Musings

WERNHER VON BRAUN

2011-08-11T04:48:00.001-07:00

If Private Fred Schneikert, huddled in a ditch in southern Germany on sentry duty on May 1st 1945, had not been a German-speaker, it’s possible that the USA would never have landed Neil Armstrong on the moon, that NASA would never have existed and that Tom Lehrer would not have found another opportunity for his satire. As he lay in that ditch, Fred Schneikert saw a lone cyclist heading down a country road towards him and called out: “Halt! Komme vorwarts mit die hande hoch!”

The man who obeyed Schneikert’s order was Magnus von Braun, brother of Wernher, the German creator of the V2 rockets, who had been sent out on his bike to approach the American lines and negotiate the surrender of von Braun and several hundred of his fellow-scientists. It was no accident that led von Braun and his team to this part of Germany. He had planned the move from the scientific-military base at Peenemünde in northern Germany by the Baltic Sea. It was at Peenemünde that von Braun had been given Hitler’s enthusiastic permission to develop the V2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2 "Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2") as a weapon with which to bomb London. Research and development began early in 1943 and the first V2 rocket was launched on London in September 1944. Von Braun, who was more interested in developing rockets for space travel, is alleged to have said: “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.”

By the spring of 1945, however, the twin approaches of the Russian army from the east and the American army from the west were causing von Braun and his colleagues to think about their futures. They knew that their technology was way ahead of both the Russians and the Americans; they knew that they would be a prize capture. So Wernher von Braun falsified documents and moved his five hundred fellow-scientists to central Germany and then eventually to Oberammergau, where they were heavily guarded by the SS. Von Braun, crafty as ever, persuaded the SS commandant that it was dangerous having so many important scientists in one place because of the risk of bombing and the scientists were dispersed into neighbouring villages. It was from one of those that his brother Magnus set of on his bicycle.

“My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender,” he said, in German of course.

“I think you’re nuts but we’ll investigate,” replied Fred Schneikert.

Investigate they did and shortly afterwards the Americans took delivery of the batch of German scientists who were to lead them into the space race some twenty years later. When they realised who he was, Wernher von Braun was allowed to speak to the press:

"We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured."

All the German scientists were denazified and given security clearance to work in America. They were quickly shipped over to the USA and based initially at Fort Bliss military base and later at Huntsville where a specialist base was created for their use. At Huntsville von Braun led the development of rockets used by the US for the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests. At the same time he was campaigning for rockets to be used in space exploration and fronted television films about space exploration for Walt Disney. The successful Russian launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 was a wake-up call to the American military brass and NASA was created at Huntsville, with Wernher von Braun as its director. The United States of America was soon well and truly in the Space Race, with von Braun-engineered Saturn and later Apollo rockets, leading eventually to Neil Armstrong and his “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Wernher von Braun’s role in the development and delivery of the American space programme was contentious, with many liberals suspicious of his at-the-time- camouflaged Nazi background. The American comedian Mort Sahl mocked his claim that he was always primarily interested in space exploration and that his involvement in the creation of the V2 rockets that hit London was the result of German war interests rather than his own, with his one-liner, “I aim at the stars but sometimes I hit London.” But the most famous satire of him is the song written and performed by Tom Lehrer, which contains the famously cutting lines:

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.”

You can watch the whole performance here and make your own mind up about the infamous Werner von Braun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

D-DAY CROSSWORD AGENT

2011-08-06T06:34:00.000-07:00

I have just been attempting to solve the most recent Guardian cryptic crossword, created by my (and many other people’s) favourite compiler Araucaria. Behind the pseudonym sits 90-year old John Graham, formerly a vicar of the Church of England who was forced to resign from the loving brotherhood because he got divorced. Behind the term ‘cryptic crossword’, however, sits Leonard Dawe, one-time England amateur footballer and later headteacher of Strand School in Tulse Hill, London, who in 1925 became the first compiler of crosswords for the Daily Telegraph and was an early adopter of the new-fangled cryptic clues. Almost twenty years later this secondary career would get him into a lot of serious trouble.

Strand School was evacuated to Effingham in Surrey during the Second World War; also based in the village were the Royal Army Service Corps and companies of Canadian soldier and American soldiers were also encamped in nearby villages. Leonard Dawe was still in charge of the school and still compiling crosswords, in one of which on August 18th 1942 he included a clue to which the answer was ‘Dieppe’. On August 19th the disastrous Allied forces attack on the German-held Dieppe harbour took place, as a result of which over three thousand Canadian troops died.

To the spooks of MI5, idly fingering their Daily Telegraph crosswords, this all looked to be too much of a coincidence. Lord Tweedsmuir, son of the novelist John Buchan, was at the time a senior intelligence officer attached to the Canadian troops and he was asked to conduct an investigation. After reflecting on matters and no doubt having had a few bevies in the spooks bar, he duly reported:

“We noticed the crossword contained the word Dieppe and there was an immediate and exhaustive inquiry which also involved MI5. But in the end it was concluded that it was just a remarkable coincidence - a complete fluke.”

And that was that, until May 1944, when ‘Utah’ was the solution to another clue in one of Dawe’s crosswords. ‘Utah’ was the supposedly secret codename for the D-day beach where the USA 4th Assault Division was due to land. On May 22nd came the clue ‘Red Indian on the Missouri’, the solution to which was ‘Omaha’ – codename for the D-day beach assigned to the American 1st Assault Division. On May 27th came a crossword containing the answer ‘Overlord’ – the name for whole D-day operation; the May 30th crossword contained ‘Mulberry’ – codeword for the floating harbours to be used on the Normandy coast; and that on June 1st included ‘Neptune’ – codename for the naval assault phase.

It was all too much for the spooks and they descended mob-handed on Leatherhead where Leonard Dawe lived and where they “turned him inside out”, as he recalled it later in life. They also visited Melville Jones, the Daily Telegraph’s other crossword compiler, in Bury St Edmunds and quizzed him. In the end, according to Dawe, “they eventually decided not to shoot us after all”.

So was it all just pure coincidence? Certainly MI5 seemed to think so. Dawe was an old-fashioned gentleman who had served in the Mesopotamia campaign during the First World War. As headteacher of Strand School he was regarded as a “disciplinarian and a man of extremely high principles”. It seemed impossible to believe that such a person was sending clues to the Germans disguised as crossword puzzle clues. But how did such precise parallels with D-day codewords come about?

The answer only really came to light in 1984 when a certain Ronald French, who worked as a property manager in Wolverhampton, read about the puzzle of the D-day crosswords in the Daily Telegraph and wrote to explain his part in the farrago. French claimed that it was Leonard Dawe’s custom to invite sixth-form boys into his study and to ask them to suggest words he might include in his crossword; later he would devise clues for these words. Ronald French had attended Strand School at the time and was indeed one of those sixth-formers invited to assist in the crossword creation. The codewords then inserted were words which were on the lips, so French claimed, of every soldier in the neighbourhood and he and his fellow-pupils mixed freely with the service personnel and picked up these terms quite naturally. He personally kept a notebook of all the codewords he heard.

“I was totally obsessed about the whole thing. I would play truant from school to visit the camp and I used to spend evenings with them and even whole weekends there, dressed in my Army cadet uniform. I became a sort of dogsbody about the place, running errands and even, once, driving a tank.

Everyone knew the outline invasion plan and they knew the various codewords. Omaha and Utah were the beaches they were going to. They knew the names but not the locations. We all knew the operation was called Overlord.”

After D-day, and presumably after his MI5 interrogation, Dawe summoned French and demanded to see his notebook, instructing him that he should burn them at once and never breathe a word of these matters to anyone. Presumably believing that neither the Germans nor the Whitehall spooks would have any interest in these matters by 1984, French decided to put the record straight.

The essence of a cryptic clue is that all is not as it seems in the clue’s wording. The mystery of the D-day crosswords holds as many cryptic moments as any of Leonard Dawe’s, or for that matter of John Graham’s, crosswords. And where better for the truth to emerge from than Wolverhampton?

SWALLOW AEROBATICS

2011-04-28T01:02:00.000-07:00

“One swallow does not make a summer,” said super-brain Aristotle but I have been watching a lone swallow practising his dives and swoops in my swimming pool for the past April week.

He arrives most commonly at early morning or late afternoon and does not appear every day. On a couple of occasions he has brought a pal along with him but his regular pattern is to appear from behind the olive grove to the south, skim a few centimetres above the blue water, as if testing out his approach and maybe checking that it is genuinely water and not some blue concrete laid to fool him, and loop upwards in a northerly direction before bending back in a circular movement to roughly where his first approach began. Then it’s into the serious business as he swoops rapidly down to the pool again, this time selecting a particular region of it to dip his belly and maybe his wing tips in, before a sudden soar upwards, shaking off the cooling droplets. He usually repeats this several times, never from exactly the same angle and never hitting exactly the same spot of the pool. Sometimes his approach is north to south; sometimes there is a lengthy hiatus of several seconds before his reappearance; sometimes he tips his wings at me as he approaches, like a RAF pilot’s acknowledgement.

This is the breeding season and I suspect my swallow is one of many that have done their wintering in South Africa and have headed back to Europe in search of better food supplies. There is a view that, when diving into water in the way I have witnessed, swallows are doing one of two things – either feeding on miniscule organisms, too tiny for the naked human eye to see, such as mayflies, mosquitoes and their larvae which are nestling either on the surface of or just below the surface film of the pool, or they are dipping their bodies in water to get rid of unwanted parasites, just as many birds do in bird baths when they give the impression that they are giving themselves a bit of a scrub-up.

The swallow has been a traditional harbinger of spring for a long time. There are swallows depicted on the frescoes of the palace at Knossos and Greeks used to carry effigies of the swallow on the Calends of March, which was the start of the New Year before January and February were added to the calendar. Swallows are mentioned in the Bible and the Roman writer and naturalist Pliny devoted some time to studying them. We’ll come to Pliny shortly but I need to disabuse you of the notion that the migration of swallows has been a given for all of history. As recently as 1788, Gilbert White in his groundbreaking The Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne concluded that swallows hibernated for winter in mud at the bottom of ponds and lakes, echoing the view that had been commonly held since antiquity. If that theory now seems barmy to us, the true story of the swallow migration is even more mind-blowing.

