Naomi's Blog

2012-01-25T00:13:00.011Z

First Love, or God in Nature Revealed

Lured by vinegary incense into the chrome shiny chip shop,

percussive fat bubbling darkly in the scorching vat,
we collected our ‘Three penn’th, please” and scurried away
into the tired Market Square strewn with dead cabbage leaves, chewing gum
and carrot tops, a sad cold detritus of the passing of another day.
A gaggle of teddy boys, crepe footed peacocks, displayed their velvet drapes
to a giggle of girls, red kiss-proof lipped and peroxide pony tailed.
Up the High Street we went to the church, pale granite and leaden roof
reflecting and refracting the evening’s fugitive sun,
a quiet elegance of dappled stone and our first chosen sanctuary.

The sharp flint of the wall bit into our ribbed grey legs,
its green moss staining our once polished shoes, but contented we sat
as Helios drove his fiery chariot far into the West,
and the dying sun fell behind the distant Abbey's pastel silhouette.
A barn owl, flash of white against the yews’ nocturnal green,
flew low into the shadowy dusk searching for prey,
or for a wandering soul to guide through Hades’ gloomy labyrinthine paths.
The waning moon rose pale above the squat Norman tower,
and I gazed up into the chill of the darkening sky,
a celestial carpet embroidered now with a host of bright gilded stars.

The church clock struck eight, its sonorous tolling a solemn curfew
to proclaim the ending of our twilight freedom,
unwelcome summoning home to school books left abandoned,
white mice unfed and evening tasks not yet done.
But I walked through those dull suburban streets head in air,
suffused with the glory that had reached down to me from the sky.
The moon’s fragile light tipped corroded gutters with silver,
weeds like luminous gold ferns glistened beneath bleak sodium lamps,
and all those stars were a million tiny candles
lit by the breath of God.

Absorbed into a mystery,
I held out my arms to the universe,
to a chaste and perfect unity.
I was a girl in love
with my very first love,
and the world was born anew,
to be for ever sanctified by this divine beauty.

Naomi

2012-01-20T00:01:00.006Z

The Angelus

'Love not knowledge is the answer, feeling not logic is the process.'
Charles Davis, Roman Catholic Theologian

They had climbed up to the old shrine - one wall only remained,
built into the side of the Reformation chapel, perched high on
the cliff above the bay. “Is it alright” asked the Young Man,
“when the Angelus bell is rung, for me to pause and say a prayer
asking for help of Mary the Star of the Sea?” Reason, a
statuesque lady with well cut hair and dainty feet, sighed. She
regarded the Young Man with a trace of scorn mixed with the
kind of sympathy that those who know themselves to be correct
can afford to expend. “No.” she said. “It is not reasonable to
invoke the assistance of a Jewish mother of uncertain virtue and
little education, who was probably simply the construct of a first
century radical Judaic legend.” “But,” persisted the Young Man,
“the spirits of the seamen who linger about this place move me
to prayer. I hear the creak of ropes as passing ships dip their topsails
in homage to the Lady, and sailors petitioning for her special
protection.”

“I would not tell you what to believe,” said Reason, “but I can ask
you to consider this. Your mind is deeply influenced by the
superstitious perceptions of centuries of well-meaning but naive
folk. Prisoners all of an ignorant society whose sole recourse was
to a learning perpetrated and preserved by a priestly class bent
upon maintaining its hold over a compliant laity. Throw yourself
into the study of the world around you. There are natural
wonders here, enough for a lifetime of study; and a million more
tragedies crying out for remedy than can be embraced within the
competence of a single man or a single generation. Look to the
salvation of this world and abandon the chimera of the next.”
“Maybe.” said the Young Man. He turned to the Old Person
beside him, androgynously resplendent in a long coat of many
colours, and battered Ugg boots. “Would you say a prayer to the
Lady?” he asked. “No reason not to.” returned the Old Person.
The Angelus

“And yet, my reason tells me that Reason is correct. There is so
much suffering and sorrow in this world crying out for reform
and repair. But, love is what I see with and what I see touches
first the heart. The reasoning mind must always be our guide for
without it we cannot contrive the good that we would do, but it is
the heart that strikes the spark which fires the boiler of
compassion. Look,” he said pointing across the bay as a great
shaft of light pierced the dense mist over the water, “does the
Lady gives us a sign? Or is that amazing radiance merely a
meteorological phenomenon? A sudden off shore breeze, a
parting of the sea fret so that the Winter sun for one glorious
moment shines through?” He took Reason’s hand in his. “So long
as we can in conscience each respect the other, does it matter
which of us is correct?” “Perhaps not,” answered Reason quietly,
“I don’t suppose it does.” The Young Man put an arm around
each of them. “Amen, and thank God for that my brother and
my sister."

Naomi

Only the Heart hears the Music

2011-12-23T16:19:00.000Z

Only the heart hears the music

Near a village called Azincourt where once were gathered up
the bones of the slaughtered nine thousand, there is a peaceful forest.
Great trees, their massive trunks like carved stone pillars
raise high their branched arches to the sky, and the leaf dappled
sun lights up a tranquil space, a vast sylvan cathedral
whose bosky peal proclaims Sitque Pax non Bellum
For across these green lands men and horses have trampled;
around these woods death has come untimely by sword and arrow,
knife and noose, treachery and bullet, mine and gun.
The screech owl mimics the cries of the dying,
and the craters of destruction
masquerade as pools of sweet white lilies.

In the blackest night only imagination can see the light;

in the deepest silence only the heart hears music;

God alone can speak with the voice of a man who has no tongue.

Let your tired eyes embrace the bright darkness,
your heart rejoice in the outpourings of the passionate nightingale
and gentle quiet surround your restless soul.
God is in the darkening light and the muted crescendo;
his the still voice that echoes far, like thunder
dancing amongst the jubilant hills.
By a million years of blood and bone have these sacred fields
and lonely woods been nourished, and Mary’s Christ Child sleeps
secure now, in an old stable beneath the sheltering trees.

The Lord is in this place.

N.L. 2011

Illustration from a painting by Oliver Postgate

2011-10-25T10:48:00.012+01:00

What dreams the Land?

Below this ridge long isolated by river and by sea, lie the wide flat lands
of the Island, stretching from sunset to sunrise.
Here you may find half a million years of history, an unending narrative
of a landscape, and the chronicles of its tribes.
The lion and wooly mammoth once roamed this land of chalk and flint,
while rhino and aurochs grazed on these rough grasses.
As the wandering hominins of Europe fished our teaming waters
and trapped the two-ton straight-tusked elephant,
the Island lay quiet, contented in the young sun’s pale morning, dreaming
of a burgeoning landscape and a satisfied people.

Two thousand years of husbandry, three thousand years of trade,
the land flourished, the sea was abundant with fish.
But under the wide open sky and the eerie scream of the the great gulls
the people were not at ease with their Island home.
They had watched the Roman legions tramp across their small fields,
fled the long Northland ships at anchor in their harbours,
endured the plague that stalked their children and laid waste their lives.
They dreamed of relief from the cruelty of greedy manors,
of an end to the tyranny of Augustine’s proud successors, and of peace.
The Island dreamed of Death hovering close by its shores.

In times of a new plenty, the corn tall and golden, the apple trees’ branches
weighed down by a rich harvest, the Island’s modest
masters grew comfortable and fat - their only enemy the Revenue men.
Farmers dreamed of barns stacked high, their wives of gowns
rich in velvet and silk, seaside landladies dreamed of the quiet winter house
and the basement kitchen free from the clamour of bells.
But the labourer displaced by new machines, the coachman and the carter
their trade lost to the ubiquitous monarchs of the iron road,
the old sailor outrun by steam, all dreamed of days never to come again.
The Island trembled and dared not sleep.

Men ripped coal from the land, tall chimneys spewed soot and fumes,
rivers were poisoned and man-made light overwhelmed
the sky’s darkness snuffing out the starry candles, the sailor’s celestial
chart and the promise that the sun always will return.
The roar of aluminium pterosaurs drowned out the skylarks’ empyrean song
and the rising sea plucked impatiently at crumbling chalk.
Until
Like some beneficent Kraken arising slowly from its deep watery slumber,
we awake and discover the land anew, and understand now
our part as stewards of God’s creation, not lords - but humble tenants.
The Island gives thanks, and dreams of Paradise.

Amen. So may it be.

Naomi

Hunting Aurochs from 'The Canterbury Chronicle', a mural painted by Oliver Postgate for Eliot College, the University of Kent
Louisa Bay Broadstairs, from old postcard

2011-08-05T20:08:00.011+01:00

ROOTS

“King Jesus hath a garden, full of divers flowers”

Geestlijcke Harmonie, 1633

In Europe, parts of Russia and modern Turkey the civilisation of the Post Roman Empire was firmly rooted in the Judaeo-Christian values and tradition which profoundly influenced every aspect of human life. Law, social organisation, ethics, education, care of the sick, literature, the graphic arts, architecture, music - all sprang from and were widely nurtured by the Christian Churches: Roman Catholic, Holy Orthodox, Protestant, mainstream and heretical offshoots alike. Pockets of Judaism established throughout Europe, and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula had their parts to play, but sixteen hundred years of Christian faith and practice remained the platform on which our whole culture and values, our taboos and justice were founded.

    With the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ intrusion of Theism and Deism, of Rationalism and Utilitarianism, of secular philanthropy and the increasing secularisation of education, of aggressively secular political theory and organisation into European and American thinking and society, our Christian foundations came under prolonged attack. Out of this maelstrom of new ideas advanced and old beliefs cast aside, there also developed on the one hand more liberal and less hierarchical new religious organisations - the Society of Friends for example, but on the other hand a tendency for some of the existing churches of the Reformation themselves to be reformed - amongst others Anglicans into Methodists and Unitarians. But whatever the new organisations or theologies the majority of the new denominations regarded themselves as Christian even if the old establishment condemned them as heretical.

    It was I suppose inevitable and reasonable that over the next two hundred years when oppressed people revolted against all the institutions of the illiberal state, including against the churches established and supported by those illiberal states, Christian teaching and preaching became the butt of the new scientists, political thinkers and radical activists. Many Christian folk responded by proclaiming and acting out “the social Gospel” - Evangelicals, Christian Socialists, Congregationalists, Quakers, the Salvation Army, and Unitarians. The Christian foundations may have been rocked, but remained more or less intact.

    Soon the demarcations of the Christian denominations became even more complicated. Universal principles gained ground in both main stream and fringe churches; tolerance of individual and “different” beliefs became increasingly important. Ideas new to the West were infiltrating from eastern religion and spirituality into European and American chapels and churches; God Himself was denied by agnostic theologians and militant atheists; whole denominations became hotbeds of controversy and secularism laughed to see the infighting amongst Christian denominations. A disgruntled Quaker lady Universalist said to me: “These Christocentrics within the Society are very hurtful people.” While another told me “Of course I’ve had a lot of trouble with the G-word. I don’t use it in my writing now.” I might have laughed, but I thought perhaps the circumstances were too tragic - their wonderful respectful tolerance to all faiths, and none, was being eroded now by tired old factionalisms, and fresh prejudices.

    One Sunday morning in Canterbury Cathedral amidst a great company of folk at the Sung Eucharist I realised that in conscience I could no longer recite the Nicene Creed. In the words of Norbert Fabian Capek in a letter written in 1910 to Thomas Masaryk the first President of Czechoslovakia describing his deconversion from the Baptist church:

“I did not believe that Jesus is God, and that Jesus’ father, as the first person in the holy Trinity, asked his son to become a human being and to shed his innocent blood in order to appease God the Father for people, that is to say, those who believe in Jesus in this sense. I did not believe in the infallibility of the Bible … I did not believe that God condemned the whole humankind for Adam’s sin, and I did not believe either in hereditary sin or never ending suffering in hell, and other orthodox doctrines.”

    So I slipped out of the Church of England, and eventually into the un-gathered congregation of the National Unitarian Fellowship. I had held very dear the rituals of the Anglo Catholic Church of England, the drama of the celebration of the Mass, the sense of two thousand years of continuity of worship and love, and I still do. But I believe that Jesus was a man, a spiritual teacher and leader of immense power and influence, and he always was and still is my prophet and spiritual director. Thus as a disciple, a student of Jesus Christ, I nominate myself as a Christian. I nominate myself as an Unitarian because it was my un-belief in the Nicene Creed, and most particularly in the doctrine of the Trinity, which brought my worshipping membership of the Christian Church to its end. I did not leave to escape from Christ but rather from the promulgations of the Early Fathers and the Council of Nicea. I did not slip onto the Unitarian Raft to denigrate Christianity and abandon my Teacher, but to pursue my own individual spiritual search in the company of open minded, tolerant, careful and caring friends. Such friends I have found in our virtual congregation and I thank God for them.

    I do have the greatest sympathy for those Christians who have escaped from Christian denominations and individual churches where the weapons of choice are submission and fear and spiritual blackmail, and who have small wish to be reminded of those horrors here in the safety of our open Unitarian Fellowship. Nor would I expect them to subscribe to a neo-Christian identity. The Christian institutions and the hierarchies I left behind were mercifully benign and I am able still to honour my Judaeo-Christian roots and the teaching and example of the Man of Peace who lived and died in Galilee two thousand years ago. Would that this were so for all of us.

   If you find a flower, an Oxeye Daisy an ancestor of whom once gave you a rash, now encroaching on the margin of a smart new bed of low pollen hydrangeas, do you dig it up and chuck it into the efficient eco-friendly incinerator? Or do you forgive the bitter memory of its great grandmother and make room for both the modest daisy and the opulent hydrangea in your tidy court-yard garden? Do you poison the roots of the centuries old Derbyshire Newton Wonder apple tree to make way for the new Japanese Sayaka variety, or do you love and nurture them both in a sunny corner of your quiet orchard, side by side and harmonious in their differences?

“The Crown Imperial bloometh too in yonder place,
'tis charity, of stock divine, the flow'r of grace.”

Naomi

Illustration: Fritillary 'Imperial Crown' from John Edwards' British Herbal , 1769

2011-08-01T23:35:00.004+01:00

Prometheus

A fulmar, high above the cliff top railings, banks and turns
into the breeze, marbled wings slender and delicate,
a mosaic of airy platinum and filigree steel.
Westward he flies across the bay over the shimmering waves gilded
by a burnished amber sun,
and soars into the haze, mother of pearl where the watery horizon
kisses the melting sky and merges into eternity.
For one magnificent moment he is silhouetted shadow dark
against that fiery solar vortex where the souls of the dead are gathering,
and the resurrection trumpets sound.
He is gone like smoke absorbed into darkness unseen,
a silent echo of a song as yet unheard, palpable memory of a forgotten dream,
jubilant spirit into the shining air of a new morning,
unbound and free.

Naomi

Dedicated to the memory of Dr Jim Fowler, member of the National Unitarian Fellowship,
died 2011

2011-08-01T23:23:00.000+01:00

The Invitation

Across the green of the sea kissed downs, flies my bird,
Cushioned on winds first warmed by desert sun
Where camel and Beduin for ever walk
Into a shimmering horizon, mysterious and bright.

Up and up he rises, my bird, a speck of dark light
In a sky of cerulean blue, a day star in the stillness
Of a summer afternoon. He hovers now, my bird,
Oh so gently, like an idle leaf in the soft June air.

Then, tumbling from the sky, stalling and whirling,
An acrobat exuberant, my bird beckons,
A pinioned king wonderful in his dignity and power.
And I can only marvel at this Malachi pointing me to heaven.

Naomi

2011-07-29T23:36:00.003+01:00

Winter - Drab Beauty

It was as if overnight some Renaissance angel
had seized a vast pallet, monochromatic with every shade of grey,
to paint anew the great curving sweep of the bay,
until it now reappeared shimmering and mysterious,
stone carved behind a frosted curtain of fine silken gauze.

From the sheltering cliffs in the West
to the ever turning Light of the foreland in the East,
the very shore itself was grey, the sand
like roughly powdered slate abandoned on the floor
of a worked out, long forgotten mine.

There were beach huts, their sharks teeth roofs silhouetted
anthracite against ashen cliffs;
and long fingers of rock, Davy’s grey, pointing down the sand towards
a soft running, gently retreating, phantasmal sea.

Around the abandoned rock pools cast in shiny hematite
sat dark cinereous gulls, marbled grey fulmars and pallid kittiwakes
whose sad cry echoed thinly through the smokey chill on the lonely beach.

