Shadows Part 1

Where do you begin with the past?
How do you bridge the gap between human experiences then and now and why should it matter?
But it does matter.
It matters a lot.

In October 1942 a little girl named Tania lost her father to the war.
Sometime around Jan/Feb of 1945 the same seismic convulsion claimed her mother too.
She has grown up with no memory of her father, and only two fleeting recollections of her mother, and yet her whole life has been accompanied by the legend of her mother's heroism.
Even if she wanted to, she can never escape the iconic status of her legacy.
For her, the past still defines the present.

There are books, a film, even a museum to Violette Szabo, and like Joan of Arc she has been passed into public ownership as a national heroine, a poster girl for the appalling conflict that shaped my parents generation.

Her story is almost unbelievable, and not helped by post war flag wavers who couldn't resist adding layers of sensational speculation and inaccuracy.
The truth is available now, 70 years on, and no less extraordinary.

Married to a French Legionnaire she had known for only 6 weeks, she was widowed at 21.
He died at El Alamein 4 months after the daughter he would never see was born.
Violette was inducted into the Special Operations Executive, trained like a commando and sent into occupied France to work with the Resistance.

Everything about her story is tinged with a terrible, tragic romance.
The coded poem she was given to memorise is both touching and hauntingly prophetic in the light
of events.
In photographs she looks so young, so beautiful and so resolute that it's hard to separate her from the image history has bequeathed her.
And yet she was just a girl who married, had a child, joined up with all the others who were eager to do their bit and tried her best to survive the nightmare.

On her second mission into France, in support of the Allied landings on D-Day, she was travelling as a courier between two resistance networks when the car she was in was stopped at a roadblock.
She and the driver, a local Maquis leader, made a run for it but it was already too late.
They escaped through a farm but a damaged ankle slowed her down and she was forced to stop.
She held them off for half an hour with a Sten gun which gave her companion time to get away but her capture was inevitable.
At that arbitrary spot on the map, and in that twist of circumstance, she was lost to the darkness.

After the war her daughter, now aged of 5, was taken to Buckingham Palace to collect her mother's posthumous George Cross from King George VI, and the world moved on.

                                                         ------------oOo-----------

It's just a junction on a country lane on the outskirts of a quaint but unremarkable French village.
It's hard to imagine roadblocks, the sounds of gunfire, and shouting, and running feet.
Most of the cottages are owned by Brits now, and since the best of summer has gone, so have they.
Little has changed here in seven decades, though.
The farm looks the same as it did then, as do all the other features that figure in the evidence of a drama that happened so, so long ago.
I've made images from old photographs of mother and daughter and try to catch their shadows in the afternoon sun but the clouds roll in, the rain falls and the light fades.
Did I really think I could make something happen here?
What on earth was I doing, trying to pull the past into the present, chasing ghosts down blind alleys and hoping for significance where it no longer existed.

And then the lights on the farm buildings come on, and there they are, together.
For a brief moment they are in the same place, at the same time, their shadows as real as yours and mine.
And in a moment, they are gone.

We are not a muse

On November 16th, 1899 Queen Victoria arrived in Bristol to open the aptly named Queen Victoria Jubilee Convalescent Home, a place where Clifton folk of a delicate disposition could recuperate after the shock of seeing a poor person.

Her visit was a trigger for one of the greatest displays of patriotic excess ever seen in the city.
The profusion of Union Jack bunting was so extreme that one commentator was moved to express the view that "John Bull himself appears to have vomited over the entire conurbation in an outpouring of red white and blue appreciation".

The route from the station was lined with scarlet jacketed soldiers, the good citizens of Bristol cheered her every inch of the way, small orphans were thrown under the wheels of her carriage to muffle the sound as she passed over the cobbled streets and everywhere the crowds thronged in a joyfully throngy way.

The highlight was a carriage ride across the downs where a 300 yard stand had been constructed to accommodate 26,000 children singing the National Anthem at her. Amazingly, she survived although locals reported hundreds of squirrels dropping dead from the trees.

She stayed just long enough for tea and buns, kissed a few dignitaries and shook hands with a baby and then it was back on the train to be home in time for a quick chapter of her favourite book; " How to run an Empire whilst looking like Alfred Hitchcock in a frock".

My, how times have changed.

These days the Royal Family has to smile at everyone and even stand quite near ordinary
people sometimes.
They have to appear both regal and in touch with the riff raff all at the same time for fear of being criticised as just another bunch of foreigners living off the state.
There is much debate over how much they cost, whether they should get proper jobs and why they don't buy their tiaras at Argos like the rest of us.

I have to say, it's not a job I'd want, but then I'm no good at dressing like my grandparents and I couldn't eat a whole corgi so I probably wouldn't qualify anyway.

Now, however, the world has turned full circle and Her Victorian Majesty, Empress of India, Mother of Nations and Upholder of the Stiff Upper Lip has returned to Clifton.

At least this time she's making an effort to offset her expenses and demonstrate that she can handle change.

If you can spare any...

Rising Tide

It's 5.00 in the morning.
The sun is tinting the sky, the sea is bathwater warm.
It's a perfect Mediterranean morning, the coast of Sicily is Bond-film beautiful and the shoreline, devoid of basking tourists, is timeless, ethereal and all mine.