Those great hordes that you can see gathering on telephone wires in the autumn in Britain head south to South Africa for the winter and in February they begin their northward return journey. They fly over the Namib and Kalahari deserts till they reach the Gulf of Guinea and turn inland to the edges of the Sahara for the long and foodless sail over the unforgiving desert. Many do not make it but those that do reach North Africa much weakened and continue over the Atlas Mountains till they get to southern Europe. Here many rest in their journey to take on food and that can be the time for further losses as the gun-toting males of Italy, Malta and Greece seek them out for sport. Some stay in southern Europe in their traditional breeding grounds while others press even further northwards to Britain. Those that get this far have travelled almost 6,000 miles in little more than two months with an average cruising speed of twenty-five miles per hour. All for the sake of some decent flies! And this is a bird that only weighs about three quarters of an ounce.

Now back to Pliny. This gentleman – a naval captain and an encyclopaedist – claimed that the wild flower Greater Celandine or Chelidon is called after the Greek word for a swallow because it flowers at the same time as the bird arrived in Europe. He also stated that the sap of Chelidon could be used for removing films from the cornea of the eye, which, according to Pliny, swallows themselves had discovered. This folk medicine is still in common usage in certain more traditional cultures and in homeopathic medicines. Another use of swallows is recounted by Pliny who tells of an enterprising friend of his:

“One Roman gentleman who was particularly fond of chariot racing would catch swallows from a nest at his country home and take them to the races in Rome. To give his friends advance results, he would paint the birds with the colour of the winning team and release them to fly back to their nest. Swallows were excellent carriers as their speed meant hey were rarely caught by predators.”

Well, it takes all sorts, doesn’t it? Another man who sought to use swallows in an unusual way was the French bird trainer Jean Desbouvrie who sought to train the birds for military communications. He even persuaded the French government in the latter part of the 19^th century to pay him to conduct a study of swallows for such a purpose. His early experiments did show that swallows could fly faster than pigeons and also managed to curb their migratory behaviour but he failed to follow up his initial experiments and his research withered away. An American science journal commented that:

“The idea of engaging swallows in war is a pretty one as, in future, all European wars will have to be conducted in ‘swallow time’ – when the warm winds blow from the sunny south.”

This same mad Frenchman, Desbouvrie, also claimed that he had invented the perfect cure for a hangover – chocolate made from an appropriate mixture of fat and albumen, to be taken one hour before alcohol consumption. He is not the most famous French inventor of all time.

Sailors traditionally believe that the sight of swallows is a good omen, probably because they indicate that land is near. The swallow is also a favourite tattoo for sailors, presumably from the mistaken belief that, if they were lost at sea, swallows would carry them to safety. Writer Arthur Ransome spent a summer in the 1920s teaching children of friends to sail on a boat called Swallow in the Lake District; this led to his memorable series of children’s books entitled Swallows and Amazons, which featured four children named John, Susan, Titty and Roger.

So back to my sole swallow. I shall call him Spit (after swallow or spit, which the cognoscenti among my readers will understand). I like to think that he is not only the harbinger of spring but also the harbinger of the summer aerobatics display that take place over my swimming pool each year. This is always the early evening show when up to twenty of the beauties, led by Spit of course, perform the most intricate and amazing dance, zipping at different angles into and over the pool in what seems an incredibly co-ordinated display. They are all travelling at twenty-five miles per hour, of course, but they never hit each other. What a sight it is! How magnificent the swooping parabolas, the loop the loops, the soaring, screamingly brilliant action! Spielberg couldn’t choreograph it, nor Fred Astaire, nor the Red Arrows. This is the swallow show – long may it continue.

BONEBREAKER

2011-04-06T07:08:00.000-07:00

Whenever in my childhood fantasies I dreamed I was in the French Foreign Legion, one of the things that always filled me with dread as I sweated my way across the unyielding desert with only that white neckerchief at the back of my kepi to keep the blazing sun off my neck was the thought of those vultures circling overhead– black, witch-like, spiky-shaped, prehistoric monsters, just waiting to pick at my flesh. Now I’m sure there are parts of the world where such creatures do behave in that way but the Lammergeier is not one of those.

Lammergeier sounds rather a cute name but it isn’t, as it’s a German construction meaning “lamb-hawk”, named so from the mistaken belief that these birds could and would and did snatch lambs (and children!). Silly Germans, and silly everyone else who bought into this myth! We now know that the Lammergeier is not a predator and is not the prey of any other creature, except those ignorant humans who still poison or shoot or trap these magnificent creatures.

So let’s start by giving this huge bird its more appropriate name - the Bearded Vulture, because of the tufts of black hair underneath its beak. It is truly a huge bird, bigger than a Golden Eagle even, with a wingspan of 10 feet (yes, that’s right, the same size as your largest fully-grown African male lion) and a body length of 3 to 4 feet. Unlike most other vultures, it is not a baldy-head but has yellowy white feathers over its head ad body. In flight it is silent but, my God, can it fly!

A number of Bearded Vultures were wing-tagged back in 1987 in the Pyrenees and it was found that on average each bird had a range of nearly 2,000 square miles that constituted its home range, while one bird had actually clocked up a range of over 4,000 square miles. It was not uncommon for a Bearded Vulture to fly up to 90 miles in a straight line.

However, magnificent as these flying exploits are, they are not the reason for the uniqueness of this large bird. The old name for the Bearded Vulture was Ossifrage, from the Latin and meaning “bone-breaker”, and it is this behaviour that makes it such an unusual bird. Bearded Vultures are scavengers, it is true, but they scavenge on the bones of dead animals. In fact, it is not uncommon for them to be sharing territory with other scavengers, such as Griffon Vultures, and to wait for their partners to strip clean the flesh from some dead lamb or goat or rabbit or suchlike and then descend to grab some bones. Thanks to their remarkable digestive system they can swallow bones whole in order to get at the delicious bone marrow inside them.

If a bone is too large for swallowing, then the Bearded Vulture has developed a unique strategy to solve this problem. Flying at a speed of 20-25 miles per hour, it will drop such bones from a height of anywhere from 60 to 4000 feet on to an “anvil” of flat rock below in order to break them. Then it swoops down to retrieve its precious material and takes it to some resting point to swallow it. It is particularly partial to the feet and legs of sheep and goats, which is presumably why it got its original reputation. It is also known to be partial to tortoises, which it will seize and drop from above in the same fashion in order to break the poor testudo’s carapace.

Bearded Vultures are common throughout Asia and Africa but are an endangered species in Europe, having been hunted and poisoned to near extinction over centuries. Thanks to imaginative conservation programmes, there are now around 100 pairs in the Pyrenees, 5-8 pairs in the Balkan mountains of Greece, 8 pairs in Corsica and 6 pairs in Crete. It is the latter population that has attracted me and sent me on a trek in north-west Crete on the Bearded Vulture Path climbing from the chestnut-festooned village of Elos up to the top of Agios Dikeos where there is what is known as a “vultures’ restaurant”, echoing the creation of similar supplementary feeding stations for the same species in the Pyrenees in the late 1980s. The best place to start is a bird information station in the tiny settlement of Rogdia a few miles from Elos, where you can read about the Bearded Vulture and watch a DVD of it and its cousin the Griffon Vulture, also prominent hereabouts but in much greater numbers. From there you can collect a leaflet about the path and about the shelter from which you can watch for the Bearded Vultures.

I hope that I have conveyed something of the magnificence and entrancement of this wonderful bird, especially since it has had a bad press historically. The King James Bible has this to say about it:

“And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the osprey.” (Leviticus 11:13)

A 17^th century text refers to it as “a despised eagle”. According to legend, Bearded Vultures used to take particular pleasure in searching for egg-seeking climbers on the crags, and knocking them off the ledges to plunge to their deaths. More recently two university students engaged in an analysis of Bearded Vulture pellets from a mountain in Spain discovered what they believed to be the bone of a human finger. Further investigation showed that the bird that had produced that pellet was a four-year old named Eva, one of those wing-tagged earlier, which had been seen frequently on a particular glacier at the top of the Pyrenean mountain of Aneto. An expedition to the top of Aneto did actually discover a frozen human body - but one that was 5,000 years old!

An even older legend claims that the Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed by a tortoise landing on his bald head, dropped by a Bearded Vulture partial to such a crusty meat pie and from a great height mistaking the dramatist’s head for a flat rock. In our own time, no doubt because he had heard of this story, a bald man had inserted into his insurance policy a clause protecting him against “death from a falling tortoise”. Aeschylus was, of course, the father of tragedy whose play The Persians tells us much about the war between the Athenians and the Persians, drawing no doubt on his own experience as a soldier at the formative battles of Marathon and Salamis, which did much to break the resolve of the Persian king Xerxes. It is only right, therefore, that he should not be remembered for his “death by tortoise” but for a memorable quotation (in translation) used by Bobby Kennedy on hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King:

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

Whether Aeschylus ever wrote of the Ossifrage, we cannot know, since only a little of his work is still extant. It is of no consolation for him to know that the cause of his untimely death was not some Persian wreaking revenge nor some giant man-eating creature of the skies but a harmless bird that made a simple mistake.

PING-PONG DIPLOMAT

2010-12-16T08:44:00.000-08:00

It’s not very often that you come upon someone who changed the world but in October 2002 I did, though I didn’t recognise him as such at first. Thanks to a British Council-sponsored headteacher trip to China the previous year, my wife had arranged a follow-up expedition for a party of twenty sports students from her school, Wood Green High School College of Sport in Wednesbury, accompanied by teachers and me, to visit schools and sporting facilities in Beijing. On one of our days we were taken to a brand spanking new international school where, as we were helping ourselves to orange juice, a smiling, balding sixty-year-old was introduced to us. He had been, we were told, a world champion table tennis player, he understood that we too had a ping-pong champion in our number and he offered to play him in an exhibition match.

Dan was sixteen or seventeen and he was a good player but being a champion in a small Black Country town and being world champion, even though it had been forty years or so previously, were not the same thing. The smiling Chinese player, still trim and still very fit, slipped off his jacket, caressed a few practice shots over the net and then play began. Dan admitted he was nervous and, although his opponent gifted him a few points, he was clearly and comprehensively outclassed. It was all done, however, in the nicest possible manner, with our new Chinese friend gracefully shaking Dan’s hand afterwards and congratulating him on his excellent play. And so we all had another drink of orange juice and made polite noises as part of the schmoozing that’s expected on such occasions.

Now what I know about table tennis can probably be written on the back of my hand. I know what the bat and ball look and feel like, I know that the magic number of points needed to win a game is twenty-one and I know that there are various grips of the bat that top players consider to be the best. But that’s about it. Oh, and I’d also heard of English player Desmond Douglas, because he had been one of those who gave Dan some coaching. I also knew that the Chinese were famous for producing world champion table tennis players, so it was no surprise to me that they were able to trot one out for our delectation. What I didn’t know, but what I was told me as we sipped our orange juice, was that this particular ping-ponger was Zhuang Zedong, world singles champion in 1961, 1963 and 1965 and the man who, largely unwittingly, initiated the thawing of Sino-American relationships and the birth of ping-pong diplomacy.