A rusty tanker rode the sea’s drab rim, chalk white now from stern to stem
made new again by the generosity of a profligate winter sun.
From the cliff path an old man, flat capped and rheumy eyed, watched
the wind farm’s etherial towers springing from the sea
like a cohort of tall charcoal guardsmen,
darkly disguised against the fading horizon of the eastern sky.

The sun slipping unseen behind the cliffs into the western ocean,
fired slivers of light, rock-dove pale, into the banks
of cumulus clouds, huge and delicate globes of dappled swansdown,
their moving across the bay almost imperceptible
in the soft platinum mist above the silvered water.

The old man gone back to his fire and his tea,
I was left alone on the grey stone path
mesmerised by this luminous marine grisaille,
humbled last Thursday afternoon by such an extraordinary
and haunting beauty - shore and sea and sky made holy.

Naomi

2011-07-29T23:29:00.006+01:00

Autumn: The Song of the Horn Poppy

Seeds wafting along the beach in the crisp air of the October morning,
we dance all day with an ebullient breeze, a seminal Morisca
jaunty and passionate, in a circle of unchanging hope.
At last I sink to the ground weary in the calm of an owl hooting evening,
and on fine shingle kelp brown, safe in my lonely solitude,
I sleep.

In the cold sandy earth, as the soft rains of May gently penetrate my meagre
covering, I awake. The nascent summer sun warms my dark home
and I stretch my roots deep beneath my stony bed.
I push pallid green shoots and fragile golden buds upwards into a
trembling June birth. I leave the sheltering womb,
I am newly born.

My home is the salty margin of the shore where kittiwake and tern orbit
and plunge, feathered arrows piercing the abundant waves.
My stem is thick clasped by succulent leaves, grey green
like the waters of the bay beneath the ever changing light. Nourished
by my stony ground, embracing wind and storm,
I reach up to the sky.

Each of my flowers opens its golden cup to the sun, each horn is pregnant
with a hundred seeds, new life rampant now within the old.
The measure of the days of my flowers is but one,
and slow showers of petals fall from glaucous stalks like
tarnished stars onto the dying surface of some long spent planet.
Soon my own short span of years will be done and
I too shall die.

My seeds, raven black, blue black, scattered by birds, plucked into the air
by importunate winds, will fall to the cold evening ground
and they also will sleep the long winter through.
So it all begins again.

In this mighty ever turning circle of life and death and resurrection, we celebrate
and dance the rituals of our ancient Trinity, thus to honour
the elements which by the grace of God sustain us,

Earth, and Air, and Rain.

Naomi

2011-07-29T23:25:00.005+01:00

Summer - Sea Campion

A man and his dog stand poised at the edge of the soft waves,
two creatures caught up in a moment of infinity,
luminous in a sweet light of etherial beauty,
anonymous for ever in the memory
like some forgotten prehistoric creature trapped in amber.

There is an old tall ship on the silver horizon, schooner four masted
in her pride, sailing still and motionless from nowhere
to an unknown destination, a fugitive plucked
out of her time, given into the charge
of an unheeding wind, a blind navigator and a careless sun.

Beach huts across the bay, preposterous in their deckchair coats of
many colours, sleep shimmering in the high noon heat, each
an unique area of silence lost in an invisible glass bowl
abandoned on a dusty shelf in an empty shop,
while the unceasing cry of gulls echoes mournfully around the cliffs.

At the edge of the shore a ring of sea campions surrounds a mirror of dark light
reflecting the whole bay. This is the place of Yesterday unremembered,
Tomorrow ignored. It is Now where we see how all things are,
held for ever in the frail white clasp of a flower,
perpetual shadows of the reality that is the immutable mind of God.

Naomi

2011-07-29T23:23:00.002+01:00

Spring - Old Tree

I am the old tree in the corner of the forest;
Bark crumbling, I watch my dead wood fall;
I am hollow-hopeless, no squirrel enjoys my shelter;
My November-withered strength lies crushed beneath Spring’s quiet glory.
Budless branches mocked by lustrous ferns,
I am a thing empty and barren in the midst of burgeoning plenty.

I am the old tree in the corner of the forest;
Around my dried out roots new life escapes the earth,
Oak seedlings and oxslips, hazel and juniper,
Wood sorrel and the common purple mallow;
Yellow-necked mice burrow beneath my rotting leaves,
Beaks full of insects, treecreepers spiral up my fissured trunk.

I am the old tree in the corner of the forest.
Dancing children circle me, singing in the shadowed sun of evening;
They have brought scarlet berries and blue-violet daisies
To decorate my cracked and rotting woody carapace,
Strewn sweet herbs and rose petals about me;
And their song to God the Mother is a Hymn of Praise.

Naomi

It must have been the Fox

2011-05-26T19:58:00.000+01:00

It must have been the Fox

The fox, elegant and handsome in her bright chestnut coat, was a lone vixen, her mate shot by a neighbouring farmer and no cubs in her earth. Having no babies to feed she hunted modestly but knew that this would not spare her from either the gun or the marauding terriers. Killing rabbits and birds, stealing autumn fruit, taking the occasional straying chicken, she was widely feared across Martyr’s Marsh

A pair of Indian Runner Ducks, the darlings of the sprawling marshland farm, had mislaid their eight ducklings. The parent ducks ran wildly about the poultry field their long necks and Roman noses stretched up to the sky, their fawn and white feathers ruffled by the freshening breeze, the duck quacking loudly and the drake crying hoarsely for his children. The little ducklings, no longer tiny bundles of pale brown thistledown floating on the shallow farmyard pool, had gone into the sea fret of an early May morning, and had disappeared.

“Well, we all know what has happened. It’s the fox again. Couldn’t be anyone else. ” The big Romney ewe sneezed, bleated and looked down her long nose . “You can never, ever trust a fox. Kills anything that moves.” She turned sorrowful eyes across the marsh to where the little brick church rose modest on its grassy island and the great copper beaches on the ridge beyond stood like burnished clouds against the bright morning sky.

Lying in her basket in the loosebox next to the paddock where the Romneys were grazing, Meg the collie watched the farmer searching the barn for the ducklings, round the back of feed bins, under the old rusty tractor and deep inside an abandoned wooden horse trough. All he found was a pair of disgruntled mice plundering a sack of barley and a dozy hedge pig who snuffled cantankerously at the intruder.

Early next morning Meg was awakened by a brief high pitched bark. There, barely ten yards away, was the fox, a dark silhouette on the coral canvas of the newly rising sun. She stared at Meg, cocked her head as if to say ‘Are you coming then?’ and turned away. The fox ran, Meg ran and, allerted by the sound of their barking, the farmer ran too. Down the drive, along the lane, over and under the field gate and across the wide grass towards the little church they all went, the fox glancing over her shoulder at them as she flew. She leaped the small stream which ran close to the church and there finally she stopped.

'Well, I'll be ... ' the farmer whispered. Trapped between the retaining board and the bank, feebly cheeping their distress, were eight little long necked bedraggled ducklings. He knelt down and gently taking them from the water he put them still protesting into the deep pockets of his milking coat. The fox stood, looked for a long moment at Meg, and lolloped away towards Elmchurch Wood leaving farmer and dog to take the intrepid explorers home.

“Well that has to be a small miracle of unexpected kindness.” Meg thought as she returned to the farm. “Not at all. There is some kindness in every creature.” the big ewe pronounced sententiously. “I knew all along that the brave intelligent rescuer would be my dear friend the fox.” Meg sighed, shook her head and wondered yet again why when God made sheep he omitted to include their brains.

Naomi

Out of Darkness into Light

2011-05-26T19:18:00.005+01:00

Out of Darkness into Light

… a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path Psalm 119

“… and so, my dearest Aunt, to the last epic term of my course for which you have so generously provided. For my final Assignment I was given an old manuscript, E Tenebris in Lucem, and told to study it from board to board. Never have I found a task so hard. Getting into the book was no problem, quartered oak is my cover of choice and a pleasure to devour, but the elegant hand of the text and the miniatures illuminated with malachite and lapis lazuli, hammered gold and cinnabar, told a story so shocking that I felt I was making a diabolical journey through a land of macabre fantasy.

I walk in a dark forest, where the dense foliage overwhelms the light and the stony path has no visible ending. I peer out between the massive trunks and I can see a landscape of savage beauty and wretched tragedy. A great wall of water, Leviathan risen from the ocean, pounds inexorably across the land, casually destroying everything in its path - whole villages smashed, animals trees and men tossed together into the air like feathers in the wind. There are small children working long cruel days in factories, young boys with rifles across their shoulders forced marching into war. In the backstreets of the sex trade there are prisoners in the brothels, while lone servants are bullied and abused in the despotic mansions of Mayfair and Belgravia.

Behind me in a war that has no end I hear a nation mourn its dead, the flowers of many forests cut down and trampled beneath the mine and the gun, enemy united with enemy in an unseemly dance of sinew, blood and bone. The little Forest Owlet cries for its home disappeared under the blade of an illicit axe, the Amoy Tiger roars in vain for its dead mate while a single humped back whale sings its erie threnody to an empty sea. It is as if all the oppressed and dispossessed beings of the earth are gathered at my back and raise their voices in a great anthem of mourning which first envelopes and then overwhelms me. Numb, I shrink into my orange shell, fold my six legs and await my fate.

The dark canopy opens and there ahead on a wide sunlit plain, tall figures clothed in light open their arms to sorrow, to despair and to a world full of fear. The landscape changes again: a tigress and her cubs come out of the forest; flowers paint the ground where blood was spilled, and new saplings spring from the craters of urban devastation. Slaves are set free; the starving and the dispossessed are sheltered and fed; old enemies embrace. It is a new song this shining world sings now, an anthem of love and hope.

I make my way along the path through the soft grass into the golden light of a new day, the final leaf of my book. As I approach the old oak board, the gateway back to my home, I pass by the figures of light. One, with eyes deep and dark as the waters of Bethesda, gives me a blessing, and I see that his hands are marked with scars where perhaps iron nails had once been driven through…

Your affectionate Nephew, A. Bostrychus Capucinus “

Naomi

2011-05-26T15:50:00.013+01:00

“In real life, the tortoise loses.”

Helen Alexander, President of the CBI

The tortoise was depressed. His bony carapace, embossed tawny and black was dust dull, his snake head hung limp between the stumpy squamous legs and his lipless mouth drooped in a thin arc of unhappiness. Sadly he told his troubles to the black-capped Capuchin monkeys. “There’s this clever lady,” he said, “who claims that in the real world the proud opinionated hare always wins the race. All my long life I have taken comfort and confidence from Aesop’s wonderful story, but now my silly little ambition one day to achieve the same is quite destroyed.” He sniffed and a great bronze tear ran down his wrinkled cheek. “And the hare has challenged me to a race and I don’t know what to do, except to creep away and hide my shame until Death releases me from my vale of tears.”

The Capuchins, who had moved away into a chattering huddle, whooped excitedly and turned back to the tortoise. “We have a plan.” they said. “The race track slopes down the forest path towards the wild flower meadow. We shall make you a velocipede and launch you into an honourable triumph.” The tortoise frowned. “Would that not be cheating?” he asked. “No, of course not.” the capuchins replied. “The challenge is to be first across the line. There’s nothing about the method of propulsion.” The tortoise sighed. “Alright then, I shall accept the hare’s invitation to make a fool of myself.”

For days the capuchins ran here and there gathering together bits of string, old elastic bands, a pair of discarded roller skates,and the oval top of an abandoned coffee table. A cohort of mice found a purple leather harness tossed out of a passing pram and with whiskers quivering and tails lashing dragged it to the Capuchins’ bosky workshop. From dawn to dusk there was a hammering of smooth stone on rock anda sawing of beaver teeth on old table top. The whole population of the Safari Park seemed to be in attendance - even the two toed sloth made a day’s expedition from his branch to the foot of his tree to admire the ingenuity of the engineers. Only the hare and his sycophantic band of rabbits kept themselves apart, smirking and lazing in the morning sun.

Race Day came and the hare sprawled under a tree beside the track, his eyelids drooping against the dappled light. “Competitors! One minute please.” The fussy meerkat sniffed the air and peered back up the path where he thought he heard a growing commotion. The hare strolled to the line, leaned against a boulder and closed his eyes again. The distant noise grew louder and, as the meerkat fired his starting pistol, down the hill came the tortoise. Strapped by the purple harness onto the tray mounted on the roller skate wheels and propelled by a dozen Capuchins, he shot across the line past the incredulous hare and shed his zoological combustion engine in a shower of small pebbles. Enveloped now in a great cloud of dust, he disappeared towards the finishing post. The shocked hare gave up the unequal struggle and lolloped off into the meadow - and oblivion.

“In real life,” said a wise Capuchin, “with intelligent combination and fraternal cooperation, the tortoise may always win.”

Naomi

2011-01-26T16:38:00.000Z

Orchidě and Aiolos

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together

Shakespeare

The Nymph Orchidě was weaving herself a crown of olive leaves and pink meadow flowers. At her feet in the soft grass near the foot of Mount Olympos, his eyes deeply ablaze with lust and love, a young goat-herd sat and worshipped his new goddess. He put out his hand to touch the crown, but Orchidě snatched it from him. ‘Not for you, Aiolos. This is a crown fit only for an Immmortal, and all the silver and gold in these mountains could not buy it.’

She placed the last pink spike carefully in the centre of the wreath. ‘Not for you, Aiolos.’ she said again and holding the crown high above her dark gold curls danced around the love-sick boy, the bright mockery of her laughter boring jaggedly into his brain. ‘Poor little earthling doomed to die, what would you give me for Orchidě’s Crown?’ The boy sighed. ‘That crown is a part of you, and I want so much to have a part of you to keep as my own. There is my new kid, with a fleece as white and soft as swansdown; there is my grandfather’s pipe on which he played the tunes the Muse Aiodě taught him. Those could be yours. Great Zeus knows how much I want that crown, but alas I have nothing else to give you.’

Orchidě came close to him and stroked his cheek. ‘If you were to give me your soul, I would place my crown on your head and take you to where the Islands of the Blessed are cradled by the waters of Oceanos. In this Paradise we would walk together across the bright sand, dine on grapes and honey cake, drink sweet Khios wine and you would be mine for eternity. Will you pledge me your soul?’ she asked softly. He hesitated, and then: ‘Oh yes. Yes. Yes.’ She smiled, radiant, jubilant in her dark triumph.

Finger tip to finger tip they stood motionless beneath the sultry sky while dense leaden clouds swirled around the top of the mountain and plunged down into the darkening meadow. The one eyed Cyclopes struck their anvil. A monstrous thunder growled and angry fingers of blinding light ripped apart the enveloping cloud as the thunder bolt cast by Zeus flew like a double headed arrow into the hearts of the impious Nymph and the sacrilegious boy.

When the dark clouds lifted and the Cyclopes put aside their anvil and their hammers, Ophělos the hermit, roaming the slopes of the Mountain heard the echo of a herdsman’s pipe in the song of the stream and the laughter of a girl in the wind rustling through the olive trees. At last he came to the meadow where the grass was soft, and saw that from it had sprung a tall exotic stem bearing waxen petalled, delicate striated pink flowers. Close by he found a curiously coloured small marble statue of a young man who wore a wreath of olive leaves decorated with spikes of pink flowers which looked, he thought, just like a cloud of hovering butterflies.

Naomi

2010-12-26T22:58:00.000Z

WELCOME

Bitter snow falling

Waiting the King’s arrival

Born in a cave

The afternoon was dark and chill with the promise of a bitterly cold late December evening to follow. The hail siling down upon the roof of my little house sounded for all the world like a stream of ball bearings thrown from a great height into a bucket. I let myself into the inky blackness of my unlit hall, threw my briefcase onto the sofa in the living room and went into the kitchen. I had had a tiring and a tiresome day in the university and all I wanted now was my supper.

As I stood in the middle of the kitchen contemplating the meagre contents of my fridge, I was distracted by a small high-pitched cry from the back porch. “Open this door. Let me in please.” it ordered. With only the slightest hesitation I obeyed, and a tiny creature made apparently from half a foot of oiled ebony string rushed past me like some demented bat fish out of a marine hell. It hesitated for not one nano second, but ran through the kitchen into the coal dark hall, plunged up the uncarpeted stairs, and disappeared.

