Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment

November 25, 2023April 16, 2024Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Let everyone debate the true reality
I’d rather see the world the way it used to be”
A little bit of freedom’s all we’re lack
So catch me if you can I’m goin’ back
Carole King and Gerry Goffin as sung by Dusty Springfield

Blue Remembered Hills

Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again

From The Shropshire Lad. AE Houseman

Houseman’s famous poem looks back at childhood as a “land of lost content”; when you are a child you are innocent, and you don’t have a care in the world. He says that childhood is a “happy highway where I went and cannot come again”, implying that they are the best years of your life but that you can never go back there. When the late British playwright Dennis Potter took the poem and turned it in to a play about a group of children on their school holidays in the Forest of Dean in Gloucester, he was asking if childhood is indeed such a land of lost content and are children really so innocent.

Nostalgia, then, isn’t all it’s cracked out to be. And indeed, it can bring out the worst in us becoming a millstone of bitterness and regret strung about the necks of discontented souls who drift off into a maze of memories, meanings and emotions.

In the seventeenth century, many considered it an illness that was curable, and could be treated with opium or with trip to the countryside. Other scholars of the phenomenon have noted that until the nineteenth century it was regarded as more a geographical longing than a temporal one, homesickness for a place rather than for an era. American author and essayist Thomas Mallon wrote in a review in New Yorker: “In the same seventeenth century that prescribed methods of relief for nostalgia, writers like the poet John Milton and Robert Burton, who actually wrote a book called The Anatomy of Melancholy. went hunting for twinges of wistfulness as if these were magic mushrooms. Through the centuries, it has been regarded sometimes a harmless solace and occasionally, as a dangerous indulgence, a mental quicksand in which we allow the past to drown the present”.

Nostalgia’s pain can be exquisite, and many of those susceptible to it have sought to cultivate rather than banish the condition. But even if we do not dive in and get lost in the past, it is nevertheless built into us consciously or subliminally. We practice it culturally all of the time. It is often more triggered by the elemental senses, smell and taste and touch, than the sights and sounds from which constant revivals of fashion and music are constructed. Which, I guess, is why folk still flock to ever recycled retreads of the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The film Casablanca has probably inspired more feelings of nostalgia than any other movie, no matter that its famous song insists that “the fundamental things apply time goes by”. Likewise Yesterday, , the most covered song in history with well over two thousand iterations: “Yesterday, my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday”. As Paul sings in the “outro”, “mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm, hmm-hmm”. I reckon he played us softies like a fiddle. “Oh, it makes you wonder”, exclaims Robert Plant in Stairway to Heaven, another opaquely nostalgic piece

Comedians have been know to lampoon nostalgia. Monty Python’s famous “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch is an absurdist riff on nostalgia itself, its quartet of old codgers wallowing in pseudo-memories of deprivation and competing for pride of place with the sheer awfulness of the pasts that they invent. Australian comic Rodney Rude went outrageously further. Go google.

And then there are “memberberries”. These featured in the long running American TV show South Park in 2016 as a purple sentient grape like-fruit that rots the brain with fake nostalgia. They evoke feelings of nostalgia in those who eat them, recalling pop culture icons that engender comforting feelings for the supposedly good times of the past. They almost constantly talk about things people remember fondly, particularly the original Star Wars trilogy. They always phrase their reminiscing as “member…?” They also make conservative comments, like recalling when marriage was only between a man and Ronald Reagan. “Member when there weren’t so many Mexicans?” They appear seem to be indestructible as one was seen burned by a torch and acid, and electrified with little to no effects, but, can be squished, eaten, and shot. Their exact origin remains unknown, but they are believed to date back to Ancient Rome.

But seriously, nostalgia is like a “pathology” that presents as an inability to move forward and accept change. As technology frog-marches us into the future, we keep a constant backward glance.

Personal genealogical research, German academic and cultural historian Tobias Becker reminds us in his recent Yesterday- A New History of Nostalgia that it is the third most common use of the internet after shopping and pornography. Some of those pursuing it, he notes, are just casually curious,. Others are taking what feels like refuge in an earlier time, or seeking a more solid sense of an ethnic identity that can shape their own outlooks and politics.

And this is where it can get dangerous because the word itself can be weaponised. People on the left often insist that people overtly inclined to nostalgia are really seeking a fig leaf for their own racism. Folk of the right cleave to the revival of glory days of old, whether they existed or not, which at its most extreme can be used as a battle cry in the “war against woke”, “replacement theory” and the likes of the MAGA movement, and even Brexit.

Thomas Mallon, quoted above, provides what I consider a fair explanation for this present day fascination, and to some, preoccupation, with our past. Nostalgia, he reckons, goes much deeper than just an idea or concept. So deep in fact “that one wonders if it isn’t a neurological condition, something fundamental and immune to the vagaries of history. As people begin living beyond their Biblical allotment of seventy years, they experience the first exaggerated panics over forgetting a name or a date, which is usually remedied by a Google search. But then comes the growing realization that short-term memory has nothing like the staying power of the long-term variety. Mentally, the seven ages of man speed up their full-circling, until the past’s sovereignty over the present is complete. The further along one gets, the more one understands that the past is indeed another country, and that, moreover, it is home. Long-term memory’s domination of short may be a hardwired consolation that nature and biology have mercifully installed in us”.

Margaret Thatcher, however, often she might have invoked her hardworking grocer father, generally regarded the past as a place where she wouldn’t be caught dead (she was happier sitting atop a bulldozer or a tank).

A warm inner glow

There’s nothing inherently or intrinsically wrong with nostalgia. Nostalgia is not just wanting to go back to something that no longer exists, but wanting to go back to something because it no longer exists. It’s not just that the past is another country, to borrow JP Hartley’s famous aphorism, where they did things differently, as did we, they perceived and thought things differently too. Whilst we rejoice in “the good old days” of our youth, like the parable of the blind wise men examining an elephant, our perspective is coloured by our experiences and our circumstances before, during and after, and the expectations and assumptions, prejudices and predilections that these engendered.

When we were younger, time appeared to move more slowly than in our later years. It is in our nature to imagine and indeed, re-imagine our salad days as the best of times and the worst of times. But looking back through our back pages, these years was perhaps no better or worse, no more significant or seminal than any era fore or aft. Like objects seen through the rear-view mirror, memories always seem a lot closer and bigger. When I’ve revisited roads and streets where I grew up, playing or sauntering or rolling home with a skinful in the pale moonlight, they are no way as wide, long or spacious as they are to the mind’s eye.

Vivid memories can distort time, making you feel that that weren’t that long ago. It’s not easy to let go of what you can’t forget, particularly if your imagine yourself in a perpetual winter of discontent in which everything passes and everything changes, and the pace, the degree and the contours of change are difficult to comprehend, leaving you feeling discombobulated, disassociated and maybe, even, a little disappointed. But we do, however, enhance our depth of perception and perspective and accordingly, our understanding.

Yet, memories are fallible at the best of times, and the way we narrate our own lives can often be partial versions of the truth. Whether our images of worse-but-better times are accurate, or just scrappy patchworks of meme, myth and memory, they are deeply ingrained.

But with most things, it’s all a matter of proportion.

call it memory, call it geography, call it
the vast landscape of childhood or night—a thing
disappearing—a country turning into a map.
Stav Poleg, Memory and Geography

Sunbathing in Banalities

When we talk about the past, we always reveal something about the present. It is hard to imagine a more intriguing or overlooked body of evidence for assessing recent British social history than the Facebook groups that have proliferated in the last couple of decades as young folk have surrendered the Facebook social media space to us “boomers”. These nostalgia communities have flourished on Facebook as its user base has grown ever older in the past decade.

It may not be “representative” in any quantifiable way, but the sample size is vast, and the memes are a canvas for a whole range of contemporary insecurities and collective memories. History might be written by the winners, but anyone can share a post on Facebook. It has given us something like a more chaotic, 21st-century version of Mass Observation, that treasure trove of vox populi reportage from the ‘thirties onwards.

Though there is nothing generationally unique in the desire to bask in the banalities of our pasts, there are now many Facebook groups devoted to commemorating the same mundane aspects of life. They’re not necessarily rivals – many folk subscribe to several. British groups include The Yesteryears Revisited, Do You Remember This?, I Grew Up In The 1970s, The British Nostalgic Bible, and One Hundred and Ten Percent British. Together, these Facebook groups have close to 2 million members: more than the official pages for the Labour Party, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems combined. The baby boomer nostalgia industrial complex is thriving.

I am a member of several such groups. My favorites are Midland Memories, celebrating where I grew up in Birmingham and it’s environs; Swinging Sixties London, rejoicing in those generous times of music, colour and adventure; Yesterday’s Britain, It was a Better Britain, which is long on nostalgia and short on tolerance for “the new “, but has wonderful pictures; and three fabulous Hippie Trail groups which are a kind of virtual “school reunion” for now superannuated former rovers like myself and many friends who journeyed overland to India and beyond in the sixties and seventies.

On these blue remembered hills, there are no births, marriages or deaths, no wars, no world-historic events, no great men and women of history. There is no post asking “who remembers the Cuban missile crisis?” or “who remembers the sinking of the Belgrano?” Or even, given the recent broadcasting of deliciously subversive The Crown, “where were you when you heard that Prince Di had died?” Those questions are too remote from ordinary life. Instead, we have “Who remembers ….? … bin men, street cleaners, milkmen and coal men, dinky toys and chocolate bars, gramophones, Dixon of Dock Green and Listen With Mother. We truly are … The Village Green Preservation Society:

We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular
Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula
We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity
God save little shops, china cups and virginity
We are the Skyscraper condemnation Affiliate
God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards …
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
Ray Davies, The Kinks

The “proper binmen” (the featured picture of this post) and like memes are popular to a degree that may feel initially baffling. They attract phenomenal interest and enthusiasm from older Britons on Facebook, where a whole constellation of meanings and memories are projected on to them: pride, anger, resentment, weariness, ennui and fond, at times very touching, personal recollection. They embody a lost postwar idyll – and often, in many people’s imaginations, point to a decline in the fortunes of a once-proud and powerful nation and its national character, as seen in what is perceived as the apparently appalling state of their modern-day counterparts, and indeed, society as a whole, which is rotten in spirit, character and service.

The gripes of wrath

There used to be trams
Not very quick got you from place to place
But now there’s just jams, half a mile thick
Stay in the human race, I’m walking
They’ve stuck parking meters outside our door to greet us
No, Fings ain’t wot they used t’be
Monkeys flying around the moon
We’ll be up there wiv ’em soon
Fings ain’t wot they used t’be
Once our beer was froffy, but now its froffy coffee
No fings ain’t wot they used t’be
Lionel Bart, as sung by Max Bygraves

This was actually the title song of a 1959 musical produced by British playwright Joan Littlewood with songs by Lionel Bart (of Oliver fame). It launched the career of “Carry On …” star Barbara Windsor. The Carry On films, featuring the cream of contemporary British comedy, were themselves an audiovisual time capsule of a simpler time with their contrived plot lines, slapstick humour and “nudge nudge wink wink” innuendo.

It is a revelation to observe how lovely snaps of the past and “the way we were” (yet another retroflective weepy) can so easily trigger the rantings of “grumpy old white folk” against “wokey snowflakes”. The past was not better or worse than the present. It was just different and we held different views, perceptions, prejudices and, as importantly, expectations. And maybe, it is disappointed expectations and the realities of ageing that engender a jaundiced view of today’s world. To quote American baseball ace Yogi Berra, “the future ain’t what it used to be”.

Those were days when boys were boys, girls were girls, and “when chips were chips”, not microchips, and preferably with lashings of salt and vinegar and wrapped up in newspaper. These, like so much else, were much better then.

“Everyone knew their place”, lament some aging nostalgists. One member of a “memories” group shared: “In those days we had capital punishment, homosexuals were jailed, and prison was not like a holiday camp. Hardly any illegal immigrants, most children were brought up in a family with two parents who were allowed to discipline their children if necessary. The woke brigade did not exist and snowflakes only fell from the sky in the winter” Another wrote of “a lack of discipline in all walks of society, therefore lack of respect. Too many immigrants from the 50s on, not heeding Mr Powell’s wise words. Glad I’m old and won’t be here in 20 years time; I feel sorry for generations to come. Certain areas are already like the lawless, drug-fuelled, murderous parts of the Caribbean. You can never bring back those wonderful early post war times portrayed in that picture”. And another: “No wokey snowflakes, no oil protesters, no green loonies, people being allowed to get on with their lives. Happy days!” Also, while we’re at it, let’s reclaim well-loved and once casually used words like “gay”, “queer” and “fag” and many others that mean something else, usually unpleasant, today. And we never did get an answer to Spike Milligan’s Goon Show query: “What’s become of that crispy bacon we had before the war, ey?

Back in those days, we were “a gentler, kinder more law abiding and respectful society”. There was respect, you read. “Men were men and women were women. Streets were cleaner, as was our language. Policemen were politer. There were no litter, no wogs, no tattoos”. There was no intrusive and onerous health and safety regulations, so kiddies could play on the spotless streets and on unfenced and cluttered bombsites without fear of accident and stranger danger, and almost ever face you’d see was white, and you could actually see those faces

The right wing has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomised people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times. Those were invariably remembered as socially cohesive – and white.

Ever since then, to quote another song, “It’s been a hard days night …”

Many folk comment about the absence of coloured faces, hijabs, etcetera in old photos, and rant about “the invasion”. They blame “the government” for introducing mass immigration. Hardly surprising when half the government are immigrants themselves”. Some add that politicians ought to to be indigenous – whatever that means as indigeneity is a murky subject. One states that any politician should be an indigenous person . “What idiot first allowed immigrants to take office. Us ordinary folk know they don’t give a hoot for their own people they are in it for themselves and power trip and I’m talking about our own indigenous MPs as for the others …Can you imagine Brits going to Asian countries and being elected to the three highest offices in their government?it just would not happen, but here is does. this is why were are the state we are in”.

When a group member declared “time take the country back!”, I cheekily replied “where to? 1950?”

“There was a time”, someone wrote, “a time when the Sceptred Isle [that came from the Bard of Avon] was full of proper born and bred British folk … who had been through two world wars … Fought for this country … got married had two lovely white children, a boy wearing boys’ things a girl wearing girls’ things … No doubt husband still slogging away twelve hours a day down some coal pit, not sunning himself on some Caribbean island … Showed respect to king and queen … Armed forces … Police and doctors … And discipline was enforced in school and home … There was conscription and hanging and children called out “mum and and dad, auntie and uncle” … A policeman, doctor, teacher were Sir or Miss or Mrs … church on Sunday .. Christening, Confirmation, Holy Matrimony. The priest was a Vicar for the CofE … Vicar was called “Father” there were no women vicars … Catholics were tolerated but the Irish were a problem … I could go on reminiscing but it’s time for my meds and an afternoon nap … GOD SAVE THE KING and GOD SAVE THIS SEPTIC ISLE …

At this point, I realized that this stream of unconsciousness was probably a wind-up. But it encapsulated perfectly a mindset of disconsolate misery. We are not only surrounded by the ghosts of Old Britain – and here in Australia by a comparable cohort – but also by its living dead, the remnants and survivals, the attitudes and assumptions, the fallacies and fears, the nostalgia and the neurosis. As American author William Faulkner wrote, “the past is never past. It is always with us”.

Glory days

And so, the past takes on the appearance of a mythical landscape, and escapist fantasy even, of the monoculture, the civility, the cleanliness of minds, hearts, and places, the abiding sense of order, the and the idea – or the lie, more like, that if things were better run nowadays, we can retreat to it.

The following comment to an article like this one in my favourite e-zine Unherd on 3rd October 2023 put it thus: “… as my generation has aged and the future hasn’t perhaps turned out as well as our parents would have hoped, we have created a slightly cartoonish overly sentimental narrative that harks back to ‘our’ glory days. But of course, they weren’t our glory days at all – they were the glory days of our parents”.

There were never any “good old days”, really. There was poverty, slum dwellings, inequality, intolerance, deference, corporal and capital punishment. Things might seem bad today, but social, medical and technological change and growing awareness and concern for others have made life better overall. The “freedom” of those “good old days” was an illusion. Step out of line, be you female, gay or Red, long-haired or “other”, and you were taunted, cold-shouldered, black-balled or bullied. Homosexuals were jailed. “It was hard”, one member once commented, “but respectful of community. To which I replied: “…yeah, but no, but … there was always an “other”. Irish, Catholics, travelers, beatniks, teddy boys, gays, West Indians

As for everyone “knowing their place”, my place would’ve been at the bottom if not for the social and political change, including free healthcare and education, that enabled working class children to grow up healthy and ambitious.

And what’s with the discipline thing? One group member commented that the banning of corporal punishment in schools was “the start of the rot”, whatever that meant to him (yes, it’s usually males who seem dig a bit of biffo against school children – you see it often on social media when schoolies walk out on climate strikes). I never relished the ruler, cane or gym pump (which I endured, infrequently, fortunately).

Corporal punishment was often administered by teachers who enjoyed meting it out – that it was a power thing, and arguably, at times psycho-sexual. In short, child abuse. I was caned and slippered on several occasions, not for indiscipline at all but for academic performance. The teachers inflicting it were known to be bullies but the powers that be tolerated it because such measures were for “our own good” and didn’t cause long term harm. The “it made a man of me” school are possibly retrofitting their childhood experience to suit their contemporary grumpiness.

The “this will hurt me more than it hurts you”, “it’s for your own good”, and “spare the rod …” etcetera, left me cold. Nor the likes of “manners maketh the man”. I can’t say that this made a “man” of me! That, I put down to the National Health Service, free public education right through to sixth form and scholarships to university – and public libraries.

[As an aside, Fintan O’Toole’s “personal” history of modern Ireland, We don’t know ourselves, describes the horrific abuse meted out on generations of Irish children by church run schools, children’s homes and reformatories – to which the authorities turned a blind eye, and which the public tacitly condoned with its silence. O’Toole is mostly definitely in the “corporal punishment is potentially sadism or sado-masochism” camp]

When it comes to modern devices and distractions, folk hark back with a “we didn’t have … and ….” and “we had to made do with …” To which I reply “we would’ve if we could’ve if it had been invented”. Which is probably the case as we boomers took enthusiastically to music cassettes and cds, Walkman and PCs, mobile phones and smart TVs. Odds are the group members are typing their griping on an iPad or iPhone or similar.

I get it that, for some folk, there is an atavistic, rueful longing for the good old days, a golden age when things were simpler albeit less comfortable, when folk were respectful and deferential, and appreciative of the achievements and sacrifices of their fellow countrymen and, at times, women. otherwise”. But, those “seasons in the sun” were, to quote Boz, “… the worst of times and the best of times”. They were then and now is now.

Think I’m going down to the well tonight
And I’m going to drink ’til I get my fill
And I hope when I get old, I don’t sit around thinking about it
But I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back
Trying to recapture a little of the glory of
Well, the time slips away
Leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of
Glory days
They’ll pass you by, glory days
In the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days
Bruce Springsteen

A glass half full

“So what? Yes, things change. I’ve noticed. Yes”, wrote British stand-up comic, satirist, writer, and broadcaster Simon Evans, in Quillette, 2nd March 2023. “The sands of time will run through the hourglass and the desert winds will blow away the dust of my bones and raze my vainglorious monuments to the ground. Big deal. I like change. New things replace the old and the world would be boring were it not so”.

Indeed! To riff once more on Charles Dickens, the past and the present are no better or worse, just different. Times change. Things change. We change. I was born in 1949, grew up in the fifties and came of age in the sixties. “Then” was good. It is now 2023, and “now” is good too. Back “then”, I could never have imagined today.