The story goes like this. In April 1971 Zhuang Zedong and his fellow Chinese ping-pongers were sitting on a bus about to take them back to their exclusive accommodation after their practice session for the World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan. Suddenly the bus halted, having been flagged down by a man with shoulder-length hair and a floppy hat who was late leaving his practice session and was seeking a lift back to his lodgings. The man, American table tennis player Glenn Cowan, clambered aboard only to find himself in the exclusive company of the inscrutable Chinese team who had been instructed not to pose for photographs, exchange flags or initiate conversation with Americans. In fact, Mao Tse-tung’s coaching guidance was: “Regard a Ping-Pong ball as the head of your capitalist enemy. Hit it with your socialist bat, and you have won the point for the fatherland.”

Against all protocol and against the wishes of his compatriots, Zhuang moved forward on the bus and through an interpreter began to make conversation with Cowan, believing that it was inhospitable not to do so. Then he decided to give the American a gift and reaching into his holdall he produced a silkscreen tapestry of the Huangshan Mountains (since 1990 a World Heritage Site). When they reached the athletes’ village, the two men were seen coming off the bus together smiling and that photograph flashed rapidly around the world, resulting in Zhuang getting a ticking off from the head of the Chinese delegation.

Back in Beijing , however, a different take on events was being had and shortly afterwards the USA Table Tennis team was invited on a visit to the People’s Republic of China. After the end of the championships nine American players, together with officials and journalists, stepped across the bridge from Hong Kong into mainland China, thus ending the information blockade that had existed since Mao had taken control of the vast country in 1949. Time magazine called the invitation “The ping heard round the world.” For six days their trip, playing table tennis, visiting the Great Wall and the Canton Ballet, talking to factory workers and students, was reported across the world, no more so than in America.

Why did Mao Tse-tung suddenly reverse the policy of the previous twenty-two years? Apart from the fact that politicians always do (see Stalin in the Second World War, for example), Mao was aware that relationships with China’s northern neighbour, the USSR, had not been as convivial as they might have been throughout the 1960s when hundreds of casualties had occurred through regular clashes on the 2,700 mile border that the two countries shared. He also wanted to steer China towards greater global significance by joining the United Nations. President “Tricky Dicky” Nixon, urged on by his Dr Strangelove of a Secretary of Sate, Henry Kissinger, was aware that establishing better links with China would prove a useful counter-balance to Russia. So the visit of the American team was the beginning of a softening in relations between the two countries. The twenty-year trade embargo against China was lifted during the visit and the following year Nixon and Kissinger themselves came on a diplomatic mission. Lo! Ping-pong diplomacy had been invented.

As for Zhuang, his contribution to the political thawing was recognised by his promotion to the Central Committee of the People’s Republic – the most powerful grouping in China. During the Cultural Revolution Zhuang became a close associate of Mao’s third wife Jiang Qing and was involved in some of the worst excesses of that period when the so-called Gang of Four called the shots, organising mass-denunciation sessions and disposing of rivals in the table tennis community. When the Gang of Four were arrested in 1976, so too was Zhuang who was imprisoned for four years before being sent into internal exile in Shanxi province but eventually he was reinstated and invited to coach top Chinese table tennis players.

I cannot claim that any of the great man’s stardust sprinkled itself on me. In fact, when I was told who he was, I only had the vaguest recall of the remarkable circumstances that had encircled him and had to read about it all much later. I cannot claim that I have taken any great lesson from this chance encounter, either, other than to confirm for me that human decency and hospitality cross international boundaries and always have done. I am also saddened by the fact that this man, who showed such sense in speaking to Cowan and unwittingly helping to establish international relationships between their two countries, was later responsible for some wicked behaviour in the days of the Cultural Revolution. Not all smiling balding elderly men can be trusted to have lived irreprehensible lives.

GONE FOR A BURTON

2010-12-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

Little did Meshe Osinsky know when he landed in Britain in 1900, aged fifteen with £100 in his pocket, that he would one day be responsible for kitting me out in my first suit. Moshe was a Lithuanian Jew from the Kaunas province, where now, thanks to first Russian and then German pogroms in the Second World War, there are hardly any Jews still living, whereas, when Moshe left, Jews made up 35% of the population. Moshe started his life in Britain, like many new migrants, selling trinkets door-to-door but he always had an intention to go into business and in 1904 he opened his first shop in Chesterfield. In 1905 he started buying ready-made suits to sell from his shop at a 30% mark-up and rapidly expanded his business to open other shops in Mansfield and Sheffield. After his marriage in 1909 he began to call himself Morris Burton and soon after moved the business to Leeds, the heart of Jewish textiles and tailoring, where he became successively Maurice Burton and then the much more impressive Montague Maurice Burton.

The number of Burton’s shops increased annually and his business was helped enormously by winning contracts to supply uniforms during the First World War. By 1919 there were forty shops, growing over the next ten years to over four hundred and becoming a recognisable feature of the High Street in most British towns and cities. A common feature of these shops was that they were frequently sited on the corner of two streets, giving opportunity for window displays on both streets; they also often had billiard halls or dancing schools in their upper premises, cleverly attracting new customers subliminally. Montague Burton’s aim was to provide cheap but decent clothing for ordinary menfolk, his catchphrase being “A five guinea suit for fifty-five shillings”.

In 1921 he began to develop his own factory at Hudson Road Mills in Leeds which, at its height, would employ 10,000 people turning out over 300,000 suits a week. Burton was unusual for his times in being a very enlightened employer, providing his employees with a pre-Welfare State health and pension scheme, the largest works canteen in the world, plus free dental, ophthalmic and chiropody services. He was knighted in 1931 for services to industrial relations and endowed Chairs in Industrial Relations at the universities of Cardiff, Leeds and Cambridge. A keen internationalist he also established Chairs in International Relations at Oxford, LSE and Edinburgh. When he died in 1952, Burton’s was the world’s largest multiple tailor.

I was eighteen when I purchased that first suit, a natty three-button dark grey number with nipped-in waist and trousers with turn-ups, almost certainly bought so that I could stun the university tutors who, though they did not know it then, were about to interview this exceptionally brilliant scholar with the man-about-town dress sense. I don’t believe I wore it more than a few times – at those university interviews at Cambridge and Durham, probably at my grandmother’s funeral and maybe at one or two weddings. Suits were things that people who worked in banks had to wear, those people who did not go to university but opted instead for the safe home circuit of work, Old Boys Club and masonic lodge and who would later get their revenge on those lucky few of us who wore jeans and sweatshirts by screwing up the banking system some three decades or so later.

I bought that suit from Burton the Tailor, off the peg but, because I was then of regulation size, it fitted me fine. I didn’t realise then that Burton’s were a few years later to be kitting out the triumphant England football team who won the 1966 World Cup (though I probably looked more like Nobby Stiles than the immaculate Bobby Moore) or that earlier Burton’s had been responsible for making uniforms for the troops during the Second World War and for the imaginative manufacture of demob suits for soldiers returning to civilian life after the war ended. Almost certainly my dad purchased one such suit in 1946. I was also completely unaware that I had literally “gone for a burton”. I knew the phrase, of course. How could I not, growing up as I and countless other post-war children did on the exploits of W.E. Johns’s Biggles and the derring-do of RAF pilots filling the pages of the Hotspur, the Victor and the Tiger? “Gone for a burton” meant kicked the bucket, bit the dust, gone belly-up, pushing up the daisies, in other words died. Most commonly this was used about pilots who did not return from missions.

Now there are various stories about where the phrase “gone for a burton” originated. There are some obscure claims linking it to two nautical terms – a burton being apparently a small tackle, formed by two blocks or pulleys, employed to tighten the shrouds of the top-masts, while a-burton is a means for stowing cargo from side to side on a ship. No one, as far as I can tell, however, has managed to explain why going for burton in either of the above senses could possibly refer to someone dying.

A one-time popular explanation linked the phrase to a pre-war advert for Burton’s beer in which a place at table was left vacant and the missing person was said to have “gone for a Burton”, i.e. gone to the pub for a drink rather than suffering another meal of cold pie and mash. Burton-on-Trent was the capital of brewing for many, many years, until British brewing was destroyed by its takeover by international companies such as Coors. Men like William Bass, Samuel Allsopp and William Worthington using the local water to brew strong beer that they could ship along the River Trent to Hull and thence to Danzig and St Petersberg on the Baltic coast. Later they developed India Pale Ale specifically for those Brits running the East India Company in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Burton Ale was originally brewed by Allsopp’s and later, after takeover, by Ind Coope but sadly, good as the above story is, there are no records of the aforesaid advert, so it is probably no more than an urban myth.

So we’re left with the most likely explanation, linking the phrase “gone for a burton” to Montague Burton’s chainstores. The demob suits, made by Burton’s, with which soldiers were kitted out on returning to civilian life have been put forward as having a possible connection but this is unlikely since the phrase was used mostly during the war, not after it. I’ve already mentioned the fact that Burton’s shops frequently had billiard halls or dance halls in the upper parts of their premises and during the war many of these were requisitioned so that RAF conscripts might take examinations such as Morse aptitude tests therein. Someone who failed such a test might, therefore, be said to have “gone for a burton” and this was later used ironically by RAF pilots about any of their number that failed to return from a mission.

Curiously enough the phrase “the full Monty” is now universally accepted as originating from Burton’s tailors, for workers at his Hudson Road factory have confirmed that it referred to a three-piece suit made and sold by Burton the Tailor. Old Meshe Osinsky would probably have known of these two slang usages and their links to his business empire, though I can find no reference to his having ever acknowledged this. And I should have known, when I went to select my first suit from his corner store in my home town, that I was not “going for a burton” nor was I seeking to purchase “the full Monty”. The latter was strictly for bankers and the former is what those self-same bankers, if they had any moral rectitude, should have done when they drove the world’s economies to their knees.

JUST SAY NO

2010-11-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

You may think that Nancy Reagan, the astrologer-consulting wife of former US president Ronald ‘The Gipper’ Reagan, was the first to come up with the simple refusenik cry of “Just say no” but of course you would be wrong. Though you have to admit, she did give it a whack forward into common currency when she used it in answer to a schoolgirl who asked her what she should say if she was offered drugs. Within months schools across the USA were racing each other to create their own “Just say no” clubs and the First Lady rode the wave of enthusiasm for her campaign by travelling across the states, by appearing on talk shows and in TV programmes, and by initiating an international crusade through inviting the First Ladies of thirty various nations to the White House. LaToya Jackson, of the infamous Jackson family, became the campaign’s spokesperson and recorded a song by Stock/Aitken/Waterman entitled Just Say No. In the UK the popular children’s TV series Grange Hill ran a heroin-addiction storyline and its cast recorded a rap version of the same song. The cast were subsequently invited to perform the song in America in front of Nancy Reagan; ironically one of the teenage actors later alleged that they were all high on drugs throughout their stateside visit.