I wade out into the dark water with a handful of votive lights, a lighter and a benevolent attitude.
I was hoping to do something worthwhile, profound but aesthetically pleasing; somewhere between a protest and a postcard.

And then it all goes wrong.

This was supposed to be a modest, respectful moment to acknowledge the people who try to cross this great blue barrier to a better life. Robbed by the unscrupulous in their own countries and resented by the inhabitants of their destination, they risk their lives for a glimpse of all that we are fortunate enough to take for granted.

And sometimes the sea takes them.

From the comfort of a lucky birthplace, we look on and try to make sense of it.
Would I gamble my family's lives for a place at the wealthy man's table if I was in their situation?
All I know is they wash up near to here sometimes.

What I thought was seaweed turns out to be jellyfish.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, attracted by the pinpricks of light, each sting like the touch of a hot iron.
I scramble back to a tideline rimmed with their stranded hordes, pulsing like tiny aliens on the shingle.

The tea lights cluster in the swell, attracting plastic bottles, paper and nameless flotsam as they drift.
My image of a flotilla of carefully choreographed candles dancing on a pristine sea, lit by the rays of the dawn is disappearing fast.

Slowly they join the tidemark of rubbish that the sea coughs up each morning, the unsightly evidence of our disregard.

I photograph it anyway, and there it is; the metaphor has beached itself at my swollen, stinging feet.

Every morning, before the sun worshippers arrive, the beach is swept of all the ugliness and unpleasantness that no one wants to see.

No one need concern themselves with the sea's darker harvest, let alone the Evian bottles and plastic shoes that cluster at its fringes.

I come away sore, disconcerted and slightly ashamed.
Floating a few tea lights on the morning tide isn't going to change a damned thing, or begin to address the enormity of lives lost, but doing nothing at all seems worse.

The sea is a dangerous place, even if you're only in it up to your knees.

Tender is the night

It's got a lot to do with the time of the year.

Cold days and long dark evenings do tend to bring out the gloomy side, and it's
hard to skip through meadows extolling the joys of creation in a duffle coat and wellies.

The weather makes me introspective, and I find myself dwelling on the more serious side.

The passing of the seasons reminds us all that we too are mortal, and one day our time will be up.
It would be easy to get morbid about all this, but the sensible thing to do is treat it as a reminder to get on with things and not waste time.

Reviewing some of my escapades over the last year, it's apparent that quite a lot of it had more than a touch of the glums about it, so  the thing to do was lighten up a bit and get out there with something a bit more cheerful.

With that in mind, and conscious of the fact that I will one day look back on all this and ask myself some pretty searching questions about how I'd spent the years, I set about doing something creative with the bins.

The bin men refused to empty them as "they contain material not specified for that container"
i.e. teeth and eyeballs.

Oh well, you can only try.

Turfed out into the cold

Bristol is brilliant.
It's one of the few places where people actually look for ways of doing jolly things that make the city more fun.
Even the sensible people who did their homework on time and ended up in the council offices have been known to smile benignly upon delightfully daft projects involving water slides on main roads, public pianos and lampposts that cast someone else's shadow as you walk under them, (which is damned clever and a bit freaky).
The problem is there are just too many people with nifty ideas, and not enough opportunities or funding to get all this wonderfulness out there.

The locals have neatly sidestepped this by simply doing it anyway.

Not for them the approval of lofty Art Institutions, the warm feeling of civic recognition or the intoxicating celebrity of getting in the local free paper.
They operate in a twilight world of anonymity, their only reward being the knowledge that someone, somewhere will see their efforts and assume it must be art students mucking about again.

Which brings us to the tricky issue of graffiti.

Even if you're not a fan of having your fence scribbled on, and have forgotten how much you disapproved of that local bloke until he got famous, it's reassuring to know that there are industrious souls out there with an opinion, who have done something more with their evenings than watch singing apprentice bakers on ice-skates crying in rich peoples gardens.
I like the clever stuff, and the constant overpainting means it doesn't outstay it's welcome.
Like all the best jokes, timing is everything.

Some seem to linger like sad reflections on us all, like the large name on a wall I often pass.
Whoever painted it had grand ambitions, as the letters are huge.
Unfortunately, he could only afford one can and his attempts to colour it in get fainter as he progressed, tailing off in a sad little sputter.

A bit like life....

Walking through an abandoned churchyard this morning, I was met by this recumbent figure.
Next to him was a pot of daises, so I planted one about his person and had a little think about some of the people who I visit now only in memory.

There was no official plaque sanctioned by the Arnolfini or the Tate, no endorsement from those who would choose our art for us or instructions as to how we should view it.

I hope it doesn't get taken away too soon.

 

Baptism of fire

My father died in February.
Going through his papers, I found photographs, documents and articles about a largely ignored, but extraordinary event from the very beginning of the First World War.
I had known the story as a family legend, but here was the first hand proof of what took place.