I’m a glass half full person, and also, a keen participant on social media nostalgie. Not because I’m embittered or regretful, but rather, I derive great enjoyment from basking in “les temps perdu”. Things change, for change they must – and not all change is for the best. To some changes, I am reconciled. Others sadden me, but I have accepted that it is less than politic and also quite pointless to complain.

The “good old days” narratives that “we might’ve been poor, but we were happy” and that simpler, slower-moving times were better than today’s fast-paced, economically and socially and culturally changing world, might be comforting, but may not be realistic ones. Yes, we recall that might’ve been happier, more contented even, as Houseman might’ve thought, and our world seemed bigger and brighter, like objects seen through the rear-view mirror, as noted above; but we were young and naïve and everything was new to us. We looked about ourselves with fresh and un-taught eyes and minds. Back then, we may have been young gods and goddesses, and the open road was laid out before us.

And yet, give me today any day for all its faults, challenges and complications – and its cultural and technological advances. In truth my wife and I would not be here now if not for modern medicine. And that might well be the problem when it comes to our present “civilization and its discontents” (that’s from my old friend Nietzsche). In olden days we’d’ve been dust by now and wouldn’t have had to go through this existential “vale of tears”.

If, like dear dead Dusty, my school boy crush, who opened this piece, I’d like think that if I could go back “to the things I learned so well in my youth, those days when I was young enough to know the truth”, I’d like to take with me my twenty first century septuagenarian sense and sensibility, sans the world-weary cynicism and physical inconveniences of my age and aging – and my iPad. Forget the phone!

And every day can be my magic carpet ride

On a personal note, back in those dear gone days, I was a Roman Catholic and my folks were paddies and went to a school that was secular with a very strong CofE ethos. Boy Scout, Senior Scout. Working class, obedient to a degree but never deferential to the powers that be, republican from an early age, socialist when I reached the age of independence, though with half-informed thinking, got into fabulous music, went to uni, had sex, did drugs, hitchhiked, travelled the hippy trail, dodged the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and even worked for the MoD, emigrated to Australia, where, through hard yakka and a shitload of good fortune, I did quite well for myself. So I’ll admit that my up-beat perspective of today is to a very large degree due to my good fortune. Not that I’ve been especially astute, canny, and opportunistic, but rather, I’ve been lucky with the hands that have been dealt me throughout my life.

And that went right back to the beginning. As I have written often before, my brothers and I grew up in a a comfortable, happy home with loving parents and a great aunt, “with free medical treatment for all our ailments, and free optical and dental care. I still have crooked teeth – no fancy orthodontics on the NHS – but I have all my teeth still. And my eyesight. We were educated, for free. This came in during the war with the Butler Act. So, thanks to the Welfare State, we were housed and healthy enough to get to primary school and beyond. Once there, we had free books, free pens and paper, and compulsory sport, and doctors and nurses would turn up on a regular basis to check our vitals. When we came out the other side, we were free to make our own choices, and chart our own course through the reefs and shoals of life. And thus, we were able to reach the glorious ‘sixties ready to rock ‘n roll”.

The Spirit of ’45

Back in the days gone by

My memories are my greatest riches
From back in the days gone by ,,,…
Time moves on like a melody, and
I can hear those memories sing
Larkin Poe, Tears of Blue and Gold (2020)

Yes, my formative years were the sixties, and I wouldn’t have missed them for quids (not that I’d had anything to do with being born at the right time in the right place), when, if we wished, we were able to break free of the surly bonds of the past. I have written earlier:

“Cynics say that most people who remember the sixties were not there. Well, I was, and I remember it all so well. And was it as great as they say? Yes it was, to me at any rate. But in reality, the story of the ‘swinging sixties’ has grown with the telling. In the closing scene of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the journalist says: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. And much of what has been remembered, written, and said about those years has followed that maxim.

This was indeed a decade of change and ferment. Values changed, morals changed, habits changed, clothes changed, music changed (the best music ever, many have argued). The way people looked at the world and thought about it. We often look back and remark that a supernova of creativity burst over the western world during those years, the likes of which was not seen before and has never been seen again. And nowhere more so than in decadent, decaying, depressing, old England, trapped in tradition, class, and prejudice.

And yet, this revolution road was walked by but a few. The greater proportion of the populace, young and old alike, carried on as if nothing untoward was happening. Following in their fathers’ footsteps, faithful to social and economic scripts written before their time, possessed of neither time, means, opportunity or inclination to indulge in the sensual, intellectual, artistic and political playground that was accessible to students and socialites of that generation. People were more affluent, no doubt, more comfortable in a maslovian sense, more socially mobile, better educated (a relative term, this), but overall, not overly adventurous. And truth be said, many of the social and political changes that are said to epitomize the ‘sixties, were well underway during the ‘fifties and even earlier or did not reach true fruition until the decades that followed.

But for we few, we happy few, in our own private Idahos, our little self-important backwaters of intellectual and cultural elitism, times were indeed a’changin”.

London was the “scene”, and then only the West End. The rest of the was still pretty drab and monochrome. But everywhere, clothes and music started to brighten things up.

With these metaphorical themes, so then did the threads unravel, so began a journey that is now drawing to a conclusion. These were the moments I occupied, looking out onto England, but imagining the wider world. And then, from the far side of the world, where the journey will most likely end, in the midst of an Australian forest. Here we are then, with the world literally at our fingertips, as we look out onto a world that is smaller, more knowledgeable, more prejudiced, less wise, more dangerous, more enthreatened, but as ever, beautiful, unfathomable, and magical. And at times like these, perhaps like Banjo, “I somehow fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy” as he “sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, and at night, the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars”. And hope that like the Bobster, we shall “dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sand, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves”. But let’s leave the last words to AA Milne as we bid farewell forever to The House at Pooh Corner: “wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing”.

Back In The Day

The beat goes on

When we reminisce about our “salad days”, they’re nothing more emotionally satisfying than the music we listened to; it is a portal to those times because there is nothing like songs and music from our past for unlocking memories. As the old crooner used to sing, those “magic moments” provided us with our very own soundtrack, a veritable code that even today, connects us to our contemporaries.

One constant nostalgist Facebook meme is the audio cassette tape. It inaugurated an era when it was possible to control one’s private soundscape, something we all take for granted now. It was cheap, portable, easy to use, and eminently shareable. It could live in the footwell of the a car or the bottom of a backpack. And was thrilling to those of us raised on vinyl. Suddenly, anyone with a cheap tape player could record music and share it. With its advent of the audio cassette, many of us took to compiling party tapes and car tapes of favourite songs to mark our passage from adolescence to adulthood, tapes that we would share with friends and also, with the objects of our young emotions and affections.

Nowadays, we have more ways to access music than at any time in history and a whole world of unfamiliar styles to explore, aided by instant access if we desire, to platforms like You Tube. And yet, there has been research to show that our willingness to explore new or unfamiliar music declines with age. It’s as if we believe, like American songwriter and musician Bob Seger: “today’s music ain’t got the same soul; like that old time rock ‘n’ roll”. There appears to be a consensus that people are highly likely to have their taste shaped by the music they first encounter in adolescence when our brains have developed to the point where we can fully process what we’re hearing, whilst the new experiences and heightened emotions of those years create strong and lasting bonds of memory based on pleasures past.

Donovan and Jenny Boyd wear the love like heaven

Farewell Middle Earth

I’ll leave my conclusion to American writer, artist and Druid (yes), Cerri Lee:

I suddenly realized it is a profound and overwhelming sense of loss for their world and mine that I feel as the Elves sail away from the Grey Havens. When the Elves leave, they take with them the enchantment from the land, something dies in it and I am left on the shores of Middle Earth amidst a fading beauty, as they sail on into the distance. The realization that now humans will have no restraints in their actions and will push forward the rise of mechanism, commerce on a global scale, and a discarding of anything that even looks like ‘fluffy’ thinking. My Middle Earth will never be the same again and I am constantly mourning its passing through this story. It leads me to wonder if some part of that feeling is what drove Tolkien to write his story.

As a fifty something woman I am starting to feel my age in the way I think. Occasionally I fall pray to the “In my day” ‘rose-tinted’ view of how things were ‘back in the day’. I don’t really think times were ever any better as such, no, definitely not better. But maybe the problems seemed more understandable, more bite sized and chewable. In truth they were not, but memory is a funny thing, as we all know, it can warp and change how we view the past.

I know that things on the global scale have always been complicated, difficult and a fine tightrope walk between warring factions, people in famine and glut, all striving for a peaceful coexistence. It is only the access to media coverage that bring the problems so close to home leaving me with the sense that I am standing before the Black Gates of Mordor, with the armies of the enemy massing on the other side and the Great Eye glaring down on me from his Tower.

Finally I understand why Tolkien’s Elves make me cry

Rider Haggard and the book that launched a genre

June 15, 2023June 15, 2023Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

In 2014, English author and academic Katherine Rundell published an entertaining article in the London Review of Books entitled Fashionable Gore. It served recently as the primarily source and backdrop for a podcast in the highly addictive podcast The Rest is History. The hosts, historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, specialist in ancient and modern history respectively, have a jolly good time discussing the legacy of English fin de siècle author Henry Rider Haggard, and particularly, his hugely popular adventure yarn King Solomon’s Mines.

Rundell writes: “King Solomon’s Mines is a very Victorian fable of endurance but it’s also a glorious romp, if you don’t mind your romps racist, sexist and tin-eared … It would be surprising if any white man born in 1856 had written non-racist, non-sexist fiction, whether it was set in Africa or not … You make a choice with Haggard: if you suspend not just disbelief but politics, logic and taste, the rewards are very real”. She first encountered the novel as a liberal-minded, educated adult when she could judge a book on its merits and its shortcomings. I was a pubescent early teen when it was recommended to us schoolboys by our English teacher, and was soon hooked on the adventure, the exotic settings and, especially the violence – and quickly moved on to its sequel, Alan Quartermain, follow up and

I republish Fashionable Gore below. It’s a very good read. Here is The Tom and Dom Show. But read on …

As a young man, in January 1879, Henry Rider Haggard walked the field of Isandlwana in present day in Kwa-Zulu Natal Province, South Africa just days after the battle in which a Zulu army totally destroyed – indeed, massacred – a British army. He was fascinated by and enamoured with Africa, the “dark continent” of myth and story. Having spent but a few weeks in the African bush, I fully under it – though I was accustomed to Australia’s big sky, the “vision splendid of the western plains extended” (that’s the “banjo”), the eldritch aura of Uluru, and the primeval magic of the coastal rain forest, we too succumbed to its spell.

To Henry, Africa was the “heart of darkness”, and yet also, a Garden of Eden, the home of the “noble savage” where a white Englishman, freed of the bonds of straightened Victorian Britain, could walk unexplored and uncharted lands, encounter many wonders, and in “proving” himself and testing his mettle, find himself and weigh his own worth.

You could say King Solomon’s Mines, his third of many adventure novels, could be said to have launched a thousand clichés and I’ve used a swag of them just then …

It all started with a bet …

Henry did not bide long in Africa, though long enough to be involved in the annexation of the Boer state of the Transvaal after the first Boer War in 1881, one of the triggers for the second and greater Boer War in 1899. He’d returned to England by 1885 when his elder brother pledged him five bob if the he could write a book half as good as Robert Lewis Stevenson’s hugely popular pirate jaunt “Treasure Island”.

By the end of the year, he had penned a novel that would become the foundational text of the lost world literary genre. King Solomon’s Mines was one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa, a story brimming with treasure, bravery and romance, and featuring all-action hero and big game hunter (naturally) Allan Quartermain and his conflicted band of British brothers (Scots and English to be precise – Stevenson, and before him, Sir Walter Scott

It was a romantic and what we call today white supremacist, man’s world of Britishness and brotherhood, martial prowess and manliness (or as Tom and Tom jest, “men in tight trousers”) in which the plucky British adventurer bested beast and barbarian and laughed in the face of fear. A “boy’s own” universe indeed, which I and my school chums lapped up with vicarious pubescent relish in the early sixties. All this “derring-do” is now dismissed as an outdated and anachronistic perspective of earlier generations, and what I perceived early on in my coming of age, as old-school Englishness. It was, of course, of its times. It lacked none of the sardonic ‘seventies irony of George McDonald Fraser’s celebrated Flashman comi-tragic adventures in which the eponymous antihero, the unreconstructed villain of Thomas Hughes’ Victorian yarn Tom Brown’s Schooldays, roves and rogers his way through the wars of the nineteenth century, somehow managing to escape by the skin of his teeth from one military disaster after another, including Custer’s famous “Last Stand” at Little Big Horn, the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the last stand of the 44th Foot at Gandamak during the disastrous First Afghan War of 1842.

In his turn-of-the-century prudish, Henry would never have let Quartermain and his pals go forth in such amours and priapic array as the nineteen seventies unchained and unzipped Harry Flashman. Though he shyly dallied with the picaresque – like Fraser, his few female characters were either portrayed as drop-dead gorgeous and dangerous or as plug-ugly and dangerous. But he views womenfolk with an almost schoolboy insouciance and deflection. Rundell observes that “the noble native woman always dies in Haggard – Quatermain feels ‘bound to say … that I consider her removal a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue’, whilst she and the podcast pals chuckle over the male protagonists’ “euphoric homosociality”, taking great pleasure in quoting at length the following mellifluous piece of Victorian soft porn from King Solomon’s Mines:

I am impotent even before its memory. Straight before us, rose two enormous mountains, the like of which are not, I believe, to be seen in Africa, if indeed there are any other such in the world, measuring each of them at least fifteen thousand feet in height, standing not more than a dozen miles apart, linked together by a precipitous cliff of rock, and towering in awful white solemnity straight into the sky. These mountains placed thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman’s breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth; and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. The stretch of cliff that connects them appears to be some thousands of feet in height, and perfectly precipitous, and on each flank of them, so far as the eye can reach, extend similar lines of cliff, broken only here and there by flat table-topped mountains, something like the world-famed one at Cape Town; a formation, by the way, that is very common in Africa. To describe the comprehensive grandeur of that view is beyond my powers.

Much to my surprise and mirth, I’ve learnt that Shebas Breasts actually do exist.

Sheba’s Breasts Ezulwini Valley Swaziland

Rundell wrote of the titular character of She, Rider Haggard’s follow up adventure yarn, “she was wise and beautiful beyond imagining: a sultry multilingual virgin, wish-fulfillment made flesh … and even more than King Solomon’s Mines, it’s a book out of which obsessions and anxieties leak”. More into power than sex, she was, of course, the original “She Who Must Be Obeyed”. A Hammer horror film version released in 1965 starring pneumatic Bond siren Ursula Andress was an international success and notwithstanding the dusty demise of Ayesha, led to a 1968 sequel, The Vengeance of She, with another femme fatale from Mitteleuropa, Olinka Berova, in the title role. Neither film has aged well, though both ladies are still with us today.

Ursula Andress as Ayesha

Rider Haggard’s work, particularly King Solomon’s Mines and She, would would inspire authors from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty first. His literary legacy can be tracked from his contemporaries and pen pals Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, both of whom were to visit South Africa during the Boer War, including the former’s Lost World and Kipling’s Gunga Din and Kim, through early twentieth century early Irish Republican Army “martyr” Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands, John Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps and Prester John, and Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan series, to JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (to many, regarded as the pinnacle of the adventure novel genre). Grahame Greene and Ian Fleming have acknowledged their debt to Rider Haggard, whilst the book has inspired movies from the beginning of the art form, including several remakes of King Solomon’s Mines and (the featured picture is from a loose British adaptation of 1937 starring Cedric Hardwicke, Anna Lee, and my namesake Africa American crooner and socialist Paul Robeson – unlike the movies, Henry would never have countenanced “leading ladies” in his manly romps) and latter day day blockbusters like the original Star Wars , and the Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider film series.

King Solomon’s Mines, its follow-ups and the many subsequent imitators are all variations on the derivative ‘hero’s quest’, the mono-myth popularized by by Joseph Campbell in his celebrated book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.That author described it thus:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell borrowed the term monomyth from Irish author James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – Joyce’s Ulysses was also highly influential in the structuring of the archetypal motif. He published The Hero’s Quest in 1949 but the idea behind the monomyth preceded him by millennia – think Odysseus and Aeneas, Beowulf and Sigurd/Siegfried, contemporaries like JRR, and latter-day film makers and authors. Star Wars creator George Lucas and Richard Adams, bunny-quest Watership Down have both acknowledged their debt to his book.

And so, to Fashionable Gore. The title refers to what Rundell refers to as a particularly Victorian fascination with bloodshed: “Second only to the relish of battle is Henry’s fascination with unusual ways a man might die”. A bit like Vikings, really, without the bonking …

See other stories of Africa in In That Howling Infinite: Johnny Clegg’s Impi – the Washing of the Spears and The ballad of ‘the Breaker’ – Australia’s Boer War and for more on “the hero’s quest”, see One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter?

Fashionable Gore

Katherine Randell, London Review of Books, 3rd April 2014

I first encountered King Solomon’s Mines in the children’s section of a public library in Harare. Most of the books smelled of water damage and many had been taken out so rarely that the last ‘return by’ stamp pre-dated Mugabe and decimalisation. I was working through shelves of books about horses and morality tales written by women who manifestly did not like children, and took King Solomon’s Mines because it’s set in ‘the Manica country’, a province a few hundred miles east of Harare. It seemed run of the mill at the time, much like the other books in the library: it was tightly plotted, suspense-driven, lavishly sexist and racist. In fact, though it is often read as a children’s book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.

As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be stupid: his father told him he was destined to become a greengrocer. The books aren’t proof that he wasn’t stupid; but they are proof that he was dogged and canny, with a strange and lurid imagination. Haggard’s father lived long enough to see his son become wealthier than he was and the author of a 15-volume series which ran for forty years; he was dead by the time his son was knighted in 1912 (a knighthood for services to literature was at the time largely unheard of, so his was given for services to the development of agriculture in Norfolk). King Solomon’s Mines was written in answer to a bet Haggard had made with his brother that he could write a book as good as Treasure Island. He said it took him six weeks (though novelists always lie about that sort of thing) and it was an immediate bestseller. The 1870 Education Act had produced a large cohort of literate citizens with an appetite for fiction. There was much in the book to be admired by the stay-at-home population of late 19th-century England: in the world Haggard created the governing principle was survival, not class or intellect, and the rewards for bravery were blood (other people’s) and diamonds. Graham Greene said that he valued Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.

The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter with good manners – and his colleagues, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, on a journey into Mashukulumbwe country. Quatermain early on stakes his claim to heroic status when he says that he has already killed, but always with the stern regret of the Victorian imperialist: ‘I have killed many men in my time, yet I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, but only in self-defence.’ The men’s aim is to find Curtis’s estranged brother, about which they are guardedly optimistic, and to discover King Solomon’s diamonds, about which – not knowing the title of the book – they are sceptical.

The novel is peppered with geographical detail conveyed in the confident vernacular of contemporary explorers’ reports, though the information itself is often mildly insane. In Manicaland, only the Chimanimani mountains and Mount Nyangani, Zimbabwe’s highest peak, could serve as the basis for ‘Suliman’s Mountains’. The heroes expend much blood and sweat traversing snowy terrain (which, in real life, 11-year-old schoolchildren climb as a matter of routine). In a crevice Quatermain’s hired bearer freezes to death (‘like most Hottentots, he cannot stand cold’) and deep inside a cavern the explorers discover a dead body three hundred years old, preserved ‘fresh as New Zealand mutton’ in the atmosphere. Even in the coldest months the temperature in the Chimanimanis is between 12 and 15 degrees Celsius; Nyangani last had snow in 1935. Haggard knew Southern Africa – he made his first trip to South Africa as secretary to the governor of Natal at 19 and was later master and registrar of the High Court in the Transvaal – but the land he paints is as lurid and fantastical as the witches and secret kings who populate it.

