Óscar Esplá – music in context

Some artists seem to be inextricably linked to places. Henry Moore’s legacy is in Leeds, where he studied, but was not born. Barbara Hepworth’s is in Wakefield, where she was born but did not live. And what about Picasso? There is Malaga, when he was born, Barcelona where he lived, but what about Paris, where he did much of his memorable work? Nuremberg equals Durer, South Kensington is Lord Leighton, a Paris suburb is Gustave Moreau, Zaragoza is Goya, Figueres is Dali, Stockholm is Milles, perhaps. The list includes the better known juxtaposed with the less familiar, deliberately.

All the examples above are painters or sculptors. What about writers? There are many associations, but not so many museums dedicated to a life and its work. Spain, for example, has Blasco Ibañez in Valencia and Miguel Hernandez in Orihuela, sites chosen here for their geographical and contemporary relevance.

But what about composers and musicians? Again, there are associations, but only a few dedicated museums. There is Puccini in Lucca, Tartini in Piran, Beethoven in Vienna and Mozart in Salzburg, for instance. Bayreuth is more Wagner’s memorial rather than record. Perhaps the relative paucity of permanent exhibitions dedicated to non-visual artists reflects the fact that painting and sculpture occupy space, whereas writing and music occupy time. The dramatist Shakespeare is a crossover who occupies both space and time, and he has a museum of sorts, but Shakespeare is always a special case.

In Alicante, the main road linking the waterfront to the centre of town is called Avenida Óscar Esplá. I had walked the street many times before I realized it was named after a composer. He was born in Alicante and lived there as a youth, before heading off to Barcelona to study engineering. He then turned to philosophy and finally music. But as an adult in the nineteen thirties, like many other Spaniards, he fled Franco’s internationally tolerated brutality. He was a dedicated teacher and active composer, but, as the Zaragoza pianist, Pedro Carboné, pointed out in his discussion of the composer’s work at this week’s concert, even in his hometown one would be hard-pressed to identify recognition of his achievement, apart from the name of that street. After decades of neglect, a week of concerts in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall offered the chance to hear his music and perhaps to reassess the significance of this neglected composer. Pedro Carboné gave the first of these concerts, alongside an extensive discussion of the man and his work. Pedro Carboné is himself a noted exponent of Esplá’s music, having recorded volume one of Esplá’s complete piano works for Marco Polo in 1998.

The music must precede the life. The achievement must be the starting point of any discussion of the man. As Carboné explained, Óscar Esplá was a deceptively complex composer. A surface gloss of apparently conventional harmony, simple lines and miniature forms initially suggest populism. Anyone who listens, however, knows within seconds that this first impression is quite false. Óscar Esplá’s principal inspiration probably did come from folklore, the folk music of the region which is Alicante. It is known throughout Spain is the Levante region, the place where the sun rises, known for its brilliance, its light, its colour and, significantly, its contrasts, mountain to sea, near desert to tropical garden, remote campo to sophisticated cities. For those outside Spain, incidentally, Alicante is a long way from what is generally termed ‘flamenco’. That was the inspiration of Manuel de Falla in Andalusia. Now Esplá and de Falla are near contemporaries, with de Falla the senior by ten years. They both started composing in their teens, and even began their careers with similarly inspired impressionistic piano pieces.

Superficially, there is a similarity between the unexpected features of flamenco and the scale that Esplá developed to use as the basis of the folkloric Levante. What they share is the almost blues-like modification of a couple of notes in the diatonic scale, changes that confuse the ear between conventional major and minor keys, classifications that actually don’t apply unless your aural expectations are fixed in what you already know. Others at the time did similar things elsewhere. Bartok used a Bulgarian scale in his early work, Debussy his whole tones, Vaughn Williams his modes and Schoenberg his everything equally. The scale, for a composer, has a similar effect to a painter’s palette, and throughout history there have been individual painters and schools associated with particular groups of colours and their use. Music, though it is often overlooked, has the same colouristic characteristics and these, sometimes, are based on the scales used to express the musical language.

In Valencia, when we think of colour and painting, we automatically think of Sorolla. His principal museum might be in Madrid, and he may well be known outside Spain for the work he created for New York, but Sorolla’s oeuvre is of Valencia, of the same Levante coast that extends south to Alicante. At first sight, Sorolla and the style he founded may appear sweet, rather populist, trite, somewhat kitsch and sentimental. But that would be a misinterpretation.

Impressionism is always close by, but so is expressionism in a form where the dreams are pleasant, never frightening. But there is also the simultaneous realism and experiment of Singer Sargent. The subject matter, however, remains folkloric, domestic in its Spanish outdoor form, depicting a long-suffering but apparently docile peasant contentedly living alongside comfortable middle classes and usually less than ostentatious aristocracy. Anyone who knows Spanish history will understand both the ironic and illusory nature of this apparent harmony. This art has a surface gloss, and apparent ease, but the vivid contrast of colour reflects not only the quality of Levantine light, the montane and plane, the arid and the lush, but also a potential for spontaneous combustion in the social tinderbox, where the traditional equals poverty and insecurity and the modern implies capital, exploitation and wealth for the already well shod, though, it must be admitted, this political dimension is never explicit in Sorolla’s work.

In music, colour may be sensed via harmonic contrast as well as via the scale chosen to communicate. The latter, in Óscar Esplá’s case, continually confuses major and minor, constantly prompts the listener to review the perspective, to flip between emotional states, perhaps to see two sides of every argument. It is sound that conveys a natural cubism. Pedro Carboné was keen to point out how Esplá was always trying to insert colour through the use of chromatic harmony, shifts of rhythm, divergence in the material, inserted deliberately to push the listener onto another, only sometimes parallel path with its own unique view.

But there is another element at work. Pedro Carboné repeatedly offered examples of how Esplá’s writing for the piano was holistic in that its effect has to be experienced in its totality, but also how it relies on the juxtaposition and superimposition of often trite material, in itself less than memorable. He played several examples where the left-hand figure was heard in isolation and then the right, sequentially. Separately these two musical lines provided little that was memorable and less that was individual, but played together they intermingled to invoke colour, contrast, even counterpoint. But that counterpoint is never expressed in the linear form with which we are familiar in Bach and others. It is present more in the sense of it creating a flow of repeated ideas, like a sequence of photos from an album that seem at first sight to be random but are later recognized as chosen.

At this time, the early decades of the 20th century, other composers were also experimenting with similar processes of juxtaposition. In Mahler we abruptly move from one view to another, mix the mundane with the sophisticated, but in general we do it sequentially, again like a sequence of scenes in a film with eventually a linear plot. In Ives, however, we are often presented with these different experiences superimposed to reflect the confusion of everyday life, to mirror how easily human senses can resolve apparently conflicting experience, but it remains a resolution that requires active participation by the listener. In the music of Óscar Esplá, we have the mix of the mundane and sophisticated, but we also often have them superimposed rather than sequential.

Earlier, Alicante was cited as the land of not-flamenco, but Alicante definitely is the land of the town band. Every town has one. These are not the brass bands of northern England, though they are often similarly linked to particular types of economic activity. These are symphonic bands, with woodwind as well as brass and they often march through towns in the frequent festivals. It is common to have three or four bands playing simultaneously in a procession within the hearing of a spectator, the individual pieces perhaps nothing more than the duple rhythm of the Valencian pasodoble.

But two or three at the same time conjures up the kind of musical experience that Ives was imagining when he heard a brass band walk past the string section in a different key, playing different and completely unrelated music. Here also we have an illustration of what Pedro Carboné was demonstrating with Óscar Esplá’s simple but contrasting left- and right-hand parts in his piano music. The different bands are not playing different kinds of music. They are not playing complex harmonies. The idiom of each piece is popular, even populist. But heard at the same time, two or three bands produce the kind of oral confusion of stimuli that everyday life often creates, a melee the listener’s mind must actively interpret.