War was declared at 11.00pm on 4th August, 1914.
The following morning a Royal Naval task force set out from Harwich, lead by the light cruiser
HMS Amphion, following reports of a German ship laying mines in the North sea about 30 miles from shore.
My Great Uncle Robert, as signals officer, was on the bridge with the captain and three other officers when the enemy ship was engaged and sunk.
The surviving German crew were rescued and brought aboard, and the ship turned for home.

At 6.30am on August the 6th, she hit one of the recently deployed mines, the foredeck exploded in a fireball and she began to sink.
Great Uncle Bob was blown into the water, his face and hands badly burned, and survived by swimming under the leaking oil from the dying ship before being picked up by one of the accompanying Destroyers.
Within 15 minutes she was gone, along with 167 men including all but one of the German prisoners.

Great Uncle Bob, along with his brother George, had joined the Navy as boy cadets and risen through the ranks.
Photographs of them reveal tough, muscular men with twinkling eyes and rough hands.
Both had distinguished careers, retired with handsome pensions, a chest full of medals and at least one MBE.
It would take more than a few mines to sink either of them.

The other brother, Melville, was my Grandfather.
He was altogether a gentler, more artistic sort who had survived both TB and a broken heart as a young man, and been left ashore to look after the aged mother.
On hearing of his brother's injuries, he took rooms in Harwich so that he could visit Bob every day at a Naval hospital across the bay.
One evening, whilst waiting for the ferry, he was spotted idly writing a postcard under a gas lamp and promptly arrested as a spy.
Things weren't helped when they went through his pockets and found a sketch of a battleship that he'd dashed off that afternoon.
The guard was called, and he was marched throughout the town by a squad of soldiers,
bayonets fixed.
Jeered and spat at by an angry crowd, he ended up in the cells of the Redoubt, an old Napoleonic fort then serving as the local military headquarters.
In the transcript of his interrogation, the sergeant of the guard asks him for his occupation:
"I make pictures and write stories" he replied...
After an anxious night on an iron bed frame, he was finally released back into a world that had only just begun it's descent into madness and loss.

Largely ignored by history, the sinking of the Amphion appears to involve the very first British, and German casualties of a war that would go on to claim millions.
There are no headstones, no memorials, no visitor centres, just a tiny x on the charts to mark the wreck site.

At 6.30am, on August 6th 2014, at a point on the same latitude as the Amphion's resting place in the North Sea, I marked the moment as best I could.

The sea is a cruel, lonely place that leaves no evidence of past conflicts.
Time means little out here, and a century is just the movement of the waves under passing clouds.

I never met my Great Uncle, but I hope I have honoured him.

Ever feel like life's become an Escher drawing?

Blues singers get it.
Country and Western Yeehaws have been known to articulate it.
Even floppy haired 60's beat combo fops in frilly shirts strayed into the arena now and then.
I'm talking about the down-on-your-luck, nobody-loves-me, life-ain't-fair lyricists who remind us all of how pointless it can be to keep paddling in an endless sea of disappointment, rejection and futility.

Songs like ' I started out with nothing and I've got most of it left' and 'My wife ran off with my best friend and I really miss that guy' are like anthems to the dispossessed.
Some people, when they fall, hit the ground like a dropped pie whilst others seem to view hard flat surfaces as trampolines to help them bounce higher.

Me, I'm somewhere in the middle, sort of rubbery but fragile round the edges like a badly cooked bat.

I made a real grimley of the last portrait.
It's still a touchy subject but suffice to say it was a lurid combination of v.attractive singer/songwriter, charity fundraiser, impossible (self imposed) deadline - um, 5hrs?! -and a Lot of Awkwardness.
Lead balloon, fart in a spacesuit, Susan Boyle at the Commonwealth Games awkward.
I'd have had a better response if I'd presented her with a shit in a bottle.

Ooh, the lessons learnt...

Anyway, moving on:
My dad met my mum in 1940, when he was barely out of school and still very interested in model aeroplanes.
My mum was a bit older, and was more impressed with chaps who smoked pipes whilst doing the foxtrot, so dad had to come up with something special to catch her eye, so he carved a perfect little plane out of a single piece of wood and presented it to her.
It must have taken him hours, but the shear devotion of it won the day or I would not be here to tell the tale.
( I think it was a one off. Can't think of a single woman I've ever been able to impress with whittling skills. )

I think our family tree was the sort that bears nuts.

 My grandfather spent  years creating amazing contraptions, intricate models and delightful paintings in the face of hostile disapproval and a lifelong pressure to "knuckle down and stop messing about with arty hobbies" but the things he left behind which I treasure most are not what he earned his daily crust from.
The painting I found recently in an attic connects me to him because it allows me a glimpse through his eyes, even though it was painted 116 years ago.

It's about allowing yourself to dream; about not listening to the voice in your head that tells you you're not good enough and about getting up more times than you fall down.

Amen

ps. To restore my dented crust I'm off to Dr Sketchy's Big Birthday Drawing Bash on Sunday 27th.
Nothing beats a class full of arty dreamers and outrageous Burlesque models who definitely know a thing or two about bouncing.
Maybe see you there.
I'll be the one in the pork pie hat.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Sketchys-Bristol/509275919119867

Dr. Sketchy's Bristol

www.drsketchybristol.co.uk