Once named after the chief propogandist of Joseph Stalin, it reminds me of the culture of Western propaganda that overwhelmed the former East German soul. When the Wall fell, West Germans who wanted to glorify in the seizure of Eastern lands, immediately called for the return of names from the past. One such was Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, a square name for the revolutionary Pole who believed in the end of borders and the freedom of women to express themselves. She was in fact a woman, who was savagely murdered by Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, where a memorial plaque reminds us of the darkest period in German history. But German history is full of dark and light, as one can see, in the raising of barracades in 1919 in Berlin, from 5th January to 12th, Spartakus Uprising, where following the German November Revolution, the demonstrations exceding all expectations so scared some that to this day schools do not teach the “Sparakusaufstand”-it has been purged from history. While Rosa Luxemburg opposed revolutionary action, Karl Liebknecht was “whipped into a state of revolutionary euphoria” and ruined their long-term chances. So as revolutionaries in Germany go Rosa stands out as the most astute. They had Marx, sure, but they hadn’t reached the stage where revolution would kick off. She has a square, outside the Volksbuehne, “People’s Stage”, named after her. Bert Brecht, the visionary theatre director started his career here and Erwin Piscator taught him about audience involvement, with a twenty-four hour performance; so esteemed were the activist, fervent goings-on here that when the First and Second World Wars ended, and the theatre was in East Berlin, West Berlin tried to steal the thunder and name their own ‘people’s stage’ in the Western Sector. This faltered and has been forgotten, but West German government attempted a last putsch, when they wished to change the name of the Square from Rosa Luxemburg. Frank Castorf, who had just worked with Edinburgh’s homeless from the Grassmarket, said he would rename the theatre Rosa Luxemburg Theatre if they dared. He won out and the place has become a sacred space for theatre that makes a difference: people’s stage meant for and about ordinary life. A West German tried to replace Castorf with a commercial artist, which resulted in theatre workers occupying the venue for many months. Once again the workers of Berlin showed themselves tougher than police and Chris Dircon from the Tate Modern left tail between his legs. From Dust to Glitter -Staub zu Glitter occupied as an art collective, determined to put on three months of free performances. Theatre maintains values in the East of education, as imposed by Zhdanov, who founded the Union of Soviet Writers, quoting Stalin and said: “Our Soviet literature is not afraid of the charge of being “tendentious”. Yes, Soviet literature is tendentious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a literature which is not class literature, not tendentious, allegedly non-political.” The tendentious is exactly what is lacking in Western Art. For Jean-Luc Godard, who tendentiously said: “I don’t make political films,” the Grassmarket Project was a vital tendency. For re-reading of Mariupol, and the War in Ukraine as the tendency of America to lead coups, and then not intervene in the bloodshed(Gaddafi’s Libya_Syrian Arab Spring_Afghanistan’s desertion, after supposed longterm commitment), it should come as no surprise that critics of the Azov brigades rise to power, such as on “Real News” recall that the Status Quo is a dangerous lie and America has fomented civil wars, with as their own Chicago University scholar put it, both Democrats and Republicans, like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing when it always leads to catastrophe.
George Kennan American diplomat said, May 2nd 1998, on NATO encouraging Poland, Hungary and Czechs to join, in a “letter from X”: “I think it is a tragic mistake.”
‘They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree..
they were not given power to kill..the locusts’ faces resembled human faces.’
What strikes me as most valuable about ship-wrecked John’s revelations on Patmos is that he doesn’t try to impress, the vision is clearly real, he hasn’t taken drugs either…for me that is epic.
The Angst of America-that they fled Europe and massacred Indians, like with their permit..Palestinians of late and yet have less to fear than the homeland Russia, where many emigrated from, which has suffered so many terror attacks that we wash our faces and bodies to try to forget..where Machiavellian cruelty must be the only path to stop endless bloodshed in the metros and Beslan– schools?
How ironic that war was evaded by Russia in 1917, when it accepted the fairly arbitrary borders the Germans designated, so that an experiment in peaceful coexistence and cooperation to feed the impoverished one hundred million peasants could show humans capable of aspiring to the heights of self-worth and confidence? Peace at all costs.
A New War is supposedly on the way…I woke up with a start this morning. Is it because as I did the bombs exploding near Kiev where being reported? Millions of phones bleeping round 6.03 or so? The fact Biden-time predicted this happening is proving almost to feel as though he is a good man, Russians bad. I know that irresistible urge the West has had since victory in Europe, since Churchill and Roosevelt rused that although Russia had seen more fighting than them and fought to greater loss, it was the West that sees itself as the good. Quickly let us forget Afghanistan and Iraq and the promises of safeguarding the world.
