Sepia Saturday Update

A little more internet searching discovered a few more facts about my father's time as a prisoner and the men who signed the page in his bible.

Several of them -probably all- were members of the Pudu Fellowship, a Christian group formed in prison. Rev. Noel Duckworth was the president, Rev. Burr Baughman, an American, was the vice president and Alan Kirk, the secretary. I knew the group existed: my father was a member and I've still got his membership card. (Interestingly, after the war he became an out-and-out atheist).

In his book The Naked Island, an Australian account of life as a prisoner, Russell Braddon describes a group of religious fanatics (not to be confused with the Pudu Fellowship):

In Pudu a small group (very small) became fanatically religious and convinced themselves that all ills could be cured solely by faith. Part of their way of life consisted of calling everyone even the most improbable types "brother": part in praying vociferously and fervently at all sorts of unexpected times (during the course of which praying they banged their foreheads on the gaol's concrete floors with thuds that were quite distressing) : and part in refusing even such little medical treatment as was available.

Since they all had ulcers and dysentery, it was a fine point of gaol ethics whether they should be  forcibly treated or allowed to pursue their own path of prayer, which on specified dates was to be followed by miraculous cures. When the cult showed no signs of spreading it was generally accepted that they were entitled to their own point of view. And when a month, later the last of the small group died (the requisite miracle on the appointed day having failed to materialize), religious fanaticism vanished forever from prisoner-of-war life as I saw it.

It has been suggested that this was a description of the Pudu Fellowship. This is certainly not the case. Quite a few members of the fellowship survived the war. Not only this, but accounts of the doings of group members hardly tally with Braddon's description - in particular, the stalwart behaviour of Rev. Duckworth, the leader of the group, and a man who Braddon considered to be one of the two most inspiring men in the prison. There was very little paper to be had. When fellow prisoners asked if it would alright to roll their tobacco in pages torn from the bible, Duckworth told them that it was alright, so long as they read the page first! He invented a fictional intelligence contact who -everyone thought- relayed him positive news about the war. He was evidently a strong character who helped keep many of his fellow prisoners going. Before the war, he had been cox in the winning Cambridge boat in the 1934 boat race.

When my father returned home after the war, the Sleaford Gazette covered his experiences with that unintended irony so typical of British local papers:

The article which follows is an improvement on the crassness of the headline, and is perhaps the best account I have of my father's wartime experiences (click to enlarge):

Sepia Saturday

 

This is a page from a a bible carried by my father throughout the Second World War. He was a prisoner of the Japanese. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'll quote from my mother's blog (I'm sure she won't mind):

My late husband, Dominic Rivron's father, was what used to be known as a Boy Soldier - he was recruited into the East Surrey Regiment in 1938 as a flautist in the band. For reasons I shall not go into here, he was almost immediately sent to Shanghai with his regiment, so that at this very young age he witnessed indescribable cruelty when the Japanese invaded China. For instance he saw the Nanking rebellion with all its awful happenings. Then in 1941 he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and for the rest of the war he lived in terrible conditions in the jungles of Thailand - and worked on the Kwai bridge and also the Death Railway.

When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and then shortly afterwards on Nagasaki, the war came to an end. At the time he was near to death with cerebral malaria. His discharge certificate cites malaria, pelagra, beri-beri, cholera, typhoid and a host of other reasons for his discharge. Immediately aid was flown in to his remote jungle camp he was airlifted to Bangalore in India to a specialist hospital, where he remained seriously ill for months. But he recovered.
He always said that the dropping of the bombs probably saved his life, because although we were winning the war anyway, the episode probably shortened the war by a few weeks - enough to save his life.

However, we were both members of CND at the time of the Aldermaston marches - and he was totally against nuclear weapons.

I've tried searching the internet for the legible names. So far I've found information on LV Headley, HC Babb, and Noel Duckworth. There is an interesting page about Rev. Headley here, which includes a number of photographs he took with a Leica. He buried the camera and retrieved it later.

HC Babb was captured at the fall of Singapore. After the war, he was a key member of a team who retraced the route of the Burma-Siam railway, identifying the 10,500 burial places of the POWs who died building it. He co-authored the book, First Reconnaissance of the Burma-Siam Railway. A photocopy of his diary is kept in the Imperial War Museum Archive.