Google will give you over 800,000,000 results for ‘Just say no’. Take your pick from naysaying Microsoft, aging, warrantless GPS tracking, fat talk, Smarties, sunscreen nanophobia, food deserts, retribution, democracy, stupid meetings, sharia law, dirty gold, botox, drinking tap water, shorts and heels, faith schools, and Silvio Berlusconi. (Refusing the last of these is, I admit, notoriously difficult, as any number of jewellery-encrusted Italian nymphettes will happily testify). Saying no has become the panacea for all of today’s ills and it fits the zeitgeist of our austerity-driven times because it costs nothing. All you have to do is open your trap, purse your lips and utter the magic word “No”.

I’m sure it must have been used many times throughout history but the instance of saying no that has had most resonance in the twentieth century is not as uttered by Nancy Reagan but by Ioannis Metaxas. The latter was the stiff-upper-lipped, right-wing, Hitler-admiring General who had been deported from Britain during the First World War because of his Germanic tendencies but in 1940 was Prime Minister/Dictator of Greece. With the support of the Greek King George II, Metaxas had declared a state of National Emergency in 1936, abolished all political opposition and created a National Youth Organisation modelled on the Hitler Youth. The Athens police headquarters proudly displayed pictures of Goebbels and Hitler; Mein Kampf was widely read in government circles; and the straight-armed Nazi salute was used by officials, the military and the police to greet Metaxas wherever he went. Hitler and Mussolini could not have wished for a man who appeared any more sympathetic to their dreams that General Ioannis Metaxas.

But it was Metaxas who famously uttered the Greek word “oxi”, meaning “no”, when Il Duce, the great Italian leader whose chief claim to fame (and a disputed one at that) is that he made the trains run on time in his home country, demanded that he must allow the Italian army to occupy Greece for the duration of the conflict with Great Britain. That is the official story and that is what causes Greeks across the world to down tools and celebrate Oxi Day on 28^th October every year with parades and flag-waving and parties. But why would this fascist dictator, this Metaxas, refuse the demands of another fascist dictator, that Mussolini, when clearly their world view as so similar? We need to look at the full story of what led up to the confrontation on October 28^th 1940 between General Metaxas and the Italian Ambassador, Emanuele Grazzi.

Benito Mussolini was envious of the power of Adolf Hitler and of the speed with which the latter had invaded and occupied the countries of northern Europe. Seeking some emulation, Mussolini had already invaded and occupied Abyssinia and Albania and now he thought to add Greece to his sphere of control. Infuriated by the German occupation of Rumania, which had happened without his knowledge, Mussolini decided to take Greece in a similar tit-for-tat way, marshalling his troops on the Greek border and then sending Hitler a telegram on October 28^th to announce the invasion. At the same time coded telegrams were sent from Rome to Ambassador Grazzi, partying in the Italian Embassy after attending a performance by the Opera House of Rome of Madame Butterfly in Athens, instructing him to personally deliver a written ultimatum to Metaxas, demanding that he allow the Italian army to enter his country or Greece would be attacked.

Grazzi was taken to Metaxas’s private home in an exclusive part of Athens and, arriving there just before 3.00 am, asked for the Greek dictator to be wakened. Metaxas, who had been half-expecting the Italian threat, donned a pair of slippers and a dark dressing gown and received Grazzi at the door himself, before taking him into a small ground-floor room. There Grazzi gave Metaxas the document which accused Greece of collaborating with Britain and demanded the free passage into Greece of Italian troops stationed on the Greek-Albanian border and their right to garrison those troops wherever in the country they saw fit. The document left no way out for Metaxas; either he accepted or Greece would be attacked at 6.00 am that morning. What Mussolini had not counted on was the irritation of a man wakened in the middle of the night with this non-negotiable demand and the extreme Greek nationalism of Metaxas himself. His reply was swift and to the point:

I could not set my house in order – much less surrender my country – in three hours. The answer is no.

What a champion! Mussolini had not calculated on encountering another dictator like himself, and one who had probably more national pride than Il Duce, who saw himself as a world figure rather than a mere Italian one. At 6.00 am the Italian troops began to enter Greece but their advance was slowed by bad weather and the rapidly-mobilized Greek army. By the middle of November the Greek army, half as big as the Italian one, had driven the Italians back into Albania and kept on driving. Metaxas’s oxi had inspired the Greeks and the Italian army was no match for them. By April Hitler realised that the Italians were staring at a massive defeat so he sent his own German troops to attack Greece and, after five weeks of war, his army was triumphant. Those five weeks, however, coupled with the subsequent weeks it took his troops to conquer Crete, cost Hitler vital time in his Barbarossa plan to invade and capture Russia. Greece could truly say that its courageous resistance to the Axis troops proved a significant turning point in the eventual outcome of the Second World War. Churchill famously said:

Until now we used to say that Greeks fight like heroes. Now we shall say heroes fight like Greeks.

General Metaxas didn’t live to see the German invasion of Greece. He died in January 1941 but his refusal to bow down to the totalitarian demands of his neighbour, his oxi, inspires Greeks to this day. And I kind of like someone who stands out from what is expected because he believes something to be the right thing to do. Raise a glass of metaxa to him!

A GORDON FOR ME

2010-11-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

A Gordon for me, a Gordon for me,

If ye’re no a Gordon, ye’re no use to me.

The Black Watch are braw, the Seaforths and a’

But the cocky wee Gordon’s the pride of them a’.

As I was growing up, my mother could frequently be heard singing this chorus of the song of the same title, written by Scottish music hall artist Robert Wilson, while she went about her baking in the back kitchen. Since my middle name is Gordon and she had bequeathed it to me, I always sort of assumed that the attraction in the song was its association with her first-born. I was aware too that, whenever in my childhood we visited my grandparents in Aberdeen, there was a great family pride in the Gordon Highlanders, which I assumed was because my grandmother’s maiden name was Gordon and why I had this middle moniker. The green and blue Gordon tartan was prominent in both my grandparents’ house and in ours – on rugs, napkins, tablecloths, cushion covers and so forth.

When my mother was in her eighties, however, after I had returned from a trip to the World War 1 battlefields of France where I had serendipitously purchased a book listing soldiers from the Gordon Highlanders who had died there, she presented me with a framed photograph of William Gordon, my great-uncle who had breathed his last in that sad conflict, together with a bronze memorial plaque and two photographs of his grave in Grevillers British Cemetery. Until then, I hadn’t even known of his existence. My family has never been very good at dealing with death, preferring to get on with living and carry the memories silently inside our heads. Being introduced to a long-dead blood relative at this point in my life was something of a shock. I looked at his photograph and saw the turned-up-at-the-end family nose and the twinkling eyes and how they all melted in a smile. Then I put the memorials to one side, intending to do I knew not what with them later.

Ten years ago I got interested again in William Gordon and did some searching via the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Gordon Highlanders Museum. The Gordon Highlanders were first raised in 1794 by the 4^th Duke of Gordon assisted by his wife, the Duchess Jean, who rode to country fairs in the north-east of Scotland in regimental outfit and with a golden guinea between her lips offering a kiss to any man who would take the king’s shilling. By tradition the Drums and Pipes of the Gordons preceded them into battle and the regiment’s motto was “Bydand”, believed to be a corruption of the Scots phrase “Bide and Fecht” meaning to stand and fight.

William enlisted with the Gordon Highlanders in Peterhead, probably around the year my mother was born, but his service record is missing, like those of very many World War 1 veterans whose records were destroyed by German bombing in 1940. What we do know is that he served in the 4^th Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders, one of the nine Gordon battalions that served on the Western Front throughout the conflict. By the end of the war in 1918 the Gordons had suffered over 29,000 casualties out of a 50,000 total force and 9,000 deaths. The scale of slaughter in World War 1 is still almost impossible to conceive.

In March of 1918 the German army launched its spring offensive, that was to turn out to be their final, and futile, attempt to bring the war to a conclusion. The German plan was to break though the front lines of the Allied forces with their specially-trained stormtrooper forces to aim for supply lines and artillery units in the rear, leaving those left at the front line to be mopped up by support units. The attack was launched on Thursday 21^st March with a huge bombardment beginning at 4.40 am and aimed at targets over one hundred and fifty miles. More than 1,000,000 shells were fired in five hours. By the end of the day 20,000 British soldiers had died and 35,000 had been wounded.

One of these was my great uncle, William Gordon. The 4^th Gordons were stationed near the village of Boursies, south of the Cambrai Road, in advance of the rest of their division but were not attacked directly by the stormtrooper brigades. Their trenches, however, were under constant attack from gas shells. The citation states that he died that day of wounds, presumably inflicted in the early stages of the battle from the tremendous bombardment and before the main attack began but there is no way of knowing exactly. It is likely that he was taken back from the front line for treatment but there is no record or diary from that time and place. Wilfred Owen, who also would not live to see the end of the war in November of that same year, wrote a poem entitled Spring Offensive which ends with his query about those who survived the offensive: Why speak they not of comrades that went under?

I feel like that too. Why did my mother never tell me about William Gordon? When I pressed her, she said my grandmother, who was twenty-eight and the mother of two young children at the time of his death, had never been the same after her brother’s death. The citation from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission states that William was the husband of H. Duncan (formerly Gordon) of Winnipeg in Canada. Who was she? Did she remarry? Is that why she was ‘formerly Gordon’? Or did she revert to her maiden name? And what was she doing in Canada? There are 117 phone numbers for Duncans in Winnipeg and I have no idea whether any of them might be related. And what of it anyway? Why chase this old hare any longer?

My great-uncle William Gordon was of the same stock as me. Aged just thirty he was cut down in the fields of France and buried in Grevillers British Cemetery, a few miles from where he died. The cemetery was used by the British and Commonwealth troops until March 1918 when it was lost to the German offensive and not used again until September when it was recaptured and 200 graves from the battlefield were brought within its bounds. I guess William Gordon was in one of those graves. The cemetery now holds 2,000 graves. The utter stupidity of the Great War (and of all others) and the sheer incompetence of the politicians and generals who prosecuted it can never be comprehended. The closest I can come to a vision of William Gordon’s dieing moments is in the final verse of Wilfred Owen’s wonderful Dulce et Decorum Est:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Rest in peace, William – my cocky wee Gordon.