I followed the trail of raindrops into my bedroom but no alien being was to be seen. I stood very still and heard a faint rasping noise under my bed. Lifting the valance I found a black kitten sitting on its right hind leg, its left hind leg high in the air motionless behind its left ear, tiny pink tongue protruding, staring at me with eyes unwinking and huge in its tiny face. “I am rather busy at the moment,” it seemed to say, “however a little supper in about twenty minutes would not go amiss. Thank you.”

In my fridge there were two tomatoes, a sweet potato, an old oyster mushroom, a rather small steak and a pint of milk. I cooked it all and precisely twenty minutes later the kitten, now dry and immaculately coated, strolled into the kitchen. It ate half the steak finely chopped with a spoonful of sweet potato and delicately lapped two bowls of warmed milk, while I dined on what was left over. Having washed its paws and whiskers, it made its way back upstairs and took up residence again under my bed.

The next morning after our modest breakfast of milk and cereal, I turned it out into the garden, grabbed my unopened briefcase, shouted “Bye, Cat.” and scurried off to the Cathedral. I could almost feel the eyes of the furry sentinel now sitting atop my wall boring reproachfully into my rapidly disappearing back.

When I arrived home that evening, I was well prepared with cod fillet, Munchies, and a large frozen pizza in my reticule. Mewing quietly the kitten ran along beside me, darted ahead of me into the hall and ran straight into the kitchen. We dined; we sat beside the fire; the kitten replete with fresh cod slept. “You can sleep here tonight, small Cat,” I said, “but … ” The kitten opened one eye and stretched languorously. “ … tomorrow I must try and find out where you belong.” I was speaking to an empty space - the lodger had made a sudden dash for the stairs and my bedroom.

I tried to find Cat’s owners, but no-one knew him or wanted him or cared at all about him. So I made him a bed in an old bicycle basket and left him in the warm while I went out to do the Christmas Eve shopping. By the time I returned the air was dry and cold and a pale sun was setting over the Cathedral towers behind the old city wall. I was greeted by the warmth of my living room fire and a small black torpedo who shot into my outstretched arms.

“Hello, small Cat.” I murmured. “You know, I can’t go on calling you Cat; it’s not respectful. Who then shall you be?” I paused. “I could call you Baruch, the blessed one. Would you like that?” The kitten stirred, climbed up onto my shoulder, rested its small face against mine, and with a tongue like the finest sandpaper gently licked my cheek. I switched on the radio and we sat in the old armchair while the familiar music of the carols and the words of the Nine Lessons floated around us.

“I have no Christmas present for you,” I confessed, “but I don’t expect you will mind.” From the radio the voices of the fair choristers of King’s gradually rose to a poignant crescendo:

"What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.”

The kitten’s quiet purr suddenly exploded into the heavy rattle of a miniature Kango hammer. God was in his heaven, Baruch had been welcomed into his new home, and all was very right with our world.

2010-12-26T22:54:00.001Z

AT THE TURNING OF THE YEAR

Heavy clouds shone darkly above the hillside,
as I stood disappointed beside an empty manger.
No great star hung motionless and brilliant in the sullen sky,
no angels sang, no wise men rode through the night, nothing stirred
but the wind that blew dust into my eyes.

A stream nearby chivying the lazy reeds
murmured “Look within yourself and your heart’s eye
will find the shepherds and the angels,
the Magi and Mary’s baby in his star-lit cradle.”
“Go” whispered the breeze lingering in the icy grass,
“follow the unchanging way which leads every weary soul to that light.”

Suddenly, in the cold still night on that empty hillside silent
beneath its leaden canopy, there were shepherds
fallen to their knees beside their midnight fire.
The dazzled sky was full of angels, whose mighty Hallelujahs
shook the branches of the olive tree
and warmed the night with the radiance of their song.

A train of grunting camels swayed over the rim of the world,
carrying tall men from the East in robes of scarlet and purple and gold,
dignified silhouettes against the coming of a new golden dawn.
Out of the shadows, from over the hills, across the rivers, down the valleys,
surged a thousand generations of pilgrims
come to honour the child, eternal paradigm of faith and hope and love.

A wide-eyed shepherd boy, his young lamb held close, walked beside me
along that crowded joyful road to Bethlehem, to witness
and to celebrate the old year’s dying, the new year’s resurrection
and the promise made before the world began.
Which is now again to be fulfilled.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Esther

2010-10-03T10:51:00.003+01:00

Patience is the companion of wisdom

St Augustine

Esther, her purring kitten Tighearnan on her shoulder, sat on a small rise overlooking Wexford Harbour and and waited patiently for her Papa to come home. But Papa’s bones, picked clean by small fishes, lay deep in the ocean four thousand miles away. Eight months later with a bitterly complaining kitten in a small rush basket, Esther, Mina and Mama waited in the autumn cold of a Dublin evening for the steamer which would take them across the wild waved Irish Sea to a new life in Liverpool.

The was no more money in Liverpool than there was a welcome for a nearly destitute family. Both the sisters had to go out to work, Mina aged 13 to look after a rich merchant’s backward daughter, and Esther aged 10 to mind the alcoholic wife of an absent sea captain. Fifteen years later, Mina was travelling the world keeping a succession of backward daughters safely away from the disdain and condescension of upper class Liverpool society while Esther, at last, was engaged to be married.

Charles was the youngest son of a wealthy business man; Esther although poor was the daughter of an officer and a gentleman, and the niece of two generals. As such, she was made grudgingly welcome by her new family and her three children were born at the big family house in the rue des Ormeaux where Grandmama held court. Although she did not care much for her husband’s relations, her highly critical and ironic wit was mercifully well moderated by a great natural courtesy, and Esther was content.

Esther loved her children with a love as fierce as it was undemonstrative and her patience was severely tested by the war in France. Towards the end of 1917 Frederick, her regular army son, returned home an invalid. Over the fields of Arras where the land was made blackly sticky with allied blood, her youngest son Bryan flew during the dreadful Spring of 1917, and then lay impatiently in an English hospital waiting for his eyes to heal and his sight to return. He rejoined his squadron, but Frederick died. Esther mourned silently for one and quietly rejoiced for the other, accepting whatever in his wisdom the Good Lord chose to throw at her.

Charles, who played the international stock markets, died in 1930 most of his money lost to the Wall Street Crash. Sixty years after Papa’s death in the Red Sea, Esther yet again found herself almost penniless. Encroaching arthritis gradually crippled her, the sheer weight of her years began to destroy her body until at last in 1950 she was taken into a geriatric ward. There with flashes of bright humour and great patience she waited three years for death to come gently for her.

In worldly terms Esther was a totally undistinguished woman; she was not beautiful, she was not famous, she had no brilliant accomplishments. The World failed to notice her brisk kindness, her undemandingly respectful friendship with children, her unquestioning acceptance of the madman, the vicious stray cat and the slings and arrows of an outrageous Fortune. She inspired great love in those around her and a wonderful sense of security and self worth. This was her distinction and her wisdom was indeed more precious than rubies.

Naomi Illustration by Liz

2010-09-27T00:15:00.002+01:00

THE INVITATION

Across the green of the sea kissed downs, flies my bird,
Cushioned on winds first warmed by desert sun
Where camel and Beduin for ever walk
Into a shimmering horizon, mysterious and bright.
Up and up he rises, my bird, a speck of dark light
In a sky of cerulean blue, a day star in the stillness
Of a summer afternoon. He hovers now, my bird,
Oh so gently, like an idle leaf in the soft June air.
Then, tumbling from the sky, stalling and whirling,
An acrobat exuberant, my bird beckons,
A pinioned king wonderful in his dignity and power.
And I can only marvel at this Malachi pointing me to heaven.

Naomi

My friend Joan's prayer:

2010-09-08T14:01:00.000+01:00

Praise be to the great Weaver of Words and Wonder; for the threads of inspiration and hope, lovingly woven in the weft and warp of our lives.

2010-08-28T18:43:00.001+01:00

THUNDERSTORM   by Oliver Postgate

Over the hill M’Bongo is beating his drum …

    Heavily the sweltering days have dragged,
    The sun burning in a brazen sky fills the air with a lake of shimmering heat.
    Pigs, heaped in the shade lie panting,
    The green corn is edged with brown,
    The heat-drugged brain fumbles with drowsy thoughts
    Lulled by the incessant murmuring of the flies, the weary earth has fallen asleep.

M’Bongo ...
    The thunder-god is laughing,
    Dark-winged and swift he mounts the sky.
M’Bongo ...
    The earth grows dark,
    His cold breath sweeps across the land,
    Shaking the leaves of the dusty trees till they dance with a lunatic joy.
    The mad cadence of his capering laughter,
    The cool swirl of the new wind,
    Fill my leaden bones with life.
The rain comes …
    Heavy drops beat out the measure of the dance of the wind,
    Faster, faster,
    Until the earth is blinded with the hiss of the happy rain
    Till the road is a river, the path a torrent,
    Till the wild joy of relief cries from the thirsty ground,
    And M’Bongo the mad one, giver of life, is dancing overhead
    Cracking the roofbeams of the world,
    Scoring with shards of light the grey mat of the rain.

The rain passes.
    The clear new air is filled with the smell of moisture,
    A white gull, wheeling against the shifting clouds
    Mingles its wailing with the last slow shaking of the thunder.
    A shred of pale light, peering over the sea’s rim
    Turns the roads and the roofs to silver.
    Under the dripping eaves a blackbird has begun to sing.

OLIVER POSTGATE
May 1944

AFTER THE STORM

2010-06-20T23:14:00.004+01:00

"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain."

Shakespeare

There was a pestilence amongst the birds, their throats so swollen they could neither swallow nor sing. Within hours the sparrows and the pied wagtails toppled from their nests or fell starving from the sky. Then the waders, the fulmars and the big herring gulls, too exhausted by hunger to fish or fly, lay inert on the sand and amongst the rocks, their useless wings hanging like November leaves drooping from fog chilled trees.

The pigeon feeders brought them bags of seed and corn, but there were few birds of any kind still able to eat. Young people in white coats and thick gloves gathered up sick birds, put them gently into wicker baskets and took them away. Unlike the gulls newly cleaned from spilled diesel oil who had come back to the beach at the beginning of Spring shining-feathered and plump with good food, none of the plague stricken birds were returned.

Many of the winter migrants, frightened by the great sickness and cursing their Goddess Rhianonn for punishing them for sins unknown, flew back early to their summer homes, risking the bitter hazards of that unseasonable journey and breeding grounds not yet fit to sustain them. Many of the gulls, convinced that the spreading of the plague was the work of humans, wrecked their gardens and attacked their children. In retaliation humans came with guns and shot every seagull they could find - it had been a massacre. The pigeon feeders wept, and the few gull survivors screamed their protest against the wind, and then they too left the shore.

The air was menacing, unnaturally warm as the copper sun sank into the early Spring sea, and the Turnstone was afraid. In her carapace of rich brown, with neat black collar and white shirt, she was an elegant bird, quick and sure in her scavenging, flicking over debris and stones with her short powerful beak, unworried by chivying pigeons and disgruntled herring gulls. This evening, as every evening, she flew up far above the beach to the concrete bridge across the steep-pathed Gap and settled down on a high ledge where the remnant of her flock roosted well away from the unwelcome attentions of small boys and other predators. But she did not sleep.

When dawn came, chill and grey, the exhausted Turnstone thought that this day might be her last. Looking down from her high perch she saw a procession of humans led by a tall, lean old man in a shabby brown cloak who looked up at the roost and smiled at the bedraggled flock. “Fly down my brothers and my sisters,” he called, “we come with wholesome food and a powerful medicine to protect you.” One by one they fluttered down on to the outstretched hands. Very gently the old man inserted a tiny dropper into the Turnstone’s beak. “There, little one,” he whispered, “very soon you will fly strong again; you will build a new nest and rear your fledglings. The beach will ring with the crying of gulls and the staccato autumn song of your returning flock.” He laid his wrinkled cheek against her neat head. “Have faith and hope, my sister; the storm is past; love is come again.”

Picture by Liz Naomi

THE LIGHT IN THE SKY

2010-05-10T00:43:00.004+01:00

You may call God love, you may call God goodness,
But the best name for God is compassion.

Meister Eckhart

Gideon knelt on the bedroom windowsill. He could feel the edges of the dark brown tiles bite into his cold three year old legs and when he looked out into what should have been the night black sky, he was afraid. What, he asked, was the flickering red-gold light which had spread across the edge of the world. Out of the darkness his mother’s voice, sharpened by a terrible anxiety, replied that the light in the sky was London burning; German pilots were dropping fire bombs on the City.

The boy who had learned to be afraid the night the sky burned, now in the aftermath of war learned to hate the enemy who had captured his Jewish doctor father near Anzio and sent him back to Germany and the gas chambers of Dachau. This hatred survived university, Middle Temple and an increasingly successful legal career. In 1978 he was asked to advise the Home Office on the likelihood of successfully prosecuting a former Unterfeldwebel accused of the murder of four Russian Jews, P.O.Ws in the Sylt Concentration Camp on the Island of Alderney.

The evidence against the man was considered to be fairly slim, but there were those in government anxious to prove their wholehearted support for the State of Israel. Gideon accepted the offer, he told himself, as a duty - an almost sacred duty - and he was seized with a curious trembling excitement. He had dreamed for so long of somehow avenging his father’s death. He studied the prosecution papers, pondered various legal opinions and flew to Jersey to interview the suspect.

In a claustrophobic room, windowless and airless, with armed guards on every corner of the corridor outside, he watched the prisoner, grey pale from incarceration, soft voiced and still like a heron watching for fish. This then was his enemy; now was the longed-for time of retribution. He looked into the watery grey eyes and saw in them not the cruelty of the fanatic Nazi who had once perhaps strangled Jewish P.O.Ws, but a but a frail, weary, hopeless, shadow of a man seventy five years old - another pathetic victim of hatred and fear, rather like himself.

This was no blinding Damascene moment, no trumpets sounded in that bleak cell, just his own voice gentle now: “I shall recommend to the Home Secretary that you be sent back to Germany. I think you are not well, and I hope you will be allowed to return to your own folk for what is left of your life.” Gideon stood up, his own fear and hatred wonderfully purged, and he quietly clasped the old man’s hand. He walked out of the prison into the sharp air of a late December evening and shining in the north over the cliffs of Alderney he saw a great light. Not this time the reflection of a city on a fire, he thought, but the radiance of angels on a hillside proclaiming their eternal message: ‘Peace on earth to men of goodwill’.

Naomi

OLIVER POSTGATE 1925 -2008

2010-05-09T23:37:00.005+01:00

It seemed to me in the Autumn of 1985 that I was perhaps the bravest woman in East Kent. Oliver had given me the typescript of his new pamphlet for my “comments and corrections”. Can you imagine telling such an accomplished writer that his syntax was sometimes dodgy and his punctuation hilarious? In his eyes I read: “For God’s sake why did I ask her?” and “When is she going to crawl back into her cheese?” All he actually said was “Thank you my darling. I’ll look at it all very carefully.” He accepted about 80% of my corrections and comments, and thus set the pattern of our working together for the rest of his life. He wrote; I edited. Sometimes I wrote, but rarely showed him my text until after publication - it made for a more peaceful existence that way.

Oliver was an inventor with frugal habits. From various bits of old wood, some lengths of strong elastic, a couple of doorknobs and the battery from his power-drill he made an auxiliary motor for my manual wheelchair. It had been test driven with a sack of bricks for a passenger but now it was my turn. He pushed me down the long hill to Louisa Bay where we sat and admired the white lace surf rolling up the beach until it was time to go home for tea. Half way up the hill I smelled burning and saw tiny flames escaping from underneath my seat. I leaped out of the chair and told Oliver in succinct and palpably unladylike language exactly what I thought of him and all other mad inventors. He did not seem too bothered about me, but he was quite put out by the demise of his battery.

A few weeks before Oliver died we talked about the modest funeral he wanted and the Broadstairs party I hoped to organise for his many friends. “Well,” he said, “ if you want to do that as well as the Funereals, my darling, by all means do so. But, I don’t expect that many people will bother to come.” Last April at the Pavilion on the Sands right beside the sea he loved so much I gave his big party, and very many people bothered to come. His family, his friends, colleagues from the BFI and Television, Richard the Gas and Pete the Shoes, Mandy who runs the Ramsgate Cat Charity of which Bagpuss is a Patron, Graham from the Romanian Hospice where Bagpuss with a little help from the brickies built the Children’s Wing, some of the wonderful ladies who cared for him during the last months of his life - they and a multitude of others were all there. So for once, dearest Oliver, you were wrong, and all of us who loved you and who will always love your work were glad about that.

