Take my Hand, I’m a Stranger in Paradise
It’s hard to imagine the orchards of Heathrow,
Abundant as the orchards of Herefordshire,
Down there, by John Betjeman’s hated Slough:
‘Come friendly bombs’;
Hard to imagine windfalls in these
William Blake ‘chartered streets’:
‘One World: One Account’,
‘The future is exciting!
Get ready!’
But I shall be flying over gramp’s
Great War battlefields,
Towards dad’s Chindit warfare,
Via dystopian Dubai airport:
‘Dubai has transformed from a humble fishing village
to one of the most cosmopolitan and innovative cities in the world …
Jump on the metro, catch an amazing view from the world’s tallest building …
shop within The Dubai Mall Metropolis,
take a selfie in front of the famous Dubai Fountain …
All you have to do is get off a plane.’
But what of Kerala?
In the words of Stroud’s Rick Vick:
‘Apparently, a functioning, flourishing and fully communist state’,
Kindertransport
Remembering
You were a deep mid-winter baby, Harry,
Born in Vienna, the home of art and culture,
Just two years after Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.
But there was nothing to worry about
In those early years before memory,
When your mum and dad held you in their arms,
In mid-winter afternoon twilight –
Until the Wall Street Crash and depression
Meant the resurgence of fascism,
Militarism, the Third Reich,
Lebensraum, and a Greater Germany,
With a visit to Vienna from Hitler
(The city-birth of his fascism),
After Anschluss in 1938;
What Makes People Love History
What makes People love history?
So that it becomes a passion,
Not a subject, nor hobby, nor interest,
Not a diversion, nor a pastime,
But a consuming passion instead.
I started to read the virtual edition
Of the History Workshop Journal,
A compendium of contributors
And historians, who recounted
The reasons, recollections, emotions,
And afternoon madeleine moments,
That all conspired, to conjure forth
A love of the study of the past:
A Passion for History.
I’ve added my own, too;
I wonder which of these apply to you?
For example …
On Seeing The Grave of Sir Fabian Ware at Amberley
On the surface, it all seems quite equal,
The Great War cemeteries and gravestones:
Identical – uniform – symbolic –
Equality of sacrifice in death;
But a different story lies beneath:
Officers: seasoned wood for their coffins,
And lids that were carefully screwed down;
Men and other ranks: had unseasoned wood,
And lids that were brusquely nailed and hammered;
1918 saw the vote given to some women –
But not the canary girls and phossie jaws,
They had to wait another ten years –
But also some five and a half million men:
Only 60% of males had the vote
When war broke out for King and Country.
Harvest Festivals and Changing Times
Times change don’t they?
“Are there no prisons?”
“Are there no workhouses?”
Asked Mr. Scrooge back in the decade
Known as ‘The Hungry Forties”,
When asked to assist with charity,
A charity that was mostly Christian rather than secular.
Times change don’t they?
‘’We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land
And it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand’…
I grew up singing that as a schoolboy,
Not knowing then, that it was a hymnal retort
To Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species …
Times change don’t they?
And when I sang that as a schoolboy,
We collected and distributed the fruits of the harvest
To senior citizens in the area,
Many, I suspect, widowed in the Great War,
And our posh head-teacher would not allow
Anything as common as tinned food
To sully the cornucopia in the hall,
Times change don’t they?
Oral History and Walking
ONE: DISCOVERY
An invitation to participate in a seminar held by the Oral History Society in September 2017, based on some work from thirteen or so years before, got me thinking about oral history and differing walking practices. Obviously, many people record their walks – but I wanted to seek examples of projects and ideas beyond that admittedly admirable practice.
So I joined the Walking Artists Network and introduced myself with a question: I wondered if any walking artists carried out oral history projects as part of their approach. Some examples follow, but first I thought I might outline my experiences and ideas.
The work which was so well regarded was for www.irespect.net – the website seems a bit creaky now, but my perspective was that the lives of ordinary people were as necessary to any transmission of ‘Heritage’ as the lives of the powerful: a form of ‘Counter-Heritage’, in a way. I also put together a whole series of worksheets and lesson plans for schools. What I/we haven’t done is to walk the streets of Gloucester, using those testimonies and questions for walking and discussion: the great thing about devising questions with testimonies is that it stops those oral testimonies becoming inert. The questions promote engagement – that is especially so, of course, with young people.