TEA FOR SAD PEOPLE

2010-11-16T03:54:00.000-08:00

On 1^st August 2000 I was sitting in the Bakowo Sokylina restaurant in Zakopane in the Tatras region of southern Poland, drinking Tea for Sad People with Henryk Gorecki. Gorecki spoke no English and I spoke no Polish so he was telling me in broken French a story about a young female Russian courier who was raped by three Polish soldiers and then murdered and her body thrown into a well. When these soldiers were sitting drinking at a bar, they started boasting about what they had done and were overheard by a waitress so, despite the fact that she was heavily pregnant, they murdered her too.

“So,” said Gorecki, finishing his story. “Which is the worst nation?”

My wife and I were there because, six months earlier, John Gorman, formerly of Scaffold, had played me Gorecki’s haunting Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, had shown me the notes on the CD cover about the graffito from a prison wall (Mother, do not weep / Most chaste Queen of Heaven / Support me always / Ave Maria) that had inspired the Second Movement and had suggested we write a play about the girl who wrote it. The graffito had been scratched on the wall of a cell in The Palace, the Gestapo’s Zakopane headquarters, by an eighteen-year-old girl called Helena Blazusiakowna. Gorecki had seen a photograph of that wall in a book and had become fascinated by the girl’s extraordinary courage and calmness in the face of adversity. Earlier he had told us how he had searched without success for twenty years to find out what had happened to Helena. Through diligent searching and much good fortune I had discovered her.

Helena Blazusiakowna did not die in The Palace or in Auschwitz, where the train she was placed on out of Zakopane on 22^nd November 1944 was almost certainly heading. That train was ambushed and stopped by Polish partisans of the Home Army who told Helena and her compatriots to jump out of the carriage and run. She escaped from the Gestapo, walked through the night to the town of Nowy Targ where she boarded a truck that took her to her hometown of Szczawnika and subsequent hospitalization until the end of the war. Later she married and bore five children and worked as an Economics Manager in Wadowice for over thirty years. Helena Blazusiakowna had died one year before our visit. Her written testimony about the German occupation and its effects on her were given to Dr Galica, the keeper of the Archives of the Museum of War and Martyrology, once housed in The Palace museum in Zakopane, by her daughter Bogumila who still lives in Szczawnika. It is this testimony, sent to me in early July in response to enquiries I had made about Helena, that had shaped our visit to Poland.

We had collected Gorecki from his home in Zab on the instructions of Dr Galica and he was enormously grateful that my research had unearthed the real Helena. He had often wondered, he said, whether she had not wanted to be found in case it exposed her to unwanted fame. Tea for Sad People is actually tea infused with vodka and by the end of the evening we were drinking Tea for Very Very Sad People, whose strength you can probably guess. Henryk Gorecki, in his red Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt and green trousers, insisted on paying for everything and we returned from Poland feeling hugely privileged to have met this man.

Our play, Lena, was performed at the Theatre on the Steps in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, in March 2001 and was attended by the President of the Federation of Poles in Britain who arranged for it to be performed at the Polish Festival in Bletchley Park some weeks later. The spirit of the composer loomed large in both productions, my meeting with him a critical point in the development of what was later written. I was saddened to read of his recent death, announced on 12^th November 2010, and raise a glass of Tea for Sad People to his memory.

THE TORRENS

2010-11-08T04:37:00.000-08:00

One of the few possessions of my mother that I wanted to cling on to after her death was a painting, or rather a reproduction of a painting, of a sailing ship called The Torrens. I don’t know the provenance of the reproduction and I am sure it is practically worthless but for me it has a curious significance. The Torrens was built in the Deptford shipyard of James Laing, one of Sunderland’s longest-established shipbuilders, and launched there in 1875. The bottle-smashing was done by Flores Angel, daughter of the ship’s first Master and part-owner Henry Robert Angel, appropriately since the figurehead of The Torrens was a model of the girl, delicately carved by the sculptor Joseph Melvin. For the next twenty-eight years the ship sailed between Plymouth and Adelaide, on one occasion establishing a record for that journey of sixty-four days, including a remarkable passage of 336 miles in twenty-four hours. The cargo on the outward journey was human, both paying passengers and those taking an assisted passage to settle in Australia; the return cargo was largely wool, although it also took some passengers. The Torrens was the last fully-rigged passenger clipper ever built, for the golden age of sail was coming to an end with the development of steam power. The picture I stare at shows the majesty, the grace and the beauty of the ship with its sails billowing in the breeze.

As my wife will be only too quick to tell you, I am not a sailor and have no wish to be, not because I suffer from mal de mer but rather because of my well-attested inability to understand and operate equipment with curious nomenclature. If I illustrate with the term “bluetooth” as used to describe a device that enables people to communicate telephonically without a telephone, I think you will understand why I can’t be doing with terms like “starboard” and “red duster”. Furthermore, I am no philistine and can readily admit to the splendour of sailing ships like The Torrens. My interest, however, stems from the reason why my mother had this painting in the first place, which is because her grandfather, my great-grandfather, William Gordon, was ship’s carpenter on The Torrens for some time. William Gordon was the last member of my maternal family to have a close association with the sea, an association that had inevitably, given their homelands in the Aberdeen and Peterhead areas of north-east Scotland, led many into trades in or linked to maritime affairs. My mother used to speak fondly of the stories he used to tell her of those voyages and of the places he travelled to.

On two of my great-grandfather’s voyages on The Torrens between 1891 and 1893, the first mate was Josef Korzeniowski, who some time earlier had anglicized his name to Joseph Conrad but who at that point had not published any work at all. This is not the place to detail Conrad’s extraordinary life up to this time. Suffice it to say that, after deciding on a life at sea he had travelled extensively, had been involved in gun-running, smuggling, gambling and had attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest before he decided to put his career on a proper footing by acquiring the relevant qualifications that would lead him eventually to gaining his Master’s ticket in the British Merchant Service in 1886 as Joseph Conrad. In the years preceding his time on The Torrens he had served on a number of ships, including a spell as captain of one but work appropriate to his newly-acquired Master’s status was not easy to find which is why he took the lesser role of first mate. Besides, he had now developed other plans and the initial chapters of his first novel Almayer’s Folly had already been written. Joseph Conrad ceased his seagoing career on returning from his second trip to Adelaide and back, though my great-grandfather continued to serve.

Conrad was clearly fond of The Torrens which he described thus:

A ship of brilliant qualities - the way the ship had of letting big seas slip under her did one’s heart good to watch. It resembled so much an exhibition of intelligent grace and unerring skill that it could fascinate even the least seamanlike of our passengers.

It appears to have been an exceptional ship, not only in its record-breaking exploits but also in its remarkable good fortune, at least in its first fifteen years when Captain Angel retained its command. It was known as a lucky ship, an oft-cited example telling of how, on discovering that it was out of lamp-oil in the English Channel, it came upon a floating barrel that, when hauled aboard, did indeed contain oil. Under its second Master, Captain Cope, it was not so lucky, sustaining severe damage to two of its masts on his first voyage in command and then catching fire while being repaired in Brazil. Cope’s command was short-lived but his successor, Captain Falkland Angel, son of its first Master, was no more fortunate, the ship hitting an iceberg and becoming partially dismasted again. On his next voyage returning from Australia with a cargo of Boer War explosives The Torrens collided with another boat in the Thames while being towed. (Plenty work for a ship’s carpenter there, methinks). Soon after the ship was sold to Italian owners but was finally put out of her misery and scrapped in 1910.

I used to fantasise, when staring at my picture, that my great-grandfather was used as a model by Conrad for one of his characters in Almayer’s Folly for we know that he had written several chapters of his novel by the time of its 1893 voyage and indeed showed them to a passenger he had befriended on board named William Jacques. From Jacques he received his first literary criticism, as Conrad himself later described:

“Well, what do you say?” I asked at last. “Is it worth finishing?” This question expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts.

“Distinctly,” he answered, in his sedate, veiled voice, and then coughed a little.

“Were you interested?” I inquired further, almost in a whisper.

“Very much!”

Jacques was the first person to whom Conrad had ever shown his writing and this curiously-terse interchange seems to have encouraged him. On the return journey The Torrens picked up John Galsworthy in Adelaide and, in the space of the journey between there and Cape Town, the two became firm friends, an association that was to continue throughout their lives. Galsworthy later claimed that it was his meeting with Conrad that convinced him to give up his law studies in order to concentrate on writing. It is almost certain that Galsworthy too read the draft of Almayer’s Folly and probably gave more fulsome praise.

I have also read the book and I have to say, even with the most rose-tinted and prejudiced of glasses, I can see no character that might possibly have possessed any of my great-grandfather’s characteristics. Although there are ship’s carpenters in other Conrad novels, I do not think it is worthwhile to seek to identify any of them with William Gordon. It is a silly fantasy anyway and I should know, for all my fictional characters stem from my mind not directly from my vision. I am also acutely aware that Conrad’s reputation is not as secure as it perhaps once was. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe for one thinks that his novels and short stories are riddled with racist attitudes and that Conrad’s most well-known work Heart of Darkness demonstrates this implicit racism in its belief that Africa is the dark continent. Achebe calls the novel “an offensive and deplorable book”. So maybe I don’t really want my great-grandfather’s image to be mixed up in the potpourri of characters that Conrad created. Maybe I should just be satisfied to know that he sailed on one of the fastest and most magnificent ships of his day, that purely by coincidence one of those officers above him was Joseph Conrad, and that his tales warmed my mother’s heart and helped to make her the teller of stories that she was. And that I hope I am too.

EMIL AND THE DECEPTIVES

2010-10-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

You may well think, and there are times when I would probably agree with you, that there must be a streak of madness running through my veins to take up long-distance walking in my sixties. I can only plead Emil Zatopek, the Czech athlete whose achievements dominated the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, when he won the 10,000 metres, the 5,000 metres and, most remarkably for he had never run the distance before, the marathon, all in new Olympic records. Three years afterwards I bought Zatopek the Marathon Runner by Czech writer Frantisek Kozik and discovered that what I had previously believed to be true about human talent was not all there was to it, for the great Emil became an athlete almost by accident and certainly with reluctance. What he brought to his sport, however, was the sort of dedication to training hitherto never witnessed and it was the whole idea of training that infected my fifteen-year-old self, who had never excelled at any sport despite spending most of my spare time indulging in football, cricket, tennis, fives and badminton. I had put my inability to make it into any school team down to my innate lack of talent but Zatopek’s book spurred me to believe that, if I were to start training, I could become a runner.