Here we have, at long last, the essence of Óscar Esplá’s music. Above all it features coloristic effects of harmony and rhythm, mirroring the contrasts of the Levante region and its brilliant light. We have the popular and folkloric, but not simply as ends in themselves, or even used as deferential gestures. In Esplá’s music, these elements merge like simultaneous marching bands to reflect the complexity of everyday oral experience. But, above all, as in Sorolla’s painting, there is a sense of beauty, of impressionistic engagement with the attractive surface of life, whilst also perhaps acknowledging the unspoken tensions that pervade everything.

Recalling Óscar Esplá’s contemporaries in Spain reveals the niche, for that is what we must accept on his behalf, into which his music fits. Manuel de Falla was steeped in Andalusia and nationalism. His music often resorts to big statements on broad canvases. He never left his folkloric inspiration behind, but he always put his audience’s ear into his work, always strove to address the popular. Frederick Mompou is more similar to Esplá in style, but perhaps not content. Like Chopin, Mompou was a grandiloquent miniaturist. His music is generally simpler than Esplá’s, deliberately and intentionally simple, it must be said, but essentially backward looking. Mompou’s world is Chopinesque, an individual romantic response to the world of experience. Its understatement is its strength, but understatement is not a characteristic of Óscar Esplá. Roberto Gerhard, like Esplá, had to leave Spain under the dictatorship. Always more interested in the atonal, even serial technique, Gerhard’s music often sounds deliberately modernistic, seeking to extend Schoenberg’s ideas and as a result becoming internalized in the individual creator’s mind rather than recalling the aural world we inhabit. Esplá’s music is often atonal, but it becomes so via techniques of juxtaposition and superimposition and therefore by musical accident, not by ideological design. Joaquin Turina is also a prime candidate for comparison. Turina’s main musical influence was found in France, but his roots were solidly in Spain’s earth. He differs from Óscar Esplá, however, in his more conventional harmonies and his use of familiar musical forms. Also, Turina rarely superimposes simultaneous material in an expressionistic or impressionistic way.

So, what is it that characterizes this music of Óscar Esplá? First and foremost, the place he knew best is depicted here, its contrasts of light, landscape, campo and city, popular and elite culture, clashing, sometimes confused aural experience that must be deciphered. There is musical impressionism in that the material is often deliberately evocative of experience, flitting from scene to scene with immediate jump cuts, often indeed superimposing images to accomplish, if nothing else, a reflection of the complexity and colour of experience. There is also conflict, but it is the implied conflict we encounter in Sorolla’s painting. It is the conflict of potential rather than current difference, where elements coexist, but at the touch of a flame could ignite. In the music of Óscar Esplá, the conflict is not ongoing, but its threat is always there. This is amplified by his musical scale’s confusion of major and minor. Through it, we are constantly reminded that things might be capable of change, that there exist different perspectives, all of which are valid.

If there is expressionism also in this music, then we might do well to carry some images of Chagall in our head. Nothing is threatening. Life in the village goes on. But the head might be green, or upside down. And the bride and groom may just be floating through the sky while the guests ignore them. It’s colourful, it’s dreamlike, but it is disorientating, sometimes disconcerting.

Above all, Óscar Esplá’s music, at least in the ears of this listener, is most reminiscent of Ravel. Now this is a name that is significant in many ways. Ravel has achieved deserved international and lasting recognition for his original music, but the corpus of his work is far from extensive. He dabbled with the sonata and string quartet, but his reputation is built on his piano and ballet music, often written in the forms that he invented to invoke particular experience or emotional states. For me, Óscar Esplá’s music, if it needs a context, is best approached via the inspiration it shares with Ravel. Esplá’s technique of juxtaposition, however, extends and amplifies these elements and perhaps renders them more vivid as a result.

So surely it is time for Óscar Esplá, the one-time engineer and philosopher who became a composer, to take his rightful place, at least alongside his contemporaries such as de Falla, Gerhard and Mompou in Spain’s musical tradition. He was an exile in Belgium. Manuel de Falla went to Argentina and Gerhard to Britain, so there is nothing unique about his exile. Just as Weinberg is appearing from the deep shadow of Shostakovich, it is surely time for Esplá to emerge from the umbra of de Falla and Turina. His music is unique and, in its own way, revolutionary.

On Tuesday 14 September 2021 in ADDA, Pedro Carboné played movements one and four from Suite Levante, Three Movements for Piano, the Sonata Española and the Berceuse from Cantos de Antaño. On Wednesday 15 September, Marisa Blanes played the first three movements from books four and five of Lírica Española, and La Tarana from Cantos de Antaño, alongside similarly evocative and contemporary works by de Falla, Ernesto Halffter and Julian Bautista.

El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero

El balcón en invierno by Luis Landero is beautiful, if at times frustrating book. It could all be said much more simply, succinctly and perhaps with greater immediate power. But if it were written that way, it would lose what becomes its special and elegant appeal as a repeated motifs, by simple virtue of their repetition, actually take on the flavour of what the writer clearly intended to communicate.

Ostensibly an autobiography, El balcón en invierno often feels like a novel, a surreal experience couched in a style that approaches magical realism. Long before we reach the end of the book, its characters have attained for the reader the near mythical status they hold for the book’s narrator, ostensibly a child of the extended family described.

We are pitched into a world of memories. This remembered world is that of a college educated, Madrid resident, mature man, who still wants to be a professional jazz guitarist. Every element of that sought after and pursued identity would have been beyond not only the experience or even capability of the family that raised him, it would be beyond the limits of their encultured imagination. Guitarists certainly existed in this reality, but jazz was recorded music, internationally marketed and reliant upon participation in an economic system that was unknown to this community. It would have been unimaginable for the grandparents, so vividly recalled from the experience of times shared. It’s a measure of how much change can be foisted from outside on a mere generation of human existence that the grandson viewed as normal that which was beyond the imagination of the parents.

The principal character of El balcón en invierno was raised in a rural community in western Spain, near Badajoz in Extremadura, not far from the Portuguese border. The families in that area shared a common approach to life. They were all different, but they were all dependent on a local economy rooted in the soil, in agriculture, in small holdings, in the processing of the products of that soil and the servicing of the needs of the community. Ambition extended only as far as the next village. And it is this all embracing, all encompassing, almost closed, repeated and repetitive way of life that forms the backbone of nostalgia the stiffens the entire book.

But not for this writer the repeated daily responsibilities of chicken coop, the tending of goats, the drawing of water, the pruning of vines, the tethering of cattle, the leading of donkeys. Not for him the preparation of gazpacho, the making of bread, the stirring of an olla bubbling with cocido over a wood fire, the kneading of dough or the grinding of flour. Not for him the cutting or pressing of grapes, the picking of oranges, the drying of tomatoes or figs, nor the harvesting of nisperos. For him, the enduring ambition was to become a jazz guitarist. And that would require visiting a city. A city! A what? And for what would you need all that schooling, all those lessons and exams and prices of paper they call qualifications, when not one of them shows you how to milk a goat, make cheese or butter or press an olive?

And it is this access to schooling, to an education that certainly existed in his grandparents’ time, that truly offered the means of transforming a life and, by accessing it, the process that would end a lifestyle. Schooling was probably a commodity not accessed by grandparents and parents alike, because it could contribute nothing to the necessities of a life that was all demanding in its essential tasks. But, as the schooling also demonstrated, it was also something of a self-reproducing prison, which retained relevance only within its own, shrinking walls. There was a life elsewhere and it was beginning to invade.