There is an interesting reminiscence about Noel Duckworth here. He seems to have been quite a charismatic figure.

The Challenge...

Simon Fisher Turner writes music for films - most famously, for Derek Jarman's Caravaggio. I didn't know this when I found his site. All I did know -and this is the only way I can explain it- was that I found what I listened to to be intensely visual. I'd heard of the old "writers workshop" chestnut of writing while listening to a piece of music but had never felt moved to try it before.

It is often said that music is a form of communication, yet what it actually communicates is unspecific. I suppose it communicates like a knock on a door. It's difficult to tell who is knocking, though intuition based on past experience might give us a good idea. It is impossible to tell from the knock why they're calling on us. The knock, however, does communicate feeling. It could be anything from the gentle tap of someone seeing if we're awake, to the irate rat-tat-tat of a neighbour come to tell us that our dog has messed on his drive. But it's impossible to transmit the feeling exactly. Was it the neighbour, or was it our mate, come to pick us up on the way to a gig, who is anxious because he's late and his car's blocking the road? Difficult to tell.

Having written a short piece based on Ghost Road Berlin, I found myself wondering what other people would produce, given the same task? Would there be common threads? There was only one way to find out...

I quickly found out that I'd make a bad scientist. Tony got in first, with an oblique, post-modern reponse to the meme. I'd not reflected on the title of the piece at all and it is, as Tony says, freighted with holocaust associations. (Like a fool, I'd not spotted them. When I saw "Berlin" I immediately thought of the fact that my daughter spent a few weeks there not long ago). If I were scientific, I'd have given out an untitled piece to listen to! As it seems to be turning out, I perhaps set something else in motion - something unexpected (by me) and at least as -if not more- interesting than what I intended to start. But we'll see...

Contributions (thank you all!) so far:

http://everton.blogspot.com/2010/01/ghost-road-berlin.html

http://travelsinthefloatingelvis.blogspot.com/2010/01/ghost-road-poems.html

http://crowd-pleasers.blogspot.com/2010/01/news-and-heavy-metal.html

http://variouscushions.blogspot.com/2010/01/dominics-challenge.html

http://weaverofgrass.blogspot.com/2010/02/ghost-road-to-berlin.html

http://titusthedog.blogspot.com/2010/02/for-dominic-ghost-road-berlin.html

http://theblogsthejob.blogspot.com/2010/01/over-at-dominic-rivron-theres.html

http://hyggedigter.blogspot.com/2010/02/monday-poem-4-dominics-challenge.html

http://totalfeckineejit.blogspot.com/2010/02/dominics-challenge.html

http://argent-delusionsofadequacy.blogspot.com/2010/02/im-running-late-for-bus.html

And so to my effort, which got me thinking of the idea in the first place:

The Ice Forest

We crash-landed in the ice forest at night. We came to rest at a crazy angle. We have had to adapt to the fact that none of the surfaces are level. Moving around is an effort. After a few hours we ache all over. Often we sit in the dark, as we can not afford to squander our resources. But at least it's not as cold as it is outside.

We have been out to explore, wearing the environmental suits. We have to wear them: it is so cold that your flesh begins to blacken the moment you expose it to the atmosphere. All around us, huge crystalline structures, arranged in avenues, rise from the ground and spread out over our heads like the branches of trees.

The night seems never-ending: this side of the planet seems never to turn towards its sun. Fortunately, there is always light enough outside to see by. The planet boasts so many moons that two or three of them are almost always in the sky. One gets to know which ones by the colour of the light.

Most of the time, however, we are confined to the inner compartments of the craft.

Mending the machine is beyond us. As we are the first humans to travel in time it is unlikely we will ever be rescued: the few who have any idea where we might be have neither the knowledge nor the means to follow us. Had anyone somehow managed to do so they would probably be here already.

The solar panels generate very little in the moonlight. The batteries won't last forever. When they run dry we will freeze. Gradually, I assume, we will become encrusted with the same crystalline structures we see all around us. No-one will ever know we were here.

Red Car

TFE asked if people could put poems on their blogs with the words RED and CAR in them. Here goes...