Cue the cross-country trials of the new academic year at school and who should finish an unexpected third therein? Yes, none other than yours truly and all down to the fact that two or three times a week of the summer holidays I had donned tee-shirt, shorts and pumps to pound round the roads near to where I lived. From then on, I was a fixture in the school cross-country team for the next two years and even for the Durham Colleges team in my first two years at university. As I progressed, so did my kit, with runner’s vest, nifty lightweight shorts and black leather running shoes replacing the casual PE kit of my summer road-thudding. Needless to say, regular training remained a feature of my preparations, although I never became so obsessed with it that I would push myself to my limits in order to seek to come first in races. I was satisfied to discover that my training made me fit and strong enough to become an accepted regular member of the team. Who needs to be a winner?

Ten years ago I was suffering from discomfort in my left knee and was told by the doctor that I needed to cease swimming and take up cycling instead. This diagnosis took all of thirty seconds and, so unconvinced was I by the offhandedness of it and of him, I sought a second opinion and betook myself to the physiotherapist then attached to Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club. If anyone knew anything about dodgy knees I thought, this would be the right person. Sharon looked the business in her three-quarter length bri-nylon white coat and, after I had been made to suffer the indignity of doffing my trousers and revealing my less than fashionable M&S briefs, she set about feeling around in my knee to ascertain the problem. This took some time, as I recall, but then, having satisfied herself that she knew where the source of the pain lay, she attached me to some electrical apparatus that hummed quietly and caused a warm glow in the said knee. Afterwards Sharon gave me a set of exercises I needed to do daily after I had warmed up by doing fifteen minutes on an exercise bike!

This visitation lasted an hour and cost me £35. In vain did I protest to Sharon that I didn’t have an exercise bike and I couldn’t really justify the expense of one. “Look in the small ads of the local paper,” she told me. “People are always buying them after Christmas to lose weight and then selling them a few months later when they realise they don’t use them.”

That’s what took me to the wilder depths of the Black Country and Leanne’s mum who told me that Leanne had done exactly that and now was happy for the £20 I offered. A few weeks later, knee duly repaired, I came up with the daft idea of walking round the canals of the Black Country, got John Gorman, ex-Scaffold and ex-Tiswas, to agree to accompany me and set about planning a route. In April of the millennium year we did it – five days of roughly ten miles per day tramping round the canals, meeting up with the locals, sampling the beer and curry, visiting statues and museums and suchlike.

Buoyed by the success of that expedition and convinced that I was now virtually back to the fitness levels of my youth, I determined to seek tougher walking challenges for as long as I was able. So, every year since then I have completed a long-distance walk – along the banks of the River Severn from source to sea, along the Offa’s Dyke Path, in the footsteps of the Roman soldiers along Hadrian’s Wall, and across the neck of England on Wainwright’s Coast to Coast route. I then set about creating my own long-distance walks, around Shropshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire.

The habit of walking for pleasure I learned in my adolescence when I was in the scouts and, in order to gain a particular badge, I had to complete a hike with a pal from my platoon and keep a log of my journey. Scouting brought other hiking opportunities too so, when I became a teacher, it seemed natural to offer hiking trips to the adolescents in my charge and that was to continue for the best part of twenty years. In the middle of that time, however, I was invited to join some fellow-teachers and a group of fifteen-year-old boys on a 35-mile walk known as ‘The Six Shropshire Summits’, to be completed in one day. I think it must have been eight or nine times that I completed this gruelling trek, the last occasion in my fortieth year when I believed I ought to cease such strenuous activity for fear of causing myself some fearful injury. Walking became a much more casual occupation over the following twenty years, until my knee problem came to light.

The great Emil Zatopek died after a long illness in 2000. Even he couldn’t outwit the Grim Reaper, however much he trained, however many intermediary sprints he undertook, however many miles he pounded. So am I deceiving myself into believing that I can still achieve physical feats of endurance by engaging in a few preparatory walks before I set out? Am I deceiving myself in thinking that an aging body can continue indefinitely to engage in these long-distance walks? At what point will my doctor call me in and say, “Bob, you’ve just got to stop all this gallivanting about. Your body won’t take it much longer. Besides, if every pensioner in town starts doing what you’re doing, I won’t have as many patients. Give me a break. I’ve got a mortgage to pay.”

So maybe I should slow down a little and recognise reality. Maybe I should start doing what senior citizens are meant to do and shuffle off to my nearest Wetherspoons and sip on a pint of beer for several hours or pad gently on to the local bowling green or sit on a park bench eating liquorice allsorts. But then I think of Wordsworth averaging twenty miles walking a day right up till his death at the age of eighty and I say, “Bugger it. I’m enjoying all this.”

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

2010-10-15T06:08:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Breslin retired in 2004 after a lifetime as a New York investigative journalist. His journalism took him into some unusual situations – being beaten up by a Mafia mobster who objected to an article he had written, standing as an independent alongside Norman Mailer for election to New York City Council, and being the recipient of letters from the murderer known as “Son of Sam”. A colourful life, certainly, but what he will chiefly be remembered or by posterity, I suspect, is this piece of his writing from the time of the Nixon impeachment process:

All political power is primarily an illusion…. Illusion. Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors, first a thin veil of blue smoke, then a thick cloud that suddenly dissolves into wisps of blue smoke, the mirrors catching it all, bouncing it back and forth.

It is from that thought-provoking piece of journalism that the phrase smoke and mirrors derives. Used to describe fraudulent, insubstantial or deceptive explanations, such as used by Tricky Dicky Nixon himself at the time of the Watergate scandal, the phrase probably owes its origin to the illusions created by magicians who make objects appear or disappear by using retracting and extending mirrors and create a distracting puff of smoke using flash powder.

The phrase has echoes, however, from more distant times. The Latin poet Horace coined the phrase pulvis et umbra sumus (we are dust and shadow), when warning of the brevity of life and cautioning against a belief in immortality of any kind – Horace, of course, was also the poet who coined the phrase carpe diem (seize the day). Horace knew of the impermanence of everything for, having fought on the wrong side after Julius Caesar’s assassination, all his family’s land and property were seized. Fortunately for him, after Augustus declared an amnesty, Horace was granted a post in the Roman treasury and later was given a villa in the Sabine Hills by the patron of the arts Maecenas.

Another Latin phrase that I believe owes its origins to Horace is to be seen on the lintel of an old stone gateway in the Cretan village of Argyroupolis built on the ruins of the even older city of Lappa. The gateway used to be the main entrance to the tower of the powerful Venetian lord Francesco Da Molin, the ninety-ninth Doge of Venice, who was engaged in prolonged warfare over Crete with the Ottoman Empire. The sign on the lintel reads omnia mundi fumus et umbra (all the world is smoke and shadow). The story of why this is written above the gateway is told on a sign attached to the stone gatepost.

The story concerns George Kantanoleon, the leader of a large number of Western Crete families that had rebelled against the control of the Venetians who at that time in the sixteenth century occupied the whole of the island. In order to reach a satisfactory reconciliation with the Venetians, who had withdrawn into the city of Chania, George proposed a marriage between his son Petros and Sofia the daughter of Francesco Da Molin. A traditional Cretan wedding then took place in Argyoupolis with much drinking and no doubt firing of pistols but, while all the guests were partying the night away, a force of two thousand Venetian soldiers surrounded the place. George and Petros Kantanoleon were arrested and hanged on the spot along with thirty other Cretan chiefs. The rest of the three hundred prisoners were split into four groups and marched away. One group was taken to be hanged on the gates of Chania, another group was hanged at the Kantanoleon family village of Koutsogerako, a third group was hanged on the road from Chania to Rethymnon and the fourth group was treated likewise at Meskla, where George had established his rebel government. The inscription was placed by Da Molin above the gate to his tower as a warning to future generations.

Now, here’s the smoke and mirrors bit of that nasty tale for there is another village in Western Crete which claims the same story occurred within its precincts. It is called Alikianos and its environs do contain the ruins of what was once a Venetian castle inhabited by the same Francesco Da Molin. Some guidebooks inform you that this castle once had a lintel on which was inscribed omnia mundi fumus et umbra but there is no evidence of this.

The Kantanoleon marriage story has gone down in Cretan mythology, largely due to a book entitled The Cretan Weddings by a Cretan writer and historian, Zambelios. Venetian sources confirm that some such event did take place, although inevitably the story varies depending on who is telling it and none of them state precisely where this wedding took place. There is a famous paradox introduced by a Cretan philosopher called Epimenides who stated “All Cretans are liars”; the problem is, of course, that Epimenides is a Cretan and therefore his statement itself is probably a lie. Smoke and mirrors? Smoke and shadow? Dust and shadow?

The choice, dear reader, is yours.

BEHIND EVERY GREAT PLANT

2010-10-11T02:44:00.000-07:00

In 1768 two voyagers from a ship named L’Etoile, part of the first French expedition sent by King Louis XV of France to circumnavigate the world, stepped ashore in Brazil to explore and came across a gorgeous climbing shrub with violet flowers. The pair collected samples of this plant and took them back on board, no doubt exhibiting them to the captain of the expedition. The two people who discovered this beautiful plant were called Philibert Commerson, the king’s botanist, and his young assistant, Bonnefoy (or Baret). The captain of the expedition was Louis Antoine de Bougainville, after whom the plant was immediately named bougainvillea.

The bougainvillea is actually a species of vine, which grows rapidly to heights of anything up to twelve metres and develops a thick woody stem with hooked thorns. Its flowers are actually small and white but every triplet of flowers is surrounded by much larger gaudily-coloured bracts of purple, crimson, pink, orange, white or yellow from the three hundred plus varieties now seen across the world, particularly in warm climates. The plant was introduced into Europe in the early 18th century and nurseries in France and England were soon propagating specimens for sending to Australia and elsewhere. Kew Gardens, in particular, did a roaring trade in distributing bougainvillea plants to all suitably hot parts of the British Empire. The countries of the Mediterranean would not look the same without their magnificent displays of bougainvillea, brightening up even the dullest and scruffiest corner throughout the year.

The story so far seems quite straightforward and so it might have remained had not de Bougainville’s voyage taken him and his two ships to Tahiti in April 1768. When they stepped ashore, the sex-starved French sailors could not believe their luck to discover that the Tahitian women were more than ready to share their favours with them. Illustrations from the time typically show naked Tahitian women swimming out to welcome passing sailors and de Bougainville helped to inspire the notion of these islanders as being “noble savages” – a notion that would subsequently attract the painter Gauguin to these same islands. However, when Commerson and his young assistant Bonnefoy stepped ashore to explore, they were set upon by young male Tahitians with shouts of vahine, vahine (woman, woman). Bonnefoy retreated back on board and immediately confessed all to de Bougainville, who described the encounter thus:

With tears in her eyes Baret acknowledged that she was a girl, that she had misled her master (Commerson) by dressing in men’s clothes, that she was an orphan from Burgundy, that a lawsuit had reduced her to poverty, and that news of a voyage around the world had piqued her interest. I considered her case unique and admired her courage and wisdom. I took measures to ensure nothing unpleasant happened to her. The royal court, I believe, will forgive this infringement of the rules. She was neither plain nor pretty and hardly 25 years old.