In less able hands, the reliving of rural life via nostalgic images could have become a mere romanticized fantasy, a lost imagined ideal world which, in reality, was hard, unforgiving, often short-lived and, when truth be admitted, far from ideal. The reader is often walked through the recalled reality of this existence, but the lists of objects, of foods, of daily tasks might just have been culled from someone else’s nostalgia. But in the hands of Luis Landero, the processing of lists becomes a cultural experience, a filled-out landscape, rather than an ego-trip down memory lane.

El balcón en invierno’s beauty is not in its sensitivity, its compassion. Its message, however, is that the lives become what time and circumstance conspire to arrange and that, in the end, we may idealize only the life we have not lived. The one we have lived, on the other hand, becomes the mundane, the challenging struggle that life has always been, even that ideal, remembered, reimagined rural existence for those who lived it. Read it in Spanish, but ignore the fact that there are many old, archaic words. Just go with the flow and appreciate the contrast that the author draws between nostalgic imagination and brutal reality.

A visit to Casa-Museo Zacarías González, Salamanca

Zacarías González is not a name that appears in many art books or catalogues. It’s not a name that appears on the title tags in many public galleries. It does appear attached to the name of a less than significant building in Calle Alcaron in Salamanca, the Casa-Museo Zacarías González.

Zacarías González was an artist. He was also a teacher. He taught drawing. He was born in 1923 and died in 2003. He lived most of his life in Salamanca, the city of his birth. He spent some time in Madrid, some on national service in Navarra and, in later years, when the Castilian winter was felt more keenly, he headed south to Alicante. He was a lifelong teacher of drawing and painted in his spare time. He does not seem to have travelled extensively.

In the Calle Alcaron gallery, a visitor can see most of the artist’s life’s work, which divides itself across three broad periods, the representational, the abstract and the re-discovery of a changed realism. Zacarías González is largely unknown in international art circles, hardly known even in Spain and is a name that only aficionados in Salamanca would recognise. So why devote an article to him? The answer is simple. It’s the quality of the experience that deserves publicity and wider appreciation.

In his biographical note in the gallery’s excellent catalogue, Louis Javier Moreno observes that for many twentieth century artists, the life is the art. In the case of Zacarías González, however, he insists that this should be inverted so that for this artist, the art was his life. These are pictures that are intensely personal, enigmatic, intellectual, reflective, self-analytical, self-critical, refined, ascetic. They are also incredibly beautiful. At no point does this work try to shock, strive for noticeable individuality above communication, use overstatement to momentarily shock. Everything here simply communicates.

As an artist, Zacarías González seems to have visited several twentieth century styles in the same analytical way that an interested tourist might become familiar with a new place. He seems always to have been learning, but his powers of assimilation were considerable. He notices stylistic detail, contextualizes it within his own experience and then, rather than copy its dictates, he uses this assimilated language to communicate a personal world in visual form.

And so here, in three floors of this Casa-Museo set in a modest house, we are presented with recognisable associations of early Picasso, cubism, di Chirico-like surrealism, Tapies-like enigmatic abstraction, classical forms that might have been painted on the plaster of Pompei, Klee and Rouault and probably quite a lot more. But these are not copies. They are not imitations. They are personal works that inhabit a stylistic world and use the language of that world to share potential expression and thus, via that learned assimilated language, state something profoundly personal, and thus quite different from the still identifiable influence.

The gallery’s website is at https://casamuseozacariasgonzalez.com/ and many of the works it houses may be viewed there. Personal highlights included Cerrada hasta octubre, Fuga, Fuego fatuo, Charra, La tunecina, El viaje del Dios, Viejo, viejo Mondrian, La suite de Nueva Orleans, and many more.

One of the joys of traveling in Spain is to share the oft-expressed pride in local heroes, be they artists, writers, musicians, architects, or whatever. From the famous, such as Dali in Figueres or Chillida in San Sebastian or Sorolla in Madrid (which, of course, was his residence, not his birthplace) to the less well-known internationally such as the Galician painters in Ourense and Pontevedra, those of the Almería school, or the Basque artists in Vittoria or Bilbao. Each town in each province seems to express a quiet, understated pride in local achievement and, crucially, devote resources to celebrate that achievement with always understated, but real pride. There may be queues of tourists in Figueres, but one often needs to seek out those galleries that display local work. One needs, for instance, to book an appointment to visit the Chillida. Also here in Salamanca, there’s an email link on the Casa-Museo website that allows a visit to be pre-arranged. One can’t just turn up to visit to the Casa-Museo Zacarías González. But do not be deterred. The appointment is easy to obtain, and the rewards are memorable.

The visitor to Salamanca will have the cathedrals, the University, the palaces and the stunningly beautiful old town on the list, not to mention the art nouveau gallery. But do not let the apparent obstacle of having to arrange a visit to this gallery deter you. Any visit to Salamanca by anyone with the slightest interest in art should include a trip to the Casa-Museo Zacarías González. You will not be disappointed.

 

Costa Blanca Arts Update, Claudi Arimany, Eduard Sanchez, Joaquin Palomares, Elena Segura

 

There are not many concerts around these days. In addition, audiences are reluctant to attend and the travel and accommodation restrictions make it hard for musicians to perform. Let’s hope things change sooner rather than later, because when music is shared it is truly capable of enriching lives. This was admirably demonstrated in the pair of concerts presented by Alfas del Pi Music Society on the weekend of 6 and 7 March.

On Saturday 6 March in Casa Cultura, the society presented a quintet of musicians led by flautists Claudi Arimany and Eduard Sánchez. The program was an intriguing mix of styles and genres, which would be suggested by the group’s title for the concert, Classic Meets Jazz. Now, anyone familiar with the flute knows the name Theobald Böhm. Indeed, without him the modern flute may never have existed, since it was his invention in the mid-19th century that established the modern fingering system for the instrument, the system that still bears his name. As a composer, Theobald Böhm may not be the most inventive, but he certainly knew his instrument and knew how to write for it. His Three Little Trios create an insider´s view of how the capabilities of the instrument can be best demonstrated and Claudi Arimany and Eduard Sánchez rendered these challenges with complete musicality, so the virtuosity blended into the music and made sense of it, rather than being an end in itself, as can be the case with such showcase pieces.

Haydn´s Duo No.4 is an arrangement of music originally composed for two violins. This version for two flutes is the composer´s own and is a substantial piece. The delicacy, skill and intricacy with which Joseph Haydn presents his ideas via this unusual pairing we probably take for granted, such is the composer´s stature. But this is music that is rarely heard in concert and so it is possible to approach the piece without the trappings and assumptions of familiarity. The restrained understatement of this music gradually grew to become its power. Well before the end, the playing and performance had completely outshone in ensemble and virtuosity the showpiece that had preceded it and the interpretation underlined Haydn status as one of the great all-time great composers.

The Andante and Rondo of Karl Doppler returned the audience to the familiar, at least those present with detailed knowledge of the flute repertoire, which probably wasn’t many! But this is a piece that is more familiar than its title or origin, since snippets of it often appear as call signs for radio stations, or advertisements.

And then the musicians reconstituted to form a jazz quartet fronted by Claudi Arimany to play the Suite for Flute and Jazz Trio by Claude Bolling. Now this is a substantial work that interleaves classical style ensemble with drum beats, jazz chords and a rhythmic, plucked bass. There is much that is familiar here, many quotations from popular song and folk melodies, as well as jazz standards and Broadway. But overall there is real compositional skill and invention, in this case not dissimilar in concept to Matisse´s collage-making, to bring everything together into a musically convincing whole. This is music that is original in style, if not often in content, but Claude Bolling´s skill in creating something greater than pastiche is considerable.

After the standing ovation and rapturous applause, the group offered two encores of Scott Joplin Rags and the concert without an interval closed over 90 minutes after it started, leaving attendees just 20 minutes to get home before the 10 o’clock curfew!