The question of justice is an awkward one, since the “Battle of Marathon”, when Aeschyllus found himself questioning why Xerxes, Darius son would want to invade and expose his own kind to history’s mockery everywhere and anywhere. The future is written in the stars..since Io was turned into a cow, for desiring Zeus.
The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss.
2
When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss. 3 And out of the smoke locusts came down upon the earth–An epic of peace is what each sees in our quasi-intelligent world. ‘Der Himmel ueber Berlin’, Wim Wenders’ attempt to see Berlin’s skies as skewed to peace-here Hockney found himself, before L.A., so too me, so Christopher Isherwood, and …many after the fall of the Wall. We want to relate to a future free of hate, aggression and destruction..but how sincere are we? Is there any real seeker of peace? Or one-upmanship? The world has promised to find a way to vaccinate everyone, but Boris tells us that ‘everyone is greedy.’ That excuses him from critique, even now that his Garden Bridge-I just clocked ‘Boris Bridge’ in my mind-has made him feel incapable of being the good guy he so longed to be. This inevitably leads us to the present scenario where Russia’s Putin is the source of all ill. It is inevitable that human nature, reels again from its false heroism-the Garden Bridge was shown to be a mammoth waste of time and resource-also that maintaining it would be catastrophic, inept, for although tourists would love it, the water needed would make those without gardens or seeking to save water daily with water butts, rather than use of hoses, feel idiotic and somehow inferior. The last vestiges of our peaceful, Tibet-loving Mother figure Joanna Lumley, whose idea it was, shrinks back silent, as it appears absolutely not fabulous. So where is the likes of Greta, a dawning generation, at the brow of a new ship, common sense, where air is clear and breathable because she is not taking planes? She hasn’t figured it out that she is not whiter than WASP white, because she boarded a yacht that has diesel engines and may need to go and see an old movie with Trump. She is brighter than most, but then Machiavelli was also-as Trump surely sees himself-cruel and Putin too, evading complete terrorist chaos by a strong arm, so a genius. Whether we love them relates to fear. The publicity machines make us in the West feel guilt whatever we do, because there are countries where people starve, and we talk of luxurious yachts. Even the Dalai Lama in India flies round the world to discuss meditation. There are few ways of talking ourselves out of our corner, except if we ‘stay at home. Do not go out.’ The virus it seems is the bitter pill that might save us, while Keanu Reeves is stuck in the Matrix, taking a truth pill, artificial drug? -and claiming it is the film he wishes to be remembered for. Even Reeves is a salesman, I feel, when I see my son in the vegetables, picking up leaves and tending the garden. He hasn’t ever sought out wishful thinking of intellectual supremacy, as is my and my generation’s want. Reality dissolves..as we fear that no answer is available. Delta and Omicron have found us still shocked and unable to cope, as children are exposed to school-spreading.
Maybe peace lies with those in Jordan’s Zaatari, their fourth largest city and Syrian refugee camp, or in Kenya’s Kakuma camp, the only larger refugee camp in the world, as they aren’t in any way responsible for our falsity or superiority-complex foibles? If we hold our breath we can hear whispers of wisdom? The air blows fresh, like the fresh freedom of the music of the spheres to release us? What humans fear is that they haven’t learnt anything, as long as a single human is discarded in a Kakuma or Zaatari.
Foxes are my son’s favourite, as they slim and agile, slink into gardens, and disappear again, howling at a distance…Cadmian Foxes “know that they will feast,” I tell him and “have wet their noses on Ministers’ children.”
A moment of inspiration has come to me which I don’t want to go unmentioned. My neighbour, Virginia Hiller asked me how I was, as we have shared our trouble, gardens and community strife over the last couple of years. Being a wise owl she has encouraged me in community and that led to me recording names of key workers who passed away, over one hundred and fifty in London, as well as registering the names of women who had been murdered by men, often within relationships. The really valued moments have been greeting nurses who are walking their dogs, or busdrivers, one of the least appreciated of victims who are known to have passed away more quickly in the first months of 2020 than any other group.
