on display. The painter Stanley Cursiter had been friendly with Colonel Scarth to whom he’d given a painting called “Odness”, which is on Stronsay.
A slight digression about the Scottish ten pound note. On the front is a picture of a lady called Mary Slessor. On the back is a sailing ship and a white woman with four African children. In the centre a small map with places on it like Nkanga, Ikotobong, Ekenge and Amasu. These places are located in larger areas called Ekoi and Ibibio. I concluded that Ms. Slessor went to Nigeria to do good work and was awarded a tenner by the Scottish Executive. I won’t digress further by describing the seven-sided Orcadian nine bob coin, currently protected by UNESCO.
We had a drink in Flatties Bar - a Red MacGregor for me, brewed in Quoyloo. Later we went over to Kirkwall for one of the Teen Sessions at the Wrigley sisters’ cafe. Several young people played fiddle together. A man from the Highlands tried to join in with the locals on guitar and started singing and playing loudly a Highland song. The yougsters just looked at him impassively and cuddled their fiddles to their chests, protecting their tradition. Wonderful, if not for Jock. He stopped after one verse and said, desperately, “Do you do any Dylan songs - Bob Dylan?...” One of the kids said “Who’s he?”. The Highlander gave up and the locals continued with their impregnable Orkney agenda. The Deerness Reel, Scapa Flow, The Stronsay Weaver. Ronnie Aim would have been proud of them.
Venus Hourston’s Plastic Rainforest
On Thursday we had a coastal walk from Marwick to Birsay and back. At the summit of Marwick Head is a plain stone tower, a memorial to Earl Kitchener of Khartoum who ‘perished’ in the sea nearby on HMS Hampshire in June 1916. The vertical cliffs at Marwick are quite spectacular and high rise apartments for thousands of kittiwakes, black-backed gulls, razorbills, guillemots, puffins, great and Arctic skuas, many of them wheeling over the sea, enjoying their fly. To the south we could see the coastline of Hoy and the Old Man, to the north the Brough of Birsay and further round the island of Rousay. We strolled down an area called Mount Misery, passing the Point of Snusan and crossing, on foot, the Burn of Broadhouse before
arriving at the settlement of Birsay. We bought a loaf of bread, four cans of McEwens Export and a half ounce of Golden Virginia at the local shop, outside which we met a very peculiar looking three legged cat.
On the return journey we did a bit of birdwatching from scary positions as near to the cliff edge as we dared. We got good views of the graphic faces of three puffins perched on a ledge. It was a classic, if rather smelly, coastal walk, the aroma of guano dominating the cliff parts and the perfume of decaying seaweed spicing the beach sections.
In the evening we went into Stromness for a meal. Before eating we called into a B & B place that we thought must belong to Venus Hourston, the lady at whose previous house we’d stayed back in 1978. Then we had been struck by the way Mrs. Hourston had decorated her interiors with every kind of plastic flower, glass figurine, candles that worked by electricity. The large garden of her new place bears all the hallmarks of Venus’ decorative genius. In it, several resin-moulded Greek figures, plastic ducks and geese, four stone squirells climbimg up a false tree trunk, a cat, a fox and a four-foot high white plastic windmill. Most of the ground in the sloping garden was covered with red granite chippings. “Thirty tons of chips”, she told us. In her new foyer were several large plastic trees in plastic pots, like a plastic rainforest. In some of the trees were perched artificial, brightly coloured birds made of feathers. She told us where her previous B & B place had been, so we went to look at 15, John Street and had some vague recollections of our 1978 lodgings.
We dined in the Scapa Flow Restaurant in the ancient Hamnavoe Lounge of The Stromness Hotel. We could see the islands beyond. My starter of cream of chicken soup arrived with a wrinkled skin on top. Jacky maintained her happy mood despite her shrimp dumplings. I followed up with vegetable moussaka while Jacy tucked into her seafood pie, blatantly ignoring my earlier warning about high phytoplankton levels at Scapa Flow. We had a jolly time but neither of our meals included anything that had been alive in the recent past. The house red was very drinkable.