On Sunday 7 March, Alfas del Pi Music Society presented what was probably a first in the history of Spanish musical performance, and a program that has probably been replicated just a handful of times in its possible century and a half of existence. This was the coupling two great Romantic violin concertos, those of Beethoven and Brahms, in one program, played by the same soloist. It has to be said that on a Sunday lunchtime in lockdown the concert could neither accommodate nor afford to employ a full symphony orchestra, that part being performed in piano arrangement in the hands of Elena Segura. And this is music that was probably originally conceived on the piano, so the arrangement carried all the musical messages, though obviously not all of its orchestral timbres. What was unchanged from the full versions of these works was the challenge posed to the soloist, Joaquín Palomares. Now, in front of an orchestra, the soloist always does have the possibility, though none would admit to it of course, of playing a little softer here and there, to blend a little more with the orchestra, not to hide of course, but merely to rest.

When accompanied by a piano in a small auditorium, such opportunity does not exist. In such a setting, there is simply nowhere to hide. On stage with an orchestra, the soloist is ten metres or so from the nearest audience. In a small room with piano accompaniment, ten metres covers the entire audience! But under these conditions, the quality of the writing comes to the fore, and the musical communication becomes nothing less than intense, as long as the soloist has the skill, musicality and, not least, the stamina to do the job.

There is no need to restate the greatness of these two concerti, since the violin concertos of Beethoven and Brahms are unquestioned masterpieces. What needs to be recorded and in the most emphatic way possible was the playing, virtuosity, and the achievement of Joaquin Palomares. Superb. Superb. Superb. Da capo al fine.

 

Amores percussion, Maria Maica, Elia Casanova in Alicante and International Chamber Orchestra in Alfas del Pi

 

Three concerts in four days…

Despite Spain’s rising number of coronavirus cases, concert halls are open. The audiences wear masks, seat suitably distanced, regularly disinfect their hands, have their temperatures checked and wait in an orderly fashion to be dismissed at the end. 

In one of the more memorable musical evenings, part of ADDA Alicante’s contemporary music festival, percussion group Amores with sopranos María Maciá, and Èlia Casanova presented a programme of Stockhausen and Hildegard of Bingen. It’s not often that works separated by 800 years are programmed side by side. And it is even less likely they will connect with the narrative. Three plain song pieces by Hildegard von Bingen were performed by Èlia Casanova and these were interposed with ten of the Tierkreis, twelve zodiac pieces by Stockhausen. This constituted thirteen pieces and so the concert was called Thirteen, Dreizehn.

Now this number, with its connotations of bad luck, the devil and betrayal, seemed to be significant in the concert’s narrative. As the evening progressed, a transformation took place which, eventually, was seen not as a transformation at all, merely a nuance of interpretation.

Assisted occasionally by a synthesizer Èlia Casanova began by singing Hildegard‘s plainsong on Christian texts. She wore white, though with a thin black veil, and apparently sang from an open book of light. She also, just once, used a musical box, which also served to remind the audience that the Stockhausen pieces were originally written for that medium.

At the end of Èlia Casanova’s first piece, María Maciá, dressed all in black, appeared. It was clear from the very moment of her entry that that this is a very different version of womanhood from the contemplative nun that was Hildegard of Bingen. María Maciá then sang, alongside the percussion trio, four of the ten chosen zodiac pieces. There followed another Hildgard plainchant, three more Zodiac pieces, another plainchant and then the final three Zodiac signs, the last one featuring both sopranos, united in their mutual transformation.

The sung part of Stockhausen‘s music consisted of vocalized seductive syllables and sounds associated with each astrological sign, including in Pisces singing underwater! What you can probably see coming is these two different versions of womanhood seemed to influence one another, transforming the purity of Hildegard into something more earthy and earthly. This also happened musically, as the last of the plainchant developed an accidental here or there, adopted a rhythmic character and was thus transformed into a pop song, jazz singing or even blues.

The transformation was complete, both personal and musical, but the musical changes had been minimal, reminding us of the fundamentally modal character of popular music to this day. And so an unlikely juxtaposition made perfect narrative sense.

The two concerts of La Socieded de Conciertos de la Musica Clasica were structured more conventionally. Violinist Joaquin Palomares led the International Chamber Group in both concerts, but in different formats, a quartet which never actually played as a quartet and an octet that behaved at times like an orchestra.

In the quartet concert, we had the Sonata opus 3 no.4 for two violins of Leclair, Beethoven’s Sonatensatz duo for viola and cello, the Madrigals of Martinu for violin and viola and finally the Mozart Divertimento No1 K39b for string trio.

And then on the Saturday we heard the octet in Elgar’s Serenade, Tchaikovsky’s Nocturne for cello and orchestra, Ernest Bloch’s Prayer for the same grouping and Piazzolla’s Tango Ballet.

The evening was completed by a performance of Mendelssohn’s Octet which, as ever, created its own space and time. Four days, three concerts and almost every work in a different musical style.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Spanish Brass and Zélia Rocha

There has not been much opportunity to review arts events of late. I am sure I don’t have to explain why. But over the last few weeks there have been attempts to ease the restrictions of earlier in the year and a number of venues have offered events, albeit with audiences wearing masks and seated according to ongoing rules of social distancing. This restricted the recent annual film festival in L’Alfas del Pi to exclude usual venues such as the wonderfully independent Cinema Roma. The festival did happen however, using the spaces provided by Casa Cultura and outside paved areas.

One venue where social distancing is rarely an issue is the Klein-Schreuder sculpture garden. The current exhibition features works by Zélia Rocha, assemblies of iron and steel, largely reimagined engine components and re-created scrap. The forms represented are largely literal, but the construction is utterly abstract. Part of the joy is pausing before each work to identify what each component used to do during its working life and then reflect on how this contrasts with its current setting. The garden’s opening times are on its website.

And then last night, Altea hosted the second of its series of concerts Música a Boqueta Nit, in the outdoor auditorium at la Plaça de l’Aigua, a venue that again is easily to socially distance. New rules, new ages, need new compound verbs, it seems.

The group Spanish Brass, a brass quintet described by no less than Christian Lindburg as one of the best in the world, presented its program and they played in all for about ninety minutes without an interval. In the open air, even a brass quintet needs to be amplified, but a group such as Spanish Brass are used to the challenge and the sound proved more than acceptable to even the most discriminating ear. Amplified, of course, it lacked the character of reverberation, but outdoors there is none of that anyway.

The program was varied and, for this outdoor summer evening, largely light, but expertly delivered. It included part of an orchestral suite by Johan Sebastian Bach, Oblivion and Libertango by Astor Piazzolla, and a medley of songs made famous by Edith Piaf. The last work was apt, since on the way to the concert, it seemed that about half of the cars in Altea had arrived from France.

Introductions to the music hereabouts are almost always delivered in a mixture of languages, and last night Spanish Brass chose three, English, Castellano and Valenciano, so though the French missed out on the words, they made up lost ground in the music.

Personally, the high point of the evening was the concerto for wind quintet by Salvador Brotons. The composer is a teacher of brass instruments in Barcelona’s conservatory and this piece was commissioned from him by Spanish Brass for the 2014 Alzira festival. It may not be common knowledge outside Spain that this eastern part of the country is known for the extent and quality of its bands. These are not the brass bands that used to be so prevalent in the north of England before the community and culture that spawned them was excised. These have the character of a symphonic band, with a mix of brass and woodwinds, mouthpieces and reeds that often march through towns accompanied by a set of timpani on wheels. The overall standard of musicality in these groups, at least one in every town, no matter what size, is so high that they can and often do play rich and varied material.

As a result, there exists a corpus of composers for band throughout Catalunya and Valencia who attempt far more than pop cliché. And so to the Brass Quintet Concerto of Salvador Brotons. The first movement is rhythmically challenging, with its complex and broken, but always punchy lines, a second movement that reminds of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, and the finale that impresses via its neoclassicism and Hindemith-like astringency.