I go down sometimes to the edge of the beach where last May I left Oliver’s ashes. I look at the golden carpet the sun unrolls across the water stretching from my feet into the infinite distance of the horizon where the sea at last took him, and I smile at my memories of that once-upon-a-time-giant of a man, vast of intellect, magnificent in spirit, so loving in heart.

As I sit there I imagine that, if there is indeed a Heaven, I can in my mind’s eye see the Management suffering a certain degree of disquietude. Challenged by Gabriel, Oliver points to the sack of feathers he has been collecting since the last seraphic moult and makes it quite clear that he, Oliver, will have no need for the services of the celestial wing-makers. He will design and make his own set of re-cycled wings, thank you very much. Meanwhile, if the Archangel will please excuse him, he has needles to make and a template to cut. Gabriel sighs and shrugs, carefully folds his magnificently tailored pinions, and exits stage left. It always takes a while to get to grips with real genius.

CHALK-PIT HILL

2010-05-09T23:35:00.006+01:00

Each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, ...

Shakespeare: Macbeth

As the four children pushed close up to the old wall, seven year old George felt the rough edges of the top railings rusty against his face and smelled the bittersweet odour of rotting vegetation where the flowers on the bank had succumbed to the heat of summer and the siling rains of last week’s storms. Silently he watched the group of children playing on the dusty lawn in front of the house. Boys in grey shirts and long shorts were kicking around an old rubber ball and three girls with pinafores over faded cotton dresses bent over a set of Five Stones, their hair - tawny, long blond and brown - mimicking the coat of the fat tabby cat sunning himself on the doorstep. These were the War Orphans, newly moved into the big empty house next door to the ugly red brick Church at the top of Chalk-pit Hill, and the four local children staring through the railings were fascinated by them.

All the children had been told they must be nice to the orphans whose fathers had been killed in the fighting. A few had lost their mothers as well, in homes blitzed flat like careless cockroaches under the angry boots of George’s dad. But when next day they saw the alien group standing together in the corner of the playground, motionless and mute songbirds caged in a foreign land, isolated in their difference, George and his friends suddenly hostile turned away, back to their own exclusive games. The Orphans, they felt, already got too much attention and fuss made of them.

Sixty years later George, sitting on a lounger in the sun bathed garden, wondered if Kate remembered the old orphanage. When the West Indian immigrants arrived and moved into the long tumbledown terrace in Albert Road, the orphans as a distinctive group disappeared and the playground hierarchies changed. Dark skinned, with voices rich and smooth as melting chocolate, laughing and singing in that strange patois of theirs, these latest incomers became the new strangers. ‘We didn’t play with them either.’ thought George. ‘The kids were the same with the Ugandan Asians, and when our Jenny announced she was going to marry Rajiv, I was afraid that we would lose her to strangers.’ He sighed.

“Oh, meant to tell you,” he said to his wife, “I saw off that BNP candidate. Told him what to do with his evil fascist ideas. And, by the way, I don’t like the grandkids’ Polish Plumber jokes. Their dad was an immigrant too.” She laughed. “Be patient,” she said, “they’ll learn, like most of us did. Remember Neville and Joan who adopted me. They were a lovely Mum and Dad and they welcomed everyone wherever they came from, however different or poor they were.” She laughed again. “Even you George.” “Yes,” he agreed, “they were good people. God bless them and everyone like them. They were especially kind when the penniless soldier boy from next door asked to marry their beautiful daughter. And she was the little girl with long blonde hair whom once I’d stared at through the railings, and whom I married in the ugly brick church on Chalk-Pit Hill.”

Illustration by Liz

DANCING DRAGONS

2009-11-20T21:17:00.004Z

… not faith by fable lives,
But from the faith the fable springs

Robert Penn Warren: Love’s Voice

The Rabbit, perched on the Dragon’s ophidian neck and hanging tightly onto his bovine ears, was tired from the long flight through clouds and ice and rain, but his eyes were bright with excitement. In the grey chill of a mid February Mancunian morning they had at last come to the end of their journey. “What, Jitù, in the Name of the Nine Emperors are we doing here?” demanded the Dragon. “Come to see the Dancing Dragons, Yinglóng.” replied the Rabbit.” You didn’t have to come, although I am very grateful for the ride.” he added hastily. “Let’s wait over there.” he said and pointed to the corner of the square in which they had landed. “None of them can see us, but we shall have a wonderful view of them. Don’t you find all this very exciting?”

“No; I find it all rather depressing. In the real world we don’t actually exist, you and I. Doesn’t it worry you that we are merely part of a myth, a corporate figment, a story men tell sitting around the fireside.” He laid his camel shaped head on his ten great claws and sighed. “We seem to me to be merely their make-believe answer to unanswerable questions. Men are rational beings who live as best they can, and then they die. They come from nowhere, and they become nothing. I have never quite understood why they are so enthralled to these stories. Do we honestly make any essential or substantial difference to their lives?”

As was his wont when thinking, the Rabbit slowly scratched the back of his right ear, leaving his left ear stuck up in the air like some eccentric furry flag pole. “I think,” he said quietly, “that without that storytelling, the New Year for the folk in every China Town would be a sad festival. For them you are their symbol of a kindly power, of wisdom and strength. You are their model of excellence and success. When the people in the streets see your effigy they remember that there is an eternal force that keeps them safe from danger. They cannot see that strength, they do not hear it call, they can neither touch it nor taste it, but in the pantomime of the dance the spirit of the dragon brings them hope, and that is a most precious gift.”

The noise around them swelled into an approaching crescendo of gongs and cymbals, firecrackers and drums. Round the corner into the square where the Dragon and the Rabbit stood came a crowd of excited laughing people following the dancing dragon - twenty joyous undulating metres of yellow and orange shimmering silken scales, and a vast horned mask of red and green and gold, its cavernous mouth stretching after the great scarlet pearl of wisdom carried on a long pole before it.

“Oh, Gold Moon-Rabbit,” sighed the Dragon, “do you really believe in all this? “ “Yes, I think I do” answered the Rabbit slowly. “I believe in that power of which all this hope and joy is a dancing shadow on a wall. Today, Old Dragon, we are a piece of that shadow, and it points us all to the stars."

Naomi

TO THE EAST OF THE GARDEN

2009-11-20T20:48:00.011Z

To Man he gave a countenance to look on high and to behold the heavens, and to raise his face erect to the stars.

Ovid: Metamorphoses 1

In the corner of the field next to the old labourer’s cottage stood a tall ash tree, its curving branches still bare beside the new greening of the hedge. Three ring necked parakeets replete with pear blossoms sat in the sun, their ever moving long tails keeping their balance on the high insubstantial branch of their choice. Every so often one of them would walk sideways along the slippery bark and, almost quicker than the eye could comprehend, turn upside down, its beady eye glittering in the sunlight. A black bird sang a love song to his brown hen while two fat pigeons, stuffed with stolen corn, basked lazy in the sunshine.

    Into this place of sun dappled peace came a short legged climbing Kentish cat intent on catching pigeon for his larder. Stuck in a low branched fork, he made a foray to his left along a perilously bouncing slender branch. He clung on for dear life, backed down to the safety of the fork again, tried the slightly bigger branch to his right, but that began slowly to sag, rotten wood threatening to break. Retreating again to the fork, with his hind feet firmly anchored to the trunk, he stretched out unsheaved claws making out that he was about to spring. His hind legs slipped again and defeated he curled up into a tight ball of fur. Ignoring the scornful avians overhead and dreaming of his brown pottery bowl in the kitchen, he slept.

    From a bank at the far end of the field two youngsters watched the drama of the day unfolding. A slim light brown body, twenty centimeters nose to tail, pretty rounded ears, long nose and whiskers, white bib and stomacher, sturdy clawed feet, quite still except for whiskers aquiver: a weasel looking for a breakfast egg or a tender chick for her kittens. Falling out of the sky, black   crested   and   cloaked in iridescent blue like a pair of feathered acrobats, the lapwings landed close to their nest some 40 yards from the rough grass where they had hidden their new chicks. They circled the empty nest, dancing and beating their wings, and screaming their haunting cry into the quiet of the morning. Disconcerted by the violence of the movement and the shrieking of two birds larger than herself, the weasel froze, then turned and scuttled away into a patch of tall thistles to search elsewhere for breakfast.

    Peace returned. The birds in the tree preened their feathers; the cat went home for Whiskas; the lapwings fed their chicks; and the weasel, at last, found a mouse for her hungry family.

The young man put out a hand and pulled his girlfriend to her feet.
    “Come on,” he said, “we’ve got things to do.”
    “Must we go?” she asked. “It’s so … sort of timeless here, and safe.”
    “Yes, we must. Got to get to the Bank before it closes. Presents to buy!”

    She laughed and they ran through the field gate back towards the village. ‘Thus Glory fades’ murmured the Gatekeeper. Silently he folded his four great wings, and a flaming sword turned every which way about the path.

Naomi

GOD LOVES EVERY SPARROW

2009-11-20T20:46:00.004Z

THIS I BELIEVE

I stood on a hillside overlooking Doone Valley. I was
nine years old. It was the perfect day - bright clear
sunlight, bird song, a slight breeze, the sort of day when
all’s well with the world and God is in his heaven. I
stared across the tops of the trees far into the horizon,
and for a split-second moment I lost everything -
sunlight, breeze, bird song, and in that ‘infinite moment’
it seemed to me I glimpsed eternity. What this huge
panorama of an immortal landscape so golden, so
delicate, so strong, seemed to be showing me was my
own insubstantial finite mortal self looking as if through
an invisible window into a world both infinite and
immortal, stunningly beautiful but to a child
frighteningly powerful. Its essential loveliness was
overwhelming, and so also was my sense of loss that I
could not remain for ever a part of this miraculous
vision.

Over the years the experience has been repeated,
but never with quite the same power, never with quite
the same sense of awe as I knew then. I have come to
look on these slivers of joy as times of spiritual
revelation; not so much like that first Exmoor invisible
window onto the otherness of eternity, but rather as the
absorbing of the individual that is myself into both the
greater wholeness of the natural world and into the
immanent hand of God. With this blessed sense of
absorption comes the perception, the belief that I must
as best I can care for this world in which I live and its
inhabitants amongst whom I live, and honour the God
from whom ultimately all this world has come.

I have no formal Creed, but since the age of nine I
have looked on the natural world and all its inhabitants
much as a girl looks on her first lover - exciting,
beautiful, pristine, unmatchable. I have heard God in the
music of Mozart, I have recognised God in the greeting
of a smiling stranger, I have seen God at work in the
meticulous and generous care taken by our street
cleaner. I have shied away from the ugliness of decay,
been sickened by the stench of blood and the injured
scream, and mourned for lives broken and wasted by
cruelty and greed. Where, in these things, is the love and
the presence of God? But as the shining beauty of the
memory of the first love is never wholly lost, so I have
never quite failed to find the a reflection of God
everywhere and in all things. A God who is omniscient,
eternal and ineffable and yet a God who knows and
loves each sparrow who falls to the ground - in this God
do I believe.

Naomi

RESURGEO

2009-05-23T18:11:00.004+01:00

RESURGEO

“... they shall mount up with wings as eagles ...”
Isaiah

Overlooked by the college gardeners, a small colony of nettles had tucked itself close up against the South West corner of the Chapel. The caterpillar walked slowly along a nettle leaf unceasingly munching, his small body undulating like a ripple on a quiet green pool. Without pausing in his mastication he watched a black column come into sight. Up the long path, over the bridge and past the West Facade of Gibb’s Building, sixteen boys walked two by two, top-hatted, black gowned and jacketed, stiffly white collared. Unnoticing of the caterpillar, they went quietly into the Chapel.

‘They look a bit like a giant version of me,’ thought the caterpillar, ‘quiet, disciplined, purposeful.’ He folded his long black body dappled with white over the edge of his leaf and slid into a hollow in the nettle stalk. From the Chapel came the sound of boys’ voices, high and clear like the fluting of black birds calling to their loves in the misty morning of a new Spring day. The music rose into a great crescendo: “God is our hope and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved ...”

The caterpillar liked the singing but wondered what this word ‘hope’ could have to do with him. He remembered the silken shelter of the nest he and his many newly hatched bothers and sisters had spun beneath a large nettle leaf. But, attacked by parasitic Tachinid grubs, all but one of his siblings had died, and she had long left him for another nettle plant and now hung inert in her yellow chrysalis suspended from beneath the leaf which once had fed her. The only thing the caterpillar knew he could expect was this kind of living death - there seemed nothing to hope for. He sighed and nibbled with little enthusiasm at a particularly succulent young leaf.

Late in the May evening the caterpillar was disturbed by the aroma of cigars and the conversation of two men standing in the light of the Porch lamp.
“Sober looking little fellow.” the first voice said. “Almost funereal, all that black.”
“But what a beauty that sobriety hides.” replied the second voice. “ In May Week he’ll spin his own shroud; six weeks of limbo and then, a Summer miracle - from the caterpillar’s empty tomb will fly an Inarchis io. That’s a Peacock Butterfly to you, Provost. Wings of red-rust with peacock tail jewels, yellow and purple, white and blue. Stunning, absolutely stunning.”
“Come on, let’s go.” urged his companion, “That’s enough about your blessed Lepidoptera. It’s not Summer yet, and I’m cold.”

‘I shall become beautiful.’ mused the caterpillar, ‘I shall fly upwards towards the sun. I shall have a cousin who looks like a shard of Tiffany glass, and another cloaked in regal purple who will dance with a lady in a grey-black gown marbled with white. But how is it that I have all these pictures in my head? Moonshine memory perhaps?’ He climbed slowly to the top of the nettle stalk and gazed up at the night sky which dappled with stars had become some huge brilliant likeness of his own modest white speckled coat. ‘I’m not sure that there is anyone up there,’ he said, ‘but just in case, for this hope that I have been given I would like to say - “Thank You.”’

Naomi

POEMS

2009-01-13T19:59:00.004Z

A PRAYER FOR NIGHT TIME

May the sea be calm for us,
The little waves sing a soft Goodnight for us,
The stars gently light the darkness for us,
The full moon heavy and low above the shadowy horizon
Unroll her soft gold carpet for us,
So that we may walk quietly into the East of the morning.

Naomi

A PRAYER FOR INNER PEACE

Let us be quiet in our hearts as is
The still cormorant watching from the sunlit rock,
The tranquil sea fret stealing over the water,
The gentle wave caressing the shingle,
The sea campion motionless in her gown of white.

For these are the mute harbingers of a loving God
And the promise of His peace.

Naomi

A PRAYER FOR PEACE IN THE HOLY LAND
January 2009

May the cruel winds of Winter
be gentled by the promise of Spring.
May the bitter mantle of ice and snow
be warmed by the green shoots of hope.
May the misery of this war's pain and despair
be overcome by the fragile power of love.

Naomi

ENVOI

2009-01-11T20:51:00.003Z

ENVOI: From Grief to Glory
Occasioned by the Death of Oliver Postgate, 8 December 2008

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil

They had long been walking with Death on a bleak and lonely path. At first Death padded behind them, like the Tiger of her childhood nightmare: “Don’t be afraid, I shall not harm you. I am soft and I am warm.” He had spoken then as now in a voice gentle and light, but always the burning breath was on the back of her neck and the jagged edges of toothed shadows were all about them. The Tiger melted away and a tall young man, Death the Companion, saturnine and unsmiling appeared between them. He put their hands into his hands and drew them close together under the cloak he wore. “Come,” he said quietly, “there must be no more delay, the time is almost here. There is nothing left to fear.” But the young man’s voice was like the jangling of slivers of ice in the moonlit wind, and they were afraid. He because it was his longed for time that now was almost come, and she because she could not imagine any future without him.

He looked up and remembered the warmth of her love even in the most terrible times of his illness, and he smiled at her in the abiding pleasure of her company. She watched as he bent again over his stick, head hunched into his shoulders, as painfully he shuffled and stumbled along the stony path. She put out her hand and stroked the greying cheek red blotched with the marks of his sickness, and to her he was as beautiful as the day she had first met this once-upon-a-time giant of a man, vast in intellect, magnificent in spirit.