Following an ancient Portuguese map, the three men and their servant, Umbopa, walk into the territory of a hostile tribe, who are awed out of their murderous intentions by the spectacle of Good’s false teeth and white legs. Good, the light-relief character, is forced to walk much of the journey without his trousers, so enamoured of his lower half are the Kukuana people. The tribesmen are also impressed by Quatermain’s gun, as he picks off an antelope from seventy yards with childlike pleasure. ‘“Bang! thud!” The antelope sprang in the air and fell on the rock dead as a door nail. A groan of simultaneous terror burst from the group before us.’ The Kukuanans, Quatermain learns, are ruled by an impostor king called Twala, who is in thrall to Gagool, a witch so pocked and wizened by age that Quatermain mistakes her for ‘a withered-up monkey, wrapped in a fur cloak’. Luckily, Umbopa turns out to be the rightful king of the Kukuana people: a snake tattooed around his middle is the proof. The next night, under cover of a convenient lunar eclipse, Umbopa unveils himself and declares war on the usurper king.

Most of the book focuses on the Kukuana kraal and the battlefield; despite the title, the quest to find the stones takes up only the last fifty pages. When the diamonds are found, in a cave with a hidden door, the moment is muted: ‘The chest was three-parts full of uncut diamonds, most of them of considerable size. Stooping, I picked some up. Yes, there was no doubt about it, there was the unmistakeable soapy feel about them.’ In the novel it isn’t the diamonds that shine but the sweat of male bodies at war. There’s no sex in the book: where there is delight in things bodily, it’s in the euphoric homosociality of the post-battle glow. Haggard’s reluctance to involve women is the most obvious difference between the Quatermain books and those of the writers who emulated them. John Buchan followed Haggard’s adventure-suspense formula closely and self-consciously: in The 39 Steps, the hero’s story is said to be ‘pure Rider Haggard’. But Buchan moistens his stories with sensual descriptions of food – particularly ham – and of beautiful women. Haggard’s heroes are small, bluff men, part of a literary tradition of beta males performing great feats, but the companions – Henry Curtis in King Solomon’s Mines, Leo Vincey in She –have beautiful bodies:

Round his throat he fastened the leopard-skin cloak of a commanding officer … the dress was, no doubt, a savage one, but I am bound to say that I seldom saw a finer sight than Sir Henry Curtis presented … It showed off his magnificent physique to the greatest advantage, and when [Umbopa] arrived presently, arrayed in similar costume, I thought to myself that I had never before seen two such splendid men.

Second only to the relish of battle is Haggard’s fascination with unusual ways a man might die. The highlight of King Solomon’s Mines for most children is the moment when a bull elephant, wounded by a bullet, attacks Good’s servant: ‘The brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to the earth, and placing one huge foot onto his body about the middle, twined its trunk around his upper part and tore him in two.’ It was in part because of the death of the poor Zulu that the manuscript was rejected by one of the first publishers to see it: ‘Never has it been our fate to wade through such a farrago of obscene witlessness …nothing is likely in the hands of the young to do so much injury as this recklessly immoral book.’ But it was a fashionable kind of gore. At the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, held at South Kensington in 1886, the entrance was taken up by a diorama depicting a stuffed tiger attacking a stuffed elephant. The exhibition attracted more than five and a half million visitors. Like Haggard’s fiction, it was lit by the radiance of Livingstone, Richard Burton and other empire-building Übermenschen. King Solomon’s Mines is a very Victorian fable of endurance but it’s also a glorious romp, if you don’t mind your romps racist, sexist and tin-eared.

It would be surprising if any white man born in 1856 had written non-racist, non-sexist fiction, whether it was set in Africa or not. Quatermain says of the Kukuana people: ‘These women, for a native race, are exceedingly handsome … the lips are not unpleasantly thick as is the case among African races.’ Narrators, of course, are not spokespersons for their authors and Haggard certainly wrote in the idiom of the time; the explorer Mungo Park, in the purportedly factual Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, wrote in similar vein: ‘The noses of the Jaloffs are not so much depressed, nor the lips so protuberant, as among the generality of Africans … they are considered by the white traders as the most sightly Negroes in this part of the continent.’ You could say that if we excised all patriarchal books from the canon we would be left with The Very Hungry Caterpillarand little else, but few writers have embraced the status quo with such conviction. The racism in King Solomon’s Mines takes the form mainly of exhaustingly oracular pronouncements: there is none of Forster’s anxiety, or Kipling’s affection. Foulata is a tribeswoman who falls in love with Good, and risks her life to save him. When she dies – the noble native woman always dies in Haggard – Quatermain feels ‘bound to say … that I consider her removal a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue’. The Quatermain novels become more explicitly unsettling as the series progresses; in a diary entry written in 1924, the year before his death, Haggard foresaw conflict between races as inevitable and bloody: ‘The great ultimate war, as I have always held, will be that between the white and coloured races.’ The sexism, on the other hand, is glossed as a charming foible: ‘I can safely say there is not a petticoat in the whole history.’ His characters describe themselves as misogynists with the same irritating coyness with which people today describe themselves as chocoholics.

She (1887) is a very different book; it certainly isn’t coy. It follows wise but ugly Ludwig Holly and beautiful but slow Leo Vincey to unknown lands on the east coast of Africa. Leo’s dying father bequeaths him a potsherd on which is written in Greek a family history showing that Leo is descended from the royal house of pharaohs, and an instruction that he seek out a beautiful white sorceress and her fiery pillar of eternal life. Haggard gives the Greek in full, in both uncial and cursive, and some of the earliest jacket covers used a photograph of a potsherd, made by Haggard’s sister-in-law, to add verisimilitude. (Vintage Classics has rejected the pot in favour of an orgasmic-looking woman.) The men travel by sea and land to find Ayesha, also known as She Who Must Be Obeyed: an all-powerful ruler, her beauty so terrible she is concealed from face to foot in ‘corpse-like wrappings’. She is wise – ‘the wisest man up on earth was not one-third as wise’ – and beautiful beyond imagining: a sultry multilingual virgin, wish-fulfilment made flesh. She, like King Solomon’s Mines, was written in six weeks and even more than King Solomon’s Mines, it’s a book out of which obsessions and anxieties leak. As Kipling wrote to Haggard, ‘you are a whale at parables and allegories and one thing reflecting another.’

The plot is as simple and linear as that of the earlier book: Queen Ayesha believes that Leo is the reincarnated soul of Kallikrates, a man she had loved and murdered when he remained loyal to another woman. When she learns that Leo too is in love with another woman, Ustane, Ayesha kills her with a gesture. Ayesha’s beauty is so overwhelming that Leo forgives her and kneels at her feet. The terrifying power of female beauty shapes the book. ‘No doubt she was a wicked person,’ Holly says, ‘and no doubt she had murdered Ustane when she stood in her path, but then she was very faithful, and by a law of nature man is apt to think but lightly of a woman’s crimes, especially if that woman be beautiful.’ And later: ‘What a terrifying reflection it is, by the way, that nearly all our deep love for women who are not our kindred depends … upon their personal appearance.’ Ayesha offers to reveal the source of her absolute power, and leads the men to the Fountain and Heart of Life. She bathes first, unclothing herself and re-wrapping her snake belt around her falling hair. It’s the only erotic moment in the book. Suddenly, as the men watch, she begins to shrivel in the flames, ageing before their eyes until she is ‘no larger than a monkey, skin puckered into a million wrinkles’. The powerful monkey-like woman seems to be a keystone of Haggard’s imagination: Gagool, unidentifiable as a woman when first encountered, is ‘so shrunken in size that it seemed no larger than the face of a year-old child’, ‘a withered-up monkey’ with ‘a skinny claw’; Ayesha’s body becomes ‘no bigger than that of a two-months’ child …the delicate hand was nothing but a claw now.’ Holly and Leo flee; Holly’s servant, Job, has died of fright, and they leave his corpse behind.

At the heart of the book is the sense that women, given power, will reign like despots or fail like children. As Margaret Atwood points out in her introduction, Haggard and his siblings had a doll called She Who Must Be Obeyed, who lived in a cupboard and whom the children both tortured and were haunted by. Read as an embodiment of Victorian neuroses and desires, She is a marvel. There are good feminist interpretations: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar connect the witch-goddess figure with the newly fierce debates over the rights of women in Victorian England, and the proliferation of semi-scientific studies of woman’s ‘true nature’. With or without this reading, Shehas extraordinary moments. You make a choice with Haggard: if you suspend not just disbelief but politics, logic and taste, the rewards are very real. There is a peculiar and beautiful scene in which tribesmen, at Ayesha’s command, dance an ‘infernal and fiendish cancan’ in a room lit by burning corpses. ‘As soon as ever a mummy had burned down to the ankles, which it did in about twenty minutes, the feet were kicked away, and another put in its place.’ She burns the body of her two-thousand-year-old embalmed lover with acid: there is ‘a fierce fizzing and cracking sound’ and the man is turned into ‘a few handfuls of smoking white powder’. V.S.Pritchett wrote: ‘Mr E.M. Forster once spoke of the novelist sending down a bucket into the subconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump.’

The trouble with She is that it’s structured around a blank face. We are told that Ayesha had beauty ‘greater than the loveliness of the daughters of men’, but her beauty is sketchily imagined, asserted but never depicted. The result is that she is impossible to desire; a problem exacerbated by her voice and what she has to say. She rants like Nigel Farage, and has only one point to make: men are powerless in the face of beautiful women, women desire not men but power. The greatest woman to have lived is a disappointment, a heckling sex witch. Haggard would think I’m jealous. He says as much, near the end:

Of course, I am speaking of any man. We never had the advantage of a lady’s opinion of Ayesha, but I think it quite possible that she would have regarded the Queen with dislike, would have expressed her disapproval in some more or less pointed manner, and ultimately have got herself blasted.

Well, quite.

The great outdoors – camping days

February 20, 2023May 31, 2023Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
Clancy of the Overflow, AB (Banjo) Paterson

Sleeping under the stars, close to nature and exposed to the elements has a timeless allure, whether under canvas or on a bedroll or in a swag. It’s almost atavistic – a harking back to simpler and indeed, primeval days, a retreat albeit temporary from the workaday world and the ties that bind us to it, and a genuine pleasure of the open road.

For those with a drop of vagabond blood in their veins, and the echoes of a gypsy soul, it’s a sure cure for those “summertime blues”!

The Travelling People

Countries where the nomadic life has long been consigned to history and where the sedentary lifestyle is regarded as the civilised norm, individuals and authorities have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a rite of passage, a route to self-improvement. But whilst some camp for leisure and pleasure, for many, it is a economic and social necessity that has often been condemned as uncivilised, unsanitary, indigent, and even criminal – and it has also served as a proxy for disputes about race, class, discrimination and rootlessness.

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it. A recent book on the history of camping in the US explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity. A excellent review in The New Yorker is republished below.

In some countries that are seeking to modernise rapidly, heavy-handed authorities have endeavoured to curtail the wandering life by regulation and resettlement, at times, by brute force. Recall the sad conclusion to James A Michener’s novel Caravans, set in Afghanistan, and the its movie adaptation, and also British historian Vincent Cronin’s The Last Migration (1957), a account of the Pahlavi shah’s regime’s repression of the Falqani nomads in the name of “progress”. I can’t recommend it enough. It is tragic and beautiful, and authentic in every finely drawn detail, like a Persian miniature on ivory. Closer to our western consciousness and consciences, is the savage repression and dispossession of the Native American and Australian First Nations. It is historically and culturally ironic that a loop-hole in Australian law decreed that camping was permitted on the lawns of Old Parliament House in Canberra, the Australian capital provided no more than twenty tents were erected. So it was that on Australia Day, 26th January 1972, indigenous activists established an Aboriginal Tent Embassy to protest against the the Australian government’s refusal to recognize indigenous land rights. It is there to this day, drawing national attention to unresolved indigenous issues. Read about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy HERE

The early light is breaking
The morning sun is waiting in the sky
And I think I’m gonna break away
And follow where the birds of freedom fly
Caravans, Mike Batt

Aboriginal Tent Embassy 26th January 1972

The big backyard

As a nipper in Birmingham back in the late fifties, we had a very large backyard, with a lawn, apple and pear trees and a huge veggie garden. And one of our pleasures during the few warm months of school summer holidays was to erect a tent on that lawn. My brothers and I would spend our days outdoors, with a picnic and an old wind-up phonogram record player, until ordered in at sundown. We’d always wanted to spend the night there but our folks wouldn’t let us. We never understand why – we were perfectly safe in our own garden, and in our suburban backyard, there were none of the wild things we encounter in the wild. Looking back, I surmised that it had a lot to do with social norms. The folks grew up in rural Ireland, and probably associated camping out with the peregrinating ‘travellers’ who were regarded very much as unsightly and shady – a prejudice that persevered into their new lives in Birmingham. Back then, we had other names for them, for which I’ve been called to order on many a Facebook post.

In those days, “the travellers” would camp with their caravans and lorries on the “waste land” (yes, that what we called it, for reasons that were never explained – there was a lot that was not explained back the but was just taken for granted) that used to be homes and factories before the Luftwaffe destroyed them over ten years before. They had Irish accents, and this created an affinity with these itinerant folk as our parents and relatives were Irish immigrants, and we lived in an Irish world of Irish history, politics and music – as a young teen, I loved Ewan MacColl’s beautiful song Freeborn Man of the Travelling People, and it was the very first folk song I ever sang in public – in a billet in Southall during an Easter CND march.

As teens, we joined the Boy Scouts – where camping was deemed not only acceptable when under the auspices of the institution, but also, character building, and a means to learning resilience, self-reliance, and of acquiring valuable Baden-Powell bushcraft skills. To my folks, this gave camping the tick of respectability.

I must’ve been eleven or twelve when I first went off to camp, the whole troop on the back of an open lorry with all our gear and supplies. That was was my first night away from home, in the middle of nowhere, and it was, well, unsettling. Two blankets pinned together, rucksack for a pillow, rubber groundsheet on the cold hard ground. Washing in the freezing country river. Drop latrines that we had first to dig . Tea “brewed” in a huge dixie, fry-ups in a big frying pan, and “spud bashing”. “Bush” walks and “survival” tips, and the famous “wide game”. Cocoa around a roaring camp of a summer evening fire at night singing jolly scouting songs.

The annual summer camp became a permanent fixture of my early adolescence, and off I went every year until I left senior scouts and grew out of “god, queen and country”. But it was an important and enjoyable experience. I still remember those songs, and snatches often pop into my memory unannounced.

We’d see parts of our land that few of us had the means to travel to, and experience a rural England that city folk had long lost touch with. On overnight hikes we’d tote our backpacks along country lanes and byways, compass and ordinance survey map in hand, and set up a flimsy tent in an open field when the sun went down. The following hazy pictures were taken at a combined South Birmingham troop scout camp in Echternach, Luxembourg, on the German border. We were an eclectic crew – it even included a trio of Sea Scouts (incongruous as Birmingham was a long way from the sea). Of its time – nowadays, such a group shot would be so much more cosmopolitan. That’s me, arms folded.

Echternach Scout Camp, August 1963

As I grew to manhood – and outgrew scouting, I remained accustomed to sleeping out. At music festivals in rural England in the late sixties, it was a given that we would bed down on site come all weather – as the lovely pictures of the retro-medieval fayres provided by my good friend Charles Tyler show (Charles in the lad with the guitar in the featured photograph). I would often sleep on the side of the road when hitchhiking throughout the land. I’ve slept under the stars in England and Scotland, in Greece and Yugoslavia, Syria and Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

I’ve awoken covered in snow near the Culloden battlefield outside Inverness; been moved on by Yugoslav police when I’d mistakenly turned in for the night next to a military base outside Niš; settled down in a shabby park by the Sea of Galilee, wary of scorpions; slept on a precarious ledge high above the rose city of Petra in Jordan; bedded down in the desert on the border between Iran and Afghanistan; and battled mosquitoes on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. In latter years, on safari in Tanzania, we awoke in the night in our tent by the Rufiji river to see a big eye staring at us through the flimsy window as an old tusker proceeded to do his business right beside our tent; and sat around a fire of acacia sticks in a makeshift bush camp on the Serengeti savanna.

Just the other day, I was browsing through my travel diary for 26th August 1971 and came upon the description of my nighttime arrival in the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, on my way to Petra and Aqaba – a night I had long forgotten: “In my lostness, I came upon a policeman. And soon, three traffic cops were crashing the ash and buying me tea and bread. At last, they took me to a park, where King Hussein had a palace, and bade me sleep – under their protection. Come morning, I was gently awoken by the coppers who bought me breakfast and commandeered a taxi to take me into the town centre (where) again, police assisted me by asking a taxi driver to take me to the Aqaba road”. We took risks, we travellers of “the Overland” back in the day, and many times we were blessed with the charity and caring of our fellow humans.

My hitching days are now long gone, and so is the urge to set up camp in the great outdoors – apart from that African journey, when there was little alternative. And yet, I still love the great outdoors and being close to nature. Living off-grid on a rural property far from the madding crowd and surrounded by forest, with birdsong by day and frog song by night, I reckon I have have the best of both worlds.

Barsham Faire 1973

Meagan Fair, Pembrokeshire, 1975

The Confounding Politics of Camping in America

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it. A recent book by the historian Phoebe S. K. Young explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity.

Dan Piepenbring, The New Yorker April 27, 2022

An illustrated scene of many people camping

Illustration by Sally Deng

Just a drop would do, though. Early campers didn’t wish to be mistaken for actual vagabonds, and the line between the two was easily smudged. In 1884, Samuel June Barrows, an outdoors enthusiast and, later, a one-term congressman, warned that a traveller carrying a “motley array of bedding, boxes, bags, and bundles” might arouse “suspicions of vagrancy”; to distinguish oneself from the riffraff, it was best to pack a “de luxe” tent and fashionable attire. Barrows’s anxiety underscored the contradictions of recreational camping, which he described as “a luxurious state of privation.” One of its luxuries was that it was temporary. In the name of leisure, well-heeled campers sought out the same conditions that, in other contexts, they condemned as uncivilized, unsanitary, or criminal.

In “Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement” (Oxford University Press), the historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.

As Barrows slept beneath the stars, countless workers were forced to do the same. In the eighteen-seventies, a boom-and-bust economy and a burgeoning network of railroads compelled laborers to crisscross the nation, following the cycles of the market. The “tramp problem” vexed those of means. Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the ruthless, union-busting Pinkerton National Detective Agency, blamed the Civil War for giving men a taste of “the lazy habits of camp-life.” In 1878’s “Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives,” Pinkerton detailed the “grotesque company” tramps kept by moonlight, writing that debauchees would doze “in a stupid sodden way that told of brutish instincts and experiences.” Scarier than the encampments was the fear that some Americans might find them appealing, retreating from society to enjoy “the genuine pleasure of the road.”

The travel industry soon recognized those pleasures by making tramping an aesthetic, something that campers could slip into and shuck off as they pleased. A writer for Outing, a magazine aimed at moneyed outdoorsmen, preferred to “rough it in the most approved ‘tramp’ style—to abjure boiled shirts and feather beds and dainty food, and even good grammar.” As Young points out, the quotation marks around “tramp” raised a barricade between the imitation and the original. Real tramps led a precarious existence, subject to arrest, surveillance, poverty, and ostracism. When élite campers wore their costume, they shrugged at a world in which, as Pinkerton wrote, “a man may be eminent to-day and tomorrow a tramp.”