It is refreshing to hear real music performed again. It’s ability to surprise via the new and genuinely original is unique, and the rootedness of this new experience in everything that has gone before has to be heard to be understood, or appreciated, in that essential order.

Doves Of War by Paul Preston

Writers of fiction are often accused of forcing their characters to jump through ever more fanciful hoops to satisfy a presumed need for engaging plot. The fact that reality often amplifies the unlikely to the near incredible regularly reminds any reader that considered fiction rarely overstates any issue that derives from our usually random human recklessness. Rarely, for instance, when dealing with war, does fiction place women in the front line. And equally uncommon is the recognition that women are also often in the front lines of politics, even when they might continue to be under-represented amongst the professional practitioners of the art.

And so we often need the kind of reality check that a balanced historical account can provide. Paul Preston’s Doves Of War is precisely the kind of book that can provide comment on all these themes and thus bring us back to earth with an eye-opening bump.

Doves Of War presents contrasting biographies of four women who were directly involved in the hostilities of the Spanish Civil War. Priscilla Scott-Ellis is born of the English upper crust and supports the Nationalists. Nan Green is also English, but motivated by a commitment to left-wing politics. She lines up with the Republic. Mercedes Sanz-Bachiller, a Spaniard, marries into the political life of Vallolid. Margarita Nelken, Spanish-speaking and Spanish-born, but Jewish and branded a foreigner by her enemies, becomes a significant actor on the political left. And so we follow the lives of four women, two on the left and two on the right, two outsiders and two insiders, two who celebrated victory and two berated in defeat. Their stories thus contrast.

It is much to the author’s credit that these lives are presented in a fair and unbiased way. Paul Preston’s personal take on the history of Spain’s war is well known. But in Doves Of War he consistently ducks opportunities to make points about the politics of the struggle, except when the politics are lived out in the lives of his subjects. Committed readers on either side of the argument might feel frustrated at this, but the overall result in that Doves Of War avoids polemic and lets the detail of these four women’s stories demand the reader’s uncomplicated attention. The first subject, for instance, was born into privilege and wealth, thus making political points easy to score. The second is very much the nineteen-thirties pro-Soviet apologist and activist, and caricature might thus beckon. The third is a long-suffering wife dragged into the limelight and the fourth is the driven polymath intellectual. In some way or other, all four could be presented as caricatures or used as vehicles to score other associated historical and political points. Aspects of all four lives could be stressed to demolish them as people or belittle their contribution and commitment. But the author always shies away from cheap shots, even consciously avoiding them, always preferring to analyse rather than judge.

What happens to these four women is the meat of Doves Of War, so this review will avoid reference to the detail of the individual stories. What the review can do, however, is note that each of these lives presents a series of events that is stranger, more heroic, more tragic, more convoluted, more complicated and much more profound than anything a writer of fiction might implausibly create to impose on a character. The twists and turns of these lives, each one pummelled by events and scarred by war leave the reader breathless just trying to keep up.

The style, however, is not easy. Paul Preston is an historian, not a sensationalist or indeed a sentimentalist, and these tales, as presented here, are more documentary than Hollywood. Their content may be stranger than fiction, but the material is considered, discussed, referenced, sourced and checked. Nothing is ever over-stated. Doves Of War displays immense scholarship and, whatever the author’s obvious sympathies, he offers tremendous respect for these four differing women who, in their different ways, gave their lives to the causes they supported.

Philip Spires website

Donald Cottee's second blog

In E283, Lexicography… - Don discusses language and the art of the blog, he examines the linguistic skills of his heritage and declares his project.

In E283, Lexicography, Etymology And Dictionary Editing Skills For Social Scientists, I encountered words I never imagined. The day I understood leukopotomy I laughed out loud. It was a question on Brain Of Britain on Radio Four. I was an addict of the show, not because I could answer the questions, but because I couldn’t - not even one. It was still an era when the working classes aspired to knowledge, rather than despised it. Suzie and I were in Dorset at the time, on a camp site near the Cerne Giant. Leukophallustry sprang to mind. When wouldn’t it? I would like to make it my contribution to the language, given the context, alluding of course to the Cerne Giant, not the CERN giant, which came in Physics P333, Sub-Atomic Mekon Layers For The Dan-Daring, and provided its own potential. I mention E283 because I learned, via its hypercatalectic stupefacient[1] word lists some absolutely metonymic adjectives.

Now in the etiquette of the blogosphere, I am learning fast, there are e-words and non-e-words. In the south of England, so I am informed, there are u-words and non-u-words. Northerners always inhabit the latter category, and, as a northerner, I never really understood the term, apart from it possessing about the same meaninglessness as describing something, brainlessly, as cool, or not cool. All I know is that it was a mechanism for exclusion, an in-word for defining something on the inside or outside of shared assumptions that I did not share.

So the internet has e-words and non-e-words, meaning that you can’t swear. You can write expletive, but you can’t write an expletive. I came close in my first entry to being moderated. This apparently threatening process merely means being edited, though not in the way that Charles The First was edited. Featherstone U. Klondike is his name and he moderates. He reads all the entries, including all three hundred ‘Ten Ways To Achieve Self-Realisation Through Diet Reconstruction’ that appear to be lodged on the site every week. He locates and scrubs out all the non-e-words. And good old Featherstone sent me a message after my first post, saying politely that bugger and arse are non-e, but since they weren’t too offensive he’d let them through just this once. But, he said - and don’t spell that with a double t - don’t do it again.

Now where I come from adjectival skills are not highly developed. The nouns and the verbs are pretty thin, as well. Most men in Kiddington only ever use one adjective, and that in the non-e gerund. But for the purposes of my project, I need to capture the flavour. I’m a Kiddington lad, you see, but now I am translated into Spain. From here, from afar, I can see my life and my culture anew, long-sight-clarified through a previous blur of myopia. I want to examine its newly revealed detail, awareness of which escaped me at the time. And this blog is my medium, the carrier of my message.

If, via these blog entries, I am to examine the identity, character, values and beliefs of my compatriots, I have to apply authenticity. If, armed with my newly confirmed academic status, I am to analyse my origins to make sense of how I finished up in a mobile home on a Benidorm camp site, I need to use the odd expletive, if only to add local colour. But expletives are non-e and will incur moderation, so achieving consistent e-status thus constitutes a challenge.

I could invent a word, of course. Indeed, I already have one. As a child I used to annoy my mother by employing an adjective derived from blood, and it wasn’t sanguine. She got so sick of telling me off she suggested a compromise. I could say sanguine as much as I liked, as long as it sounded different. So she made up a word especially for me. She said, whenever I felt like saying sanguine, I should say ‘slodidonty’. It was a pretty word. I liked it.

“What are you doing with that Lone Ranger replica Colt 45?” she might ask.

“The slodidonty thing’s bust,” I could now reply.

I grew out of it.

So I could use my word in these blogs, but you would grow out of it quicker than I did. And if too many slodidonties gummed up Featherstone U. Klondike’s grammar checker, I might get moderated anyway, thus defeating the object of using its absurdity.

An alternative approach has already been used. I could employ some suitably acceptable word, such as adjectival, and curse merrily away. “Stuff this adjectival bus shelter,” I hear the lad say, as he kicks out the bottom panel on the left. But it lacks colour. It has also been done before in a fictitious account of a real life. As Donald Cottee, blogger, I should distance myself from such an approach to ensure no reality muscles its way into my fiction.

My solution is to employ my E283 skills. Why did I do the adjectival course in the first place? To use it, of course. So whenever I need to say something colourful, I am going to employ a colourful adjective, or even a noun or verb occasionally. By colourful, I mean something you wouldn’t expect to write on a shopping list or use in polite conversation outside of a university. Pseudohermaphrodite might be an example. So I can have my young lad say, “Stuff this pseudohermaphrodite bus shelter” as a prelude to booting out the ill-secured lower panel. I can use my skills, get my meaning across, keep things varied, remain thoroughly e, and still get past Featherstone U. Klondike’s solipsistic grammar checker. You, my reader, can then substitute what I intended. Problem solved.