Meanwhile I have been following a friend Jean Findlay’s writing efforts and had heard of William of Hawthornden. Just as I was sharing a book in progress then with Virginia, she tells me: ‘our family houses have always been called Hawthornden. My grandfather was a French scholar, who wrote books on William of Hawthornden..’ So I’m truly inspired and interested in the naming of people, who have a yin and yang, a female softness, as well as a male agression. Orlando, from fiction, or Gandhi who quietly takes salt from the oceans himself, weaving, without need for Britain, his own clothes, or Admiral Nelson, who perhaps rather surprisingly is willing to die on his deck: doesn’t he have the quality of courage, like a mother, who won’t leave her children to an uncertain end..but fights side by side to the last breath?
I hope that while I’ve been caring for a family member, going through health matters, she, Virginia, forgives me for not reading more about Hawthornden, except now I know that he was the first Scottish Makar-maker-literally, to write in English, rather than Scots, or Latin and is a perfect mirror for the trouble that James I encountered when trying to position himself as mature Rex Pacificus, away from superstitious fear of witchcraft and Protestant extremism, which even threaten the young poet, in a powerful scene, with heresy for being a secret…Papist? He also translates the bible, it is rumoured himself.
*A word for Catholic, which the hillbilly nasties of the day would call sinners. “Hark to the boy, Lennox! It matters not our releegion. We will a’ die anyway, if not by hunting then of old age.” In summary a ‘life’s too short’ message sustains James’ responses at court and his Danish wife, Anne, has also had a lot of troubles, as a woman giving birth, as the book relates. The defender of procreating is put central theme, as the faith is rational, but always, feminine..woman, mother who brings physical life into the world. As his been remarked of the times of Shakespeare their is fear at every turn. So: “James cannot conceal his fury at the relentless march of time, and the relentless march of death. These look without care on king and commoner alike. The frightening part is that all keep getting older…
“Farewell thou child of my right hand and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee,” again verse is expertly interwoven…Powerful as he is the King cannot control the clammy hand of mortality, which points with arbitrary finger at whomsoever it chooses…”.
How wonderful that I’ve unconciously convened a possible future book event with Jean’s Scotland Street and Virginia’s children writing and illustration(‘Freddie Fox’) my son already loved, because they both appear to me to be credulously real characters out of the ‘Queen’s Lender’.
Here’s to community and understanding and kindnesses.
When George loses a child and wife in child-birth, he receives a letter from his father, weaving in the makar, William Drummond, quoting: “Death is not painful or evil, except in contemplation of the cause, being of itself as indifferent as Birth…Death is but a short, nae sweet sigh.” For anyone grieving in Lockdown at personal loss there is real wisdom in the sense of someone’s spirit sighing softer…
“George keeps this page in his pocket for the rest of his days. It is as valuable as the letters documenting the debts that keep accruing from his royal patrons.” One of the spiritedly funny and beautiful themes of the novel is the simplicity with which George ensures his jewels and then lends the money he borrows to the king, at a percentage. It skillfully awakens a sense of the emptiness of materiality.
There is scholarship and range in the novel of makars William of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare’s players, inherited from Elisabeth I, whom James I admires and continues sponsoring in spite of debts. The word and culture come first to Scots and William is the original…as we also know the legacy of the first Edinburgh Hospital, painted by an awed William Turner. Ben Jonson is told to walk to Scotland, and I feel that would be good for present government, getting to know real folk. Boris eat your heart out!
It is worth noting that out of William’s life, as poet rather than lawyer, which he travels to study in France, has grown the oldest literary award, along with the James Tait Award: both Scottish!
Review: Nature is a part of Jean’s world, her grandmother from Orkney, one of the Scottish Renaissance writers. ‘An owl in the desert dinna smile, they behold the Almighty,’ says one character. There is range in this novel of <William of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare’s players, inherited from Elisabeth I, who James I admires and continues sponsoring in spite of debts. The word and culture come first and as we know the Edinburgh Hospital, painted by an awed William Turner.
We know when Queen Anna remarks before giving birth for her husband, James, in Chapter 4(-page22): ‘Creation of children is god-like’ we are in the presence of genius. The simplicity of the remark is such that we barely take in the importance, in the novel, for a woman, defending her central role in governance and faith. Do men govern, or do women truly? Orlando shows women can become men.