“How long now?” he whispered to her. “Not long now.” and she took his hand. “I love you.” he said. The young man led them to a flat place from where they could see the valley beyond and the steep banks of a river so vast, with water in such quantity that it might have been fed by all the rivers and the oceans of the world, mighty cataracts and great tidal waves, quiet pools and bubbling mountain streams. Everywhere the myriad droplets leapt and danced, wheeling and plunging across the surface of the eddying waters.

Death the Angel who separates the soul from the body, now stood beside them, above them and all around them. “Why have you brought us here?” she asked. Death shook out his silvered robe and spoke gently: “This is the eternal river which cradles the Universe. From it you both came, and to it this night he is to return.” The clouds suddenly cleared the moon and unrolled a wide glinting pale gold carpet across the waters, stretching far into the shadowy distance. “Follow me now,” invited Death, “and ride the waters into eternity.” Death led him to the edge of the shining path and together they walked towards the depths of the shimmering waves. She watched him go and marvelled as all his anguish and depression, his anger and confusion, all seemed to fall away from him. He dropped his stick; straight backed and laughing, he plunged into the river and she could see him no longer. A tiny droplet flashed white diamond bright high above the dancing waters, and she smiled.

“I told you sixty years ago,” said the Tiger standing beside her, “that I would not harm you.” She leaned silently against him and stroked his soft flank. And the Tiger, who was Death the Merciful, purred gently with a quiet pleasure.

Naomi

DE MIRACULIS

2009-01-11T20:44:00.001Z

DE MIRACULIS

All shall be ruled by fellowship I say,
When we are ruled by the love of one another.
All shall be ruled by fellowship I say,
In the light that is coming in the morning.

Sidney Carter: John Ball

Sir Rainald’s servants found the young man lying beside the track leading to the Manor House. His clothes, though dishevelled, were made of fine cloth and his hands were pale and soft, but his eyes were blank and he could not speak. He had no visible injury and allowed himself to be led to the long time empty cottage close to the Manor Farm. There Sir Rainald himself brought him a blanket of coney skins, a bed, a stool and a six-board oak chest black with age and beeswax. Each day food and wine, wood for the fire and candles to light the dark evenings of winter were sent to the cottage. Not a word did the young man speak, but he bowed low to Sir Rainald and nodded briefly to the servants.

One frost white morning as the reluctant Christmastide sun rose behind the low timbered walls and the reed thatch, a boy of perhaps ten years lifted the latch of the young man’s door, and went into the small dark room He was ragged and grubby, but he smiled and bade the young man a Good Day as he unpacked his basket. The young man looked silently away, unsmiling. Was there anything else the master wanted Aldret persisted. The young man hesitated, then pointed to the small wooden pipe which hung from the boy’s belt. “Play me a tune.” he said, and lay back against the wool filled mattress. Aldret put the mouthpiece to his lips and the young man shut his eyes

As he always did, the young mand saw in his mind’s eye his wife Ysolt in her coffin, her new born babe lying on her breast. The pipe filled the December gloom with the trilling of birds and the soft song of running water, and suddenly the gloom of the cottage seemed to be overwhelmed by a midsummer sun. He could hear laughter and there was Ysolt in her blue gown, her corn gold hair flying out loose behind her as she danced with him in her father’s hall. He walked with her once more across soft green fields and amongst the dancing dappled shadows of the ancient forest, and he came alive again.

“What miracle is this?” Sir Rainald came into the cottage as the young man, smiling while the tears ran down his cheeks, put a hand on Aldret’s shoulder and a silver coin in his scrip. “No miracle, my lord,” the young man said, “as when our Saviour was born of a Virgin and cradled in a manger. Rather it is the uniting of your abiding kindness to a mind-sick stranger together with Aldret’s generous sharing of his music with me, that have opened my eyes again to the loving presence of my lady who lives on in my heart’s memory. If such courtesy and compassion were always to direct us thus towards all whom we may meet, then my lord in this world we should perhaps have little need of miracles.”

Naomi

PARLEY OF INTOLERANCE

2009-01-11T20:39:00.005Z

PARLEY OF INTOLERANCE

First Peace and Silence all disputes controll,
Then Order plaies the soul;
And giving all things their set forms and houres,
Makes of wilde woods sweet walks and bowres.

Herbert; from ‘The Familie’

“This” complained the Death Watch Beetle “is my sacred space. I have my home here and am nourished by it.” “It’s you who are spoiling my home with your selfish larval gnawing, piles of dust everywhere , and your arrogant claims to be superior.” protested the mouse. “You’ve got no respect for my sacred space.” “Well that’s a joke” said the Beetle. “What about that heap of mouldy crumbs and those disgusting rotten apples you hide behind the old chairs? Uncivilised I call it.” “Look out,” squeaked the Mouse, “there’s the awful Bat. Now, he is uncivilised and disgusting, with horrible noisome habits. I don’t see why any of the rest of us should put up with him. Oh, no...”

The bat landed and hung upside down from the Beetle’s beam. “Room for a little one?” he piped. “No, definitely not.” they chorused. “This is our space.” said the Beetle. “There’s no room for anyone else.” added the Mouse. “You don’t fit in with us.” protested the Beetle. “You are not of our persuasion. And besides, you stink.” “Why don’t you go outside , or into the porch with the Wren?” suggested the Mouse. “She’s a flyer too, and she doesn’t trouble anyone - too obsessed with those eggs. She wouldn’t mind.” “I would mind.” snapped the Bat, “I am a mammal like you. Beetles I can put up with - they taste quite good. But I don’t consort with birds.”

“That, gentlemen, is enough.” It was the Voice speaking in the darkness behind the curtain, through the crack in the door, from beneath the flagstoned floor, from the apex of the vault, louder than the loudest clap of thunder, more silent than the silence of a still feather. Whose voice it was depended on who was listening. It might be Bramha or G-d, Confucius or Amaterasu, Isis or Baku, even Jesus. “This” continued the Voice “is no one creatures’s space. It is sacred precisely because it belongs to no-one. It is made sacred because of the care and love of each for the others within it. We observe precious little of that love here, gentlemen.” The bat began a shrill protest, but the Voice was not to be interrupted. “And by ‘love’ We do not mean ‘like’. We do not expect you to find each other agreeable. We do not require you to worship the same gods, or indeed to worship any god at all. Resolve therefore to look care-fully at each other, to try to understand each other, to respect each other.”

The Voice paused. The Bat, the Mouse and the Beatle moved closer together, looking outwards with wonder and awe, no longer glaring at each other. “I’ll give it a go.” the Beatle muttered. “I’ll try.” the Mouse said softly. “I suppose it might work.” the Bat admitted reluctanly. “It has to work,” responded the Voice, “or you betray that purpose for which you were made, which would indeed be sad.”

Naomi

THE ODD TRIO

2009-01-11T20:33:00.003Z

THE ODD TRIO

Who practices hospitality entertains God - Ancient Proverb

The Secretary bird sat disconsolately in the empty saucer-like nest she had made high in a massive old oak tree. She thought about her chick seized by a marauding eagle and her mate who with clipped wings had struggled into the air, lost the thermal on which he was riding and crashed to a cruel death on the razor wire which topped the fence of the dreadful menagerie in which they had been trapped for the past five years. She flew upwards and then laboriously crossed the boundary fence to an uncertain freedom. She walked across the Norfolk Brecklands, fifteen miles a day until she found, near South Dereham, “The British Raptor Sanctuary” where the Man welcomed her, gave her fresh food and some little hope for her future.

A Posse of British Raptors - a broken winged Barn Owl, two tailless Sparrowhawks, a club-clawed Goshawk and a rather less than enthusiastic purblind Kestrel - listened to her soft mewing cry. She was a conspicuous bird, almost four feet high, elegant in her grey and white and black plumage with long black knee britches, quilled headress and orange eye patched face. They envied her her exotic beauty; they feared she had more than her fair share of fresh food brought to her by the Man; they mocked her African song; they despised her hunting technique - although she had wings and a beak she ran after her prey, for Horus’ sake, and stamped it to death!

Sitting quietly in an adjacent tree, another immigrant outcast watched and mused. He was a young undersized Spanish Griffon Vulture brought to the Sanctuary from Belgium where, searching for food many hundreds of miles from his home in the Pyrenees, he became separated from the rest of his flock and was found distressed and exhausted wandering in a park near Ghent. An exceedingly nervous bird, constantly terrified of an imagined attack from his own shadow, he nowadays rarely finished his dive from his nest to the raw meat put out for him, but soared back empty-beaked and hungry to the safety of the tree-top. He had to be hand fed and so had become the butt of the Posse’s cruel jokes.

A few days later he flew low above the ground close to the running Secretary Bird. She did not turn him away, but left for him a dead mouse and a grass snake, and there was no swooping shadow to terrify him. Guided by the sound of her running feet the Kestrel joined the strange pair and found a short tailed vole which the Secretary had stunned and kicked in his direction. As they made their daily sorties like some dignified avian Battle of Britain Flight emerging modestly out of a misty morning, the Posse shrugged its collective wings, turned its collective ire upon a flight of young marauding buzzards who were creating havoc amongst the older raptor residents, and finally left the Odd Trio to work out their lives together in peace.

Naomi

SHIVA DANCING

2008-02-09T21:09:00.009Z

Only in the dance do I know how to tell the parable of the highest things....

Nietsche: Zarathustra, "The Tomb Song,"

The Rabbit limped across the blackened stubble to the patch of low Autumn sunlight underneath the old tree which spread its leafless branches thickly across the corner of the field. He stretched out his limbs gratefully on the still warm dusty earth, closed his eyes and quietly, gently, died.

Lucy and Anisha, on their way home from school to the farm cottages on the ridge above the field, found him there, looking already as if he were returning to the earth on which he lay. For a moment they gazed at him, and then hurried away. They returned with Lucy’s own small spade and a piece of fine Indian cotton, from Anisha’s treasure box, embroidered with an image of a blue skinned, four-armed dancing Shiva, a belt of skulls at his waist and a cobra, symbol of divine power, around his neck.

They took it in turns to dig a grave deep in the soft dry earth under the tree. These were country children who had little fear of death; they wrapped the stiffening body in the delicate cotton and then, carefully and reverently, lowered it into the hole they had dug. They filled in the grave with the thin brown dust and stood for a moment, solemn under the tree.

As they passed the small grave, each day the girls checked that it was undisturbed. The long Autumn rains had turned Summer’s dust into damp mud and the Rabbit lay safe beneath his loamy pall. In January the first snow fell; the frosts were hard and the blown white flakes lay blanket thick under the tree until March. As the snow melted Lucy noticed small green shoots pushing through the dark brown earth; weeds perhaps, the girls thought.

By the end of April it was obvious that what they had thought was some old weed was growing into a strong thick stemmed plant. Spring gave way to Summer and the plant pushed its way upwards in a clump of a dozen spikes, with tiny grey-green narrow leaves, bases and sheaths tinged with violet. As full Summer approached it flowered, covering one side of each spike with a mass of heads - pale green upper petals like pointed shells, brown lips tinged with pink. Nothing else grew in that patch of dried up earth, just the plant now maybe 18 or 20 inches high and shining like a cluster of far away pale stars in its drab and shaded home.

The girls were puzzled - they had never seen flowers like this before. Anisha’s father brought a local botanist to look at this miracle of new life. It was, the young man said, a rare wild orchid, a Violet Helleborine which did well in woodland and in shaded places, but in this old patch of untended barren earth, its success was quite remarkable.

“It was because of the Rabbit who died.” said Lucy, “His bones must have fed the plant.” “And the Lord Shiva.” added Anisha. “First he danced at the Rabbit’s death but now he is dancing for the birth of a new life.”

Naomi, February 2008

NO BIRDS SING

2008-01-01T15:45:00.004Z

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Eliot: Burnt Norton

From her quiet corner in the the Cloister Garth where she had taken coffee out into the early morning June sun she watched as the monk emerged from the gloom of the Infirmary Cloister, walked through the herb garden, passed the Prior’s Staircase and, just before he got into the Great Cloister, turned sharp right and walked through the wall. The monk wondered why had the high round arched door been bricked up, and why had anyone thought the old stone staircase well replaced by pallid marble and black iron. Then his prescient mind’s eye saw the fireballs of 1942 raining from the night sky, heard the crash of falling masonry and felt the acrid smoke in the back of his throat. He remembered then that what for him was a tragedy yet to come, for the young woman, whom he knew watched him from her place in the Cloister, it was already a piece of history.

The girl spotted the pale face under the brown hood peering at her from a window high up in the Library, close to where he might once have had his cell in the monastic dormitory. She wondered why he had lately been so persistent in his appearances. Were they random or did they have a purpose? Perhaps he wanted to talk to her, but how did you talk to a monk who had died centuries ago? What could he have to say to her, who was not even a Christian, let alone a Catholic.

The monk leaned against the stone windowsill watching the girl, silently challenging her to look and listen with him. He closed his eyes and flooded his mind with images of men afraid, women angry, young men hurling stones, young girls circling their bodies with belts pocketed by death. He heard mothers weeping for starving babies, a mob screaming and the terrible death march of children burying their virus stricken parents. He felt the anguish of centuries circling the globe in a never ending river of terror and pain.

The door at the far end of the long Library room opened and the monk knew the girl had returned. He slid behind one of the fine old book presses and went into his cell through the portrait of a sweet faced seventeenth century Dean. The girl clattered past his doorway and then paused to stroke a venerable red Turkey binding. He could hear her thoughts quite clearly: ‘How could people do.... Can’t they see... Perhaps I could .... Perhaps...’ The sound of a telephone, urgent in the heavy silence. She ran off down the aisle between the presses; another door banged and she was gone. The monk made the sign of the Cross and sighed. Was another pebble of understanding to be added to the defences against the infernal flood? If only his work here were done and he could sleep again. Outside the window of his narrow cell, a blackbird sang.

Naomi 31 December 2007

THE TREE

2007-09-21T20:40:00.002+01:00

"I have come here to be amazed " Goethe

It stood in the yard of a small Georgian court - a flowering cherry, Prunus Ichiyo, tall with spreading branches and snow-dusted buds, like an Kyoto fan etched against a sky of new Spring blue. There was no garden there in the yard, just the tree. No-one knew who had planted it or how, in an old neglected part of Leeds with stones stained ugly black by two hundred years of industrial pollution, it had survived. But survive it had and become as much part of the life of Salamanca Court as that of Number 4’s ninety year old Mrs Sewell.

The tree reflected both joys and grief. In the chill sad days of early February it was hung with black streamers to mark the passing of Deaf Jonty, born, lived and died in Number 1. Pritam, dark eyed and beautiful, was born in March and the tree was decorated with blue ribbons. Although the quiet Guptas at Number 10 did not know why the ribbons were blue, they saw their baby son thus made welcome to the Court.

Rosheen Sewell sat in her kitchen and looked fondly into the yard. In the lengthening June evenings the Japanese students of Number 8 put down a mat beneath the tree and, to the delight of the Latvian Balodis brothers at Number 5, practised their Aikido. July was hot and Rocheen and Caleb from Number 2 took chairs out into the shade of the tree and shared memories of long hours in a Yorkshire mill and the winter cold of sheep-herding on the Pately Bridge high moor. Children played round the tree through August and Gladstone of Number 9 got a bollocking from his dad for trying to carve his initials on its trunk. “Boy, we have to care for that tree. It’s our piece of paradise in this grey land.”

She thought about Jonathan and Gary of Number 3 who held their September wedding party out in the yard. The tree was hung about with pink hearts and everyone got drunk and danced long after midnight. She remembered Middle-Aged-Mercy, the Quaker lady at Number 6 who last October hung a banner on the tree saying: “Save Our Planet” and all the neighbours threw coins into her Save our Planet Bucket. As if not to be outdone in generosity, the tree rained down purple-red leaves, a rich carpet spread over the cold black ground.

In November Rocheen refused to go to a retirement home in Headingley. She did not want to leave the Court where her life and the lives of her neighbours seemed all bound together within the life of the tree. For Divali there were firecrackers and lanterns round the tree; the Levine boys dug a hole between its roots as a hiding place for their Hanukkah gelt. As the year neared its turning, Pagan Morganna made the Solstice fire outside Number 11 and the tree’s branches turned dark red in the glow of the flames. In its Christmas coat of gleaming tinsel and silver bells it lit up the cottages of Salamanca Court like a great Star of Bethlehem shining over them all.