 So what is my project? Well, it’s partly a chronicle and partly a history. The first aim is quite a pastime these days. We have Brits moving to France, Brits moving to Spain, Brits moving to Italy, Bulgaria, Turkey, Dubai and wherever, anywhere but Britain. They all tell their stories to the folks back home. We have intimate detail of how they grew their first olive, how the ceilings fell in, how the local attorneys rip you off, about the first time they really enjoyed sardines, about how many things you can do with a clove of garlic and about how you can use gunpowder to cure baldness. In this aspect of my quest, I accept the clichéd status to which I aspire. I’m from a mining village in Yorkshire, for God’s sake! What do you expect, imagination? But the second part of my agenda is what makes my project different. This will be more than a diary, more than a travelogue, and more than a renovation project. It will examine, from an academic viewpoint, precisely what Suzie and I have left behind. We aren’t here just for the weather and the wine. We’re here, in part, because our origins decayed to free us. Our roots were so secure, at one time, that you couldn’t have pulled us out of Kiddington soil with a JCB. At sixty-four, I was wafted abroad by a breeze. The question is, why?

There is a third, and more nebulous goal, a goal that can be realised merely by the very existence of this blog. Since the invention of writing, the promulgation of ideas has been the privilege of the few. Entitlement in publication, if I might mix disciplines, has always favoured the resourced. Either your face fit, or your wallet did - or whatever you used to carry around your readies in the era of The Epic Of Gilgamesh. With the rise of the internet, this has changed, and I intend to be one of the first to place a permanent text in this new era, which I will label the “phenomenological phenomenon”, or pp for short. Quietly, the common man’s voice (sorry, pc), the common person’s voice is now being heard. Never before in the history of humankind has the ordinary person been able to promulgate. How would history have judged Alexander The Great if those conquered could have blogged about their experience? And what about those raised from the dead by certain miracle workers? Would they have blogged? Just imagine: “Fell asleep after too much unleavened bread for lunch. Hysterical father pulls tramp off the street to try and wake me, because now that I am obviously pubescent he won’t come within five cubits of me. Tramp sits on my bed, shakes it and wakes me up. Father declares it a miracle and offers a shekel to get rid of him and his mates.” Yes, they would have blogged, and in the pp era, they can. Vox pop will thus explode myths, or merely create them, like it has always done.

For the first time in human history, the ordinary person has a say, at least that’s what we learned in Media M101, Althusser, Derrida, Post-Modernism: An Introduction To Neo-Marxist Analysis Of Soap Opera. It’s a partial viewpoint, of course, but no more partial than those who published in the past. A search for Donald Cottee, in the era of pp, produces results. In all previous eras, these people would have died unknown, and remained so, their contributions eternally unrecognised. The information age has thus changed everything. It allows the claiming of previously privileged territory by the common person, and I can now seek my own immortality via its free space.

Back in Kiddington we have the lad who kicked in the expletive bus shelter. I watched him just a few weeks ago. The shelter is by the church, a dark stone structure built by miners who gave their labour for free. That was just over a century ago. Across the road is the cemetery, where many of the poor archimandrites[2] are buried, their headstones removed a generation ago when the place was tidied up by a council worker with an excavator, an act that afforded them the eternal anonymity that was the birthright of their era. Across the fields beyond, clearly visible from the bus shelter, is where Kiddington Colliery used to stand, the apparently permanent institution that absorbed miners’ labour, encrusted their lungs, made their livelihoods and took their lives. It was also tidied up, demolished, in fact, smoothed over and grassed, because a certain government decreed that our nation no longer needed a coal industry. Energy prices rose and British Coal, now predominantly not British, has moved back in to skim off the grass and topsoil to open-cast what’s left of the saliferous spoils. Crepusculate[3] the stuff that’s still underground.

So when I watch this lad, this specimen of Kiddington’s future, walk under the shade of the church bus shelter, I have parallel stories in mind. I watch him as he starts to poke a Doc Marten toe at the bottom panel. In my mind’s eye, I see a permed lady fixing on a target, a summary symbol of what she wants to destroy. I see a lad start to kick hard until the panel breaks away and flaps loose. I see the woman’s plan go into operation. The hired assassin hits his first targets. I see the boot smash the panel. I see a war waged by a government against its own people. “They should make ‘em better, my dad says. You can just kick them to bits,” says the lad. “It’s cheaper to buy it from Poland. Dimorphicise the ocelots,” said the government. Put the boot in.

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[1] Extra text likely to induce sleep - ed

[2] A substitution for an expletive. Henceforth I will only insert references when expletive substitutes might have relevant meaning - ed

[3] Implying a contaminated end to mining - ed

Donald Cottee's first blog

A search for Donald Cottee… - Don sets the scene by examining who he might be. He searches for himself without much success. He then introduces himself, comments on his lost education, discusses sheep and goats and goes back to school

            A search for Donald Cottee in this information-rich, perhaps wisdom-neutral age reveals a wealth of potential identity. Like everyone with broadband, I regularly Google my name and even minor variants to see if I still exist. Browsing results carefully ordered for relevance I imagine possible identities, alter egos that one day I might be tempted to adopt.

I could be a black belt in taekwondo, bi-locating between California and Indiana. This version of Don Cottee is an active type, both younger and fitter than me. Alternatively, I might be the co-author of an Australian educational resource, no doubt enlightening for those who experience it, if, that is, experience has time to crystallise in an attention span trained by search engine response times. In another persona, I might even be involved in agriculture. But, despite pursuing a personal enlightenment in recent years, farming was not a discipline I explored. For Donald Cottee, perhaps, the life of a beef eater or indeed Beefeater might have appealed, but a beef farmer, no, since along West Lane in Kiddington I have lived close enough to the odour and ordure of husbandry to know they offer no attraction.

            D. Cottee might be a specialist cleaner of carpets and rugs in Western Australia, no job too small or too large, contact me and I’ll quote. As a reader of these pages you will soon begin to appreciate how often I do quote! When I do, I will usually refer, as my recently acquired academic respectability now requires. Back in the search results, I might be a retired public works officer from New South Wales, rather than an ex-electrician from Old West Yorkshire’s coal mines. In that alternative guise, I might have facilitated bicycle usage, initiated bush-care projects and demonstrated simple ways to store water. He sounds a far worthier specimen than the village lad of my continuing and, as yet, unrealised aspiration.

            As a lad, indeed, I might have played baseball in one Terre Haute American Little League, but I played rugby league and that none too well. The story of my sporting life deserved no Oscar nomination. Despite my origins down the pit, where players of the game reputedly bred, my time has been firmly on the spectators’ side, in that vast indefinable team that always turns up, never participates and never shares the victors’ pride, life being at best a temporal draw.

            But the one I would dearly love to have been is the researcher, the Cottie D., who has achieved fame via the intricacies of bronchovascular downstream blood pressure changes in exercising sheep. I applaud the specificity of his achievement but personally I aspire to a broader landscape, wondering whether a single lifetime might suffice if one were to travel upstream as well. But I applaud his achievement of academic respect, perhaps the only kind of respect that is more than academic. Academe has, indeed, become a recent obsession of mine, but it was human society that formed my focus, not the insides of an animal’s gullet.

