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

Exodus

“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

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

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