Red Car

Madder hat
leaden sky
black jacket
purple tie

brown cow
blue stone
green grass
orange phone

ginger cat
crimson stain
ochre joker
yellow grain

white shirt
silver star
pink carnation
red car



And, on a lighter note (we don't live that far from the East coast of England),

Seaside

a tanka

When I want to go
to the seaside I drive to
Redcar. It's not far.
There's a good fish and chip shop...
In fact I think I'll go now.


And finally, if you're feeling up for a challenge, and you haven't read the previous post yet, scroll down...

A Challenge!

I was checking out The Wire magazine's website the other week when I came across the music of Simon Fisher Turner. Listening to a track on his MySpace site, I was immediately struck by what a good film soundtrack it would make. I grabbed pen and  paper and replayed it...

The challenge is to produce a piece of flash fiction (or, if you prefer, poetry) as follows:

1. Armed with pen and paper, go to Simon Fisher Turner's MySpace site and listen to Ghost Road Berlin (it's one of the tracks on his playlist).

2. Write down what comes into your head as you listen.

3. Knock the result into shape and post it on your blog next Monday (February 1st).

4. Leave a link to your post in the comments below, and I'll post a list of the links I receive.

I was initially going to post a preview of what I've written here, now, to get the old ball rolling - but then I decided not to. It will interesting to see the similarities and differences in the ways we responded to the music.

Out and About

Christmas is over, the new year's begun. The snow's turned to slush and melted (well, almost). Life has returned to normal (well, almost). I was sitting in the car in Leyburn the other day. Feeling indolent, I decided not to get out and go looking for photographs, but to simply stay put and take what I could see.

I didn't take any photos of the surrounding countryside. I'll leave that to Kenneth Grahame. We're re-reading The Wind in the Willows here. It's a great book. It's most famous, of course, for Mr Toad. However, the Toad parts of the book are my least favourite. I much prefer the less burlesque bits, such as Ratty and Mole's encounter with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and their visit to Badger's house in the Wild Wood. Bits like this:

"It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he [Mole] slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering -- even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple."

Personally, I find it hard to feel as positive as Mole. I find the bleakness of winter anything but exhilarating, but reading the book makes me almost believe that I like the landscape that way too. To really enjoy winter I have to get out and run - or cycle. The "high" one gets from exercise makes the world look wonderful at any time of year. It leaves you feeling warm, too.

As I've mentioned before, the beck that runs past our gate has the tenuous claim to fame that it may have inspired the river in the book, as it runs through the grounds of a nearby "big house" where Grahame sometimes stayed. However, I suspect this claim is made for just about any watercourse that passes near any of his known haunts!

Icicles

If this weather continues much longer, there is a risk our house will become an icicle-cage. We'll wake up, try to get out, only to find ourselves imprisoned behind a wall of ice bars!

Not that I'm competitive or anything, but I've had a look round the village and I think that if there were a competition here for the best icicles, we would win it. If I find better ones, I'll photograph them, too.

Little Whernside

On the way to the supermarket the other day, we stopped to take some photographs. This is Little Whernside: not to be confused with the famous Whernside, the highest hill in Yorkshire or, for that matter, the cloud behind it. "Whernside" simply means a hillside considered good for quarrying millstones, or "wherns".  There are four in the Yorkshire Dales: two more are concealed in the cloud-bank. One of the them, Great Whernside, is probably my favourite hill in the Dales (it's also the nearest to us of the bigger ones). The famous one is miles away, to the West.

I love it when the shapes of distant cloud-banks get all confused with the shapes of the hills, especially when the hills are covered in snow. Sometimes -but not here- it's hard to tell which are which.

To change subject entirely, the Guardian newspaper have just published a great short film about the sculptor, Terence Coventry.

Igloo

Today I built an igloo. I've always wanted to do this, ever since I saw a film as a child of a real one being built. I've built shelters in the snow before, but never out of "bricks". I used a plastic storage box as a mould, and made the bricks as one would make sandcastles.

The finished result was a bit on the small side, but it would take one person comfortably. Karen and I took some photos of it as it was being built.

The first course:

Almost finished - just a few more blocks to put on:

Making the doorway:

The finished article:

I thought of spending the night in it (there's just room) but chickened out!