Page 23 is an example of profound involvement with the space and time of the novel; referring to: ‘the mound of Arthur’s Seat rises behind them as daunting to Christian as her own round form, but they do not climb it as they have done before…’*which as lines go is wholy original and instantly relatable. What better way for a woman writer to give a context to Edinburgh’s natural proturbance, that no man could have dreamt up, the Mound has always struck me as almost ‘pregnant’, yet I could never find those distinctive words. It continues: ‘He points to St Anthony’s Chapel,
‘Under it in a crag tae the left is a cave where ye can bide but still see Edinburgh. Dry and warm, ye’ll see boats docking in Leith, see the Kingdom o’ Fife-and even right intae Holyrood Palace.’ These lines transport us to a world of intrigue, as though the author lived in that time, and knew Elsinore and Hamlet himself. She gently finishes the paragraph, bold and female embodying the times: ‘A man in that cave can see us here in the gairdens.’ A shiver runs up and down my spine.
A form of historical psychogeography has for me become a sort of new way of writing, feeling the psychological, social impulse of the time, through a social perspective as Jean does with George Heriot. Such a form of perspective has evolved slowly with profound scholarship, traceable to ‘Orwell’s Roses’ where those he planted are found alive, as well as Ruth Scurr, in her ‘Napoleon in Gardens and Shadows’.
The Queens and hidden histories of women are really hot topics of conversation this year, as we approach the extraordinary seventieth year of Elisabeth II’s reign, her platinum Jubilee. So also then is the story of her namesake, Elisabeth I, and the next in line as Monarchs: Anne and James I and VI of Scotland.
Through a multitude of vibrant voices Jean Findlay guides a majestically detailed narrative account of prominent women, Anna of Denmark, Christian, wife of George Heriot, a highly diplomatic jeweller, James I and his subtle responses to the spying of Elisabeth I’s Court, which binds two nations hence creating the Union Jack-named after him, yet the book wanders like Baudelaire might into free associations of kinship and the realms of profound psychogeography. The book pays homage to the various confused dogmas, suspicious and absurd supersitious belief in ‘storms being created by witches’ to prevent Anna of Denmark’s arrival. Like Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, it fears factions, skirts skilfully, as sympathetically round the outrages of those like Bothwell, who was banished after abducting Mary Stuart, and shows how humanistic common sense guides Heriot away from pitfalls, often harmful misunderstandings, while enjoyably picking up on evolving aesthetics, poetry and art forging judgments that are beyond religion. The merry Court finds George Heriot, Queen Anna and James alive with singing and poetry of forgiveness and forgetting utterly contradictory mumbojumbo about witchcraft, irrational fears of death, deleterious differences of opinion. Actually Jean who is an expert on French literature has a touch of Baudelaire and suddenly are we not twenty thousand leagues under the sea of a psychogeographer, showing us how modern humanity is born of kindness? At a time when the world is in confusion this book has sincere relevance, the selflessness of women and a wish to partake in creating beauty, against the barely concealed lust and greed of god-botherers, also acting as a warning to the modern Downing Street.
Is our Queen a symbol of women’s empowerment? ‘Seeing is believing’ is a quote that she is known for. The wish to meet everyone actually has a strange parallel in Quentin Crisp, “I want to meet everyone” he told me-others-while he described himself as the ‘alternate Queen’ with a yearly ‘Queen’s Speech’. I met him in New York for tea, which was bizarre as he seemed a little too keen! I see evidence of a parallel with a good writer, ‘seeing is believing’ inviting us to join her on a walk through Edinburgh’s past: a woman who has worked for charity, with homeless and adicts..who now believe.
We live with a monarch, a sure symbol of tradition, grace, presence and persistence in a world changing faster than we might be able to cope with. So too, ‘The Queen’s Lender’, comes along with insightful detail at a time when our present Queen is about to reach her platinum anniversary and Alistair Campbell is even a fan of her ‘extraordinary’ abilities; in her novel, Jean has recreated Queenly women, married to power, but who as women are independent-minded and break tradition, Anne wanting to be able to stay with her first-born, even if it means treking across stony scrubland paths, woodlands and risking her reputation.
She has an ally in George Heriot, whose name is one of those in history that reigns supreme. Although a rich jeweller, he shows himself interested more in art and culture, and when successful enough starts a school in his name; apart from which ‘Heriot-Watt University’ is also known to all who live in Edinburgh. He is in this most refreshing and realistic book willing to bend to Anna’s wishes, unafraid even. Under the radar women dare to speak their minds and Jean has magically unmasked the boundaries of non-court life and grasped exactly the subtle manipulation of how that helped the women’s cause.
From birth Anna is exposed, unable to defend herself: the decision comes at the birth of Anna’s child, Henry, to invite all the court to watch..as proof of his legitimacy, which is actually standard for the time. On George’s wife: ‘There’ll no be the same crowd. Only the midwife and ourselves.’