            So if none of these is me, then who am I? At one level the answer is easy and already I recognise that I am stretching the etiquette of the blogosphere by not having introduced myself at the start. We can all have endless fun speculating on who we are not! I am Donald Cottee, usually Don. I am sixty-four years old. I am not losing my hair: it dropped out years ago. My wife, Suzie, is still my valentine and our newly-adopted Spanish residency has assured a copious supply of wine. I don’t stay out late, never did, though in future, and together, Suzie and I might try a little town painting in the local clubs. So no cottage in the Isle of Wight for Don and Suzie, and no grandchildren either, it seems. I can’t explain. Dulcie, our daughter, seems happy enough these days, though things maternal never really seemed her priority. But Rosie, our motor home in a Benidorm caravan park, is precisely what we wanted, our years of scrimp and save thus having borne enough fruit to juice up a few final years.

            Suzie and I have been together, more or less, since our teens and she has never called me Donald, always Don, a title that here in Spain endows me with unexpected and undeserved kudos beyond imagination. Don is actually short for my nickname, my extra name, which Suzie coined. It was Eccles, in the dark cellar, who told Bluebottle that most people called him by his nickname. “What is it?” the lad asked. “Nick,” said Eccles. But mine is Don, short for Donkey, not Donald. To Suzie, I have always been a donkey. This hypocoristic label has nothing to do with an alliteration of Donald, or any loose consideration of homophone. It derives from my large, fleshy, usually shining, salivated lower lip. Suzie would see a donkey on the television, or a horse, hippo, moose, camel or llama for that matter, and pronounce with a mocking finger wag, “That’s you, Donkey.” Anything but a llama, I used to say. They have harelips. I did call foul at a similar reference applied to a rhino. I may often get horny, but my nose is a quite normal length, width and shape, firmly within one standard deviation of the mean for a man of my size and shape. And that, incidentally, is one metre seventy-eight in height and eighty-five kilos in weight. That’s five ten and thirteen stone five in real money.

            You may have already noticed that I like to be accurate. My memory instinctively opts for precision on the grounds that its products may be needed one day. This tendency has landed me in trouble as often as it has been a saving grace. But years of accuracy and manual dexterity with my soldering iron, my insulation-stripping clippers and scrutiny of colour-banded resistors have fostered both accuracy and precision. Donkey does things right and in the right way, but no doubt the onrushing sloth of retirement will calm my over-active brain and teach it to let things pass. “That will be the day,” I can hear Suzie say.

            Our latest pride, our trusty steed, is Rosie, our Swift Sundance, our motor home, now driven all the way from a Yorkshire village to a Benidorm plot. We’re hooked up to water and electricity, we have satellite television for the football and now, as of today, we are on-line, hence this, the first blog entry of a new era, Donkey Cottee’s blogosphere retirement. It’s no more hiking through the rain to the pub, no more dashing down to the chippy in the car, no more fighting along the aisles of Asda in the prefabricated retail park outside Bromaton. From now on it’s t-shirt and shorts, flip-flops, salad and wine, beach walks and blogging. Our trusty Rosie, our Swift Sundance, may be something of a rusty plodder, but a Sundance is what it promised and a dance in the sun is precisely what it has faithfully delivered. Nowadays the dance is of necessity a linearity of age rather than a twist of youth, though we still manage the occasional rock’n’roll, just for old times sake, even if it does leave the hips and knees grinding.

            As a youth I was too eager to twist, rather than stick. It was a chequered childhood: I know that now. I knew it before I was twenty-five, but by then I was already bust, committed, even over-committed to the whirring and ever-speeding treadmill of consumerism’s cage. I was married - to Suzie, of course - and Dulcie was ready to start school. We needed more money, our aspired lifestyle demanded it. Like everyone, we wanted to be something different, someone else. In those days it wasn’t done, of course, but, if we were young today, we would have been first in the queue for a new face, a new image, a new identity to put alongside the new car, the new house, the washer, the camera, the holiday, the carpet and the garden lounger, things we had to have but never paused to enjoy.

            How we strove to be who we wanted to be! But the acquisitive affluence that society demanded needed resources we didn’t have, entitlements to which we were not entitled. I had drifted along in my job, doing well, earning good money, but the words ‘have a rise’ never quite rhymed with our avarice, and money was always short. But then, one day, there was a chance of promotion. I applied for the job I had already been doing for a year, covering for Ted who had gone long-term sick. I knew I could do it. My mates knew I could do it. My boss knew I could do it. But management appointed a lad, straight out of college, a newly qualified entrant to the industry. He’d had sponsorship, I think it was called, a label that was only ever mentioned in hushed terms, like a disease you shouldn’t catch. But it was far from an impediment. It was nothing less than a privilege for the already privileged. It meant that the Coal Board had paid all his college fees, his upkeep, his books and probably his beer since the age of sixteen. There he came, clutching his HND, still hot off the press, a diploma both national and higher. Along with the sponsorship, that made three things he had that I didn’t, four if you include the piece of paper. And so I was passed over, but it was a pass-over where I supplied the identifying blood and where I became the sacrifice. And so I embarked on what has since become my life’s mission: education, the enlightenment of the mind, plastic surgery for the persona.

            I only had myself to blame, of course. I passed my scholarship. Mrs Brown saw to that. There were two classes at the top of Kiddington juniors, Mrs Brown’s and Mr Taylor’s. She was a fiery, smock-wearing matron, whose temper could make you shake at the flip of an unspoken word. He was a soft-spoken Burton-suited genial gent in his middle age, with leather patches on his dark green jacket elbows, dandruff on his shoulders and bad breath. In a contest between the two of them, she would have insisted on shouting “go” and he would have been third away.

            All the bright buttons of the village went to Mrs Brown. The snotty-nosed, dribbling, farting, lice-shaven, frayed-end, scruffy rabble went to Mr Taylor. There was always much talk of sheep and goats. I said I preferred pigs and chickens, but they never took me seriously. It was a distinction I failed to comprehend at the time. Having already lost the basis of Christianity and with it the automatic association of sheep with the faithful, laudable flock, and goats with the opposition, I became doubly confused by Mrs Brown’s clandestine socialist subversion. You see, despite her professional insistence that we should all achieve the sheep status that entry to her class ought to endow, she regularly confused us by sharing her farmer’s daughter experience that sheep tended to follow blindly, whereas goats often practised independent thinking. Thus, she would tell us, she would rather see us become goats rather than sheep, thus inverting received values we hadn’t yet received. And I have remained confused ever since. At the time, the idea that Mrs Brown might even have borne a carnal respect for the animal never entered my head. Worship is a strangely human state. So, thus inverted, we became Mrs Brown’s goats, and, contrary to the divinely desired and naturally revered flock, we became a working-class inversion, transformed into independent-minded, perhaps subversive kids, Mrs Brown’s locally privileged goats in contrast to Mr Taylor’s predictable, second-class sheep.

            When Mrs Brown’s goats practised their fractions for the umpteenth time, Mr Taylor’s ovines were out gardening. Well, at least the boys were. The girls were probably elsewhere learning to wash and iron. While goats recited tables, forwards, backwards and at random, there was touch and pass for rams and rounders for ewes. Goats wrote essays, while sheep copied from the board. When goats studied the Roman Empire, sheep returned to that sojourn of the infant school, desktop sleep, head placed comfortably to the side, resting on folded arms, eyes no doubt surreptitiously staring out the most recent playground target.

            Mrs Brown’s goats, of course, were being prepared for the eleven plus, or Galton’s Pleasure, as I prefer to call it, that enshrinement in rationally-justified science of Britain’s feudal class system. Mr Taylor’s sheep were being schooled for life minus, the goats for life plus, a grading for life, if that’s the right word to describe what might be left after Galton had taken his prurient pleasure. Plus-graded goats headed for a grammar school, complete with Latin and French, while sheep were branded with the equally obnoxious pair of labels, secondary and modern. Rams would practise the skills of metal and wood that British industry had already exported, while the ewes were confined to the practice washing of plastic babies in an era when the birth rate would drop to historical lows as the command of the dual domestic income sent most women out to work. Goats, for the most part, at least in terms of what they read or wrote, were sexless.