Naomi
illustrated by Liz

The Hamster and the Rats

2007-06-20T14:52:00.001+01:00

“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad”
Euripides

The Hamster lay in his burrow beneath the Syrian Steppe. He could not see what was happening above his nest, but he could hear. He could hear the rumble of tracked vehicles, the thud of guns, the screams of missiles and men dying in the hot sun of the dry Steppe. But it was all nothing to do with him. The accumulated wisdom of many generations of ancestors told him that a wise creature is one who lives apart even from his own kind, expresses no opinions, indeed has no opinions about anything, who guards his own burrow, gathers his own food, and lives out his short life in solitary safety. This was the Hamster’s philosophy and it had served him well - until he met the Rats.

There were three of them, quite ordinary Black Rats, surprisingly friendly but, their eyes blazing with the fires of righteousness, quite manic in the darkening evening. With them they had a pair of Jirds, your cousins the Rats said, to act as scouts and guides. The Rats had come to the Middle East by ship, but the Jirds were natives - from down there, waving their paws towards the South East. Their mission? To seek and to destroy. To seek for and to destroy what, the alarmed Hamster wanted to know. Snakes, the Rats answered in an excited unison. Their Masters’ Intelligence agents had discovered an enormous colony of killer MacMahon’s Vipers hidden not three kilometres from the Hamster’s burrow. Their Control had fitted the rats with mouth pouches, rather like the Hamster’s they thought, only theirs were filled with poison. When they released it into the Vipers’ waterholes, it would destroy the terrorising reptiles and the Hamster would be free again from danger.

The Hamster, much perturbed, filled his pouches. He ignored the water hole - like the Jirds he had no need of water - and scuttled back to his burrow fervently wishing that he had never met the Black Rats. Shivering in spite of the warmth of his deep home, he lay in his nest for many days until hunger drove him out once more into the night. Some irresistible impulse took him back to the Black Rats’ waterhole.

He found them all returned - two sad Jirds and three dead Rats. They had found no Vipers, no terrorist snakes of any kind, but they had poisoned the water holes as they had been ordered and many small creatures had died, too many to count. The rodent platoon fled back to this place where, forgetting that this was the the first hole they had poisoned, the Rats drank their fill and they too died, victims to their own deadly weapon. “What shall you tell your Masters when you return home?” the Hamster asked the Jirds. “That like men we have tried to play the role of the gods,” they replied, “and that now, like men, we are become mad and shall be destroyed.”

Naomi
Illustrated by Liz

ON THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA

2007-05-09T15:59:00.000+01:00

"For what’s left of our religion,
I lift my voice and pray:
May the lights in The Land of Plenty
Shine on the truth some day.”
Leonard Cohen

We had been discussing varieties of epiphanic experience and were lost in the contemplation of glory when Andrew looked out of the window and we crashed back into unpalatable reality. He counted the gas-guzzlers parked in the Square. “I would like”, he said, “to go to the driver of each of those monsters and say ‘If you do not trade that thing in for a small more eco-friendly car, a little girl in Bangladesh will drown and you will have killed her.’ And do you really need to have forty eight pairs ofshoes? Think of all that wasted energy.” With this parting shot, he took his leave. I had to agree with him. I don’t need forty eight pairs of shoes and I want to see each individual and every government living in harmony with the natural world, reordering our lives and society so that the world may perhaps escape the terrible results our reckless consumption seems to be bringing.

But, pursue these policies single-mindedly and the Law of Unintended Consequences will kick in. Cut back or cut out, control and ration - then jobs will disappear, services shrink and the weak go to the wall. In the affluent West, there could be big tax rises, increasing unemployment, civil unrest, anger at the loss of our precious freedom to do what we like and to hell with the rest of them. Much, much worse, if all the Western women like me stop buying shoes we do not need, a worker in a Far Eastern sweat shop may be sacked and his family go hungry. If his young daughter gets sick, he will have no money to buy medicine and another little girl will die.

If we want the moral luxury of choosing to moderate our own life style - consuming less, buying less, recycling more, rescuing the Northern Spotted Owl, saving the rain forests of the Pacific North West, then surely we must recognise the moral necessity of overturning the policies of discrimination and preference now perpetrated by affluent European and North American nations against the struggling economies of the Third World. While good global ecological practices can help make life easier for struggling South American and African farmers for example, they will not be enough to make any significant lasting improvement unless all kinds of protectionism against these poor nations are removed. Our well meaning efforts to avoid one kind of ecological disaster will be tragically wasted if we fail to recognise that another equally appalling human catastrophe is already happening.

Otherwise, we remain perched precariously on the horns of the great grandmother of all dilemmas - half the world may still be damned even if we do what many of us believe the whole world needs - but the whole world may be damned if we don’t.

Naomi

Going Home

2007-02-05T11:07:00.000Z

Illustration by Liz

GOING HOME

There's no sun to burn you,
O, yes, I want to go home;
Where there’s no stormy weather,
O, yes, I want to go home;
There's no tribulation,
O, yes, I want to go home.

from a Negro spiritual collected by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, published in 1867

The Dragons were going home. They had, it was said, done a good job. Eyes gleaming and nostrils aflame, they swept through and swept away the noxious detritus of the Old City and left it like a skeleton stripped clean and white by vultures. They left it silent and empty, jagged and stark against the sun bright sky, disturbed only by lazy wisps of smoke which gathered and lingered around the fire cleansed concrete and stone.

The Inhabitants, those who had survived the plague, were making a new settlement on the plains to the east of the old city and would not return. In their place would come the slaves newly released from the chemical mines far across the ocean to the north who would refurnish and refurbish from the raw materials the dragons had rescued from the cleansing and had stacked in great piles around the edge of the city. Nothing clean and free of bacteria was to be wasted - waste and theft were capital offences - and slaves who complied with all the emergency regulations could look forward to a distant manumission, unless of course they were female. Females were held as slaves in perpetuity, by their masters or by their husbands if their masters had had to give their slaves up to the Resettlement Committee.

“Why do they all put up with it?” asked Blue Dragon Apprentice.
“Safety.” said Blue Dragon Site Manager. It was rumoured that Blue Dragon Site Manager’s rapid rise to seniority was largely due to his not wasting the Rulers’ time with unnecessary chat.
“Is safety worth losing your freedom for?” persisted Blue Dragon Apprentice.
“Yes.” replied Blue Dragon Site Manager
“I don’t get it.” Blue Dragon Apprentice wrinkled up his already wrinkled forehead, leaned back with all his weight on his rather short scaly tale, and waved an ungainly front foot at Blue Dragon Site Manager. The effect he was trying to create of a mature, sophisticated, university educated dragon, which he was not, was sadly lost on Blue Dragon Site Manager who had closed his eyes and was now beginning very softly, by dragon standards, to snore.

“I mean, well, you know, if anyone tried to make a slave of me, I would fly off into the Waste Lands, and catch mowbats for supper, burn down the forest, and boil up the rivers until all their water supplies failed, and then They’d die of thirst, and...”
“No They wouldn’t. They’d shoot you first.”
“I’d like to see anyone try.” Blue Dragon Apprentice almost shouted at the boss dragon. “I can out fly any of Them. I can kill with fire at a distance of a hundred metres. My talons will tear out their throats and I will bite off their legs and arms. We’re the most dangerous creatures on this planet, the most powerful in the whole of the universe.”

Overcome by his own eloquence his roar disappeared into a monstrous squeak and, too embarrassed to notice what he was actually doing, he grabbed and began to swallow a passing mouse. Even more embarrassed he coughed loudly, spat out the mouse and mumbled it an apology. The mouse shook itself, brushed its whiskers and exuding quivering outrage from the pink of its nose to the grey tip of its tail, limped away into the undergrowth.

Out of the approaching dusk other dragons came to join the pair - Yellow and Green, and one Silver-Dragon, Surveyor 1st class.
“This freedom thing,” Yellow Dragon Explosives said, “it can get you a lot of grief.”
“How?” demanded Blue Dragon Apprentice.
“Well, take Earth for example. The Inhabitants have got freedom, all kinds of freedom, all over the place - free democracies, free elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of action - so long of course as they stay within their laws or don’t live in one of those tyrannies they also go in for. And then there’s the really dangerous one.”
“What’s that then?”
“Freedom to choose to do nothing about anything they don’t fancy, or about any problem which they don’t care to face. Hey! Get your ugly great tail off my foot, you horrible little reptile.” The other dragons startled by the sudden change of subject looked up. Blue Dragon Apprentice, having lost all interest in the finer points of Freedom, had rolled over so that his tail had indeed fallen across Yellow Dragon Explosives’s foot while he stared up at the darkening sky and counted, very sotto-roar, the night’s newly appeared stars.
“Oh, sorry about that,” he said, and moved his tail to one side. “I think I was just exercising my freedom to consider other matters. Everyone keeps going on about Earth, and it’s getting boring.” Yellow Dragon Explosives glared at him.
“That’s the sort of self centred, blinkered, dangerous rubbish that’s making the planet not safe for its Inhabitants.”
“Not safe? What are you on about?”
“Because while they’re all running around demanding their rights and chasing after money and things, and exercising their precious personal freedoms - or being tyrannised by tyrants - they haven’t noticed that they’re poisoning the place.”
“How do you know? Have you been there?”
“Well, no.” Yellow Dragon Explosives admitted, “No-one has. It’s Not Allowed. But stories get around, we hear things, and the place doesn’t sound to be very safe, or very healthy.”

“I’ve been there.” the Surveyor said. “I was sent to do a survey and see if there might be anything we could do to help.”
“Why isn’t it allowed?” backstitched Blue Dragon Apprentice, “And who said you could go? And how did you get there? And if you can go, why can’t we all go?”
“It’s not allowed usually” said the Surveyor patiently “because it is the only planet in the Universe where dragons are not safe. The first dragon was born on earth thousands of years ago, but not from an egg. He was an idea that sprang from the imagination of one of Earth’s story tellers sitting beside a fire in the middle of a clearing in a forest. If we were to meet any of Earth’s inhabitants now, they might remember that dragons are only a figment. The egg that was never laid would crack and the baby who was never born would fly up to the stars and be lost for ever in the darkness of the eternal night, and there would be no more dragons.

“It was the Governor himself who sent me to look around and make a report. I flew solo through the Universe like some miniscule silver shooting star and none of their telescopes bothered about me, probably didn’t even notice me”
“Brilliant! What did you find then?” asked Green Dragon Engineering.
“I found a planet which seems to have been abused by its Inhabitants for more than two hundred years. The frozen Arctic tundra is beginning to melt and will sooner or later release tons of methane gasses into the atmosphere which is already dangerously polluted by CO2. The Polar ice caps and the glaciers are melting and one day there will be too little white ice to reflect the sun’s excessive heat back into space; the seas will rise and drown land and people; the desert will cover a whole continent and land and people will starve. The survivors will try to escape to the cooler lands of the north and the south and will kill each other for what little food and fuel that might remain, and their civilisation will perish.

“Their politicians say ‘We must do something, very soon.’ Its people say ‘Oh yes we must.’ But just like one of their own holy men they don’t want to give up anything nice just yet. The rich don’t want to lose their luxuries; the really poor now only just about survive and if they give anything up they’ll just die a bit sooner. Like Yellow Explosives said, the truly free are free to do nothing. The tyrants refuse to do anything, other than buy more personal aeroplanes; the tyrannised and the slaves can’t do anything even if they wanted to.”

“You’re being mega-pessimistic about all this.” commented Blue Dragon Apprentice.
“In all the circumstances in which we work, pessimism is appropriate.” The Surveyor’s voice was tinged with impatience. “What is our first rule when we are setting up a new assignment?”
“The Rule of Worst Case Thinking - while hoping for the best, always prepare for the worst.” chorused the rest of the Dragons.
“Quite.” said the Surveyor.

“What about Technology?” Green Dragon Engineering demanded.
“Have you met Technology?” the Surveyor asked. “ OK, he’s a genius, marvellous ideas, amazing ingenuity, builds fantastic machines, but not always in the right place and at the right time, and not always quick enough. And he’s not always even facing in the right direction. There’s presidents and politicians, frightened out of their tiny minds at the thought of draconian regulations and rationing, who now are preaching that Technology will save their world. But you know the old saying: 'They who put their trust in Technology risk breaking their necks as they trip over his discarded crowbars, nuts and bolts.'"
“Is there no hope at all?” Yellow Dragon Assistant Surveyor spoke very quietly.
“Not much,as far as I can see,” said the Surveyor, “unless there’s a deal of clear sighted thinking, a collective will freely arrived at, some kind of miracle really.”

“Come on lads,” Blue Dragon Site Manager had woken up again, “Forget Earth. We’ll be sent for when we’re needed for the Great Clean Up. Long journey for us tomorrow. Earth’s Inhabitants’ll have to fend for themselves for now.”
“God help them then.” muttered Yellow Dragon Assistant Surveyor and, with their great claws beating a ragged tattoo against the stone road, the members of Dragon Clean Up Squad Number 58 disappeared into the night.

April Song

2007-01-14T18:47:00.000Z

"... the song was wordless; the singing will never be done."
Siegfried Sassoon

The sound rolled across the surface of the lake like the gradual crescendo of some Russian Choir moving through their cathedral battering the ears of the Almighty with petition and praise. It was Eastertide in the Correze but our choristers were a great company of green pool frogs sitting on the lily pads which spread from one end of the lake to the other. One frog, agitated by a predatory hedge pig snuffling along the far bank, began the chant which was slowly taken up by hundreds of his brethren. Then, as it had begun with a single voice and grown into an immense triumphal shout of “Allelu-ee-a”, it died gradually away from the mighty chorus to a single soft note from somewhere in the middle of the lake.

Only a few yards away from us among the fine old trees of the deserted parkland young red squirrels played. They darted up the huge pines like tongues of crimson flame cauterising the old winter bark and burnishing the new spring growth. Common lizards roamed around and about or lay on small rocks basking in the gentle April sun. Shy creatures by nature, they largely ignored us, their attention concentrated on the abundance of new springtime food and the exigencies of the rapidly approaching mating season. In mid-western France where we were, the trees were already in new leaf, the rough grasses were studded with tiny yellow and blue flowers, the lake shimmered in the sunshine and the ubiquitous wood pigeon chortled happily to itself as it surveyed its newly rich April forest home.

Later in the afternoon with Oliver and his writing safely ensconced in the salon, I took my crutches and poled down into the village. Accompanied by a loud chorus of “Bonjour Madame. Ca va?” I made my way into the Place de l’Eglise. The church of La Roche Canillac is one of the several rather dull churches of the region - a box of unadorned stone rather like a Yorkshire barn, a bell-wall instead of a tower, but with an unlocked door and a quiet interior which said “Come in. You are welcome.”

The incense of the morning Mass lay heavy in the air and the massive Paschal Candle rose high above the sanctuary. On a chair close to the statue of the Virgin I sat down and chatted to the Lady about the great festival of revival we had found at the lake. I was no longer a Christian and had never had any special devotion to Our Lady, but I talk to seagulls, to the moon in the night sky, so why not to Mary the mother of Jesus? Sitting in this small French rural church I perceived myself united with anyone and everyone who celebrated the same miracle of rebirth I had glimpsed that morning. I lit a candle, as a symbol of my hope and of my thanks giving, and I went home singing.

Naomi

Frogs by Liz

The Road to Bethany

2006-12-25T20:16:00.000Z

Who sweeps a room as for thy laws
Makes that and the action fine.
George Herbert

Cynthia and Tom met in Birmingham. She slipped on the newly washed marble floor of the entrance hall in the hospital where they had both recently started work and fell literally into his arms. Three months later they married and when Cynthia presented Tom with the first of their two children she retired to become a full time wife and mother.

Tom, an ambitious but lowly laboratory assistant, studied biochemistry part time and got a first class honours degree. By one of those unlikely but happy coincidences, he presented himself at the University Careers office just as the Professor of Biochemistry phoned to say she had to have a new research assistant in a hurry - the previous assistant having yesterday been inconveniently run over by the Vice-Chancellor’s Deux-Cheveaux. Tom proved to be the perfect man for the job. Devoted to his master, Science, he drank deep at the well of Academe, published a couple of well received monographs and eventually was appointed to head a department of his own.

Through the lean years Cynthia economised and, although the children had everything they needed, she herself made do and mended. Tom bought all the books he wanted, went to all the conferences that interested him and dallied with female post-graduate students. Whenever he found one he particularly fancied, rather like an excited schoolboy taking home his first girlfriend to meet his mother, he would take her home for lunch “to meet Cynthia.” Cynthia would smile, say not a lot and serve the lunch while Tom and the lady indulged in riotous conversation on arcane biochemical matters. Cynthia was widely regarded in the University as awfully nice and very worthy, but just a bit dull and dowdy and boring.