Excellently researched, Jean won grants to spend time learning of the era Anna and George lived in; Jean’s detailed description in this scene allows us a unique look at the whole drudgery, hypocrisy of monarchy. The mirroring of George Heriot’s poor wife, expecting a child without a midwife, with Queen Anna’s in the story of the start of James I’s reign, illuminates snobbery and elicits frightening images-hurling us into the world underpinning the humiliations of poverty, deference, high office and war.
‘Gem watching is his pleasure;not the acquisition, but the working of stone.’ He watches jewels but also court and learns how to invade it. Vanadium and chromium of emeralds is the chemistry, in his day, a wonder: ‘When you cut in a stone, it is not really a cut, more a graze, a filing, and it has to land on the right place, so a minute flat face can be shown which twinkles in the right light and the right light is either sunlight, the best, or a single candle flame which gives a dark, deep insight into the stone itself.’ The ‘cursed ships’ and the necessarily supersitious nature at Danish and Scottish courts terrifies, especially when a ‘sage’ woman, Agnes Sampson, still known today to history and us, infamously, burned at the stake, when she is an ‘essential worker’-a midwife: Jean lets that last fact drop gently, almost casually quietly and so doubly appalls us, after showing in a previous scene how a midwife can save Danish Anna’s life. Without spoilers it would be inappropriate to venture further, but I figure George has some of the peaceful nature I recently found appealing researching Aristophanes, who wrote multiple plays that contain much about peace in ‘Lysistrata’, particularly from a woman’s perspective. As Anna says, ‘Creation o’ children is god-like-‘ bluntly and like George III’s wife displays intellect: ‘a woman could make much of herself if educated’; she is the mother of Charles I-a patron of the arts, after his mother’s example.’George’s love is not possessive and in that sense it is true love; he wants the best cut for the best stone, he knows the best cut, like a wise woman advising her grandchildren on the future.’
The historical novel can elucidate and enlighten us about what we know of the times, we live after: so it is with references to a ‘rumour of the translating’ of a text about ‘I am like a pelican o’ the wilderness I am like an owl o’ the desert-‘being by James himself. We learn to see his nature with all its faults, in a broad light.
Jean Findlay was born in Edinburgh. She studied Law and French at Edinburgh University under Peter France and Theatre under Tadeusz Kantor in Kracow, Poland. She co-founded an award winning theatre company and wrote and produced plays which toured to London, Berlin, Bonn, Rotterdam, Dublin, Glasgow and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. She spent years in London writing drama and book reviews for the Scotsman, and has written for the Independent, Time Out and the Guardian. In 2014 she published Chasing Lost Time: The Life of CK Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy and Translator with Chatto and Windus, now in Vintage paperback and with FSG in New York. She founded Scotland Street Press in Edinburgh in 2014 and now runs this small, award-winning publishing house. For writing The Hat Jewel she won a Hawthornden Fellowship 2018 and a Lavigny International Writer’s Fellowship 2019.
When my mother gave me ‘Wind in the Willows’, recently,astonished I was not familiar with it, I was amazed to find there is plenty of Ratty at work in me. Flinging books aside and prescribed modes of communicating like Ratty Jeremy, Jean and I took a new fork away from tradition, putting ordinary marginalised in their own space and way on stage to perform. It is a growing format:
Last Thursday the unexpressed anguish of those who have been abused was put on at BAFTA-Be Heard was directed by Cath Arton-Still, produced by Judy Goldberg of London Screenwriters Fest and the head of a national charity for child abuse marvelled at how open media and film has grown for this to be possible.
So it was in many ways an echo of the way we were embraced with open arms in Berlin and Paris where ranting non-actors incoherently at first, but endearingly have started ensembles and taken their space in the theatre world .
Silo Sage of the Andes stated only by failing does our heart open, so there is a Buddhist learning in all this. ‘Failing all the way to the top’, is how Chris Jones describes some-we only feel at peace when mixing with those better enabled and so become used to self-expression.
With Jayson and Ksenia at Battlefield at the Young Vic we met Peter Brook, ninety, all smiles-whose daughter and her singer songwriter sister-in-law Sadie have expressed interest in my dreamy story of Lissie Strata (based on Lysistrata, the first of real flesh and blood women to reject men until they stopped fighting in Greek times )-“nice one”-Irina Brook put it.