The double standard was especially glaring in Native communities. White Americans, including Barrows, saw tribal settlements as the epitome of savagery. The U.S. Office of Indian Affairs hoped that Native populations would disavow their “barbarous life” and take up “a distaste for the camp-fire.” Such goals were presented as matters of public health, but the message diverged sharply depending on the audience. Although Native groups “learned that the only way to prevent consumption was to give up camp life,” Young writes, “recreational campers read that exposure to fresh air and sunlight” could cure the illness. The government forced Native children to attend boarding school and subjected adults to dehumanizing reëducation projects. Meanwhile, Outing, as it had with tramps, presented Indianness as an identity to be adopted and discarded on a camper’s whim. One contributor confessed that summer gave him “an irresistible desire” to “live the life of a savage in all of its most primitive simplicity.”

In the early twentieth century, the automobile allowed legions of new drivers to flock to the countryside. Camping shed some of its élitist pretensions, but its popularity exposed new rifts. Eager for traffic, many towns constructed no-frills auto camps at their outskirts, where entry was often free, at least until the camps attracted hordes of families and their Model Ts. These “tin-can” tourists, as Sunset magazine called them, ate canned food heated on the engine—or, more boldly, by a camp stove connected to the exhaust pipe. Camps couldn’t keep such people away; now that the backcountry, or even the frontcountry, was within reach, Americans intended to pitch their tents wherever they could. From 1910 to 1920, national parks and monuments saw a fivefold increase in visitors, reaching a million a year; by 1930, that figure had jumped to more than three million. The deluge was unmanageable. In addition to arresting vistas and pristine forests, campers expected generous amenities—firewood, electric lights, running water, garbage collection—and they were not in the habit of leaving nature as they found it. California’s redwoods, in particular, were so frequently, heedlessly beheld that their roots began to choke underfoot.

To save the trees, Emilio Meinecke, a plant pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service, conceived a template still in use today: a one-way loop road with short “garage-spurs,” each of which functioned as parking for a designated campsite. By presenting campers with private, manicured spaces, Meinecke hoped to spare the surrounding plant life, reminding visitors that they were “guests of the nation.” Intentionally or not, his campsites had the flavor of the suburbs—the land, once for farming, was now to be savored as a consumer, and every family had its plot. The New Deal funded the “Meineckizing” of almost ninety thousand acres of federal campgrounds, about half of which were new, signalling the rise of what Young calls “the campers’ republic.” “Mixing leisure with nature,” she writes, “became a potent way for citizens to demonstrate national belonging.”

But all was not well in the republic. The Great Depression had pushed record numbers of Americans into homelessness: by one estimate, during one day in the spring of 1933, a million and a half people were sleeping outside or in public shelters, and the actual number was likely higher. Because camping was so popular, budget-minded vacationers were sometimes cheek by jowl with the down-and-out. Who could say which was which? Manufacturers of camping trailers went out of their way to disclaim the use of their products as “a permanent address.” Others argued that campgrounds were too affordable or unsupervised. In 1940, J. Edgar Hoover, never one for understatement, alleged that roadside tourist camps had become “dens of vice and corruption” for “gangs of desperados.” Even Meinecke, for all his talk of hospitality, did not look kindly on extended stays at national parks. In an internal report, he complained that some visitors, “evidently camped for a long time,” had given one of his campsites a “ ‘used,’ second-hand look,” spoiling it for “decent people who are not slum-minded.”

Black visitors, too, found that the ordinary recreational privileges did not apply to them. The National Park Service couldn’t fathom how to attend to the needs of African Americans, so it simply dissuaded them from coming. “While we can not openly discriminate against them,” the minutes of a 1922 conference read, “they should be told that the parks have no facilities for taking care of them.” The numbers of Black visitors were low, which the N.P.S. took to mean that Black people had no interest in going; in fact, it was evidence that the agency’s deterrents had been effective. If there was wariness among Black communities on the subject of camping, it was, Young notes, well deserved: Black travellers had often been forced to camp in degrading conditions when inns and hotels refused to host them. Like many New Deal agencies, the N.P.S. was obligated to welcome all Americans equally, but parks in Southern states deferred to “local custom,” building segregated bathrooms, campgrounds, and picnic areas. When this policy was finally reversed, in the nineteen-forties, some Southern workers used just enough paint to cover the signs for “Negro Areas” without making them illegible. The discrimination remained, thinly veiled.

If the U.S. has dithered about the basics of camping—who can do it, where, and for how long—it’s been outright bewildered by camping as political speech. Could anyone have a message so urgent that it can be delivered only by sleeping outdoors? The answer is yes, as thousands of protesters have made clear, but the government has seldom taken them at their word, instead casting them as devious freeloaders or closet indigents. Occupy Wall Street, which famously enjoined its participants to bring tents, honed an approach popularized after the Civil War, when the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ group, camped near the Washington Monument to raise awareness of their sacrifices. In 1932, the Bonus Army—thousands of out-of-work veterans seeking their service bonuses—followed suit, encamping in plain view of the Capitol. For weeks, the public debated whether the soldiers were heroes or hobos. President Herbert Hoover, deciding on the latter, ordered the clearing of the camps, resulting in a fiery conflict that claimed at least one life.

But a tent makes a forceful statement: someone is here, and that someone intends to stay. When Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wanted to show Washington the true toll of poverty, they decided that camping was the only suitable action. The Poor People’s Campaign brought more than two thousand people to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in May, 1968, a month after King’s assassination. Known as Resurrection City, the encampment lasted for six weeks, drawing support and ire. A concerned citizen wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson that “a hoard [sic] of locusts” was abusing “hallowed ground.” Calvin Trillin, writing for this magazine, noted the irony: the poor had intended to show America that they were “sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless—and they are criticized daily for being sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless.” By June 24th, the camp had dwindled to five hundred, and police fired tear gas to expel those remaining. A demonstration about homelessness, it seemed, was no different than homelessness itself.

Just three years later, Vietnam Veterans Against the War began planning to camp near the Capitol, and the Nixon Administration, fearing a repeat of Resurrection City, refused to give them a permit. The V.V.A.W. requested a stay on the ban, and the case went to court. Determining the legality of protest encampments, Young writes, “required finding an elusive balance between Constitutional freedoms and public safety.” The N.P.S. would allow only a “simulated” camp on federal grounds: no fires, no tents. John Kerry, who argued for the V.V.A.W., maintained that a real campsite was the only way to “tell our story to the people of this country.” The judge hearing the case, meanwhile, felt that to camp was essentially to sleep and was an act that couldn’t “express a single idea”—and that couldn’t claim First Amendment protection. He upheld the camping ban; the Court of Appeals reversed it; the Supreme Court reinstated it. The V.V.A.W. decided to camp anyway, and, not wanting a public-relations disaster, Nixon let them be. The Washington Post quoted a Park Police officer who, looking over a National Mall clotted with sleeping bags, waxed philosophical: “What’s the definition of camping? You tell me. I don’t know.”

The ensuing decades did little to answer that question. By 2012, Congress was holding hearings on the subject, in which Trey Gowdy, a House member from South Carolina, grilled Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the N.P.S at the time. “What is the definition of camping?” Gowdy demanded. Occupy D.C. had been staying in McPherson Square, in downtown Washington, for months, and Jarvis had been reluctant to say that the protesters were camping—their actions were a means to an end, not the end itself, which was reason enough to avoid enforcing the N.P.S. ban. Gowdy seemed to understand the Occupiers as recreational campers in disguise; their politics were a cover story for a good time, and taxpayers were footing the bill. But the Occupiers emphasized that they weren’t camping at all. (“WE ARE NOT CAMPING,” signs on their tents read.) Campers slept outside for the joy of it; Occupiers wanted “a redress of grievances.” Gowdy couldn’t compute how people camping “for fun” were permitted only in certain areas, while those “pitching a camp in protest of fun” were welcomed by the National Park Service. Without a clear distinction between camping and not-camping—the distinction that generations of Americans had tried and failed to make—he felt that “the fabric of this republic” was “going to unravel.”

Gowdy is now out of the House, but his comment echoes through a nation where camping, in its many forms, remains vital and perplexing—an emblem not just of our freedom but of its limits. Last summer, national parks saw a record number of visitors, leading to overcrowding and abundant litter. The housing crisis continues to deepen; researchers estimated that, on a single night in 2020, roughly five hundred and eighty thousand people were homeless. And Young’s central insight—that camping both reflects and challenges notions of “national belonging”—is borne out in new ways every summer. In June, 2020, in Forks, Washington, residents mistook a mixed-race family for members of Antifa. The family, unemployed because of the pandemic, had been living in a modified school bus, and had hoped to spend a few nights nearby while the bus underwent repairs. Instead, they were accosted by “patriots” in a supermarket parking lot, and then trailed into the woods by men driving trucks and A.T.V.s. At the family’s campsite, they heard bursts of gunfire, and found their escape route blocked by felled trees. According to Wired, Shannon Lowe, one of those harassed, later said, “They looked us right in the eye, and didn’t believe we were camping.”

Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller

February 7, 2023April 13, 2023Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
You couldn’t see these cold water restrooms
Or this baggage overload
Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads
From Joni Mitchell’s Hejira

When the Beatles and their partners, with Donovan and Mia Farrow in tow, travelled to India to sit at the well-kissed feet of the Maharishi, they would’ve travelled by BOAC jetliner. But hundreds if not thousands of young people from Europe and North America were already making their own own way, by boats, trains, trucks and automobiles, motorbikes and bicycles, and in extremis, shank’s pony, some ten thousand kilometres and more to the end of the line, be this Kathmandu, Kolkata (where I ended up), South East Asia (Tim Page, a recently departed friend, ended up there as a war photographer in America’s “crazy Asian war) or Australia (that’s where my uni pals washed up – see below). Other adventurers set out in the opposite direction from conservative Australia and New Zealand-Aotearoa heading for Britain, the “old country” and a wider world. The numbers would swell during the seventies and the “overland” as it was then called became the well-travelled “Hippie Trail” – until the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan wars effectively blocked it to all but a resolute and crazy-brave few.

The Beatles in India

I’d never intended to hit the hippie trail back in the day. In the northern summer of 1971, I didn’t even know it existed.

I’d just finished my final exams, graduating with a good degree, but after three exciting and formative years, it was as if everything had suddenly ground to a halt. Uni was over; a romantic relationship was on the rocks; I was footloose and free, floating and feeling the urge to escape elsewhere, somewhere, anywhere. I’d no idea at all what I would do next, other than an inchoate plan to undertake post-graduate study – guided by my tutor and mentor exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely, my academic interest was Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but that was to be down the track.

When the finals results came out, I spent the evening at the student union with friends, unwinding and getting pissed; and the very next day, I walked into the Student Travel office and booked a one-way air ticket to Athens (only my second time on an aeroplane), passage by steamer from Piraeus, Athen’s port, to Alexandria, Egytpt, via Limassol, Cyprus, and back from Egypt to Piraeus and thence to Tel Aviv, Israel, with no bookings for onward travel.

Seized by the idea of visiting the two principal antagonists of the almost recent Six Day War, I’d a naive and uninformed notion to view both sides of the Arab-Israeli puzzle (and we’re no nearer a solution today, and I’ve spent half a century since watching and waiting – but that is another story). Within a few weeks, I’d bought a second-hand rucksack and sleeping bag, converted my savings to traveler’s cheques – there were still currency restrictions in the UK on how much cash you could take out of the country – packed a few things, and in the words of Cat Stevens, I was “on the road to find out”.

That road took me through the Middle East, and on and on, until I reached Kolkata in Bengal. What was planned as but a two month holiday to “clear my mind out”, to quote that Cat song again, extended to over six months as the appetite grew with the eating.

I traveled through lands of which I knew very little, picking up fragments of history and heritage, parables and politics as eastwards I roamed, through the lands of antiquity and of empire: Greece and Cyprus; Egypt and Israel; the Levant (old French for the lands of the rising sun – Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan); Iraq before Saddam, and Iran under the Shah; Pakistan and India, who went to war with each other as I crossed their frontiers (a story for another time); and then back to Britain by way of Turkey and the fabled Pudding Shop.

I stood beside the great rivers of ancient stories – the Nile and the Jordan, the Orontes and the Yarmouk, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges. I traveled though deserts and mountains, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. I climbed through the Kyber Pass, immortalised by imperial endeavour and hubris, and the valley of Kashmir, a betrayed and battered paradise. I crossed Lake Van, in the shadow of Mount Ararat, and the Bosphorus, from into Europe. I stood atop ancient stones in Memphis and Masada, Baalbek and Babylon, Jalalabad and Jerusalem.

On my return, my plan to specialize in Soviet Studies evaporated as I resolved to learn more about these lands, their peoples, and their histories, and this I did. The Middle East has long-since captivated and colonized much of my intellectual life, imbuing it with a passion that has found expression in my persona, my politics, my prose, my poetry, and my songs.

See: East – an anthology and Song of the Road (1) – my hitchhiking days

Broken statues, empty tombs.
Ghosts of commoners and kings
Walk the walls and catacombs,
The castles and the shrines,
Marking lives and story lines,
Lie the ruins and the bones,
The ruins and the bones,
Ruins and bones.

Through the desert to the beyond …

I was at the end of the beginning. Having travelled through Egypt and Israel, I’d decided, for many reasons, that I wasn’t ready to return to England as planned, and recalling the advice of a fellow traveler I’d met in Cairo, I resolved to head east …

In early 1972, I wrote in an empty1962 diary: “Friday 20th August 1971, a fateful day indeed, when manifold and manifest destinies unfolded, when plans were forgotten and begotten, when the past was shelved and the future postponed. To the desert. Through the desert. To the beyond. To see. To decide. To move forever onwards with no direction home. With no grip of time to defeat me or dictate to me …”

Less prosaically, my actual travel diary recorded on that day:

“Arriving in Nicosia from Tel Aviv at 15.15 after a neglectful and body-shaking El Al flight, I headed straight into town from.an almost deserted airport. How much Anglo, how much Greek, how empty. Hot and boring in my mobile mood. Bought a ticket to Beirut and headed straight out again on the six o’clock Air Liban Boeing 707. A highly hospitable fifty five minute flight and by seven o’clock I was passing through Lebanese customs … “

The following day, I wrote:

Saturday, 21st August 1971, Beirut
“Now for a calculation space … I have £55 in travelers’ cheques and £25 in cash. Eighty quid in all. How far will that go? Syria? Iraq? Jordan? Afghanistan, Iran? Then home? Visas, maybe five quid? Amman to Baghdad, four? Damascus Amman Two? Amman to Baghdad, Teheran, Kabul 10 quid? That’s £21 all up. Kabul to Istanbul, £13, so £34 in all. £3 max in each for contingencies? £15 or £49. Leaving about 30 quid by Istanbul. Cutting Jordan, could save four. India? There is time, but little money … Even if the three quid were cut and Jordan too, that would leave £19 from Kabul to Delhi – but I must eat, I must eat somewhere – hence, no India…this time … “

But the appetite grew with the eating and the road led on and on …

Life on the road …

People will tell you where they’ve gone
They’ll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Others just come to harm
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
Joni Mitchell, Amelia

Traveling was sooo different back then in the days before ubiquitous air travel, the Internet and mobile phones. On the road, our destinations were set, but these were fluid in their timeline and attainment. Much of our information came by word of mouth from other travellers on the road. You’d head to places other people had recommended, without having seen pictures and read descriptions on the internet. You couldn’t book a hotel room in advance so we often never knew where we’d sleep. You’d find a bed for the night once we’d arrived in a city, town or village or if you were in the information loop, you’d rock up at well-frequented hostelries like Amir Kabir in central Teheran, Mrs Dunkeley’s Guest House in the heart of New Delhi, and the famed houseboats on Dal Lake in Kashmir. Often, you slept on floors, in railway station waiting rooms, in constant fear of robbery, or beneath the stars. You’d spend long hours waiting in the post office to place a call home, and sometimes the operator didn’t know where that was. Letters would take an age to reach their destination. I wrote letters to England from Amir Kabir, and picked up the replies on my return journey months later. You’d work out how to deal with banks and money changers to convert travelers cheques to the local currency – and keep a close count of every cent because these were limited, and you were constantly worried about being ripped off.

Hotel Amir Kabir, Teheran

Like many on the road, I travelled on the cheap, crowded onto local buses, struggling to grab a third class seat on packed trains, eating street food. watched every dinar and dollar, rial and rupee. To supplement my diminishing funds, I washed dishes – and sold blood twice, to the Red Crescent in Jerusalem’s Old City (risky) and In New Delhi (in hindsight, potentially suicidal).

I’d only intended to be out of the country for about a month, but had cleaned out my bank account. I’d worked on building sites in Birmingham during the summer breaks from University, and had earned enough to keep me in books and records and other “luxuries” and also for travel. And I got to India and back to Istanbul before I ran out of cash and had to get my folks to wire me enough for a ticket home. My university pals who took The Overland a year later washed up in Darwin stoney broke and had to work their way all the way south to Bondi Beach, where they’d resolved to rent a flat overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Of the five who roved out, three returned to England, but two remained, establishing careers, marrying “sheilas” and raising children and grandchildren – by happy circumstance, I too settled in Australia six years later, and John (RIP) and Christian became my oldest friends in Australia.

Most of us travelled without cameras and so relied on travel diaries and memories. I had a dinky old Kodak and couldn’t afford a lot of film – I sold some for extra cash somewhere along the way – so I had had just a few pictures on a couple of rolls. And I had to wait until my return to England to take them to Boots Chemist for processing. And looking back, perhaps it was easier and also most adventurous in those days to be present, to live in the moment, and to be surprised over things you hadn’t seen before, not even in books and photographs. So many everyday things are now very practical with ATMs and mobile phones and travel advisories to hand, whilst our mobile phones and tablets absorb so much of our attention. In some ways these take away much of the vicarious risks and also, magic. I’m sure glad to have experienced travelling in the old-fashioned way.

If you never go, you’ll never grow

I’ll conclude this story by observing in the present how in all my journeying, I never came to harm, whether by mishap or misadventure, malice or malignancy.

The accidental journey was driven by a combination of whim, thrift, expedience, and necessity, but also, by a sense of romantic adventure – buoyed by what seems in retrospect, a naive feeling of dare-devil invulnerability.

Passers-by, and local people I’d meet would often ask where I was going and why I traveled thus. They’d tell me it was dangerous, that there were men out there who would rob me or do me harm. When I returned home, folk would ask if I faced danger and if I was afraid. Yet, we who traveled the world before jumbo jets and cruise ships understood that bad things could happen and that they sometimes did whether you journeyed by thumb, van, bus or train. In hotels and hostels from Beirut to Baghdad, Kabul to Kolkata, you’d pick up word-of-mouth “travel advisories”, warnings and “war stories”. In India, I’d been told of a chap who’d been robbed and stranded in Afghanistan, and I actually met him when I bunked down in a backpackers’ in Sultanahmet, Istanbul, on my way back to Britain.

As I journeyed “there and back again”, I took risks on rickety buses and in reckless cars. I’d walk alone through slums and shanty towns and eat food sold on the streets. I risked typhoid and cholera outbreaks, caught “Cairo belly”, sold blood in “third world” clinics, and ran from thrown stones and the sound of gunfire. I was arrested for spying on the Aswan Dam in upper Egypt (though released soon afterwards) and handcuffed as a “joke” in a Beirut police station. I’d crossed a battle-scarred landscape between Syria and Jordan on foot, and watched the military buildup in Kashmir as the Indo-Pakistan war was breaking out.