When aged 52 Cynthia died from an aggressive breast cancer all the neighbours came to her funeral, but few of the University wives. Left alone after the wake, an inconsolable Tom hunted through Cynthia’s cupboards and boxes trying to find there something of her to ameliorate his pain. Already half out of his mind with grief, he found only old clothes painstakingly repaired, meticulously kept housekeeping accounts, the few postcards he had sent her. Guilt descended on him, an all enveloping blanket of self disgust and absolute despair. He surveyed the ashes of his important achievments and the spent glory of his important thoughts and he wept.

Cynthia had not looked for martyrdom, Tom was not a monster, but now he rapidly descended into a melancholic alcoholism - a deserted and disillusioned wailing Mary. His quiet Martha who had loved both God and her neighbour lay cold in her grave, but warm and vital in the hearts of her children and everyone whose life she had touched and served. Whose was the good or the better part? Not Tom’s, that’s for sure. Long ago Jesus had nominated Mary, but I always did suspect that on that occasion he got it wrong.

Naomi

Verulamium

2006-12-10T23:48:00.000Z

November

Exodus

2006-10-04T00:10:00.000+01:00

“He was just some Joseph looking for a manger”

Leonard Cohen

Towards the end of winter a small colony of blind Driver Ants made its preparations for escape. The corporate intelligence of 250,000 ants had decided to move away from their dying mountain forest and march towards the coast. On the beach just above the tide line they discovered a large hollow log well suited to be both a nest and a vessel. Having established a temporary home in the coarse grasses behind the beach, phalanxes a thousand strong gathered and moved quantities of food into their new log home. Large male ants were captured by the workers who tore off their wings and accompanied their hymenal procession back to the grassy nest and their Queen. The colony was ready. Long lines of soldiers guarded the Queen and her eggs as they were escorted into the log where the rest of the colony was already installed and the entrance was sealed. That evening the tide was extraordinarily high and the log was swept south out to sea.

In the early Spring a flock of Cape Crows flew south. In spite of fifty million years of imprinted instinct and custom, they abandoned their parched, sweltering homeland and island-hopped across the raging seas until a remnant of the original flock, wind-hurtled, bedraggled and hungry, found an island where the grass was green, the spring water was sweet and flowers still grew. There the Crows found insects, small reptiles and mammals and a flock of inoffensive Yellow Birds. The Crows had arrived in the Promised Land.

By the time the log with its colony of ants was washed up on Yellow Bird Island the Crows were running out of food. The flock had stripped the scrubby bushes, eaten every visible insect, consumed any tiny creature who had not taken refuge underground, killed and devoured all the small Yellow Birds. No longer acting as a coherent group, they began to turn on their weaklings. First they throttled and ate the sick and the old, then the young fledglings. Now lurking solitary in undergrowth and in dark rock fissures they stalked and killed each other. Those who escaped cannibalism fell starving out of the sky and their bodies began to rot.

The Ants unsealed the log and organised themselves. They gathered up every tiny morsel of food the crows had not found, they smelled out the underground fugitives, killed and carried some of them back, in many pieces, to the nest. They feasted on the remains of the crows. Everything they could scavenge, everything they took they shared, but for now left alone the younger animals and the microscopic insect eggs the Crows had failed to see. Yellow Bird Island was theirs and the colony perhaps had a future.

When the sun turns blood red, when our piece of the planet burns up, when the ocean rises, the sea boils and the great flood comes, when we fly from the destruction of our homelands, whose example shall we follow - that of the Crows or of the Ants?

Naomi

Bad Soldiers

2006-09-21T19:47:00.000+01:00

My speculative and philosophical powers are out of a rather large Syrian hamster, by a particularly puny armadillo. Both these creatures are solitary, short sighted and small brained. Neither has much capacity for anticipating danger - hamsters regularly fall off tables and chairs with no visible expression of concern, and the nine banded armadillo leaps straight up into the air to avoid danger, without first looking to see if there is anything in its way. This careless manoeuvre has resulted in the untimely demise of many armadillos who have unthinkingly head butted the undersides of passing cars. My unthinking tends to work in much the same way.

In 1957 I was given a copy of “A Year of Grace” compiled by Victor Gollancz “to express a mood about God and man” - an anthology now out of print but still to be had in libraries and second-hand bookshops. It’s good brain food and I recommend it. Gollancz drew from more than 160 different sources ranging from the Upanishads to the Yorkshire Evening Post, and from Marcus Aurelius to Albert Schweitzer. I remember in the long aftermath of the sometimes bitter Peace of 1945 being much moved and provoked into thought by a report he reprinted from his own monthly, ‘Left News’. In the midst of the current maelstrom of the fanaticism, hatred and hysteria stemming from the Middle East, it resonates just as powerfully now as it did sixty two years ago.

‘November, 1944 .....an extract from a letter received from an Austrian Jew now in the British Pioneer Corps in the B.L.A. He is attached to a hospital receiving German wounded. He had been for nine months in the concentration camps of Dachau: he had been hung by the wrists to a tree and had nearly died of gangrene, Jews at that time not being allowed medical attention in concentration camps......

‘“This is being written in the solitude of a ward in which I am guarding wrecked members of the Herrenvolk. It is so strange a situation that I can hardly describe what I am feeling. Loneliness is perhaps the only word for it. These are men who set out to conquer the world, and they and their kind have done unspeakable things to me and my kind, and I am supposed to hate them with all my strength, and would be right to do so according to the recognised standards of human behaviour. But I cannot hate, or is it that in the face of suffering hatred is silent? So it happens that the guard is turned into a nurse, and if a man, from losing too much blood, goes out of his mind and stammers incoherently, I have to talk him to sleep again. And it sometimes happens that men try to hold my hand when I have helped them.....

“What shall I make of that? I can only draw one conclusion, which is that I am a terribly bad soldier and I am somehow glad about it.”’

Let us thank God for bad soldiers.

Naomi Linnell

Cat Friends

2006-08-06T19:54:00.000+01:00

BAGPUSS

in the Garden

NEWBURY CATS

KINGSDOWN CAT

FRED & GEORGE
in Canterbury

THE BROADSTAIRS BRUISER

EGBERT & FRIENDS

DAISY
in an Oxfordshire Garden

GRACE
in
a Bag

photo by Florence

Anna Mikhailovna's Legacy

2006-07-18T18:49:00.000+01:00

The funeral tea-party was nearly over - if indeed such an elegant collation of smoked salmon, caviar and canapés, mille-feuilles, passion fruit pavlova and a sculpted ice swan could properly be described as a mere tea-party. Katerina Ivanova leaned against the wall and pondered upon the ceremony and the demeanour of her hostess. She had enjoyed neither.

The silver and black edged invitation had bidden her to attend the “Golden Sunset Crematorium (Private) to join with us in a Secular Ceremony of Farewell to Anna Yanovskaya Smith, widow of John and dearly beloved Mother of Jules (formerly Ulyana)..... Light refreshments in the Hospitality Suite.....R.S.V.P. Mrs Peregrine Cavendish-Brown....”

Katerina took the bus from the tube station to the Godalming Road. She hitched up her long black silk skirt which she had for many years always worn at funerals, and sometimes at weddings too, and strolled back up the road towards the massive wrought iron gates and the wide gravel drive which welcomed the better class of mourner who usually attended Golden Sunset ceremonies. She glared at the Jags and the Mercs and the Porsches in the car park but smiled at the old tandem bedecked with black ribbons padlocked to the railing beside the portico. At least someone, she thought, in this maelstrom of conspicuous wealth and
over-consumption has contrived to get their priorities right.

A flunkey directed her to the Secular Suite. She pushed open the silver and black door and found an empty room awash with purple brocade and black silk, velvet and plush, silver and crystal and preposterously large flowers. In a gloomy corner on a purple bier, almost swamped by a huge wreath of lilies, stood an elaborate black coffin. Secular-ceremonial the room might be designed to be, Katerina mused, but it seemed to her to be awfully like a shrine to bad taste.

Other mourners began to arrive and she retired to a far corner and composed herself for the Ceremony. One word from the Director, a spotty faced young man with pebble glasses and a peculiarly unctuous voice, and she retreated into private consciousness and memory. She and Anna Mikhailovna Yanovskaya had been brought up together in Paris. Anna’s grandfather, banker and astute businessman, had in 1904 moved the family money from St Petersburg to Switzerland and his import-export business and his young family to Paris away from the burgeoning threat of revolution. The Paris business had prospered and the boxes of gold in the Swiss bank had multiplied. Katerina’s own father, the impoverished Count Ivan Gretchaninov, had fled in 1917 also to Paris away from the mayhem that was now loosed in Russia to the shelter and support of the old banker’s son with whom he had gone to school in St Petersburg. The Count and Countess lived happily enough until the Countess’ death in April 1921 two days after the birth of her second child Nikolai Ivanov. The Count never recovered from this loss, never accepted the new baby, took no consolation from the company of his amazingly beautiful three year old daughter Katerina and just after daybreak on a soft July morning in the Bois de Boulogne blew his brains out with the revolver he had brought with him from Russia. His old school friend and his wife opened their hearts and their home to the two orphans and brought them up to be sister and brother to their own one year old daughter Anna.

The young man had stopped talking and music was piped in - sentimental, little children in smocks talking to the bunny rabbits in a woodland glade sort of music. Katerina in her mind’s ear began to sing the sad slow Contakion for the Departed. When, blessedly, the piped music stopped and the chat began again she returned to her memories.

Although Katya was the eldest of the three, it was Anna with her plain happy face and untroubled conscience who mothered and managed the trio, who soothed their hurts and was proud of their many accomplishments. Nikolai was a studious boy with a precocious talent for drawing and painting. Katya was a fine musician with a lovely singing voice which as she matured grew rich and deep. In 1936 the ever perspicacious Mikhail Yanovsky moved his émigré family and household away from Paris to Lausanne where Katya studied at the Conservatoire while Nikolai attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Geneva. In 1946 as the concert halls of Europe reopened, Katerina embarked upon a highly successful singing career and Nikolai began to buy and sell fine pictures.

Anna’s son-in-law read a poem of dubious literary merit to which Katerina listened politely, but she returned to memory when yet more regrettable music filled the Ceremony Room. The Yanovskys returned to Paris and Anna met and married John Smith, a young Englishman who had been appointed director of Mikhail’s business interests in London. They bought a big house in Surrey where eventually Anna had a fat and healthy baby girl baptised Ulyana, who grew into a plain and spoiled young woman, married a humourless merchant banker, tended to despise her gentle mother and wholeheatedly hated her mother’s outspoken friend Katerina. They met occasionally in the nursing home into which Anna, after John’s death, had been put as soon as her increasing frailty had become an inconvenience to Ulyana’s important social life. Six months after Anna’s removal Ulyana informed her mother that she had renounced all things Russian and was henceforth to be known as ‘Jules’. Anna, although unhappy, made no protest. Katerina, thoroughly impatient, did so very loudly. Jules shouted that Auntie Katya was an interfering old bat and could leave now. So the invitation to the Ceremony had come as a great surprise.

Suddenly everyone stood up. Pebble Glasses turned to the coffin, waved his hands in the air in what he probably thought was a dignified and meaningful manner and to the sound of muted trumpets the curtains behind the bier parted and the casket slid away into anonymous gloom. Katerina crossed herself three times, and said out loud “Everlasting be your memory, O our sister, who are worthy of blessedness and eternal memory. Come, all you her kindred and friends: now is come the hour of parting. Let us pray to the Lord to bring her to her rest.” Jules interupted her quietly genteel weeping and glared at Katerina. “My friends,” she said, “please do join Peregrine and myself for refreshment. Everyone,” a slight pause, “is most welcome.”

Katerina looked across the Hospitality Room at Jules. Her skirt was too short, her bodice too tight, she was drinking a great deal of champagne and in her high pitched laugh as she circulated amongst her friends was more of tears than of joy. Uneasy for a moment she watched Jules with a small parcel in her hand making her way with tiny bird like steps towards her.

“Aunt Kate. How nice of you to come.”
“Ulyana. How kind of you to invite me. And my name is Katya.”
“And mine Aunt Katya is Jules.”
Katerina heard both the anger and the appeal in the voice. She stretched out her hands, placed them on the young woman’s shoulders and said gently:
“Forgive me. I am old and changes are sometimes alarming. I’m truly pleased you asked me today. I would have been very sad if I hadn’t been able to say good-bye to Anna. Thank you.” She leaned over and kissed Jules lightly on both cheeks and turned to go.
“Wait a moment, please Aunt Katya. Mama asked me to give this to you. She said it had been precious to her, and that when she was gone she hoped it would be precious to you - a sort of treasure that she wanted to share with you.” She held out the small package.
“I’d love to have something of Anna’s. Whatever is it? “
“It’s just an old framed photograph of you and her, when you were girls in Switzerland. Anyhow, she made me promise that I would give it you. Please, do take it.”
“That was so thoughtful of your mother. The older I get the more important the old photos seem to be.” She took the parcel and put it into her deep black bag.
“And now, I think I really must get back to Pimlico. Goodbye my dear. God bless you. I will hold you in my heart.” She clasped the diamond and emerald encrusted hands for a moment, turned, and walked away.

Sometime later Katerina let herself into the apartment in Warwick Gardens which she and Nikolai had shared for many years. She went wearily up the stairs to the drawing room where her brother sat looking out at the gardens. He rose from his chair, taller than his sister but with the same mass of silver hair, strong features and bright mischievous eyes.
“Good evening Countess.” He kissed her hand.
“Good evening Count.” She made him the slightest of curtseys.
“How went your day?”
“In parts, dreadful. The place was dreadful, the Ceremony was dreadful, the music was very dreadful indeed. And I didn’t behave very well.”
“And the party?”
“All right, perhaps. The food was a bit over exuberant. But I made my peace with Ulyana. I left her with a smile and a blessing of a sort.”
“What’s that in your bag?”
“Oh, that. It’s a present - from Anna. A photo Ulyana said.”
“May I see?”
“Of course. But give me a drink first, and then you can open it.”

He filled a glass from the decanter on a side table, brought it over to her, took the parcel and very carefully removed the picture from its padded envelope.
“It’s a photo I took of you and Anna in Lausanne. Two lovely Russian girls, so happy, so full of life. It’s a pretty frame, silver-gilt, but the back is made of wood. That’s why it’s so heavy. Do you mind if I take a closer look at this?”
“Of course not. But do be careful with the photo. Anna said it was a treasure she’d wanted to share with me.”

Nikolai stroked the wood and weighed the picture in his hands. With a slim antique penknife he gently eased out the tiny pins which held the wooden back against the carved frame. Slowly, carefully he removed the panel, glanced at it, and handed it almost reverently to Katerina.

"I think this may be Anna's treasure." he said.
“Oh Kolya,” she said, “it’s an icon. The Virgin Eleousa, the gentle Mother. The colours, and the exquisite patterns on her robes, and the protecting curve of her body around the Christos. It’s beautiful. Is it original?”
“No. The original is much, much bigger. It's in the Tryakov Gallery in Moscow, painted by Simon Ushakov in 1668. This little panel here is just a copy of the original, but it’s exquisitely done and extraordinarily like Ushakov’s. Look. Look how young the virgin is, how her face is rounded and so much more human than in the old icons. It was the influence of Western European naturalistic painting on Ushakov and his School. An old agnostic person like me can empathise much better with this young loving mother in her pretty dress than with the old stylised stiff Virgins who say nothing to me at all. You know.....”

He glanced across at his sister and broke off. With a slight smile around her lips, Katerina had fallen asleep where she sat on the sofa. Very gently he took the icon from her hands and laid it on the table. ‘Stop lecturing and being such an old bore, Kolya.’ he said to himself. ‘But what a blessing Katya, this hidden treasure that Anna Mikhailovna has left to you. God be praised.'

Naomi

High Flight

2006-06-24T19:28:00.000+01:00

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of, wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air;
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark nor even eagle flew;
And while, with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee 1922-1941

Emily gave me a copy of this poem because, she said, she loved it very much and hoped I would enjoy it too. It reminds me so much of her, especially of the times we sat in the green and blue peace and shelter of Wellington House garden - very happy, gentle and precious times.