Stane Pies and P.scotica
We went to the Stromness Museum again on Friday morning to take a second look at the cabinet about Dr. William Balfour Baikie. Born in Kirkwall in 1825, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University before joining the Royal Navy. In 1854 he went to West Africa to explore the Niger River as Mungo Park, another Scot, had done before him. Baikie made another trip to West Africa in 1857 but the ship hit a reef and was destroyed. Baikie and the rest of the company were stranded for a year before being rescued by another British vessel. According to the information card, “Baikie refused to leave until he had paid the local people for the food they had received. He caught up with the (rescue) ship a few days later in a canoe that was overflowing with gifts”. Baikie actually stayed in Africa and “founded the town of Lokoja” while his “anti-slavery beliefs brought him in conflict with the local chiefs”. He decided to take a trip back home in 1864 but, having called in at Sierra Leone, unfortunately caught a fever and died. Apparently, his name lives on in the Ibo word for white man - ‘beke’. In his cabinet were several interesting artefacts from Africa, including a leather and raffia belt with Juju ‘blokes’ to protect the wearer from evil. It had come from northern Nigeria.
I checked out a cracked portrait of a man called Hugh Miller, who lived from 1802 until 1856. He was a stonemason, geologist, theologian, journalist and poet who came from Cromarty. His father, a sea captain, was drowned when Hugh was in his early teens. The night of his father’s death, the door of thefamily house suddenly burst open in the wind. Hugh went to the door and saw “the severed hand and arm of a woman, dripping with water, hovering (not hoovering) in the doorway”. Not long afterwards he had a fight with his schoolteacher and became a stonemason. He got interested in the fish fossils that occur in the Old Red Sandstone on Orkney, became a journalist on “The Witness” newspaper in Edinburgh and proceeded to publish some books of the poetry he had written.. After many fossil-collecting visits to Orkney he wrote, in 1847 (four years before The Origin of Species) a study with the charming title of “Footprints of the Creator or the Asterolepis of Stromness”. Miller was actually a devout Christian, beleiving in the Biblical creation myth rather than in evolution. I was shocked, reading the info about this interesting man, when I came to the following - “Tragically, Miller took his own life on Christmas Eve in 1856. He had just finished correcting the proofs of his final book when, in the small hours of the morning, he shot
himself. He was suffering from a probable brain tumour which caused terrible headaches and hallucinations. In one of these attacks, he had chased imaginary burglars with his revolver”. One of his poems mentions the fossilised Old Red Sandstone fish as having been “baked in stane pies before Adam”, which I thought was a nice way of putting it.
Downstairs I found Jacky looking through a big folder about pirates. The main man is John Gow, who I mentioned earlier as having been treated to the gibbet at Wapping Steps. Gow was put into the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, London. The trial was at the Old Bailey but Gow, understandably, held up proceedings by refusing to enter a plea. A bit like Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague. Gow was ordered to be tortured until he entered a plea. “His thumbs were squeezed between a whip-cord by two men, until they broke. They were then bent double and broken again. Even after they had been bent and broken a third time, Gow refused to plead.” He was then ordered to be “pressed”, which meant that they put “so much iron and stone weights on his body as he could stand”. After a few days of being pressed, Gow pleaded guilty and was immediately sentenced to death.
We took a trip to Yesnaby to see the amazing rock formations and to search for Primula scotica. We saw Yesnaby Noust into which Linklater and Greig entered in Stanley Cursiter’s painting. We walked all around the cliffs nose to the ground trying to walk the line between a distant barn and the nearby cairn, as advised by Herr Lipp. It made us notice all sorts of other wild flowers that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen - the grass of Parnassus, buttercups, bladder campion, marsh orchids, bog asphodel. Having given up the search, disappointed, we wandered back to the car park. Jacky’s sudden shreik made me jump. “There it is - that’s it!!” And there it was, the miniature primrose with red-violet petals. And, of couse, once you’d seen it you couldn’t not see it. It was everywhere but nowhere outside a 15 yard radius.
It didn’t take long to pack up after our week at Loons Cottage. We drove slightly sadly to the Saturday morning ferry in the rain and waited in a queue of cars opposite Venus Hourston’s garden before checking in. Bye-bye to Stromness and the barely visible Old Man, down the gangplank at Scrabster, heading south to the sounds of Devon Sproule keeping her silver shined and young Orcadians playing their fiddles. Back again in 30 years’ time?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)