So yes, there always was a risk; but if you think too much about it, you’d never go, and if you never go, you’ll never grow.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Walking Song, JRR Tolkien

My road in pictures

The brown fedora, Giza 1971

By the rivers of Babylon, August 1971

Srinegar, October 1971

Luxor, Egypt 1971

Me and the gang, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 1971

Layers, Damascus 2009

Salah ad Din al Ayubi, Damascus 2009

Sun al Hamadiyya, Damascus 2006

Bakdash ice cream parlour, Damascus 2009

Cruising the Golden Horn, Istanbul 2014

The Sulaymaniya Mosque, Istanbul 2014

Jerusalem the Golden

Bondi or Bust

The morning after the night before …
In late summer 1972 we housemates threw an all-night farewell party before going our separate ways. Christian, Brendan, John, Mike and Eric embarked on the hippie trail across Asia and ended up in God’s Own Country. Having recently returned from that same odyssey, I remained in London, but destiny saw me washed up DownUnder five years later. The first picture portrays the laid-back lethargy of that morning in East Finchley. Chris is in the shot so Brendan must’ve taken the photograph. The second is taken when we got it all together for a more formal tableau with Chris behind the camera.

Shortly thereafter, the five pioneers set off for Dover and the East. Many years later, Christian revealed these pictures from their journey. The first is of John and Chris soon after landing in northern Australia. The others are pictures of Chris’ tote bag. He still has it.

When an old cricketer leaves the crease,

March 26, 2022April 17, 2022Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

When the day is done and the ball has spun in the umpire’s pocket away, and all remains in the groundsman’s pains for the rest of the time and a day. There’ll be one mad dog and his master, pushing for four with the spin, on a dusty pitch with two pounds six of willow wood in the sun.

It was a magical Sunday afternoon during an English Indian Summer in September 2008, an afternoon that evokes memories of long gone childhood and adolescence. I was England on my tod to surprise my mother on her 80th Birthday, and passing through London, I was staying with one of my oldest friends and his family in Muswell Hill. He asked me if I’d like to pop down with him to the local cricket club to down a few ales and watch a game.

Now, in all of my adult life, I have never been into spectator sports, and I haven’t watched a cricket match for over half a century. But I was enjoying the company and the craic, and thought “well, why not?” So there we were, sitting in the little members stand, drinking beer and calling out “well bowled!” and “well played, sir!” like a pair of old die-hards. In addition to his many other talents, Peter was an avid and talented amateur cricketer, and the game was his passion – he once considered a professional career and in retirement and was part of a peregrinating team of amateur players who would criss-cross the world giving kit and coaching to young people who lacked the skill and wherewithal to play. The visited some thirty countries in their cricketing odyssey.

Peter Setterington passed away in his sleep on Wednesday 23rd March. He was almost seventy five. We’d been firm friends for five decades. It’s 4am the following Sunday and I’m sitting here writing this eulogy in a hotel room on the fifty fifth floor overlooking Sydney’s Darling Harbour and listening to Roy Harper’s tribute to the game that is played in heaven. It’s cold and rainy outside and this echoes the emptiness I am feeling inside.

‘Twas in another lifetime

When the moment comes and the gathering stands, and the clock turns back to reflect on the years of grace as those footsteps trace for the last time out of the act. Well this way of life’s recollection, the hallowed strip in the haze, the fabled men and the noonday sun are much more than just yarns of their days.

1972. I was house sharing with former uni pals in London’s East Finchley. One of my friends worked for a market research company located on the top floor of an ornate Georgian building in Trafalgar Square. It’s still there – it’s the one with the little cupola on top. He talked about this very friendly, garrulous, and ambitious bloke who’d just joined the team. Not long afterwards a girl who also worked there threw a party in Romford, Essex and invited Chris and us flat mates. And so one Saturday evening in spring, we all headed over there.

The party is now a blur. I was introduced to Peter for the first time, but then proceeded to get blind drunk. I passed out on the bathroom floor and woke up in a flat near Hampstead Heath with the sun streaming through the windows. A kindly lass had volunteered to put me up for the night and Peter, who lived in close by in Swiss Cottage at the time, had driven us there. I think I was fully clothed. He rang me up a few days later to ask how I was, and we became fast friends.

His helping me out at that party when we were total strangers was an early display of the decency and generosity of spirit that he showed to me and to others on many subsequent occasions. When a mutual friend got himself into dire straits and seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth, Peter made every effort to track him down until the trail went cold in Thailand. He was like that.

Later that year, my friends hit the Hippie Trail, ending up in Australia. I moved to a bedsit in Finsbury Park and commenced my Middle East studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. A year later, I moved in with two gay friends who had a big house in Highgate. I cleaned the place and lived there for free in a top floor flat. They would introduce me to friends as “the only queer in the house”. Peter would often drop in of an evening in an old red Post Office van and we’d pop over to Jack Straw’s Castle by Hampstead Heath for a drink. He ran a mobile disco on the side at the time, and the van was the “band bus”.

During my London days, we’d visit each other and he’d have great parties. Peter really knew how to enjoy life and to help others to do so to. In March 1974, he threw one for me at his Swiss Cottage home to celebrate my 25th birthday, to which I invited all my London friends. I recall walking home to Highgate across the Heath in the early morning mist.

I’d stay weekends now and then with Peter’s folks in Oxford – Spring and summertime walks in bucolic gardens, punts on the River Cherwell and Pyms on the back porch. So quintessentially English. If I recall rightly, his father was a teacher at the university, well read and very erudite. His mother, whom Freddie has met whilst he was on military service, was a charming and beautiful Burmese lady who treated me like part of the the delightful and happy family.

In 1978, my wife and I moved to Australia. But when I returned to the old country, I’d stay with Peter and Jenny, first in Finsbury Park, and later in Muswell Hill near the Alexandra Palace. His home was our home, and as the years rolled by, Adèle, my second wife, and I watched Peter and Jenny’s sons grow from childhood to youth to family men.

Over time, Peter rose higher and higher in the marketing world, eventually becoming a senior executive for Saatchi and Saatchi – until he rationalized himself out of a job sometime in the nineties. I recall once lending him book called Driving The Pigs To Market, a take-down of the marketing industry. It may still be somewhere on his crowded bookshelf , and though I’ve stayed at his place many many times over the years, and I’ve searched, but could never find it.

On the surface, we seemed an odd couple, Peter and I – him with him marketing shtick and business acumen, and me with my Middle East Studies and morning music and poetry, and later, as a visiting Aussie. But in reality, he was much, much more than his marketing persona. He was a Renaissance man whose interests extended far beyond his day job – he was well read and loved music and an avid fisherman, a hedonist and wine buff, and above all, a consummate family man.

We had clicked immediately, and whenever we reunited, he’d collect Adèle and I up from the tube station, and we’d just pickup from where we’d last left off, chatting away through the night about life, the universe and everything, and downing gallons of French wine.

A big man with an unquenchable zest for life, he was a force of nature. With his cheeky grin, loud laugh and pukka accent, Peter was and is so much a part of my London life – and London will never be the same without him.

Yours was a life well lived, old chum, and yes, “very well played, Sir!”

Fare thee well …

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, you never know whether he’s gone. If sometimes you’re catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly Mid-on. And it could be Geoff and it could be John with a new ball sting in his tail. And it could be me and it could be thee and it could be the sting in the ale, the sting in the ale.

For more about London in In That Howling Infinite, see: Back in the Day – my journey, in song and poetry; A Window on a Gone World – London days; Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Something about London; Ciao Pollo di Soho – memories a classic café

Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1

February 21, 2022May 13, 2024Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

Soho (needless to say)
I’m alone on your streets on a Friday evening
I’ve been here all of the day
I’m going nowhere with nowhere to go
Al Stewart, 1972

… it felt like we had one toe in the Mediterranean, even though it was January and our fingers were numb under our gloves …
Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Too Much

Sometimes, out of the blue, a message from the old country triggers happy memories and sends us wandering through “the foggy ruins of time”. An old friend from my London days emailed me the other day, recalling how back in the day, I’d frequent a cheap and cheerful Italian café in Soho – what was then “swinging” London’s seedy, sexy and infinitely interesting red-light, hip-boutique and cool restaurant mecca. She’d laid down one wintry English afternoon to relax with a novel, and to her surprise, two pages were dedicated to that very same café.

So, as often happens these days, I was soon flicking through my back pages and disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind.

Cut to 1967 and pictures of a gone world …

The café at the end of the M1

As I wrote in a recent trawl through my back pages (OK! Enough with the Bob Dylan already!):

.“… that motorway from Brum to London was a road well-traveled. In my final year at Moseley Grammar, I’d often hitch down to London for a weekend with pals who’d gone there before. We’d hang out at cheap and cheerful Pollo’s Italian restaurant in Old Compton Street in Soho and the Coach and Horses across the road, and go to Cousins folk and blues joint in a cellar in nearby Greek Street, and the 101 Jazz Club off Oxford Street. Bunjies folk cafè and Ronnie Scott’s jazz club were just around the corner. After a meal or a pint, I’d often catch the last tube to the end of the line closest to the M1. I can’t recall how many times I headed off into the night; and there were always drivers on the road at the witching hour. I guess many folks “get the urge for going”, as Joni sang back then, “and they had to go …” And in those generous times, people were happy to offer a lift to a wayfaring stranger – gentle souls who would not leave strays stranded by the dark wayside; lonesome folks seeking company and conversation in the dark night of the soul; curious people wondering why a young man would hitch the highways in the middle of the English night”.

Yes, Café Pollo was indeed a significant landmark of my London days.

I discovered Café Pollo in the Spring of 1966 when I’d first hitched to London with school friends to take part in a Campaign for Nuclear Disbarment march. From ‘66 through ‘71, I’d go there whenever I was in town, and regularly when I ended up living there – right up to my departure for Australia in 1978. When I was studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies, I’d go there for lunch after Friday classes with my best mate and soul brother Mike (we were born on the same day in the same year in a British city beginning with B).

So, for years and years I’d hung out at Pollo’s. Dined there, boozed there, courted there – almost always on spaghetti bolognese and Chianti with a sticky rum baba to follow. It was crowdy, noisy and smokey, and in winter, steamy and clammy – and “cheap as… “

Though I’d left Old England’s shores, I’d visit Pollo’s whenever I returned and catch up with old pals. When I became vegetarian, the bolognese was replaced with pesto pasta liguria or arrabbiata. When The Evening Standard and Time Out recommended it as an excellent “cheap eats”. I thought its glory days of low-key popularity were over. But it was always there, the same as it always was. The feature picture of this post was taken, I think, when Adèle and I were in England in 1987 – I still have that old Chinese denim jacket and use it for sitting around our bonfires in wintertime.

We continued to go there until 2005, when we were denied service as we just wanted a cup of coffee. The next time I popped by, in September 2008, it was gone. Indeed, it had closed soon after our disappointing coffee quest. Having served the impecunious for generations, it was, in the words of a classic London cafés blog, dismantled and dumped, to be born again as a classier, impersonal, cut-out trattoria – La Porchetta Pollo Bar.

But at least, the name and the memory live on …

Cheap, cheerful and unchanging …

Classic Cafés published an excellent obituary to this Soho icon. Here are some extracts:

“The Pollo, at 20 Old Compton Street, with its ox-blood booths, lapidus beanpole railings, contemporary ceiling, murals, top notch signage, and perfectly preserved light fittings always had hungry queues waiting outside. It remained the proverbial Soho institution for as long as anyone could remember. A proper bargain Italian with perfect ‘60s decor, friendly banter and a worryingly high turnover of chefs (there always seemed to be a ‘chef wanted’ sign in the window). “Cheap and cheerful” remains the operative term at the long-standing Italian café Pollo …

… The almost endless hand-written choice of pastas has now been typed up for easier interpretation, but otherwise the menu remains much the same as I remember it being 20 years back. The food is still hearty, the prices are laughable for central London, the coffee is rocket fuel – and the waitresses still insist on doubling you up in the booths with complete strangers …

… Plenty has changed in London. Fortunately, Pollo hasn’t … The Pollo often finds its way onto the ‘top cheap London eats’ lists, and it was the Evening Standard listing under budget eating that first nudged me in its direction a few years ago… It isn’t fancy. It is an Italian restaurant. The inside looks something like a truckers’ caff, with formica tables and little booths, and there is more room downstairs if it looks full. There isn’t a lot of space and the tables are packed in, but the food is good. The main courses consist of a variety (unsurprisingly) of pasta and pizza dishes, again the price range for these tends to be between £3 – £5. There are some risottos as well, and some meat dishes, such as chicken with rice or veal which are a bit more expensive”.

One toe in the Mediterranean …

As for the book my London friend was reading, which inspired her email and my jaunt down the rabbit hole (a pleasant one), The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy, here’s what the protagonist had to sat about about our café de coeur:

“In late January 1989, Jennifer and I were sitting in a cheap Italian restaurant called Pollo in Old Compton Street, Soho. It was always full of students from Saint Martin’s our school around the corner because it offered its loyal impoverished customers three courses for a fiver. Jennifer had introduced me to Pollo when we first met. Once we discover spaghetti vongole and penne arrabbiata, it felt like we had one toe in the Mediterranean, even though it was January and our fingers were numb under our gloves … She devoured a plate of spaghetti bolgnese even though she was supposed to be a vegetarian. While she drank water, I knocked back carafe of red wine and ordered another one …. it was warm inside Pollo. Everyone was smoking and shouting us the waiters thumped plates steaming pasta on the formica table. A young man with a blue mohican was stubbing his cigarette in the avocado that had arrive on a plate. it was stuffed with something pink’.

Al Stewart’s Soho (needless to say …)

Apropos the song quoted at the beginning of this memories, whenever I recall Soho in the sixties, I always think about my bedsitter days in London to the early seventies and also, British singer-songwriter and musician Al Stewart’s over-orchestrated debut album of 1967, Bedsitter Images. I knew Al Stewart’s London ‘ere I first knew London. I bought the album when I first saw him perform at the famous Jug o’ Punch folk club in Digbeth, Birmingham, run by The Ian Campbell Folk Group (I also saw a teenage Joni Mitchell play there – it was love at first sight, and I bought her first album there too, Songs from a Seagull). Al may have autographed his record – I can’t recall. It was stolen from my bedsit room in Reading in 1970 along with many of my favourite discs.

Maybe it’s about what here in Australia that, borrowing from our indigenous compatriots, we might call “spirit of place” – the association with the streets within a hop, skip and an amble from Old Compton Street out into Shaftsbury Avenue and that bookshop in Charing Cross Road, the opening verse of the second track Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres, and that flat in Swiss Cottage, a suburb I used to frequent in the seventies. Maybe it’s the seedy, needy, greedy vibe of the priapic songs on Al’s follow up albums. An old friend and Al Stewart fanboy called them aural masturbation. Although there were many “love chronicles”, the lengthy titles track of his second album, Al also wrote about melancholy middle aged suburban couples and historical events, with the odd foray into poetic mysticism. My flat mates and I were all fans of Al back then, and went to most of his gigs.

In the early seventies, when a girlfriend started going out with him, I actually got to know him for a brief while. Indeed, one time, when he played in Birmingham Town Hall, me and a couple of pals drove up to my old hometown to see him, and after the show, invited him back to my folks’ place for a late night fry up. My mom reckoned he need fattening up. And afterwards, she and Al sat in the kitchen for a couple of hours talking about pop music. “I love Cat Stevens”, mom said. “Oh, I much prefer the Incredible String Band”, said Al. “Oh, they’re very weird, but Paul like them!” She said. Then they got talking about Mick Jagger. And my dad, in the sitting room, said to us others gathered there, and referring to Al’s stature, said “there’s not much to him is there!”. Strange but nice how you recall these little things. The folks have both passed on …

My Bedsitter Image

Postscript – on another iconic café …

Rowda Ya Habibi

Cheap, cheerful and unchanging, with it garish turquoise neon sign and bold orange awning and signs advertising cushion rooms and belly dancing, Rowda Ya Habibi was a Newtown institution, and one of the first Lebanese restaurants in this cosmopolitan area.

It has been closed these past eighteen months – the pandemic finally closed the doors of this inner west icon, but driving down King Street recently and seeing its fading, sorrowful frontage brought back memories of our Newtown days.

Adèle and I had been coming here for for nigh on thirty five years. We’ve known Antoinette and Asaad Rowda, who ran the restaurant since 1978, and their family for much of that time, and the last time I was there, Antoinette introduced me to the tall handsome man I’d known as a toddler. Whenever I dropped by, we’d chat about Lebanon and Syria – they were Maronite Christians from the north of Lebanon – and I’d practice my Arabic.

I can’t count the number of takeaway felafel rolls we have eaten over the years, an instant and filling meal at a price that satisfied the appetites and wallets of tens of thousands of University of Sydney students, staff from the nearby Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and locals over the years. And it was the place to go with friends on a budget to enjoy delicious, homemade Lebanese tucker and clap and laugh along to the belly dancer who would sweep in on a Friday night in a flurry of scarves and scimitars and entertain us with her raqs arabiyya dragging unwilling and clumsy customers to their feet to join her in the dance.

And at the risk of upsetting Syrians, Lebanese and Israelis, I’d would declare the house hommus “al ahsin fi al’alim”, the best in all the world.

Rowda Ya Habibi, Newton, Sydney

For Krishna Sundari -friends always and forever

December 12, 2021September 16, 2022Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

In September 2021, our beautiful, talented, wise friend and soul sister Krishna Sundari departed our world.

I am remembering how we first met once upon a lifetime ago. She was Kathy Kellock in those days, and later reverted to her birth name, Kathy D’Amico – she was of American Italian heritage and the music was in her blood – her late father played a mean flugelhorn is a Sydney jazz band

It was in the fall of 1983 at Hornsby Folk Club in Sydney, Australia. This gorgeous, elfin flautist was doing a Jethro Tull riff to Red Gum’s Ned Kelly Song, Poor Ned you’re better off dead, with a couple of folkie lads in a band called Kurrajong. After their set, I went up to her and said “Hi, I’m Paul. Would you like to be in my band?” She said “I’ll give it a go”. And she did. The band was HuldreFolk.

Our group sundered, as is the way of most groups, but we never lost touch, and we’d rendezvous often down the years. There’d be many an impromptu recital along the way. All were special. One enchanted evening, I think it was 2013, we held a house concert in our home in Newtown, Sydney. The band was winding down. “Where’s Eric?” asked Adèle, And away they go, Dimitri, Dominic and Krishna Sundari, into Layla. Llew ran off, quickly returned, and hey! it’s bizouki Layla – and magic happened. Magic happened often whenever Krishna Sundari picked up her flute.

We’ve all traveled different roads since and have ended up in places we’d never imagined we’d be.

She changed her life and her religion, joining the Krishna faith, letting go of the material world and giving away everything she owned except the clothes she wore – and her flute (after all, Krishna himself was a flautist). She rarely played, but she’d take it out and played like in days of old, enchanting all who heard her.

On enchanted evening, we held a house party at our Newtown home back in about 2013. The band was winding down. “Where’s Eric?” asked Adèle. And in they go, Demitri, Dominic, and Krishna Sundari, into Layla. Llew ran off, returned and hey, bizouki Layla. And magic happened. magic happened often when Krishna Sundari picked up her flute.

Kathy D’Amico, Billy Williams and Wayne Jury jam at our home, December 2016,

Visiting her guru in India, she was at a dham in Kolkata when COVID19 struck, and unable to score a flight back to Australia, remained there for sixteen months. She called us regularly on WhatsApp to tell us that she was safe and happy, and how wonderful it was when during the lockdowns, Kolkata’s pollution disappeared, the skies were blues, and birdsong filled the air. It was only after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer that she was evacuated back to Australia via the Howard Springs Quarantine Camp in Darwin and her family. It was her karma that she passed away in Mullumbimby.

She faced her death with courage and equanimity, confident in her belief that this world is just one station on the way to a better one. Before she left India on a Qantas repatriation flight she joked that if she missed that plane and died, at least she would be cremated beside the Ganges.

At the end of our mutual journey, it’s like we’ve been close friends forever – and forever, we will always be.

At Sri Govinda Dham, Uki

Our deepest condolences to her daughters Sarah and Haley, her son Robert, and granddaughter Naomi, her former partner, Billy Williams and the devotees of the Sri Govinda Dham in Uki on the Tween River.