Her real name was Jeanne Barè and she had been taken on as his valet by Commerson at Brest. Allegedly some of the sailors on board the two ships had had their suspicions before the landing at Tahiti. They had expressed curiosity at this ‘boy’ who grew no beard, who was never seen washing, and never removed his voluminous clothing. But it was the ‘noble savages’ of Tahiti who sniffed her out, by what means we can only guess but it appears that, while their women were granting sexual favours to the male French sailors, these Tahitian men were hoping that Jeanne Barè would reciprocate.

Some later writers suspect that Commerson knew of her gender all along and that she was his mistress. Certainly Commerson and Jeanne Barè disembarked from the expedition when it reached the French colony of Mauritius, where Commerson named a newly-discovered plant baretia after her, because it had ambiguous sexual characteristics. Commerson, however, maintained that he had not known of her gender before the Tahitian revelation (well, he would, wouldn't he?), describing Jeanne as:

A valiant young woman who, adopting the dress and temperament of a man, had the curiosity and audacity to traverse the whole world by land and sea, accompanying us without ourselves knowing anything.

Little more is known of them, other than that at some point after Commerson’s death in 1773 Jeanne returned to France and married a soldier. In 1785, now widowed and living quietly in the Burgundy countryside as Madame Dubernat, she was awarded a government pension, presumably at the behest of de Bougainville, who had recognised her talents as a botanist. In the 20th century she was reclaimed as a feminist archetype – the first woman to sail around the world no less and a woman who demonstrated that she could do anything that a man could do, venturing alongside Commerson into hostile territories to explore and liberate specimens of plants previously unknown to Europeans.

I love bougainvilleas. I have always loved the sound of the word – those seductive French vowel sounds and those soft consonants – and those wonderfully-blousy plants with their in-your-face bright hues have for a long time spoken to me of warm climes. And now we have several clambering up to heaven in our Cretan garden and thrusting their purple, pink and red florets over our balcony. They now provide me, however, with a new and additional reason for loving them, the remarkable story of Jeanne Barè who accompanied Philibert Commerson into the jungles of Brazil to discover them and begin their transatlantic voyage. Behind every great plant……

BILLY GOAT GRUFF

2010-08-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

Personally I blame Ptolemy. That might seem a tad unfair because, if it hadn’t been him, it no doubt would have been someone else shortly after. But it was his tabulation of the zodiacal signs that created the opportunity for two thousand years of charlatans in every race to conspire to convince the foolish-minded that their characters, their love lives, their fortunes and their health could be determined by the day they were born. Ptolemy did not, of course, invent astrology; it is generally agreed nowadays that the Babylonians of the third millennium before Christ were the first people to believe that interpretation of the behaviour of celestial bodies could help them predict outcomes in their daily lives. So, for example, if the new moon appeared in a cloudy sky and there was subsequently heavy rain or the woman of the house became pregnant, it would be perceived that there was a connection and a later similar phenomenon in the heavens would be deemed to be equally fortunate. But it was the Egyptian brainbox Ptolemy who, in the second century AD, collected all the ancient writings about astrology from the Babylonians and the Greeks and created a systematic rationale for his subject.

Making connections between disparate things still haunts too many people. It’s why 1966 World Cup-winning England captain Bobby Moore always insisted on being the last person in the dressing room to don his shorts, why Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar always puts his left pad on first and why US tennis champion Serena Williams always wears the same sweaty pair of socks throughout a tournament. I don’t know if any of these three, or of the thousands of top-class sportsmen and sportswomen with their multiple superstitions, actually read their horoscopes on a regular basis but their actions quite clearly indicate that they believe there is a connection between their idiosyncratic actions and their ultimate success. Daily newspapers and weekly magazines are full of these astrological predictions and they are widely read, not only in the dentists’ waiting room or at the hairdresser’s.

My birthday is in January which means I fall under the zodiacal sign of Capricorn – the Goat. Here’s one horoscope from today for Capricorn:

Intellectual disagreements or differences of opinion and viewpoints arise now. You may have to speak your mind in a way that challenges or unnerves someone else. However, your mind is very active and sharp, and your reasoning power is good, so this is a good time to do mental work.

Here is another:

You're exuding oodles of sexual excitement, and using your erotic charms will get you anything you want. A past kindness of yours could be repaid with a windfall, and all joint financial agreements are destined for wealth and wonderful gains.

And here’s another:

This is a time that could convey disappointing news. Maybe the job you were interested in has been filled, or your counter offer rejected. Try not to let disappointment get you down.

Now those strike me as being rather different from each other. I may be speaking my mind and unnerving someone at the same time as oozing sexual excitement and trying to hide my disappointment at not getting a job (I am of course a pensioner). And it’s not surprising that there is such variation between predictions, although it is surprising that so many people appear to give some regard to their daily horoscope “readings”. It is estimated that there are almost 7,000,000,000 people alive in the world at present. Let’s assume that the birth dates of all those people fall equally between the twelve signs of the zodiac. That would mean that over 58,000,000 were Capricorns like me and would all share the same characteristics. And every man-jack and woman-jill of us would be speaking our minds, oozing sexual excitement and hiding our disappointment simultaneously. It’s truly mind-boggling, innit?

The bit about Capricorn I do like is the Goat bit. Crete is full of goats and always has been, for there are finds of coins from ancient Crete portraying goat-heads or goat-horns. I see them everywhere I go once I am off the beaten track and especially when I am walking through one of the many gorges. They don’t seem especially scared of humans, though they gaze quizzically at me as I approach and usually take a couple of impossibly perpendicular steps away, so they can eye me more carefully. Goats, as is well-known, have cloven hooves and that’s how they’re able to effect such prodigious climbing, appearing at times to rise up sheer rock faces with ease. I am no goat but I like to think that sureness of foot is a characteristic that assists me when I am walking in challenging terrain.

Goats feature in interesting ways throughout history, and not just in Crete. In Killorglin in Eire every August the people celebrate the Puck Fair, which begins with the capture of a wild goat from the mountains and his being crowned as King Puck. The origins of this ceremony (which nowadays is mostly an excuse for excessive boozing) are lost in time but it probably is a relic of some pagan ritual designed to give thanks for a good harvest. The gipsy girl Esmeralda in Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame had a pet goat called Djali who could perform various tricks, including counting. William Windsor, known as Billy, was a goat that served as a lance corporal in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Welsh brigade from 2003 to 2009. This tradition had begun at the Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolution when a goat was used to lead the Welsh regiment. The Three Billy Goats Gruff, as we all remember so well, outsmarted the troll who guarded the bridge to the sweet grass

I love to hear the soft tinkle of the goat-bell worn round the mountain goat’s neck. It is a sound forever associated with the wild places of Crete where we Capricorns, we Billy Goats Gruff, might meet and recognise each other, knowing this is our territory and that we will be here when all the rest of the crazy world has disappeared into history’s deep chasm, having failed to read their horoscopes properly.

HALCYON DAYS

2010-06-26T05:24:00.000-07:00

One day early in the New Year of 2010, we were having lunch in one of our favourite fish restaurants just outside Kissamos in Western Crete. The weather was unseasonably warm so we chose to eat at an outside table on a decked area that overlooks the waters in the harbour where fishing boats with names like Eirene, Niko, Stelios and Eleni gently bobbed. As we sipped our Mythos beers and waited for our Greek salads, a flash of blue suddenly took my eye and, when I checked to see what had caused me to blink, I spotted a kingfisher sat on the rigging of the Eirene, its tiny head swivelling from side to side and its electric blue plumage rustling in the breath of wind. It was there but a few seconds before it flew off, looking elsewhere for fish or maybe for somewhere to build its nest.

According to the ancient Greeks, kingfishers build their nests on a raft of fishbones and then float them on the sea where they then lay their eggs and incubate them. In order to allow this, they said, the gods always saw to it that the seas and the winds were calmed at this period of the new year which occurred just after the winter solstice. The Greek word for the kingfisher is halcyon and of course that is where we get the term “halcyon days”, which was originally used about this period early in the new year that not infrequently in Greece sees fine weather. We now use the term in reference to some fondly remembered time in our past but where did the kingfisher get the name of halcyon?

According to a Greek myth, Alcyone, who was the daughter of Aeolus, married Ceyx, who was the son of Eosophorus, the Morning Star. The pair were very happy in their marriage but made the mistake of referring to each other privately as “Hera” and “Zeus”. Of course, the gods hear everything, even from the quietest of homes, and Zeus was very displeased at this sacriligious use of his name. When Ceyx was at sea one day, Zeus summoned a mighty storm and hurled a thunderbolt at Ceyx’s ship that killed the poor unfortunate lover. Ceyx then appeared as an apparition to Alcyone to tell her what had happened and she was so distraught that she threw herself into the sea and drowned. Out of sorrow and compassion, the gods then turned the pair of them into beautiful, flashing-blue halcyon birds, named after her.

Geoffrey Chaucer uses the story of Ceyx and Alcyone in his earliest major poem, The Book of the Duchess. The poem, allegedly wrtten to commemorate the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt, tells the story of the poet’s dream but begins with the poem reading a book of ancient stories and in particular the story of Ceyx and Alcyone. In Chaucer’s version of the tale, Alcyone, distraught at the unknown fate of Ceyx, prays to the goddess Juno to send her a dream vision that tells her the fate of her missing husband. Juno arranges for Morpheus, the god of sleep, to convey the body of Ceyx to Alcyone with a message. Brought in dream to his wife three hours before dawn, Ceyx instructs her to bury him and to cease her crying. At this point the poet, still holding his book in his hands, drifts off into sleep.

Shakespeare uses the term “halcyon days” in Henry IV Part 1:

JOAN LA PUCELLE: Assign’d I am to be the English scourge.

This night the siege assuredly I”ll raise:

Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyon days,

Since I have entered into these wars.

Shakespeare also refers in King Lear to an old folk tradition that stated that, if a kingfisher was killed and hung by a thread from a post (please don’t try this), its beak would always point in the direction of the wind:

Bring oil to fire, snow to their colder moods;

Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks

With every gale and vary of their masters.