Let's Hear it for Who!

It was excellently done. And, as is the way with excellence, once it's gone, it's hard to imagine anything ever being done that well again. I'm not talking about Late Beethoven here, but Dr Who.

One might envy Matt Smith landing the role of the new Doctor, but not for having to take over from the man who was probably the best ever. The manner of David Tennant's leave-taking said it all. This was no bog-standard "regeneration" in which the Doctor, being a Gallifreyan, merely changed his face: this was a death, with all the attendant pain. The Doctor paused, wistfully: "I don't want to go," he said. His body first glowed, then exploded. The pillars of the Tardis fell in, the windows smashed outwards - one was reminded of the events immediately following Christ's death on the cross. Then straight on to the resurrection: Matt Smith picked himself up, wondered if he was a girl, discovered that he wasn't, and picked up the role where Tennant had left off. If the trailer below is anything to go by, we're in for another good one.



Which would hardly be surprising. Tennant is an excellent actor (he packs a mean Hamlet in his spare time). But, much as I think he was the best Dr Who ever, it would be wrong to him single out. If one person could be singled out as being responsible for reinventing Dr Who, it's probably Russell T Davies. Tennant's predecessor, Christopher Eccleston, did an excellent job too - possibly an even a harder job than Tennant's, as he had to revive a role that had been mothballed for years by the BBC. And it's not just about individuals, it's about the whole production. As anyone who has watched the behind the scenes programmes, Dr Who Confidential can see, the show is produced with unbounded creativity, commitment and energy.

What exactly is Dr Who? These days TV pads the gaps between the reality shows with entertainment masquerading as drama in the form of realist soap, hospital dramas and whodunnits. For me, Dr Who is the opposite. It's drama masquerading as entertainment. It is itself: there is nothing quite like it.

*

The 10th Doctor's 10 Greatest Moments. A great link for Who fans (worth it for the clip from The Christmas Invasion), but none of them are from my favourite episode (well, it's a two-parter):

ArtSpark Challenge #4

A contribution to ArtSparker's New Year Caption Competition. Happy New Year!

Christmas Eve

We've been out today doing a few bits of last-minute shopping. We found ourselves walking though Leyburn market, so I took a few photographs. It was a bit foggy. I really like seeing other people's photos from around the world on blogs: they don't have to be great photos, just snapshots of what people see as they wander around. With this in mind, I thought I'd post this morning's efforts.

Merry Christmas!

The Tower

This is my contribution to TFE's Christmas Poetry Go-Kart. Observant visitors will notice it, er, came out as a piece of flash fiction, not a poem...

It was a dream. I was walking along the beach, somewhere on the North East coast, I think, although there's no specific reason for thinking that. I was walking towards a white tower, which stood on the edge of the beach. It was not unlike a lighthouse: it was circular and the smooth, stone sides tapered. Only, the lantern was missing. The tower was topped instead by a brown, low-pitched conical roof. Perhaps it had once been a lighthouse, I considered. Maybe it had been put to another use and, so, the lantern had been removed.

The closer I got, the more curious I became. I just had to know what was inside it. I made my way gingerly over the slippery seaweed that covered the rocks and the stone foundations around its base, and knocked on the large, brown door. It was so substantial that my knock sounded  like a mere tap, hardly audible above the breaking of the waves on the beach behind me. Needless to say, there was no response.

I turned the handle and pushed against the door. It was unlocked and fell back easily. I found myself in a low, circular chamber. Just enough light came through a small window for me to make it out. (I had noticed several such windows dotted about on the outside of the structure). The walls had once been whitewashed, but were now tinted green, covered as they were with an irregular film of algae.

I made my way across the stone floor to the window. As I did so, I heard the door swing shut behind me.  The window was, as I said, small -about a foot each way- and seemed to be made of "bottle glass". Whatever it was, though it admitted light, it was impossible to see any clear image though it.

Not far from the window, to my left, was the foot of an enclosed spiral staircase, just as you might expect to find in such a tower. I made my way up it, every now and again passing one of the small bottle-glass windows. The staircase emerged in another room. This was very much like the first, though this room was provided with basic furniture. There was a chair, a table and a low divan. The upholstery smelt of mildew and they were all caked in a greasy dust. They had obviously not seen use for a very long time.