As my friend and Arabic teacher said when I told him of the loss of friends, Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un – إِنَّا لِلَّٰهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ‎ – We belong to God and to Him do we return

Kath played on my two record albums. Here she is in full flight.

Kathy jamming with the Hip Shooters in Mullumbimby

Exit West – a hejira of hope

December 5, 2021December 5, 2021Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
Somali poet Warsan Shire, Home

Outside my regular, earthy existence here on our acreage in the midst an Australian forest, where our days are largely dictated by the weather and the changes of the seasons, I have two extracurricular preoccupations. These are a lifelong passion for the Middle East – its history, it’s politics, its many faiths and cultures, and its people, supplemented and complemented by travel to those lands that are still safe and accessible for travellers; and working as a volunteer helping people who have come to our country town as refugees from war – and, increasingly of late, the displaced and damaged Yazidi Kurds from benighted Syria and Iraq. I’ve previously been written about this work in In That Howling Infinite: No Going Home – the refugee’s journey (1) and Hejira – the refugee’s journey (2).

And along comes a beautifully written story that speaks elegantly, poignantly, and yet, viscerally to the refugee experience. Mohsin Hamid writes: “… everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time”. Many of us are indeed temporal migrants, crossing the world to establish new lives far from home and “the fields that we know”, as Gandalf the Grey put it a long time ago in a land far, far away. And when we migrate, we leave former lives and loves behind. When Nadia promises her lover’s father that she will look after his only son, ”by making the promise he demanded she make, she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our loves those we leave behind”.

Like Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel of 1953, Mohsin Hamid’s novella Exit West is a fable and also, a parable. A tale of alternative futures that says much about ourselves, and sounds a warning about where we are headed. But unlike Bradbury’s incendiary scenarios, it also signposts paths that may lead to what may in dire circumstances be interpreted as happy endings.

Hamid also echoes the fantastical fancy of a “Time And Relative Dimension In Space” (yes, The Tardis!) storyline that once propelled Alice through the looking glass glass and the Pevensie children through their wardrobe, and the magical realism of our own times. It is a portal fantasy, straight out of speculative fiction and children’s literature, but the world on the far side is darker and more dangerous than either Wonderland or Narnia.

Like Bradbury’s, this is a book for the times. Then, it was the blinkered and poisonous groupthink that ensnared American politics, society and culture during the years of the McCarthy witch hunts (and indeed, anywhere past and present where straighteners endeavour to chain their compatriots with their own world view). Now, it is the unravelling of societies riven by politics, religion and war, a world in which millions of souls are cast adrift on the highways and the high seas.

Exit West begins, ironically for myself as an Australian and until quite recently a longtime resident of inner-city Newtown, in a terrace house in the neighbouring suburb of Surry Hills. An unidentified women is sleeping. A dark, disheveled stranger struggles out of the darkness of her closet door, crosses the bedroom and slips out of the window into the warm Sydney night.

Time and space shift – as they do over the next two hundred or so pages – and unexpected, strange, wonderful, frightening, dangerous things happen.

Arabian nights

Imagine a modern, cosmopolitan city in the Middle East, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, heterogenous, and relatively tolerant. People and their various communities get along with each other despite, in spite of, even, their differences. Secular and religious, rich and poor coexist in relative harmony. Alongside mosques and madrassas, there are cafes and coffee shops, colleges and campuses, banks and ATMs. There is the glitzy uptown with wide streets, hotels and department stores, and a picturesque and historic old town, the timeless jungle of suqs and alleyways, ancient mosques and churches, Ottoman and colonial-era mansions with their hidden courtyards now converted into boutique hotels, and the all-hours hustle and bustle, street sounds and smells. And beyond, the boulevards with their post-colonial apartment blocks, and outlying, sprawling slums and shanty towns that attract the dispossessed and destitute from the countryside, and the refugee camps that over time have become suburbs housing refugees from drought and financial misfortune and from wars past and present. It could be Damascus or Aleppo before the war, Baghdad or Mosul, Beirut or Istanbul.

There are the rich folks and there the poor folks, and in between, the relatively comfortable middle classes cleaving to their religious and political affiliations, and yet, getting along with each other, and striving to be part of the globalized world. Many are educated, some are affluent, multitudes struggle. But there is power and water, and in our wired age, good mobile and internet service and social media. People are able to communicate and connect with each other and with the wider world.

It is a time of turmoil and social and political unrest and the city is swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war. A young man meets a young woman in a classroom, but doesn’t speak to her.

“It might seem odd” writes Hadid, “that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class … but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about on errands and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending dies not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it dies”.

Nadia and Saeed have met in an evening class “on corporate identity and product branding”. She wears a long black robe, he, a fashionable stubble rather than the required beard. When he follows he downstairs to ask her out, he is surprised to see her pick up a black motorcycle helmet. She rides around their city on a scruffy trail bike. Saeed is the only and late-life child of two educated parents whom he loves and respects. He lives with them in their flat in a once elegant part of the city. Nadia has broken with her religious, well-meaning family and lives alone in a rickety flat at the top of a house. Her dress, Saeed learns, is to protect her from men. They meet in coffee shops and a Chinese restaurant, and eventually, in Nadia’s tiny apartment. They play music on an old record player, smoke dope, eat magic mushrooms which Nadia has bought online, and fall in love.

In this urban landscape set in what could be the very recent past, the still unfolding present, or an impeding and dystopian future, things are falling apart and the centre is not holding. The distant drumbeats of civil strife get louder and closer. For all their weaponry and electronic sophistication, under the drone-crossed sky and in the invisible network of surveillance that radiated out from their phones, recording and capturing and logging everything…18, the forces of law and order are struggling to hold back the falling dark.

First there are “just some shootings and the occasional car bombing”. Then there are checkpoints, and soon the sky is full of helicopters as the army strikes at militants infiltrating the suburbs and attacking strategic locations. Law and order crumbles; there are power and internet outages; and a rush on food stores and banks. Battles rage. Buildings are bombed and shelled, and innocents are killed in the crossfire. The militants advance and inevitably, conquer, targeting those of other faiths and affiliations, and imposing their coded of conduct and costume.

In the pages that follow, ordinary chores and ordinary preoccupations of thoughts, feelings, emotions, fears and fantasies play out in uncertain, extraordinary and often magical circumstances.

As people adjust to the new reality of homelessness and danger, a new normalcy is created: “Refugees had occupied many of the open places in the city … some seemed to be trying to recreate the rhythms of a normal life, as though it was completely natural to be residing, a family of four under a sheet of plastic propped up by branches and a few chipped blocks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy”.

As the violence worsens, and lives are shattered, escape feels ever more urgent. War erodes the façade of Saeed’s building “as though it had accelerated time itself, a day’s toll outpacing that of a decade”. Nadia tapes up her windows against shattering glass. They hear of mysterious black doors appearing all over the city, all over the world. To walk through these doors is to escape into another part of the world and into a new life.

Led by a shadowy agent to a shattered dentist’s office and shown a door that once led to a supply cupboard, Saeed and Nadia go through the door, experience a passage of extreme stress and darkness “both like dying and like being born”, and miraculously arrive, exhausted, in a toilet block next to a beach club on Mykonos, Greece.

And thus, the narrative transforms into an antique story of lovers fleeing their homeland. From Mykonos the couple travel on several times, including through a startling vision of London in the near future …”The following evening helicopters filled the sky like birds startled by gunshot, or the blow of an axe at the base of their tree.”

Slipping Away

But it is not just the abandoned and forsaked of Nadia and Saeed’s once cosmopolitan city that are falling apart.

“Rumours had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country … Most people thought these rumours to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless”.

“The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders, nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. Many were arguing that smaller units made sense but others argued that smaller units could not defend themselves”.

Imagine then a world where the affluent, peaceful, economically and technologically advanced countries of Europe and North America, the so-called “north”, become a magnet to people who yearn to escape the poverty and violence, drought and famine, oppression and dispossession of the overpopulated “South”. Millions are on the move by land and by sea, and from the Rio Grand and the Sonora Desert to the Sahel and the Sinai, to the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, they are spilling over the borders, staggering across deserts, and washing up on the shores of the lands of milk and honey.

As Nadia and Saeed stagger into the Mykonos sunlight, elsewhere people are emerging in the same dazed way from garden sheds and bedroom closets all over the world. And the couple’s journey is punctuated with disconnected moments happening elsewhere on earth. “All over the world people were slipping away from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields,

But those who are slipping away are not trekking across deserts or taking perilous journeys on a lethally overcrowded dinghies across the Mediterranean or Walking the dusty, thirsty highways of the Balkans. They just step through a door. For those who are slipping away, there are no life-or-death journeys in the backs of lorries, trecks across rivers and desert, or perilous crossings on flimsy, overcrowded dinghies; No harrowing middle passages – just a swift, jarring stepping through a dark doorway, and the cognitive shock of having been freshly transplanted to tough new terrains.

Whilst the story highlights the triggers that impel or more often compel people to flee their homelands, it focuses more on the psychological consequences of dislocation – and then in a superficial romantic fashion – boy meets girl, boys runs away with girl, boy loses girl. It neglects the reality of the trials and vicissitudes of dislocation. As described in No Going Home:

What if you had to leave behind everything that you hold dear. Your identity, culture, language, faith. You job, your school. Your loved ones, your friends, and your play-mates.
What if you have to sleep with your shoes on so you are ready to run if your enemies are approaching your village? And then you have to flee your home and climb the mountain to escape, helping your youngsters and old folk up the rocky slopes in the summer heat, and there is nothing to eat or drink, and nothing you can do except wait for capture or rescue.
What would YOU do if you had but a short while to gather a few things together and run, leaving your whole life behind? What would you try and take with you?
Then you wash up, literally and figuratively, on foreign shores – in border refugee camps, dusty border towns or urban slums. And there you stay, with other tens, hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands in like dire straits.

Hejiras of Hope

For all the confusion, dislocation, disappointment, there is hopefulness. In one of the parallel but alternative universes a suicidal man chooses life. In another, two old men – one Dutch, one Brazilian – exchange a kiss. Most of all there is prayer – prayer for the loss that “unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry”. Being human is the solitary commonality.

But as with most things in life, there is a reckoning. If you escape from your homeland with your romantic partner, through a door or otherwise, things get pretty intense pretty fast, and amidst countervailing currents and crosswinds, relationships slowly, sadly, and realistically unravel. Not only do emigres and refugees slip away form their former lives, they slip away from other people, people they had in some cases loved – “as Nadia was slipping away from Saeed, and Saeed from Nadia”.

For in this life and in the next, there are promise made and promises broken. Bonds forged and then loosened and broken – “eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime”.

“She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not. But then around he she saw all these people of all these different colours in all their different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed, and a new time was here …”

And in a world that is constantly changing, revolving evolving, sometimes it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

The following is a survey of the statistics of the world refugee crisis, published in In That Howling Infinite in June 2019 as an epilogue to No Going Home, and after that are tow reviews of Exit West

The Melancholy Mathematics of the World Refugee Crisis

Like death and taxes, the poor and racism, refugees have always been with us. But never in modern times – since the Second World War – have they been so many!

There are over sixty nine million people around the world on the move today – that have been forcibly displaced from their homes – fleeing from persecution or conflict.

This doesn’t count economic migrants who have hit the roads of sub Saharan Africa and Central America fleeing drought and crop failure, economic recession and unemployment, poverty, gangs and cartels, seeking a better life for themselves and the families in Europe or the USA.

Three quarters of a million ‘economic migrants’ are on the move in Central America, whilst the UN estimates that at least four million people have left Venezuela because of its political and economic crisis in what has been described as the biggest refuge crisis ever seen in the Americas. There are refugee camps on the Colombian border. Most are in Columbia but others have entered Brazil and Peru. But these are not by legal definition refugees – see below, The Refugees’ Journey .

Of those sixty nine million people over 11 million or 16% are Syrians. The numbers keep growing Thirty one people at being displaced every minute of the day. In 2018 alone, 16.2 million people were newly displaced.

Forty million people have been internally displaced within their own countries – this includes six million Syrians and off our radars, some two million souls who once lived in the contested regions of eastern Ukraine.

Over 25 million are refugees in neighbouring countries and further afield. 25% of them are in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and Uganda. Some 57% of them come from three countries: Syria, 6.3 million, Afghanistan 2.6 million and South Sudan 2.4 million. The top hosting counties are Turkey 3.5 million, Lebanon, 1 million, Pakistan 1.4 million, Uganda 1.4 million and Iran 1 million.

Jordan shelters over three quarters of a million Syrians; during the Iraq wars, this relatively poor country sheltered a similar number of Iraqis, and still hosts tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who’ve fled persecution at home.

These figures are of those registered by the UNHCR. The real numbers are much higher. The Lebanese government estimates that there are more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees in the country.

Much of the focus these days is on the Middle East – Syria and its neighbours, on Libya and the frail boats crossing the Mediterranean, on the war in Yemen which has killed over thirteen thousand and displaced over two million.

But situation in Africa is as dire.

More than 2 million Somalis are currently displaced by a conflict that has lasted over two decades. An estimated 1.5 million people are internally displaced in Somalia and nearly 900,000 are refugees in the near region, including some 308,700 in Kenya, 255,600 in Yemen and 246,700 in Ethiopia.

By August 2018, the Democratic Republic of the Congo hosted more than 536,000 refugees from Burundi, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. And yet, there are over 4.5 million Congolese people displaced inside their own country and over 826,000 in neighbouring countries, including Namibia, Angola and Kenya.

Should the present situation in Sudan deteriorate into civil war, another tide of humanity will hit the road.

And closer to home, there are millions of refugees in Asia.

As of March 2019, there are over 100, 000 refugees in 9 refugee camps in Thailand (as of March 2019), mainly ethnic Karen and Shan. Refugees in Thailand have been fleeing ethnic conflict and crossing Myanmar’s eastern border jungles for the safety of Thailand for nearly 30 years.

There were an estimated 1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar before the 2016–17 crisis, and since August 2017, an estimated 625,000 refugees from Rakhine, had crossed the border into Bangladesh.

The top-level numbers are stupendous. The detail is scary.

Some 52% of the world’s refugees and displaced are children. And many are unaccompanied. Every hour, around 20 children run for their lives without their parents to protect them.

Children are the most vulnerable to disease and malnutrition and also to exploitation and lose years of schooling. Millions are elderly and are also face health problems.

And the problems facing young people and adults are all enormous. International aid is limited and host countries often unsympathetic. Work opportunities are few, some countries even forbidding refugees to take work, whilst unscrupulous employers exploit the desperate. Migrants are often encouraged, sometimes forcibly, to return to their countries of origin regardless of whether or not it is safe for them to return. There are reports that many have returned to Syria into the unwelcoming hands of the security services.

Refugees have lived in camps and towns in Pakistan and Thailand, Namibia and Kenyan for decades. Most refugee children were not born in their parents’ homelands.

And the camps are by no means safe havens. There may be no shelter or only basic shelter in tents; no privacy; a lack of clean water; meagre food; limited medical care; and the threat of injury, disease and epidemics. They may be poor physical security and armed attacks, and abuse by the authorities and officials. There may be organized crime, shakedowns and extortion, corruption and bribery.

Families may have become separated, exposing women and children without the protection of male family members to more fear and violence. Women are subsequently vulnerable to harsh conditions, including potential sexual and physical and abuse, poor healthcare, and unequal access to food and water. They may be coping with the loss of the head of the family and with the changing roles and responsibilities that come from being the sole parent. They may not know if their male family members will return to them safely and they must deal with the stress and anxiety, the grief and loss arising from their recent experiences. They might be fearful of the future, which in a camp is unknown and unpredictable.

This Syrian mother and her child were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard.

Magical Vision of the refugee crisis

Sukhdev Sandhu, The Observer , 12 March 2017

Exit West, a novel about migration and mutation, full of wormholes and rips in reality, begins as it mostly doesn’t go on. A man and a woman meet at an evening class on corporate identity and product branding. Saeed is down-to-earth, the son of a university professor, and works at an ad agency. Nadia, who wears a full black robe and is employed by an insurance company, lives alone, rides a motorbike, enjoys vinyl and psychedelic mushrooms. She doesn’t pray. We think we know what will happen next: a boy-girl love story, opposites attracting, secular individuals struggling with the shackles of a theological state.

Now, though, this unnamed city is filling with refugees. Militants are creating unrest. The old world was neither paradise nor hell – one of its parks tolerates “early morning junkies and gay lovers who had departed their houses with more time than they needed for the errands they had said they were heading out to accomplish” – but its terrors are driving out those with ambition and connections. Saeed and Nadia embark on a journey that, like the dream logic of a medieval odyssey, takes them to Mykonos, London, San Francisco.

Hamid, intentionally for the most part, doesn’t exert as tight a narrative grip as he did in previous novels such as The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Exit West shifts between forms, wriggles free of the straitjackets of social realism and eyewitness reportage, and evokes contemporary refugeedom as a narrative hybrid: at once a fable about deterritorialisation, a newsreel about civil society that echoes two films – Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here and Peter Watkins’s The War Game – and a speculative fiction that fashions new maps of hell.

All the same, the novel is often strongest in its documentation of life during wartime, as Hamid catalogues the casual devastation of a truck bomb, the sexual molestation that takes place as hundreds of city dwellers throng to take their life savings from a bank, and the supernatural elation of taking a warm shower after weeks on the road. This is annexed to elements of magical realism and even The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe-style children’s storytelling. A normal door, Saeed and Nadia’s colleagues start to discuss, “could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all”.

Characters move through time and space like abrupt jump-cuts or skipping compact discs. There are no descriptions of life-or-death journeys in the backs of lorries or on flimsy dinghies. No middle passages. Just the cognitive shock of having been freshly transplanted to tough new terrains. Hamid is deft at evoking the almost contradictory nature of Nadia and Saeed’s digital life (their phones are “antennas that sniffed out an invisible world” and transported them “to places distant and near”), whose broadband freedoms contrast with the roadblocks, barbed wire and camps they face in what passes for reality.

Exit West is animated – confused, some may think – by this constant motion between genre, between psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future. It’s a motion that mirrors that of a planet where millions are trying to slip away “from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields”.

The skies in Hamid’s novel are as likely to be populated by helicopters, drones and bombs as they are by dreams and twinkling stars. Yet his vision is ultimately more hopeful than not. In one of the book’s parallel but alternative universes a suicidal man chooses life. In another, two old men – one Dutch, one Brazilian – exchange a kiss. Most of all there is prayer – prayer for the loss that “unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry”.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

Exit West – necessary, timely, wise, and beautiful

American writer Richard Hoffman, judging the web ‘zine The Morning News’ Tournament of Books 2018, declared: “… Exit West is a full-fledged masterpiece; it’s necessary, timely, wise, and beautiful”.

Saeed and Nadia meet in a business class and begin dating just as war starts encroaching on their city:

“The following evening helicopters filled the sky like birds startled by a gunshot, or by the blow of an axe at the base of their tree. They rose, singly and in pairs, and fanned out above the city in the reddening dusk, as the sun slipped below the horizon, and the whir of their rotors echoed through windows and down alleys, seemingly compressing the air beneath them, as though each were mounted atop an invisible column, an invisible breathable cylinder, these odd, hawkish, mobile sculptures, some thin, with tandem canopies, pilot and gunner at different heights, and some fat, full of personnel, chopping, chopping through the heavens’.

The story is told in a lofty, mythical, religious tone. Sentences spool out like scripture. For the most part, I found this style beautiful. Occasionally, it would become too much, and I wished the story was more simply told. But that would only happen rarely, and the beautiful far outweighed the florid.