            But I passed, achieved my goat status along with twenty others from Mrs Brown’s class, the nine who didn’t subsequently being referred to as ‘tailored’ by the exam. That year two of Mr Taylor’s class actually passed. God knows how.

            So I went off to the grammar school in Bromaton. It meant having a uniform, and that had to be bought. Just one shop had the franchise. It was called The Queen’s in The Springs, that gentle incline of a street that skirted the cathedral. It was an unfortunate name for the lads, since every year the ovine rejects would goad the goats with bent wrists, swinging hips and creamy voices, asking whether they had yet been to The Queen’s. When you shouted at them, saying it was because you had an IQ, they would retort their version, which was ‘indisputable queen’. The street is a precinct now, a word that when I went there for my school blazer and cap, we only knew from the scripts of black and white American cop shows. And what stupid hats they used to wear!

            Going to The Queen’s in August was a village ritual. It marked you out as different, determined which friends you would keep, and which would reject you. The chosen would advertise their anointment by going to the chip shop in their new uniform, complete with their silly quartered or target caps, just to show off. The kids hated it, but the parents seemed to lap up the status. Whenever I see mutton-dressed-as-lamb middle-class women with an haute coiffeur miniature dog in tow, I am reminded of that annual parade of newly uniformed Kiddington kids being pulled along by their mothers.

            There were two primary schools in Kiddington, ours, the large, newer one, and an old church school with too few children to have a class per year. It’s been demolished, its triangular plot large enough only for a single house. The kids who went there, sent more out of tradition than choice, had about zero chance of learning anything. Half the time they had to look after the younger ones in the same class while the teacher marked books. But pass some of them did. Kiddington’s Galton Pleasure roll each year was probably about seventy-five, of whom twenty-odd passed. It wasn’t a bad show for a mining village, I later learned. It still meant that two-thirds of the population went economically in the direction of the slag heaps that surrounded our pit.

            “Of course we’ll have to go to The Queen’s in the holiday,” was a phrase that successful parents bandied around the village after the results came out. In the queue at the chippy, in the queue at the butcher’s, in the queue at the bus stop, in the queue for the one-armed bandit in the Working Men’s Club, “Of course, we’ll have to go to The Queen’s in the holiday,” would rise above the babble of village gossip, intoned loud enough to ensure even the distant might hear. Ribs would be nudged, eyes would glance their momentary lift skyward and “Hark at her” would be whispered aitchless by those whose families had been branded secondary and modern.

            Except in the famous and still recalled case of Mrs Turner, of course... She made a right laughing stock of herself and her family by anticipating the result. Whether she had married into poverty was never clear, but her aspirations were forever above her status. Whenever she asked, in a plummy-vowelled, tight-lipped voice full of cream for strips of ‘stomach’ pork in Elseley’s, the butcher, the mimicking titter that would ripple round the queue was nothing less than memorable, no matter how many times you had heard it.

            Her husband, a stooping, tweed-suited, wiry man with a thin black moustache, a cowering manner and a body volume about a quarter of his wife’s, suffered terribly. Without his knowledge, Mrs Turner had taken Galton’s Pleasure for granted and fitted out young Adrian at The Queen’s long before the results were known, before he had taken the test, long before they learned he had failed. The father hardly spoke for six months, and never showed his face in the village, except to catch the bus towards Gagstone at the stop at the end of the common, the stop hardly anyone else used. His ploy worked because the bus was always full by the time it reached the end of the village, meaning that he had to hang on to the rail on the conductor’s platform at the back, the noise of the road across the open space precluding any social contact with his fellow Kiddingtonians.

            The son, Adrian, suffered the real butt of the communal joke, however, and found himself branded for the rest of his life. He had to leave Kiddington in the end. He couldn’t stand listening again and again to “Oh, yes, you’re the one whose mother went to The Queen’s and…” He would try to stop listening, but you could see the hurt in his face, a hurt inflicted for life by nothing more than an untimely purchase of clothing, clothing that proclaimed a status that was not his to claim.

            Adrian had been in Mrs Brown’s class, and a dead cert for the cert, so to speak. Mummy took Galton’s Pleasure for granted. Every weekend he was instructed to wear the barathea blazer she so proudly bought, on tic no doubt, so that he could be paraded up the road by the common, tugged determinedly by the hand by his leading mother. The knife-edge pressed grey turn-upped flannels accompanied, as did the quartered cap in blue and brown. All of us lads in those days used to wear shorts, by the way. I didn’t go into long trousers until I was fifteen! So there went Adrian, resplendent in his new uniform, a spick and span member of the class to which his mother aspired. And the poor bugger failed! Oops! I used a non-word…

            Adrian couldn’t show his face for weeks. While the rest of the anointed goats paraded their Queen’s purchases through the village and the sacrificed sheep publicly gathered, he stayed firmly locked indoors. “Is Adrian coming out to play, Mrs Turner,” delivered by conspirators with convincing innocence across the doorstep, presented respectably, yellow-edged with scouring stone, would elicit the curt response, “He’s poorly,” and inside he would stay. They kept it up for the whole summer. You could see the curtain twitch as Adrian peeked out to see who was asking after him. Eventually he did transfer from his secondary and modern to the grammar, one of the few that made the impossible dash. You had a better chance of crossing the Berlin Wall than passing the thirteen plus, but Adrian did it. These days he would have been diagnosed dyslexic, syndromed into a corner, boxed into a stereotype, excused his birthright, but back then he was simply given the second chance that most dismissed. By then, of course, he had long outgrown the barathea and the flannels, and anyway he was already into long trousers, unlike most of us, his mother convinced he was mature beyond his years. As far as I know, the original uniform is still in his wardrobe. His mother was too proud to offer it second hand and probably afraid to throw it away, since its unread name tags had been dutifully attached at every specified place.

            But now, from the perspective of a life lived, I can see that we Kiddington lads were out of place at the grammar. The girls at the high fared better, basically because the ladies found it easier to adopt airs and graces, even if they later rubbed off just as quickly. I did all right. I was never top of anything, and never at the bottom either. There were O-levels to take at sixteen, but I, along with most of my Kiddington mates, left at fifteen to go down the pit, because the local competition we had entered had already been won, and that was the limit of our ambition. We had taken Galton’s Pleasure and were neither secondary nor modern, blissfully unaware of any competition beyond Kiddington’s borders. So apprentices we became. We learned a trade, that essential adjunct to the human being that would not only automatically assure an income, but also, by virtue of endowing title and role to a name, would supply an individual identity. Any idea that we might ‘stay on’ and train as solicitors, bank managers or even teachers never entered our heads. It wasn’t for the likes of us. You tried to stay clear of the law and most Kiddington people were paid in cash, solicitors and bank managers thus being generally associated with life’s problems, not its advantages. There were always a couple of Kiddington kids who broke this mould, but usually they were from the big houses at the top of West Lane and they went to the toffee-nosed schools in Punslet, or that other one, orbiting in its own universe, a place where people paid for education, a dimension the rest of us could not even imagine.

            But then it’s all different now. I have that piece of paper I needed all those years ago. I’ve studied my units, done as the great course designer has deemed, jumped hoops, hurdled intellectual challenges like a pro. I now have my honours and can proudly attach BA to my name, courtesy of The University Of The Air. We used to joke, Suzie and I, with her parents, who used to tell her that she should get a BA. We told them that she already had one, if it stood for big arse. Oops, there’s another one… Anyway, we wanted to get married and she was pregnant straight away. Dulcie was the sweetness of our life.

            I have overstated my welcome … and I am going to be told off for my non-e language[1]. I blog. You blog. He, she or it blogs, but not too much. Enough.

           

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[1] The terms used in this first entry are informal rather than vulgar, with the exception of ‘bugger’ - edA Search For Donald Cottee