In my latest Ratlike ramblings I suggest that Oblomov is a displaced nature spirit who Lissie is seeking although she is trapped in the Jungle camp at Calais. Maybe he sleeps in the ‘Great Bed of Ware’ the biggest bed in the world.
So we also wish to follow our inner voice and go to Calais end of February or early March to meet migrants and show Lissie walking around.
She has always talked with nature spirits-as she recalls her mother telling her when she went in the woods-and now she has found her role in the Jungle as she collects wood and is the Match girl who helps them keep warm.
The issues around poor are expanding away from dialogues about Greek Oblomovs and how they are not keeping up EU bills to watching Greek fishermen announced as Nobel Nominees for swimming into the sea to rescue children-drowning as they cannot all be rescued.
It might be a question as to where we align abuse with children and when it is about poor. If anyone writes this for film they will be accused of being fanciful but many issues in Europe expanding rapidly that have left simple answers drawing on The United Nations definition of a refuge as a place to survive while a ‘home is where you can be yourself’
The EU is as much about how much we can be ourselves as bills.
Judy and Cath gave Laura Hymers and I a line as ” consciences of the film”,but how good our consciences in Europe are remains to be seen as to how much refuge is given to those in fear of persecution.
Maybe babies laugh and cry most as they are most honest?
My mother put a pic up on Facebook of Will my thirteen-month-old-pointing at a plane:to my amazement ex-CNN man Charles Hodson ‘liked’ it. She explains: ‘he was chief finance reporter,broadcasting regularly to 200 million people: he grew sick of the business lies’- he updates on Facebook and she enjoys reading his private opinions.
It is rare someone high up the food chain would lose interest in making money: maybe he believes as some Buddhists or Spiritual protestors who camped around St Paul’s that giving is more.
In German theatre I interviewed the European theatre prize winner of the year for the Guardian, who wrote ‘Hamlet Machine’ and invited me to stay. Over whisky he explained that ‘Europe is a bank’ and with a wry smile ‘the ghost of Hamlet’ is ‘the German Bank’. The EEC would have liked him if they indulged in Berlin cabaret and satire.
As a writer in the East he experimented like Bertolt Brecht who began at the People’s Volksbühne where we at Grassmarket Project brought homeless from Edinburgh. The stage dates from 1790 and always allowed real social dramas-as proactive as Judy and Cathy Arton now with a BAFTA Premiere of ‘BeHeard’ on child abuse on February 4th, which includes a sentence from me.
The King’s Speech producer was involved.
Homelessness has become a major issue since ‘Questions about Cathy’ in Parliament set the ball rolling in the Sixties.Recently I told actors about the Jungle in Calais where migrants are still arriving. Our ignoring of those persecuted is supposedly creating the worst carbon footprint in Europe, as no electricity or running water is making them collect fire wood and burn gas cylinders. I envisage a ‘Match Girl’ like in Hans Andersen fairytale whose parents have died in a Syrian bombing.
The words ‘torch’ and ‘slum’ remind me of shoddy reporting on Battersea, which was described as a ‘slum’ in the Sixties when Jeremy Sandford and Nell Dunn moved in and found it ‘beautiful’ and ‘green’-single mothers were rehoused here to keep them out of tourists’ view-they fell in love with local colour and a couple with two children who could not keep up with the landlord’s rent were evicted:this resulted in ‘Cathy Come Home’ and Irene films of Ken Loach’s beginnings like: ‘Up the Junction’
My brother Fred informs me that it was far from a slum, but actually a market garden with a pub we frequent the ‘Asparagus’ named after what they grew.
Ray Brooks has long been a friend and played the lead Reg, describing at a homeless film festival recently how he was shouted at in the street for losing wife and kids-as some people thought it documentary!
You can read more of Ray and his books and music on: www.mrbennsfriend.co.uk-as he was the voice of the children’s cult show.
You can read my book with a kind review by Guardian contributor Angela Neustatter about working with homeless, as well as Ray’s and Timothy West’s support and intelligence:
Perhaps also worth mentioning is that I saw a video recently of a teenager who realised when he was six and older that he still was attracted to the children of two or three and realising that he had a problem joined a self-help group to stop him becoming an abuser. Many sides and all should be visible. Notably no-one wrote a negative comment under the video…
Our latest play is Owl Time ‐ Jayson’s Rangoli sand painting for this is above; also Ksenia Agarkova who is developing Lichen Lissie, refugee and Matchgirl leaving a trail of Oblomov’s chocolate crumbs.
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