There was very little to do except walk around the room and look out of the window. Again, although it admitted light, I could see nothing clearly. There were blue swirls which could have been either the sea or the sky and flecks of yellow that I took to originate from the sand. My curiosity about the tower satisfied -what creatures of instinct we are!- I decided it was time to go.

I made my way back down the staircase to the lower floor. Only, when I emerged at the foot of the stairs I found I was not in fact in the downstairs room but in the room I had just left! I had a good look around me: it was, to all intents and purposes, the same room although now I could see, on the far side of the room, the head of the staircase I had descended only a few moments before. I felt disorientated, slightly nauseous. I could feel myself coming out in a cold sweat. I decided I must have made some sort of foolish error, although I felt sure that since leaving the upstairs room I had always been walking down the stairs, not up.

What was I to do? I had a pencil in my pocket. It occurred to me to leave it on the table and make my way downstairs for a second time. This I did and, when I emerged into the room again, there was my pencil, on the table, just as I had left it.

Sometimes -ever hopeful- I attempt to descend the staircase but the result is always the same. Apart these brief exertions I have been in this room ever since. I sleep, fitfully, on the divan and when I do I dream: I dream I am living my former life. My sister and I sit before the fire, talking animatedly as we often did. Sometimes we sit down to a meal (oddly, all that I need seems to be provided for me in my dreams). Sometimes I improvise on my guitar. I read, I write. I attend to the garden...  And then I wake up - to the cold, to the dim light of the tower and to the sweet, mildew smell of the old divan.

The Tree - continued

Just thought I'd post two photos of the tree, now it's finally got it's bits and pieces on. I'm a sucker for real christmas trees. When they're lit up, I find looking into them is a bit like looking into the embers of a fire. There's a whole imaginary world in there.

How to fit a pine tree into your living room

Oh well, Christmas approaches. We equipped ourselves with a Christmas tree yesterday. We usually get ours these days from a farmer in the village. It felt curiously Christmassy walking up a field in 6 inches of snow to select it and remove it. (He and his granddaughter had built a tepee in the field. I though it looked a great place to spend Christmas - but in practice it would be pretty cold and I doubt if I'd get many other takers).

We carried the selected tree home between us only to discover it was a little on the big side. It would just about fit in the living room - sideways, if we removed all the furniture. A doorstep debate ensued as to whether we should cut off the top or the bottom. The top we decided. Also, the thing was still caked with snow. We did our best to get it off, then dragged it through the front door. There's only one way to do this with a monster pine tree: remove breakables from the vicinity and go for it.

Having to cut the tree down to size was bad start. However, the shennanegans had only just begun. The bottom of the tree was too wide to fit in the christmas tree stand (we usually have this off to a fine art). Out came the bow saw again. After fifteen minutes wrestling on the livingroom carpet with a wet eight-foot pine tree in a lather of melting snow and sawdust I reckoned I'd made the end small enough to fit the stand - just. I stood it up, Leaning Tower of Pisa fashion, behind the settee, while we had a cup of coffee and a mince pie.

We decided it would stand up better in a bucket of rocks. (There was a pile of suitable rocks in the back garden, and a bucket - all under 6 inches of snow). This worked - sort of. I tied the top of the tree to the curtain rail as a back-up. We then realised we didn't need to have cut quite so much off the top, so I made an extension out of cardboard and stuck it up the inside of the fairy. It looked fine. It even helped keep it's head on. Then to the lights. I soon realised that I'd got off lightly the last few years. It took another quarter of an hour to untangle them. They flickered a bit when I tested them, and I thought, as we'd had them for years, it might be a good idea to retire them and use newer ones. There were a couple of other sets in the decorations box, so I used one of them. Unfortunately, once I'd got them on the tree we discovered they were flashing lights. I quickly realised that living with a flashing christmas tree for two weeks would drive me insane, so I took them off. The other set was too short, so - back to the old lights. Unfortunately, stepping back from the tree, I trod on them. In the end, I managed to cobble something together, so we've now got a tree that lights up.

Oh well, serves us right for chopping it down in the first place.