THE TREE

"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

“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

"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

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

"... 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

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

November