The kingfisher has inspired poets hroughout the centuries. W.H. Davies pays tribute to the kingfisher in his eponymous poem:

It was the Rainbow gave thee birth,

And left thee all her lovely hues;

And, as her mother's name was Tears,

So runs it in my blood to choose

For haunts the lonely pools, and keep

In company with trees that weep.

Another poet, mad John Clare, in his natural history writings states that “it flyes on the top of the water down rivers & dykes & often seizes its prey on the wing – it makes its nest on the ground in the reed beds & lays 5 eggs of a dirty brown colour - the young take the water as soon as hatched”. Andrew Marvell's kingfisher is seen “flying betwixt the day and night” and changing as she recedes up-stream, into a “sapphire-winged mist”, while for Gerald Manley Hopkins “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”.

From the balcony of our home in Bridgnorth, we often see the blue flash of the kingfisher arrowing across the River Severn and there was a time when I was curious as to what happened to the little bird’s nest when the mighty river floods, as it is wont to do with devastating consequences from time to time. The kingfisher tunnels up to eighteen inches into the river bank to create its nest where the female lays as many as ten eggs. With their amazing facility for catching fish, the male and female can snaffle over one hundred fish a day to feed their young, with the result that this deeply-dug nest is a mass of fish bones and fledgling birdshit. So smelly is it that the adults can frequently be seen dipping into the water to cleanse themselves immediately on exiting the burrow. And what happens in a flood? A very good friend of mine, when I asked this question, pointed out quite correctly that I was clinging to an anthropomorphic vision of birds snuggling regularly into their nests each night when of course nests are merely places for laying eggs and bringing up their young. It is – and I was – wrong to think that birds live in their nests all through the year, when of course they don’t. No doubt the eggs and the unfledged young of the kingfisher will be submerged in a flood but the adults will be able to take avoiding action. Their attachment to their young is biological, not sentimental.

We enjoyed our literal halcyon days at our Kissamos restaurant, the becalmed Aegean Sea, the bright if wan sun, the stillness of the air, all testimony to this meteorological curiosity. The kingfisher that alighted on the rigging of the Eirene that day was a timely reminder of that winter phenomenon, of the magical blue flash across the River Severn and of the long-lost innocence of my youth.

THEMISTOCLES AND ME

2010-04-19T07:52:00.000-07:00

In April of 2007 we bought a segment of an olive grove on a hillside a few miles from Chania in Crete from an elderly man named Themistocles. It was land on which we were to have a house built. What captured our imagination were the views from this sloping site – views down the olive-coated valley of the cobalt blue Aegean Sea, views to the west of the haze-enshrouded Rodopos peninsula, and views behind us of the fabled White Mountains. But, if I’m honest, I was also enormously taken with the idea of buying land from someone who bore the name of one of my great heroes – Themistocles, who in 490 BC persuaded the Athenians to increase the size of their navy, to withdraw from their city and, together with their Greek allies, to take on and conquer the might of the Persian King Xerxes’s huge armada in the straits of Salamis. His decision was certainly one of the reasons why democracy survived and prospered in the ancient world. It was also arguably the moment that started a distinctly European culture that has lasted to our day.

After agreeing to buy this strip of land, we decided to fly back to England from Chania, which meant a break of several hours in Athens, giving us a long-desired opportunity to visit the Parthenon and what a wonderful experience that is – the vision that created it, the craftsmanship of the sculptor Phidias and his helpers, the mathematical precision of those long tapering columns, and above all the sheer majesty of this temple to Athena that has lasted since the second half of the fifth century BC to our times. On our way down from the Acropolis we stumbled on the ancient Agora and there in the peristyle outside the Stoa of Attalos museum, I came upon a face I recognised – the sculpted head of Herodotus, commonly acclaimed as the world’s first historian. It was Herodotus who first told me of Themistocles and his achievements.

Back in England, I sought out my battered Penguin copy of The Histories by Herodotus and there he was – that same face staring at me from its front cover as I had come upon outside the Stoa of Attalos. I spent some time re-reading Herodotus and reminding myself of the Battle of Salamis and it made for fascinating reading. The Athenians had already established an early form of democracy by this time and Themistocles had to achieve his ends of increasing the Athenian naval force by persuasion, for he was one statesman among many in the city, and it was this grounding that allowed him to use the same strategy with the commanders of the other Greek states that had sent troops to fight alongside the Athenians in what all agreed was their last-ditch attempt to stave off the threat from the east.

You can see Themistocles in Herodotus’s account using his rhetorical skills trying to persuade Euribiades, the Spartan commander of the whole fleet, of his plan to trap the Persian triremes in the narrow waters off Salamis. When he doesn’t at first succeed, he tries to persuade the Corinthians of his plan, before finally he gets everyone’s agreement. If you contrast that with the behaviour of Xerxes, who sounds out the views of his commanding officers but then makes all decisions himself, as true tyrants always do, then you can see the beginnings of that democratic debate that is at the heart of our Western way of politics and life.

There is an interesting and appropriate coda to the Battle of Salamis, because Aeschylus, generally acknowledged as the father of Greek Tragedy, fought in the battle alongside his brother. In 482 BC he used his experience to write his tragedy, The Persians, which recounts the story of the battle as it is received at the court of King Xerxes. The Persians is the oldest work of Aeschylus still extant and marks the emergence of tragedy as a major art form in Western culture, leading eventually to Shakespeare and the great Elizabethan playwrights as well as to their present-day successors.

My chance encounters with the owner of the olive grove I was purchasing and subsequently with the bust of the world’s first historian in Athens have led me back to the beginnings of our Western culture and politics. They have reminded me of how much we take for granted and how much we need to fight to maintain all those values that we hold dear – the freedom to argue for what we believe in, the opportunity to vote for our selected leaders, the chance to be moved and inspired by works of art. In those chance encounters I have travelled back two and a half thousand years in time to be reminded of certain eternal ideals that still drive so much of our shared existence on this planet.

THE GOOD GERMAN

2010-04-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Like any British male aged fifty or above, I grew up with images of Germans who stalked the comics I read with their goose-stepping march, their Teutonic sense of destiny, their shouts of “Heil Hitler, “Gott in Himmel” or “Hande hoch”, their ferocity and cruel determination to dominate the world, and their lack of humour. They were the enemy, of course, or once had been before most of us were born but that did not constrain D.C. Thomson and their ilk from building into us impressionable boys a stereotype that still crawls to the surface whenever England play Germany at football. So, although much of what I am about to write concerns a German atrocity from the Second World War, my focus is on a German who swam against the tide, a man who refused to accept that the soldiers’ permanent excuse about only following orders was acceptable, a man who was imprisoned in Germany because of this refusal which was deemed treasonable, but a man who survived to help convict Reich Marshal Herman Goering at Nuremberg.

The German who is central to what I write was called Franz Pieter Weixler, a war correspondent and photographer serving with the Wehrmacht. Weixler was with the main German force that had landed in Crete following the paratroop landing of 20th/21st May 1941, the failure by the occupying Allied troops to resist that attack, despite causing horrendous casualties, and the subsequent withdrawal of those Allied troops to the south coast of the island and the evacuation of two-thirds of them by boat to Egypt. Weixler was based in the north-western city of Chania, at that time the capital of Crete, in early June of 1941 when, according to his testimony at the Nuremberg trials, he was told by a young officer that “a punitive expedition would be sent against several villages since the corpses of parachutists, massacred and plundered, had been found”. Weixler discovered from this officer that Goering himself, having been told about the involvement of Cretan civilians in the alleged mutilation and murder of members of German paratroopers, had sent orders that severe reprisals were to be taken against the local population, including the shooting of males between the ages of eighteen and fifty.

Such was the background to what came to be known as the Massacre of Kontomari, when twenty-three men from the village just down the hill from where I am writing were taken into an olive grove and shot. The power of rumour is a known inspirer of action in peacetime as in wartime. It is estimated that over four hundred German paratroopers from the 1st Air Landing Assault Regiment were killed in the initial attempted landing of May 20th/21st, the majority of them picked off by Allied guns as they fell from the skies. Others would have died on the ground from their injuries. Many of the bodies that the succeeding troops came upon would have shown evidence of mutilation by crows or other wild creatures; others would have decayed rapidly in the excessive May heat. It is quite likely that some Cretans would have fought against any invaders landing among them with everyday weapons such as axes, knives and scythes. Rumour of massive Cretan mutilation, massacre and plunder, however, was certainly exaggerated. Weixler himself stated that he had seen vultures feeding on the corpses of paratroopers and that, although they had seen any number of half-decayed bodies, “we had never seen a single murder or massacre”.

Nevertheless, General Kurt Student, at the time temporarily in charge of the Crete offensive, issued orders that Goering’s word should be obeyed and that brutal reprisals against the civilian population were to be mounted without the need for trials or other formalities such as evidence. And so, on 2^nd June 1941, Oberleutnant Hurst Trebes, one of the few officers to have survived the airborne landing uninjured, led a party of some thirty paratroopers, plus embedded photographer Franz Pieter Weixler, in four lorries up the hill from Maleme to the village of Kontomari, where some dead Germans had been found for whose deaths the villagers were blamed. The soldiers surrounded the village, rushed into each of the houses and drove all the men, women and children into the village square. Through an interpreter Trebes informed the villagers that they were to be punished for murdering members of the German Wehrmacht. The women and children were then released and twenty-three men were led into a neighbouring olive grove and made to stand by an ancient olive tree. Weixler’s chilling description tells the rest of the story.

“Trebes had the men form half a circle, gave the order to fire, and after about fifteen seconds, everything was over”.

A few weeks later Trebes was awarded the Knight’s Cross by Goering for his braveness.

What is astonishing about this is that Weixler filmed everything as it happened and those photographs exist today, a sequence whose initial ordinariness turns into the most gruesome massacre with inevitable but still remarkable suddenness. Somehow or other he managed to get the negatives of his film sent to a friend in Athens, even though the film itself was taken away from him by his superior officers and he was made to sign a form saying he had no copies. Later in 1941 Weixler was dismissed from his post with the Wehrmacht for political reasons but it is obvious that he was showing these photographs to others for some time because in January 1944 he was arrested, tried for treason and imprisoned by the Gestapo. He remained in prison until near the end of the war and from his home in Munich he wrote his testimony against Goering in November of 1945.

The photographs turned up in the German archives in the 1980s (www.fallschirmjager.net/Bundesarchiv/Kondomari/Kondomari.html) and a series of them is at the heart of one of the two war memorials in the centre of the village of Kontomari. Each year on 2nd June a special service of memorial is held in the village church. It is very well attended for the relatives of those twenty-three men still live there, tending to their olive trees, washing down their dusty yards and remembering the day when murder came to their forefathers and a young German photographer created a record that reminds of the horror of war.