As things worsen in their city, the couple starts hearing rumors about the existence of doors that will magically lead them to a different place. I’d heard about this element of Exit West, and as that part of the story drew closer I found myself resisting the idea. I don’t know why that was. (Magical realism prudishness?) Whatever the case, I was dragging my feet. When it did finally occur, when they found a door, my stomach knotted up the way it does when your therapist or partner points out a flaw in your character. That knotted-up feeling was short-lived. The doors are a beautiful device. They make the reader feel—more clearly than straight realism ever could—precisely what refugees want. They want a door to take them from whatever frightening place they’re in, to a place that is safe. By skipping the realism we see it for what it is. The trick is high art.

There is a blurb on the back of the book that calls it “extraordinarily clever.” That is a gross understatement. Better than clever, the book is wise. Not only does it track Nadia and Saeed as they move through these doors, traveling first to a small island in Greece, then to London, then to Marin County, but it also tracks their relationship as it slowly, sadly, and realistically begins to unravel. There is no melodrama in this part of the story. When the two lovers lie in bed without touching, it feels as if they are true flesh-and-blood characters.

In the end, Exit West did that thing that only great literature can do: It made me feel more fully for humans writ large.

Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey

September 16, 2021September 17, 2023Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

Photographs of guns and flame
Scarlet skull and distant game
Bayonet and jungle grin
Nightmares dreamed by bleeding men
Lookouts tremble on the shore
But no man can find the war
Tim Buckley 1976

Marines, Operation Starlite

Tim Page had already been two years “in country” when as an undergraduate I’d participated in the violent melees in front of the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square protesting what Kenny Rodgers would call “that crazy Asian war”. Our undergraduate passions were inflamed by the fear that our government would answer US President Lyndon B Johnson’s call to join him and his forces in Vietnam – our Antipodean kin in Australia and New Zealand has already committed troops, and Johnson was applying the economic screws. But Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson held firm and Britain avoided the débacle that has haunted the US for half a century.

This is the story of a war, and a young man who wandered into that war.

Chaos without a compass

A ship is waiting for us at the dock
America has trouble to be stopped
We must stop Communism in that land
Or freedom will start slipping through our hands.
I hope and pray someday the world will learn
That fires we don’t put out, will bigger burn
We must save freedom now, at any cost
Or someday, our own freedom will be lost.
Johnny Wright, Hello Vietnam

The Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War” was waged in South East Asia initially by the colonialist France, and then by neo-imperialist America. France’s war ended in defeat and ignominy for French arms and prestige, and a partition that was but a prelude to America’s Vietnam quagmire.

in his masterful documentary, The Vietnam War, acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns narrator intoned: “America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended, thirty years later, in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by five American Presidents, belonging to both political parties”.

America’s War has since been defined as chaos without compass. It was inevitable that acclaimed historian Barbara Tuchman would chose it as one of her vignettes in The March of Folly, her celebrated study of débacles through the ages characterised by what would appear to be a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity.

As Tuchman saw it, exceptionalism and manifest destiny are historically proven folly. Self-belief in American power and righteousness has historically created delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, stubbornness, and an inability to learn from past mistakes or even admitting error – a wooden-headedness that often sees the US persisting on erroneous paths that lead to loss of blood, treasure, reputation and moral standing.

Why did the US’ experience of backing the wrong horse in China in the forties not provide an analogy and warning in Vietnam in the fifties? Why did the experience in Vietnam not inform the it with respect to Iran right up to the fall of the Shah in 1978? And why hadn’t it learned anything when it stumbled into Salvador in the eighties? And then, of course, we arrive in the 21st century with no-exit, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Middle East that end in retreat and betrayal with the ‘freedom-loving’ USA still backing the wrong horses by supporting autocrats and tyrants against their own people.

But, back to Vietnam …

As historian Per Yule noted in The Long Shadow: Australia’s Vietnam Veterans Since The War, the Vietnam War was based on an assortment of unproven assumptions and half truths. It wrongly identified a dictatorship as a democracy a civil war as an international conflict. Our armed forces were sent to fight in support of a corrupt military regime which received solid support only from the catholic minority and the small landowning class. Few willingly fought for the regime.

Many in the US military reckoned that if given a free hand by the administration of President Johnson, they could have prevailed against North Vietnam – by destroying it utterly with overwhelming firepower. But the US had backed the wrong side and no amount of support could make the South Vietnamese fight and die hard enough for their corrupt, incompetent, puppet government. We hear a similar rationale with regard to the the Afghan army’s rapid collapse and the US’ shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan

The US wanted to convince the North Vietnamese that they couldn’t win on the battlefield. The North Vietnamese wanted to convince the American people that the cost in blood and treasure was too high. Both sides continued to believe that they could improve their positions through escalation and both continued to focus on military rather than political means to end the conflict. And so we were left with an almost certainly unwinnable strategy of bombing the enemy to the negotiating table when that enemy shows no willingness to negotiate under duress. The bombing campaign, code name Rolling Thunder, was described by a commentator in Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War as “the dumbest campaign ever designed by a human being”.

The many names for a war lost before it began

All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I’ll lead on.
We’re waist deep in the big muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Pete Seeger, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Vietnam has been called the pointless war and the needless war. It was certainly a costly war. The butchers bill was horrendous. No one really knows how many people perished. Civilian deaths range from 1.3 to 4.5 million.of which over 80% were Vietnamese and 7% Cambodian. American soldiers dead numbered 58,220 and wounded,153,303. The number of Vietnamese and Cambodian wounded is inestimable.

As for the American forces, it most certainly “the poor man’s war” – most who were perished or were maimed were not rich folks, and a disproportionate number were black. Amd the more who died, the more were sent to replace them. And like here in Australia, thecdraft caught mainly the poor and unconnected. Even as soldiers started going home, actual or attempted murder by enlisted men of their superiors increased alarmingly.

As to the monetary cost: an estimated $1 trillion in today’s dollars. But that is doubtlessly an understatement – what about the rebuilding, the rehabilitation, the recompense? Vietnam was the most heavily bombed country in history. More than 6.1 million tons of bombs were dropped, compared to 2.1 million tons in WW2. U.S. planes dumped 20 million gallons of herbicides to defoliate VietCong hiding places. It decimated 5 million acres of frostbite and 500,000 acres of farmland.

It has been called “the helicopter war” because choppers were the primary mode of ground combat and transport, and also “the television war – it’s triumphs (few) and tragedies (many) were beamed Into American homes nightly, fuelling the public’s confusion and unease about this Asian war, and eventually, the anger that forced the US government to eventually withdraw over half a million soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors and abandoning South Vietnam’s puppet government, its demoralised and abandoned army, and its unfortunate, battered and bloodied people to the tender mercies of the hardline and heartless ideologues in Hanoi.

Vietnam was also, notoriously, a pharmaceutical war. In its final year’s, as raw and reluctant draftees made up an increasing proportion of the US forces, indiscipline and substance abuse transformed, in the words of one professional soldier, an officer, a fine army into a rotten one. Alcohol, marijuana, acid, coke, heroin, and a cornucopia of pills were freely available on base, on leave in Saigon, and often, in the field, and many soldiers actually made it a business. The press too were sucked into the machinery.

And, it was a promiscuous war. So far away from home and loved ones, like warriors in all wars since time immoral, US solders took comfort and solace where they could find it. Historians, memoirists, veterans of both the French and American wars in Indochina write and talk of the beauty of the Vietnamese women. Economic deprivation and social dislocation create a flesh market supplying lonely, frightened strangers in a strange land.

It was chemical warfare – not the mustard gas of older wars, and the Zyklon B of the Nazi death camps, nor the recent wars in the Middle East, in the first Gulf War, between Iraq and Iran, and in Syria – but the broad-acre use of chemical defoliants designed to deny the enemy of jungle and forest concealment that left behind a bitter harvest, a legacy of disease, deformity and death that ricochets to this day.

And, in the United States, it was a war that divided a nation. The protest movement emerged during 1965. It grew and grew, and by the Moratorium of October 1969, it became the largest outpouring of public dissent in American history. The moratorium movement was massive and unprecedented – and peaceful. Nationwide, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people across the US were marching. The children of politicians and officials and soldiers were also marching. They were marching not about winning or losing the war but demanding an end to the war.

It was a journalists war too, and the photographers’ War. The military had a relaxed and tolerant attitude towards the press that would seem profligate and foolhardy in today’s tightly managed and manipulated combat media. Journalists and photographers would be permitted and indeed invited along on patrols and sweeps, carrier landings, on helicopter “dust offs” (a euphemism for evacuating the wounded and the dead), and the controversial “search and destroy” operations that destroyed so many fields, villages and lives. Needless to say, the coopted fourth estate were often in harm’s way. They were taught how to use weapons and often actually did use them in self defence and, sometimes in anger. And like the officers and men with whom they worked, many were wounded and slain. More than two hundred would die covering the fighting in South East Asia.

And English photojournalist Tim Page, who ran away from boring ‘sixties Britain to the exotic East at the age of seventeen, taking the ‘overland’ route that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’, washed up in the war of our generation, and left it critically injured and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper.

Tim in a tight spot

Cameras and Comrades

There is no decent place to stand in a massacre
But if some women takes you’re hand
You go and stand with her.
I left a wife in Tennessee and a baby in Saigon
I risked my life but not to hear
A country-western song
Leonard Cohen, The Captain

Tim Page literally and figuratively ambled into the last of the “great” wars of the Twentieth Century; and reading Tim’s autobiography, you wonder whether this peregrinating, ever-restless bloke had more lives than a cat!

Page ran off to join the circus. Leaving England in 1962, it was to be twenty years until he saw his folks again. A restless soul, he split for Europe with his girl friend, and when she baled, headed ever-eastwards, an early pioneer of that famed trail in a succession of secondhand vehicles and a caravan of colourful comrades. The further east he wandered, the more drugs he savoured, sampling the local toke through Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Burma. Many a time, he was flat broke and broken down, and laid low with a variety of exotic, intimate and excruciating ailments. But we needn’t go there.

Though photography was a teenage hobby, he drifted into the profession almost by accident, and virtually ambled into the Vietnam War, the Great War of our generation – a road -trip to Vientiane, the sleepy capital of the Kingdom of Laos to renew his expired Thai visa saw him hanging out there just as the the US’ fateful foray into Indochina was escalating into the quagmire that it was to become.

For Tim, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times. “Hot and cold running …” he says, using the vernacular of those days … booze, drugs, girls, he meant – battle injuries and diseases – and action, lots of it, in the air in helicopters and on occasion, fighter bombers, on the land in jeeps, armoured vehicles, and motor bikes, on the rivers in patrol boats, and on foot.

The lure of sex, drugs, and excitement – and paid work for a major news agency saw him wash up in Saigon and the celebrated, inebriated Frankie’s House, a kind of home-away-from home and party house for transiting bao chi – ‘round-eye’ newsmen – a decadent, dissolute, de facto foreign correspondents club. From here, they would fan out though war-wracked South Vietnam under the often dodgy and dangerous protection of Uncle Sam. In the 1992 series of Frankie’s House, based on Tim’s Vietnam days, he was portrayed by the Scottish actor Iain Glen, famous nowadays for his role as Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones.

Iain Glen on the left as Tim Page in Frankie’s House

Like the soldiers they accompanied, many came back in body bags or on stretchers. Many just disappeared @and it has been Tim’s mission in life to trace these lost souls. They include his best buddy Sean Flynn, the son of famous actor and pants man Errol Flynn.

Tim’s number almost came up in a blood-soaked friendly fire debacle on a navy river boat. Patched up and R&R in the US, he photographed the burgeoning antiwar demonstrations wracking the nation and ‘fesses up in his chronicle that he didn’t quite get the rage of the protesters – to Tim and his Saigon peers, the war might’ve been hell, but it was also a helluva buzz, and he was itching to return to the maelstrom.

But his intoxicating and intoxicated Nam days came to an explosive end in a dry paddy field when he and his helicopter crew landed to help an injured GI and walked into a minefield. Dead on arrival and resuscitated three times, he was medivacced stateside minus part of his skull and with injuries that hamper him still half a century later. Photographs of that almost fatal encounter turned up out of the blue just a few years ago.

Post-op and recuperating in the US, Tim took himself off to Woodstock, New York State. where it was being said that there was going be a cool scene – which indeed there was, as we all remember: the famous music festival held over three days in August 1969 on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. But Tim never got to hear any of the great music – complications from his injuries meant that he had to be medivacced out of Woodstock, probably on the same chopper that had just brought in the legendary Crosby, Stills and Nash.

And today he is still alive and kicking, despite multiple surgeries, PTSD, and suicidal impulses, and is still shooting pictures, revisiting Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and also Afghanistan (he was appointed the UN Peace Ambassador that unfortunate country) where his photos have recorded for posterity, real-time real-time stories of reconstruction, recovery and resilience in these battlefields of old. One of his last “hot war” missions was to report in pictures on the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession. In Bosnia, he “souvenired” a Toyota utility truck with big UN letters on its flanks that eventually ended up on a property in Bellingen.

He is in demand at photographic exhibitions and symposiums news world wide, and continues to hang with those of his bao chi who have also survived the journey. Tim is now a neighbour of ours, over the hill, across the forest, four thousand miles and a lifetime away from his Asian war

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
Jim Morrison 1967

A Vietnamese woman grieves for her dead husband

Author’s note

Internationally acclaimed photographer Tim Page has been the subject of many documentaries, two films and the author of ten books, including his latest opus Nam Contact. He has been recognized as one of the ‘100 Most Influential Photographers of All Time’ and is the recipient of many awards. After a career spanning sixty years, world renowned photographer Tim Page has settled quietly into the Bellingen Shire, where he and his wife Marianne live what Tim describes as “a peaceful life. The choice of the word Peaceful’ is pertinent considering that his photographic assignments during the of the Laos Civil War, the Vietnam War and the Six Day War in the Middle East in 1967 brought him directly into the firing line. He still carries the injuries to prove it.

This piece was originally conceived as a forward for an autobiography of Tim, now a friend and near neighbour on the edge of Bellingen’s Tarkeeth Forest. It was but a fallback option – I’d suggested to Tim and his Marianne that the book would be better served with a forward by either Paul Ham or Peter Fitzsimmons, Australian historians who have written about the Vietnam War. It eventuated that the book was not published – but the story grew with the telling, informed by a re-watching of Ken Burns’ excellent documentary The Vietnam War and historian Max Hasting’s masterful tombstone of a book Vietnam., an epic tragedy 1945-1975

The photographs featured in the post are but a few from Tim’s large archive. They are used with his kind permission ©Tim Page. These and many more can be viewed on his website timpage.com.au and in Nam Contact .

In Country

Postscript: Journey’s end – Tim Page’s wild ride

At 4.15pm on Wednesday 24th August 2022, after a relatively short illness, our friend and neighbour Tim Page, photographer, writer and humanist, passed away peacefully at his bush home in Fernmount, Bellingen Shire, on the mid north coast of NSW. e: Journey’s end – photographer Tim Page’s wild ride

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow
Bob Dylan

Friends of acclaimed Anglo-Australian photographer, writer and humanist Tim Page, gathered from all across the shire, from the mountains to the sea, and from around Australia on Saturday 10th September to bid him farewell at his bush home in Fernmount next to Tarkeeth Forest to bid him farewell. Bellingen’s resident square-tailed kite did a fly past as if to salute him, and as we sat around the campfire under a full moon, a bevy of fireflies emerged from the forest like faeries coming for to carry him home.

Tim had departed this mortal realm at 4.15pm on Wednesday 24th August 2022, after a relatively short illness. He been sleeping most of the time during those last few days when we dropped by on our way over the hill. We knew it was very close as we’d visited several times, and almost at the exact time of his passing, we’re were actually driving by but decided not to disturb him.

The international and social media response to Tim’s death was astounding and almost instantaneous. Within hours, tributes had been published and posted all over the world. The New York Times published an excellent eulogy, as did the Sydney Morning Herald. The Guardian presented an excellent gallery of his work. An interview by the ABC with Ben Bohane, photojournalist and author and longtime friend and mentee, is both poignant and precise. We had the pleasure of meeting Ben when he visited Bellingen and spent several days with Tim immediately before his death.

He was given a fine send-off. As one mourner noted in a Facebook tribute, “It was a long, melancholic, yet kind of wonderful weekend … the kind of gathering he’d have loved, crammed with people he cared about, the Stones and Dylan rolling out over the Birds of Paradise grove in the gully, a grassy aroma in the air, and tales of his misdemeanors, wisdom and humanity prompting chuckles and affirmations as a light breeze loosened leaves and sent them down in lazy spirals onto his wicker casket …”

Fine eulogies were delivered by Tim’s “brothers” in photo-journalism who’d worked with him over all over the world and down the years. There were tales of battlefields and bar-rooms, of recovery and resilience, of road trips and revelries, of incidents and accidents.

Tim Page 1944-2022

I spoke too, as a friend and a forest neighbour, and also, as a resident of Bellingen Shire. We’d had the privilege and pleasure of sitting with Tim for many an hour during the three months of his decline. We talked of was and when, of our childhoods in Nineteen Fifties England, of life in our valley, of history and politics and of his long and colourful career – and we were able to say goodbye to him in person four days before the end.

This is what I said …

Journey’s End

Living just over the hill, and forever dropping in here at paradise park, Adèle and I spent many an hours sharing stories and gossip with Tim and his partner Marianne and her sister Annette, who we farewelled right here just over a year ago. We all shared a common English heritage, having all grown up in postwar Britain with its rationing, blandness and monochrome conformity – in the midst of the Cold War and under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

During the three months of his decline, Tim and I would reminisce about our common boyhoods in nineteen fifties England before we both split for foreign parts.

We were into bicycles with drop handlebars and comics like The Beano and illustrated stories about “the war” – which was still a lived experience for the adults around us whilst the sons and brothers of our friends and acquaintances were called up for national service. We’d built the same Airfix aeroplane kits and hung our trophies from our bedroom ceilings – Tim’s are now hanging in his archive bunker over yonder. I believe he still has his Hornby train set and, no doubt, his Meccano – folks here of a certain vintage will know what I mean. He was and remained a great collector of stuff. He even picked up a UN Toyota “technical” utility truck in Bosnia and brought it back here. [Author’s note: he eventually gave the truck to a friend up the valley and it saw service as a water carrier during the devastating wildfires of our 2019-20 Black Summer]

In the sixties, we’d listened to the same music, and used some of the same drugs – me, much less than he. We both took to the Hippie Trail from Europe to Asia taking the ‘overland’ road that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’.

But Tim had already been two years “in country” when I was demonstrating in front of the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square against what Kenny Rodgers would call “that crazy Asian war”.

Tim virtually ambled into the Vietnam War, the last of the “great” wars of the Twentieth Century, and though photography was a teenage hobby, in Vietnam, he drifted into the profession almost by accident. The war was a conflict with many names, but the best is probably one from Ken Burns great documentary: “chaos without a compass”. Tim navigated it cannily if carelessly for several but left ‘Nam a few years later critically injured in a minefield and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper. Post-op and recuperating in the US, Tim took himself off to Woodstock, New York State. where it was being said that there was going be a cool scene – which indeed there was, as we all remember: the famous music festival held over three days in August 1969 on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. But Tim never got to hear any of the great music – complications from his injuries meant that he had to be medivacced out of Woodstock, probably on the same chopper that had just brought in the legendary Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Tim told us the clear-felled Tarkeeth Forest to our immediate south, just beyond those trees, reminded him of those Vietnam battlegrounds – indeed, the use of fires and herbicides in Forestry Corporation’s “forest re-establishment” reminded him of the devastation wrought by the defoliant Agent Orange in that unfortunate country. Ironically, Agent Orange may have contributed to his illness. He was unable to have MRI scans because of the shrapnel fragments in his liver from one of his many close encounters with the Grim Reaper.