Naomi

Oliver's Poem

2006-06-24T19:20:00.000+01:00

GREETING

I will not lumber you with love
nor climb on you to measure you for sins
nor wipe you over with foregivenesses
nor kick your shins.

I know your eyes do not see out of mine
nor are your tears the tears I shed
but I don't care,
for I will take your hand and make a place for you,
because you're there.

Not for some complicated ploy
of pity, piety or private greeds
but for an older, simpler joy,
that, nothing wanting, nothing needs,
except to live.

for, as I see you feel the rain and breathe the air,
so just to know the sun that shines on you
shines on me too.
confirms the sunlight,
makes it sure,
tells us we live, are there.
that now will do,

and asks no more.

Oliver Postgate 1979

Turquoiseism

2006-06-22T11:02:00.000+01:00

Words per sese mean absolutely nothing. They are merely groups of aural or written alphabetical symbols arranged together in such a way as to indicate a sound or a combination of sounds which those of us who speak or read a common language tend to invest with more or less the same meaning. I think ‘discrimination’, a word many of us bandy around in a fairly indiscriminate fashion, is a rather difficult and possibly a rather dangerous word, whether written or spoken.

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary the verb to discriminate in its first meaning is merely ‘to make or see a distinction’, a perfectly neutral action influenced rather often by innocent fancy. I like the colour red, I don’t very much fancy the colour turquoise, so I choose to buy a red jumper and I choose not to buy a turquoise jumper. Unfortunately some tiresome person then comes along and say: “Look at her, she always wears red and always ignores turquoise. She’s discriminating against turquoise. She’s a Turquoiseist!”

Next the politically correct brigade will arrive, write letters of outrage to the Guardian, boycott my tea-parties, hold silent vigils of protest outside my house, found MAT ( Movement Against Tuquoiseism) and generally attempt to ‘persuade’ me into renouncing my antisocial and immoral actions. The MAT might try to justify its campaign by citing the Concise Oxford’s second definition of to discriminate - ‘to make a distinction, esp. unjustly and on the basis of race, colour or sex.’ Its members would, I believe, in this be wholly wrong because they would have omitted from their reasoning the most crucial factor in this equation: my motive for discriminating between red and turquoise jumpers.

None of them ever asked me why I ignored turquoise jumpers. Did it never strike them that I might just, perhaps, simply have noticed that wearing turquoise makes me look like a swept up, faded, wrinkly old leaf which didn’t quite make it to the municipal bonfire? Or has aesthetic discrimination just become a piece of ‘unjust’ discrimination, non-PC? At least in red I still look like an almost vibrant, only slightly wrinkly old plum not yet quite ready for the municipal bonfire. Or maybe I have deeply held spiritual objections to displaying myself in turquoise - for that is the colour of the mystical and malevolent Greater Three-Horned Toad. Perhaps I am severely allergic to one of the constituents of turquoise dyes. One shred of the offending fabric wrapped around my person, and my skin erupts into a dreadfully uncomfortable and hideous purple rash. Are spiritual convictions and medical problems all now to be condemned as non-PC and to be expunged from a properly ordered society?

Ridiculous isn’t it! Like a story board for some warped fairy tale, quite silly really. But not only might this sort of nonsense conceivably happen, something very like it probably will happen. Indeed, maybe it is happening now, only all the sensible people like you and me just haven’t noticed yet.

Naomi

Laughter

2006-06-22T09:50:00.000+01:00

LAUGHTER IS A PRECIOUS GIFT

‘He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.”

‘Scaramouche’ by Rafael Sabatini

Oliver and I got into terrible trouble once for making a small joke in The Friend about a medical condition from which I suffer. The author of the pompous article which had nudged us into this solecism became quite incandescent with rage that we should dare to laugh about Serious Matters. She wrote to us, and went on at some length listing our manifold iniquities and hoping fervently that we had not done too much Lasting Harm to her Cause. We were not at first exactly amused by this communication - although it did serve as a salutary warning to engage imagination and brain before opening word processing programme - but my bruised psyche was later much soothed by a vision I had of a first Quaker martyr about to be run over by my power chair.

This long ago episode, however, did absolutely nothing to alter my firm conviction that laughter and humour are good for you: they lower the blood pressure, assuage the effects of anger, deflate pomposity and generally restore the equilibrium of the body and of the soul.

Regard these two men -they just happened to be persons of the male gender, nothing sinister in my choice. The first, a very senior cleric and distinguished peace campaigner, I met striding through a meeting hall with what my agnostic and slightly less distinguished peace campaigner partner described as "teeth gritted into a dazzling smile of Christian good humour and loving kindness" spreading unease wherever he looked. The second, an Anglo-Catholic priest I once knew, one memorable Sunday morning in the Sanctuary tripped on his overlong alb up the altar steps, then, burdened with overmuch ecclesiastical iron-mongery and blinded by 'holy smoke', fell down the steps again and finished up on the floor with the Gospel Book clasped to his bosom and his feet inextricably entangled with the base of the Paschal candlestick. He struggled there a second or two in the face of a silent and horrified congregation until he lay back again convulsed with laughter. Everyone laughed, and remembered why they so loved and respected this holy and humble man. Which of these two would you rather sit next to at a dinner party, or entrust with your most intimate problems?

Maybe, as I am reliably informed, there isn't much explicit humour in the Bible, but if we are indeed made spiritually in the image of God, then God himself, herself, itself or themselves must have laughed first and given us an example we should follow. Listen to the chuckle of the beck as it runs down off the high moor or the gentle teasing of a soft wind in the leaves. Look at the sunlight laughing on the tops of the waves or the wide smile of a fenland sky, and be glad.

Naomi

November Morning

2006-06-22T01:05:00.000+01:00

NOVEMBER 2004

“...Not the intense moment

Isolated with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment.”

T S Eliot: ‘East Coker’

One amazing November morning when the sun shone with that sharp, pale golden, early winter light so clear and pure that you can almost hear the sound of an invisible finger stroking crystal, I rode down to the Harbour and parked myself on the quay. A run of gales and very high tides had coincided and the receding waves had left great lagoons abundant with small fish stranded across the top of the beach.

Three Great Black Backed Gulls were fishing. Even two of these, the largest of our native gulls as big as Barnacle Geese, are not often seen together on the South East coast, so the presence of three of them on our beach that morning was pretty remarkable. Accompanying them was a crowd of eager juvenile Herring Gulls as large as their watching, elegantly feathered white and grey parents, but themselves still wearing their speckled baby plumage.

Each time one of the visitors came out of the pool with a fish, some of the juveniles gathered round with shrill calls trying to harry the huge adult into feeding them. Exasperated, the Great Black Back dropped its fish and, just like a goose, raised its beak to the sky and honked a warning. One of the juveniles, quite unintimidated, darted across, seized the abandoned fish and flew off hotly pursued by the Great Black Back. Another Great Black Back emerged from the pool, fish clamped in beak; the remaining juveniles gathered round, and the drama began all over again.

The action was fast, the dialogue simple, and the villain triumphed every time. It was a lovely piece of natural theatre: the backcloth immaculate, the lighting stunning, the air conditioning superb, and the performance was free - a beneficence from a laughing God.

I laugh too all my small miseries forgotten, and thus by some miraculous osmosis an elderly lady in a wheelchair and a few dozen preposterous seagulls are absorbed into a piece of glory. It doesn’t last, that blinding flash of perceptive lightning - that amount of intensity would be too much for humankind to bear for more than a moment; but the enlightening remains, like a bright golden thread woven into the fabric of memory.

Naomi

Brownman & Crippleduck

2006-06-22T00:59:00.000+01:00

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen: "Anthem"

Edward Greestone did not really like people. Not that he was aggressive or obsessively withdrawn, but he had an air of apartness about him, of being a man who stood always to one side. He was a pale brown man with a palely sallow skin and pale mousey hair, wearing fawn trousers and a brown jacket. He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither obviously happy, nor obviously sad - altogether a man whom no-one much noticed and whom no-one ever knew. He lived in a modest house with a biscuit-coloured front door on the edge of the city at the end of a short track, muddy or dusty according to the season. Beside the neat front gate was a locked box in which the postman left his few letters and on top of which, in the plastic folder provided, the boy with the red cart left his Free Papers.

He worked from his house, something to do with computers, or so it was said by the gossips in the smart terrace up the road into the city. He was a regular church goer, but not to the little Saxon parish church at the end of the city road. Instead, he walked every Sunday across the wide green acres where once the Roman city had stood and was now a huge public park where swans and moorhens swam in the the lake and children played in the stream while their parents sat in the shade of the ruined walls which were two thousand years old. Then he climbed the long hill to the massive Cathedral which dominated both the cities, old Roman and “new” Saxon. He liked the Cathedral. There he could sit behind a pillar, bothering no-one, unbothered by anyone, and commune with his God in his own individual and solitary way. The clergy, both the local Rector and the Cathedral canons, had tried to visit him pastorally, but none had ever got further than his front doorstep from which after a few moments’ desultory conversation they had been politely but definitively dismissed.

One weekday morning he walked down the hill from the Cathedral - it was Ascension Day and he had been to Choral Matins - and stopped at the bridge over the little stream. He could see a red-headed girl of about eleven or twelve with two quite small boys. ‘She should be at school.’ he thought. One of the boys pulled a small loaf of bread out of the bag the girl was carrying. He held it up over his head and shouted excitedly. Attracted by the shrill calling, a group of Mallard ducks clambered up the low bank and, in a wetly glistening feathery herd, hurried purposefully, as one duck, towards a late breakfast. All of them that is except for the last one to get out of the river who hobbled, one foot shrunken and malformed, slowly along the path behind the rest of the group. The children tore up the bread and offered it to the ravenous group jostling and gobbling around them."Crippleduck. Crippleduck!" they yelled at the straggler. As the lame duck caught up with the rest, the boys broke away and ran down the path, pieces of bread still in hand, laughing and shouting to the ducks "Come on, come on, chase us!" The ducks broke into an untidy slow gallop, leaving their lame cousin yet again way behind and still unfed.

Edward Greestone felt an uncomfortable and wholly unfamiliar anger rising within him. How could these children behave with such unthinking cruelty, how could they run away laughing from this pathetic deformed little creature? How was it that the God whose power and glory and love just twenty minutes ago he had remembered and affirmed could allow such wretchedness, such pain, such casual disregard? He wanted to run after the children and shout at them that he hoped one day they would be left behind, that they would be hungry, that they should know what it felt like to be isolated, an outsider, to be in the world but not a part of the fabric of it. But the children had gone, down the path, through a gap in the hedge, lost in the bright sunshine of the morning.

In his frustration he kicked the bridge, and scuffed his well polished brown shoes. The ducks, finding there were no more crumbs to be had, took themselves back to the river, slid down the bank and into the water. They gathered themselves into formation and swam slowly up stream, whistling softly as contented ducks do, eyes bright, beaks busy snatching and filtering. He watched them as they came towards the bridge - eight mallards, a watery squadron as confident and precise as the flight of Hurricanes he could hear thousands of feet above the city. He counted them again. What had happened to the lame duck, why was she not lagging behind? His anger subsiding, he realised that in the water, in her own environment, in her own world she was not isolated, not an outsider, not a lame duck at all. Whereas himself...

He walked on slowly, thoughtfully, beside the lake, across the soft grass under the old oaks, past the lovely eighteenth century houses in their quiet old gardens and the gentrified Edwardian terrace, up the slight rise to the Saxon Church, then along his own dusty lane. The postman had leaned his bike against the wooden fence and was pushing letters into the locked box. “Good morning,” said Edward Greestone, “it’s a nice day.” The postman, who was very big and very black, was amazed by this greeting from a man who in five years had never acknowledged him with more than a barely polite nod. He swung round, knocked over his bicycle, seized his helmet from his head and held out out his hand. “Brother,” he said, “it is indeed a beautiful day.”

Naomi

Lady Elizabeth Gull

2006-06-19T14:39:00.000+01:00

"John Palmer, merchant, to Sir Edward Gull...
...there is much talk here of the Witch Finder Matthew Hopkins being lately in Norfolk where it is rumoured some 40 women have been seized and tried. We are sore afraid that soone he may be here in Lynn and we must look to the safety of Anne Greenfield the bastard daughter of our servant Alice who being brought to bed of the child this two years since was taken into the arms of Oure Saviour leaving the care of her child to My Lady yr. sister. The childe was born with a redde weal beneath her arm which we fear the midwife who attended Alice may swear to be the Devil’s Mark. Therefore I entreat you to take this child into yr. household....
Kings Lynn, 3rd Aug. 1646”

Sir Edward sent directly for the child to come to his home near Lincoln where his eldest daughter Elizabeth and her nurse would care for her. Elizabeth who was just 20 had been betrothed the previous year to Sir Thomas Delamore of Southwell but in January the baronet, twice her age, had succumbed to an ague and Elizabeth, far from heart broken, had resumed housekeeping for her widowed father and her two young brothers. Anne flourished but, as Hopkins spread his net throughout East Anglia, wild accusations swept like some evil miasma northward across the Fen country to Lincolnshire. There were many rumours and questions asked in the City about the motherless child who recently had been brought so suddenly and secretly from King’s Lynn. Late in the Autumn of 1646 Elizabeth and Anne fled into Derbyshire where an old friend of Sir Edward had found them a cottage close by his estate. Elizabeth, her betrothal ring on her finger, set up house as Mistress Eleanore Gardner. .

All went well for more than two years, but in September 1649 Elizabeth wrote to her father:
“...my minde is muche taken upp with recent troubles. Anne two days since was playing with our hound on the greene beyond the cottage and in their romping her dresse was torne and her red weale made cleare to all. Two of the servants from the Manor saw, and even now are gossiping and questioning Annes birth, my Marryage and all the other detailes of our historye. I chastise them mightilie with my tongue but memories of the witches of Bakewell who were executed fortie yeares since in Derby are very present in mens mindes. I love Anne as if she were indeed my daughter and as Oure Saviour exhorted us to protect His Little Ones I must protect this childe. So I beg of you that Kit who has brought your giftes and gold to us may for a brief time stay with us and assist our removal into Yorkshire where I may by the Grace of God find a safe refuge for us...”

The next letter Sir Edward received from his daughter was sent from Thornthwaite, a small hamlet some miles inland from Whitby high up on the North Yorkshire moors. There she had found a suitable cottage and yet another chance for a new life. But Lady Elizabeth’s most painful rejection of everything she had been brought up to hold proper and sacred was still to come. She had already chosen to abandon her comfortable home, privileged life and expectations of marriage to some wealthy man, children of her own and high social status within the community. She had lived a lie pretending to be a married woman and had had to defend herself and little Anne against the spiteful tongues of greedy and superstitious women and the serious danger of betrayal to witch hunters. Now she believed she must choose between risking the salvation of her own immortal soul or putting at risk the safety of the child she so much loved and whom she saw as put into her care by the God whom she also so much loved.

She wrote to her father in April 1650:
“...The families amongst whom we dwell in this small village are Papists who are ministered unto by Fr. Nicholas Poskett who daily travells the Moors baptysing and instructing the children, bringing the Sacraments most secretly and reverendly to all who desire them. His People have been gentille with us but if we wish to live honestly amongst them and bee protected by them I believe that I must abandon my Protestant Faith and embrace that of the Popish Religion. My Little Maide is so precious to me that I will willingly riske any danger even to my immortal soul that she might be secure in the shelter of this isolated place and grow unharmed into womanhood. All my Joye is in her safetey and happinesse. Fr. Poskett knows of my secrets and Annes troubles and will receive us bothe into the Churche this coming month. I beg of you my dearest Father to pray for me. If you and my Churche cannot forgive my apostacie and betrayal of our Protestant Faithe then I hope and trust that Oure Most Merciful Lorde will see fit to do so....
I remaine ever your most loving and devoted daughter E.G.”

There are no further letters extant from Elizabeth to her father and we have no other record of her. Father Nicholas Postgate was denounced in 1679, found guilty of illegally baptising a child and was executed in York. Of Thornthwaite there is now almost no trace. Only a solitary farmhouse with sixteenth century bricks walls and a few low mounds in nearby fields, where probably cottages once stood, still remain. Anne “Gardner” survived until May 14th 1716 when her name was entered in the Parish Death Register - an entry which in a way may serve as an endorsement of the Lady Elizabeth’s success in her constant and indomitable struggle to make the child’s life safe and long and also, I trust, of her own consequent joy.

Naomi