Listening to Tim’s stories, you wonder whether this peregrinating, ever-restless bloke had more lives than a cat! When he was first diagnosed in early May, as Adèle and sat on his hospital bed, I remarked that he’d already used up his nine lives. He replied: “No matter how many times you’ve faced the prospect of death, you’re never prepared for it”.

But, when the end came, he faced it with stoicism and courage. I hope that when we get there, we’ll all be as brave.

Farewell wild rover.

Your’s was a life well lived, and to borrow from Rudyard Kipling, filling the unforgiving minute of the unrelenting day with sixty seconds worth of distance run.

As Bob Dylan sang, “Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore – you may not see me tomorrow”.

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
Jim Morrison 1967

This painting by his friend Joanne Brooker portrays his long and eventful journey.

Tim Page by Joanne Brooker

Also in In That Howling Infinite: The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy ; and Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – 1968 revisited

Nam Contact: Symphonic coda to Tim Page’s Vietnam

Children of Abraham

March 23, 2019December 22, 2023Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

The ancient and holy city of Hebron – al Khalil to Muslims, and named, like Hebron for the Jewish and Islamic patriarch Abraham/Ibrahim – is rarely out of the news; and the news is never good. “There’s this thing that happens here, over the Hell Mouth”, says Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “where the way a thing feels – it kind of starts being that way for real. I’ve seen all these things before – just not all at once”.

In May 2016, we visited Hebron, a fault line of faiths and a front line of an old war still being waged for possession of the Holy Land. It is a hot spot, a flash-point, where tensions between Israelis and Palestinians are usually followed by calamity, and bad things happen. We’ve travelled right through the West Bank, and yet nowhere did we feel exposed to the danger of a sudden flare up of violence and being caught in an indiscriminate crossfire than here in the old heart of the city. It is the seemingly intractable conflict in the raw, a microcosm of the Occupation, and there is no denying the brutality of the place. Most western journalists and commentators give their readers an impression that Israel absolutely dominates this Palestinian city of some 200,000 souls. In reality, the area under military control, immediately surrounding the ancient Ibrahimi mosque, holy to two faiths, is very small. The city, with its high rise apartments, official buildings and shopping malls, looks down on this pressure cooker of a ghetto, where dwell some 700 settlers and thirty thousand Palestinians, segregated from each other by walls and wire, fear and loathing – and by two soldiers to every settler.

On our return, the e-magazine Muftah published the following article.

Children of Abraham and the Battle for Hebron

You who build these altars now to sacrifice these children, you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision and you never have been tempted by a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now, your hatchets blunt and bloody – you were not there before,
When I lay upon a mountain and my father’s hand was trembling with the beauty of the word.
Leonard Cohen, The Story of Isaac

I recently returned from Hebron in the occupied West Bank. The city is a fault line of faiths and a front line in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It is a “hot spot,” a flash-point, a place where tensions between Israelis and Palestinians are usually followed by calamity. Hebron has been a key focus of the tension and violence that has characterized the troubled relationship between Palestinians and Israelis. Since October 2015, over 200 Palestinians and thirty Israelis have been killed across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, in the latest flare-up in the decades-long conflict.

In March this year, an Israeli soldier was filmed shooting and killing a wounded twenty-one-year-old Palestinian, following a stabbing attack on Israeli soldiers. The soldier, just nineteen years of age, is now facing trial, amidst massive outcry on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.. In June, not long after we left Israel, a young Palestinian murdered a thirteen-year-old Israeli girl as she slept in nearby Kiryat Arba. Hours later, a Palestinian woman was shot dead by Israeli soldiers outside of the Ibrahimi Mosque. Later that afternoon, Palestinian gunmen ambushed an Israeli car on a road just south of Hebron, killing a father and wounding his family. Local Palestinians gave emergency first aid to the victims and shielded the children from any further attack.

A Holy Land

Hebron has long been sacred to Muslims and Jews as the last resting place of the prophets Abraham and Isaac – the founding father of Judaism, and the son he had resolved to sacrifice until God ordered him to stay his hand. In the first century BC, Herod the Great, famed builder and bad boy, raised a mighty mausoleum above the cave where Abraham was laid to rest. Abraham’s wife Rachel, and his son, Isaac, Isaac’s wife Rebecca, and Isaac’s sons Joseph and Jacob – whose wrestled with an Angel to represent man’s struggle with God – and Jacob’s wife Leah are also buried there.

As time went by, Christians and then Muslims revered Hebron as a holy place. Abraham was the founding father of both religions and his sons and grandsons, buried in the cave, are considered prophets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In time, a mosque was established on Herod’s edifice, and for a short while, during the hundred years of the Crusader kingdom, a basilica too. The well-known story of Isaac and Abraham, told so cryptically by Leonard Cohen is in a way a metaphor for Hebron itself. It is common to Christians, Jews and Muslims (Id al Adha is islam’s Feast of the Sacrifice) but the protagonists in the Qur’an are not Abraham or Isaac or Ishaak, but Ibrahim and Ishmael the son of Hagar, Abraham/Ibrahim’s servant) the genealogical forbears of Muslims. Two faiths, two narratives. [Cohen’s lyrics are reproduced at the end of this article together with my translation into Arabic]

In the thirteenth century, the Mamluk Sultan Baybars expelled the Christians from Hebron. A small community of Jews continued to reside in the town of Hebron, however. In 1929, amidst rising religious and nationalist tension in the British Mandate of Palestine, some seventy Jewish men, women, and children were killed by Palestinians who had been incited to violence by rumours that Jews planned to overrun the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam. Many local Palestinians also helped save Jewish neighbors from the bloodshed. Following the riots, Hebron’s Jewish community largely ceased to exist, until the an-Naksa, or ‘setback’, of 1967, when Israeli military forces occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.

In the early days of the occupation, Israeli authorities did not encourage Jews to return to Hebron. One of the first illegal Israeli settlements was established outside Hebron in what is now Kiryat Arba, and thereafter, a small settlement was built around the Mosque of Ibrahim. Beginning in 1979, some Jewish settlers moved from Kiryat Arba to the former Jewish neighborhood near the Abraham Avinu Synagogue which had been destroyed in 1929. Other Jewish enclaves were established with the Israeli army’s support and more homes were subsequently purchased or forcibly taken over from their Palestinian owners.

With the establishment of a Jewish presence in and around Hebron, the religious right-wing demanded that Jews be permitted to pray at the tombs of the patriarchs, and the 700 years old restriction on Jews praying here was lifted. Muslims and Jews were now obliged to share the holy place, although it was formally administered by the Muslim Waqf. Thus, even prayer became a focus of conflict and tension, and sometimes, violence, particularly during each faith’s holy days.

Tensions and Divisions

Since 1979, tensions have continued to increase between the small community of Israeli settlers living in Hebron (several hundred) and the tens of thousands of Palestinians whose lives have been turned upside down by their presence. These tensions reach boiling point in February 1994, when US-born Israeli doctor Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslims worshippers during the dawn prayer at the Ibrahimi Mosque. He killed twenty-nine people and wounded another 125 before he was overcome and killed by survivors. Hundreds more Palestinians were killed or injured in the Israeli military’s response to the ensuing violence.

Goldstein had been inspired by a boyhood mentor, the ultranationalist New York Rabbi Meir Kahane, and had belonged Kahane’s militant Jewish Defence League, founded ostensibly to protect Jews from antisemitism, but implicated in numerous acts of violence in the USA and elsewhere. On emigrating to Israel, he joined Kahane’s right-wing Kach Party.

The Israeli government condemned the massacre and responded by arresting Kahane’s followers, and criminalizing Kach and affiliated organizations as terrorists, forbidding certain settlers from entering Palestinian towns, and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued weapons. It rejected a demand by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation that all settlers in the occupied territories be disarmed and that an international force be created to protect Palestinians.

UN observers came to keep the peace, but, after Israeli and Palestinian authorities could not reach agreement on resolving the situation, they departed. The Hebron Protocol was signed in January 1997 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat under the supervision of US Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Under its terms, Hebron was divided into in two. H1, 80% of the city, and home to over 120,000 Palestinians, was placed under the Palestinian Authority’s control. H2, which was home to nearly 40,000, was placed under the exclusive control of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in order to protect some 600 Israeli Jewish settlers who lived in the area.

Jewish Israelis were barred from entering HI, whilst Palestinians found it nearly impossible to Access H2 unless they lived there. Palestinian residents of H2 experienced forcible displacement, restrictions on their movement, the closure of their businesses, IDF checkpoints and searches, and verbal and physical harassment by settlers protected by the IDF.

In a surreal, sad parody, the mosque too was divided, with a separate mosque and synagogue. The IDF controls access, closing it to Muslims on Jewish holy days and to Jews on Muslim holy days. There are frequent bans on the call to prayer on the grounds that it disturbs the settlers, and likewise on exuberant

Dual Narrative

We travelled to Hebron on a “dual narrative tour”. It was run by Abraham Tours, which operates out of the Abraham Hostel at Davidka Square in Jerusalem, and caters for independent and mainly young travelers on limited budgets. One half of the tour was conducted by a Palestinian guide and the other by a Jewish guide. They walked us though the streets surrounding the Mosque of Ibrahim, and gave us the opportunity to meet and talk with several members of each of the communities.

We visited the Muslim side of the mosque, which retained the wide prayer hall, the empty catafalques of Isaac and Rebecca, the qibla and minbar, and the beautiful dome; and the larger Jewish side, which was, once upon a time, the open courtyard leading to the mosque. Abraham and Sarah occupy the neutral ground between the two halves.

The area around the divided holy place is a ghost town. On one flank, a deserted street is patrolled by young Israeli soldiers in full battle gear, leading to the settler neighborhood. On the other side, past checkpoints and security screening, is Shuhada (martyrs) Street, an impoverished souq with more shops locked up than open, a small number of Palestinian storeowners, and a bevy of children endeavoring to sell us souvenirs. Above the few shops that are still open, there is a wire mesh to catch rocks, garbage, and various unmentionables thrown at Palestinians from Israeli settler families who have literally occupied the higher ground, abutting and overlooking the souq.

Scapegoating the Other

The Palestinians we met told us that Jewish settlers have been trying to drive them out of H2, to claim it for themselves, and that they will resort to all manner of harassment to do so, including throwing stones, and assaulting Palestinian children on their way home from school. Indeed, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recently confirmed that movement restrictions, along with on-gong settler violence, reduced income, and restricted access to services and resources, has led to a reduction in the area’s Palestinian population.

It is a desperate, hard life for all the Palestinians who live there. They cling on, refusing to leave or sell their ancestral homes. Offers, some very large, have been made in the past, but people will not trade their birthright, even when they are faced with physical threats to their lives. One Palestinian whose home we visited told me that his late wife was shot by Israeli soldiers, while his children were attacked by settlers. Nowadays, he and his few neighbors have no choice but to remain or flee without compensation as the Palestinian Authority has forbidden selling property to the settlers. And so they remain, in poverty and punishment.

The rebuilt and refurbished settler zone is a mix of run-down apartments. waste grounds, new community buildings and playgrounds, and a street of shops that once served the settlers’ needs but are now locked and neglected in a dusty, empty street. Here, the settlers too play the victim card, claiming that they area harassed, insulted, and killed. We met the administrator of the small Jewish museum and library who told us of how her grandfather was killed in 1929, and how her father was killed by an assailant in his own home.

Today there are two Israeli soldiers for every Jewish settler. They are youngsters, barely out of high school. Heavily armed and nervous. With the power to end or destroy the lives of the Palestinians they occupy, many of them youths just like themselves.

“You who build these altars then to sacrifice these children, you must not do it any more”.

If only it was that simple on the fault line of faith and nation.

Below is a selection of photographs taken during our visit.

Read more in In That Howling Infinite on the Middle East : A Middle East Miscellany

Author’s Note:

Whenever I pen commentaries such as this, people ask why I rarely forward my own opinion on the issues I am presenting or discussing. On the contrary, I would argue that my views are fairly transparent in the subjects I chose to engage with, the words I use, and the vein in which I use them.

With respect to my numerous posts about Israel and Palestine, and the Middle East in general, I come to my conclusions from a political science and sociology perspective – that’s where my academic experience came from – and a background in conflict resolution, supported by study and travel. If I do on occasions display any particular bias, it. originates in my longtime interest, understanding and affection for the history, politics, culture and language of the region, of its geography and archaeology, and of its people of all faiths and nationalities that I make my observations.

I am presently working on a piece that encapsulates my thoughts on this complex and controversial subject. But meanwhile, here is a brief exposition.

I do believe that the systematic dispossession of almost a million Palestinians and the destruction of half of their towns and villages in 1948 is Israel’s original sin. It is the primal stain that colours and corrupts all that followed. And yet, if not for the actions, often daring, often brave, often questionable, and often deplorable, of the politicians and soldiers of 1948 – and of the generations that folllowed – Israel would not exist today. This paradox is addressed sympathetically by Avi Shalit in My Promised Land, referred to above, and scathingly by ‘new history’ scholar Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

The Occupation, fifty years old this year, which grew out of the unexpectedly total victory of June 1967, has taken on strategic, ideological and indeed messianic dimensions by many in the Israeli government and political elite. It compounded the original sin, deepened the primal stain, released the demons of messianic fervour, and wounded Israel’s soul. The settlements locked the nation into the the colonialist project. With the close-call of the Yom Kippur War, the violence and murder of the first and second Intifadat, and present Palestinian jaquerie, Israel’s heart has not just hardened, it has become sclerotic.

I admit that I have always been sympathetic towards Israel – from my first visit in 1972. But it is not a blinkered viewpoint. I am deeply critical of Israeli politics and policies, and have no respect for many of its leaders.

Ayelet Shaked, the nationalist’s La Passionaria, and her boss Naftali Bennett do not not represent ALL Israelis! They hold extremist views just like we in UK, US, and Australia have parties and individuals with extremist views. But there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who oppose the present government and long for justice and peace. And if – a very big “if” – Arab Israelis and the Israeli left could work together, they could obtain a majority in the Knesset and change Israel’s politics.

Yet meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu and his nationalist allies call all the shots, the Israelis continue to control and exploit the land, its people, and its resources, whilst varying degrees of annexation are on the cards. The settlements are an abomination, as are the policies and practices of the state and its occupying army, as described by Lyons and others. There’s no escaping these facts.

But I am likewise critical of Palestinian governance, politics and politicians. Hamas and the PA are on the nose in their respective fiefdoms, and if a moderate “third force” were to arise – and survive, because sure as hell, they would risk being murdered – Palestinians who just want a quiet, normal life, adequate services, and opportunities for their children, and Israelis who want likewise, might – just might – reject their extremist, dogmatic, entrenched leaders and reach some form of modus vivendi.

Palestinians themselves have to take control of their own lives, kick out their corrupt leaders, cease inculcating their children with hatred and jihadism, and use all that international good will and dollars to build a viable economy that can provide jobs, opportunities, and security, economic and physical to the people. Only this way will they be inoculated against cronyism, corruption and extremism. And yet, the dead hand of a moribund, patriarchal, conservative and ethnocentric culture holds them back – but that is the subject of another, future discussion for In That Howling Infinite.

Today, the ‘powers that be’, defenders and beneficiaries of a status quo that looks more like a cul de sac, predominate over a dispiriting array of competing, clamouring factions, left, right, nationalist, secular, tribal, Haredi, and Islamist alike. New, young, brace, local voices in both Israel and Palestine, are not heard.

So what happens next?

I get that question too. And I am perennially reluctant to venture an answer beyond one that runs like “on the one hand…but then on the other”. I inevitably fall back on Robert Fisk’s response to the same question with regard to the calamitous freezing over of the Arab Spring and the fall and rise again of the same old autocrats and tyrants: “my crystal ball is broken”. It’s a cop out, really, but just as cogent as that famous line in that UK spy drama Spooks: “What’s gong to happen to me?” “Bad things!”

One thing is for sure: as songwriter Warren Zevon sang, “the hurt gets worse, and the heart get harder”.

October 8th 2017

For more posts on Jerusalem, Israel and the Middle East, visit:
https://m.facebook.com/HowlingInfinite/
https://m.facebook.com/hf1983/

See also, my collection of posts about Jerusalem, and A Middle East Miscelany

Below, some pictures from our visit to Hebron in May 2016

The Story Of Isaac

Leonard Cohen

The door it opened slowly,
My father he came in,
I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
His blue eyes they were shining
And his voice was very cold.
He said, “I’ve had a vision
And you know I’m strong and holy,
I must do what I’ve been told.”
So he started up the mountain,
I was running, he was walking,
And his axe was made of gold.
Well, the trees they got much smaller,
The lake a lady’s mirror,
We stopped to drink some wine.
Then he threw the bottle over.
Broke a minute later
And he put his hand on mine.
Thought I saw an eagle
But it might have been a vulture,
I never could decide.
Then my father built an altar,
He looked once behind his shoulder,
He knew I would not hide.
You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children,
You must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
Your hatchets blunt and bloody,
You were not there before,
When I lay upon a mountain
And my father’s hand was trembling
With the beauty of the word.
And if you call me brother now,
Forgive me if I inquire,
“just according to whose plan?”
When it all comes down to dust
I will kill you if I must,
I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust
I will help you if I must,
I will kill you if I can.
And mercy on our uniform,
Man of peace or man of war,
The peacock spreads his fan.

قصة إسحاق
ليونارد كوهن

الباب فتح ببطء ،
أبي دخل ،
أنا في التاسعة من عمري.
ووقف عاليا فوقي ،
كانت عيونه الزرقاء مشرقة
وكان صوته شديد البرودة.
قال: “كان لدي رؤية
وأنت تعرف أنني قوي ومقدس ،
يجب أن أفعل ما قيل لي “.
فبدأ الجبل ،
كنت أركض ، كان يسير ،
وكان فأسه مصنوعا من الذهب.

حسنا ، الأشجار لديهم أصغر بكثير ،
البحيرة مرآة سيدة ،
توقفنا لشرب بعض النبيذ.
ثم ألقى الزجاجة.
انكسر بعد دقيقة
ووضع يده علي.
اعتقدت رأيت نسر
ولكن ربما كانت نسر ،
لم أستطع أن أقرر أبدا.
ثم بنى والدي مذبحًا ،
نظر مرة واحدة خلف كتفه ،
كان يعلم أنني لن أختبئ.

أنت الذي تبني هذه المذابح الآن
للتضحية بهؤلاء الأطفال ،
لا يجب أن تفعل ذلك بعد الآن.
المخطط ليس رؤية
ولم تجرِ ابدا
بواسطة شيطان أو إله.
أنت الذي تقف فوقهم الآن ،
فتاكاتك حادة ودموية ،
لم تكن هناك من قبل ،
عندما استلقيت على جبل
وكانت يد والدي ترتجف
بجمال الكلمة.

وإذا اتصلت بي أخي الآن ،
سامحني إذا سألت ،
“فقط وفقًا لخطة من؟”
عندما يأتي كل شيء إلى الغبار
سأقتلك إذا لزم الأمر ،
سأساعدك إذا استطعت.
عندما يأتي كل شيء إلى الغبار
سأساعدك إذا لزم الأمر ،
سأقتلك إذا استطعت.
ارحم زينا
رجل سلام أو رجل حرب ،
الطاووس ينشر مروحة.

	Lebensraum Redux… on “You want it darker?” … Gaza a…
	Lebensraum Redux… on The calculus of carnage…
	Lebensraum Redux… on Flight into Egypt, and the pro…
	Lebensraum Redux… on Total war in an urban landscap…
	Gerry Myerson on Dermott’s Last Ride

	Lebensraum Redux… on “You want it darker?” … Gaza a…
	Lebensraum Redux… on The calculus of carnage…
	Lebensraum Redux… on Flight into Egypt, and the pro…
	Lebensraum Redux… on Total war in an urban landscap…
	Gerry Myerson on Dermott’s Last Ride